David Levine is not your normal director. Although he has staged a number of straight plays off- and off-off-Broadway, lately he is more of a theater conceptualist, a provocateur. His 2007 Bauerntheater (“farmer’s theater”) had method actor David Barlow fly out to Germany in order to play a potato farmer with no modern equipment, working 10 hours a day for a month on four acres of farmland outside Berlin. The idea was to explore what it meant to be an actor in a real workingman’s role. Here he takes an unfinished play by a French philosopher, Simone Weil, about a 17th-Century conspiracy to overthrow the Venetian government, and uses it as a starting point for an ostensible seminar about American theater. Playwright/novelist Gordon Dahlquist has provided contemporary-referenced discussion topics. I spoke with Levine.

Hi David. So is the audience number going to be limited?
There’s only 30 seats a night, eight performers and 30 audience members -- a total of 38.

Will we know who are the actors and who are other members of the audience?
Eventually. The only set piece is a table and all are around it.

Will you be in it?
Yes, along with four actors and three dramaturges. But we’re all performers.

Will the audience be expected to participate, to say something?
It’s totally fine not to say anything. That’s also a performance. There’s no pressure to speak. No one will be singled out or embarrassed.

What’s going to happen?
The basic themes of the show are 1, why make political art?; 2, why go see political art?; and 3, what do you hope to achieve by political art? People go to political theater, sit in the dark and don’t say anything, but here people can be involved and say what they want.

So it’s really going to be a seminar?
It is a seminar, but it’s not a seminar. It’s a performance piece in the form of a seminar. There are some conventions, and some set pieces.

Where did the idea to do this come from?
Part of it came from years of going to shows and realizing that the most energetic thing from the show was the B.S. session afterwards at the bar. That’s when people talked about things that really mattered, in ways that were really funny, passionate and energized; in ways that theater and performance hardly ever were.

Is there something deeper here?
The most basic question you can ask of theater or performance art is, does it really matter at all? And also, that’s the funniest question you can ask.

So it will be different every night.
It depends on who shows up. Also, you can’t talk about political art without talking about the politics of today. We’re covering a lot of ground, from post-Katrina New Orleans reconstruction, to Obama’s charisma to Blackwater. Also, the generally fucked condition of theater in the staes today. How the seminar goes is what the people in the audience know, but everyone is always an expert on something.

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