Theater of questions

Snooping through Lear deBessonet’s sixth-grade diary would reveal two incontrovertible pre-teen confessions. She wanted to direct plays, and she wanted to stage them in Russia. The first seems awfully prescient in hindsight. The second a quirky whim now lost in the footnotes of youth.

There are success stories and then there are success stories a lot people have heard about. The 27-year-old Baton Rouge native and Episcopal High School graduate must be filed into the latter category. After college deBessonet moved to New York City in 2002 with little money and no connections. She worked coat check for two years while pursuing her dreams in drama. Since then her theatrical productions—often utilizing non-traditional spaces and always challenging the audience—have fielded top-tier attention in almost record time. Time Out New York hailed deBessonet as one of its People to Watch in 2006. Last spring The New York Times quizzed her on the religious ruminations of her plays, and when reviewing her “notable” early canon the oft-stubborn Village Voice recently lauded, “One can’t help but anticipate her future work.”

Not that she reads her reviews, she doesn’t. But over coffee deBessonet acknowledges that her honest, spiritual themes stand out in a place like Manhattan, where most theater with religious content is seen as ironic or hilarious or both. It is this refreshing take on spiritual discussion that has caught so much media attention.

Not that deBessonet is preaching, she doesn’t. She never uses her art to make a point, firmly believing that theater as an art form dies when it becomes didactic. “The only way to make authentic work about human dilemmas is to ask a question you really don’t know the answer to,” deBessonet says. “If you are hypothetically asking the question but think you already know the answer, there is something that will be dead about the art. For it to be a living, breathing thing there has to be a question jumping around inside of it.”

DeBessonet attends church with her boyfriend at Broad Street Ministry, a Philadelphia-based Christian group with a large contingent from the arts community. “In a lot of my plays you watch someone have a spiritual experience, and that brings up questions for an audience,” she says. “Right now I am very interested in social justice, the church’s role in that historically and also its failure historically.”

As founder and artistic director of Still Point Productions, deBessonet has directed several works, including a 1920s country-blues version of Bertolt Brecht’s Saint Joan of the Stockyards and transFigures, a play about sufferers of Jerusalem syndrome, a rare delirium that strikes visitors to Israeli holy sites.

“There are things we only whisper about, and Lear will create a masterpiece and encourage the audience to talk about hushed topics,” says longtime friend Caroline Preis, now an attorney in Washington, D.C. “You walk out of Lear’s plays more enriched.”

Though deBessonet juggles several projects simultaneously, it takes a year to realize each monthlong run of a performance. She also freelances internationally, having helmed productions in Ireland, Kazakhstan and later this year Germany. No matter the audience, the country or the work, deBessonet admits opening night is sheer torture of the nerves. “There is nothing like that terror,” she says. “But at that point you have to relinquish control, sit next to someone you love and hold their hand.”

If her nerves are shot on opening night, her actors don’t show it. Kristen Sieh portrayed Joan in Saint Joan of the Stockyards. She says deBessonet’s detailed cast preparation ensured their characters were approachable, even though hers spent much of the play preaching on a street corner. “Coming from a religious background and reconciling that with being a New York bohemian, Lear has a curiosity about faith that is pretty unique,” Sieh says. “She shaped Joan with momentum and passion.”

DeBessonet has several projects in development, including a traveling piece called Talk is Cheap but Money Buys the Whiskey, which rolls the Peak Oil movement, Navy Seal survival training and The Oregon Trail video game into a meditation on the finality of a generation that tends to view itself as infinite.

But her next production, a musical in collaboration with playwright Marcus Gardley, is ironically her first piece about the South altogether. It is inspired by John Barry’s Rising Tide, Spike Lee’s When the Levees Broke and the Flood of 1927. “It is really important to me to perform this piece in Louisiana right now,” she says. “I’m making it for Baton Rouge.” Her team is developing the musical in New York City, and the production should debut in Baton Rouge in 2009. stillpointproductions.com