Listen in as The Fire This Time Artistic Director & the plays’ director Cezar Williams, along with producer & performer Danielle Covington, discuss highlighting the small moments, finding compassion, developing playwrights, and what’s new this time with The Fire This Time.
“I always say that The Fire This Time Festival feels like a family reunion, and it feels like we just added a ton of new people to the family…”
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Listen in as Harmony Hall playwright & director Duncan Pflaster, along with the cast of Wyn Delano and Clinton Powell, discuss inspiration from terrible/wonderful Tennessee Williams adaptations, what is and is not a “pandemic play,” personal connections to the material, grounding your characters, the challenges of putting a show up in a festival, religious trauma, and the joy of working on poetic new work.
“…this is one of those things where we put our hearts and soul into it, all of us, it’s a very meaningful show…something where I think people will get a lot out of it if they see it, but to see it, you gotta do the old-school theatre thing and put your butt in the seat.”
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Listen in as Genny Yosco, the writer & director of (and an actor in!) im ur hamlet., discusses writing through food poisoning, creating for the Zoom medium, knowing who it is your parodying, creating a Shakespeare festival from afar, making community during a pandemic, and what happens when everyone wants to be the star.
“One of the things about this cast is…they all love each other, and I love all of them, so even though we were all playing at odds with each other, there still was this overlying, person-to-person silent communication that we all did really enjoy each other, which was perfect…”
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Listen in as CC: You in Hell! playwright/producer/actor Mark Levy, along with fellow performer Sarah Detrik, discuss a love for 90s horror, uniting the theatre and comedy scenes, ensemble work, creating your style, putting horror onstage, finding collaborators with a different view of the world from your own, warm hugs, and the magic of the indie theatre community coming together.
“…it is a horror comedy set very much now, but it feels like it’s from the late ’90s…it’s a very nerdy, theatre-movie-nerd play…”
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Listen in as playwright/performer Manning Jordan, director Alice Cash, and performers Ashley Underwood & Ellie MacPherson of Dooley, performed as part of FRIGID 2018, discuss inspiration from disturbing 1960s board games, plunging psychological depths, collaboratively re-writing, re-naming in the interest of financial considerations, “sneaking around outside of classrooms” to meet your new collaborators, the benefits of inconsistent performance times, and sharing your most vulnerable self onstage.
“…my friends wouldn’t play it, they said ‘it’s all too heavy, we don’t want to get into it.’ So then I went home, and I wrote the play as if we had played it…”
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Listen in as Molly “Equality” Dykeman herself, Andrea Alton, along with her director, Mark Finley, & “Jerry from Task Rabbit,” Allen Warnock, of the new Molly show in FRIGID 2018, Molly’s World, discuss responding to the moment, working with a director when the show is grounded in improvisation, finding the gold between the islands, allowing for audience engagement, internal logic, “Molly-heads,” and having the freedom to say whatever you want, however you want.
“…I like that Molly can say whatever she wants, and she always comes from a lovable place. She’s this total misfit, and I like that she has the freedom, and she’s just trying to get through the day as best she can. I kind of enjoy her freedom, and her cluelessness…”
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Listen in as Tessa Flannery, playwright/performer of the new play Tentacles in the 2018 FRIGID Festival, along with her director, Rebecca Cunningham, discuss naming your characters after your actors, keeping calm in the face of technical difficulties, “on-brand failure,” and how to layer difficult social issues into your show about hentai.
“…I love working on shows that have strong women as the leads, but I also really love when they’re flawed, and the character Tessa is not perfect, and is certainly privileged and is coming at it from that perspective, and so we throw that at her…”
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Listen in as performer Mariah Freda & director/”script assembler” Melissa Moschitto of The Anthropologists‘ new show Artemisia’s Intent discuss the company’s approach to devising, the well-meaning wish of “break a frame,” skirts from tablecloths, working from found texts, activating original art, and the resonance of 17th Century baroque painting with #MeToo.
“…pressing up these two points in time, with 400 years in between them, there’s actually still a lot with us, and we’re trying to point that out, and be, like, ‘now what?’ Let’s move forward from that…”
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Listen in as The Dirty Blondes, Elizabeth Sarkady and Ashley J. Jacobson (whom you’ll remember from past podcasts on The Miracle Play and The Tunnel Play), along with the full cast—Faith Sandberg, Jenna D’Angelo, and Brandon Ferraro—discuss the company’s new play How to Be Safe, finding relevance in the present moment, the “low hum of anxiety,” the draw of terrible true crime shows, the incredible experience of having a theatrical home-base, being a sponge (then wringing yourself out), and finding safety & solace in the theater.
“…the election happened, and that made me question what I was going to be putting out into the world. It needed to be relevant, it needed to speak to something. And so I figured, ‘let me just create the most honest, emotional show that I could, because that felt like my own personal safety, and that felt like my own personal contribution, to talk about how afraid I feel, and how afraid I think other people feel…”
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Listen in as Kyle playwright Hollis James and director Emily Owens—who are, combined, the newly-formed Hot Tramp Productions—along with actor Nat Cassidy discuss how a play can sneak up on you, overcoming the little demon inside of yourself, how to pronounce “publicist,” getting coaxed into the director’s chair, playing your playwright in his play (while he’s acting opposite you), and why you shouldn’t get a “Nat-Cassidy-type”—you should get Nat Cassidy.
“…I didn’t set out to write this story. I just sat down to try and write something, my writing partner and I…we were in a holding pattern, and we were sick of pitching, and going through all the rigamarole. So I just sat down to try to write something just for me, and I wrote this scene…and then I realized, ‘that’s me, back then…'”
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