Mandy Patinkin and Kathryn Grody play The Music Center at Strathmore on Valentine’s Day, February 14, 2024, at 8 pm. Find tickets ($28–$128) and more information online.

Interview originally published September 26, 2023

Stage and screen star Mandy Patinkin has been a part of my life for as long as I can remember. My love for musical theater can be traced back to the hours of my early childhood spent lying in the backseat of my mom’s car (no seatbelt, it was the ’80s) staring at clouds and listening to Evita on cassette tape. Then there was the time my mom dragged me, a jaded teen by then, to a back alley stage door in Cleveland to meet the man. When Patinkin came out after his concert, we were the only people there: a mortified 14-year-old and a mother who was so excited that I would not have blamed him for taking out a restraining order. Instead, he was kind and gracious, chatting with us and thanking us for coming to the show.

“It’s always a risky thing to get to know your heroes,” my mother used to say. “You never know if they will live up to your imagination.” What a joy then to discover, decades later, that Mandy Patinkin is every bit the white knight my mother imagined him to be.

Patinkin has been in the public eye across a variety of mediums his entire adult life. He first earned fame on Broadway, with iconic turns in Evita and Sunday in the Park with George. Then there was that role in The Princess Bride: “My name is Inigo Montoya! You killed my father. Prepare to die!” and a long spate of hit TV shows: Chicago Hope, Criminal Minds, and Homeland to name a few.

Now, Patinkin and wife Kathryn Grody, both in their 70s and both self-proclaimed social media neophytes, have achieved celebrity status in a sphere more typically associated with folks much younger than the septuagenarians: social media. The couple credit their son Gideon Grody-Patinkin with coaxing them into sharing their lives on platforms like YouTube, TikTok, and Instagram while the three of them shared a home in the early days of COVID.

And it turned out people loved to watch them. Their content combines efforts to promote political causes with more homespun videos documenting their history as a couple and their daily lives. A quick look at their recent TikTok content shows videos supporting the Hollywood writer’s strike, the International Rescue Committee, and individuals displaced in the recent Moroccan earthquake, with clips of Mandy puttering around the house, Kathryn asking him to change a cartridge in the printer, and the couple snuggled on a sofa discussing how they first met.

It’s the self-described “third act” of a couple who, 45 years into married life, define themselves through family and love.

By all appearances, the Grody-Patinkin home is idyllic and disheveled, cozy and chaotic. They give off the energy of people who have known each other for so long that they finish each other’s sentences without thought. They bicker but in the adorable way of people who love each other’s quirks and who will always have each other’s backs. Maybe it’s that in a world where so much is unstable, Grody and Patinkin feel like a safe harbor, a voyeuristic way for us all to feel like we are wrapped up in a warm blanket of safety. Thirty minutes into our conversation, I felt the urge to call everyone in my family and give them big virtual hugs.

I spoke to Mandy, Kathryn, and Gideon before their upcoming appearance at the Reston Community Center from their woodsy home where they all joined around one Zoom screen and barely let me ask questions. It was like being a fly on the wall at a boisterous family dinner where conversation zinged from one family member to another and I loved every minute of it. Here is just a bit of what we talked about.

This conversation has been abbreviated for clarity.

Gideon, I would like to start with you because I feel like you are the mastermind behind this third act in your parents’ lives. How did they get started on social media?

Gideon: I came back here during the COVID lockdown to look after the folks. I saw that Dad [Mandy] had a small social media presence and was making some posts about the IRC [International Rescue Committee]. My parents are both pretty unusual and authentic people so I thought that if I recorded some videos of them being themselves, it might bring some more eyeballs to causes they are interested in promoting. To our great surprise, it took off. Then it became a project for me to document my parents and make a diary of their existence. There was extra motivation because, in 2020, we felt like we might be getting COVID at any time.

Kathryn: At that time, I had no idea how social media worked. I wasn’t interested and I thought it was just garbage. But it felt like a good social service. We were all so frightened, we were all so isolated, in our homes. So it felt like, OK, whatever this thing is, if we can give some comfort and perspective during this particular time, that is a legitimate use of this weird thing.

Was your content political from the outset?

Mandy: My social media platforms were begun in 2015 by the people I work with at the International Rescue Committee. But they had hit a plateau in terms of followers and then Gideon came along and exploded it.

Kathryn: It’s an interesting thing, Nicole. Mandy said he wasn’t political when I first met him. This guy [gestures to Mandy] is six years younger than me. He missed the ’60s, which were pivotal for me. When I first met him, I asked him if his parents were Democrats or Republicans and all he knew was that they were members of the sisterhood and brotherhood of his Temple. I mean, we are both Jews, but he grew up in Chicago in a very conservative, loving shtetl-like community. I grew up in Southern California where being Jewish meant Passover, Rosh Hashana, and social justice. You couldn’t be a prejudiced person because of your religion.

One day soon after we met, we were getting on a bus in NYC and Mandy saw an elderly lady running to catch the bus and he asked the bus driver to stop. The driver didn’t stop so Mandy pulled the cord so this woman could get on the bus. I just looked at him and said “That’s political.” Being political is the way you behave, it’s kindness towards others, it’s your point of view about sharing resources. You can’t separate politics from your whole being.

That’s wonderful. Who decides what you are going to publish on your social media accounts?

Mandy: Gideon and our good friend Ewen [Wright] are the puppeteers, the arbiters. Gideon knows how to push our buttons and ask the right questions. The TikTok started after we were on a Zoom fundraiser with [former NYC mayoral candidate] Ruth Messinger during the 2020 election. We were talking about getting out the vote and Ruth jumped in and said, “You aren’t reaching young people and that’s a big part of the population.” The next morning Gideon and Ewen said to us, “We’re going to ask you to do some interesting things. You just need to trust us.” So they launched a TikTok site and it went crazy.

Gideon: Well, things have changed since those early days. They have issues and organizations that they believe in so they put stuff out now. It’s interesting to see them, people in their ’70s, learning about these platforms and what is or isn’t popular. It can be very confusing. They got 350K followers in one day for shaking their butts to a song to get people to register to vote.

Kathryn: It was so embarrassing! What you won’t do for Democracy!

Gideon: It’s interesting as people who are already known to the public, our dad in particular, it’s this new wave of attention but in this medium that they are still working to understand and it’s very amorphous. And it’s a way for these two people to see their own relationship in a different light.

What has that been like for you guys? Are you surprised at anything?

Mandy: Well, I have been surprised. There have been times when I’ve been completely overwhelmed by what Gideon and Ewen capture on film. I remember saying to Gideon and Kathryn, “My god, when we are gone, this is everything I would have wanted my children and grandchildren to know about us. We are not here anymore but this is who we were.” Gideon and Ewen did that for us and it’s such a gift.

Kathryn: It’s a strange thing because my parents died in 1972 when few people had movie cameras, but now Gideon has archived us in such an amazing way that, god willing, our great, great, great-grandchildren will know what we were like.

And they’ll know about the time you struggled to put in a lightbulb with a dimmer switch!

Mandy: Well, yeah, since you mention that, I do get excited about those things. I’m not performing in those videos. I’m concentrating on making that fucking dimmer switch work. The other day I spoke to a buddy of mine who is a washer and dryer repairman. He gave me an amazing piece of information on what one has to do to get rid of mold in the washing machine. I said, Gideon, I think this would be really helpful to people. Most people have washing machines and they don’t clean them properly so why don’t we make a video about that? I think that would be a wonderful public service.

Gideon: And then I say, Oh yes, that sounds great. I would love to spend 27 hours editing footage of you cleaning the washing machine.

Mandy: And he will!

And this cozy content, the clips of you puttering around the house, brings in an audience for the causes that are important to you.

Mandy: To have a platform that inspires people to contribute to the world is an extraordinary privilege and to not take advantage of it is a little criminal. Five minutes ago we posted a little clip to support dear friends of ours who live in the Atlas Mountains in Morrocco that was recently hit by an earthquake. They started a GoFundMe Page, so we made a little video saying this is where we shot parts of Homeland and these people are beautiful and they’ve suffered a tragedy so please help them.

And now the three of you are inviting live audiences in to share these experiences with you in person. What is that like?

Gideon: What is interesting about doing these live interviews compared to the social media content is that the live programs are unedited. Most people would be uncomfortable having their parents talk about their childhood to a room full of strangers, but we are able to have fun, vulnerable, and sometimes difficult conversations in front of an audience.

Mandy: And Gideon plans each event. Kathryn and I don’t know where he’s going with it or what he’s going to say. We have no preparation whatsoever.

Gideon: We thought we would only do a few of these live events and then run out of things to say, but once I saw how available they were to have fun, to be surprised, to try new things, to get into a family argument onstage and recover from it, I was like, OK, these are great collaborators because they are down for whatever. After working together for a while, you can take risks because you know if you mess up or calculate something wrong…

Mandy: Then we bring out chocolate chip cookies and pass them out to the audience! [Addressing Kathryn:] If you had said to me when we first met, “Listen, I would like to record everything we do. Are you willing to do that?” I would have said you are out of your mind! That is our private life. If you had told me that one day we would have social media platforms and be able to communicate with people on a variety of levels from fundraising to registering people to vote, to entertaining during the pandemic, I would have said, You’ve got to be kidding me! So you don’t know what life holds for you.

Kathryn: The truth is that this is not a “show.” It isn’t rehearsed. It’s basically a three-person trust exercise. We go out there in front of people and we have no idea what this extremely daring, creative person [Gideon] is going to do. And he has done some things which were not easy.

Mandy: I’ve wanted Kathryn to have a larger audience my whole life, but she just didn’t want to deal with certain aspects of show business and avoided it. She loves off-Broadway and writes and does other people’s plays and her own. But I wanted the world to know her in the way I did, and I couldn’t succeed in making that happen. But Gideon has made my dream come true. Gideon got the world to know the woman that I love. I couldn’t make it happen and he did.

Kathryn: I write solo shows, and I wrote one called “The Unexpected Third,” which was what I expected this period of my life to be like, what it actually is like. I did a production for three nights near our home [in Upstate New York], hoping maybe 50 people would come, but because of Gideon sharing it on social media, there were 250 people there every night. It was the only time the theater had ever sold out. It was quite thrilling and shocking.

Mandy: Kathryn said something a minute ago that I wanted to riff on. She used the word trust. Well, if I had to look at one word that defined this journey of being public and free form with my wife, son, and our dear friend Ewen, it is trust. This is all possible because of the trust that we have in each other.

Kathryn: It’s a full circle from when we got married.

Mandy: [raising his hand to the Zoom camera and taking off his wedding ring] It’s written right here on my finger if I take off my wedding ring…

Kathryn: I didn’t know what to inscribe on our rings and this baby, who was 26 years old at the time…

Mandy: 25 when you met me!

Kathryn: He suggested “in loving trust,” And that is a big thing, trust. It doesn’t come easily. You earn it, and you mess up sometimes, and you splinter it up and it comes back… what is that thing the Japanese do where they take pottery and splinter it up and then put the pieces back together?

Gideon: Kintsugi!

Kathryn: Yes, Kintsugi. Where they mend broken things with gold? Well, that’s kind of what I feel we are. We are a mended thing put back together with gold.

Mandy: Or Krazy Glue!

A Conversation with Mandy Patinkin and Kathryn Grody – Moderated by their son Gideon Grody-Patinkin plays on Saturday, September 30, 2023, at 3 pm and 8 pm at Reston Community Center – 2310 Colts Neck Road, in Reston, VA. For tickets ($40-$60) go online.

The post Mandy Patinkin and Kathryn Grody: A third act defined by love appeared first on DC Theater Arts.

By Alex Zavistovich

Many, MANY years ago, when I was barely in junior high school, I was cast in my first role – a school production of Edgar Allan Poe’s The Tell-Tale Heart. As most first experiences are, it was influential in my passion for acting. In my case, it also prompted a lifelong fascination with the intersection of Poe, horror, and live theatre.

That’s why, having moved to Poe’s burial place in Baltimore three years ago, my current creative endeavor as artistic director of The National Edgar Allan Poe Theatre is so meaningful to me. On October 14, Edgar Allan Poe’s Blood, Sweat and Fears opens in Dundalk, MD at FPX Events Live. While it is the first live production from The National Edgar Allan Poe Theatre, after two years spent producing award-winning audio plays on NPR, the real story is NOT about this single-stage show.

Modesty aside (and anyone who knows me knows modesty isn’t my strong suit anyway), the real story is a 15-year odyssey of production successes that started in DC and made its way an hour north to Charm City. Our current show is an interweaving of the sensibilities of two companies, one having been spawned from the other.

Years before there was a National Edgar Allan Poe Theatre, I co-founded Molotov Theatre Group, a non-profit company dedicated to the preservation of the historically significant Grand Guignol Theatre of Horror. The Grand Guignol began in Paris in the late 1800s, grew to the heights of its popularity in the 1920s, and finally saw its demise in the 1960s, as motion pictures began to dominate the horror entertainment scene.

Grand Guignol saw a cult-like return in interest in the early 2000s, with a dozen or more theatres around the world recreating a typical evening of scripts from the horror theatre. The Grand Guignol founders and creative powerhouses cited numerous inspirations – including Edgar Allan Poe, whom the Grand Guignol paid tribute to with an onstage dramatization of Poe’s infamous The System of Doctor Tarr and Professor Fether.

Arguably, Molotov Theatre Group was at the forefront of that cult of fascination with all things Grand Guignol. The company first gained attention in 2007 with its Capital Fringe Festival Entry For Boston, which won Best Comedy recognition. Molotov followed up its success the next year with its play The Sticking Place, which was awarded Best Overall by fans – despite a lackluster response from critics.

Molotov went on to amass a collection of Helen Hayes Recommendations, and a nomination for its work Nightfall with Edgar Allan Poe in 2015. Two years later the company saw one of its greatest commercial and critical successes with a remounting of an early production, Blood, Sweat and Fears: A Grand Guignol Sick Cabaret. The show was a resounding favorite among fans and critics and even received a lavish positive review from this very publication.

Molotov Theatre Group was undeniably better known internationally than in our own hometown of Washington, DC. (In fact, our cult status in the international horror community was underscored just a month ago, when Molotov was the subject of an entire chapter in an academic text from the University of Exeter Press in the UK, titled Grand-Guignolesque.)

Moving forward two years from our final Molotov show, I found myself in Baltimore – a happy decision that prompted a refocusing away from Molotov Theatre Group. As Baltimore is the home of The Ravens, The Poe House and Museum, and Westminster Hall (Poe’s gravesite), it made sense to honor, in our small way, America’s grandfather of horror and suspense.

Staying true to its interest in horror and suspense theatre, Molotov Theatre Group officially became The National Edgar Allan Poe Theatre in 2021. The company has maintained its 501c3 non-profit status while honing our ambition and focus as the only theatre dedicated to the adaptation of the works of Poe for the stage, for broadcast, and in education.

Along the way, The National Edgar Allan Poe Theatre entered an agreement with Baltimore NPR affiliate WYPR to create radio drama adaptations of Poe’s best-known works. Over nearly two uninterrupted years throughout the pandemic, the company produced monthly adaptations of Poe’s work under the banner Poe Theatre on the Air. The programs are streamable on Amazon Music, Audible, Apple Podcasts, and a host of other platforms.

These monthly adaptations have won five awards of excellence, including the 2021 Saturday Visiter Award for Best Adaptation from the International Edgar Allan Poe Festival for the company’s production of Hop-Frog. As a result, The National Edgar Allan Poe Theatre was invited to work on an international collaboration with the University of Stirling in Scotland and the University of East Anglia in England with a three-part audio drama adaptation for a curated project called The Media of Mediumship.

And now, finally, on October 14, this 15-year odyssey culminates with Edgar Allan Poe’s Blood, Sweat and Fears. The show readapts for the stage three of the Poe Theatre on the Air programs: Berenice, A Predicament, and The Tell-Tale Heart.

When asked how we selected the stories to be adapted for Edgar Allan Poe’s Blood, Sweat and Fears, the answer is the perfect hybrid between Molotov Theatre Group and The National Edgar Allan Poe Theatre. The early Grand Guignol theatre shows relied on an approach called “the hot and cold shower,” or in French, “la douche ecosaisse.” An evening at the theatre would begin with a suspense story, followed by a comedy, and would conclude with a horror play. The mid-show comedy served as a palate-cleanser and caused the viewers to be caught off guard by the finale.

So it is with Edgar Allan Poe’s Blood, Sweat, and Fears. The first story is the shocking Berenice (also notable for being among the stories written by Poe during his time in Baltimore), followed by A Predicament, one of the several true comedies written by Poe. The Tell-Tale Heart was the obvious horror story to end with, not only because it is one of Poe’s best-known works, but also because it is currently being taught in the Baltimore County Public Schools Eighth Grade Curriculum.

Fifteen years on from my first foray into horror theatre, I’m still pushing a very big rock up a very steep hill by producing works in this underappreciated genre. Horror theatre isn’t what you’d call a big seller to begin with, and I’m compounding the challenge by taking on some of the best-known works from an author with a rabidly loyal fan base. I’m really opening myself up to criticism, and I sincerely hope that this time around, unlike Molotov Theatre Group, we might actually become as popular in our hometown as in the global horror community.

For me, acting in and producing horror theatre has been a lifelong passion that got its start in childhood and grew through the years – in one form or another – to be the one thing that can keep me working past midnight.

And isn’t that the perfect time to work, for someone producing horror theatre?

Edgar Allan Poe’s Blood, Sweat and Fears plays weekends from October 14 through November 6, 2022 at FPX Events, 7938 Eastern Avenue, in Baltimore, MD. For tickets, go online.

Alex Zavistovich is the founder and artistic director of The National Edgar Allan Poe Theatre. He can be reached at alex@poetheatre.org

Edgar Allan Poe’s Blood, Sweat and Fears was co-written by Professor Richard Hand of the University of East Anglia and Poe Theatre Director of Education Jennifer Restak, the play is directed by Jay Brock, Catholic University Associate Dean for Undergraduate Studies. includes music performed by Jill Parsons, lighting design by Hailey Laroe, costume design by Jacqui Maranville, sound design by Jay Shovan and choreography by Christen Svingos Douglass. The production director is Jackie Wilberton.

The cast of Edgar Allan Poe’s Blood, Sweat and Fears includes Adam R. Adkins, Elizabeth Darby, Olivia Ercolano, Melanie Kurstin, Anna Phillips-Brown, B. Thomas Rinaldi, and Alex Zavistovich. They include some old Molotov cohorts along with new friends.

This article is part of DC Theater Arts’ In Their Own Words Series. DCTA invites members of the arts community to contribute articles. If you have a topic that you feel passionate about, please reach out to nicole@dcmetrotheaterarts.com about potential publication. Examples of past articles include this essay on the playwriting process by playwright Normal Yeung, and this article on burning paper onstage in Hamilton by props designer Jay Duckworth.

The post ‘Edgar Allan Poe’s Blood, Sweat and Fears’ is a story 15 years in the making appeared first on DC Theater Arts.

By Tia Shearer, Deb Sivigny, and Anna Lathrop

Editor’s note: DCTA occasionally invites artists to write about their own work. In this submission, artists Tia Shearer, Deb Sivigny, and Anna Lathrop write about their five-year-and-counting rehearsal process for Edward and Christine, a 1996 poem-play by Kenneth Koch that the trio will be presenting in a Zoom production for an intimate audience of active spectators from May 13 through June 17, 2022.

In the play, Edward and Christine meet, fall in love, get married, procreate, get divorced. Only, they do it completely out of order and with talking bunnies, hungry statues, cannibals, and a host of other witnesses and players both real and imagined.

In this version, the 100+ characters are all portrayed by Shearer, performing from her living room to yours (with potential guest appearances by her son and cat).

Audiences will be invited to keep their cameras on…to have a few of their own pre-gathered objects near, and to embrace the delightful messiness of love, life, and Zoom/living room theater!

And now, without further ado, Anna Lathrop, Tia Shearer Bassett, and Deb Sivigny (plus guests) discuss Edward and Christine…in the unconventional style of Edward and Christine.

WHAT
Tia: Edward and Christine is a poem-play by Kenneth Koch, written for an undisclosed number of actors to portray 100+ characters in 50+ locations. We got permission to do it all with one actor and a bunch of objects. And then our actor got cancer, so we re-envisioned the re-envisioning for Zoom. But, from the start, the idea was that we would work on this play together, when we could and wanted to, with no definite result in mind.

Tia’s cat: <eats half a prop>

WHEN
A calendar: I’m going to need more to work with, please. If you mean, When is the show? It is happening now. At least, iteration one is happening now. On an oddball schedule that works around the actor’s home life, and takes into account her neighbors in the apartment building.

If you mean, When did this all begin? Well. Tia fell in love with the play just out of college, when she performed in the premiere in New York City (directed by Unexpected Stage’s Chris Goodrich). In 2015, she took an earlier idea of the project to Anna, and they began to imagine the piece for 2 clowns (“shout-out,” as the kids say, to Séamus Miller). Then, after working on 2 wonderful solo shows, Tia got struck with the idea to try E&C as a single-actor piece. In 2017, she took this wild notion to Deb and Anna.

WHY
Anna: I wanted to work on this project because I was attracted first by the opportunity to work with Tia, who is a truly formidable actor, and then later by the opportunity to work with Deb, who is a truly amazing designer. It’s so rare to work on a project where every artist has an equal voice — theater as we typically know it in America is normally very hierarchical and siloed. This was a chance to work with two artists whose voices and visions I deeply respect in a deep way without the constraints of urgency and product-focused art-making.

Deb: I’m always on the lookout for interesting projects that stretch my design knowledge and dramaturgical brain at the same time. When Tia and Anna approached me about joining their team it was an automatic yes — the opportunity to work with two amazing, creative, generous people on a narrative that had no predetermined outcome was thrilling. As we worked together, it was genuinely the first time I had experienced a project with no hierarchy. We worked together as a trio where ideas and roles overlapped and complemented each other. What a dream!

Tia: There is a reason this play has vibrated inside my brain since I was 22. I wanted to find that reason. Or at least (and maybe more importantly), enjoy the heck out of the chase. Also, these days, I only want to work on projects that make me happy, with people who make me feel comfy and welcome and safe and intellectually ignited and challenged.

WHERE
Tia: We worked over email, Zoom, in-person, across multiple states. We would meet and then months would go by; then we would have a period of focused work together, and then part again, letting the piece simmer. I have to credit another dear collaborator of mine, Natasha Mirny, as well as Michelle Kozlak of Arts on the Horizon, with opening my mind to the possibility of slow-cooking a theater production. I think I can come off as someone with very quick energy? Like a bunny or a squirrel? But this bunny-squirrel loves working slowwwwwly. It lets a piece grow, it lets you grow with it, and creates layers of richness, like sediment.

Airbnb farmhouse in rural Pennsylvania: Oh yeah, those artsy city gals! They stayed for a weekend. Called it a retreat. They were nice, so I gave ’em my sweetest quiet. The squirrely one started makin’ my sewing kit talk. Another one made these pretty paper cut-outs, and a kind of zipline for ’em.

HOW
Deb: I was really drawn to the look and palette of mid-20th century travel postcards — especially as hotels, cities, cruise lines, etc. were advertised. The rich but muted colors, that dusty, grainy look to the printing, and the blocky coloring of the graphic — all of them lent a dreamy, hazy quality to the story, which goes to many many places in a blur of memory.

Blurred memory: It’s truuuuue.

Deb: I was also inspired by the simplicity of a hand or an object representing an entire character: how expressive the turn of a finger could be, how the twitch of a muscle could convey huge emotion. I found artists like David Leventhal and Paul Zaloom and how they used objects and gestures in their work to be particularly informative.

Anna: Some of my inspirations were the artwork of José Naranja, who created The Orange Manuscript; the works of 1927, a UK-based theater company; and the rest of Kenneth Koch’s poetry. He has such an amazing poetry collection and he creates such exquisite worlds that you just want to climb in and inhabit.

WHO
Anna’s biographer: Anna often has a resting skepticism face, but really she’s just thinking — or trying to, anyway. She currently occupies many worlds, that of research, that of futuring, and that of theater, and finds that these worlds crash together in the most magical ways sometimes.

Deb’s biographer: Deb often has this look on her face, one of skepticism and sadness — but she doesn’t really intend it — rather she’s just thinking really hard about the thing she just saw or heard. She’s kind of an octopus of ideas but sometimes her brain ties those limbs in knots.

Tia’s biographer: Tia is a Russian doll of sorts — a squirrel inside a tortoise inside a wolf inside an actor. One day, she received a grant from her local government to help bring a first iteration of Edward and Christine to The People. That work is currently playing here.

Edward: Ah, hello!

Christine: I felt the excitement of a walk of which I didn’t know the end….

Running Time: Approximately 80 minutes.

Edward and Christine plays on Zoom on select dates from May 13 through June 17, 2022. For more information tickets, go online. Tickets are pay-what-you-wish. The show is recommended for adults aged 18 and up.

SEE ALSO:
Fun and intimate ‘Edward and Christine’ plays live online (review by Charles Green)

The post In Their Own Words: the creators of ‘Edward and Christine’ share their unconventional take on the show appeared first on DC Theater Arts.

That Theory has gained urgency and relevance since I wrote the first draft in 2009 is uncanny and alarming. Over ten years of innumerable workshops, readings, and productions, the challenge of revising this story rife with internet vitriol wasn’t updating a laptop to an iPad, or a DVD-R to a USB stick, or even #YOLO to… whatever nineteen-year-olds say nowadays. I think “OK Boomer” is currently fire. No, the toughest challenge was navigating a socio-politico-cultural environment that was changing faster than our climate; so fast, that around the time I started writing this play, freedom of speech was a liberal value, and somewhere along the way, it became conservative. To keep my film-professor protagonist Isabelle as progressive as she professes to be, I had to revise the script like a boat riding atop churning political waves, calibrating her moral compass and rerouting leftward in a circle that meets rightward, and ultimately landing on the shores of Irony in the nation of Hypocrisy. I’m being metaphorical, obviously—I’m not referring to Canada or the United States, although those two nations figure prominently in the evolution of Theory. Obviously.

Isabelle creates an unmoderated discussion board for her film theory students to keep talking and learning from each other beyond the lecture hall. Her liberalism gets dismantled when an anonymous student posts increasingly offensive and dangerous material, taunting her to shut them down. My writing of Isabelle grew her from a champion of free speech, to free thought, to giving voice to the voiceless. Her progressiveness became more complex as political positions became more complicated, and liberals were increasingly fighting amongst themselves. Her complexity is very human, like my friend who advocates freedom of speech as much as she does Bernie Sanders and AOC. The evolution of Isabelle and Theory required me to use friends and colleagues as reference points as politics changed. I needed to be guided not by politicians, but by humans. One guide gave me the most consequential advice, sparking the evolution of Isabelle’s wife, Lee.

Lee was originally a white dude. He was Isabelle’s boyfriend and played a minor role in terms of plot and theme. Many of the dynamics and tensions within intersectionality were absent in this early script. In 2013, my dramaturge, the playwright Shirley Barrie, said to me, “Instead of Isabelle merely professing progressiveness, how about she lives progressively? What if she were married to a woman?” I said yes.

Making Lee a woman of color required almost no thought from me. My automatic choice is to make a colorful cast. And because explosive debates over the film Birth of a Nation were crucial to the story, the choice was laid bare before me: Lee would be a Black woman, and Theory would be a new play.

At one workshop in 2018, leading up to the professional premiere at Tarragon Theatre in Toronto, Audrey Dwyer, who was playing Lee, had concerns. Audrey had already played Lee in various presentations, but this current draft dove particularly deep into race relations. And things in the world had changed particularly extremely. Mind the year I stated. In this draft, the element I introduced was that Lee used to be an activist. Audrey’s concern was that if Lee had fought for social justice as a woman of color, how could she be so tolerant of Isabelle’s missteps? She offered to go through the script, page by page, beat by beat, with me and director Esther Jun, to locate moments where Lee’s reactions—or lack thereof—were not congruent with Isabelle’s aggressions, micro and macro. By offering her personal experience and perspective, Audrey was doing so much more than providing accuracy and believability to this relationship—she was giving Lee a soul, and now the heart of the story is Lee awakening Isabelle. And I was re-awakened to the value of listening to an artist I can trust. There are more than a few in Theory’s history.

October 2018, and Theory would have its first professional preview. After the show I was sitting in the house with Tarragon’s artistic director Richard Rose and literary manager Joanna Falck. Things felt grim. “It drags. It’s ten minutes too long,” they said. “These are the cuts you should make,” they said. Massive cuts can feel, to a playwright, like taking a butter knife to your Rubik’s Cube, prying out chunks, and scrambling to put it all back together. Stat. I dreaded what must have felt like slight sadism to the actors, rewriting every night after the remaining six previews until 8:00 AM so they could rehearse new material at 10:00 AM, and perform it that evening. By opening, I had cut ten pages. Richard and Joanna are excellent at what they do, so I took their advice to heart, which is why at that grim first preview my heart was sinking. “Excuse me,” a polite voice chimed in through the grimness. “I don’t mean to interrupt. My name’s Victoria Murray Baatin. I’m here from Mosaic Theater in Washington, DC.” Victoria had nothing but praise and enthusiasm for what Theory was saying, and saw the vision despite a clunky preview. She requested the script and wanted to stay in touch. I turned to Richard and Joanna and etched on my redemptive smile were the words: “I guess my play doesn’t suck.”

Mosaic Theater Company of DC made an offer to produce Theory, and I would have conversations with Victoria and Mosaic’s artistic director Ari Roth about revisions for the DC production. As I expected, I would Americanise—I mean, Americanize—the text, changing “university” to “college” and “mark” to “grade” with the help of dramaturge April Sizemore-Barber. But that’s the easy part. The play’s content is what I wondered about. Over the years, I’ve consulted innumerable professors so I knew I wasn’t off the mark, but now I could consult someone who lends a closer understanding of Isabelle’s world—April is an Assistant Professor of the Practice, Women’s and Gender Studies, at Georgetown University. For this American production in late-2019, was I now off the mark? April didn’t mention any egregious errors. I defer to experts.

In general, I knew Theory would transport well to the United States because Canadians can’t escape American culture and media. Attentive, news junkie Canadians like me are quite knowledgable and familiar with American politics and stuff (it’s okay, reader—we know it’s not reciprocal). I’ve divided my time between Toronto and Los Angeles for years; I’m no stranger to the States. And yet I was anxious about bringing my play to America.

There’s a lot of filth and bigotry in Theory. I’ve sometimes wondered if I’d gone too far with the students’ offensive postings, but then, against better judgement, I read YouTube comments and, yup…real life is way worse. Emboldened by free speech, Theory’s mysterious student injects racial tension into the home of Isabelle and Lee, forcing the couple to confront an issue they’d never had to before: Isabelle’s refusal to silence the student makes her complicit to racism against her wife.

So let’s talk about race. I was born in China and immigrated to Canada when I was a baby. I’ve seen race my entire life. Don’t be fooled by our “politeness”—Canada has a sickening racism problem, especially toward our First Nations people. America has a different narrative, and given its history, demographics, culture, and media might, racism in America seems especially pronounced, violent, and stark. I was anxious about how Theory would resonate not just in America but in DC, where the population is majority African-American and where so many fights for civil rights were fought. I don’t mind if my work offends people’s sensitivities, but if I offend people fundamentally because my work seems irresponsible, reckless, disrespectful…then I’m just being an asshole. And if I seem irresponsible regarding race, then that’s far more problematic than an asshole.

Our first preview in DC. Our audience included many people of color. When an act of racism was about to happen on stage, when a most terrible slur was about to be uttered, I braced myself and hoped the audience would be patient to see it through, that it had context and served the narrative.

One man walked out. Over the next four previews and opening night, with several post-show discussions in between, audience members approached me. They were positive and enthusiastic, some vigorously. Oftentimes they were African-American women. At one talkback, without it being the subject at hand, one woman said she believed Lee and Isabelle’s marriage.

Perhaps I didn’t really need reassurance. After all, Theory has had assured guides its entire existence. Victoria had told me months earlier that she didn’t see any problems with how the play could be received by the DC community. And she certainly wouldn’t allow an irresponsible portrayal of Lee on stage. Nor would Andrea Harris Smith, who is playing Lee. Nor did Audrey, who helped shape Lee to correct my formerly errant writing of the character. I could trust the encouragement and constructive feedback I’d received from LGBTQ+ actors and audience members over the years, whose thoughts helped my revisions. I could have faith in what I learned from collaborating with the directors—every one of them a woman, woman of color, or man of color (once)—who provided an experienced voice to this story about two women fighting institutionalized patriarchy and racism. That Theory remains of-the-moment after ten years is a credit to all the people who advised me along the way. All I had to do was listen.

There is a parallel between a writer and Isabelle. Yes, write whatever you want, say whatever you want. Think however you want. You could even share those words with someone in private. But once you put those words out there—on stage, published, to a lecture hall full of students—there could be consequences. Maybe those consequences were intended, maybe not. But nowadays, for a writer to write whatever they want, including experiences not their own, can be irresponsible. Artists should be allowed to use their imagination, but there are limits to what story they tell; it’s incumbent upon the writer to engage people whose communities are represented in the work, as part of the process of writing. Otherwise, they’re being tantamount to saying, “This is what I believe. I’m right. You’re wrong. I said what I said. You deal with it.” As a character, Isabelle must embody that stubborn, sanctimonious spirit. She must be unbending. Otherwise, she has no journey of awakening. And she does awaken when she listens to Lee. She learns. Isabelle and writers can be good at forcing their ideas on to others, but only when they listen to others—and learn from listening—will they grow. As I’ve evolved Isabelle and Theory over ten years in lockstep with our turbulent socio-politico-cultural attitude, I recall that Isabelle originally wasn’t so obstinate. But neither were we.

Running Time: One hour 35 minutes, with no intermission.

Theory plays through November 17, 2019, at Mosaic Theater Company of DC performing at the Atlas Performing Arts Center in the Lang Theater, 1333 H Street NE, Washington DC. For tickets, call the box office at 202-399-7993 extension 2, or go online.

Norman Yeung works in theater, film, and visual arts. His play Theory had its American premiere at Mosaic Theater Company in Washington, DC, after its world premiere at Tarragon Theatre in Toronto. Theory won the Herman Voaden National Playwriting Prize, was nominated for the Carol Bolt Award, and is being developed as a feature film. Theory will be published by Playwrights Canada Press. He was recently at the Stratford Festival developing his new play Others, a social satire about the shifting power from straight white males to… others. His play Pu-Erh, about language dividing and uniting an immigrant family, received four Dora Award nominations, including Outstanding New Play, and was a Herman Voaden finalist. Other plays and performance pieces include Deirdre Dear (Neil LaBute New Theater Festival, St. Louis), In this moment. (Scotiabank Nuit Blanche), and Black Blood (Tapestry New Opera Showcase, with composer Christiaan Venter). Theory and Ms. Desjardins are available as podcasts (PlayME/CBC). Acting credits include Chimerica (Royal Manitoba Theatre Centre/Canadian Stage), The Kite Runner (Theatre Calgary/Citadel Theatre), Resident Evil: Afterlife (Sony/Screen Gems), Todd and the Book of Pure Evil (SPACE/CTV), and many more. He will be acting at the Stratford Festival in 2020 in Hamlet, Much Ado About Nothing, and Wolf Hall. He holds a BFA in Acting/Theatre from University of British Columbia and a BFA in Film from Ryerson University. Norman is from East Vancouver and lives in Los Angeles and Toronto.

[READ John Stoltenberg’s Magic Time! column: “Mosaic’s brazenly brainy ‘Theory’ is both a treatise and a treat”]

The post “All I had to do was listen”: Playwright Norman Yeung rethinks his ‘Theory’ appeared first on DC Theater Arts.

As a Props Master, you try and read through a script and see where the big “what ifs” are, but there is always a human factor that you just can’t predict. In Hamilton, one big “what if” was the song “Burn.” In the song, Eliza Hamilton carries a coal scuttle onstage in which she burns the letters between herself and Alexander Hamilton. Getting those letters to burn in just the right way, for just the right amount of time, was my job.

But first, some background: The one factor that I kept seeing through Hamilton was the amount of writing and paper props. My team and I set our sights on finding out everything we could about paper and printing in the American colonies. We wanted to find the interesting facts and practical uses of paper. For example, playing cards were only printed on the front, and it was a fact that a destitute mother would identify her child by using a playing card before she would abandon the child in a church or on a wealthy person’s doorstep. If she tore the card in half, it signaled her intention to someday return with her half and be reunited with her child. If the card was left whole, it meant the child was completely abandoned and the mother would not return.

[Related: Hamilton Through the Eyes of Original Broadway Cast Member Betsy Struxness]

Ben Franklin provided many paper-related services to the colonies. One was to write frequently for newspapers (and his famous Almanac) to keep people informed. He often wrote under pseudonyms, writing to the editor on one side of a current affair and then replying with the opposite side of that issue, using a different name, to the same paper. He also started the postal service, making sure newspapers and mail could cross boundaries faster. Historians frequently cite the rising literacy rate in the American colonies, noting that by the end of the 18th century the colonial literacy rate was higher than that in Britain. All of these things created a greater demand for paper. Franklin, no dummy, bought up or invested in at least 18 paper mills that helped supply the colonies.

Now, how does this relate to Hamilton? Well, every text, post, email, Instagram, tweet that we send out today had its paper equivalent in the 18th century. All the secret notes, love letters, maps, military orders, proclamations, treaties, checks, receipts… ad nauseam. Everyone needed paper. But your status and wealth would determine what type of paper you used. Washington and Jefferson had paper of a different weight and color than did Hamilton, who used a lighter weight and less bleached paper when he was first starting out at his clerk position at the top of the show. Rochambeau’s map of Yorktown was a different paper altogether.

The importance of paper in Hamilton culminates in the song “Burn,” in which Eliza Schuyler Hamilton burns, onstage, all of the letters that she received from Hamilton. (Earlier, in Act 1, you can see love notes being put in a small chest before the wedding.) The challenge was: How could we get the papers to burn realistically, and without setting the stage, or Phillipa Soo, the actress playing Eliza, on fire?

My idea was to use a coal scuttle since it had a large opening at the top to hide any compartments we wanted. At first, the “fire” was an LED light and a small smoke machine. This way we could control the light and smoke; the letter she ignited went down a hidden slip and was contained. But it just didn’t look real at all. It’s so hard to replicate flame. Then stage manager James Latus said, “Can we just burn the letters and keep it simple? So that’s what we did.

I went through a bunch of different paper weights and sizes until I found the one that burned for exactly two minutes and nine seconds (the length needed for the song) and then extinguished, so that Eliza could exit in a blackout, with the ash heavy enough not to rise out of the coal scuttle when she walks off.

The actual letters carried on stage by Eliza went down a slip I made of tin in the front end of the scuttle. They never even get near the flame. The lantern she carries onstage, which she uses for ignition, has two rings on top, and one is covered in leather knotwork – not for decoration but because the ring right above the lit candle gets too hot. The second ring, covered in leather, stays cool to the touch so at the end of the song she can grab the leather-covered ring and carry the lamp off without burning herself. Also, if her candle ever went out, I made sure to attach two matches and a strike pad to the inside of the lantern using double-sided tape. If the flame should go out, all Eliza has to do is relight the candle.

So when you see Hamilton and the song “Burn” comes on, nudge the person next to you and whisper “two minutes and nine seconds.’ If they respond with a thumbs up you know you are sitting with a theater geek like us.

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