Chaos and Order: Making American Theater
(distributed by Films for the Humanities & Sciences)
Swept up by The Chaos and Order of Art
Tim Jackson is not a man with too much time on his hands. He teaches, mentors students, plays drums in a band, gives music lessons, and runs film festivals. He has also carved out time — three years’ worth — to make his first movie. ”Chaos and Order: Making American Theater” screens today at 5:30 at the Brattle in Cambridge. The 60-minute documentary goes behind the scenes at the American Repertory Theatre and raises insightful questions about the value of art in our culture. Jackson is clearly a fan of the ART’s experimental style, and his film is based on interviews with almost two dozen theater types, including directors, producers, and critics.
”I’ve never seen a film that didn’t focus on just one play or one actor but really tried to focus on the entire art form,” says Jackson, who teaches digital media and communications at New England Institute of Art.
Though theater has long been one of Jackson’s many interests, the 56-year-old married father of two has popped up, Zelig-like, in some unusual places through the years. He was the drummer for Boston’s Robin Lane & the Chartbusters, a band popular enough in its heyday to see its video aired during MTV’s first hour when the channel launched in 1981.
In 1959, a 10-year-old Jackson performed on a Merv Griffin game show called ”Play Your Hunch.” Five years later, he was in the audience when the Beatles made their first appearance on ”The Ed Sullivan Show.” When the Yardbirds performed at Jackson’s high school, the teenager’s band provided the sound system (which the guitar gods promptly destroyed).
The same year the Chartbusters were on MTV, Jackson’s wife, Suzanne Boucher, scored a hit on the pop and R & B charts with ”General Hospit-Tale,” a parody of the ABC soap opera, as a member of the Afternoon Delights. Jackson also worked on music for several John Sayles films and played with LaVern Baker at the 1991 Montreux Jazz Festival.
”At 40, someone described me to my wife as the grandfather of rock drummers,” Jackson says with a laugh.
For the past 20 years, he’s played drums in a group called The Band That Time Forgot. By the time his son was born in 1984, Jackson was playing in as many as seven bands while finishing an undergraduate degree in English at UMass-Boston before pursuing a master’s in education at Cambridge College. He was also a charter member and actor in a theater company called the Harrison Project. With as many careers as he’s had, ”Chaos” allows Jackson to explore the early interests that sparked his creative life.
‘This film really goes back to what I loved in the first place,” he says.
”Chaos” isn’t Jackson’s first movie, if you count the 8mm he made at age 12. He got everyone in his neighborhood to play a part in the no-budget film, which played on bomb scares of the ’50s.
Jackson is trying to tap into that kind of youthful enthusiasm in other budding directors. This year he launched the first New England Student Video Festival, which he plans to make an annual event. The festival returns in the spring as the New England College Film and Video Festival, and Jackson hopes to increase the number of schools that participate.
Mary Cardaras, the head of Jackson’s department, tapped him to direct ”Chaos.” She was approached by Sam Weisman, a Hollywood director and American Repertory Theatre advisory board member, about doing a documentary on the theater’s founding director, Robert Brustein.
”Chaos” grew into a more expansive look at the theater’s history, the challenges it’s faced, and its connection to Harvard. Jackson is now working on his next documentary, about subversive art.
”The thing I like most about him is he’s so curious about everything,” says Cardaras. ”He goes in as a consummate interviewer and ends up knowing people better than they know themselves.”
Jackson lined up an impressive roster of interviews for the film (which is narrated by founding company member Cherry Jones) including F. Murray Abraham, Debra Winger, Peter Sellars, and Anne Bogart. His preparation included reading books written by his subjects and reviews of productions they’d been involved with, and sitting in on ART co-founder Robert Orchard’s class at Harvard.
Gang of Four drummer Hugo Burnham teaches at New England Institute of Art and describes the atmosphere in the office that he and Jackson share with four others as a party led by his colleague.
”When he’s not playing, he’s gigging or teaching or filming or going to museums or art galleries or taking weekends to go to New York,” Burnham says. ”He wears me out just being near him.” 
COMMENTS