Talijancic:  What I wanted was the flavor of the play, or the senses one has from the world of the play - maybe an awakening to the play - but it is absolutely not the play. Again, what I was interested in was the tensions and conflicts.  Another axis was the contrast between a scientific outlook and a poetic one.  Wangel versus Ellida.  He can give her pills, but her disease is of a different kind.  He is experimenting with her.  He’s so rational, so scientific, he doesn’t understand how people work.  He’s studying them, and it’s this metaphor that informs the visuals in the production.
            Templeton: Yes, Site 7, the computers, monitors, and so on; she is being observed and experimented on
            Talijancic: My aim was to explore these ideas, not to give a finished production. I found it desirable to work on it in a site-specific production. I walked around the buiding, let the space talk to me so I could find how the space could lend itself to the play. Some spaces were more performative than others. I find that there is something liberating in the freedom with which the audience can move around as it wants.
           Templeton: Also, the whole idea is to move around, isn’t it? To be free of sitting in a theatre, in an auditorium?
           Talijancic: Yes, of course.
           Templeton: Have you done traditional productions of texts?
           Talijancic: Yes, I’m working on Heiner Müller now - Quartet, which I’m doing at P.S. 1 in Queens this spring and taking to Europe next summer.
           Templeton: Do you think that Lady lends itself to an installation performance better than A Doll House, say, or Hedda Gabler?
           Talijancic: Oh yes, there is something much more here, and I was challenged to express this.
           Templeton: What is it?  Are you saying that the play breaks its realistic bounds, that the form of the play keeps the kernel of the play from being dramatized?  Is it schizophrenic?
           Talijancic: Yes, I think I would say that.  I wanted the actors to explode the text, I told them to do this.  To take it to extremes.  Now we have destroyed the sea, we are destroying the environment.

             Templeton:  Do you find this in the play?
             Talijancic:  Well, it’s the 21rst century and we are alienating ourselves from nature.  Ellida is the only one who is in tune with it, and these days that is an incredibly important subject. 
              Templeton: Would you say that you have completed a leitmotif of Ibsen’s play?  Something he implied but didn’t work out?  You seem to be saying that the play should have been a tragedy rather than a comedy, that she should have left Wangel and returned to her element - 
              Talijancic: Yes, of course, as in Hedda Gabler, for example.
              Templeton: This is very interesting because with the possible exception of Little Eyolf, this is the only mature play of Ibsen’s that ends in comedy.  You seem to be suggesting that the ending of The Lady from the Sea is really against the grain of Ibsen’s writing, not only atypical but in contradition of Ibsen’s work as a whole.
             Talijancic:  Well, yes.  The ending just stops.  It doesn’t follow.
             Templeton:  You were really interested in the play Ibsen didn’t write.
             Talijancic: Yes, and I guess you could say the audacity to explore it.
             Templeton: Thank you very much. You are taking Ibsen where nobody has taken him before. It’s very exciting and I congratulate you.