Making Conversation

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Thanks for joining me for Making Conversation, where every week I interview an artist in his or her 30s, who is doing work I find important, and has something illuminating to say about what it means to do what we do as we are now.

My name is Chelsea Marcantel, and my guest this week is Trish Harnetiaux. Trish is a Brooklyn-based playwright whose work has been performed and developed at the Incubator Arts Project, Soho Rep, The Cherry Lane, The 13th Street Theatre, The New Jersey Rep, and more. Her plays include How to Get Into Buildings, Welcome to the White Room, and If You Can Get to Buffalo. If You Can Get to Buffalo premiered in February at the Incubator Arts Project in NYC.

In 2008, Trish received her MFA from Mac Wellman’s playwriting program at Brooklyn College. She has been a recipient of the Himan Brown Creative Writing Award and a finalist for the Kesselring Prize, the Heideman Award, and the 2011 SLS Fiction Fellowship. In 2011, she co-created the production company Steel Drum in Space. Her short films, including the just-released You Should Be a Better Friend, can be found at www.steeldruminspace.com and her playwriting at www.trishharnetiaux.com.

Trish Harnetiaux; photo credit: Jacob A. Ware

CHELSEA: Good morning, Trish! How are you?

TRISH: Hey, I’m great! How are you doing?

CHELSEA: I’m doing pretty well. I think spring has finally come to Appalachia.

TRISH: Oh my God, here too. It’s like it’s beautified in Brooklyn today, for the first time. Ever, actually.

CHELSEA: {laughing} In the history of Brooklyn.

TRISH: Yeah, yeah, pretty much.

CHELSEA: Well I’m so excited to talk to you today. You’re the first female playwright I’ve interviewed, and as a female playwright myself, that’s very exciting.

TRISH: Yeah!

CHELSEA: But when I asked what labels you use to describe yourself as an artist, you said that you don’t really like labels. So I will try not to put you in a box.

TRISH: No, that’s okay. I guess I just, uh, I feel like I do a lot of things, but yes, I am a playwright. That is a label. But, I don’t know, it feels like, in this day and age people identify with so many different kinds of creative outlets—I’m not sure. You know what I mean?

CHELSEA: And the more you can do, the better off you end up being.

TRISH: Yeah.

CHELSEA: The more versatile you are.

TRISH: Yeah. I mean, I definitely—I am a female. I am a playwright. That is true. But I just do lots of other things, too.

CHELSEA: Right. Among many things. So, speaking of Brooklyn, are you, uh, making art in the same place you were in your twenties? Do you think you’re in the right geographical location to make the art that you’re making?

TRISH: Yeah, you know, it’s funny. Um, “yes,” I think, is what I would say about that. But definitely not without consideration for where I am. I mean, I’m definitely aware that, you know, I choose to live in a really, really expensive city. But I think up until, at least, this point and the foreseeable future, um, what the city kind of brings to me as an artist outweighs the need to, you know, pull together a life here and have it be more expensive than, you know, say, Spokane, Washington.

CHELSEA: Right.

TRISH: Or a different kind of town. So I think, yes. You know, and I love it, and I definitely need to get out of it for stretches of time in order to come back and really appreciate it. But, um, I love it here. I love Brooklyn. It’s great.

CHELSEA: You’re originally from the west coast, correct?

TRISH: Yeah, I’m from Spokane, Washington, actually. {laughs}

CHELSEA: {laughing} Oh, so you know what you’re talking about.

TRISH: Yeah, I do, I do. And it’s not a bad city. And it’s changed so much since I left when I was seventeen, you know? But, yeah, I grew up in Washington State, then I went to college in Seattle, at UW (University of Washington). And, uh, I love Washington State. It’s great! I go back quite often, actually.

CHELSEA: Yeah. Um, how does the work you’re making differ today from the work that you were making five or ten years ago?

TRISH: I mean, I think that I have a lot more outlets than I had back then, and you know, I was thinking kind of deeper about that question, and one of the things that I did is when I was thirty, I went to graduate school, you know. And that completely kind of changed my core group of artistic people that I knew, in a really great way. And, I think, really opened my work up to a lot more… I would say kind of experimental work, but I just started working with a lot, you know, a lot of different theatres, seeing a lot more downtown work. And I was really fortunate to study with Mac Wellman at Brooklyn College, and my, you know, people I went to school with were amazing. And so that was a big kind of two years there, in my really early thirties, that I think kind of opened me up as an artist. And allowed me to be a bigger risk-taker than, say, I was in my early twenties, when I just trying to figure out, you know, what the hell I wanted to write about, and you know, why I wanted to do it. So yeah, I think that it’s a lot different. And then, I’ve started to work in kind of different media in my thirties, too, you know, doing some filmmaking.

CHELSEA: Mm-hmm.

TRISH: And doing the comedy stuff with Steel Drum in Space. So all of that has evolved in the last, like, three years, actually. So I’m kind of excited about that. I think there’s definitely been an evolution for the better.

CHELSEA: Yeah. Absolutely. I think that, um, when we were speaking about this before, you said that you’re more interested in breaking rules than following them now, which I find to be my experience as well, having just turned thirty. Again, going back to Brooklyn, um, what percentage of the time do you get paid for your work, and how do you solve that puzzle of making ends meet, living in one of the most expensive cities in the country?

TRISH: So, I think that, um, {laughs} I sort of laugh when you say “get paid for your work.” I think that as a writer, I’m also a producer, too, you know? And definitely get involved with my own work in many ways. No one’s giving me money to write plays. {laughs}

CHELSEA: Right.

TRISH: And it’s very rare that that happens. And so I would say that, you know, making a living as a playwright doesn’t really exist for more than, like, three people in the whole world. So it’s never been about that, and I’ve never had any, you know, illusions of grandeur that, “Oh, someday I will be able to be a playwright and make this all happen.” That said, I do a lot of speechwriting, and I write for live events, and programs, and award shows, and stuff like that. And so, the skillset kind of has taught me—getting into the “how do you make ends meet”… I’m basically an accidental consultant for live events. And I executive produce, and produce, and take on various roles depending on what the event is. So that’s how I pay the bills.

CHELSEA: Right.

TRISH: But more often than not, I’m investing in my own work as a theatre artist. And trying to make something happen.

CHELSEA: I think it’s really important to be the person who takes responsibility for production of your own work, and not just waiting for some sort of ‘gatekeeper’ to open the door to you, because that might never happen. I have found with my own writing that if I am in a position to be able to get it on its feet, and not wait for someone else to sort of bestow a production upon me, then that just… That doesn’t make me any less of a writer, to be the person who’s also got to wear the business hat.

TRISH: Oh, I one hundred percent agree.

CHELSEA: You know, that doesn’t make me any less creative.

TRISH: No, I think it actually, I mean… For me, I could never write a play and then just send it out and, like you’re saying, hope somebody likes it. I mean, I just… A) I don’t think the world works like that.

CHELSEA: {laughing} Right.

TRISH: And B) I also, as a playwright, having for years and years developed new work, I find that I make the biggest discoveries when I’m in a room with actors, and smart people, and you know, directors. And I’m not… That’s why this is a collaborative art form. And they’re there to make the work better. And I think that’s very much… I could kind of never imagine not being involved in an initial production of a new play that I wrote. It seems that it would be ripe for misinterpretation.

CHELSEA: {laughing} Right. Yes.

TRISH: {laughing} Even though, you know, you try to bulletproof it… I just obsess over tone.

CHELSEA: Mm-hmm.

TRISH: And this is my own constant struggle, is how to convey the exact kind of right tone on a page, so it does one day stand alone. You know, constantly looking for what that nuance is, as a writer, on the page.

CHELSEA: That’s just… I feel the same way. You know, I always say that what I like about being a writer is not sitting by myself, staring at my computer. I like being in rehearsal. Well, switching gears to something, um, over which you would have more direct control, let’s talk about Steel Drum in Space, the comedy website you created with Jacob A. Ware and Anthony Arkin. You make these hilarious short films, and the tagline—which I love, and wish I had on a t-shirt—is “Dealing with the Issues of Tomorrow, Today, with Yesterday’s Science.” I want to talk about Steel Drum in Space, and how it came to be, and how it fits into your identity as an artist.

TRISH: First off, I think we probably should make t-shirts with that logo on it.

CHELSEA: {laughs}

TRISH: Really good idea. Um, but no, about two years ago, Jacob and I decided that we wanted to make a short film. And, uh, we wrote the script for it, basically, the first draft of it, like standing in line at Shakespeare in the Park in Central Park.

CHELSEA: {laughs}

TRISH: And then we got… You know, Jacob had just done a short that Tony Arkin had directed. And thought he was the bee’s knees and all that. And so basically we decided that we wanted Tony to be in this film. And so, this was, you know… Jacob had come from Chicago, and had a lot more experience than I did in both the world of comedy, and the world of making videos, even, and short films. And he’s an actor, performer, and funny guy, all that kind of stuff. And so basically we kind of spent the next month just putting together this shoot, and, uh, it was great. And just kind of calling in filmmakers, and people that had different skills. And we shot this film that Jacob was in, and Tony, and this great actress Emily Davis, and then spent like the next three months editing it—Tony ended up editing it. And we just decided… like, we all had the best time ever on set, and so Tony and Jacob and I kind of, you know, finished the film and then decided that we wanted to keep it going.

CHELSEA: Mm-hmm.

TRISH: And so, Steel Drum in Space was born out of that. And it was really a shared sense of comedy that the three of us had. And then also, we all kind of brought to the table something different that worked really well. And we realized we could actually… With all the superpowers we each had, we could make things happen. And it was really exciting. Because I, as you probably know… It’s really fun to sit there and generate a lot of ideas, but actually getting down to work and following through and making stuff happen’s a whole different ballgame.

CHELSEA: Right.

TRISH: So that was the birth of Steel Drum, and then we started making… So, we did the short film, that went to a couple film festivals, and it’s called You Should Be a Better Friend. And we’re going to release it online I think next week. {Note: The film is up! Check out the trailer and link to the entire short film below. It is hilarious.}

 Click here to watch the full short film.

CHELSEA: Oh great!

TRISH: Yeah. And I’m really excited for the greater world to be able to see that, because they haven’t, other than, like, the occasional film festival here and there. So basically after that, we’ve made, I think, thirteen or fourteen videos at this point. We’re in production for our new one; that will be shooting in the next couple weeks. And, yeah, and we’re also kind of putting together a pilot with everything that we have so far.

CHELSEA: To see more videos, you can go to SteelDrumInSpace.com, and you have a YouTube channel, too, right?

TRISH: Yes, we do. Which I think is just “Steel Drum in Space.” (click here for YouTube channel)

CHELSEA: Right. If you search for it on YouTube, you should be able to pull up the videos there as well.

TRISH: Yes.

CHELSEA: Awesome. So how does making the videos, how does making work with Steel Drum in Space, sort of affect you as an artist, and make you think differently?

TRISH: I think in a couple of different ways. Uh, I think that obviously the medium is totally different, and what you can do—I mean, I’m going to sound like an idiot right now—what you can do with the storytelling device of the camera just kind of opens up the world to possibilities in this sort of magical way. And so it makes you think differently about, you know, how you tell a story. And so to me there’s been—again, in the last couple years—starting to try to think now about the medium being a lense. It’s been exciting to see how, you know, all these new ways kind of push boundaries with everything. And also with the comedy, I mean, again… The aesthetic that Jacob and Tony and I have is not a very mainstream aesthetic at all. You know, it’s very kind of subversive comedy. There’s probably a wide section of people that wouldn’t even think it was funny. Often what we find funny is just sort of like, masked horror.

CHELSEA: {laughs}

TRISH: About how awful, you know, existence is.

CHELSEA: Right, absurdism.

TRISH: Yeah, exactly. And to me as a playwright, that’s always been something that I’ve been drawn to, is creating a world that you recognize, but is off-kilter, and there’s something very different or wrong or unrecognizable in this recognizable world. And so I think that with our sort of collaboration, it’s great to have these guys and for us to work all together, because we keep pushing each other in different ways.

CHELSEA: Mm-hmm. Awesome. Yeah, I’m excited to find out more in the coming weeks about your pilot, and to watch the movie, and to keep watching the videos, which are so funny. I mean it’s my—that’s my brand of humor, too.

TRISH: Oh, good. Of course, right? Because you’re a Chicago girl, aren’t you?

CHELSEA: I am, I am. That’s how I know you, is through Jacob. He was in a show I directed in Chicago, and then we just kept in touch while working on stuff. But yeah, that whole sort of like, “Everything is so bleak, we should just laugh at it” is absolutely my brand of humor as well. Um, you also just closed a new play at the Incubator Arts Project in New York, called If You Can Get to Buffalo.

TRISH: Yes.

CHELSEA: And the description of the play is fascinating to me. The central question of the script is: “How much are we responsible for the things that happen to us online?” So tell me about the play, and why you were interested in making work about the early internet.

TRISH: So, the play has been a labor of love for like the past four and a half years. It kind of started when I found this article in the Village Voice from 1993, called “A Rape in Cyber Space.” And it’s this incredible article written by Julian Dibbell, who’s actually also from Chicago (click here to read the article).

CHELSEA: Oh!

TRISH: He was actually one of the leading tech writers of the time. And it basically talked about this early, early online community called LambdaMOO, which was the, like, earliest version of a chat room, an online chat room.

CHELSEA: Mm-hmm.

TRISH: And they had created this virtual mansion that was completely text. So it’s kind of like this early Wikipedia version of a chat room, that had the architecture of a mansion. Like, you entered through the coat closet, people hang out in the living room, all just through description and words.

CHELSEA: Uh-huh.

TRISH: Very much about language. And so basically, the people kind of created this world, and it was this utopia for a while, and was very exciting, obviously, and unprecedented. And then it all came crashing down when one of the members in the society, of course, figured out how to overwrite the code, and he went in and kind of created this havoc one night in the living room. He assumed the identities of other people and created these really awkward and violent sexual situations. And it basically made this online community question itself, and… In a society that had no rules, and was kind of state-of-nature, it forced them too… Because people were upset. Some people were upset, some people though it was funny, some people were like “well, this is what you get.”

CHELSEA: Yeah.

TRISH: There were varied reactions. And ultimately they decided to kick him out. And they kind of slowly became this democracy, and lost that kind of free spirit of the initial utopia. So that’s the long answer. It’s a very kind of complicated meta-meta—it’s about an online community. And then the play takes the article, and takes some characters from the article, and it also takes a subsequent episode of Charlie Rose that aired a couple months after the article. The author of the article, Julian Dibbell, had gone on Charlie Rose, and he was on there—you know, he has multiple guests sometimes—with another guy, with this author from the New Yorker, who was there because he had written one of the very first articles via email, interviewing Bill Gates. And there was a discussion on this episode of the show about what happened. So I took this Charlie Rose episode, the idea of it, and kind of mashed it all together with all of that, with, you know, fabricated online scenes of the actual world itself, and created this exploration of this incident that happened.

CHELSEA: Yeah.

TRISH: And that was the play that we did at the Incubator Arts Project in February.

CHELSEA: Oh, man. It sounds amazing! I hope that I get to see it one day; it’s fascinating to me.

TRISH: Me too, me too. It was a long, long, long time in development because I kept… It was really hard to find a way in. I don’t think that it’s very easy to put the internet onstage or even the idea of it.

CHELSEA: Right.

TRISH: It just kept, again, coming back to tone. And like, not wanting to pander to a modern-day audience that’s going to walk through the door, having, you know… What I like to say is, “having the answer to how the internet ends.” Like, how we are now, twenty years after this incident, when a lot of things were unimaginable at that time, because there was no precedent. And we spent the next twenty years… The internet, you know, blows up, and then all of these social problems take main stage, in real life now.

Photo from IF YOU CAN GET TO BUFFALO. Pictured: Rob Erikson.  Photo credit: Brendan Bannon.

CHELSEA: Yeah.

TRISH: We like to say this is kind of like an origin story.

CHELSEA: Mm-hmm.

TRISH: And really, it does… And I don’t think there’s an answer to that question which, you know, you had mentioned and which I’m very interested in, which is, “Yeah, who is responsible?” If you can get up and walk away from your computer at any time, is it the responsibility of the person on the other side of the computer? I think that’s an ongoing question that should be open for debate.

CHELSEA: Yeah, I uh, I remember reading an article when I was in college, about a man that had been arrested because he had been trapped by one of these people that poses as an underage kid a chat room, but is really like a police informant who tries to lure predators to a location where they can be arrested.

TRISH: Uh-huh.

CHELSEA: And his defense was like, “Well, I didn’t do anything.” And the police’s stance was, “Well, you had planned to.” And then the debate in that article was like, “How is this really a crime? No one was hurt.”

TRISH: Right.

CHELSEA: Is it a thought crime, because he was thinking he wanted to do this thing? There was never actually a real child in danger. And there was no answer for that, either. That article really stuck with me, because it was sort of like, “We don’t know what to about this. This is a whole new frontier of what is a crime and how can we be safe, and we just don’t know.”

TRISH: Clearly there’s a lot more responsibility these days, you know, put on people who are misrepresenting themselves online, and there’s more systems in place, but in my opinion, it’s just like—the amount of restrictions are so tiny, it’s still like the wild west.

CHELSEA: {laughs}

TRISH: But I’m really really happy with the production we just did. I’m really proud of it. And hopefully it will find another home someday.

CHELSEA: Fantastic. Yeah, I hope so, too. I would love to get the chance to see it. So, moving on to a kind of bigger-picture question, I just was reminded, because there was this article in HowlRound recently called The Art of Never Giving Up (click here to read the article), and I was reminded by this article about Marsha Norman’s article from a few years ago in American Theatre, called Not There Yet (click here to read the article),in which she says “The US Department of Labor Considers any profession with less than 25% female employment, like being a machinist or firefighter, to be untraditional for women.” When you consider the fact that only 17% of plays that are produced in this country are by female playwrights, then that makes being a playwright like being a firefighter, essentially, in as far as how traditional it is, and how successful women are supposed to be allowed to be at it. So, um, and this is the state that I’m in, too, so I’m really curious to know, what sustains you as an artist? Why do you keep writing and making work?

TRISH: I mean, I think that’s a great question, and I think that the answer to that question, for me, just keeps changing all the time. I’m always really obsessed with whatever the current project is I’m working on, and I think that’s for a reason, and I think it kind of relates to what you’re saying. I think that there’s something about working on something that’s really important you to at a time, that then sustains you, if you do project-oriented work like this. Which is writing scripts and developing them. So I think it’s the fact that it keeps changing, and I can change with it. And to me the bigger question is, “How do you want to spend your time?” Do you know what I mean? {laughs}

CHELSEA: Right. No, I know exactly what you mean.

TRISH: “Well, I guess I choose to do this.” Because it makes me… It makes my brain hurt, and it makes me think more, and it makes me continue to ask questions that… uh… I mean, I kind of what to say that make me a better person, but that sounds really stupid, so…

CHELSEA: I don’t think that sounds stupid!

TRISH: No! But like make me, you know, more aware of life in a way. I just don’t quite know what else I would do, except maybe now I’d be a firefighter.

CHELSEA: Yeah, now that you know that it’s just as easy as being a playwright.

TRISH: Yeah.

CHELSEA: On a numbers level.

TRISH: What’s so funny is that I feel like I know a million female playwrights, and I think it’s… I know tons and tons and lots, because my friends are female playwrights that are amazing. And I hope that there is… And I don’t know if that’s because I’m in New York and there are a lot of people creating work here that I see, but… You know, I don’t go to Seattle, or Spokane, or you know, California and see a lot of, you know, regional plays by women being championed. I do in New York. Because I know a lot of those people that are creating that work. But, yeah, I do think there needs to be more opportunity out there, because… I’ll tell you this: having just done this play at the Incubator, and I did my first—my first and my last—IndieGogo campaign, and really kind of put everything I had into this show, and it’s kind of tapped me out. You know, I don’t really think I’ll be producing a big show like that forever-slash-for many years.

CHELSEA: Mm-hmm.

TRISH: And, um, I think about that, and it’s like, well, hopefully there’ll be some support in other ways that can come into it.

CHELSEA: No, no, I’m right there with you. I mean, I self-produced a big play in 2010, and I have not done it since, and I do not have any plans in the immediate future to go through that again.

TRISH: I mean, it takes a lot—I feel like I’m still in recovery. And that said, kind of going back to what we were saying earlier, the good thing is you can work and develop a script without going bankrupt, and I don’t mind doing that. You know, doing a workshop, or putting together a reading.

CHELSEA: Right.

TRISH: That kind of stuff is fine, but clearly what goes into a full production that’s professional, and you’re working to get people in the world to come see it, and come review it, that’s a whole different thing. And a whole different level of commitment of the producer, especially when it is your own work.

CHELSEA: Yeah. And it’s also… for me the thing was, yeah, I could try to be the marketing person on this, but I don’t have the training in marketing. I could try to be the, you know, the art director, but I don’t have the training in art direction. {laughing} Aren’t there people out there who’d be better at his than me, that I could find or someone could send me?

TRISH: {laughing} Yeah.

CHELSEA: And I think that’s the major thing about having outside support, is that then you can do things you want to do, and you can oversee everything, but like, how many people come to see the play is not dependent on how good I am at marketing. Which is not very good.

TRISH: Completely, yeah, exactly. It takes a village.

CHELSEA: Yes. I wish that I had that village and someone else would pay them. That’s my ideal.

TRISH: I know, I know. I’ve been super fortunate that I’ve gotten, like, fellowships at places Yaddo, or MacDowell, and have been able to go away and write. And that’s been really, really important to me. Like, I’m going upstate this summer to the Millay Colony, and like, that sort of nurturing on the ground level for writers, is invaluable.

CHELSEA: You sort of get the best of both worlds: having a room of one’s own, and then also the village, too.

TRISH: Yes, yep, exactly. Yep.

CHELSEA: So what is your big artistic goal for the next year, or even the next decade?

TRISH: You know, I think that, um, focusing on the next year, I am going away this summer; I’m going to write a new play, which I’m excited about.

CHELSEA: Oooh!

TRISH: Yeah, very excited. It’s this idea that I’m just going to kind of take notes on until I go, I think. And then try to write it all there. Which sounds like fun to me. {laughs}

CHELSEA: {laughs}

TRISH: Because right now, I’m kind of finishing up a pilot, like a one-hour cable pilot deal. Because I’m trying to bridge that gap and maybe, you know, and try to do some TV writing for a while.

CHELSEA: Mm-hmm. Cool.

TRISH: And I say that like it’s… That’s like winning the lottery, right? Getting a job on a premium cable show? But, I’m going to kind of gun for that for the next year or so.

CHELSEA: Uh-huh. Well, it was so lovely talk to you today, and I’m so glad that we made this happen. And I’m really excited to see the short film on your website next week, and this upcoming stuff on Steel Drum in Space, and hopefully this new play sometime in the future.

TRISH: Absolutely. Thank you so much. It was great, you know, talking to you and seeing your reading in New York a couple years ago, when you were here and we met and I wish you all the best in your work.

CHELSEA: Thanks a lot! Thanks for making conversation.

TRISH: Of course.

Thanks for tuning in to this episode of Making Conversation. I hope you’ll join me again soon for another chat about making art in our thirties. You can download and read transcripts of past episodes by clicking here. You can also find this podcast on iTunes (click here).

My guest today was Trish Harnetiaux, and you can find out more about her plays at www.TrishHarnetiaux.com. You can also see the sketches she’s written, and the original short film You Should Be a Better Friend, at www.SteelDrumInSpace.com. Our music is composed by Miles Polaski, and my name is Chelsea Marcantel. And now I’ll leave you with a little bit of humor from Steel Drum in Space.

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Thanks for joining me for Making Conversation, where every week I interview an artist in his or her 30s, who is doing work I find important, and has something illuminating to say about what it means to do what we do as we are now.  My name is Chelsea Marcantel, and my guest this week is Levi Petree.

You can listen to his debut EP, Rebel Music, if you click here.

Levi is a songwriter and actor from Lafayette, LA. He attended Northwestern State University in Natchitoches, LA, as well as The School at Steppenwolf in Chicago,  where he was a founding member of the SiNNERMAN Ensemble. Levi currently lives and works in Los Angeles, CA, writing songs and performing with his band, The Radio Publica. You can also see him in the sketch comedy series, The Best of Craigslist.   Levi is one of my best pals.  We had a standing karaoke date at the Holiday Club in Chicago: rain or shine, or blizzard, every Wednesday night, for about two years.

Levi Petree (photo credit: Ashley Anne Caven)

CHELSEA:  How are you today?

LEVI:  I’m doing great!  Beautiful day out here.

CHELSEA:  Oh good!  So, Levi, what labels do you use to describe yourself as an artist?

LEVI:  Um, I’m really working and getting comfortable with just being a ‘songwriter,’ or maybe just an all-around ‘entertainer.’  I think I feel very confident in myself when you just say, “Yeah, I’m a songwriter.”  Or “I’m a musician.”

CHELSEA:  Mm-hmm.

LEVI:  For some reason, I’ve felt uncomfortable in the past saying, like, “I’m an artist.”  Like, it just implied something that didn’t sit too well with me.  Maybe it’s because I just didn’t wholly buy into what being a true artist means, and totally committing yourself to it.  So, um, I don’t know.  I feel… I just feel very comfortable just saying, “Yeah, you know what, I write music.  I write and play music.”  It’s what I love doing.

CHELSEA:  Great.  Do you have any sort of, like, role models for the kind of entertainer that you want to be?

LEVI:  Yeah!  Songwriters like Springsteen, Dylan, Morissey—guys that write a lot of rock songs that are very poppy, and are just very, kind of, firm in their structure.  Very much a verse—chorus—bridge type of writing process.  But also, just in terms of what I’m trying to work towards, I feel like those guys just keep cranking things out.  They are able to write things that are fun to sing along to, and also things that are very personal to them.  And they’re great, they’re really fun entertainers, when you see them live in concert.  I think ultimately that’s something that I’d really like to achieve, where people just know that it’s going to be a great time when you come to the show.  And it’s songs that you can just sing along to, and it’s going to be a fun, unique experience.

CHELSEA:  Uh-huh.

LEVI:  That’s what’s most important to me right now.  Just making sure we have good songs that will hold up well live.

CHELSEA:  Cool.  So let’s talk background and geography just a little bit.  You are from Louisiana, like I am, but we actually met in Chicago, and now you live in Los Angeles.  So let’s talk a little bit about the cities that you’ve lived in and worked in, and why you chose them when you chose them.

LEVI:  Okay.  So, once I left Louisiana—I went to college at this great, great school in central Louisiana called Northwestern State University, which really paid off when I moved to Chicago, because it had the same font and color as Northwestern University in Evanston.

CHELSEA: {laughs}

LEVI:  {laughing} So I just really tapped into that student discount market up in Chicago.  And, you know, I ended up in Chicago because I was dating this girl at the time—I was a semester ahead of her—I had just gotten into grad school in California, and kinda talked my way into going to Chicago with her for the summer.  She was going to be doing an improve intensive at iO, Improv Olympic, in Chicago.  So, we found this really expensive, furnished studio apartment in the Gold Coast before we went up there, and we loaded up her dad’s truck, and we drove up.  Neither one of us had been to Chicago.  And I think I’d only auditioned for grad school because I didn’t know what else to do or where to go, so I just wanted to have something set up.

CHELSEA:  Mm-hmm.

LEVI:  So, when I ended up in Chicago that first morning–it was raining the night that we got in, so you couldn’t really see anything—so the next morning when I woke up, we were so close to the lake that I just walked out to it.  And it was so beautiful.  And, you know, you could look up and see the skyline, the Hancock tower kind of overlooking the water, and Michigan Avenue, and it was just so beautiful.  I felt so at home right away.  I was like, this is, yeah, this is where I’m gonna stay.  I’m gonna make it happen here.  

CHELSEA:  Yeah, June is how Chicago gets you, for sure.

LEVI:  {laughing} Yeah!  Yeah, definitely… you definitely want to buy into that over the summer.

CHELSEA:  {laughs}

Headshot by Greg Crowder

LEVI:  Yeah, so, then I decided to move there, moved all my stuff up.  And it took me about a year before really getting settled, and meeting people, and figuring out, you know, how to play the Chicago game.  Of acting and auditions.  After I’d been there for a year, I got into—I got really lucky with this, and I think it set up the rest of my time in Chicago, and kind of informed everything from there—I auditioned and got into the Steppenwolf Summer Theatre Program.  And from there I met about twelve or thirteen people that, we just really connected and decided to form a theatre company together, which, you know, seems to be thing that people do in Chicago, is they form their own theatre company.  And so we formed the SiNNERMAN ENSEMBLE, and we started producing plays together.  I’ll give other people more of the producing credit.  I, you know, helped out with other stuff, and acted in the shows.   But, yeah, so, I was fortunate to work with some really great directors and companies, and do some shows and roles that I really liked a lot, and I think by… After a couple of years, you’re working so much that you’re constantly in a show, and then you’re in rehearsals for another show while the other one’s running, but you are having to find other ways to make ends meet.  So, it could be… In my case, I was getting up at five in the morning, or a little bit before that, to work at this gym during the day, and I did that for about the first three years that I was there in Chicago.  And then after that, it was dog walking, and the apartment brokers thing.  So, you know, you’re working your full-time job to be able to support your nightlife, which is the theatre and the awesome theatre community of Chicago.   I think I just got to point where I was like, “Well, I’m young and without responsibility, so maybe I’ll just try to move out to LA and see what happens there.”

CHELSEA:  What was it about LA that appealed to you, specifically?

LEVI:  (pause) I honestly sometimes don’t really know, when I look back on it or think about it.  And I think it’s a couple of things.  I think it’s that I got it in my head where, “Oh, you can go out to LA and make money acting?  Yeah, sure.  That sounds like a good idea.”  And then, I think, I put myself in a position where I’d said I was going to do it, so think I said “I guess I better just do it.”

CHELSEA:  Mm-hmm.

LEVI:  And it took… it took a while to get to a place where I really felt like I knew what I was doing.  I feel like I got my butt kicked around a little bit.  I was trying to make a life in a city happen very quickly.  I was so used to living in Chicago and working there, that I kind of gravitated toward a lot of Chicago people.  I got here and was trying to rush tings, and make new friends, and form, like, a new family, and get involved with more familiar acting work.  Like, I started doing a Meisner series that I ended up just hating.  I just wasn’t very comfortable, and I was trying to rush myself.  And I also got hurt—I’d been training for a marathon and I hurt my knee, so I was in physical therapy as soon as I moved here.  It was just a lot.  And I kind of realized that, you know, I don’t really know if this is the day-to-day work that I want to be doing in order to make sure I make it as an actor.  Like, I don’t really know that I care about it that much, to where I will just be crushed if that dream doesn’t happen.  And, in the back of my mind—or, something that had always been on my mind—was that I wanted to play music.  I had a guitar.  I’ve always fantasized about it, and would also kind of write things and have melodies pop up in my head, even though I didn’t know how to play an instrument yet.

CHELSEA: Mm-hmm.

LEVI:  And I’d finally, you know, just kind of made myself start sitting down and learning how to play guitar.  I’d go onto YouTube and watch people play things, or I figured out that you could go on the internet and they’d show you the chord structures if you wanted to learn and song.  And for me, that just ended up being the easiest way to learn how to play guitar, was learning other songs.  And so I just started to teach myself, and it also taught me more about songwriting.  And just knowing, like, a big song book and just being able to pull from all these things.  So once that started to happen, then I became a lot more comfortable with being in Los Angeles, and really loving the city, and starting to figure out, “Okay, how can I make that happen here?  Like, have that be the reason why I’m here and the work I want to do.  And finding that now and having that to work on daily, is something that kind of opening acting and everything else back up, because it’s got… It’s helped me figure out that here, you really have to self-produce and self-start and make your own things happen.  It’s got, you know, me writing other sketches, or doing comedy, or getting involved with that again.  Also when I moved here, I was doing stand-up for a little while and it was fun.  I had a great time doing it.  So, for me being in LA, that is what the experience has been.  It’s been more about like, “Okay, this is really time for you to hammer down what it is that you are going to do and make happen for yourself.  Something’s not just going to fall in your lap, and if it does, you have to be prepared to run with it.”

CHELSEA: So you’ve made this transition now from being primarily an actor, to being primarily a songwriter and a musician.

LEVI:  It doesn’t feel like a phase.  I mean, I don’t know that when I was acting, that ever felt like a phase.  I thought, for sure, you know, why would anybody ever want to do anything else?  This is the life, this is the best thing.  And then, I got older, and had some other experiences, and it just kinda changed that.  Since I started doing this, since I started writing my own songs, and getting out and getting to play, I haven’t looked back.  That’s something that feels overwhelming at times, and a little scary, but it’s also a huge driving force.  It’s like, well, if you don’t do it, then guess what?  You’re going to run out of time and it’s just not gonna happen.

CHELSEA:  Uh-huh.

LEVI:  So, no, it’s not a phase at all.  We had a show last night that just burned the house down.  And it’s invigorating, it’s like, “Yeah, this is—this is it.  This is the way to go.”  And it just fits.  It just feels right.

Levi Petree and the Radio Publica at the Silverlake Lounge (photo credit: Becca Murray)

{Song Excerpt: “Cheap Thrills” from the Rebel Music EP}

CHELSEA: So, if you could give advice to a young artist in his or her twenties, what would you say?

LEVI:  Oh, there’s so much!  There’s just so much!

CHELSEA: {laughs}

LEVI:  I… Just based on personal experience, I feel… Just try to sit down with yourself and really just write out what it is that you want.  What kind of goals do you have for yourself.  And if it is… if you know what it is that you want, no matter what type of artist you are, find a couple of people whose careers you admire, whose careers you think you’d like to have, and just study anything you can about them.  Read biographies, watch their work, figure out what process is.  What kind of stuff do you do that’s similar?  If you don’t really know what it is that you want, your twenties, I think, are a great time to just throw yourself at the wall and just see what ends up sticking for you.  Not everything will, but you’ll be able to figure out what it is that you want to do.  You’ll also be able to figure out what you don’t want to do.  And you can just really work yourself to the point of exhaustion, because you’re gonna have plenty of time to settle down and be selective.

CHELSEA:  Mm-hmm.

LEVI:  You know, if you can, if it’s possible, maybe find a mentor.  Somebody that is a little bit older than you, or is willing to kind of take you on and check in with you every once in a while, that you can kind of be there up close and study one-on-one.  And they can kind of tell you, “No, you know what, maybe kind of worry a little bit more about this, focus on this, try to get into these places.  Here’s what you can do to kind of get your foot through the door.”  I feel like some people that you have access to, I feel like a lot of people probably would want to help out somebody that was just starting out.  I guess.  Also, I feel like now that I’m in my early thirties, focus starts to change and I think more ahead now.  Like, okay, I’m not going to be young forever, I guess my body will start breaking down.  I’ve had a couple of surgeries in the last years that I’ve had to pay for.   So think about trying to get your health insurance, think about saving money, getting a savings account and learning more about finances, too.  So that you can be okay down the road.  You’ll be taken care of.  And also because it’ll help sustain you as an artist when things are going slow.  Like, you can still kind of do some work for free, just to stay involved with the process. 

CHELSEA:   Mm-hmm.

LEVI:  And not just be constantly worrying about money.

CHELSEA:  I think the financial stuff is a good point, because um, specifically with artists, I think that, um… In other professions, maybe you realize that you’ll have to pay your dues and you’ll have to put in some time and slowly build up equity, and slowly to get to a point where you can comfortably live.  But with artists, I think we sometimes have this idea that we’re just going to struggle, and be poor, and then eventually we’ll have this break and we’ll have more money than we could possibly know what to do with.  So, it’s like, “Well, I’ve just got to get to the point, to that watershed moment when I get all the money.”  When in fact, most working artists, you know, will never have that huge payday where they suddenly get a $20 million paycheck.  So the sooner you can learn to live on what you have and live within your means, whatever that means for you, the more comfortable you’ll be and the less anxiety you’ll have.  Which will ultimately make you more able to focus on what you’re trying to do.

LEVI:  Yeah.  Yeah, I think you’re absolutely right.  The biggest wake-up call that I had, and a lot of my friends had, as we got older and we got into our thirties, is that Life Is Real.  Real problems exist.

CHELSEA:  Look to the future.  Because Life Is Long.   That’s something I’ve learned in my thirties.

LEVI:  Yep, yep, yep.

CHELSEA:  Life goes on for a long time.

LEVI:  Oh yeah.  Oh god, Chelsea, it’s… I’m only thirty-one, and I’ve had that same thought of, “Life is long.”  And then I think, “There’s another forty, fifty years of this?  Maybe more?  Maybe less?  Oh my god.”

CHELSEA: {laughs}

LEVI:  {laughing}  That’s uh, that’s definitely something I’ve started to write about, too.  And I think they’re funny for, like, this thirty-year-old person to be singing about, you know, “I’m not saying we can live forever.”

Photo credit: Becca Murray

{Song Excerpt: “Dropping the Shield” from the Rebel Music EP}

CHELSEA: Well, piggybacking on the “Life Is Long” realism, what sustains you?  Why do you keep doing and making and creating?

LEVI:  (long pause)  Right now, I feel like, to be 100% honest, there is a lot of fear and worry of future disappointment that makes me wake up and just really try to hit these things and make it happen.

CHELSEA: Uh-huh.

LEVI:  Because I, I think, “Okay, you’re getting older, and time may actually be running out.”  It sometimes feels like it’s a young man’s game, or a young person’s game.  So you only have a certain window to get these things out. And it’s not like that for every artist.  If I get in a position where I’m stuck, or I’m worried, it’s like, you know what?  Screw it.  Just get it out there.  Find something to do; just start making it happen.  Get people together to play music.  Um, you know, I’ve loved living in Los Angeles and Chicago.  I don’t know that I want to live in another city, or start that process all over again.  And there’s a hope, I think, that I just want to end up in Louisiana.  I think I’d be really fine and comfortable and want to be back in Lafayette or around there, and just be able to work on music every day.  And be around my family.  It has hit me that, “Oh, you know what, the last ten years I’ve spent most of my adult life away from my family.  Getting to see them a couple of times a year.”

CHELSEA:  And you said something when we were talking about this earlier that I had not thought about but, um, I identify with—the idea that you would have spent all this time away from your family pursing something that would eventually not amount to anything.  So it has to, it has to mean something.  To have given up all this time with your family, you have to dedicate yourself to it so it becomes a worthwhile sacrifice. 

LEVI:  I don’t know why, but I sometimes worry, as I start to think more about having kids and what is the reason behind… I try to come up with, like, why you’d want to have a kid and raise a child, and what is it that you want your kid to achieve?  And I sometimes wonder, like, “Man, I wonder if my parents are disappointed in me.”

CHELSEA:  Aw!

LEVI:  {laughing}  Because it hasn’t clicked, or it hasn’t happened.  And I don’t think that they are at all, but it’s just something that I think about.  So, knowing that I want to be closer to them, and I miss them, I think that just has an effect on me.  Like, “Well, you can’t just go on without thinking about it forever.”  I feel like a lot of people—I don’t know if this is true—but I know a lot of people do move away from home, and they don’t see their folks or talk to their folks or their other family members that much.  I feel like you’re really great about it.  You get to see your parents a lot, and you’re in contact with your brother and your sister, and I really admire that.  I find that very inspiring.  Because I feel like you are able to live the life that you want, and from my impression, it seems like you are very comfortable with the life that you and Miles have together.  It’s just so awesome, and I look at that and I admire that so much.  And I think… I don’t know that I’ve found that yet, to where I’m just really comfortable and have everything set up the way that I want to be.  And I think my ultimate fantasy sees me down in Louisiana, near my family, being able to do all this stuff.  Which I think is possible.  {laughs} But you know, now I feel like, okay, you’ve got these guys you love playing music with, and it’s doing something to elevate that, so now it’s like, “Okay.  You need to commit to being here.”

CHELSEA:  Yes.

LEVI:  I do feel good about committing to that, and being here, even though, you know, it’s a little lump in my throat.

CHELSEA:   I didn’t, um…  I—I am close to my family, I mean, I know I don’t see them as much as they would like, but I also sometimes feel like, if I have a kid… We live in Virginia, or if we go somewhere else, how often is that kid going to see their grandparents?  How often are they going to see their cousins?  How are they going to know them growing up?  Having grown up being just so close to all of my family all of the time, and I know that really shaped me as a human being, I sometimes worry that I’ll have a kid that’ll have a long-distance family.  And how weird that would be.  So that’s kind of a lump in my throat, too.  I think about that more since I got married.  But, to shift to something less melancholy and more exciting—

LEVI:  Okay?

CHELSEA:   Tell me about the album.  Tell me what’s going on, and how people can find it, and what you’re exited about.

L-R: John Salgado Jr, Tony Sancho, Levi Petree, Sean Novak. (photo credit: Calliope Porter)

LEVI:  Well, I’m very excited!  I got the news on Friday that it’s up, it’s streaming on Spotify (click here) and it’s up on iTunes (click here).   The guys that I play music with?  I love them.  Absolutely love them, and I feel like a lot of people say, especially out here in Los Angeles, “Well, there’s so many musicians that everybody’s got their own thing going, so it’s hard to make it work.”  And I’ve gotten really lucky where, we all—the guys that I’m playing music with—this seems to be our ‘thing.’  When it was time to put the record out, you know, we sat down and kind of had the discussion of, “Okay, so we’ve got this band name, and we’ve been billing it as ‘Levi Petree and The Radio Publica.’  Is it easier to just market it as just myself, should we put the band name on there?”  And we’re like, “Eh, maybe it’s harder to have the band name on there, maybe it would be simpler and people would be able to recognize it a little bit more.”  So we kind of walked away from that and I made the decision to just use my name.  But then, at the end of the day, I was like, “You know what?  These guys really made it into something special, on top of anything that I did.  So I want to make sure that they get credit, that they feel like that we’re a band.  That we are all in it together.” 

CHELSEA:  Mm-hmm.

LEVI:  They’re so talented and great, and we’re friends.  And we really connect together.  So anyway, so—very excited.  It’s an EP, it’s our first release.  We titled it Rebel Music after one of the tracks on there, and I think it just sums up  the very rock-and-roll spirit that is on there.  You know, it’s a statement of like—a little mini-statement, almost a demo, if you will, but a pretty professional, professionally mastered and mixed and recorded session of songs—that I think are a great idea of what our band is.  Of the greater ideas that we have, how much fun we are live—if you listen to this record, I feel like it’s pretty much exactly the energy that you’ll get when you come to see us play live.  It’s very fun.

CHELSEA:  Yeah, it’s all the things you’re saying.  It’s fun, it’s energetic, it sounds like a group of guys that have a lot of fun together.  It reminds me of all of the best parts of singing karaoke with you.  And I think that it’s gonna be great for summer, and for driving around with the top down.  And that whole sort of like, “We’re on an adventure.  Just every day, every day of life is an adventure” kind of feeling.  And I hope that people will find it on iTunes (click here) and Spotify (click here) and Facebook (click here) and just really connect to it.

LEVI:  I have no idea, like, I cannot control what people will think, if they’ll like it.  You know, whatever people get from it, that’s their own thing.  I just know that I want to put it out there.

CHELSEA: Well, thank you so much, it’s been so wonderful to talk to you today.  And I can’t wait to send this album out via, you know, my little push here, so that people can find it and enjoy it and listen to it.

LEVI:  Well, I was just going to thank you for offering to do this, and just the entire series that you’ve done.  I’ve been reading all the transcripts, starting with Danielle, and Margot, and all the others that you’ve put up.  It’s really awesome that you are doing this, and giving voice to your friends, and artists that you don’t normally get to hear from, and hear that side of, “This is what it’s like for a working artist that hasn’t exactly become a household name yet.”

CHELSEA:  Right.

LEVI:  And I just really appreciate that you asked me to participate.  I’m very grateful for that.

CHELSEA: Well that’s very nice of you to say.  Thanks for reading along, and for supporting the podcast!

LEVI:  Absolutely.

CHELSEA:  Well, I’ll talk to you soon.

LEVI:  All right.  Well, thank you very much, Chelsea.

{Song Excerpt: “Remember When” from the Rebel Music EP}

Thanks for tuning in to this episode of Making Conversation. I hope you’ll join me again soon for another chat about making art in our thirties.  You can download and read transcripts of past episodes at www.ChelseaDays.com.  You can also find this podcast on iTunes (click here).

My guest today was Levi Petree, and you can find his debut EP with his band The Radio Publica on iTunes and Spotify.  It’s called Rebel Music, and here are the links:

Levi Petree and The Radio Publica on Facebook  (click here)

Spotify  (click here)

iTunes  (click here)

CD Baby  (click here)

The Radio Publica band features Sean Novak on bass, Tony Sancho on drums, and John Salgado, Jr. on guitar.   Our theme song at the top of the show was composed by Miles Polaski, and the rest of the songs you’ve heard are from the Rebel Music EP.  My name is Chelsea Marcantel.

Subscribe to the podcast on iTunes!

(click on the media player above left to listen to or download the full audio of this interview)

Thanks for joining me again for Making Conversation, where every week I interview an artist in his or her 30s, who is doing work I find important, and has something illuminating to say about what it means to do what we do as we are now.  My name is Chelsea Marcantel, and my guest this week is Evan Linder.

His show reWILDing Genius is currently running as part of the Steppenwolf Garage Rep, through April 20th. (click for info)

Evan is a founding member and the Co-Artistic Director of The New Colony. He works in Chicago as a playwright, actor and director. He also teaches playwriting at the University of Chicago.  A graduate of the College of Charleston, Evan has had the pleasure of working with Victory Gardens, The Inconvenience, Collaboraction, Bailiwick Chicago, the side project and Bohemian Theater Ensemble during his time in the Windy City. Favorite New Colony roles he has created include Kirk in Hearts Full of Blood, Tasty in Down & Derby and Randy in Pancake Breakfast. Evan’s first play produced in Chicago, FRAT, was named as one of the Best of 2009 in the Chicago Tribune, Windy City Times and New City. Other works include 11:11, The Warriors, The Bear Suit of Happiness, B-Side Studio, and 5 Lesbians Eating a Quiche, which was named Best Overall Production at the 2012 NYC International Fringe Festival and is published by Samuel French. 5 Lesbians also enjoyed an Off-Broadway run as part of the Soho Playhouse’s 2012-2013 season. Evan’s play The Bear Suit of Happiness and his hybrid stageplay/sitcom/webseries B-Side Studio (co-written with Hit the Wall playwright Ike Holter) both received their world premieres in Chicago in 2013, and he was recently listed on Chicago Magazine’s 2013 Power List of Theater Scene Stealers. Evan will next be seen onstage as Jonathan in TNC’s reWILDing Genius at the Steppenwolf Garage.

Evan Linder; headshot by Ryan Bourque

CHELSEA:  Hey!  How are you today?

EVAN:  I’m great!  How are you?  We start, uh, we start tech today.

CHELSEA:  Oh wow.

EVAN:  I know, I know.  It’s upon us.

CHELSEA:  So, great, well good—I’m glad I’m catching you at an exciting time.  We should have a lot to talk abut.

EVAN:  Yeah.

CHELSEA:  So tell me—what labels do you use to describe yourself as an artist?

EVAN:  I usually say I’m a playwright and an actor.  I started teaching this past year, though, so I kind of throw that in there as well.  And then, I kind of wear so many hats with The New Colony, that… Somebody actually said this to me the other day, when I said, “What do you see yourself doing for the future, or what do you want to be?”  He said, “I just want to be a new play developer.”  And I said, “Oh, that’s great!  I think that’s kind of what I am.”  Because in the past year I’ve directed a new show, and written several new shows, and now I’m about to be acting in two new shows, back-to-back, that I was very much involved in the creation and workshop of before the script was even written.  So I guess that’s kind of a good title: New Play Developer.

CHELSEA:  Yeah.

EVAN:  I’ll own it.

CHELSEA:  Let’s talk more about that.  Definitely.  You’re a founding member and the Co-Artistic Director of The New Colony, which is one of my very favorite companies in Chicago.  And part of your mission as a company is not only to develop new work, but to develop a new kind of theatre audience.  So, tell me about The New Colony and the way you guys collaborate.  It’s so fascinating to me.

EVAN:  Yeah, absolutely.  We develop everything that we create through a very specific process.  And the process is designed to make everybody—whether you’re an actor, or a playwright, or a director—more confident in that role as you develop the piece.  So, it’s very highly collaborative, kind of right from the beginning, and it takes flexible people.  Flexible people who say, “I don’t know exactly what I’m doing in this show yet, I have an outline.  And now I’m going to learn everything that I’ll be doing for this show.”  So, we really kind of start with just an idea.  And it can be very small; it doesn’t have to be a huge five-page treatment of a story.  As soon as somebody has an idea and says, “I’m ready to start workshopping this,” then we jump into a room.  And we usually ask the playwright to come up with at least two pages of treatment—where is your structure for this story, where are you building towards, and what are the characters that you need to tell this story?  And then the actors come in, and they tell the playwright exactly who those characters are.  And that allows the playwright to write specifically for those actors.  And that’s really what we find can be most, um, vibrant onstage, I think.  Is if you have actors who feel like they own that character.  You know?  Um, and then the director is able to throw different actors together, throw them in different scenarios.  They playwright controls a lot of the workshops as well.  And when the playwright puts his hands up and says, “I’m done, I have what I need,” then everybody just goes away.  And the playwright starts to write the show.  And then hopefully, we’re able to retain those actors who helped create those roles in the workshops, for the actual production of the show.  Um, so we usually have a turnaround time of usually around nine to twelve months.  Fingers crossed that everybody is still in Chicago and does not have a show scheduled at that time.

B-Side Studio; photo credit: Ryan Bourque

CHELSEA:  Right.

EVAN:  It can get pretty crazy trying to, uh, trying to maneuver all of that.  But, the ideal of our process is to workshop the show with a certain number of actors, and have those actors actually onstage for the world premiere of that show.

CHELSEA:  So do you use the label ‘devised theatre’ for what you do?

EVAN:  Other people use that label.  I never think of it in that way, just because I think any sort of new play is being devised. 

CHELSEA:  Mm-hmm.

EVAN:  And in my mind—and it may just be a semantics issue—in my mind ‘devised’ makes people think we all get in a room and just make it up.  As we go along.  And it’s really much more structured than that.  You know, the playwright does come in with an idea.  And it their specific idea that they want to see grow.  And then once they have that idea, then the actors come in, and you get to tailor characters specifically to them.  And we have a lot of improvisers in our company.  I mean, half of our ensemble has more of a theatre background and training.  And then the other half of our ensemble is comedians and improvisers and people who moved here to do that.  And what we’ve found is that putting those two mindsets together in a room can create a lot of magic.

CHELSEA:  Mm-hmm.  I have found the most successful experiences I have had making devised theatre have been in situations where the roles were very clearly defined.  And it sounds like that is paramount to your process.

EVAN:  Yeah, absolutely.  I mean it’s just trust from everybody in the room.  You know the playwright trusts the actors to come in and build an interesting character.  Before they’ve started writing their script.  Um, the actors trust the playwright just by signing on board and saying, “Yeah, that’s an idea that sounds great.  I would love to be in that play.  Let me come and create a great character for you.”  And those characters are created, really, from… The playwright will usually come in with just like one to two sentences of a description, you know? Of “this is this character’s function in telling this story.”  And then the actor is entrusted to build a very rich backstory.  And to know everything about that character.  So much so, that when I’ve written in the process, I’ve been able to call up an actor—even months later, after workshops, when I’m still working on the script—and say, you know, “Where did you go to high school, and uh, who were your best friends?”

CHELSEA:  {laughs}

EVAN:  “And how did you interact with them?”  You know?

CHELSEA:  Yeah.

EVAN:  “I have this story that I’m going back to on this, and I would love to just hear your viewpoint as the expert on that character.  If the playwright’s the expert on the story, and building the structure, and telling it successfully, then the actors are the experts on the characters.  And then the director is the expert on, you know, the experience of watching the show.

CHELSEA:  The expert audience member.

EVAN:  Yeah, exactly.  How is the audience going to receive this story that you all have built?

CHELSEA:  How would you describe your artistic style, and has it evolved in your thirties?

EVAN:  Definitely.  I would definitely say it has, solely because I think that whenever I start to sense that I have a style, I want to stop whatever that recurring style is.  And that’s… I don’t know.  Yeah.  I think that’s why it’s interesting.  You start to do something, and you get good at it, and then you say, “Yeah, but I want to tell a whole bunch of stories.  I don’t want to just be known for doing this.”  So, my first two shows that I did in Chicago were very, very personal.  And they were both comedies, and they were both centered around subcultures that I had been a part of over my life.  And I would say those two shows, even though it’s two very different subcultures, were very much had  a documentary-style feel to them.  All the dialogue was very natural, very hyper-realistic.  And they were funny.  And the next show that I did was a show about the survivors of the Jonesboro school shooting in 1998.  One of our company members, Mary Hollis Inboden, is a survivor of that school shooting.  And, it was really her saying that she wanted to do that play, and wanted me to write it.  And I think that doing those first two shows kind of gave me the confidence to say, “Now I feel confident enough as a playwright to tell somebody else’s story.”  And not just stories that are very much on people who I know.  This was about exploring people who I didn’t know.  And then, when we got done doing that show, it was very… heavy.  To be in that world for so long.  And then we immediately followed that up with an absurdist comedy called, Five Lesbians Eating a Quiche.  And then, from there… Yeah.  I feel like each show that I do… From there, my first show that premiered in 2013 last year was called The Bear Suit of Happiness, and it was about gay soldiers in WWII who are tasked with putting on a drag show for the men in their camp.

The Bear Suit of Happiness; photo credit: Anne Petersen

CHELSEA:  Mm-hmm.

EVAN:  And then, this past year, I kind of came and wanted to thwart kind of the style of all of those shows was just… I always had the creative force of The New Colony around me, and workshopping all of my shows before and while I was writing them.  Then this year I just said, “You know, I already have this one story where I know the characters extremely well, I know exactly how they talk, I know exactly how I want to tell this story, my structure is already laid out, and I don’t feel very flexible with this story.”

CHELSEA:  Ah.

EVAN:  “And I’m ready to go ahead and just start writing it.”  And one thing that I kind of landed on the other day when thinking about this, in detailing our process to other people, is that it is meant to empower you in the role that you have.  If you ever feel that you have a story, and doing our process would not empower you—if it feel just like a cocoon to you because that’s the way you’ve always done it, like a safe little haven for you to create in—then maybe you should step outside of it.  Then I stepped outside of it.  And that was a big kind of evolution for me, to be able to do that.  And just being able to say, “I have an artistic family who I can use for a resource for writing some of my shows, but I’m not completely tied to them all the time,” was a really great realization to come to.  You know?

CHELSEA:  Do you find that that’s kind of how you run the room with a different company?  The same way that it goes with The New Colony.

EVAN:  Yeah.  It’s um…  I’m not sure.  I would definitely say The New Colony has taught me how to best behave collaboratively.

CHELSEA:  Aha.  So you teach playwrighting as well, at the University of Chicago.

EVAN:  I do.

CHELSEA:  How does teaching writing impact your own work?

EVAN:  Let’s see.  I would say that teaching writing taught me that writers who are most interested in other people’s stories, are the best writers.

Evan with students at University of Chicago; photo credit: Robert Kozloff

CHELSEA:  Wow.

EVAN:  People who know how to be an engaged audience member know how to write plays that will engage audience members.  If that makes sense.

CHELSEA:  Yeah.

EVAN:  I just remember… My first class that I had at U of C was just sort of magic to me.  Because I just had six students in that class.  And I run my class kind of as a writer’s workshop over the course of 10 weeks.  And those six students in that class were so invested in what everybody else was writing and the characters they had created.  And were always anxiously awaiting everyone else’s pages the next week, almost as much as they were interested in hearing their pages read.

CHELSEA:  Right.

EVAN:  And that was just amazing to watch.  And then… I’ve been there a while and my classes are much bigger now—I usually have twelve to fourteen in my classes now—and it’s not as easy to have that much intense interest from everybody in everybody’s stories.  But I still think that it holds true.  That everybody who knows how to be an engaged audience member knows how to write the best plays.

CHELSEA:  Yeah.  I teach playwrighting as well, and I have fifteen in my class this semester, which is the biggest class I’ve ever had.

EVAN:  That’s tough, right?

CHELSEA:  It’s tough!  It really is, because I do sit-around-a-table-and-do-workshop, too.  And especially with a fifty-minute class, it’s like we just get started talking about something and it’s time to leave.  But, um, I find that the most interested edits that get emailed to me or brought to me, are the ones that someone goes home and makes after, like, a day when their play wasn’t even read in class.   That listening and talking about someone else’s play made them realize something about their own, and they had to go home and do a rewrite.  And I always find those to be so interesting, because when it’s… When we’re talking about that student’s play, they go home and they make edits that other people suggested, or that they think I am going to think are, you know, right.  But when it’s something that they come to from listening to other people’s criticisms of different work, they sort of extrapolate these really beautiful discoveries on their own.

EVAN:  Exactly.  I know, and I think that’s a great thing just about opening yourself up to work collaboratively with a room, and be able to say, “That wasn’t my idea, and I’m going to use it.  Absolutely.  I’m not going to not be open to an idea because somebody else in the room came up with it.”  Because everybody, at the end of the day, has the exact same goal, which is to make that show that’s being created.  To tell that story in the best way possible.

CHELSEA:  Absolutely.  And speaking of shows, you have a new show coming up in Chicago that you’re acting in at the Steppenwolf Garage, called reWILDing Genius.  It sounds—I’ve been, you know, reading about it online—it sounds very immediate and a little bit dark, which are two of my very favorite qualities in a play.  So tell me about it, and tell me about working with the Garage Rep.

The cast of reWILDing Genius; photo credit: Pat Coakley

EVAN:  Yeah.  It’s been a great experience.  The development of the show was very interesting, because we developed it at the University of Chicago, where I teach.  Last year.  The New Colony was the company in residence there during the winter quarter of 2013.  So Andy and Megan Johns both went in with a story idea, which was about Anonymous and about a group of hackers who wanted to change the world.  And this was… This is so often, for so many of our shows, we find something that we get interested in, either in the news or a piece of history or something like that, and we just start learning everything about it.  I think reWILDing has really been swirling in Andy’s brain for maybe like four or five years, really.

CHELSEA:  And Andy Hobgood is the other Co-Artistic Director of The New Colony.

EVAN:  Yes.  Exactly.  And he had this idea, for just a very long time, of the power of a small group of people organizing to change the world.  What is the biggest impact that the smallest group of people could have?  And we went in to these workshops, and one of our actors in the show, James, he was given a few lines of character description and everything like that, and at the end of that workshop, Andy had said, “You know who you should look at, James—this would be a great kind of jumping-off point for you—but look at the co-founder of Reddit, Aaron Swartz. This is a great person to kind of use as a foundational base for you.”  And he [Aaron Swartz] was, at the time, being prosecuted by the US Government.  And, we had just started this workshop, it was on a Monday, and five days later, we get a Google alert, and then we get a Google alert, and then we get an email from James that says, “Aaron Swartz just killed himself in New York.”  And, um, we were like, “All right, we’ll talk about it on Monday.”  And then the show just got very, very real.  Immediately.

CHELSEA:  Yeah.

EVAN:  On the second week of those workshops.  It was very unsettling.  All of us were… We were all unsettled.  And we walked in, and the direction of the show, and the tone of the show, completely changed from that moment on.  And, let’s see, yeah, now we’re on draft, like, eleven of this script.  Because it is so current, and it is so ‘right now.’  So it really has been changing and changing.  And the last act of our show now takes place in December 2013.

CHELSEA:  Wow.

EVAN:  I remember Andy, when we had a reading in October… The changes of the weather, and very weird, intense days of extreme weather in Chicago kind of drive each act of this show, and I just remember that in the stage directions for that, it was just bracketed as: [We Have Yet To Find Out.]  What that day will be, in December 2013.  Because, uh, we will know by the time we open, but we just don’t know quite yet, right?

CHELSEA:  {laughs}

EVAN:  And Walkabout Theatre Company and Prologue Theatre Company, the two other Garage Rep companies, what they’re doing is they have two world-premiere works as well.  And Walkabout’s is completely devised.  From everybody in their cast.  And I think that is more of a ‘devised’ piece of theatre, because it’s very movement-based, I know it’s very Viewpoints-based.  And then Prologue is doing a world premiere by Katori Hall.  And just to have three world-premiere shows, and to see how differently each one of those three was created: One playwright’s voice, two playwrights with an idea who workshopped with an ensemble and then they structure their story around that, and then something that’s devised by everybody who was in the room.  That’s kind of the three different methods that three world-premiere plays were developed with.

Evan in reWILDing Genius; photo credit: Pat Coakley

CHELSEA:  Pretty incredible.

EVAN:  It really does feel like a curation, really, by Steppenwolf.  A very smart one, I feel.  And then on top of that, it’s just been fun.  Again, everyone is really invested in everybody else’s work.  Right?  So that makes it a whole lot of fun, getting to work with everybody.

CHELSEA:  Are you happy with where you find yourself in your career?  And what sustains you, as an artist?

EVAN:  I am happy, without a doubt.  I think that that definition just always changes for you.  I moved here to Chicago eight years ago to act, and to be an actor.  And it wasn’t until nine months of not getting cast in anything, and then I got cast in my first show, and then that snowballed.  So then I did five shows in one year.  I kind of came to the conclusion at the same time I was meeting everyone else who eventually became the founders of The New Colony, that in order to constantly be fed and constantly be happy, we have to create our own work.  And I think, really, once I realized that, even through every shitty day job, and you know, everything that you have to go through to be able to do that work—I would say ever since we came to that realization, that we can make whatever we want to, because we’re in Chicago, and you can do that here.

CHELSEA:  Yeah.

EVAN:  I think once you kind of come to that realization, then it doesn’t… You have to work hard to not be happy, if you’re an artist who wants to make new work in the theatre, and you live in Chicago. 

CHELSEA:  {laughs}

EVAN:  You have to work pretty hard to not be happy with where you are.  You know?  Because I really think it’s the best place in the world to be inspired by other people’s work, and to be able to find an audience for this weird thing that you want to do.  Whatever it is.  I love, love, love Chicago.  I really can’t imagine living anywhere else any time soon.  And then, I also know that that changes all the time.  You know?

CHELSEA:  Yeah.

EVAN:  I’m open to anything else, but I’ve got an amazing family of artists here that I love creating with.  So.

CHELSEA:  So what is your biggest artistic goal for the next year?  Both interior accomplishments—like how do you want to feel—and the exterior accomplishments?

EVAN:  I would love to see more New Colony scripts just being produced.  We’ve definitely had some success with Five Lesbians in regional theatres, and kind of around the country.  It’s being published by Samuel French…

CHELSEA:  Awesome!  Congratulations.

Five Lesbians Eating a Quiche; photo credit: Anne Petersen

EVAN:  Oh, thank you.  It’s got this title that people raise their eyebrows at, and at least, you know, want to see the script in front of them.  After they see the title.  So that’s been great for us, but because of that, it has kind of opened up the rest of the archives of New Colony shows to other companies.  That was really just always our mission in creating our shows, is we want to create new plays using our process, specifically for our actors, but there’s a reason why it is scripted theatre.  We want these shows to continue on and to have other lives outside of our original productions of them.  So, I would say that’s really kind of a main focus for me this year, is just getting—not just mine, I mean all of—our scripts that we’re proud of and that we want to see somebody else’s interpretation of them.

CHELSEA:  Awesome.  So besides reWILDing Genius, do you have anything coming up after that that you want to talk about?

EVAN:  Yes, we have a show coming up after reWILDing called Orville and Wilbur Did It by David Zellnick.  And it’s just one of my favorite scripts I’ve ever read.

CHELSEA:  {laughing} Fantastic.

EVAN:  {laughing} It is so funny.  David is a New York playwright, he wrote the musical Yank a few years ago, which was about gay soldiers in WWII.  And when I started writing Bear Suit, about a year and a half ago or two years ago… David had been a fan of The New Colony because he had seen us when we’d come to New York Fringe, and we had met him there.  And he was so supportive when I was writing that, which I was even kind of nervous to tell him, “Oh, I’m writing a show that kind of is digging into the exact same history as your successful show that’s running right now.”

CHELSEA:  {laughs}

EVAN:  And he was like, “No, that’s great, that’s amazing.  They’re going to be completely different, because you’re going this completely other angle.  No, people need to know these stories, put it out.”  And, you know, he was just so sweet through all of that, and then he came out to see Bear Suit last year.  And when he was coming out, I said, “You shouldn’t come out to Chicago for the weekend unless you have an idea you want to workshop with our ensemble.  Because we’re here and we would love to work with you.”

CHELSEA:  Ah!

EVAN:  So he came in, and he brought in the idea of a touring children’s theatre company, doing a musical about the Wright brothers, travelling around the Midwest in a van.  Um, just great seeing another playwright come in, who’s not part of our ensemble, and who had never worked in this process before, and to say, “We hope you like this, we hope this does something for you, we hope that this isn’t something so insular that we’ve created for ourselves, that this is not going to be helpful to other playwrights.”  And he just loved it.  And he loved the style of working, and he created something so unique and specific for those actors who workshopped that.  And we just had our first reading two weeks ago, and it was amazing.  It was amazingly funny.  So that’s our summer show.  Should be going up in June—exact date TBD.  But, yeah, we’re really excited about that.

CHELSEA:  Fantastic.  Well, it’s been so lovely to talk to you this afternoon.

EVAN:  Yeah!

CHELSEA:  Good luck with everything you’ve got going on, good luck with tech and class and workshopping new plays, and everything else.

EVAN:  Thank you.  Well, yeah!  Thanks for calling me.  It was a lot of fun.  And best to y’all down there, and let us know when you’re coming up.

CHELSEA:  Will do.  Thanks for making conversation.

EVAN:  No problem.  Bye, Chelsea!

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Thanks for joining me again for Making Conversation, where every week I interview an artist in his or her 30s, who is doing work I find important, and has something illuminating to say about what it means to do what we do as we are now.  My name is Chelsea Marcantel, and my guest this week is Sheena LaShay.

Sheena is the creator of SheenaLaShay.com, a blog, brand, lifestyle network and production company focused on expression, freedom and enlightenment.  Through her work, she explores transformation and empowerment through PASSION, SENSUALITY and EROTICISM.  Sheena also works as a portrait & boudoir photographer, keynote speaker, and theatrical stage manager. She uses her special mix of creativity, industry expertise, exposure, & experience to provide amazing services to her clients. She has been hired as a business consultant, brand ambassador, videographer, performer, stage manager, event planner, workshop leader, writer, and much more.  Currently living and working in New York City, Sheena is the host and creator of the Wild Magical Woman workshops, the yearly CREATE retreat for women artists, and the hugely popular Crafts + Cupcakes DIY parties.  You can learn more about Sheena, read her writing, and check out her videos at www.SheenaLaShay.com.

Sheena is hugely inspiring to me in many ways, and you’re going to hear me get really gushy about how much I love her in this interview.

Sheena LaShay by Glen Graham Photography

Chelsea:  Hi, Sheena, how are you?

Sheena:  I’m doing well today.  How are you doing?

Chelsea:  I’m doing okay.  The weather’s not great, but it’s a good day for staying inside and talking to you on the phone.

Sheena:  Yay!

Chelsea:  So we’re going to go right into it – what labels do you use to describe yourself as an artist?

Sheena:  Because I do so many different kinds of artistic things, the main thing that I just tell people is that I’m a Creative Artist.  Because I’m a photographer and a videographer, and a stage manager, and a writer, and a dancer—I do lots of things, so it’s just easier to say “Creative Artist.”

Chelsea:  Yeah, and then you open up a conversation, too, I feel like.  Because then it’s like, “Oooh, I want to know more.”

Sheena:  Exactly.  And then, it depends on who I’m talking to.  It may be relevant to talk more about myself as a photographer, and my experience stage managing has nothing to do with that particular conversation.  So I feel like I can’t go wrong with Creative Artist.

Chelsea:  We—You and I met working on a show in Chicago.  But for the last several years, you’ve lived and worked in New York.  So tell me about the cities that you’ve lived and worked in, and how they’ve affected your work.

Sheena:  Um, I’m excited in that I just celebrated my four-year anniversary of living in New York, so…

Chelsea:  Congratulations!

Sheena:  …I’m very happy.  Thank you!  I don’t know necessarily that the places I work affect the work.  My experience has just been that I create whatever kind of work I want wherever I am.  And maybe that’s different—like if you’re an actress and you want to work on TV, maybe you’re going to go to LA and maybe New York, instead of Chicago.  Or, I don’t know.  I think there are some industries where the location heavily influences the work.  For the type of stuff I do, however, it doesn’t.  It’s just good for me to be in a city with lots going on.

Photographs of New York City by Sheena LaShay

Chelsea:  You’ve worked a couple of other places, too.  Just places that clients have hired you: Seattle, Washington.  Austin.

Sheena:  Yes, those also, I mean, I love—my clients can fly me wherever they want.  If they want to fly me to a volcano to take some pictures of them, I’ll do it.  So I did—I was flown to Austin, Texas as a videographer, photographer, and keynote speaker for an event.  I was flown to Seattle, Washington to film the promotional videos for a dance company.  Or even, I mean, it’s not far—even though in my mind it’s far—I have a client in New Jersey who comes to pick me up and film her and all of her projects, too.  So I go where my clients want me to go.

Chelsea:  It’s one of the best parts of being a creative artist, I would think.

Sheena:  Mm-hmm.  Yes.  They can keep flying me wherever they want.

Chelsea:  {laughs} So how does the work that you’re making today, apart from the fact that you’re in a different city, how does it differ from the work you were making five or ten years ago?

Sheena:  I think, for one, depending on the time… Like five years ago and ten years ago my focus was different things.  Five years ago I was mainly stage managing, whereas now I’m doing other things.  So sometimes the specific time means that something else is a higher priority.  But also, I feel like I have more, um, direction towards my work.  Like I understand it more.  And it means even more to me.  Because, I don’t know, in the past it was just like, “I’m going to stage manage a fun play, and I get to work with great people.”  And I feel like I understand my mission even more, regarding why I’m doing the work I’m doing.  And then also, as I have evolved and matured as a person, that starts to reflect in my work.  So, the past ten years of what I’ve experienced in career, or family, or relationships—all those things give my work more depth as time goes on.

Chelsea:  You are actually one of the people I most admire for using your art for advocacy.  It seems to be a real drive in what you do, and I respect that so much about you.  Um, can you talk a little bit about that?  About being an advocate with your art?

Sheena:  Yeah.  You know, I think my first experience in seeing this, it was in college.  I took a… what was it… it was like ‘Theatre and Culture’ class.  And in that class, we were studying plays like Nickel and Dimed, and whatever different hot topic issues and advocacy issues there were.  And before that I just thought, “Oh, theatre is fun.”  I didn’t know there was a thing called ‘socio-political theatre.’  And so realizing that I could use art to critique culture, or to talk about some kind of advocacy, really opened my eyes.  And so whether I was stage managing or blogging—which is where a lot of what I do goes toward, blogging—I realized I could do it to tell people about my life, or to work on a new project, but I could also tell deeper stories of, like, my own personal experiences.  Whether I was doing a YouTube video on anti-bullying, or suicide prevention, I really saw that that was possible because of what I learned in that Theatre and Culture class.  And because it happened to me.  The best examples of where I really understood an issue someone was facing,  happened through art for me.  Like, I could read someone’s story in the newspaper, or I could, I don’t know, read a book, or hear some impassioned speech, but the times when something really connected to my core was when, like, I heard it in a song.  Or, I saw it in a play.  Or I read it in a poem.  And so I wanted to do that same thing with my work and advocacy.

Chelsea:  Right.  Like somehow the interpretation of it, or the presentation of it, through the filter of art makes the truth of it even truer.

Sheena:  Yeah.

Chelsea:  I know exactly what you mean.  And I know that you’ve—I mean I’ve just witnessed, from kind of a distance through your blog, how many people you’ve helped.  Who’ve reached out to you and said, “You know, you really said something that changed my life, or made me feel like I wasn’t alone, or I could get through this.”

Sheena:  Yeah.  And that’s just, I mean, that’s so crazy to me because again, years ago when I was doing my art, or doing my blog, it was just like, “I’m just going to do whatever I want and whatever I feel.”  And I really had nothing in mind.  I just wanted to say stuff.  And to see how sharing my story—the good and bad, the advocacy things, all those things—to hear someone say, “I feel like I’m not alone” or… Even, like, I have a friend who, she hasn’t gone through the things I’ve gone through, but she says she just understands it more.

Chelsea: Mm-hmm.

Sheena:  And that’s so powerful to me.

Boudoir Photography by Sheena LaShay

Chelsea:  There’s a great quote that I love—I’m going to butcher it, but, uh, Bill English in an article about theatre for young audiences that came out maybe in 2012—that “Theatre is a gym where we practice empathy.” (to link to the article by Lauren Gunderson click here).  And I thought, “Oh, that’s great.  That’s exactly where you learn to feel for people who aren’t exactly like you.”  I thought that was a great aim for art.  For theatre, and for art in general.

Sheena:  Yeah.

Chelsea:  You were actually one of my inspirations for this project, because you do so much conversing and interviewing with other artists.  And it’s amazing to see how many different kinds of artists you know and are in contact with.

Sheena:  Right.

Chelsea:  So what is behind that drive to converse?  And what have you learned through these conversations?

Sheena:  Um, so, as you mentioned, I know so many different kinds of artists.  By working as a stage manager, I meet sound designers, and actors, and playwrights.  And working as a photographer, I meet dancers and models and… I was just like, “I am connected to a ridiculous amount of talent.”  And one, all I really know is that specific project.  You know, I might photograph a model, and I hear them say, “Oh, and I have this other project coming up.”  And I just wanted to know, like, more of their story beyond the current project we were working on.  And I wanted to know, like, all the… I mean, I myself am a photographer and videographer and all these other things.  I was like, “I’m pretty sure these other artists have all kinds of other interests, too.  And I want to know more of that.”  I also just have a very curious personality, and I like to know how things work.

Chelsea:  Uh-huh.

Sheena:  People’s life philosophies, and why they think the way they do, and so that was part of what drove me to start.  I have an interview series on my blog as well. (click here to read that one time Sheena interviewed me)  I just wanted to know how they thought.  And the third part—and it goes back to theatre and culture and socio-political theatre—I believe that art is transformational, and that it just has the power to really change people’s lives.  And I wanted to see what other artists had to say about that. 

Chelsea:  Mm-hmm.  And you’re also inspirational to me in another way, which is that you are one of the best artists I know at getting compensated for your work.  And I don’t want to say, like, ‘fighting,’ because that sounds combative, but being very aware of what your time is worth.  And not letting people take advantage of your good nature.  So, I want to talk a little bit about how you’ve structured all of your creative art financially.

Sheena:  Yeah.  So, there are different parts to this.  One of the ways that I structure myself financially is that I don’t just pick art because it’s fun and great.  It also has to have a part of it that is practical, because I do have to pay my rent.  Right?  So there’s just, like, the basis of “I need money to live.”  And then also, because I find there is value in art—just like if I’m going to go to Starbucks, I have to pay for coffee because there’s an exchange of things—it’s the same with art.  Even if I didn’t have to pay my rent, there’s still this exchange in goods and services.  So I don’t apologize for wanting money, or abundance, for the work that I produce and services I give.  And then also, I happen to do artistic things that actually pay.  So, like, as a stage manager, at least years ago, stage managers in the hierarchy of pay in a theatre production, they get paid.  And even now that I’m a photographer and videographer, in that industry there are all different roles that one could be.  But a videographer gets paid a good amount of money, because, again, it’s just more labor-intensive than other parts of it.  So there’s that.  The other part is that I have, like… I’ve worked full-time as an artist, and then I go back and forth with also having a part-time or full-time corporate job.  And, you know, for some people that’s hard for them.  Or they feel like they’re not being completely authentic to their art.  Or I don’t know.  I don’t see anything wrong with having multiple sources of income.  With getting paid for a certain corporate project, as well as getting paid to perform, or whatever it may be.  So, I think it’s that, too.  We have to find multiple sources of income.  If you like to write poetry but you’re really not making money on that, maybe you also need to write freelance articles, or a newsletter, or something.

Chelsea: Mm-hmm.

Still with Bernadette Pleasant from a video by Sheena LaShay

Sheena:  And then the last part—it also goes back to understanding the value in yourself and in your art.  And because I understand that value and I make no apologies for it, it gives me more confidence to negotiate on my behalf when I am meeting with clients.  And in that negotiation I’m also educating my clients on my value.  I’m not just, like, taking what people are giving me.  Or feeling like I’m being taken advantage of.  I hardly ever feel like that, because I won’t allow that.  Because I fully understand my value and I will vocalize that.

Chelsea:  Yeah.  And I think that educating your clients—I think that is the thing that makes it a negotiation and not an argument.  Because if everybody understands the value of what’s being exchanged, then, um, the rate of compensation is not like a guessing game.  It becomes very clear.

Sheena:  Exactly.  And then when I have that—when I have someone who makes an inquiry to me, for instance, for videography services, and once we get to discussing the prices and things like that.  If I find that their budget isn’t aligned with my quote, one, I’m not going to fight with them.  But I’m also not going to be like, “Okay, well, maybe I can do it for half.”  Because then I feel like that’s diluting my value. So I may also—maybe there’s a videographer that I know that doesn’t have as much experience, or their prices are just structured differently.  So I recommend them.

Chelsea:  And that goes back to the idea of “abundance,” which is a word that I love.

Sheena:  I love that word.

Chelsea:  The idea that there’s enough, that it’s not wrong to want financial stability, it’s not wrong to want monetary and, sort of like, physical comfort.  And there’s enough of it to go around.  If you don’t have a scarcity mentality, then we can all share the wealth.  Once you get to a certain point in your life, you realize that you don’t have to take every job, and that the karmic benefits of passing on jobs to other people that know and trust come back to you tenfold.

Sheena:  Exactly.  We’re on the same page.

Chelsea:  You and I have a different kind of relationship than I have with a lot of the other artists I know, and we talk about these kinds of things, so I wanted to do it on the podcast.  I want to talk about spirit a little bit, because you’re so fascinating to me in the way that you seem to balance your energies: artist/businesswoman, youth/wisdom, male/female.  All of these energies, you balance so well.  So I don’t want to act like this is something that you can take notes on or really break down, but I just want to talk about it a little bit.

Sheena:  {chuckles} Yeah.  In the past, I always struggled with the fact that I, like, consider myself a “dark artist.”  In that I write about darker and heavier subject matter than like, rainbows and unicorns or whatever.

Chelsea:  {laughing}  Yeah.

Sheena:  And I remember for years it was something that I struggled with, this part of me, and I was like, “I could never be truly successful, because I’m too much of this.”  And, um, I don’t even remember the chapter or the quote, but there was something I’d read in The Artist’s Way, that really just set me free from feeling so bogged down by that part of my personality.  And as the years progressed, it was something I realized at least for myself: I’m not one particular thing.  I’m a whole human being.  And I experience every single emotion, and that’s part of being human.  And sometimes I’m more artistic, and I want to dance, and the world is amazing and creative!  And other times, I am shrewd and I’m going to negotiate and it’s about business, it’s not about rainbows and pretty things.  I don’t even think about, “Am I balancing it?  Am I being too childish today,” or, “Do I need to be more business-minded today?”  I work on being present.  And whatever’s happening in the moment is what’s going to pull something out of me.  And if I’m present, I know, “in this moment it’s about business.”

Chelsea:  Yeah.  And I think that that kind of goes back to, about how you make your art.  You put the pieces of what you do together in this cohesive artistic identity.  But, I’m curious, do you consider any of the things you’re doing right now to be your primary art form?

Sheena:  The primary thing is that, in everything that I do, I want to inspire people to live powerful and authentic lives.  That’s my primary mission in life.  And I express that mission in different ways.  Like, it always goes back to that.  And that’s why I don’t feel like, “Okay, do I need to just focus on pole dancing right now?   Or do I need to just focus on stage managing right now?”  That just differs because of the timing of my life, or what my schedule is, or the pitches I’ve made or people have made them to me.  But no matter what’s going on, or what client has sent an inquiry my way, or what I may be interested in, I go back to: What does this have to do with authenticity, empowerment, inspiration, or creativity.  Or that kind of thing.  That’s my primary art form. 

Photography for Fly Fitness NYC by Sheena LaShay

Chelsea:  That’s so wonderful.  And I think, um, honestly I think that if people don’t know you and they’re listening to this, they might think, “How do you… how does that become a concrete life?”  But you really do.  That is your life.  That is how it’s led.  And I would encourage anybody who is listening to this to go check out Sheena’s blog, and I’m going to put a link to it.  (here’s the link)  I’ll put several.

Sheena:  Thank you.

Chelsea:  It should be easy to find.  Um, so.  What is your biggest artistic goal for the next year, or the next decade?

Sheena:  I want to finish editing a book that I wrote.

Chelsea:  Mm-hmm.

Sheena:  And by ‘finish,’ I guess I would need to start the editing process.

Chelsea:  {laughs}

Sheena:  {laughing}  Because I wrote the first draft of the book, but now I need to go back and make sure, you know, that it’s not just me blabbing.  And that’s a big thing for me this year. And I also, one of my clients—I work with her on many different things, but—one of the bigger projects that I want to do with her this year, is to produce a short film with her company.

Chelsea:  Oh!

Sheena:  So that’s another thing.  And a huge part of my time right now goes toward being a co-president and the editor of The Pole Dancing Blogger’s Association (click here).  And, you know, it’s a blogger’s association and kind of a creative media agency.  And we just have a lot of things we’re working on this year: awareness, building up our accounts, and all that kind of stuff.  It’s become such a huge part of my life!  Like, every day I’m doing something for this group.  So, there are those goals.  And then the last thing is that I myself, I formed an LLC a few years ago: Sheena LaShay, LLC.  And, you know, even though I do a billion different kinds of artistic things, it goes back to that one mission of mine.  And one of the things I want to work on this year is really starting to transition my work from being a freelancer to an actually full-fledged company.  I want an actual legacy, and I want a company that exists 100 years after me.  500 years after me!

Chelsea:  Mm-hmm.

Sheena:  And in order to that, I also have to restructure how I work.  And that restructuring, just figuring that out, is also happening this year for me.

Chelsea:  Part of that, um, that brand, that company, is the CREATE retreat that you’ve been doing for the last several years.  And I went to it last year, and it was amazing.  So I just want to talk a little bit about that.

Sheena:  I go on lots of different retreats and do different workshops, and they have their pros and cons, but I was like, “I want a retreat with creative people, but they’re also my friends.  And I want us to relax and enjoy each other’s company, but I also want us to teach each other.  And to lead each other.”  Because, again, it goes back to, “I know Chelsea is a playwright, but I know she knows a billion other things, too, and I want her to teach me something.”  And I didn’t know the first thing about planning a retreat, uh, I knew nothing.  But, I don’t let that stop me from doing anything.

Chelsea:  {laughs}

Sheena:  I sent an email to my friends and was like,”Hey, I’m thinking of doing this.  Who wants to do it with me?”  And as it evolved, I learned more about event planning, and retreats, and budgeting, and all these different things.  And it’s become a thing.  I love it.  I love it.

Portrait of Sheena by Glen Graham Photography

Chelsea:  Yeah, it was wonderful.  I think it ties back into, you know, your drive to converse with other artists, and to make a cohesive whole out of a lot of different components. It was really great to relax and enjoy each other’s company, like you said, but then to be able to skill-share and learn different things from different people.  And I hadn’t met anyone… I didn’t know any of the other girls except for you, when I got there.

Sheena:  No?

Chelsea:  No, I’m thinking about it now.  I hadn’t met any of them.  And it was just a wonderful—not just a bonding experience, but um, creatively fulfilling as well.  I think sometimes it can be hard to carve out time, not just carve out time in your life, but carve out time in your day, to be creative or to work on your art.  Especially if you take clients and you get paid for art, sometimes it’s harder to work on the things that no one’s paying you to do.  Just to find time to do those things that are just for you.  So to say: We’re going to rent this big house on Long Island, and we’re gonna be there for three days, and this is all you have to do for three days.  And you’re not allowed to, like, be on your phone.  And you’re not allowed to be… there’s no TV-watching.  Which was a bit contentious when we first got there.  {laughing}

Sheena:  {laughing} Yes it was!

Chelsea:  You remember?  Because everyone was like, “Scandal!  We’re gonna miss Scandal!”  But, uh, even the meal were like skill-shares.  Because people cooked things that were, you know like, family recipes, or culturally significant, and we all learned from each others.

Sheena:  I love the meals.

Chelsea:  Yeah, it was great.  So, do you have any upcoming or ongoing projects that you want to talk about and plug?

Sheena:  Well, one, just to always stay up to date on things would be to go to my website, because that’s where I just, I post everything.  (click here for Sheena’s website) Whoever knows what my next upcoming project will be, because of how my life works?  But, you know, along with doing the CREATE retreats, every other month I do a DIY workshop and craft party.  And our next Crafts + Cupcakes Party is going to be in March, and I’m excited for that.

Crafts + Cupcakes event by Sheena LaShay

Chelsea:  Fantastic.

Sheena:  And I also have, in addition to the workshops and retreats, I have this other thing called the Wild Magical Woman.  And those are more in-depth workshops. They’re like two days, eight hours each.  And I have another one coming up called Wild Magical Woman: In the Spirit of Love. And I’m excited.  We’re still putting together the curriculum for that, but I’m excited for it.  And then, you know, I’ll mention again that I work with this group called the Pole Dancing Blogger’s Association, and whether someone’s a pole dancer or not, our website (click here) is all about providing business information, and social media and marketing tips, or photography tips, whether you’re a dancer or an artist or an everyday person.  So we are also always looking for people to be featured on that, or to be guest writers, or anything involved with it, whether they’re in the pole dance community or not.  So if anyone’s interested in that, they should also reach out to us.

Chelsea:  Yeah, again, I would direct you to SheenaLaShay.com (click here).  And you can check out Sheena’s portfolio, and her blog, which is amazing, and all of the different things she has coming up.  If you’re in the New York area, the Wild Magical Woman workshops and the Crafts + Cupcakes workshops are fantastic, fantastic events.  Sheena, I have so enjoyed talking to you today, as I always do, it’s always wonderful to spend any time with you.  And I just want to thank you for making conversation.

Sheena:  Thank you!  For just even inviting me and asking me these questions.  I love to talk about art, and it’s great to talk about it with like-minded individuals, but, people who also have a different perspective than me.  And that’s why I value our conversations so much.  It’s like I’m speaking with a kindred spirit, but also someone who will critique and teach me as well, and I appreciate that.

Chelsea:  Aw, thank you.  Thank you for saying that.

Sheena:  You’re welcome.  Aw, I have so much love for you!

Chelsea:  Aww!  It’s a mutual admiration society. It’s kind of, it’s adorable, but also I think, like maybe a little saccharine for people outside the circle. {laughs}

Sheena:  {laughing} Yes.

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(click on the media player above left to listen to or download the full audio of this interview)

Welcome, and thanks for joining me again for Making Conversation, where every week I interview an artist in his or her 30s, who is doing work I find important, and has something illuminating to say about what it means to do what we do as we are now. My name is Chelsea Marcantel, and my guest this week is Margot Bordelon.

Her newest project, AT THE RICH RELATIVES, opens February 10th at Target Margin Theatre.

Margot is a freelance director based in New York City.  She recently graduated from the Yale School of Drama with her MFA in theater directing. Favorite YSD productions include: Sagittarius Ponderosa by MJ Kaufman, Cloud Nine by Caryl Churchill, This. by Mary Laws; The Secret in the Wings by Mary Zimmerman; and A Duck On A Bike by Amelia Roper.  Before moving east, Margot spent six years in Chicago working as a director, writer and performer. She is a founding member of Theatre Seven of Chicago, where she co-conceived and directed Yes, This Really Happened to Me; Lies & Liars; and We Live Here.  Margot spent four seasons working at Lookingglass Theatre, where she served as Literary Manager and Company Dramaturg.

www.MargotBordeon.com; headshot by James Banasiak

In Chicago she also worked for such companies as Collaboraction, Timeline, Pavement Group, Hell in a Handbag, and Steppenwolf Theatre, where she assistant directed for both Tina Landau and Austin Pendleton. Margot originally hails from the Pacific Northwest.

And Margot reminds me, for several reasons, of Neko Case.  When I told her that, she said it was the best compliment she’d ever received.

CHELSEA:  So, Margot, how are you today?

MARGOT:  I’m good!  How are you?

CHELSEA:  I’m doing okay!  Um, it’s not bone-chilling cold here for the first time in a couple of weeks.

MARGOT:  Same here, same here.  It’s been 50˚.  It’s been nice today.

CHELSEA:  Excellent.  So, when I asked you, when we were preparing for this conversation, “What labels do you use to describe yourself as an artist?” You answered “dramaturge” and also “new play director,” which I find so interestingly specific.  Why “new play director”?

MARGOT:  Um, I think that I’m finding here, more so than in Chicago, that when I’ve been telling people that I’m a theatre director, especially when they’re not theatre people, they ask me what kind of plays I direct.  And I think what they’re really asking me is if I direct musicals, or Shakespeare plays, or classical plays.

CHELSEA:  Uh-huh.

MARGOT:  None of which are necessarily my passion, but I do have a passion for creating new work.  Even though new work takes a number of different forms.  So really, in a sense, I just started labeling myself as a “new play director” because I feel like that is easy for people to understand.  Especially non-theatre people; it really is a non-theatre-person question to ask, I think.

CHELSEA:  Right.  Well, as a playwright, if someone were to say, “Oh, I’m a new play director,” I would immediately be like, “Let’s go have a lot of beers.  Come with me.  Come with me right now.”  That would be so exciting to me.

MARGOT:  Oh good!  Okay.  Well good.

CHELSEA:  Coming from a playwright’s perspective, I would love to hear that from more people, I think.  Um, how do you describe your artistic style, besides just the label “new play director”?  Has it evolved in your 30s?

Cloud Nine by Caryl Churchill; photo credit: T. Charles Erickson

MARGOT:  Yeah, I think it has.  I would say that I have always had a passion for creating highly physical ensemble theatre; I think that’s always been the case, since I was in undergrad to now, um, many years later.  I think what’s really changed about my work is the content that I’m interested in.  So, I think that when I was in my early twenties, I had an insatiable passion for big, gay camp.  I mean, I still do.  I joke that it’s my dream to move to San Francisco and just direct drag shows at Tranny Shack, which is not completely a joke.  I would actually love to do that.  But I think, especially, that was my primary focus in my early 20s.  I loved to do anything that was really over-the-top stylistically, and wildly homosexual, and hilarious.  And I think often the content that fell into that category would maybe be labeled as “fluff.”  Which I also love.  I think, you know, theatre serves different purposes, and entertainment and fluff is very important.  But then, once I moved to Chicago, and I got really involved with this company called 2nd Story—which is a group of actor/performer/writers and also writers who perform—I became really interested in investigating this line between fact and fiction.  And this group of writers were all writing autobiographical personal narratives, and I just started getting really interested in what it would mean to adapt some of that work for the stage, and have actors play these writers who were talking in first person.  But yes—very interested in the line between fact and fiction.  Um, and a lot of the stories also that I was working on with my theatre company that were adapted from 2nd Story stories, just had to do with being a young person, a 20-something, living life in Chicago.  That’s what I was doing at the time, and I was interested in investigating that further.  And then I would say during grad school, my focus has shifted more specifically to: I really want to work on plays that challenge sexual and gender norms.  Which I guess, a little bit, the big gay camp was doing that, in a way.  But I think I have an interest now in doing that more aggressively.  And I think that we just need more of those narratives in our culture right now.  And I think that they are starting to emerge.  And I feel really strongly that I just want to start making work, or continue to make work, that’s unapologetically political, that’s radically feminist.  I still want my work to be accessible, but I want to display my political views in the work that I’m creating.

CHELSEA:  That’s something that I’m hearing more and more from people recently, as we’re growing a little bit older, and growing into our careers… That you feel like you needed to be working all of the time, and then realizing as you get older, that there’s only so much time in a day, there’s only so much time in a year.  And do you—as you’re finding out more about who you are as a person—do you want to be spending time doing things that you don’t agree with or don’t feel passionately about?  The more self-aware of us, I guess, are coming into this age where what we do is as is important as how we do it.  In terms of projects we accept.

MARGOT:  Mm-hmm.

CHELSEA: So, we touched on this briefly just now.  You lived and worked in Chicago, which is where we met, and then you are in New York now.  And in between you were at the Yale School of Drama for your MFA in Directing.  Why did you choose those cities in the order that you chose them?  And how was your work affected in each of those places?

MARGOT:  Okay, yeah.  So, I grew up in the Pacific Northwest.  I grew up in a city called Everett, which is about 25 miles north of Seattle.  And that’s where I went to undergrad, at a wonderful college called Cornish College of the Arts, where I studied acting.  I got my degree in theatre with an emphasis in original work, back in the day when I was an actor.  And I stayed there for a couple of years after I graduated, but I knew that I wanted to move to a bigger city.  And I had gone on this trip back-to-back to New York, and then to Chicago.  And I’d been to New York before, and I loved New York.  And it was my first time to Chicago, and I went in December.

CHELSEA: Oh gosh!

We Live Here by Various Writers; photo credit: Amanda Clifford

MARGOT:  I know!  And I still fell in love with it.  I saw amazing work when I was there: I saw a show at Steppenwolf, I saw a show at Lookingglass, I saw a show at Second City.  And I just thought, like, “Wow.  What an incredible city that has such a range of work that is all so high-quality.  So I applied to an apprenticeship at Steppenwolf, and then eight months later I moved there to do it.  I got an apprenticeship there, working in the Artistic Department.  And I thought, you know, “This will be a good foot in the door,” and it really was.  I still consider Steppenwolf my first Chicago artistic home.  I have so many affectionate feelings toward that company.  And I met a ton of my future collaborators working in that apprenticeship.  And I think what I enjoyed most about Chicago, and what I still love most about Chicago, is that it really felt like an embodiment, for me, of all the ideals that I had learned at Cornish.  All of these values around, um, ensemble, and you know, you’re more powerful as a group, and creating work with people with whom you share an aesthetic.  And I just think that that mentality is epitomized in Chicago theatre.

CHELSEA:  Yeah, that’s the mythos of Chicago theatre.  I think it was Martha Plimpton—again, Steppenwolf—who said something like, “People go to New York to be stars, and they go to Chicago to start a company.”  Or something.

MARGOT:  Totally!  Yeah.

CHELSEA:  I’m paraphrasing, but something like that.

MARGOT:  I think that’s so true, and I think what I’ve found in New York—and, granted, I haven’t been here that long, so I still feel like I’m getting my New York sea legs, and trying to figure out how to navigate this city—but, it does feel like in New York a little bit, everybody’s out for themselves.  Whereas, I never had that feeling in Chicago.  Even though there were a number of different companies, I felt like even those companies really supported one another.

CHELSEA:  Yeah.

MARGOT:  Now I’ve been here, I’ve been on the East Coast for about three and half years, but Chicago definitely still feels like my home.  What has your experience been, being away from it?

CHELSEA:  I still, um, yeah, it still definitely feels like my artistic home, and like a a hometown to me, because there are just so many people there that I miss so much, even people outside the theatre world.  And I actually got what feels to me to be one of the greatest compliments I’ve ever gotten: I went to see The Hypocrites’ Pirates of Penzance at Actors Theatre of Louisville.  So I went and saw it, because we’re a few hours’ driving from Louisville, and I met someone there that was with the production that I hadn’t know before.  A little bit younger than me.  And he said something like, “Oh, I know who you are!  I’ve seen a couple of your short plays.”  And I said, “Oh, great!”   You know, “Thank you.”  And he was like, “I didn’t realize you didn’t live in Chicago.  I thought you lived in Chicago.”  And I thought to myself, “That’s—Let’s just keep that illusion alive.”

MARGOT:  Yeah.

This. by Mary Laws; photo credit: Christopher Ash

CHELSEA:  “Let’s just not let anybody know I moved.  And keep telling new people that I still live there.”  I don’t know why for me that was like a badge of honor.  That people still think I live in Chicago, when I moved two years ago.

MARGOT:  Yeah.  That you’re still a name floating about in the theatre scene there.  And that ‘s great. {pause} So then I ended up leaving Chicago because I applied to grad school, and, yeah, I applied to grad school.  I got into Yale, which, I mean, felt like a dream come true.  And then, yeah, so in the summer of 2010, I moved to New Haven, Connecticut to start school.  And I just graduated last May.

CHELSEA:  So, in Chicago it was really ensemble-based, and then what was it like in New Haven?

MARGOT:  You know, part of the reason that I wanted to go back to grad school was the opportunity to revisit all of these classics that I’d studied in undergrad, but had been so far removed from, at least in my own work since I had graduated.  I was out of school for eight years.  So, I got to go back and study Shakespeare, and Chekhov, and the Greeks.  I got to study some Mozart; I’d never done any opera in undergrad.  And I got to go deeper into artists that I really admired but hadn’t really worked on, like Brecht, like Caryl Churchill.  You know, it was wonderful.  I feel like it was such a gift to be able to go to that program and focus on this thing I’m passionate about for three years.  And I think I’m much more well-rounded, I’m much more confident in my directing than I was before I went in three years ago, and I’ve just been exposed to a wider variety of work.

CHELSEA:  Awesome.

MARGOT:  And now I’ve moved to New York!  And as I was saying earlier, I’ve just always wanted to live in New York, and that’s almost more of a motivating factor for me than, you know, a really strong desire to create work here.  I don’t necessarily feel like I have to be in New York to create theatre, I just want to spend a couple of years of my life living here and having that experience.

CHELSEA:  I feel pretty much exactly the same way, actually.  I sort of feel like New York is ‘the one that got away’ sometimes.  Because I chose Chicago, instead, you know, when I graduated.

MARGOT:  Yeah.

CHELSEA:  I don’t know.  Maybe, still.  You know, I’m not dead yet.  There’s lots of years left.

MARGOT:  I think it’s good.  I’m giving myself two years.  And depending on where I’m at in two years, absolutely moving back to Chicago feels like a total happy option for me.  But I do want to spend a couple of years living here and say that I did.

CHELSEA:  Yeah!  So, now that you have an MFA in Directing, and you have this well-rounded education and all this experience with new work, um, what percentage of the time do you get paid for your work?  And how do you feel about that?  This is something that I struggle with a lot, because sometimes I think to myself, “You know, if I sat down and did the math and figured out how much per hour I actually get paid when I get paid… I would just throw myself out the window.”

MARGOT:  Yeah.  Absolutely.  I was thinking about that for the show I’m working on now.  I think it would come out to fifty cents an hour.  {laughs}  You know?

CHELSEA:  {laughing} Yes!

Cloud Nine by Caryl Churchill; photo credit: T. Charles Erickson

MARGOT:   Yes.  I would say, that I get paid for everything that I do now, but it is very rarely a living wage.  So there’s never a time that I don’t have to supplement that in some way.  And I do that by taking on many other types of jobs.  I teach and tutor and I temp—things that begin with Ts.  Babysitting.  I was in Seattle directing something at Cornish, and that was actually a pretty nice fee, but even then it still wasn’t quite enough.  And I was doing some housekeeping at a bed and breakfast, which I actually kind of enjoyed.  It was kind of nice to have a job that was sort of mindless physical labor.

CHELSEA:  Uh-huh.

MARGOT:  So yeah.  I definitely thought that by the time I was thirty-three, which is how old I am now, that I was going to be making my living doing theatre.  Of course when I thought that, when I was, I’d say, 18-22, I don’t think that I had a clear sense of how difficult it is to make your living doing this profession.

CHELSEA:  Right.

MARGOT:  So, I don’t know.  It is depressing, to be totally candid.  But I’m also feeling artistically fulfilled at the moment in the projects that I’m working on, so that keeps me optimistic and moving forward.

CHELSEA:  I know that I feel that tension as well—the tension between expectation and reality, and that’s one of the reasons that I wanted to start conducting these interviews.  Because I kind of looked at my life and thought, “Oh, I’m thirty years old this year, and I’m not exactly… not anywhere near where I thought I would be.”  And everyone tells you that it’s going to be hard, but the only person you know really, is you.  And you think, “Well, I’m a hard worker and I don’t have crazy expectations, and it’ll be different for me because I’m me.”  And you can’t know anything else.  So I think it’s kind of… it’s nice to hear that people I admire have the same tension and have the same sort of shortfall when they look at their careers.  Because I think we’re all still headed up, you know.  It’s definitely a marathon and people drop out every day, but as long as you’re still feeling fulfilled, and still feeling like, “this is where I should be,” then the monetary compensation… doesn’t have to be exactly what you’d hoped.  If that makes sense.

MARGOT:  Yeah, oh yeah.  It totally makes sense.  And you know, I just don’t have… I’m just not driven by material possessions.  And I think that that is helpful {laughs} for me in this particular field, because I do think that the majority of us pursuing a career in theatre have to take a kind of vow of poverty.  And we hope that we don’t really have to hold on to that vow for our entire lives.  But at least for a while.  But I come from very blue-collar people, and I think some ways I don’t have this image of my life with a lot of money.  I’ve never had that, so I almost like don’t know what I’m missing. I mean, do know what I’m missing.  I live in New York City.  I’m surrounded by materialism.  But, I also don’t believe that that’s, you know, the key to happiness.  I don’t think it’s making money.  You know, I want to be able to buy an apartment some day.  I’d like to be able to be married someday.  And all those things cost money.  I don’t necessarily need to have a kid, and I think if I did want to have children, then I’d feel a lot more pressure right now at thirty-three.  You know?

CHELSEA:  Mm-hmm.  Yeah, I hear kids are real expensive.

MARGOT:  Yeah.  Real expensive.  Exactly.  Um, I just try and keep forging ahead, and setting really specific goals for myself.  And just being in New York now, for me it’s like, “Okay, I’m trying to see as much work as possible, I’m trying to meet as many people as I can, especially playwrights, and read playwrights’ plays.”  I don’t know, I guess if I’m really honest with myself, I’m holding out for my big break.  You know?  The ‘big break’ that people get? 

CHELSEA:  Yeah.

This. by Mary Laws; photo credit: Christopher Ash

MARGOT:  And what do they say about theatre?  “You can’t make a living, but you can make a killing”?

CHELSEA:  Yep.  Stephen Schwartz.

MARGOT:  Yeah.  So brilliant.  So I’m waiting for my day when I make a killing.  I would sell out in an instant.

CHELSEA:  Exactly, right?  I would totally sell out!  I mean, I wouldn’t do—I would do something that was super fluffy and meaningless.  I wouldn’t do something that was detrimental to society or, you know, women or anything like that, but, oh yeah.

MARGOT:  I would never do anything that, you know, supported the Republican party or was against any of my political beliefs, but sure.  I mean, I think for directors its difficult because… It’s so interesting.  So many of my peers who are writers and actors, they have, I think, an easier crossover into film and television.  But when you train as a director in theatre, you’re a theatre director.  I don’t feel like I have any of the skills to direct a television show.

CHELSEA:  Yeah, I don’t feel like I have any of the skills to write them.  I mean, I look at a screenplay and it’s like, in a foreign language to me.

MARGOT:  Oh really?  I suppose that’s encouraging to me, then.  Because I feel like “Oh, why couldn’t I have just stayed an actor or a writer, and maybe the crossover into making money would be easier.”  But maybe not.

CHELSEA:  I mean, I would love to take a screenwriting class one day, or writing for television, I mean, it seems to me to be a fun thing to do.  I’m not opposed to it and I definitely don’t think I’m above it in any way.  But I just don’t feel like I know how to do it in any way that’s marketable.

MARGOT:  Right.

CHELSEA:  Where do you hope to be with your art in five or ten years, or even further down the line?

MARGOT:  Well, I think my big fantasy is having my own company that is composed of writers and actors and designers, creating original work that would tour.  I’d love to be creating shows that tour internationally.  I think it’d be a great way to see more of the world.  And I think what I’m working on very specifically right now is just establishing strong relationships with playwrights whose work I really really admire.  I think being a young director, in this country specifically, that is the way to start your career.  You hook up with writers who you really like, and then you continue to work together and you make a kind of regional circuit.  So yeah, I mean I hope that I’m at a place where I’m able to pick and choose my work.  And that work is paying me a living wage!  That’s really my goal.  Five years, if that could be my life, I would be so pleased.

CHELSEA:  Mm-hmm.  I feel you.  I have many of the same dreams.  Especially because… Well, I think this is something that… When I’ve actually spoken to older writers and makers of theatre and told them that this is the system now, as I perceive it: that playwrights and directors who have a similar aesthetic and admire each other kind of hook up and then sometimes come together on a project.  I sent some plays to an artistic director the other day, and I said, “This one’s with this director, and this one’s with this director, we’ve already been working on them.”  In the absence of anyone to produce them, you know, we’ve just been workshopping them and going back and forth because that’s how it gets started.  And it seems to be surprising sometimes because it’s sort of a new system, but for me at least it helps to get the ball rolling on stuff.  So I don’t feel like I’m just working on things all alone and then emailing them out into the void.

MARGOT:  Right.  Yeah, it’s interesting, especially coming out of grad school, I feel like I’ve got maybe five plays that I’m working on with different playwrights right now.  And we’ll have a reading and then, you know, wait for the next thing that hopefully we get into so we can keep working on it.  Unless I had my own company, and then I would be self-producing.  Which, you know, is the dream once I’m established enough.

CHELSEA:  You do have quite a few things in the works right now, from looking at your website (here is the link to MargotBordelon.com).  Tell me about At the Rich Relatives, which is coming up at Target Margin Theatre this month?

A Duck on a Bike by by Amelia Roper; photo credit: Matt Otto

MARGOT:  Yes.  Okay, great.  That piece is a new experimental operetta and it’s co-adapted from a short story by the author Celia Dropkin, who was a turn-of-the-century Russion feminist socialist.  Mallery Avidon, who’s a playwright friend of mine—we went to Cornish together, way back in the day—she adapted it with a composer named Jeff Bryant, who just graduated from CalArts, I believe in their experimental music program.  So, this piece is being produced by Target Margin, as you said, it’s a part of their Beyond the Pale Festival, which is what it’s called.  And what they do each year is produce a series of lab pieces—so we have like five performances, I believe—and they explore different genre.  And this year’s focus is Yiddish literature.

CHELSEA:  Oh cool.

MARGOT:  So it’s a 45-minute piece, the music is incredibly beautiful and interesting.  I think Jeff’s such a talented composer.  The cast is really lovely and wonderful.  We just started staging it.  I have a rehearsal in about an hour, and we’re going to keep staging it.  And it’s just been really fun, and a total delight, and the story it’s adapted from is a beautiful story, and yeah.  I’m excited about it and I’ve never directed an operetta before.  It’s fun.  It’s challenging in all the great possible ways.

CHELSEA:  And what’s on the docket beyond that?

MARGOT:  I’m working on a piece about family legends with Brian Golden, who is the artistic director of Theatre Seven of Chicago.  He was a close collaborator of mine when I lived in Chicago.  It’s an interview piece.  And we’re right in the midst of conducting a number of interviews with a wide variety of people, about stories they were told about their families growing up.  Part of what our interest is, is why particular stories are told in our families, how they evolve, and then how they kind of shape our conceptions of our families, of our communities, of our entire nation.  And, so yeah.  That’s what we’re working on.  We’re in the very beginning stages of that, just interviewing people now and collecting material.  That’s our first step.

CHELSEA:  What’s your biggest artistic goal for the next year, both exterior and then interior, like, how do you want to feel?

MARGOT:  Really, my biggest goal is to build another show from scratch.  The most satisfying artistic experiences I have are when I’m all-in, creating a labor of love.  So I’m hoping that this family legends piece pans out in some way.  I’m really interested in documentary and interview theatre right now.  I want to keep exploring that genre.  So I’m hoping that we in some way get a full production.  That or a workshop production of that.  That’s definitely my goal for the next year: to have created an original piece.  And, oh interior goals?  I just want to feel happy and satisfied with where I’m at in my career and be able to really embrace and love New York.  I feel like I got a kind of beating my first couple of months here; it was a pretty rough first couple of months.  And I want to, yeah, hit my stride in New York.  And you know, there are things that I’m always working on just in general as a person.  I want to find a really good balance between my work life and my personal life.  I want to be a good friend.  And I also want to stay being a really hard worker.

CHELSEA:  This is totally off-topic, but I’ve just always wondered, and just remembered that I have always wondered: your last name, Bordelon, is like kind of common in Louisiana, which is where I’m from.

MARGOT:  Yeah!

CHELSEA:  Is your family from Louisiana?

MARGOT:  Yeah!  My whole dad’s side is from Louisiana.

CHELSEA:  Oh, that makes so much sense to me now.  Because when you said you’re from the Pacific Northwest, I thought, “That’s so odd.”

MARGOT:  Yeah, my grandparents lived in Louisiana until 2002, when my grandfather died, and then my grandmother moved to Virginia Beach to live with my aunt.  But yeah, I have a ton of family down in Louisiana.

CHELSEA:  Mystery solved!  I’m glad that that’s finally cleared up.  For me.

MARGOT:  Yeah.  My dad carries hot sauce around in his bag.

CHELSEA: Oh, a man after my own heart.

MARGOT:  Yeah?

CHELSEA:  Well, thank you so much for taking the time to talk to me today.  And good luck with your rehearsal in less than an hour, and your show at Target Margin Theatre.

MARGOT:  Thank you.

CHELSEA:  And thanks for making conversation.

MARGOT:  Absolutely.  Thank you, Chelsea.

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And thank you for joining me again for Making Conversation, where every week I interview an artist in his or her 30s, who is doing work I find important, and has something illuminating to say about what it means to do what we do as we are now. 

 (click on the media player above left to listen to or download the full audio of this interview)

 A native of Southern Illinois, Erin holds a degree in Theatre from the University of Evansville with Associated Studies in Art & Music.  She currently resides in Nashville, TN where she has worked with various local theatre companies, and is a founding member and the Artistic Director of MAS Nashville (www.masnashville.com) – a production company focused on the development & realization of theatrical and musical ideas into performances.  Erin was the recipient of the 2011 Tennessee Arts Commission Individual Artist Fellowship Grant in Theatre.  Recently, Erin spent 2.5 years as a Resident Acting Company member at the historic Barter Theatre in Abingdon, VA.  In addition to her Barter and other regional theatre credits, she was in the cast of the 1st National Tour of Ring of Fire: The Music of Johnny Cash, and has also toured with CMA Award Winner & Grammy nominee Martina McBride.    Erin is currently playing the role of Emilia in The Nashville Shakespeare Festival’s production of Othello, starring Eddie George, and is rehearsing MAS Nashville’s latest offering: MAS AMOR POR FAVOR.

Erin was also my partner in the 2012 Country Roads Cookoff, and I’m proud to report that we won both the Audience Choice and Team Spirit awards.

CHELSEA:  How are you this morning?

ERIN: I’m good!  Rested.

CHELSEA:  You’re rested?  Awesome!

ERIN:  Great.  If you can make me not awkward, that would be awesome.  That’s been a dream of mine for a long time.  {laughs}

Erin Parker

CHELSEA:  {laughing}  I’ll do my very best.  So, we have known each other since the end of 2011, but just for the benefit of the folks at home, what labels do you use to describe yourself as an artist?

ERIN:  I’m an actor and a singer, also a writer and a storyteller.

CHELSEA:  Mover, shaker, heartbreaker?

ERIN:  Well, those too, of course.

CHELSEA:   Little bit of everything.

ERIN: Uh-huh!  {laughs}

CHELSEA:  So you’re in Nashville right now.  And you’ve lived in Nashville and made art there on and off for about a decade, with jaunts during that time to New York and Abingdon, which is where I live.  Not a lot of folks think about Nashville when they think theatre.  So let’s talk about why you’re living and making art where you are.

ERIN:  I first moved to Nashville in 2001.  And I didn’t know anyone, and I had never really spent much time here, other than one trip.  And I moved here because I knew there was music here, and I like music.  And a lot of people had told me that I would like it.  So that’s pretty much why I moved here.  And I was kind of at a place where I didn’t know what to do.  At that time I didn’t even know that I wanted to still do theatre.  I had majored in theatre in college, but I was kinda over it at the time, and I just thought, “Nashville sounds good.”  And I eventually found my way into the theatre world in Nashville.  Everybody knows Nashville as Music City, but there’s actually quite a bit of really great theatre going on.  I like it here.  It’s—it’s a small enough city that a country girl like myself can manage.  Cost of living is… doable.  I’m a person who kinda freaks out when my basic needs aren’t met.

CHELSEA:  Uh-huh.

ERIN:  And I get a lot of comfort from just knowing I can handle survival, um, which is something I know that… When I’ve lived in larger places, sometimes I can get a little overwhelmed with just, you know, feeding myself.

CHELSEA:  Right.

ERIN:  So when you can feed yourself AND make really great art, it’s kind of a win/win situation for me.

CHELSEA:  How does it compare to—besides just the cost of living—how does the scene compare to other places that you’ve lived and worked.

ERIN:  There’s not the same quantity of theatre professionals here as there are in a city like New York, or Chicago, or even LA, but, your ratio’s still probably about the same.  You’ve got Equity theatres, you’ve got non-Equity theatres.  A lot of the same stuff is here on a much smaller scale.  I don’t think that’s why a lot of people move here, but if you live here, there’s definitely a place to do that.

CHELSEA:  Is there some overlap between the two communities?  The music and the theatre communities?

Erin as Starlett O’Hara in I’ll Never Be Hungry Again (photo credit: Barter Theatre)

ERIN:  A lot—there’s a lot of overlap.  I know some actors who are also aspiring artists musically.  It’s funny—everybody sings here.  I overlap a lot with music and theatre.  I love music and I love theatre (I don’t love all musical theatre), but I like to find a way to marry the two.

CHELSEA:  You’ve toured with music-based shows before, like Ring of Fire.

ERIN:  Yeah, actually, when I moved to New York, the nice jobs that I immediately got were: Johnny Cash’s Ring of Fire, Patsy Cline, um, a John Denver show.  And I thought it was hilarious that I had to go to New York to get cast in Nashville-type shows.  I’m still navigating that and trying to find my view of that, and kind of where I fit into it. And.  Yeah.

CHELSEA:  You said this great thing when we were preparing for this interview, about how in your 20s you thought that there were rules that every artist lived by that you didn’t have a copy of, and you were so concerned with doing things right.  I think that’s a really common feeling.  These rules: tell me about them.

ERIN:  I was thinking about this.  I think that it stemmed, maybe, from growing up in a kind of rural community and not being connected to any sort of artistic or theatre world.  There wasn’t a lot going on there, artistically. So I kind of thought, like, artists were these other people.  And I wanted to be one of them, but I didn’t really know how, so I was always looking for somebody to tell me how.  Or show me how.  Or give me permission to be this person that I wanted to be and do these things.  And that continued, I think, through college because—I mean, I’ve always been kind of an over-achiever, perfectionist type.

CHELSEA:  We have that in common.

ERIN:  Yes.  {laughs}  So if I do something, I want to do it right and I want them to say, “Yes, that girl knows what she’s doing!  She’s doing it right.”  And that sort of carried over into my artistic life for quite a long time.  I think when you’re concerned with doing something right, you don’t take risks.  Because you’re waiting for someone to tell you how you are allowed to take risks.  I also kind of convinced myself that it was all about, like, what’s going on in your internal life, and I let that be all that was happening.  So not a lot was happening externally.  And a lot of that I know now, in hindsight, was because I was afraid of, “Well, what if I do something and it looks like I’m trying to do something.”

CHELSEA:  Uh-huh.

ERIN:  And I’ll be doing it wrong, and somebody’s gonna judge me, so I’ll just quietly do it right in my head and know that I know.  {laughs}

CHELSEA:  {laughing}  There’s a lot of layers of this.

ERIN:  And I think when I moved to Nashville, I was kinda done with theatre.  I worked in a bridal salon when I first moved here, which is hilarious if you know me.  I ended up just kind of auditioning for a show on a whim, and got the show, and just kind of got introduced into the Nashville theatre community.  And then through that I found some other jobs, and was performing more.  Gradually, I mean, this sort of happened gradually.  I just felt like people kept trusting me with larger and larger things.  Which allowed me to let myself grow.  You know, these people don’t know that in my head I was afraid to do things, so maybe I’ll just pretend I’m not.  And I think through that, I started just… not being as afraid.  I’m a much better artist now, in my thirties, than in my twenties.  And it’s not that I’m a different person or anything, it’s just that I’ve gotten a lot of… bullshit, for lack of a better term, out of my head.  I’ve also gained a lot of tools that help me actually do the work.  It’s not as nebulous a thing as it was for me in my twenties.

CHELSEA:  You and I have discussed privately the “to-grad-school or not to-grad-school” question, so let’s chat about that now.  What do you think the pros and cons of going back to grad school would be for you, as a person who has already had a professional career, and—if I may—in the words of Mary Lucy Bivins, is “on the dark side” of your thirties.

ERIN: {laughs} I am a person who loves learning.  I love the academic side of theatre, and I love analyzing texts, and I love talking, I mean, I love table work, I love talking about storytelling, I love… I just love every bit of it.  We took the time to do that in a lot of the stuff that I did at Barter, and there are a lot of really smart people there, who are really interested in making great art and talking about it.  And talking about what we can all do to make ourselves better artists.   I knew leaving that, that I would really miss it, and I thought, “Well, maybe grad school.”  But I also—one of the questions on a lot of grad school applications is: “Why do you want to go to school?  Now?  At this point in your career?  Why don’t you want to just work?”  And I think it’s a very different answer to that question when you’re fresh out of college and twenty-two or twenty-three, than when you’re on the dark side of thirty.  And the more I thought about it, the more I thought, “Oh, I don’t have a good enough answer.  For myself.”  And I am working right now, I work quite steadily, and the thought of taking two or three years out of where I am right now—when I come out, I might be a totally different type.  And I feel like the learning that I want to do is still going to be there, maybe in five or ten years, and if I still want to go back, at my age it’s not going to make much of a difference, either now or later.  {laughs}  So I think I chose to stay working while I’m working.  I mean, if I’m getting the same jobs as people with MFAs are getting in the marketplace right now, it’s not that that MFA is going to help me get a job, necessarily.  I mean, I’m sure I could learn a lot.

CHELSEA:  Recently, you had surgery on your vocal cords.  The day after Jon Hamm had the very same surgery with the very same doctor.  What was the point… what had change for you in the way you worked that you realized, like, something is not right here?

Note: Erin wants me to point out that she’s not completely sure that Jon Hamm had the exact same surgery she did, but the media reported it was the removal of a polyp on his vocal cord, which sounds the same to me.  Also, it was ABSOLUTELY the same doctor, and I think the fact that Erin and John Hamm did not meet is a missed opportunity for both parties.

Erin as Madame Thénardier in Les Mis (photo credit: Barter Theatre)

ERIN:  Well, I think that fortunately and unfortunately for me, I would often get hired—especially for county and pop musicals—because my voice doesn’t sound overly-trained, because it isn’t.  And it isn’t your average musical theatre sound.  And I think a lot of people get attention for their voices, including a lot of pop singers out there, because they have a particular sound.  And sometimes you don’t realize that that particular sound is something that might either be harming your vocal folds, or that this might be something that’s not sustainable on a musical theatre schedule, until it’s way late in the game.  I first started having vocal troubles that I was aware of when I was on the national tour of Ring of Fire in 2008.  I was belting my face off eight shows a week, not getting enough rest, and I didn’t realize that what I was doing wasn’t going to be sustainable for me.  And by the time I figured out I was having some trouble, I was knee-deep in the tour.  So I went on vocal rest, and would save my voice just for the show, you know, and pretend that I was Céline Dion. {laughs}.

CHELSEA:  {laughing}  Uh-huh!

ERIN:  And I’d write notes to my cast mates, and—I mean, that happens a lot, when people who don’t have vocal issues (like Céline Dion), rest their voice.  These are very tiny muscles, and when your career depends on them, you have to take extra special care of them.  So, I took extra special care of my voice during the rest of that tour, and when I finished I went to the doctor, and I found out that I had vocal nodules.

CHELSEA: {laughing} Whaaaa!

ERIN:  {laughing} Oh my god!  For anybody out there who doesn’t know, vocal nodules are basically bumps of scar tissue, or calluses, on the vocal cords where they beat against each other.  They beat themselves to death.  And I’ve been seeing voice specialists, and doctors, and speech pathologists on and off every since I started having that trouble.  And I found that, you know, just like with any medical issue, different doctors, different specialists have different opinions on how to treat it.  And I’ve pretty much tried everything that was out there.  Because I lot of people have them and work around them, and it doesn’t completely, you know, throw their careers off.

CHELSEA: Uh-huh.

ERIN:  But for me it kind of became a roller coaster.  I would work, and then I would rest, then I would work, then I would rest.  And I was able to kind of manage it like that for several years.  So when I was working at Barter Theatre… the workload there is unlike any place I’ve ever worked, and probably will ever work again.

CHELSEA:  Yeah.

ERIN:  It’s an eight-show-a-week job, plus as many rehearsals as Equity will allow.  And from an artist point of view, it’s glorious.  I mean, to have that much work, to have much opportunity to grow, to have that variety of characters, it’s really, really cool.  But it’s also really, really exhausting when you’re singing an alto part in one musical, and a soprano part in another musical, and rehearsing a play in which you yell a lot.  You’re shifting gears all the time.  And that’s a difficult job for people with cords of steel.  So, as a person that had vocal issues, I finally got to a point where the stress that I was feeling from that struggle was kinda more than I could handle.  So I went to the powers that be and explained what was going on, and they were like, “Go.  Fix it.  Stop wasting time, you’re dancing on broken legs.”  Which was true.  But at the time, you know, with the perfectionism, I was like, “No, I can do it.  I don’t want to admit that I’m broken, I don’t want to admit that I need help.  I want to continue to do this thing that I love.”  And nothing’s worth that.  Your health isn’t worth that, and your longevity isn’t worth it, and as much as it sucked to lose my job, it spurred me to make the decisions that I needed to make.  So I went to yet another doctor, after leaving my job at Barter, and he told me that considering where I was and what I’d already tried, and the fact that I had lost my job and my world had pretty much been turned upside down, that I was a great candidate for surgery.  And I really wanted to believe him, so I did.  And at that point I agreed, considering what I’d been navigating for the past five or six years, I didn’t think it was something that was going to just go away with a little more vocal rest, or with a little more therapy.  Because at that point, I had pushed so hard and so long, because I didn’t want to admit there was a problem.  Kids!  Don’t do this!  Get help right away!  {laughs}  Yeah, I was missing a good third of my range, and I knew that, until those nodules were gone, I wasn’t going to be able to do my job.  So for me it was a situation of… The risk factor in my head wasn’t as great because I didn’t have as much to lose.  I’d already lost a lot.  So it was an option that could possibly get everything back on track for me, and it really, really did.  I went ahead and had the surgery and that was in October of this past year, October 13, and I started rehearsals for the show that I’m in right now in December.  And I’m not singing.  I’m not gonna tackle a musical until the spring.  Definitely taking a lot more care with my re-approach.  I’m in vocal lessons, and I’m starting singing and speech therapy next week, and this is not going to happen again.  But… it’s really, it’s, it’s been a miraculous thing.  In my life.

CHELSEA:  Yay!

ERIN:  Yeah.  {affects a squeaky voice}  Do I sound different?  {laughs}

CHELSEA:  {laughing} Yes, you sound like a completely— you used to be a man!  I mean, so it’s—

ERIN:  {affecting a low voice} I used to sound like this.

CHELSEA: —shocking!

ERIN:  {affects a squeaky voice} Yeah, I know!  {laughs}

CHELSEA:  {laughing}  I heard a great deal in the last episode of this podcast about the reasons that an actress who wasn’t in a union in her twenties would want to join one in her thirties, and that was your experience as well.  So what made you want to join Actor’s Equity when you came into your thirties?

ERIN:  There’s a lot of non-Equity stuff going on here, so it wasn’t imperative that I be Equity to do work and have really great experiences.  And when I moved to New York when I was twenty-nine or thirty, and I started doing auditions there, it was like, “Oh my gosh.  {laughs} Non-Equity is rough.”  And trying to get Equity jobs, just trying to get auditions, trying to get people to take you seriously as an actor—I just noticed that it was different, a different ball game in New York.  And I remember that a friend of mine fell down on some mashed potatoes, and I tripped and fell on a piece of glass, and nobody even filed an injury report or an incident report.  And I thought, “If I’m a thirty-year-old woman, who wants to do this for a living, I need to set… I need to make some changes in the conditions under which I am willing to work.  And after the mashed potatoes/glass incident {laughs} I, uh, I got a job that gave me an Equity contract, and I was like, “Absolutely I’ll take that!”  And things have just truly looked up from there.

CHELSEA:  So is there anything that you find easier about making art now than five years ago, or anything you find more difficult about making art now, than five years ago?

Erin as Meg March in Little Women
(photo credit: Barter Theatre)

ERIN:  Well, suffering’s not as fun in your thirties as it was in your twenties, I think that’s a given.  And I also think that I’m bringing a lot more to the table, and I shouldn’t need to do that anymore.  I have gotten over a lot of that need to get things right, which has come from experience and maturity.  I’m a lot more willing to fail now than I ever have been, because, you know, I just don’t see failure as that big of a deal.  I mean, you have to try.  If there’s something I want to do, I’m gonna do it.  I’ll find a way to do it, I’ll try to do it.  I’m also not looking for somebody else to give me permission to do my work anymore.  I know there was a time when, even if I would get cast in a show, I would feel this pressure of like, “Oh, now I have to prove why I was cast.”  And I know, it’s something that you have to learn on your own, but for me I know that’s a total waste of time.  Any energy that you spend trying to prove yourself, is energy that you’re not spending really trying to serve the play and tell the story.  So, I think I’m a lot more interested in the work now.  And I think fear is exciting.  If I feel fear, then I know that I am probably on the right track, and I need to keep going toward that.  Because that’s what’s interesting to watch.

CHELSEA:  You, like me, are a person who believes in making work for yourself, in addition to hunting down work in the greater world.  So let’s talk about MAS Nashville and making projects.

ERIN: Oh, all right!  Well, MAS Nashville is a group of ladies in Nashville that I assembled in the interest of wanting to create something without, like, permission.  I had been talking for a really long time about, “Gosh, I need to put together a cabaret.”  And that used to be a habit of mine, to talk a lot about stuff that I wanted to do, but not actually do it.  And in the interest of making that change for myself, which I really have done, over the last few years—less talking, more doing.  Or, just the same amount of talking, but, just more doing. {laughs}  I have a ton of really interesting, talented, gifted, hardworking friends, and I reached out to these particular girls, I think, just because of timing, and fate, and the universe.  There are five of us.  We’re all really, really different, but we’re all musical and we’re all theatrical, and I thought—hey, let’s put together a cabaret of sorts, a concert-type-thing.  And without even realizing it, the people I picked all have talents that complement one another.  And it turned into this really cool thing.  You can visit MASNashville.com to read about who we are and what we do.  We put together a show called “Five” that spring, and we really thought, “If twenty of our friends come and see it and give us a little feedback, that would be amazing.  And we sold out—I mean, it was a small theatre, but we sold it out—and were shocked, pleasantly shocked at the response.  We were like, “Wow, maybe we should do this again.”

CHELSEA:  It’s incredibly entertaining and also very impressive.  And it’s a lovely show.  It’s great as an audience member, because you guys have a very natural rapport.  Even though you’re playing caricatures of yourselves, it’s sort of obvious how much chemistry there is within the group.  And then also, everyone is so extremely talented in such an easy way, that it’s sort of like, “Here are the things that I am good at.  Here’s the best impression I can do of myself on my best day.”  And it’s funny, and it’s poignant at moments, and it’s just a fantastic showcase for all five of you.

ERIN:  Yeah, the musical talents of these ladies are pretty impressive.

CHELSEA:  That’s true.  And you as well.  It’s not like you’re the weak link!  All five of you are really great.

ERIN:  {laughing}  We’re all completely different types; it’s not a competition, it’s  celebration.  And we called ourselves “MAS” because in Spanish that means “more,” and, you know,  there’s always room for more.  We hope to inspire other people to do their own thing and make their own projects.  It’s a Mutual Admiration Society.  It stands for that as well.  Hopefully, a few people have been inspired.

CHELSEA:  I’m inspired!  I mean I thought it was a fantastic show.  Now that you’re back in Nashville, you’ve got stuff on the front burner.

ERIN: Yeah!  We have a show February 16th and 17th that we are hoping to put the press release out for today.

Poster for MAS Nashville’s upcoming February show
(photo credit: ANTHONYMATULA)

CHELSEA:  Hooray!

ERIN:  Yay!

CHELSEA:  Well, I’ll definitely post the link to your website (click here) and the info about that (click here) in this blog so people in the area can check it out.  You said this great thing when we were preparing for this phone call: “I always have to have several personal projects going on that I am in charge of, that nobody can smooshe or take away from me.”

ERIN:  Did I say that?  “Smooshe?”  {laughs}

CHELSEA:  Yeah.  “Smooshe.”  That’s how I feel, too.  You wanna have something no one can smooshe or take away from you.  And I think that’s one of the reasons that you and I get along so well, is that we understand that we understand that about each other.

ERIN:  You know I feel like auditioning is a numbers game.  That’s something I learned in New York.  All I can do is go in and give the best audition I can give.  Show them the best version of myself.  And eventually somebody’s going to be looking for me.  Sometimes they’re not, but someday they will be.  And I think if I can keep that idea, you know, it’s a lot easier to not take things super personally.  And, in addition, if I’ve got other things going on, of my own, I am… happy.

CHELSEA:  In addition to the MAS Nashville stuff that’s coming up in February, you’re also doing a show right now with Nashville Shakespeare.  You’re in Othello, playing Emilia.  So, plug your show!  Tell me about it.  (click here for information)

ERIN:  Oh, okay!  This is my first show with the Nashville Shakespeare Festival.  I was really excited and surprised to get the part because I had just, you know, sort of moved back to town.  And I went and did my thing and thought, “Well, they either want me or they don’t.”  And they did.  And it’s been really great.  I’m working with a ton of new people.  So it’s been… it’s been really great. Nashville Shakespeare Festival does… it’s, it’s—I think one reason I really like it is because it’s kind of an academic setting.  They take the time to do the table work.  We do student matinées every Tuesday through Friday, with talkbacks, so I love that.  I find it fascinating.  The star of the show is Eddie George, who is a retired NFL player.  Which is pretty cool.

CHELSEA: Oooh!  Interesting!

ERIN:  To me the guts that it takes to do Shakespeare, as a former NFL star… I don’t know, it’s been really cool to watch him work.  He’s done… I think he’s done God’s Trombone, and he played Julius Caesar a couple of years ago, but that’s a much smaller role.  I mean, it’s called Julius Caesar, but, you know.

CHELSEA:  Right.  He dies.

ERIN:  {laughing}  Yeah.  This is a lot bigger role.

CHELSEA:  Yeah.

ERIN:  But he really wanted to do it, and he has really done a bang-up job.  He jumps in there.  He’s not waiting for anybody to give him permission.  Which, again, that’s something for me to learn from.  And he’s huge.  {laughs}  He’s  a very large man.

CHELSEA:  {laughing}  He could reasonably be physically intimidating in the part of Othello.

ERIN:  He can actually wrap his hands around Desdemona’s neck and they touch and…

CHELSEA: Whaaa!  So, wrapping up here, wrapping up our lovely conversation: What is your biggest artistic goal for the next year or the next decade?  Both exterior accomplishments, and also interior accomplishments. How do you want to feel?

ERIN:  Hmm… Um, I… Right now I don’t have an exterior goal.  I know that some people would say that that’s a terrible idea, that you should always know where you’re headed.

CHELSEA:  I don’t know about that.

ERIN:  But I don’t feel that way right now.  I know that I want to continue working.  And I know that I want to continue putting myself out there for opportunities.  But, I’m really learning that I don’t always have the best plan.  And when things go haywire—like, ie, my voice not working—sometimes the things that can come out of that are far better than what I could have imagined for myself.  What seems like a crappy thing in the moment actually turns out to be a really wonderful thing that spurs you on to be exactly where you need to be.  So I’m really working hard right now to let go of what I think I need.  You know, I don’t have that specific, like, “I am going to be in this show with this company by this day.”

CHELSEA:  Uh-huh.

Erin performing with MAS Nashville (photo credit: La Photographie Nashville)

ERIN:  I just, I don’t know.  I think… I just have this weird feeling about 2014.  That something really awesome is going to happen that I can’t even fathom right now.

CHELSEA:  I have that same feeling!

ERIN:  Isn’t that weird?  I’ve talked to a couple of people that do.  And some people I know are also terrified of 2014.  So, there is that out there as well.  I get it.  And who knows?  I have no idea what’s going to happen, but I feel like I’m in the right place, I feel like I’m doing the right things.  I go to work and I am excited about my job every day.  Which is a great place to be.

CHELSEA:  Yeah.  That’s where you wanna be.

ERIN:  Yeah, and I know that it’s going to end.  But there’s something else that’s going to happen, you know.  I have a job lined up for March/April, and… you know I would like to—I guess, external-goal-wise—I’d like to make enough money doing what I love that I don’t have to constantly be worrying about the money.  And that’s another thing that I’m kind of putting in the universe’s hands.  I don’t know how that’s going to happen, but I’m comfortable it’s going to happen.  It’s going to figure itself out.  But, yeah, I would like to not be stressed about money, that’s a goal.  Finding, creating, and keeping that balance through external projects and friendships and intaking art, as well as being an exporter of.  I think that’s going to keep me on that path.

CHELSEA:  Well thank you so much for chatting with me today.  As always, it’s wonderful to talk to you.

ERIN:  You too.

CHELSEA:  And thanks so much for making conversation.

ERIN:  You’re welcome, Chelsea.

Subscribe to the podcast on iTunes!

Thank you for joining me for this inaugural episode. Today, I’m speaking with my good friend, actress Danielle O’Farrell.

(click on the media player above left to listen to or download the full audio of this interview)

Danielle was most recently seen in San Diego at The Old Globe as Audrey in As You Like It, the First Fairy in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and Clara in the 100th anniversary production of Pygmalion (featuring Robert Sean Leonard and Paxton Whitehead). Previously, she worked in Chicago with Remy Bumppo Theatre Company, Chicago Shakespeare Theater, American Theater Company, First Folio Theatre, Signal Ensemble Theatre, and many others. She has had the great pleasure of working with Adrian Noble, Lindsey Posner, Nicholas Martin, and James Bohnen. Danielle’s film and television work includes My “Boys,” the independent film “Farewell Darkness” and short horror film “Stay With Me,” and industrial work for McDonalds. She currently lives and works in New York City. And Danielle is one of those actresses who is always at the top of my list for a reading or workshop whenever I’ve got a new play.

You can find out more here: www.DanielleOFarrell.com.

Danielle O’Farrell • www.DanielleOFarrell.com

CHELSEA: So, hi, Danielle, how are you today?

DANIELLE: I am well, thanks, how are you?

CHELSEA: I’m doing well. This is actually our second attempt at this, because yesterday I did not manage to use the software correctly, and did not record the entire call. But this will be even better though, because now I’ve got a first draft of my Terry Gross impression under my belt, and we can move forward with at least me being a little be more polished. So I’ve just given a little bit of an introduction about you, but why don’t you tell me what labels you use to describe yourself as an artist?

DANIELLE: I have always introduced myself as an actress. And I think I mentioned this when we were talking before, it’s interesting to me because I always introduce myself as an “actress,” my person as an “actress,” but my career as an “actor.” So when I’m talking about what I do in the business, I refer to myself as an actor, but personally, I guess I consider myself an actress.

CHELSEA: And lately, since you’ve been through grad school, a ‘classically trained’ actress.

DANIELLE: Mm-hmm. An actor that trades in doing classical things.

CHELSEA: Right, that’s your particular niche.

DANIELLE: [My] “brand.”

CHELSEA: Brand. Right. I want to talk first about geography. I think geography is going to be a big part of this Making Conversation series, because we all have very strong opinions about where we choose to live and make our work. And you are a great person to start this conversation off, because when we met, we were both living and working in Chicago, and then you went out to California for grad school, and you made theatre there for a couple of years. And now you’re in New York. So you’ve hit all of the major cities.

DANIELLE: The major markets, as it were.

CHELSEA: The major markets. So why don’t you talk about what kind of work you made in each place, and why that was the best place for you at that time.

DANIELLE: So when I was looking at colleges, I considered New York for a bit, but honestly, at the age of eighteen, after growing up in Nebraska pretty much since I was five, I think it was intimidating, and scary and far away. And I ended up at the Chicago College of the Performing Arts at Roosevelt University, because, just, all the doors opened the right way that I needed. I knew some people there that sort of got me in to see all the right people in terms of scholarships, and so I ended up in Chicago for my BFA. And then stayed in Chicago after school was over, partly because, it being Chicago, I was able to work while I was in undergrad. So, I think every gets out of school and thinks about, “Oh I’ll move to New York, Oh I’ll move to LA,” but I at that point had already been working Chicago for a year and a half, when I graduated from school, and had already made some connections, and gotten to know some theatre companies, and had some friends, and so I just stayed. I kept working for about five years. And I did, as we can attest together, lots of big parts in small theatres and small parts in big theatres, and festivals, and readings, and new plays, and all kinds of amazing formative things. Played a lot of Greek tragedy for an audience of seven people…

CHELSEA: Right, right. For which no one gets paid.

DANIELLE: For which no one gets paid, or, if you do — toward the end of my career I was making like $75 a contract, which was very exciting.

CHELSEA: Yeah, very exciting!

DANIELLE: I remember my first show when I was twenty, I think I made $50 for that. That was pretty cool. We ran for seven weeks and it was thrilling.

CHELSEA: And then sometimes people will say nice things about you, like, my favorite review of you ever: Hedy Weiss in the Chicago Sun-Times, “O’Farrell, with her red hair and creamy skin, can break your heart with her eyes alone.”

DANIELLE: Indeed. That’s one of my favorite things, too.

CHELSEA: If I were you, I would have that written on the wall over my bed.

DANIELLE: {laughs} It was a very, very, very nice thing for her to say. It was astonishing, and terrible in some ways, because I was twenty, and I thought “Oh my God! This is what being an actor is like! It’s fantastic!” So, I’m sure it, in some ways, got me started on this primrose path thinking it would always be this spectacular, which, as we know, it is not. But, yeah, it was amazing. So, I was doing lots of really fantastic work. And then, sort of hit a point where I was getting auditions for all the places I wanted to work, I was getting called back sometimes, but I wasn’t getting the jobs. And I think you can go a while on the sheer adrenaline and excitement of being an artist for the first time. Every night in Chicago that I wasn’t doing a play myself, I could go to the theatre and see somebody I knew in something I wanted to see, something exciting, something different. And I ran for quite a long time on the excitement of that. But I that think everyone, even those who are very successful, at all levels of their career, hits a point where you look around and go “Is this going to be it forever? Is this all there is?” And for me, that point happened around five years into my Chicago career. So then I moved to San Diego, and did the graduate program at the University of San Diego, which is working with the Old Globe, the big regional in SD. And it’s a fantastic program, especially for what I wanted to do, because it is focused on classical training. All Shakespeare, Shaw, Stoppard—heightened language stuff that I really particularly love and am passionate about. And then also, it’s affiliated with the Globe, so the big thing for me was that it wouldn’t take me out of my career completely for two years. So I ended up being at the Globe, and that was phenomenal in terms of training, and also in terms of the people I worked with, because again, I didn’t have to take my feet out of the professional world. The doors that were opened for me and the rooms I got to be in because of that would not have happened in Chicago. I would not have been able to work with these people, based on the career level I was at, at that point. And then I finished grad school and decided to come to New York, because the particular things I’m good at and that I care about mostly take place here. In terms of the opportunity and in terms of my ambition, and the level of work I hope to do and intend to do as much as I can, New York is the place for me to be right now.

CHELSEA: And the interesting thing about New York that actors know, but perhaps some other people that are reading or listening to this don’t know, is that a lot of theatres all over the country and even the world cast out of New York. So there are a lot of working actors who technically live in New York, but they—

DANIELLE: —are never there!

CHELSEA: Exactly.

DANIELLE: So yeah. It’s mostly just a mass of opportunity.

CHELSEA: Yes, the sheer volume of opportunity. In the movie New York, I Love You, one of the cab drivers says, “This is the capital of everything possible.” Which I love.

DANIELLE: Yeah.

CHELSEA: Staying in the conversation about auditions and auditioning, you’ve recently joined Actor’s Equity, which is the professional actor’s union. You were not Equity when you were acting in Chicago in your 20s. Why do you feel it’s important to be in a Union when you’re in your 30s in New York?

DANIELLE: Well, there’s lots of reasons for that. I am really grateful that I was not an Equity actress right out of school in Chicago. I think at the age of 22 it would have been really hard to work at an Equity level in Chicago, at any—

CHELSEA: —I think at any age. Yeah. I know actors in Chicago that are in their 40s who could be Equity, they have all of the points that they need, but they’re sort of like “I wouldn’t have as much work” or “I wouldn’t be able to work in the theatres that I love if I went union in Chicago.”

DANIELLE: Well, but the thing about Chicago especially is that there is such good, specific, amazing work happening at all levels. And the advantage of that, again, for me as a young artist, is that—I have a lot of friends, especially friends from grad school, who came to New York right out of school and did, you know, four shows or seven shows in the five years following their graduation. And I got to do seventeen, in the period between being twenty and twenty-seven.

CHELSEA: Yeah, the sheer amount of work that you can cram into your life in Chicago if you don’t care what you’re getting paid, is kind of staggering.

DANIELLE: Right.

CHELSEA: I remember having those conversations myself with friends that had moved to LA or New York right out of school, and—this is not in any way to toot my own horn, because I’m not saying that the shows that I was doing were the most spectacular thing ever—I would be like, “Yeah, I’m working on three shows right now. You know, I’m assistant stage managing one, and then I’ve got this ten-minute play in this festival, and then I’m volunteering in the box office for this other thing, all at the same time. What are you working on?” It’s just cheap to make theatre in Chicago.

DANIELLE: So cheap.

CHELSEA: And there’s so many people doing it that you can be working all of the time, in some capacity, if you want to be.

DANIELLE: Yeah. One of my favorite experiences that we actually did together was that play festival at The Side Project, where, I think you did the opening piece, and I had the opening piece for the second act. And it was a little fifteen-minute play, it was adorable and sweet, and artistically it was one of my favorite things I’ve ever done. I came to the theatre every night and fell in love with my friend Brett every single night, and it was just delightful.

as Jasmine with Brett Lee as in Black & White at the side project

CHELSEA: That was the festival, I think, where I had a piece that I was directing, by Brian Golden who I hope to have on this series a little bit later in the year. And there were something like 21 people in this 10-minute play. Which is— You would never— I mean, if you had to pay all of those people— We could barely fit them backstage! But if you had to pay them for every one of those performances, 21 people for a ten-minute play, I mean— That’s the kind of thing that does not get made outside Chicago storefront theatre.

DANIELLE: So the advantage of being non-Equity, especially when I was young, especially when I was in Chicago, was huge because I worked a lot. Literally, most nights I was sitting, you know, eighteen inches from the audience, looking at my lover who was breaking my heart. And it required such focus, and such vulnerability, and such— You know, you can’t fake it from eighteen inches away.

CHELSEA: Right. And it requires a lot from the audience, as well. Because there’s no hiding from the performers when you’re that close.

DANIELLE: Exactly. Yeah. So all of that said, one of the reasons I was really excited about the Old Globe program was that it would enable me to get my Equity card. Whether it’s earned or not, there is as sense of legitimacy conferred on you as an artist, as an actor, when you’re a union member. The opportunities available to you, the way that you are treated, should not be, probably, but is a little different. Actor’s Equity makes sure you that you won’t be kept waiting more than… an hour and a half, I think it is, for your audition appointment. Whereas, you could go to a non-Equity audition and be there five hours.

CHELSEA: All day.

DANIELLE: All day. Because they have all the power and they’re allowed to. Actor’s Equity will also watch out for me if I get hurt in a show. I twisted my ankle in a show at the Globe, and it was fine, it wasn’t a big deal, but any time I needed to go to the doctor, that was paid for by workman’s comp. I didn’t have to worry about it. Whereas, you know, a friend of mine got a concussion in a show in Chicago, and the small theatre would have loved to be able to pay for it, but they didn’t have that kind of insurance, they didn’t have that kind of resource to be able to take care of those medical bills. It’s also nice for me because we get breaks according to Equity schedule. So, again, you’re not going to be sitting there for five hours straight, or working on some heart-wrenching, difficult scene for five hours straight without getting ten minutes every hour and a half to get a breath of air. And you have recourse if you’re being treated poorly. So, the working conditions are inherently better than when you’re not Union. And then also, again, like you were saying, I don’t want to toot my own horn, it’s not like I’m saying things about my work specifically, other than that I work really hard. And I put a lot of myself into my work intellectually, emotionally, and I do my absolute best to go out every night and tell the story as best I can. There’s an F. Scott Fitzgerald quote that I absolutely love. It’s him writing to a young woman who is, I think, a friend of a friend. He says, first of all, it’s clear that you have talent, and talent is the same thing as having the right physical attributes to get into West Point. But, I just don’t know if you have what it takes, because, “You’ve got to sell your heart, your strongest reactions, not the little minor things that only touch you lightly, the little experiences that you might tell at dinner.

CHELSEA: Mmm-hmm.

DANIELLE: And I feel like, as an artist, I am for that every night. I try my damnedest to give that every night. To sell the depths of what I can offer, as opposed to just letting you see, you know, me be affected lightly by something. Unless it’s appropriate to the play and that’s what I’m doing. Money certainly isn’t everything, and money certainly isn’t the price of good art. Art doesn’t know money, in terms of quality. But, it’s nice that because I am a member of the union, when I am offering these things, when I am selling these experiences, I will be compensated in a way that makes my life easier.

CHELSEA: We also spoke a little bit yesterday, and we’ve spoken in the past, about how nice it is when you get to that point in your career—whether it’s because you’re in a union, or because you’ve just gotten to the point where you feel like you are owed the defined role of the professional. So, you’re an actor, you show up and you do your job, and you don’t have to fold programs, and you don’t have to do marketing—

DANIELLE: This is my Twelfth Night story—

CHELSEA: Yeah. You don’t have to, as you say, pick the ants out of the prop crackers.

DANIELLE: Right, exactly. When I came to grad school, the first show that I did at the Globe was Twelfth Night. I was playing Fabian. And it blew my mind, because I had spent all this time in Chicago— I mean, I would come to my shows at my Chicago off-Loop theatres with a bag of stuff. I would come in with, you know, clothes, socks, bobby pins, safety pins, with all the makeup I needed, extra earrings, you know, all these different things. And so I got to the theatre in San Diego, at the Old Globe for the first time, and I walked into this dressing room, and it was just me and this other girl. And we had a cot, and we had an extra chair, and we had all the hangers we needed, we didn’t have to bring our own hangers! And we had a sink in the room, and we had a bathroom across the way, and I didn’t have to clean either of them! {laughs} I had a dresser who told me that she would braid my hair for me every night. And I was just like, “You don’t have to, I can figure it out.” And she was like, “No, no, no, it’s fine, I got it.” And I just thought, Wow! This is amazing!

CHELSEA: And there’s something really beautiful about the everybody chipping in spirit—

DANIELLE: Absolutely.

CHELSEA: —Of the off-Loop theatre that you do when you’re younger, but then, I have found—and there have been times I’ve self-produced my own plays, and that’s something I’ve done to myself—you can’t do your best work if you have to concentrate on doing everything. And be worried about everything. Be worried about the marketing, and be worried about, like, where are we going to get another flat, can we hang stuff on this, or do we have the resources to go buy another can of paint? Is another company coming in that’s rented the space right after us that’s going to unhook all of our lights? You know, if you could just be the playwright, or the director, or the actor, and focus all of your creative energy, and all of your energy period, on doing that thing, then your work is invariably going to be better, because it’s more focused.

DANIELLE: Well, and this is going to sound kind of strange, but it’s also a feeling of respect. I’d like to think that everyone in Chicago, or in any small market, or you know, small theatres in New York, or in LA, would pay you this kind of attention and respect if they could afford it.

CHELSEA: Right.

DANIELLE: But for me it felt like a real acknowledgement that this is actually your job. Your job is to be an actor. And that was really validating for me in lots of ways, and really wonderful.

CHELSEA: So we’ve talked a little bit about how the circumstances of making work have changed, or the work situations that you find yourself in or that you seek out. How does your process as an actor differ, now, from the way you were making work five or eight years ago?

DANIELLE: I think, again, being in Chicago was great for me because it taught me to be gutsy. And it taught me to really commit. And it taught me, for better or for worse, to throw myself at something and see what happens. Which has served me well; that courage has served me really well. Grad school became a lot about the technical aspects of creating work. So—learning in Shakespeare all of the basic things you need to know to do Shakespeare: thesis/antithesis, the shape of a line. And then the more complicated stuff: builds, and sustaining thoughts, and all of the things that go into being able to technically deliver an idea that isn’t yours, a complicated idea that isn’t yours—

CHELSEA: In heightened language, no less.

Danielle with Matthew Bellows and Christopher Salazar in Measure for Measure (USD/Old Globe)

DANIELLE: Yeah, exactly. Poetic imagery, delivered in such a fashion that it is completely clear, and expressive, and seems like you thought it up all by yourself. And then, being brave enough to just go out there and listen and respond. I operate as an actor a lot on instinct, and what I’ve learned is that the more I learn technically, and the more capable I become technically, the more that serves my instinct, and the more my instinct is sharpened. Rather than it getting in the way. Which is really nice. The big thing for me about the way my work has changed is that, when I was twenty-two, I needed to say, “Okay, here’s my big moment, and I have to build to this moment, and I have to do this, and do this, and do this.” And all the while, doing my best to be present and listen, but with a little voice back in my head saying, “Remember you have to give that big speech in five minutes. So you need to make sure you can get there.”

CHELSEA: Right.

DANIELLE: And now, on my good days, on my best days, when my work is really something I’m proud of, it’s about the fact that I am comfortable enough and feel competent enough, and also trust myself enough to go out onstage, look at the other person, and put my attention completely on them. And just listen. And all of these really brilliant people I worked with at the Globe, they don’t push. They don’t throw a bunch of energy at it, and they don’t do anything really hard in the beginning, they just take their time, and listen and listen and listen and figure it out. And then all of a sudden, there they are, doing this completely honest, simple thing. And it’s astonishing. And the only thing you can do is keep listening and responding and hope that in thirty years you look like that, too. {laughs}

CHELSEA: You recently had a very interesting meeting with an organization that I had not heard of before: the Actors’ Fund Work Program. So tell me a little bit about that.

DANIELLE: The Actor’s Fund Work Program specifically exists because acting work is, and has always been, and probably will always be, project-based. So that will always end. Your show will close. It may be seven years, but your show will close. And what I love about the goal of the Actor’s Fund Work Program is that they want to help you find work—whether it’s a survival job, or a second career, or a primary career, or if you want to leave the business altogether—they want you to be able to find work that is meaningful to you, that makes you happy, and obviously will pay you enough to sustain whatever level of your life you need it to. It’s all free, which is astonishing as well.

CHELSEA: That is astonishing.

DANIELLE: They have a bunch of classes, so you can train in anything you can do with a computer, basically. They do a networking thing every week, so if you just need a job right now, you can go and hear from other people who have applied for other things, and see if anybody has something they need. I think they do once-a-month panels, where they have people who were members of the Work Fund and they’ve now started small businesses, or they’re teaching, or they’re involved in something else specific to them, that they can then come and speak about. So you can say, “Oh, I think I might be interested in teaching. I’d love to know more about that.” And you can go to the teaching panel and get more information.

CHELSEA: Great!

DANIELLE: So it’s astonishing, and wonderful, and heartening, honestly, because I think that the image you have in your head when you’re younger tends to be, “I will have money and it will always be okay.” And that happens for, like, probably twenty-five people. And so, I think when I was twenty-two I assumed that, eventually, I’d just be doing enough theatre that it would be fine. And that’s still the goal, and that’s still something I’m working towards, and I’d really like it and I’m hoping it will happen for me. But if it doesn’t, or even if it does and I want more stability, I need to explore what I can do in my life that will offer me that stability. And what I can do, again, that will be meaningful to me, that will be a useful way to spend my time. So that was really big for me, and I think a lot of artists when we hit the next decade of our careers, we get to the point where you sort of look around and say “Is this enough for me? Is this everything?”

CHELSEA: I think, too, when I was younger I underestimated the amount of money it takes just to live. Not even to live well.

DANIELLE: Totally!

CHELSEA: I was like, “Yeah, so I won’t make much money, I’ll just be poor and I’ll be happy.” And it’s like, yeah, in your mind you can live on ramen noodles, but in reality, you have to have some kind of quality of life. And then also, there are always going to be unexpected things: unexpected medical bills, unexpected plane tickets for funerals. You can’t just think, “I can totally stretch this little tiny bit of money that I have.”

DANIELLE: $17,000 a year.

CHELSEA: Exactly. “I can totally live on that! I’ll be poor and happy.” And it’s like, no, you’ll be poor and miserable. And, we’ve spoken about this before: in the periods of my life where I’ve been unemployed and I didn’t know where the next bit of money was coming from, I have been totally sapped creatively. You would think if you don’t have a job, you would just sit and write all day. But I’ve written nothing during those periods, because I’m so frantic about money, that I have no energy to write anything.

DANIELLE: It’s true. As an actor, when you’re starving, literally or figuratively, you can’t go into an audition and say, “GIMME THIS JOB I REALLY NEED THIS JOB!!” Because shockingly, no one wants to give you the keys to the car if you look like you’re so desperate you might crash it at any moment.”

CHELSEA: Right. {laughs}

DANIELLE: You need to be able to— and again, when I was twenty-two, there was such a romance and excitement in being really broke because I quit my second job so I could be an understudy. And, to be honest, because I’m kind of a fool and I really do love working, I’d probably do that again. But at the same time, it is not too much to ask of life, I don’t think, to have a place to live where you feel safe, and comfortable, where there is heat. {laughs} It takes a certain amount of money—it isn’t that much money, but it kinda is, sometimes—to just take care of yourself and have a fulfilling personal life. And I don’t think that your art should come at the cost of your personal life, always. Every now and then it will, and that’s just the reality we accept. But that shouldn’t be a decision you have to make every single day. And ideally, again, if you could find a way to make money that is fulfilling to you, or useful for your career, or even if it’s something totally stupid but you enjoy doing it enough that the time that you spend there is beneficial to your life, as opposed to something you get through just so you can go home and dread coming back, then—then that.

CHELSEA: Changing course here for a moment, I would like to talk to you about something we share a deep and abiding love for, which is fashion. But kind of, on a larger scale, beauty and aesthetics, and bodies for that matter. I believe, and I know that you do too, that fashion, or how you present yourself to the world, is actually not frivolous, but it ties into this artistic bent of liking to be surrounded by beauty, and feeling like you have the power to make beauty, to make yourself beautiful, and the way you present yourself to the world is beautiful and artful. And you once told me this great thing about how a person’s life’s work can be their life. Like, the beauty of your life can be your great art project. So, let’s talk about fashion!

DANIELLE: Well, I think I said this to you before, but one of the advantages of being an actor is that you can get away with being a little vain, because it’s your job. It’s my job to care about how I look when I go into this room—it’s not all of my job, but it’s a piece of it, to make sure that what they see is the best possible thing I can offer. And I think it does tie into bodies, especially for women. Because I’m really lucky that I’m finally coming into a part of my career where the body I have isn’t holding me back. I’m very—we’re both hourglass-y people—

CHELSEA: We are. We share that.

DANIELLE: And I, finally, coming into the next decade of my life, am happy about that and I like my body. And I like the person that I am in my body. And I don’t much want it to change anymore. I mean, everybody has things they don’t like about their body, but on the whole, I’m pretty comfortable with mine, and I only am striving to treat it better. To put better things on its skin. And be nicer to it; to stop putting Nutella into it every single day.

CHELSEA: Oh don’t! Never stop putting Nutella into it! Sometimes, though. Just a little occasionally. {laughs}

DANIELLE: Right, exactly. {laughs} But you know what I mean: let’s put some spinach in here, and chicken in here. Let’s be nice to my body because I’m going to need it for quite some time. As opposed to, when I was twenty-two—I dieted so much when I was twenty-two and twenty-five and at different points in my life, that I look at pictures and go, “Well, you were sure skinny. But you don’t look good. Because that’s not what your body’s supposed to look like. You were never supposed to be that skinny. So you look kinda weird, actually.” But when I was twenty-two and I was going out for all these ingénues, that was the way that I was supposed to look. Everybody else was that skinny, and half of them were people who were supposed to be that skinny. They were different body types than I was, and that was difficult for me. And it got in the way of casting, in terms of the things I wanted to do. But, um, you know, that’s the reality of what I looked like when I was twenty-two, so I consider myself very fortunate that as I’m coming into my thirties, I am able to look the way I look and have it be acceptable to everyone. In terms of my casting. And sort of continuing on that, one of the things we did in grad school was that we came to a couple of faux audition classes, and all dressed in what we would wear to an audition. And talked about, as bluntly as we could—although gently—what that particular outfit made us think about that person. And it was really useful, if occasionally difficult to hear, because you look at somebody who comes into a room, and their clothes are too tight or too loose, or they’re wearing something bright that’s distracting you from their face, or any of these things, and that’s what you think about. “That guy doesn’t know what he looks like, does he?”

CHELSEA: Yeah. I’ve sat in lots of auditions where I’ve wondered, “This person has no idea what shape their body actually is. How in touch are they with their body as an actor when they’re onstage? If they don’t even know what clothes fit?”

DANIELLE: And emotionally, if they can’t look in the mirror and be honest with themselves about that particular part, how are they going to be able to be honest with themselves when it’s much more important?

CHELSEA: Right, and it’s not like you’re just sitting across from this person on the bus. They chose this outfit to present the package of themselves to someone who has the potential to hire them, and this is what they came up with.

DANIELLE: Exactly. But a lot of times I feel like the advantage to being savvy about what looks good on you, is that you are showing people what’s useful about you. So, rather than going into a room into a big tent-like dress, which is very fashionable, and having people look at me and being like, “God, she looks chubby around the hips…

CHELSEA: Yeah, I can’t wear things that don’t have defined waistlines. I just look pregnant.

DANIELLE: Right. It’s just not going to work. For me either. And it’s such an important thing I think, again, to know, I’m going to put myself in this Betty Page dress, and what you think when you look in the room is, “Oh, awesome, she looks great!” You know, ideally, you’ll think that. But also, “She knows who she is. She’s not trying to hide anything about herself. She’s aware of what’s going on with her and she’s used it to her best advantage.”

CHELSEA: Right. And now moving on to the actual audition, or the actual conversation, or whatever.

DANIELLE: What’s she going to say when she opens her mouth?

CHELSEA: As opposed to being fixated on the outfit for the entire interview or audition.

DANIELLE: Distracted—again, not useful. This is useful, that would be not useful. But I also think—one of the things I love about aesthetics—you know, moving completely to the other side of it—is that the ‘living the beautiful life’ thing becomes about the fact that you can make any choice you want, in lots of things. My bedroom in New York, which I’m in right now—and it’s kinda messy right now—I spent a lot of time putting it all together and thinking about what I wanted it to look like, because this is where I’m going to be creating art for a couple of years at least, if not longer. And what I like about my room, too, is that any of my close friends would walk in and be like, “Oh yeah, this is Danielle’s room.”

CHELSEA: Right. Right right.

DANIELLE: {chuckles} There’s a chandelier in here. And a dressing gown.

Danielle in an ad for her graduate program that ran in American Theatre Magazine in 2013.

CHELSEA: {laughs} Yep.

DANIELLE: And rows of vintage-looking earrings. So. This is clear who she is.

CHELSEA: Wrapping up here: the Big Question. What is your biggest artistic goal for the next year or the next decade? Not just exterior accomplishments, but interior goals. How do you want to feel?

DANIELLE: {pause} That’s a big question. Um. I think—and we hit on this a little bit—the thing for me is to build an artistic home. Because I have just gotten here; I got to New York two and a half months ago. And have been getting all of my ducks in a row in terms of, you know, meeting with agencies and developing relationships with them, and casting directors, and doing the same. And meeting all these people at my showcase, sending out thank-you notes for that, that kind of thing. And also, my personal life: figuring out who I’m going to be when I’m in New York. And also, my day job. Where am I going to make money, and what can I do to make money in a way that will be efficient and productive and will not get in the way of my being an actor. I’ve been really careful to keep space open to be an actor in my life, in a way that I never have before. So, coupled with all of that, is that one of my acting professors—who’s a very, very smart, very accomplished man, said to me, “Theatre should always be the means to an end.” And at the time it threw me a lot.

CHELSEA: It’s so hard to hear because it’s like, “What’s the other thing?! I’m barely managing this thing! What’s on the other side?”

DANIELLE: “It’s so hard all by itself! Why on earth would there be one other thing beyond that that I’m supposed to get to?!” And so I think my goal for everything in my life for the next year, is to build my artistic home here, which means: my artistic home, my professional home—which involves those casting directors and agencies and theatres, coworkers, all those things—but also, my home. Getting my support system in place, getting my friends network together, finding the ways I want to spend my time. Dating. Building a network of people to be with me professionally, and a network of people to be with me personally and privately. I think the big thing that has been scary is that I am starting over now that I’m thirty. And I’m in an incredible place to do that, because my graduate program is incredibly well-respected in New York, and that’s great. And I have connections, again, and friends that I know from the work I did in Chicago, from the work I did in San Diego, even some friends from high school who are now working in New York theatre, which has opened doors for me as well. But it’s going to be doing this one more time. The good news is, I only have to do it one more time. And so I just have to keep working on making all that happen.

CHELSEA: Well, I think that you are in a fantastic place, both geographically and in your mindset and your life to make all those things happen. And I can’t wait to see what’s next for you.

DANIELLE: Thanks.

CHELSEA: And I’m so glad that we had this talk today. Thanks very much for making conversation.

DANIELLE: Oh no problem.