February, 2004

Deke Weaver is the kind of artist who makes you want to skip must-see TV, even though he would be the first to acknowledge that commercials get to him. “There was this ad a few years ago for the Olympics where they had this father tossing his kid in the air and the baby was laughing and laughing, and the music was beautiful, and I was so moved, and then the McDonald's sign popped up, and I was so angry with myself.”

Of course there's nothing wrong with sentimentalism, but why bother with it if you can get the real thing? Weaver's aim, no matter the story he's telling or the performance he's giving, is to provide an experience far more moving, far more resonant while still maintaining a sincerity of purpose. He wants you to cry or laugh - or do both at the same time - but for the right reasons. “I want to lead people to a place where something that matters happens and the cynicism is gone and the irony is gone.”

Having grown up outside of Minneapolis, a region infused with Nordic reserve, it's easy to mistake Weaver's earnest temperament with his background. But in fact, his guileless approach is most apparent when he talks about his art. Describing what performances does to a person, he pauses, rolls his eyes upward to find the right thought, and says, “I'm just getting chills thinking about it.” Explaining how he always aims to intersect humor and sadness in his work, there is a palpable emotionalism in the room, as if the experience he's recalling right now absolutely justifies a good cry and a good laugh. Weaver's pursuit and practice of acting and storytelling was the result of finding the theatre to be a “sacred circle” in which all things are possible, and it's easy to see how he affords his audience the same leeway. In a phrase, it's easy to trust Deke Weaver. And that's what makes him a worthwhile artist and a formidable stage presence. “I love how people can slip into a performance and forget it is one. I want people in a place where they are suspended. ” Suspended is an admirable destination since, for Weaver, it is in that untethered moment where one can embody every emotion and every truth equivalently.

The piece he is currently writing at MacDowell was born in one of those moments. In the process of becoming the San Francisco Grand Slam Champion - a statewide poetry slam contest that ultimately crowned Weaver the winner - he and his friend were road-tripping their way through the country and decided to tape their conversations. Listening to the roughly six hours of tape, Weaver detected a “rank cynicism going through my voice, this sneering superiority that was disgusting to me. But there were a couple of moments where that tone was gone and it felt to me like cynicism was just this brittle mask to protect hope.”

The moment was not wholly personal. It got Weaver thinking bigger - culturally - prompting the idea that cynicism might be endemic to a nation that craves hope. The kind that can be glimpsed in a 30-second ad but truly felt in a performance where the dimensions are literally greater than one. “In that way, I think theatre is really grassroots,” he says. “It really is true that there's such a thing as performance time where, if you're watching something great and it's three hours, it feels like 20 minutes. Or if it's really bad, it can feel like three hours even if it's only been 20 minutes. Theatre bridges us into dream places.” The metaphor is a good one, not only because it affirms the commitment by this artist (he wants to take you there), but because it's the dream places that find the collective unconscious, and in doing so, arrive at the complex sentiments we long to understand.