Butterworth at FUSION:
In Conversation with Michael Samuel Kaplan

NEWS | TUESDAY, AUGUST 18 | BY FUSION STAFF WRITER, RUDOLFO CARRILLO

Consider if you will, the following:

Jez Butterworth is an acclaimed British playwright. FUSION is an acclaimed professional theatre company outta Burque.

Butterworth’s been doing his thing for the past thirty-odd years; his remarkably brilliant breakthrough, MOJO, premiered in 1995. In 2023, he co-wrote the epic franchise finale for the Indiana Jones films, INDIANA JONES AND THE DIAL OF DESTINY.

FUSION, meanwhile, has been bringing thoughtful, provocative, challenging, and beautifully realized—for realz wondrous theatre experiences—to this city since 2001.

It’s no wonder, then, that these two magical theatrical forces find a point of intersection at the beginning of FUSION’s 25th season. Butterworth’s 2012 play, THE RIVER, will be staged in Albuquerque on Thursday, September 10, at 7 PM.

Author and critic David Ian Rabey wrote recently that “The theatre of Jez Butterworth looks for strange and surprising ways to connect the personal to the communal. His plays begin as tragicomedies: plays that are often startlingly and horrifically funny.” Those sorts of intense juxtapositions are typically and often compelling to today’s theatre audiences, and the upcoming production at FUSION promises to come from the hearts of playwrights, directors, and players who speak from the heart to the deep and sometimes mysterious encounters within which humans often find themselves.

To find out more about this landmark production, your reporter on the scene had an in-depth conversation with the director of the upcoming production of THE RIVER. His name is Michael Samuel Kaplan; he’s an assistant professor of voice, speech, and dialects at the University of Connecticut’s Department of Dramatic Arts.

Professor Kaplan took time out of his wonderfully waning summer (the fall semester is right around the corner!) to talk with your reporter about the significance of Butterworth’s work as a playwright, the upcoming production of THE RIVER at FUSION, and what audiences of the postmodern era expect and desire in the way of the current American theatre.

Rudolfo Carrillo: Thanks for speaking with me today, professor! What I want to talk to you about is the upcoming Jez Butterworth play at FUSION, THE RIVER, which will be the first production for the company’s Autumn 2026 season.

Michael Samuel Kaplan: Well, THE RIVER is this beautiful, sexy, funny, suspenseful, mysterious, mythic story written by the amazing playwright, Jez Butterworth, who has written some of the greatest plays that we’ve seen so far this century, notably JERUSALEM, which is, I think, still regarded as a seminal work; [a recent production] starring Mark Rylance swept the Tonys in recent years. [His other notable works include] THE HILLS OF CALIFORNIA, which is more of an autobiographical work that he wrote, and a play called THE FERRYMAN, about Ireland during the troubles. THE RIVER is an intimate play that he has written, and it's unlike some of the other plays that he’s written. It’s perfect for [FUSION]. The theatre has a long history with Butterworth, because in 2008 we produced his PARLOUR SONG as the U.S. premiere prior to its opening at the Almeida in London. He himself offered permission for FUSION to do that play, and so coming back to him with THE RIVER is very exciting for all of us.

Butterworth is a challenging playwright, and he’s a playwright that’s known for producing really beautiful, lyrical, numinous, but also kind of troubling work. Does that fit in with audience expectations? Is Butterworth’s work part of a new American theatrical aesthetic?

Is this part of a sort of aesthetic that is drawing people to theatre now, a really challenging and deep sort of [experience]? Yes, I think so. I should also mention that Jez has penned recognizable films like one of the recent Indiana Jones movies and one of the recent Bond films, SPECTRE, that Sam Mendes directed.

Cinema in its epic and mythic formats?

Yes, I think so, and maybe the launching point for the remarkable success of THE ODYSSEY right now, which is actually drawing people back into the theaters to watch a three-hour epic, the Homeric epic, Homeric mythology; there is an element to this play that haunts as a myth. Butterworth talks about writing plays about characters who exist in two realms at the same time, caught between worlds, between spaces.

Hmm …Like Odysseus and company are caught between worlds … Those kinds of liminal spaces are the places where myths come to life, it seems, within Butterworth’s work.

He’s interested in myth, and he’s also interested in what is numinous, what sort of glimmers around the edges of something that is sacred or divine. I think that Butterworth sees the modern world as something that maybe has been hollowed out a bit from, or more than a bit from, the sacred, from the numinous, from the meaningful. The play JERUSALEM really tackles that. And this play, THE RIVER, exists as a funny, sexy, mysterious, suspenseful comedy and drama between a man and a woman and another woman, maybe others.

Could you tell me more about THE RIVER, please?

You can accept this play as a realistic event, but what is compelling about this play is the Jungian-type imagery that emerges, the inability to completely, narrowly define and categorize the events in each scene. And so it glimmers around the edges with something that is deep and mysterious and exciting and thrilling. It glimmers around the edges with these things, and I think speaks to something very deep in us. I’ll bring it back to THE ODYSSEY. I think that contemporary audiences are hungry for meaning. I think our body politic is hungry for meaning and for belonging. This play is part of a rare grouping of plays that is beginning to address those issues.

What about that intersectionality between ancient epics, the current cinema, and the direction of Postmodern American theatre is striking to you, professor?

I saw THE ODYSSEY, and it was fun. Nolan had to shave it down and really focus on narrative and drive home a big idea, and I think that that big idea he drives home…he [Nolan] does extremely well at that.  But this is all to say that in live theater, something can exist that probably can’t exist in the same way in film, or even long-form television. There’s something that is meaningful and sacred that I think can come through when we’re all in the room together.

Right! Theatre is more of a—even more than the cinema, from my experience—a form of magic; there’s a potential for actual magic to happen. I think that allows audiences to really engage in deeper thinking about things.

I think so. The director Peter Brook says that the magic of theatre is that you get the story and the meaning and the awareness of that meaning all at the same time. And that, I think it was Edith Sitwell who said that about poetry, that poetry is a suppressed scream. You get it in a clarified way; that is what this play’s potential is.

Why should people come and see this production of THE RIVER, even if they’re familiar with the work of Jez Butterworth, which is entirely possible, as you said, because he’s the author of the screenplays of the notable, current cinema? If they haven’t heard of this particular playwright or the kind of Postmodern theatre that it represents, why should they come out to FUSION?

Well, let me jump off the Postmodern thing to start. I think, yes. I think this play perhaps benefits by the breaking open of how we think about things in Postmodernism. But I think that Postmodernism is made [is a created thing]. “Foucault said, do not make a religion of what I have, the ideas that I have pioneered.” And I think that that is exactly what we have done. We have made a great monolith of the great rubric through which we see our world. I think that this play actually—while it takes advantage of how things have broken open with postmodernism—it also goes against it because it’s looking back to something primal; something that will confound and challenge and provoke contemporary Postmodernist thought at the same time. So I think that’s one of the reasons that THE RIVER is exciting. I also think it’s worth attending because I think people are hungry to bear witness to the mysteries that will be explored in this play. Listen, if we’re going to spend money and we’re going to take time out of our day and turn off our cell phones, we better be entertained. I also think that on another level, this play is entertaining.

Now that we’ve covered the intellectual bases, could you tell me more about the entertainment part of the story?

It is a sparkling play of a dance onstage. And it is my goal in this production to manifest a physical dance in space between a man and a woman. Maybe another woman, too. Right? I think it’s sparkling. It’s entertaining. It’s witty. It’s erudite. It’s sexy. I keep saying that, but it is. There’s a charge and an electricity between these two characters. They’re characters that you would love to go spend an hour and a half with, along with a fabulous meal… And the play features a fabulous meal, also onstage. So for a summer evening, it will be a memorable night out.

FUSION Theatre Company presents THE RIVER
Thursday, September 10, 2026 7:00 PM
Through
Sunday, September 20, 2026 3:00 PM
FUSION | 708
708 1st Street Northwest
Albuquerque, NM, 87102

FUSION PERFORMANCES
Thursday, September 10, at 7 PM
Friday, September 11, at 7 PM
Saturday, September 12, at 2 PM & 7 PM
Sunday, September 13, at 3 PM
Thursday, September 17, at 7 PM
Friday, September 18, at 7 PM
Saturday, September 19, at 2 PM & 7 PM

TAOS CENTER FOR THE ARTS PERFORMANCE
Sunday, September 20, at 3 PM

Tickets Here.