Eccentric's Corner: Maestro of Metamorphosis

PROFESSION: Director-provocateur

CLAIM TO ECCENTRICITY: Take-no-prisoners staging; repeatedly fired from high-profile gigs

As an undergraduate, Peter Sellars staged a now-legendary production of Wagner's Ring cycle using macramé puppets and disco lights. Three decades later he produced an Obama-era Othello in which dialogue is blasted by cell phone across a barren stage. Sellars's mash-ups of the classics have always drawn extreme reactions. His fiery humanism energizes even the briefest exchange: Sellars is as passionate about a waitress's attire ("You are so arriving!") as he is about the use of psychiatric medication in the criminal justice system. He believes in turning art—and conversation—on its head, and in the power of operatic epiphany in individual lives.

You've expressed relief that the 20th century, which you've called the century of psychology and the self, is over.

For me, one of the biggest issues is the pathologizing of everything, rather than simply recognizing that life crises are supposed to happen. Painkillers are one of the most intense things about this hyper, self-serving Western culture. The Navajo say that pain is a guide, a teacher. It's trying to tell you something: When your hand is in that open flame, please remove it. If you keep your hand in the flame but take the painkiller, you miss the deal.

You strike me as hyperempathic. Do you consider yourself a good reader of people?

It's what I do professionally. In auditions, you have 10 or 15 minutes with somebody to figure out a lot of stuff. One of the first things is to get past what they want to tell you. You have to remove that entirely from the windshield and move to something completely opposite from their self-presentation. What's never interesting is what they're trying to show you. What's always interesting is what they're trying to hide.

You also spend 15 minutes with each of the 400 students in your UCLA class.

I have no other way of evaluating them because they're so diverse. The film-maker has no problem expressing himself on invisible, difficult-to-detect subjects. The biochem major has been asked to deal only with the so-called empirical universe and has no way of handling the points that I'm always making in class: the difference between scientific and nonscientific knowledge. How much you love your grandmother cannot be quantified and cannot be bought and sold and has a whole other value structure. The year's subject was the non-cash economy—everything that we don't do for money. My mission was, "Turn your back on the money and walk towards your life."

Are there people with whom you cannot connect?

I'm trained in the tradition of community organizing, where you go with the most troubled spirit in the room. The whole point in my life's work is "Go with the problem, not around it." As Rumi would say, the wound is where the light enters. You have to give the meeting over to the person who wants to disrupt it and destroy it. You have to reverse the energy flow and, again, not pathologize.

Let's say the troubled person suffers from schizophrenia. What if the person is screaming and nonsensical? What does that do to the community and what should you do for the individual, especially if you do not want to medicate?

I'm more involved with transformative models. That's why in my life we tell stories of people for whom it didn't work out: Oedipus Rex and Electra, these are not success stories. These are people who were profoundly traumatized. But their trauma was the path of illumination. You find out who you are exactly when you're in free-fall and have no way to stop yourself. That is the moment when you become yourself. We're at our least human when we're successful and telling people how successful we are. It's obnoxious. It's horrible! I'm not sure how comfortable I am buying into the term "schizophrenia" at the end of the day. Anybody who claims they're normal—that's the first sign of his psychosis. The assumption of what normal is drives me crazy and shows a limited acquaintance with the human being.

How should we reframe the concept of normal behavior?

Schizophrenia is actually asking us to find resources in ourselves that we underestimate. I'm resistant to the idea that something is this person's problem versus that person's problem. It's about what's between us. If life is asking you a larger question, you don't want to invent a pathology that means you don't have to answer it. It's like 9/11: Everybody freaked out about the messenger. And, of course, it was horrible. But 10 years later, we still haven't opened the envelope. If you spend your whole time creating a crisis over the messenger, you still haven't heard the message.

Given your outlook, you must have little patience for the characterizations of you as an enfant terrible.

The idea that this is how the opera "should" go and I'm doing something else is ridiculous—a cliché of a cliché. A cliché releases everyone from having to think or deal. A cliché is a beautiful refuge where we can say, "It should go like I saw it once" in a mindless, standardized production that is like a day at the post office.

You are currently working on Nixon in China, an opera you first staged in 1987.

It's a living being. Who Nixon was keeps shifting. You have to start by empathizing. Boris Godunov did horrible things. But we still have this unbelievable opera about him with unbelievably heartbreaking music. My task is to open the material in such a way that no two people have the same reaction. I don't want you to have the headset and go in front of the next Cezanne painting and learn how to respond to it. You're looking into some kind of mirror that allows you to see yourself. Nixon is a perfectly good mirror for a bunch of things about yourself that you're not proud of. Watching Nixon in a state of denial is highly instructive—not about him, but about you!