Since 1994, when the Fargo, ND native moved to New York from Illinois, Maxwell has developed what's quite possibly the most distinctive theatrical voice in the city, as a writer-director of plays produced through his company the New York City Players. For some fifteen years, Maxwell and his collaborators have been developing a rich and subtle anti-mimetic performance style used mainly to realize Maxwell's own texts.
Maxwell's process is painstaking and meticulous. (BOMB magazine had a great interview with him in which he demonstrated his process, and it's well worth reading in its own right.) As a theater-maker, the various elements of his work exist in complex relation to one another. Maxwell may be a writer as well, but the text is always at the service of contributing to a live performance.
Immediacy–rather than any formal aesthetic goal–was what emerged from our conversation as a primary concern of Maxwell's. The text is an essential part of Maxwell's art, and as a director, part of his work is establishing his performers' relationship to it. Far from a purely aesthetic practice, Maxwell's formal distancing serves the purpose of placing both the text-as-spoken and the performer-as-speaker in an immediate present, rather than attempting a compelling fiction onstage.
Perhaps most intriguingly, Maxwell suggested that finally bringing Neutral Hero to New York presented a unique opportunity for the artists in how they approach their material.