The Confounder

The illusions and spectacles that play out on Geoff Sobelle's stage often have a familiar ring. In performances of The Object Lesson, he unloaded heaps of personal junk from a seemingly bottomless box and rolled a vacuum cleaner, hopelessly, atop a sand pile many times his size. In his acclaimed production HOME, the domestic lives of seven characters magically overlap, unfolding in well-choreographed rhythms under a single roof. A leader of the absurdist performance group rainpan 43 and longtime associate of Philadelphia's Pig Iron Theatre Company, Sobelle extracts humor and meaning from everyday life—then blows them up to unmissable proportions.

You started out as a magician. How does that connect to the way you think about theater?

Magic tricks are so odd as a form. You say, "Look at this pencil," and then it does something—penetrates a dollar bill. You have to get somebody's attention with this thing and make them care about it. And the moment you say, "I want to show you a magic trick," that changes how they see it. Like saying, "I'm going to tell a joke now," kind of makes it less funny. I've always thought the same about performance. If you say, "We're going to do a play now," that sets the audience up. Maybe it's better to say that but then tell a joke or do a magic trick.

In one show, you woo an audience member with a tap dance—in ice skates—and then "break up" in the span of minutes.

The tragedy for me was that that's how love can be. You find this person out of a sea of faces and everything seems so unique. Then you suddenly find you're no longer aligned. They're leaving, and you're like, "What happened? Why can't we get back to that place?" It's easy for love stories to slip into cliche, so I tried to get at the nature of that feeling.

When did you get interested in messing with people's expectations?

Early on, I was excited by the Surrealists and Dada, as well as by Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin. That art form and those jokes are about pulling the rug out from under you—and also, especially with the Surrealists, eking out some poetry from the everyday. In high school, I would do strange practical jokes that were really about subverting expectation.

What were those like?

I once found a yellow broomstick in the trash. The end had snapped, so a custodian must have thrown it away. I thought, it's useless as a broomstick, but it's a perfectly good stick. It cracked me up, because a stick will never be useless. So I rescued it. But it really freaked people out. They would say, "Why do you have that?" I loved that they were so worried about it. My friend thought this was the funniest thing; then he found one, and suddenly we were both walking around with broomsticks. People were confused because it was a willful aberration.

You employ the performance style of a clown in your work. What does a clown do, fundamentally?

The clown doesn't really know why the audience is laughing; they are laughing because the clown is an idiot. There's an innocence in that state. We all have that. Even the savviest people don't totally know themselves. We spend a lot of time behaving in such a way that no one will know that we're afraid or vulnerable or feel small: We dress a certain way, or in New York, we walk a certain way. We try to hide those things, and the clown is the one who exposes them.

HOME invites viewers to project their own lives onto a generic house. Why is that approach important to you?

I remember feeling a quality of openness while working on a Shakespeare performance: We may not see eye to eye with kings and queens, but there is still something very human in those plays. I'm interested in encouraging the audience to put their own self in. Imagine a visual artwork where there's a hint of something—the scantest line—and you, as a viewer, complete the shape. You're investing in it, and that's going to mean more.

Much of your earlier work featured spooky or isolating settings. What informed that?

I think I felt a little trapped at the time. I also found that funny, to feel trapped—in relationships or situations—knowing full well that it's really a psychological trap. In Flesh and Blood & Fish and Fowl, two characters, but particularly the one I played, cannot come to terms with what has happened on Earth. You are given the sense that maybe there was some nuclear holocaust. As they sit in an office pretending things are normal, nature is reclaiming it—bushes are growing, raccoons are darting by. That seemed, to me, kind of the way we are: "I'm just going to keep driving this car." "I'm going to keep eating meat the way I always have."

Your show The Object Lesson involves a massive amount of cardboard boxes. Even the seats are boxes. Why?

Any time there is too much of one thing, we find it monstrous and awesome, and everybody is in that same situation. I have a sneaky motivation in that show: to trick audience members into caring about one another. Usually when you go to a play, you don't have to look at the people next to you; you can pretend to read the program and wait. In this case, you have to work—and ideally, help each other—to get comfortable. Before anything has happened, that has happened, and that is the show.

You've also used props to highlight the link between stuff and personal history. What intrigues you about how we recall the past?

We hang onto certain stories from the past, but we're also myopic. You'll open up a box of stuff from college or whenever, and you didn't save everything—you couldn't—but you did take this thing. Based on this one thing, you remember a story, but not completely. It's like the way a detective looks at the clues left at the scene of a crime. Our residue offers clues, and they're frustrating. You want to know more—and you never really will.