Theater Sins and BY KAREN BOSSICK

Paul Lazar can’t help but spend time thinking about his role in “The Silence of the Lambs” lately, thanks to Donald Trump, who keeps mentioning “the late great Hannibal Lecter” on the campaign trail.

The movie, which starred Anthony Hopkins as a cannibalistic psychopath and Sun Valley resident Scott Glenn as an FBI agent, was dark. But, looking back, Lazar remembers the joy and vibrancy created on the set by Director Jonathan Demme.

“Jonatham Demme made a masterpiece that is sort of so iconic it does get referred to outside of just-film conversation,” he said. “Even in ‘The Silence of the Lambs,’ which was as dark a movie as there is, there’s a sense of joy in making it, a vibrancy that radiates with the joy of the maker.”

Lazar, whose film career includes roles in “Mickey Blue Eyes,” “Philadelphia,” “Snowpiercer,” “The Host” and “Lorenzo’s Oil,” will discuss his film and theatrical career during a free presentation at 4 p.m. today—Monday, July 29—at Ketchum’s Community Library.

He is in Sun Valley for the third time at the invitation of Sawtooth Productions’ Jonathan Kane—this time to direct Caryl Churchill’s play “Escaped Alone,” about three old friends who discuss fantastical solutions to environmental disasters and reasons to fear cats over afternoon tea.

The play, presented by The Argyros, stars Kathy Wygle, Claudia McCain, former Wood River Valley actor Danielle Kennedy now living in Los Angeles and Sarah Morrissey of Florida. It runs at 7 p.m. Aug. 8-11 in The Bailey Studio of The Argyros with a 2 p.m. matinee on Aug. 10.

“The first play I directed here was ‘Outside Mullingar’ at the Argyros. The second time I worked with  Pulitzer Prize-winning Idaho native playwright Sam Hunter on “A Cast for the Existence of God” outdoors at the Reinheimer Ranch. Every time I come, I always have these wonderful actors and really lively engaged eager audiences, and I get to be in this beautiful place working with top-notch playwrights and top-notch actors. It’s a lovely experience and why I keep coming.”

Churchill, an 85-year-old British playwright who is known for her exploration of feminist themes, is one of the very best playwrights living today, Lazar said.

“She stipulated that all the women in the play be in their 70s. My initial reaction was you don’t see that many plays that require that demographic so that interested me. The play is about personal and global catastrophe and what it takes to persist. On one hand, it’s a light playful lively almost comic play. But beyond the seemingly superficial chatter you get a glimpse of how these human beings have survived a lifetime that has some serious darkness in it and how they stay afloat despite the darkness.”

Periodically, one of the characters stands on a precipice looking into the near future and describing the global environmental catastrophe humankind is visiting on itself.

“So, it is a very dark and a very light play at the same time and a masterful marriage of darkness and lightness. And the way the playwright uses language is completely unique in that the sentences are often truncated—they’re not full-length normal sentences, which is probably much closer to how people actually really talk with partial phrases and stuff.”

Lazar hopes he is bringing the same kind of joy to the set that he has witnessed Demme bring to his.

“I did six movies with Jonathan because the way that great American director worked was to use a lot of the same actors, cast and crew over and over from movie to movie because they knew each other and could work very familiarly with each other so he could get really exceptional work out of them. He was an ensemble-minded director, and I was very proud to have been part of his stable,” said Lazar.

Korean Director Bong Joon-ho, whom Lazar work with on “The Host” and “Snowpiercer,” also worked in an ensemble way, said Lazar.

“The two filmmakers remind me of each other in that both have such an identifiable signature style that you can recognize. They also create an atmosphere on the set, a sense of fun and experimentation which as a theater director I identify with deeply,” he said. “A movie set can be an extremely tense and unpleasant environment because there’s a tight timeline and a lot of people working together in close quarters for long hours. Jonathan gave people a sense of the incredible joy and pleasure of making fantastical and fictional films, with a thrilling sense of joy that radiated from his personality that is so evident in the films themselves.”

Lazar says Bong Joon-ho is the greatest living director.

“Both ‘The Host’ and “Snowpiercer’ are unrealistic tales. One is a monster movie and the other about a futuristic idea that this planet is becoming frozen. But he makes the stories completely believable and without being didactic he infuses films with a seasoned political message in a playful, comic, very digestible way.

Lazar founded Big Dance Theater with his wife Annie-B Parsons in 1991. He has acted in and directed such plays as Christina Masciotti’s “Social Security,” Fran McDormand’s “Bodycast,” Richard Maxwell’s “Cowboys and Indians” and Mac Wellman’s “Girl Gone,” along with Young Jean Lee’s “We’re Gonna Die,” which was reprised in London with David Byrne.

He is teaching at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts, after having taught at Yale University, SUNY Purchase and Rutgers University.

“I’m always aware that the financial support for the theatrical arts in America is bare bones because there’s a certain amount of minimal support and maximum suspicion of the validity of the performing arts,” he said.

The suspicion arises from the Puritan ethic that came with colonists who believed they were escaping sins in Europe that included the tendency of kings to go to the theater, Lazar said.

“They came here to practice their religion--a very stringent Christianity that thought arts and dancing were a sinful enterprise.”

The lack of interest in investing in the arts is derived by the nation’s hyper-capitalist economic engine, which wants to prioritize things that can be monetized in maximum way, Lazar said.

“Theater, unless it’s a Broadway musical, doesn’t monetize particularly well. So, if doesn’t make money and it’s rooted in sin…”

Despite his own love of the theater, Lazar is reluctant to make any grandiose statements that theater is good for humanity.

“But it seems very essential, like eating and walking in the woods,” he said.