“Sellars might just as well have bounded on stage, done a headstand, cried, ‘look at me!’ before the curtain rose, and let the play proceed with a modicum of sensibility,” he wrote.
The same year, Sellars directed Vladimir Mayakovsky’s satire The Bedbug in the Loeb. Crimson reviewer Katherine P. States ’79-’80 grumbled that Sellars “winds his actors into near-epilepsy…the plot is barely intelligible in [his] frenzied production.”
Sellars used a supermarket motif to stage the show, complete with an “incessant procession of slides of dog food, toilet paper, peas and Burry cookies,” according to States. The actors wore bug costumes complete with mops on their heads and pushed shopping carts.
States seemed perturbed by the entire circus: “Assaulted by Sellars’ sound and fury, we feel confused, trapped, and embarrassed… Why does Peter Sellars have so much contempt for his audience that he goes so far out of his way to make things inaccessible?”
Sellars says he most remembers his 1980 Loeb Mainstage performance of King Lear.
Crimson reviewer David M. Frankel ’81 wrote, “Peter Sellars has balls. His King Lear drives Shakespeare’s poetry to a North Hollywood parking lot, yanks it from the back seat stabs it helter skelter while the gods guffaw.”
When the lead actor quit, because he was “unable to reach the level of intensity” his director sought, Peter Sellars himself stepped into the title role.
Frankel was less than impressed.
“Sellars flops to his knees, letting his words drool in an endless, barely audible stream. His tortured soul is senile, not mad,” he wrote.
Sellars used every inch of the stage, the halls outside the theater, and the wings in his show. Shakespeare’s Act III storm “wail[ed] for an hour amidst pendulous light bulbs, harsh spotlights, rolling rocks, flickering candles, blinking headlights of a sleek Lincoln Continental and the disturbing whine of steel cellos.” Four television sets showed everything from the results of the New Hampshire primary to Ajax commercials, Polaroid cameras flashed and the audience was blinded with spotlights “until [their] eyes tear or shut,” according to Frankel.
Frankel called the show “four hours of mechanical torture.”
For Samuel Beckett’s Happy Days, Sellars dug up the Adams House basement floor in order to conduct a live burial of one of the characters.
His interpretation of Chekhov’s Three Sisters was over three hours long, stilted with maddeningly long silent pauses and random Chopin nocturnes.
He even directed a play in the Hilles library elevator.
Genius or oddball? Today many consider Peter Sellars one the world’s leading theater, opera and television directors. He’s been a part of more than 100 productions, large and small, across America and abroad. He’s served as artistic director of the Boston Shakespeare Company, and at 26 he became director of the Kennedy Center’s American National Theatre.
Sellars, for his part, says he never read his Crimson reviews.
—Staff writer Kristi L. Jobson can be reached at jobson@fas.harvard.edu.