Quick Q&A: Michael Aronov

I talked with Michael Aronov, both writer and electrifying solo performer of Manigma currently at The Clurman.

The word I keep using to describe your show is “dangerous”.

I love to feel that when I go to a show. I feel palpably alive as an audience member when I don’t know what’s going to happen next and I can’t wait to find out. For me, safety is the death of theatre. When I am on stage I can see in people’s faces that they want me to come closer, and they also don’t want me to come closer. It’s so fulfilling to feel that energy not only artistically but also personally, knowing that I am igniting that fire and that passion.

There’s a lot of excitingly uncomfortable humor in the show. Do you think of it as comedy?

I’m walking a line between comedy and tragedy. The audience feels more permission to laugh at some of the characters than others. When Cha Cha, the first character, talks about anaplastic astrocytoma and how her mother died, and that it was a lot to swallow but she swallowed it all and has no gag reflex left, the twisted people in the audience laugh their asses off. The less twisted people want to laugh, but they don’t feel they have permission to. I love that discomfort.

Was it deliberate to start the show with the character who is the most, for lack of a better word, hardened?

I’d say she’s coarse and resilient. The core of that character is the artist. What’s fascinating about artists – painters, musicians, writers, actors – is that it’s the only profession in the world where no matter what you have endured, whether drastic or fantastic, it’s all a plus. She represents that; she says thank you for the terrors and the dysfunctions because I’m f*cking fabulous because of them. I think that’s powerful. I’m trying to do tricky things with her; I am with all the characters but especially her. The show starts off with her saying “I’ve got one word for you and it starts with the letter: cock!” I wanted to start out shocking and awing the shit out of people, and then have to work harder to lure them back to loving and understanding and respecting her. All the characters are sort of like that – I want to see how far I can shake and rattle the audience and then how much work I have to do to get them back. When I feel it work it’s incomparable to anything else.

It may sound cliched, but you disappear into each of these characters to an awe-inspiring degree. I wonder if you feel the transitions between characters physiologically.

On the good days I am connected to each guy in the marrow. I don’t know how to work any other way. I grew up fascinated by the people who could play multi-faceted polarities. Lon Chaney for one. And Al Pacino: to see him in Dog Day Afternoon being vulnerable or in Scarecrow using humor and distraction to make peace in the world, and then as a cold calculating killer in The Godfather or a raging animal in Scarface…that’s the character-rich acting I’m drawn to. It’s not “oh wow he’s walking differently” it’s that the center of his core is different. He’s walking differently because his legs have no choice.

What inspired the idea of the show?

I started writing this about 5 years ago to express some multi-faceted experience of who I was. I wasn’t born in America, and had a very traditional old school upbringing where family, loyalty and religion were all very powerful for me. At the same time I was hanging out with the real troublemakers and getting into all kinds of shit – drugs, sex, violence. My experiences were disparate – I was out in the clubs loving the music and the high nightlife while being the compassionate family man and graduating Magna Cum Laude. I wanted to create something that celebrated the diversity of experience rather than echoed the ambivalence.

I took the 6 characters you play in turn in the show to be who you might be today if only such and such…

Exactly. If there was only the OCD part of my personality, having to make all the food groups disappear on the plate at the same time and washing my hands again and again…if only that existed I would be that one guy I play. It’s a mixture of him and all these other individuals that allow me to be who I am – uninhibited, integrated.

What would you say is the commonality between all these characters?

They’re all flawed, and they are each desperately trying to improve. Sometimes they are falling badly; sometimes they are on the cusp of working something through. Someone pointed out to me that each of the 6 characters wants people to learn from the discoveries and mistakes they’ve journeyed through. We’re at our best when we try to shine a light for other people, thinking “I learned the hard way but maybe you don’t have to”. These people are striving towards something and they want to impart the love, the wisdom and the cruelty. It is so easy for a solo show to be a self-indulgent, narcissistic tutorial; if these characters were perfect the show would feel pedantic and patronizing. But these guys are flawed and limping; I think people can relate to that.

What’s been the most nourishing feedback you’ve gotten about Manigma?

It’s one thing when people say how fascinated they are by the transformations. It’s another when people come up and say that I’ve echoed some experience they’ve had in their life and I’m exhaling it for them. The greatest thing that people have said is that they thought about their life and want to take chances. Whether that means respecting their mother more, or reevaluating their politics, or seeing a fascinating person on the subway and having the stones to tell them “hey, you’re beautiful. I don’t have an agenda, I don’t want to take you out, I just wanted to say that.” Anybody who wants to do something bigger, better, bolder because of this show – I have nothing greater to offer; that’s as good as it gets.