For Joan Kane, theater is a family business.
She and her husband, Bruce A! Kraemer, run Ego Actus Theatre Company, which is Latin for “My Way.” (That’s not a typo: Her husband’s middle initial is distinctively an exclamation point.) Joan said the term “Ego Actus” means that artists should discover their own process that works for them. She said, “The artists bring to the work their own vision, and then we unite and put heart and soul into it. It’s very satisfying.”
Bruce, who produces Joan’s productions, is adept at stage management and has done lighting, audio and technical work for some of the largest and most watched events in the world: Super Bowls, World Cups, Papal visits, NBA All Star Games, Tonys and Grammys.
Joan directed a one-person show adapted by her husband from a short story by his Russian-born grandmother. The show, Identity Paper, is about an immigrant to America who has difficulty adapting to this country. In 2016 the play won an award for best Director in the United Solo Festival at Theatre Row in midtown. Joan is now considering making it into a short film.
At that same festival in the Fall of 2017, Joan is directing “One Woman,” which she has described as “an unapologetic look of a transgender woman’s relationships with shoes, lipstick, other women and her journey toward self-confidence.”
Her theatrical approach is “art for art’s sake.” As she explains, “I do plays because they are important for our lives.”
At the Theatre for the New City, Joan co-produced a play with the Scandinavian American Theater Company, called More, which was written by Maria Tryti Vennerød.
The head of an acting school in Oslo told Joan, “I want you to come over and direct my students.” They were adults who had acted in films and television, including soap operas. What was unusual is that while she directed them in English, the actors went on to perform it in Norwegian. Joan noted, “They all spoke English, but not well enough to act in it.” She was surprised at how much leeway directors seem to be given in independent theater in Norway: She was told by the playwright “It’s up to you. Go ahead if you need to put the end at the beginning or the beginning at the end. It’s your job, not mine.”
In the Prague Fringe Festival, Joan directed Kafka’s Belinda, about the harrowing Czech writer in his last year of life. Her husband and J.B. Alexander co-wrote it, which featured a puppet called Lizette who takes a trip around the world. She likes Prague because “the city is breathtaking and people of all ages go and see plays.”
As Joan explains ample teamwork, “My husband and I have a great time working together. Our life is like a 24-hour production meeting. We even discuss our work in our own code at dinner parties.”
She also enjoys the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, particularly because there are so many plays to watch. She has brought two shows there including Safe by Penny Jackson (2013) and what do you mean by Bruce A! Kraemer (2014), which was written by her husband.
Through many avenues, she discovers plays to direct. Sometimes Joan sees a show that she likes and asks the playwright, “Do you have other plays to show me?” Joan said that she is drawn to playwrights whose work has an interesting voice. For her accomplishments, Joan was inducted into the Indie Theatre Hall of Fame by NYtheatre.com.
Awards notwithstanding, Joan said that when she started in theater thirty years ago, she couldn’t break into the profession. “I knocked and knocked, but nobody opened any doors.” Then Joan once found herself talking with Ellen Stewart of La MaMa, at a summer artist colony in Umbria, Italy. Stewart told her, “Why are you asking other people permission to do your work. Create your own door and open it.” Joan found it uncanny that when her mother later died, she was cleaning her apartment and found artwork from first and second grades in which Joan had drawn lots of pictures of doors.
Among her many interests, Joan attended Bank Street School and became Curator of School Programs at the Hudson River Museum, where she taught museum docents, and school children. She finds museums have a similarity to theater: “In a museum exhibition, there’s a story. The theater is telling stories, too.” She added, “I love telling stories. We can learn through them about ourselves and the world we live in.”
Joan attended High School for the Performing Arts (now LaGuardia High School) and went immediately into the theater, while waiting tables in the 1970s. “I got a degree in life.” She gained experience in a lot of experimental theaters and directed plays as well.
Joan later earned a degree from Fordham University. She studied with Sanford Meisner at the Neighborhood Playhouse. “He was serious. No nonsense.”
In 2010, she was the oldest student in a directing MFA program at the New School for Drama. There she learned about clowning from Jean Taylor, who is also a faculty member of the Barrow Group Performing Arts School. Joan said, “A clown has to be present in the moment.” In the New School program, each student directs two main stage productions.
Joan says it is getting harder in New York to do independent theater. “There is less funding available. It can be 5,000 dollars a week to rent a theater.” She develops a lot of work in festivals, where entrants pay a single festival fee and thereby have access to theater space and equipment. If a festival show draws a lot of interest, she goes on to stage a stand-alone production.
Joan said women have more visibility in the theater nowadays, but the level is not what it should be, especially for women playwrights. She offers the example of noted playwright Paula Vogel who is just had her first play on Broadway, Indecent.
Venues she especially enjoys to visit are Theater for the New City, WorkShop Theater, La MaMa, Playwrights Horizon, Brooklyn Academy of Music, and St. Ann’s Warehouse.
Joan met Shepherd of The Lambs Marc Baron when she was having a martini at Sardi’s. She went on to direct a reading at The Lambs of a play called Tragedy of Dandelion by Duncan Pflaster produced by Oberon Theater Ensemble. Through the League of Professional Theater Women, Joan met producer and director Peggy Chane. “Peggy kept saying, ‘You have to join The Lambs.’ I finally did.”
Joan offers this advice to young actors and playwrights: “Learn by doing. That’s the only thing that will make you wise. Join theater companies, help people out, get involved.”
She is also a dramaturg. In looking at play structure, she finds that many plays have difficulty with their conclusion. “Endings. Endings. People don’t know how to do good endings. But my biggest complaint is verbose monologues that go on for pages and pages.” She said audiences today have a shortened “TV attention span.” As she elaborates, “People are not used to full meals when they go to theater. They don’t want appetizers or salad. They just want the entrée.”
Joan is currently developing and directing Moonage Daydream by Mary Monahan for the Philadelphia Fringe Festival during September 2017. Monahan is a big David Bowie fan and so is Joan. The play is about a woman for whom that rock star is “her imaginary and spiritual guide.” “It turns out Bowie had a music studio there,” she said.
Joan has written a play titled Almost Thirteen, about a twelve-year-old girl who witnesses a murder. She developed the play in the La MaMa International Playwright Retreat in Umbria, Italy, and plans to produce it in 2018.
In 2018 she is co-producing with Maggie Alexander the play Time Stands Still by Donald Margulies about a photographer who returns injured from the war in Syria. To get a lot done, she says, “I work around the clock. “
Her philosophy is that the script itself is important but it is not everything: lighting, sound, set and costumes are vital. “You need all these elements to make the play jump off the page.”
–written by Gary Shapiro