Interview: Michael Barakiva of IN EVERY GENERATION at TheatreWorks Silicon Valley Revisits His Own Family Memories of Passover in This Inherently Theatrical Play

TheatreWorks Silicon Valley is kicking off 2023 with the West Coast Premiere of Ali Viterbi's In Every Generation, winner of the National Jewish Playwrighting Contest. Written by Viterbi in the wake of the white supremacist march in Charlottesville, the play reflects on what it means to be free, providing a timely commentary in the midst of anti-semitism escalating to a fever pitch in America today. It is also a celebration of Jewish tradition, as it follows one family through four millennia of Passover dinners, past, present, and future. As the multi-generational, multi-cultural Levi-Katz family asks, "Why is this night different from all other nights?" they find they all have different answers as they struggle with questions of race and religion that have yet to be resolved. Directed by acclaimed Armenian/Israeli-American director Michael Barakiva, In Every Generation runs at the Mountain View Center for the Performing Arts from January 18th to February 12th.

I spoke with Barakiva by phone earlier this week just as he was diving into final rehearsals for In Every Generation. His career in the arts seems to know no bounds - director, producer, YA novelist, artistic director, playwright and Founder and Creative Director of Novel Readings, a company that uses the performance of text to produce social justice events and develop writers' work. Barakiva is a delightful conversationalist who relishes a colorful turn of phrase (see his description below of In Every Generation as "what would happen if Wendy Wasserstein and Sarah Ruhl had a glorious lovechild"). We discussed what particularly resonates with him about this play, his formative experiences working with theatre titans Wasserstein and Garland Wright, and how he came to write YA novels with queer protagonists. These are edited excerpts from our conversation.

You're coming down the home stretch right now with rehearsals. How has it been going?

Omigod, it's been a truly blessed rehearsal process. I realize that might not make for a great quote, but it really is. I can't remember the last time I have felt so blessed to be in a room with so many talented artists and technicians and theatre makers.

How did you become involved with In Every Generation?

Well, I've known [TheatreWorks Artistic Director] Tim Bond for 25 years now. This is the fifth or sixth time he has hired me, and I am exponentially grateful each time. He sent me this one and we had a really long, really beautiful conversation about it. The play is unique in so many ways. I sort of think about it like what would happen if Wendy Wasserstein and Sarah Ruhl had a glorious lovechild. Because it has the Jewish wit that Wendy's plays were known for, with Sarah's gift for theatricality and casually devastating poeticism.

What do you especially love about this play?

Well, we could spend the rest of our this conversation just with me rhapsodizing... but the first thing I love about this play is that it can only be a play; it is inherently theatrical. It is sometimes a living-room play, sometimes theatrical and poetic, and mind-boggling in how it travels through time and space the way that only theatre can. So that's what I love about it on a sort of aesthetic level.

On a really personal level, it is telling the story of a family celebrating Passover over thousands of years. My seder and Passover memories from childhood and into adulthood are some of my favorite family memories and the most meaningful ones to me, so it's a great chance to revisit them and to ask the question of what it means.

And then thirdly, it's the way that Passover, in times when we are not free, reminds us of a time that we became free; and when we are free, it reminds us of the importance of helping people who are not. It insists on a kind of empathy for us to tell the story as if we ourselves are searching for freedom through the desert and it's so perfect for theatre, which inspires empathy more than any other artform does.

I think that's something so many of us realized during the worst of the pandemic when we could no longer gather in the same space for theatre.

Yeah, there is something about being in a space with other people, watching stories being told live, that is primal for us.

Given your specific skillset and talents and sensibilities and personal history, what do you bring to this play that another director might not?

Well, because the play is wedding these two very different forms, sort of the dinner-party play and the epic, you really need somebody who can live in both of them. For the dinner party, there's kind of a nuance and attention to detail, which are crafts that I love in this kind of play. Also I am a foodie and run a theatre company that produces readings of obscure plays and presents free meals inspired by those plays to the people who come. So the food part of it is really important to me, and food is an essential part of the seder, of the Jewish experience.

Having worked for Wendy Wasserstein for the last five years of her life, there is a kind of Jewish wit that Wendy excelled at that this taps into, so I'd like to think that I bring that skillset. And then also this ability to ask ourselves what kind of stories can we tell in theatre that cannot be told in other mediums, and how do we tap into metaphor and theatricality to bring those stories to life?

I didn't know you worked so closely with Wendy Wasserstein. I just love her plays!

Oh, how can you not?!

How did that relationship come about?

I assisted Mark Brokaw on a production of Wendy's Old Money at Lincoln Center in 2000. And Mark is actually coming to TheatreWorks Silicon Valley to direct a play at the end of the season [Alice Bliss]. So I met Wendy on that production, and then she asked me to be her typist. For the last five years of her life, I basically typed everything that she wrote, as her vision was failing and computers continued to befuddle her. We were very close, and by the end of our time together she was not only my mentor and my boss, but also a friend and collaborator.

I still reel at the thought of the plays we never got to experience because she died so young [at 55].

I know, I know.

You studied at Julliard under Garland Wright, who is another one of these seminal figures in the theatre who died too young [at 52]. Do you have any specific memories of him? He sounds like quite a character.

Oh, my god, yeah! Garland was amazing. I only studied with him for a year, but it is the year that I learned more about theatre... I mean, almost everything I do is in some way inspired by Garland's work and his process. For example, he did this exercise that I always do and everybody thinks it's insane but it's extraordinary (and insane!). Which is that after we finish our text work, we stage the play in a day and we just create the shape of the play and get up on our feet. I've been thinking particularly of Garland a lot [with this play].

You're not the first director I've spoken to whose path was profoundly influenced by Garland Wright. What was his special magic, how was be able to have such an impact on people?

He was the best of us. He understood artistry and what being an artist meant, on a kind of cellular level. The next time you're in New York, go to the Performing Arts Library, give yourself a treat and watch one of his productions - like he directed The Tempest four times and he directed a few Misanthropes, and his Chekhovs were famous. The quality of the work that he made! I am utterly speechless to describe its wonder.

I don't really know much about Garland Wright's work because he died 25 years ago now, plus the heart of his career was at the Guthrie, which was not in my orbit, you know?

Yeah, and what you're tapping into is really a thing. I'm going through this right now. In all honesty, I think this is the best play I may ever direct in my life. The play is stunningly beautiful, everybody working on it is [stupendous], every moment is gorgeous - and maybe three people I know [from New York] will see it, you know? This is the nature of our form. This is its ephemeral beauty and maddening limitation.

As a musical theatre nerd, I have to ask about First Wives Club which you associate directed in Chicago. It's one of those titles that clearly has built-in audience appeal and has attracted topnotch talent in its regional productions, but never seems to quite work. With a Chicago cast led by Faith Prince and Carmen Cusack, I felt certain it was going to be a "can't miss."

Yeah, yeah, we all felt the same.

Do you know if the creators are still working on the show?

Unfortunately, I know nothing about it, other than that we had a great time working on it, and I feel really grateful for that opportunity, because getting to see how a big musical like that is put together is an extraordinarily valuable learning experience.

You are also quite an accomplished novelist, with books like One Man Guy featuring young queer characters. How did that all come about?

It's really crazy and totally unlikely. My last girlfriend, who is also the mother of my goddaughter, we went to Vassar together, and her best friend from college became an editor. Maybe 15 years ago, I was at a birthday party or something, and she said to me, "You should write a young adult book with a queer protagonist. It's a really up-and-coming genre." So we worked on it for two years and then we couldn't sell it. Then she moved to another publishing house, Macmillan, and got back in touch with me. She said, "You know I've always thought there was real promise in your book. Do you want to look at it again?" And I said, "Sure."

She sent me the manuscript because my computer had crashed, and I hadn't backed it up, so I had no copy of it. Just gone! But she did, luckily, and I looked at it and thought it was garbage, but I was like "Oh, no wonder we couldn't sell it - it's bad." But two years had passed and I could see it as if somebody else had written it, and I really understood how to make it better. So I rewrote it and then Macmillan picked it up and it became one [of the first of] this generation of queer protagonist rom-com books, like Becky Albertalli's Simon vs. the Homo Sapiens Agenda, which became [the film] Love, Simon which spun off [the TV series] Love, Victor. I'm about to finish the third one, which is a contemporary fantasy with multiple queer POV perspectives.

Can you tell me about another of your recent endeavors, Novel Readings? What's that about?

I had a few pandemic projects, and Novel Readings was one of them. We do two things, based on the belief in the power of performing literary texts. We take literary texts - novels, sometimes essays even - and we perform them using professional actors. Most of our events have social justice themes. I did one around the Armenian genocide, and through my publisher we did one celebrating Asian American Pacific Islander YA voices.

We also work with novelists developing their work in a truly novel way, which is that the actors read their work to them. The extraordinary creativity that actors bring to performing inspires writers to reconsider their characters and their voices in new ways. An adaptation of Paradise Lost has been integral in my understanding that we process information through our ears so differently than we do through our eyes. I had the honor of doing the second audio recording for my book, and as I was reading it I thought to myself, "Oh, I wish I had done this while we were still editing because I'm hearing things I'd never heard before."

I often hear from playwrights that they don't even begin to understand their plays until they hear the actors read them.

Absolutely, and I believe there's a real way for us to help novelists using those same tools.

Is it true that in 2012 you received the Most Improved Player Award from the New York Ramblers [gay soccer club]?

Absolutely! It's my proudest accomplishment. [laughs]

Are you still an avid soccer player?

I am not nearly as avid a soccer player as I would like to be, but I have become much to my chagrin an avid CrossFitter in the last two years, and I have enjoyed Homegrown AthletX as my local CrossFit, during rehearsals. They have been very good to me there.

Since you have such a multi-faceted career and seem to be up for tackling just about anything, I'd like to crib from the Bernard Pivot questionnaire James Lipton always used at the end of his Actors Studio interviews and ask what profession other than your own would you least like to attempt?

Omigod, you know recently I had a reckoning with myself when I understood that the reason I never had a 9-to-5 job is because I'm just not emotionally wired for that kind of thing. So as flattering as your depiction of my professional life is, it is all really just an attempt to not get a real job, ever! [laughs]

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In Every Generation will be presented January 18 - February 12, 2023 at Mountain View Center for the Performing Arts, 500 Castro Street, Mountain View, CA. For tickets and more information, visit TheatreWorks.org or call (877)-662-8978.