Jason Beckmann, What’s Up?  

 

Jason Beckmann: That’s a great question. (Laughing) The only risk we have is that I go into a therapy session and then you’re like, Wait, our 30 minutes is up… I’m feeling a mix of high anxiety and excitement and haven’t slept much as our premiere approaches. Like any artist in a similar situation, I wonder, Why do I do this to myself? But then I also live for it. It’s like high-speed gambling. (Laughing) That’s what’s up with me.  

 

I directed a reading of Juha Jokela’s The Fundamentalist last year in New York. Orginally, I came across the play back in 2009 or 2010 in my home county of Westchester, outside New York City. The Scandinavian American Theatre Company (SATC) presented the play at a local theatre festival. Up until that point, most of my experience with theatre was on Broadway—big lights, all that. But The Fundamentalist was performed in our local library with a a very simple set, and still, I remember being engulfed by it. It completely changed my understanding of what theatre could be.  

Years later, I ran into SATC at another theatre fair and told them how beautiful the performance had been. This feeling stuck with me—the hope of being able to direct something like it one day. As an artist you can never imagine the impact your work can have on someone’s life—I was entirely blown away by this play.  

 

However, it turns out that The Fundamentalist—and this is fascinating—is quite a different play from the one I remember. Naturally, every great play has a relevance in the age in which it is staged, and The Fundamentalist resonates with the world we live in today. But what it does extraordinarily well—in a way that an American play could not because of the ways they are structured—is that it flips. I find I have much more hope for the characters than I did before. What we are coming up with now is more expressionistic, and we’re bringing out a little more of the chaos in the play.  

Jokela’s play is more focused on ideas than American plays generally are. It is more willing to not provide answers for the audience. I think there’s more of an acceptance in Scandinavia as for allowing characters and stories to be vessels for philosophical questions. In some ways it makes it more of a challenge because it is harder to be grounded as an actor in the text—you’re constantly questioning what’s happening and where the character stands. But in another sense, it grants the freedom of not being constrained by the plot.  

 

The that that it can’t be painted as either black or white makes it distinctly non-American. There’s also a message in the play that goes beyond religion. It recognises that anybody, in a certain sense, can be trapped in an ideology that prevents them from being accountable and truly seeing the bigger picture. And that can have devastating consequences.  

 

Fundamentalists are people who need to believe in something in order to survive or to make sense of a world. While conspiracy theorists may be irrational and illogical, they are often trying to make sense of their pain or the chaos around them.  

 

That’s why the play is more provocative today than when it was written. It has big emotions; it’s very raw. And the space we’re using isn’t large, so my biggest hesitation is that there’s no separation between the audience and the performers. It’s going to be intense.  

I’m not Scandinavian—unlike everyone else in our company—but this play brought me to SATC in 2017. What keeps me with SATC, I think, is the cultural contributions of Scandinavia at large. The region has such lovely and lively contemporary work to offer. Scandinavia is so much more than Ibsen.  

 

What I’m looking for in Scandinavian drama is catharsis—a deeper understanding of the world. You don’t find those same perspectives in American plays. Just for sheer geographical reasons. This is such a vast country—utimately, you can just retreat into your own buble and never be confronted by other worldviews, languages, and people. 

 

We’re currently figuring out the future of SATC. It feels like we have a responsibility to be a cultural exchange for contemporary Scandinavian artists and New York City. Here in New York, you have to do other things to survive. You can’t just focus on this one thing. We’re pretty much doing this for free. Especially post-COVID, there are fewer and fewer funds available each year. So we’re trying not to overwhelm ourselves.  

As long as we produce good work, we can keep going steadily. People will always be interested in quality theatre. Our audiences are primarily Scandinavian, but at the core, they’re just theatre lovers.  

 

I would like being able to expand our audiences. Ideally, I’d love for everyone to see our shows, but it is important to SATC that Scandinavians have representation in this wild city—a home where they can return and engage with ideas.  

 

In a dream world, we’d also be touring with this and our other productions, but we just don’t have the time to plan for that right now. 

 

As for the times we’re living in—my intuition is that the performing arts sector in New York doesn’t quite know how to react. I viewed this election very differently than the first one.  

 

Back in the fall of 2016, I was stuying at the Moscow Art Theatre. I hosted an election party because I thought Hillary Clinton was going to win. It was such a shocking experience for me as a young artist—up until then Barack Obama had been president, and things seemed to be improving in line with my values. It was eye-opening to realise that people don’t share those values.  

 

This time, I understood that although we’re becoming an isolationist nation, we’re also aligned with global trends. Incumbent parties were being voted out worldwide. But now, we knew what we were getting into, and people still voted for it—more forcefully. As an artist, I feel like I need to wait and see what happens. 

I take a broader perspective. Things ebb and flow. The pendulum swings. The liberal values  we hold aren’t set in stone. Stability is an illusion.  

 

A Russian film professor I had in Moscow—who grew up in the Soviet Union—used to say, if you live long enough, you see every season under the sun. It’s a little nihilistic, and I say this with the heightened and painful awareness that I am extraordinarily privileged to be able to say so, but I hold on to the belief that this too shall pass. That’s the American optimism in me.   
 

We premiere in two days and I am absolutely terrified. But it’s a sold-out run, which is fantastic. I hope Finns who see it feel the production honors both the play and its Finnish essence. And I hope Juha gets to the see it—it would mean a lot.  

 

I wish I could direct full-time, but after this, I really need a break. I also run a rock climbing gym in New York City, and a bunch of people from there are coming to see the show, which is fantastic!