YOU DON’T HAVE TO to have much imagination to be bowled over by either of these guy’s accomplishments. Beny blasted through the world of Yale and California theater and has directed and produced Hollywood films, while “Nico” sallied through a career as an entrepreneur (including Cowgirl BBQ restaurant), a film actor, and director. They also co-founded the acclaimed New Mexico Actors Lab. Its first production of 2021, Lifespan of a Fact, was a critical success, but the COVID Delta surge hammered attendance. Nico and Beny were initially heartbroken, but have since shaken it off.
So, with all that they have done, and now flush with cash in the wake of just-awarded grants, as well as having successfully taken over the space formerly occupied by the Desert Rose and The Swan theaters, you would think these guys would be feeling pretty good about everything. You’d be wrong.
They do know what they have accomplished, but as we sat down, what they expressed was not self-satisfaction as much as an energized vulnerability. They met as a teacher (Beny) and student (Nico). We wanted to hear what they had to say about that, about their growing up, and how they got here. They wound up sharing stuff that surprised both themselves and each other—details unknown even after 30 years of collaboration.
I don’t know who had the best seat.
What accounts for your life force? Your enthusiasm just radiates, your dislikes, your curiosities. Most people associate that brand of fervor with younger people.
RB: Well, let’s see. First of all, my parents; I’m a first-generation Italian American, and my father, especially, had a lot of trouble assimilating. He was derided for not speaking English well—had to leave school after third grade in order to go to work to support the family during the Depression. And I was burdened with their hopes and dreams. It was made clear to me early on in indirect ways that my job in life was to fulfill all the things that they hadn’t been able to fulfill. The rule was that as long as I was happy doing what I was doing, it was fine with them. But there’s a subtext to that message, which is that what you do doesn’t make any difference.
Was that liberating?
RB: No, it wasn’t. It was confining, in fact, because I grew up in search of a sense of purpose…because no sense of purpose or service had been required of me. In my formative years, I had no boundaries, no guiding principle, except for what I could invent for myself. It took me decades to get past that and, in truth, I’m not sure I ever have. What I do gives me great pleasure, but what I’ve had to discover along the way is that that ain’t enough. Without a sense of purpose, a sense that what I do makes a difference or can possibly make a difference, there is no deep satisfaction or self-esteem in whatever success I’ve had. I’m constantly comparing myself to people I think have accomplished more than I have… Elon Musk, or Bill Gates, or…
You don’t want to be Bill Gates.
NB: Or Elon Musk, I don’t think.
RB: Yeah, I could certainly suggest better role models for myself than them [laughs], but what I’m trying to say is that I’m still trying to please my parents. I’m still trying to prove that I’m worthy of a burden that they placed on me as an only child—the sole burden of the family line, which any Italian or Greek can tell you is a primary factor, at least for a man. I don’t know about women as much. But my mother was the brains of the outfit, there was no doubt about that. She was an accountant. I worked at International Harvester in the department that she ran, and didn’t recognize her at work; she was far more competent and valued and in charge than she ever was at home. I think my father’s lack of education made it necessary for her to suppress her own intelligence, so as not to…
NB: Rock the boat?
RB: Right. She was the valedictorian of her class in high school, and had won a scholarship to the University of Chicago, which her father would not allow her to take, because education on that level was reserved for her older brother. In the structure of an Italian family, the eldest male child was the one.
NB: Yeah.
RB: And my mother actually had to surrender her potential to that cultural class system, and to her relationship with my father. I recognized that early on and felt it was unfair. It actually enraged me, and left me in search of a different value structure than the one I had been exposed to. I looked for it in academia for 40 years, but didn’t find it there, because academia is all about territory. It’s all a big pissing contest, because there’s nothing real at stake in terms of competition between people. You know, there’s no real money at stake, there’s no real…
NB: Property, right.
RB: Yeah, nothing tangible. It’s all about force of will, and as a result, people tend to be deceitful… two-faced. I really disliked the academic world, even though I was quite successful in it. I always disparaged it in my own mind. So, when my former student, Ted Danson, made it possible for me to go into the movie business, I found it a breath of fresh air… that people were much more honest, in the sense that you knew everybody was out to screw everybody else. Nobody was hiding that. I found there was a lot less duplicity, a lot less disingenuousness in the movie business, and in general, people were smarter… you met a higher class of people in the upper realms of the executive structure. Many of them were people of principle, I was quite surprised to discover.
NB: They’re “the doers,” as opposed to the ones who can’t do, so they teach.
RB: Yeah. So, when I retired from both teaching and the movie business, I must say that I missed the movie business much more than teaching. But when we got to Santa Fe and I connected with Nico and Jonathan Richards and a small number of other like-minded people here, it gave me an opportunity to create a new structure. I didn’t set about this in a very conscious way, it just sort of happened that we started doing stuff, and just followed the momentum of our relationship and the work that we were doing together… it just happened on its own and we were sort of along for the ride.
NB: And it keeps happening.
What about you, Nico?
NB: Mine’s a mirror image to that story in some ways. The ethnic American experience is certainly critical to my life, and Beny’s also. My grandparents were immigrants from Mexico and Greece. I grew up more or less in a Greek American household on the East Coast, and the whole Mexican side was one of those family secret-ish kind of entities where we didn’t talk much about where my mom came from. She was first-generation, born in Winslow, Arizona. She had a Hispanic father and Native Indian mother. Her parents emigrated and settled in a little Winslow burg called Cooper Town, which was a small Mexican ghetto, basically, a barrio. But none of this was really known to me. I was just a Greek kid, Nick Ballas, that’s one of the reasons I have a hard time being called Nick, like “Nick the Greek.” There’s much more to it than “Nick,” but that has to do with leaving my family of origin at about 17. And likewise, my dad had such a chip on his shoulder about being Greek American and not being accepted into the Waspy culture of suburban Boston. Because he made the interesting choice, if not mistake, of moving out from the safety of Central Square in Cambridge—which was heavily Greek American, very mutually supportive and connected to the church there—to the suburbs. So, from the time I was about 4, I grew up in Framingham, which was fairly Waspy at the time, and my dad thought he was doing the right thing by moving there. In fact, he wound up really lonely for the connections of that old Greek American culture, and the drinking, and Greek dances, all of this. I was brought up Catholic, though, because of my mom and her Mexican roots. That was kind of nonnegotiable for her, like, “The kids are going to grow up Catholic.”
RB: Not Greek Orthodox?
NB: I was baptized Greek Orthodox, but grew up Catholic. But I had this chip on my shoulder that I inherited from my dad about not fitting into this culture. I was the first of my family, and the only one in my family to go to college, and went to the whitest of white liberal arts schools in Maine.
It doesn’t get whiter than Colby, does it? I bet they didn’t know many people who were Greek.
NB: [Laughs] They didn’t. But with respect to my dad, it was always, “When are you going to make it?” Whether I had a successful theater company, which I did in the 1980s here, whether I had movie roles, recurring roles in series—and I had a couple of them back in the 1980s—he’d always say, “When are you going to make it?” And I’d be, like, scratching my head.
RB: What did he think “making it” was?
NB: That’s one of those questions… I don’t think there was an answer for him. I think nothing was ever good enough for Pete. It was simply, “You got to do better than that.” And I don’t know what the hell he wanted. I was on the cover of Pasatiempo, and he said, “When are you going to make it?”
RB: For me, it was exactly the opposite. Whatever I did was great. There were no standards, yet you suffered from unstated, or undefined, but somehow high standards. What’s interesting is that, from such diametrically different backgrounds, the effect on me is pretty much the same. I’m still trying to prove something to this inner father. To, “When are you’re going to make it?” I’d say, “I don’t know. I’m going to do this show. Let’s do this show. Let’s make this.” So, you know, I’m doing… getting another recurring role on a series or whatever, but always trying to find that validation somehow in the work.
One of the therapists I worked with, a guy named Nathaniel Branden—who was Ayn Rand’s right-hand man—his therapy was based on Rand’s principles, which I hated, but Nathaniel was a fascinating guy, and he would do this sentence completion exercise. In one of the most powerful sentence completions, I’d hear my father’s voice speaking through my own. That always destroyed people, that particular excursion into an inner dialogue.
I’m also interested in the effect of religion on both of us. I have never believed in God, ever. I can’t remember at any age believing, and I was raised Catholic. I had trained to be an altar boy, though didn’t eventually do it.
NB: Yes, I did believe. I got there. I was an acolyte [a person who assists the deacon and priest in liturgical celebrations, especially the Eucharistic liturgy], and that was my first taste of stage, too… being up there and performing, doing it correctly, and having the right posture, learning about stage turns, because it’s the same thing. You don’t turn your back to the audience when you’re on the altar. You’re always opening up.
RB: Did you believe in God?
NB: I believed in ritual, and that’s what hooked me about the Catholic Church. But after the Church convened Vatican Two [Second Vatican Council, convened by Pope John XXIII in 1962]… when they changed the mass from Latin to English…
RB: Oh, yeah.
NB: …It just went to crap for me.
RB: Although I didn’t believe in any of the underpinnings of it, I did believe in the effect of ritual on people and the support that it gave.
NB: Exactly.
RB: And I, too, was outraged when they eliminated the Latin mass.
NB: The whole tenor of the performance, as it were, changed at that point. It became hokey, I thought, and the magic just disappeared. I left the church early, too, I was about 12 or 13. I started asking fundamental but not really complex philosophical questions, like “Catholics are all saved, but everybody else in the world isn’t? So, where are the Jews? What about the Muslims?” There were no satisfactory answers.
RB: I’ve always thought that if I were to find God, I would convert to Judaism.
Why?
RB: I’m not exactly sure, but it seems to me to be a religion that encourages self-reliance and self-responsibility, whereas Catholicism is all about confession and absolution. Judaism says, “Through me, you shall know my God,” so it’s all on me and there ain’t no excuses.
NB: That’s why I’m drawn to Buddhism, because Buddhism is very much about being yourself and responsible. Though in the non-dualistic sense, “itself” doesn’t even exist.
RB: I’m drawn to Buddhism, too. And there was another source of passion-of-feeling for me, which was politics. The important males in my family were socialists. They had come over from Italy with that brand of Italian socialism. They were very anticlerical. I grew up in a neighborhood where the priest had to be accompanied by members of the Knights of Columbus as a sort of bodyguard. The whole neighborhood was pretty much a socialist hotbed. I wasn’t really aware of that, but as I got older, I began to find in theater that the best work I did was rooted in a left-wing political purpose, and that was true in the movies I produced, too: Miss Evers’ Boys [executive producer] and A Lesson Before Dying [producer], On Promised Land [executive producer].
You guys know each other very well.
NB: Yeah, and we have a shared value about the socially relevant pieces that we do. Deep down, neither of us wants to do fluff—neither wants to waste our time doing theater just for pure entertainment. We’re looking for message. They don’t have to be overtly message shows, but if there’s no substance, what the hell is the point? I think this is where we’re totally congruent, in that regard.
RB: I also think we both see theater as a means to an end, rather than an end unto itself.
NB: Absolutely.
When you say “means to an end,” what does that mean?
NB: It has to provoke awareness… questioning. You should leave the theater scratching your head and having passionate conversations over coffee and dessert somewhere. I think if you don’t have that, then we’ve failed as theater makers to do the job, which is to, kind of, pry open people’s minds and hearts and see what is it that was missing in there? “Why did that affect me that way? What was happening? What was this all about? How is this real for me?” And I very much appreciate that, because there are people, and more power to them, who just want to do work… want to do shows for the sake of doing shows, and that’s not…
RB: Not this company, no.
What drew you to this guy? What was the thing about him?
RB: I recognize myself in him in a lot of ways. The restlessness that you speak of and the desire for a spirit of service, so there’s a lot of fundamental philosophical and spiritual connections. And when I turned 80, I began to realize that I could not go on doing it all myself as I had been. It drives my wife crazy; she feels excluded from what I do because I’m not a very sharing kind of guy. Despite the fact that I’ve made my life as a teacher, my teaching has always been about the work rather than about the student. I think one of my shortcomings as a teacher, when I compare myself to others who I think have been more impactful on people, is that they often treated the person, whereas I’ve always treated the work. In therapy, there’s client-centered therapy and then there’s…
NB: Process, exactly.
RB: Yeah. If you’re getting Rolfed, it’s the same no matter where you are. If you’re doing a certain kind of Jungian therapy, it’s the same no matter who you are. And my teaching is like that… the teaching is the teaching. It’s a view of the way the work works, and if that is good for you, then it’s good. If it’s not good for you, then you’re left out… I’m not going to feed it to you in order to fit your needs or predilections. So, I recognized that Nico was a natural heir, if you will, because we’ve built something that needs to continue and to have a life of its own, independent of us. I mean, the New Mexico Actors Lab, which Nico named, has come to a point in its life as an institution when it needs to stand on its own two feet, not just as the reflection of the energies that we pour into it. And that’s a point at which some structures fall apart. Second City, which I was in in the ’60s, had gotten to a point like that, where it couldn’t sustain itself doing what had given it its birth. I’ve seen a lot of theater companies come to their maturity and lose touch with the energies that gave them their birth.
NB: Many companies, yeah.
RB: And in the corporate world, you see that a lot.
NB: Oh yeah.
There are also questions as to whether an entity can survive the departure of a founder.
NB: Well, I’ve lived through this with Cowgirl BBQ. Because my partner came up from New York with this concept, which he received from his partners there. Then we started this restaurant here, and I kind of Santa Fe-ized parts of it, but now we’re both gone from the restaurant.
Beny and I laid down a baseline of what the New Mexico Actors Lab brand was, so to speak, and I think it is possible for its prime movers and shakers to move on and have the entity continue. Neither of us is going to live forever, we do know this.
RB: It’s very disappointing. [Laughs]
NB: Yeah, I know. So we’re trying to look at how we grow this theater into a whole and holistic entity that will perpetuate beyond our tenures. And there’s a lot to that question.
RB: One of the reasons that I’ve spent the pandemic writing grants, thank God successfully, is because I feel the need to create a firm financial basis that will allow the organization to survive. Signing the three-year lease on the theater was a really big deal. I recognized that in Nico, too, in his background…vthat entrepreneurial spirit, and how much he values a sane system.
NB: Budget…vapproach.
RB: That’s why I liked the movie business. I really liked being a producer. I wrote a book about producing [From Concept to Screen: An Overview of Film and Television Production, Pearson, 2001] and I said at the beginning that a producer is the traffic cop at the intersection of art and commerce. My job was to recognize the essential energy of the project—which was usually political—and then make all of the many choices one had to make to render that energy into the final product without losing the initial essence of it. And, if possible, actually fulfilling it and expanding it in the course of producing. That was the real genius of some of the great producers. When Coppola brought Robert Evans the first cut of The Godfather, Evans said, “You told me you are going to do an epic. This is not an epic. Go back and shoot more.” I encountered some executives who had that quality, and so I determined that I would be that kind of a producer.
What pisses you off most about this town?
RB: There are times when I really dislike the class structure of Santa Fe. In a way, this town is like Renaissance Florence in that the arts are run by the Medici. Yet at the same time, I recognize that if our theater is going to survive as an organization, it’s got to enlist that level of support; the performing arts will never be able to pay their own way. But I really think that the Marxist critics are correct… that art will always reflect the taste of whoever is paying the bills, whether that’s the Medici or the NEA, and there are a lot of theaters in America that do NEA seasons. Once in a while, while considering a play, I find myself thinking, “How will this look on the grant application?”
And what do you like?
RB: Oh, I think the diversity of the culture here, and that people have a lot of freedom to pursue their own tastes. It’s like a smorgasbord, because there’s a lot of choices—a strangely large array of cultural choices. And once in a while art that is outside the mainstream finds support—that was part of the fun of Meow Wolf, although George R. R. Martin is a sort of Medici, and Meow Wolf is itself fast being swept away by the mainstream. As James Agee said, “Every fury on earth has been absorbed in time, as art, or as religion, or as authority in one form or another.”
Nico, what pisses you off?
NB: Well, I suppose the myth of multiculturalism. It’s often spoken of, but seldom seen. There is no one Santa Fe; there is an Anglo Santa Fe, there’s a Hispanic Santa Fe, and there’s a Native Santa Fe, and they don’t really overlap all that much. They have their own cultures and they have their own celebrations. And I look at poor Argos down at Teatro Paraguas [Argos MacCallum, Vice-President of Teatro Paraguas in Agua Fria], trying to assert a multicultural presence, and he struggles to get the local Latino, Latinx, Hispanic population to support the big umbrella productions, and it just isn’t there.
So, we have a myth of multiculturalism. It’s great advertising copy for the Chamber of Commerce, but in reality it ain’t there. And I wish it was, because that was part of what attracted me to being here, since I don’t know where I fit in, you know… Greek American, Mexican American, educated at Anglo schools back East. And for some odd reason, I do fit here, which is what I love about it. It is a very accepting place for misfits. There’s a lot of crazy stuff that comes out of this town. And it was wild in the 1980s; there was a period of time I ran this restaurant called the Lone Wolf Cafe, which was legendary. There were nights there when Armond Lara, who is a wonderful Native painter, and Doug Coffin, who was another native dude, Sam Shepard, and a handful of others would just be hanging out drinking. Drinking was a big part of the culture. There were people just having a lot of fun and it would spill over to the streets. There was wine up and down Canyon Road, a real sense of… that we were all renegades living in this cool frontier town, and we’re going to raise some hell. That was nice.
Do you want to get some of that back?
NB: Could be nice, but there’s kind of a lid on this town right now. The Medicis, as it were, you know, kind of want to keep it pretty, keep it tidy… keep it tidy. It was the wild, wild West, and has now become a bit of the mild, mild West.
Let’s talk about your new theater season.
NB: I loosely chose plays that organized around a theme of truth and lies… truth and what masquerades as truth. There are secrets in almost all of the plays. The lead-off show, The Lifespan of a Fact, was focused on what constitutes that thing called “fact”… and on what we know as truth. I mean, we just spent four years scratching our heads as to what the hell is going on in terms of what reality is, when you had somebody gaslighting you all the time… telling you, “Oh, that’s not reality at all folks, you know, this is it.” I wanted to find opportunities for that to come out dramatically, and so that’s exciting. I’m thrilled that Beny did Cradle [The Cradle Will Rock] again. This is big stuff.
RB: And it’s daunting, because the human resources to do that kind of show in Santa Fe are limited. We don’t have a lot of depth in the bench, and when you’re dealing with a town where it’s tough to get X number of people together in the same room at the same time, it becomes a logistical nightmare. Luckily, the timetable forced on us by COVID has given me three months to prepare this show. Without that time, it wouldn’t have been possible. The extra time also compensated for the lack of cohesion and logistical efficiency of the operation, because this is a much bigger cast and a much more difficult piece of material than anything we’ve done before. So, we’ll see. I think it’s going to be good, but the jury is still out. Also, I’m not really a musical theater director, although I have done them. The director in a musical is not the main person; the choreographer, the music director, these are the people who really run the show. The director just kind of steers the boat. So, it’s a little scary. I mean, there are people rehearsing right now, as we sit here, and I don’t know what they’re doing.
NB: What also excites us is this new space. We get to put four shows up, and each one has a distinct floor plan; there are no two this season done with the same plan. So, we get to play, in the pure sense… get to go into this sandbox, as it were, and start building rooms and castles and roads. We get to play. And it’s really exciting to have a space that is as flexible and accommodating as this, and that it’s ours to do with as we please.
RB: Yes. We have a whole new level of choice that most directors never even get to consider—the psychodynamics of the theatrical environment itself. We can ask, “Given this play, what is the best possible physical spatial—and therefore psychophysical relationship—that it can have with the audience?” Should the audience, say, surround it? If I were going to do The Glass Menagerie again in this theater, rather than in Teatro Paraguas, I would do it in the full round, because it’s a play about children trapped in orbit around their mother. Another example: A Doll’s House, Part 2 was successful partly because of the tennis court stage arrangement we chose—you had a play about two strong wills colliding, and the central axis of that long, narrow playing space was perfect for that.
NB: There was a moment a few weeks ago when I’d been playing around with floor plans for Lungs, which is a two-hander, probably the most experimental of the shows we’re doing this year. I finally figured out that I could just toe in a couple of the seating platforms about 30 degrees each, and it would create the beginning of a round space. And because I have the huge advantage of Beny being right nearby, I was able to show him a copy of the floor plan, and he was like, “Yeah, that’s great.” It’s lovely to have the opportunity to work with somebody to bounce ideas off in a productive, noncompetitive, nonjudgmental manner… to just throw shit on the wall, see if it sticks, with two sets of eyes looking at it… to have a partner whom you respect.
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Photo Mary Moon
