Stage & Candor

The cast of "Travisville

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A Conversation with Denny Dale Bess, Sheldon Best, Brian D. Coats, Bjorn DuPaty, Lynnette R. Freeman, and Ivan Moore

William Jackson Harper’s impressive debut play Travisville, though set in the 1960s, feels like a contemporary piece tackling issues of race, gentrification, and political revolution. We sat down with cast members Denny Dale Bess, Sheldon Best, Brian D. Coats, Bjorn DuPaty, Lynnette R. Freeman, and Ivan Moore over lunch to discuss the play’s impact and importance in our current political climate.

Margarita Javier
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Ramiro Antonio Sandoval directs "In the Eye of the Needle"

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On a rainy Monday, I stopped by Teatro LaTea, located on the second floor of the Clemente Soto Velez Cultural Center on the Lower East Side. LaTea is hosting a residency of the international theater collective Tabula Rasa whose mission statement is, among other things, to foster dialogue on an international level through artistic expression. We were invited to sit at a run through of their latest piece, In the Eye of the Needle, a funny, inventive, and ultimately poignant look at communication in the modern age. We sat down with Ramiro Antonio Sandoval, the founder and artistic director, who in the middle of an arduous day full of rehearsal was gracious enough to share his thoughts on theater, social change, diversity, and the importance of interpersonal communication.

Margarita Javier
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The cast of "An Ordinary Muslim"

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A Conversation with Purva Bedi, Sanjit De Silva, Rita Wolf, Angel Desai, Sathya Sridharan, and Andrew Hovelson

Walking into the room that held much of the cast of An Ordinary Muslim felt like walking into a family home during Sunday dinner. Despite the seriousness of the play, the atmosphere was light and warm behind the scenes—it was a joy to be a part of it. I sat down with Sanjit De Silva (who plays Azeem, the protagonist), Purva Bedi (Saima, the wife), Rita Wolf (Malika, the mother), Angel Desai (Javeria, the sister), Sathya Sridharan (Hamza, the lover), and Andrew Hovelson (David, the token white friend, and here, the most sarcastic of the bunch) to discuss being the odd one out, in life and in the industry, the psychological mindset that changes when one is no longer the minority of the room (or vice versa), and of course, An Ordinary Muslim, playing at the New York Theatre Workshop until March 25th.

Michelle Tse
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Marina Kondo

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Timothy Huang: You were born in the Netherlands, but raised in America. Is there anything about Japanese culture that you have discovered is different from American culture?

Marina Kondo: I think as a performer I bring a lot of simplicity. And in Japan that is a very huge thing. Simplicity is a sign of beauty. My senior thesis was about this: if there’s a cup and there’s a crack on it, in Japan the crack is the beauty. That missing part, that emptiness represents something. And I feel like that’s a great metaphor for Japanese art and culture. In America we try as much as possible to fill every single white space with some color or design. In Japan it’s the emptiness that is mesmerizing. The missing part. The silence.

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The cast of "Pride and Prejudice"

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A Conversation with Kimberly Chatterjee, Kate Hamill, Amelia Pedlow, and Nance Williamson

Something joyous is happening at the Cherry Lane Theatre. That’s the home of Kate Hamill’s uproariously funny, clever, and at times deeply moving adaptation of Jane Austen’s most famous and celebrated novel, Pride and Prejudice. The limited engagement, directed by Amanda Dehnert and led by an energetic cast with Hamill herself playing the iconic Lizzie Bennett, is being presented by Primary Stages in co-production with The Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival through January 6. We caught up with Kate and the other women in the cast: Kimberly Chatterjee, Amelia Pedlow, and Nance Williamson—whose palpable energy, playfulness, and affection towards each other suggested we were spending an afternoon with the Bennetts themselves—to discuss the role of women in the arts and the ways this 200-year-old text still manages to enlighten and surprise us.

 Margarita Javier
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Joe Breen in Bryant Park

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Joe Breen: I’m not gonna lie; I’m a big musical-theater dork. So when I’m asked, “What are your favorite productions?” I sit there and name a bunch of classic musicals.

Margarita Javier: Like what?

JB: Man of La Mancha, A Little Night Music … I love Sunday in the Park with George. Most recently, Bandstand. I have to plug Bandstand, one of the greatest things I’ve seen in a long time. I also loved The Visit.

MJ: An underrated masterpiece!

JB: Yes. That’s where my heart is.

MJ: But you mostly write straight theater.

JB: Yes, I only write straight theater. When it comes to playwrights, I love Tennessee Williams. I love Eugene O’Neill. Sort of the big classic Americana plays.

MJ: I’m also a big theater lover, and I sometimes go see a piece of theater that makes me go, “Yes! This is why I want to work in theater!” Have you had moments like that? What’s the earliest experience you had where you were like, “This is what I want to do”?

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Johnson Henshaw & Morgan Green at the Sharon Playhouse

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Michelle: So, how has the experience been, what are the lessons learned, and what can others take away from this type of programming? How would you encourage other artistic directors or administrative folks to be inclusive in their guidance of emerging theater artists?

Johnson: It’s a leap of faith. You have to trust the artist. I’ve only seen Morgan do one show.

Morgan: He was very trusting. I couldn’t believe it.

Johnson: Well, I don’t think great work happens without great risk. There are so many theaters in this country. There are so many theaters in New York that are picking the trusted directors, the old steady hand, with the way that it has been done before. It feels to me, if I’m going to be a young artistic director, I should do something different. I should make a different choice. I should think about who’s going to make the next great theater, and give a platform. I’m really proud of Morgan’s work, and now she’s had three big productions in a row. I won’t speak for whatever she’s learned, but there have been insane learning moments. No artistic director can ever tell her she’s not ready to do a musical. No artistic director can tell her she doesn’t know how to do a stylized Caryl Churchill play, you know, and that’s so exciting to me. To give her that experience…

Morgan: Yeah, it’s a ton of experience right in a row. It forces this kind of feverish creativity.

Michelle: It must be all overwhelming.

Morgan: Very overwhelming. But it’s pushed me to be really collaborative with the designers and the actors and trust them in the way that Johnson’s trusting me. I think [Johnson] told me I brought about 80 people here, all in all.

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Rubén Polendo at BAM

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A Conversation with Rubén Polendo & Darrel Alejandro Holnes

DAH: Can you talk about the theatrical approach to Death of a Salesman, and how you’re using the theatrical elements to answer the question of “What happens when you’re written out of the American Dream”?

RP: This goes back to that initial instinct. We as a company not only make work together, but we train together as well. One of the big goals is really to lean in and trust the artistic instinct, and to know that following that instinct will actually reveal the reason for that instinct. Often in making theatrical work, the artists have an instinct, and immediately that instinct is interrogated. So as an artist, you see the color blue, and someone says why is that? Why is that in the script? And you think, I don’t know! That was an instinct! We as a company actually feel that the rationale for all of our instincts we usually don’t see or truly understand until the work is complete because you’re being impacted by the text and your own ideas in the moment.

The instinct for me as a director became to manifest these four central characters and to really place them in a complete austere aloneness. That already had a kind of aesthetic implication which sort of implied an incredibly bare space, dry and absent of humanity. Once we did the pre-recorded voices, once that started, my instinct was to follow that and make [the supporting characters] these objects. There was also obviously a gravitation towards the time period so they became these objects of the time and they really became about manifesting the metaphorical language one uses for people. So if someone says, “that young man is so bright,” it literally manifests as a bright light that no one can even look at because it’s so bright. It was about taking the poetics of everyday language and manifesting them on stage. There’s something about that clarity that is so fantastic and exciting.

The equation that is then created is this world that has somehow stopped paying attention to the changes happening, but in fact, is just very blindly becoming another object or cog or piece in the machinery. We use this emotional focus on the family that is actually trying to stay human and ask questions and explore. The result is this very asphyxiating experience with, say Willy, as he’s sitting surrounded by these other characters that have now become objects, and truly saying, help me, please help me. And the objects are completely inhuman, and out of the recording comes, It’ll get better tomorrow! Willy, what’s going on next Thursday? And they keep ignoring him. It’s really frustrating to watch, because the objects just go about themselves, and it really becomes this cautionary tale of what happens when you ignore.

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Mimi Lein at the Imperial Theatre

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Michelle Tse: And I also imagine for this show, you maybe collaborated with the other designers more than any other production. Was there one designer you worked with more closely than another? We sat down with Paloma [Young, costume designer] recently, who said your set informed her designs a lot.

Mimi Lein: Really?!

MT: Yes! And I noticed when I was at the show that when the actors are spinning around on the constructed aisles that the circumference of their dresses were literally the exact width of your aisles.

[Everybody laughs]

ML: I know! I don’t know whether it’s possible that Paloma went and calculated that, but I noticed that, too! Everytime I watch the hem of their skirts I worry that it was going to knock over something. [laughs] I mean, if Paloma has calculated that, she hasn’t told me, but I worship her. I feel like for me, a lot of the bunker is actually in response to the punk flavor of some of the ensemble costumes. We certainly talked about it in the beginning, about this being an anachronistic vision of Russia. We’re not being period specific. This is not what 19th-century Russia looks like, you know? This is maybe if you went to a nightclub in Moscow in the late ‘90s and their theme was Imperial Russia. Maybe that’s it. So that has a lot to do with the techno music that Dave [Malloy, creator and composer] composed. So it’s kind of a mashup of things.

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Martyna Majok in Fort Tyron Park

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Corey Ruzicano: Absolutely, and as someone who has known people from these many places and who has gotten to travel to different parts of this country and a little bit outside, I wonder how that perspective has affected your work. Have their been lessons from your travels that have influenced your writing or are there lessons that you think New York could learn from other parts of the world about how to make or take in work?

Martyna Majok: I’ve been to two places that I’ve seen theater outside of this country – I think just two? I’ve been to Poland and to Russia. I went to Russia with a program in grad school that was similar to one of the Lark programs where they translate your play into Russian and they stage it. I speak Polish; I don’t speak Russian, but I know enough cognates to have an idea of what’s going on. It’s funny – they flew me out to Moscow, translated my play and then when I got there they were like, What are you doing here? Get out! Playwrights, we don’t want you here! The director that was trying to get me out of the room said he didn’t speak English very well so I’d have to go but it turned out the two main actresses were from Poland. They said they’d translate for me but the director was not having it. For that particular experience though, I was totally fine to be out of the room. I mean, Isherwood wasn’t about to show up to Moscow to like, make or break this production. I was happy to go out and grab a drink and walk around Moscow and, you know, See you at opening!

CR: Wow, so it’s a really director-centric culture there?

MM: Oh yeah, it seems like they’re the auteurs there. I was on a panel with some Russian playwrights who became really emotional talking about how they felt like their words were disrespected. In their experiences, the directors would cut or insert or do whatever they want with their text. It seems if you want to have the more authorial voice in Russia, you become a director. But that was just my one experience. It seems similar in Poland. In this Russian production of my play, I was more watching someone’s response to my work versus my work. It was interesting to me as an experiment. And in Poland, from what I understand, it’s similarly director-driven, where often groups work for a long time devising a piece of theater that’s written together. Or they work from a text that they choose from freely. And it’s very politically engaged. I went out this past December for the Festiwal Boska Komedia in Kraków – my first time seeing Polish theater in Poland – and these shows were not shy about attacking the direction of the current government. I’d love to be able to work on a text for a really long time. Or to devise with a group – like Joint Stock, where people meet around an idea, talk and explore, and then the writer goes off with those thoughts and creates something for an ensemble. I’ve only gotten to do that once and I loved it.

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Ellie Heyman at St. John’s Lutheran Church

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EH: …I’m thinking so much about the role of art in our crazy world right now, and yes, it’s always been important, but the feeling of immediacy is stronger now than ever before in my life. People need to remember their own humanity and they need to be finding it in each other, and I think our brains can lie to us, they can justify anything inside of our minds, where our bodies are not very good at lying to us. When something feels wrong, it feels wrong.

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Jinger Leigh & Amélie van Tass at the Palace Theatre

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AVT: I was always interested in the history concerning performance, and a hundred years ago, magicians were the rockstars. When they entered the stage, people would come, and they would scream and cheer and…the girls would go crazy for Houdini, for example. You can imagine nowadays, it was very similar. And I think there were some very golden times of magic too, but I think now is a new time and it’s coming back anew—although it’s an old thing the show presents it in a different way. And people are very excited about it, and magic is coming back—differently.

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Morgan James, Torya Beard, & Richard Amelius at St. John the Divine Cathedral

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Morgan: Right around Christmas of last year, I had a dream that I did Jesus Christ Superstar with Shoshana Bean as Judas. I didn’t know Shoshana very well at the time ­– I didn’t even have her number. [Richard and Torya] were coming over for Christmas dinner, and when they came over, I said, oh, I had this dream, and they both immediately said, when are you doing that? That needs to happen. So I asked a friend for Shoshana’s number and I texted her: It’s Morgan James. I had this dream. She said something to the effect of WHEN ARE WE DOING THAT? and I thought, ok, there’s three people that I like a lot who don’t think I’m insane.

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Lyndsay Magid & Josh Aviner

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JA: Of course, but fear is still really tied to circus. Even the best acting moments…you could have Meryl Streep stabbing Al Pacino on stage, and at the end of the day, you know it’s all fake. With circus, if you mess up, the danger is real…And that’s what makes fear such a fun thing to play with. Our performers totally know what they’re doing, but maybe to the audience there is a question of whether or not they’re in control of what they’re doing.
(Full Conversation)

Ayodele Casel in her studio

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AC: …That is one of the wonderful things that tap dance has given me: it teaches you to recognize your individuality from the get-go. In improvisation, you cannot be anybody else. If you aren’t being yourself, you aren’t being authentic, you aren’t being interesting, you aren’t honoring the dance that you’re doing, you aren’t honoring the art form and most importantly, you aren’t honoring yourself because we all have our own unique and wonderful point of view. If you’re paying attention, you learn very quickly to start honing some authenticity.

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Shaina Taub at the Public Theatre

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ST: How you act and the energy you put out does matter. We’re not powerless. A thought I had in the wake of one of the unfortunately fill-in -the-blank terrible days we’ve had this year, was that: we’re not powerless, we can’t give into the myth that we’re powerless. We can love each other and put out a loving, joyful energy and that doesn’t count for nothing. It counts for a lot. We can’t let anyone take that away from us.”
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