Director Yvan Greenberg explores the rampant narcissism and blurred lines between what is public and private in modern society in Genet Porno, opening September 9 at HERE Arts Center. The play transports Divine, the cross-dressing gay prostitute of Jean Genet’s 1943 novel Our Lady of the Flowers, from the underbelly of Paris to the world of porn and video blog confessionals in Los Angeles. Mr. Greenberg, a HERE resident artist, spoke with StageBuddy about Genet Porno, the second piece in a trilogy of works inspired by influential gay authors and novels of the 20th century. He also talked about his artistic forebears and revealed one of the most powerful lessons he learned while working for the trailblazing theater ensemble The Wooster Group.

How did you come across Jean Genet’s Our Lady of the Flowers?

My company, Laboratory Theater, created a 30-minute dance piece based on another Genet novel called Querelle [of Brest]. It’s kind of a gay sailor slash crime novel. I was really interested in doing more with Genet because I felt really strong resonance with him. I’ve since come to feel like Genet is one of my patron saints or something.

I think I read Our Lady of the Flowers back in 2008. I knew at the time I wanted to create a piece based on it, but I wasn’t really sure at that point in time how to go about doing it. I didn’t really feel like it had an easy way in because the novel is very complex and there are a lot of narrative layers to it. At the time especially, I wasn’t really creating such narrative driven work. The work I was creating was a lot more dance-based and fragmentary, so it stayed on the shelf for awhile.

How long did it sit on the shelf?

I returned to it at some point in 2010, when I came across a video blog. There was something about the two things that clicked together for me. We actually started working on this show, starting with developing a script as early as fall of 2010.

Genet Porno examines how the lines often blur between what is public and private today. Were there moments in the process of staging the play in which you felt as though the lines were blurred between the piece and your own life?

I feel like that happens with most of the work I create. I don’t know if that’s specific to me and the way I think about creating art, or if it’s because I’m really involved in experimental work or what people call devised work. I’ve never taken a pre-existing play by a playwright and staged that. I’ve always been involved in creating original work from scratch with a company and rehearsal process. There are personal reasons why I’m drawn to those materials. Since 2001, I’ve basically worked with an ensemble company developing work with [them]. Inevitably, my life bleeds into the work and the life of the performers I’m working with bleed into the work. I think that’s always going to be part of the process. I definitely feel a very strong personal connection to the show.

Genet Porno is the second work within a trilogy. Can you talk a little bit about the trilogy?

I didn’t realize that I was making this trilogy until some point during the second piece. The last piece I made is called Git Along Lil Doggies, and it’s based primarily on a novel by William S. Burroughs called The Place of Dead Roads. Midway through working on Genet Porno, I realized that what I was doing subconsciously was doing works based on gay artists of the past who I felt some kind of really strong artistic connection to: William S. Burroughs with the last piece, Jean Genet with this piece. I think the thing that I was doing was tracing a little bit of what I see as my artistic lineage as a gay artist, looking back at other gay artists that I feel a particular affinity with or that I feel are my artistic forebears.

The next piece in this trilogy is based on a novel by Andy Warhol simply titled A. I feel there’s something about the nature of who Warhol was and who the group of crazy outcasts that he hung out with was. There’s something about him as a gay artist, and Genet as a gay artist, and William S. Burroughs as a gay artist. I feel like the three are connected in a certain way. I also feel like each of them really speaks to something about who I am now in the 21st century as a gay artist.

A lot of the dialogue is quite poetic. Do you read or write a lot of poetry?

I don’t actually spend much time with poetry. Also, I’m not really a writer. But I do think that kind of highly, highly literary, very poetic language is really something about the Genet novel that I was really drawn to because it is so unusual. I think there is something about the combination of this really beautiful writing that a lot of the time is also incredibly sexually explicit and explicit in other ways, too. I mean, talking about shit and farting and all those other kinds of crazy physical, bodily stuff in an extreme way being married to this beautiful poetic language was really fascinating to me and spoke to me in how different our relationship is to sexually explicit material today. That’s ultimately where the connection between the gay porn material and the Genet novel came together for me.

What was it like working with the Wooster Group?

They have been one of the most influential companies not just on me, but influential on the downtown theater scene for ages now. I worked for them for about 6 or 7 years. It was an amazing period of time in my life and I was working administratively for them but I got so much out of being around that work. I think that Liz LeCompte is basically a genius. I have so much love for all of them.

What is one thing you learned during your time working at the Performing Garage with the Wooster Group that greatly impacted you?

A real appreciation -- and this is something I think is important in a broader context today -- for the idea that artmaking is work. At the Performing Garage, everyone goes in every day and it’s their job, their work. Creating art is work. I just never thought about it in that way before. I think that’s a fundamental problem in our society now as far as the way art is perceived.

[Art is] perceived as something that is a luxury for only certain groups of people, or as something that’s just a hobby or [thought of] as entertainment. And it’s also perceived as purely mysterious, something that comes to the artist through muses. But it actually requires work. It’s actually an occupation. I think if more people in our society thought about it as work, the arts would be funded better. Artmaking in the country would be in a better place.

What would you like audiences to leave with after watching the play?

Partly the way that I go about making work is to leave that open a little bit. I think of my work as being very political because it’s coming from a place of very personal politics, but I’m not interested in my work being didactic or telling people how to think or feel about any specific thing. I’m more interested in opening up questions or creating space for people to contemplate things or think about issues.

No matter what you want to get across to people, every single individual audience is going to have their own individual experience and come away with their own individual ideas. Ultimately what this piece does is raises a lot of questions about how much we, in our society nowadays, decide to expose ourselves on a daily basis. We do a lot of sharing online with social media with every little aspect of our lives. There’s this kind of completely willful shedding of privacy. It seems that people have by and large decided they’re okay with [it]. There’s nothing that represents that idea of complete and total exposure more than pornography. I’m interested in people thinking about those issues and thinking about what it means to expose yourself.