Adam Seelig

AdamSeelig is the founder and Artistic Director of One Little Goat Theatre Company. He is the author of Every Day in the Morning (slow) (New Star Books, finalist for the 2011 ReLit Award in poetry) and his plays include Ubu Mayor (BookThug 2014), Talking Masks (BookThug 2009), Antigone:Insurgency (2007) and, for children, PLAY: A (Mini) History of Theatre for Kids (Toronto 2016-18).

Adam is the writer, director, and composer of MUSIC MUSIC LIFE DEATH MUSIC: An Absurdical, running May 25 – June 10 at Tarragon Extraspace.

Tickets: http://onelittlegoat.org/music-music-life-death-music

Transcript

Welcome to episode 127 of Stageworthy. I’m your host, Phil Rickaby. Stageworthy is a podcast about people in Canadian theatre featuring conversations with actors, directors, playwrights, and more.

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Then click the subscribe button. And you can also find links to both of those sites at the Stageworthy website. And if you want to drop me a line, I would love to hear from you.

You can find Stageworthy on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram at stageworthypod, and you can find the website at stageworthypodcast.com. If you want to drop me a line, you can find me on Instagram and Twitter at philrickaby, and my website is philrickaby.com. My guest this week is Adam Seelig. Adam is the writer, director, and composer of One Little Goat Theatre’s Music, Music, Life, Death, Music, opening May 25th at the Tarragon Extra Space in Toronto. So just to jump right in, the play is Music, Music, Life, Death, Music, which just I have to have my little cheat sheet here just so that I have that title in front of me.

Thank you. Okay. It’s an absurdical, which I suppose is an absurd musical? It’s an absurd musical, an absurdist musical.

So a musical with a heavy, heavy dose of the ridiculous, but also not just ridiculous in terms of ridiculousness, but also the lack of meaning that forces us to really bond and have strong relationships with each other. So that is, it’s more than just a kind of silly absurdity. It’s a sometimes disconcerting kind of absurdity that’s behind it.

Is there a story that you can tell us about? That is inherent in the play? Yeah. So this is a really simple play. The woman played by Teresa Tova, who goes by B, she knocks on her daughter and son-in-law’s door in the middle of the night.

She wakes them up, and in the process also wakes up their teenage son. And it is really everything that unfolds from there. So it’s not plot heavy.

It’s much more about the dynamics between these three generations of family, between the husband and wife who are, let’s call them a sandwich generation, torn between their loyalties to this older generation and need to help her and accommodate her and their love for her and their annoyances with her as well, and just as much towards their younger generation as well, towards their teenage son. So that is what happens in this play as far as plot goes. But really, I’d say that’s just a simple setup from which everything unfolds.

Is there anything in particular that inspired this for you? Where did this musical come from? I think I might be a writer, a playwright, a director trapped in a musician’s body. So I think that what happened was this time, I just, rather than sitting down with paper, I sat down at the piano and thought, well, it might be interesting to just open with a song and see what emerges from there. So the opening song is called, it’s called, I have to get the order of the syllables right.

It’s called Fa-fa-la-la. I almost called it La-la-fa-fa, which would be totally, utterly wrong. And the subtitle, which is the chorus, is One and One are One.

And One and One are One, that is a love song between this couple. And that’s what started it all. Sitting at the piano and I guess this idea of building out from the music and beginning with that.

So it started with that love song. Then it moved to this, there’s really a passionate scene between this couple. Again, with a healthy dose of the ridiculous mixed in.

And nevertheless, there’s a real strong, powerful, joyous love and sexual love and pleasure that they are about to embark on when Didi’s mother B knocks on the door. So the couple’s, or Didi and JJ, mother’s B and their son goes by, at least they call him Pee Pee and they often call him Little Pee Pee, that’s his nickname. So it started with that, emerged from there.

And before I knew it, there was a mom knocking at the door. Before I knew it, there was a teenage boy who was waking up in the middle of the night. And it was just one thing leading to another.

So really, no map or clear concept that I started with just starting with a song and growing from there. Have you had an ambition to write a musical previously? So I’ve written the one called Ubu Mayor, which we did right before the municipal election. A number of years ago, I guess it was exactly fall of 2014.

We did a musical One Little Goat, performing musical with Michael Dufay’s Richard Hart and Astrid Van Weeren, whom a lot of people know from Come From Away. She’s part of the original cast. And we did a full on play with music.

I’ve never been entirely comfortable with the term musical. Maybe it’s because often the drama is sacrificed, or maybe some of the text is sacrificed just in order to quickly get to the numbers. And so I keep referring to these as plays with musicals or finding other ways to call the musicals like an absurdical, in order to show that really, we do have a balance here of the dramatic with the musical.

So I guess the answer to that is yes, four years ago, writing Ubu Mayor was such a pleasure, such a delight, so much action, and excitement and randomness and humor and just surprising moments can emerge when you mix music in with it. And one of the things that was a challenge for me in writing music, music, life, death music that I thought would be just interesting for me to explore is well, okay, music seems to be great for the outrageous and Ubu Mayor was certainly outrageous. It was just flat out ridiculous.

What if through the music, we also brought some depth, some emotional depth, some ballads, some slower numbers. So that was the challenge that I explored with this. And there is a much broader range of music.

It’s not just fast, upbeat numbers. We also have several that are slower tempos and that are more vulnerable. Sure.

I mean, the whole the idea of the play with music as separating from a musical. I totally get that. Because the movie La La Land, everybody was calling a musical.

And then I saw it. And I was like, no, no, that’s not a musical. That is a film with music.

Because the songs don’t propel, didn’t propel the action forward. The songs might have been character pieces. And sometimes they were just like nice things.

And to me, in my mind, that is what an X with music is a play with music, a film with music. In your mind, what is like what separates a play with music from a musical? I think that what separates it for me is that is, maybe it’s just a little more emphasis on text here than I would sometimes expect from a musical. But at the end of the day, if someone calls this a musical, I take no offense whatsoever.

And I think it might actually be even more accurate than what I’m saying. So I think it’s really just my way of trying to have it always saying, it’s not just music. It’s not just text.

It’s both of these things. I give them equal weight. And I really throughout the play, I’m not trying to rush a scene along in order to get to the to the song, nor am I rushing through the song in order to get to the scene.

I’m really trying to give them equal weight. And so that’s why rather than this kind of musical term, the best I could come up with this time was an absurdical so that just just to get people thinking a little bit differently about about how we approach this. But yeah, at the end of the day, I’m not idealistic or militant about it in any way, shape or form.

Was I mean, like you were saying that you wrote Ubu before, and this one you sort of wrote in a different way. Ubu was written. You sat down with paper, you didn’t sit down with with the piano first.

Yes, I sat down with paper and Ubu became a musical almost by accident. And that’s the part about me being a writer trapped in a musician’s body, because about 20 pages into it, I just had this feeling like, well, this scene where Ubu’s brother Dudu and his and Ubu’s spouse, Huhu, when they serve him a plate of bacon, he’s just going to have to sing about this. He can’t hold back.

And I wrote that first song, the bacon song in Ubu Mer. And that really just just happened. And then one song and another song and another song before we knew we had we had about, you know, two thirds text, a third music.

So yes, call it a musical call to play with music. But there was a lot of music there. Whereas here, I just really wanted to open right away with song and build it with music.

And so you know, I hope I put music in the title enough times for people to know. Yeah, I just I don’t know false advertising here. Absolutely not.

Absolutely not. You sort of have like have all of the things in the title here. Um, I would like to ask you about your, your theatrical origin story.

I like to look at all of us. We are yeah, creative superheroes. And so our origin stories, the things that we the thing that why we do this thing? Yeah, I just won’t reveal the kryptonite.

No, no. And I’m sure I know what it is. But for me, it is the first place I saw as a kid, my elementary school at the Colby Lang in Vancouver, and then at Sir William Osler School in Vancouver.

These are the the elementary schools that I went to. And once a year, troops would come through and we’d all sit down in the gym, and they would do these performances. And I would say to this day, those are still the most influential performances for me in my life.

And what I’ve started to do with one little goat over the last couple years is tour elementary schools, to, in a sense, recreate that experience that I had then. So that’s, that’s the origin for me. Some of them were I remember there was a troop that came in and did Carmen.

I’m not a huge opera fan, per se. But I remember that performance. I still remember.

I must have been when they did that 110 years old. The funny thing is, if I talked to friends from elementary school, they remember those two, and we’re talking about accountants, lawyers, plumbers, whoever, all kinds of professions, not necessarily in the arts, and they remember those vividly, too. So for me, that that is the beginning of it all.

Do they remember them in in the same with the impact as you? Or do they say, Oh, yeah, I remember that. They remember them making making a strong impression. Yeah, being great performances.

So that would that would be the origin for me. The other side of it is the musical side. And for me, I think what lit me up early on was a lot of R&B.

And soon after it became some of still to this day, my favorite piano players, Oscar Peterson, absolutely blew my mind when I was a kid. And Miles Davis’s pianist, Bill Evans, and then John Coltrane’s piano player, McCoy Tyner. And a little later on, Ahmad Jamal would be another one.

And now currently my favorite piano player who just played in Toronto two weeks ago, Abdullah Ibrahim. So these when you know, you know, very emphatically, the superhero aspect, when I think of superheroes, I really think of these titans, these musicians, so phenomenal. And I think that really the circle around Miles Davis, a lot of those musicians who went off in different directions, Herbie Hancock would be another example.

Those are musicians for whom I just have tremendous love. It goes beyond just appreciation. These are people who can do no wrong.

And you know, they play I’m listening. And certainly early on, I was listening to those, those guys all the time. What’s been great for me now in adulthood is I’ve warmed up to music with lyrics for ages must have been one to maybe as many as two decades.

I couldn’t listen to music with lyrics, other than maybe Leonard Cohen, and a few songs and folk songs where the lyrics aren’t too, maybe clever and are just solid. I always found it hard to relate to to lyrics. But something’s happened in the last while.

And I’m not sure what it is, it could very well be that from the experience with Ubu, I discovered that singing is an incredible experience. Number one for the people who do it. But sometimes just as much for the people who are around it.

I’m not a singer. But being around people who sing is an extraordinary experience, because you can’t really hide when you sing. Yeah, it’s true.

Singing is like the most vulnerable things you can do in front of somebody. And I’m not quite sure why singing is. And yet, yeah, it’s almost like everybody, like you make somebody sing, and they will show you who they are.

Even if they even if they don’t sing well. Fascinating thing. Yeah, yeah.

When did you start playing music? Childhood that you wanted to do? Or were you like so many children are like made to do it at first? Yeah, so I’m one of three. I have to have an older brother and a younger sister. So I’m one of three siblings, and they didn’t carry on with their with their instruments.

And my parents weren’t particularly militant about being certain that we practice they gave us all of us music lessons for about a year and shortly after my brother dropped out shortly after starting my sister as well. But for me, what really drew my interest was going off the page starting to improvise and starting to play by ear. And it seems pretty elementary to us to talk about that as adults Oh, playing by year and that you know, that’s pretty common out there.

But as a kid, it was a real discovery. For me, when I was about the age of eight, starting to think, Oh, you know, I could listen to a song and play it back and pick it out at the piano. So I would say from about the age of nine onward, I was I was playing more and more.

And then around the age of 1314, where it just became pure love, pure love for music for playing for exploring, playing with other people. So that really artistically is my first love. And it all comes back to that the beauty of learning by ear and learning to improvise is that it really lets you play with so many different people.

And so you just learn to collaborate. And the spirit of collaboration is a huge part of music, music, life, death, music, this play that we’re doing now. I’ve, I think, had a lot of training from early years playing music, and just being in the room with people and seeing where things go, and trusting, trusting their instincts.

I think when you have a cast like when you have Richard Hart, Sierra Holder, Teresa Tova, Jennifer Villaverde, I mean, they, I follow them, a lot of people look at a director and think, Oh, what’s your vision? And where are you leading this? Where are you guiding this? It’s kind of the other way around. They are letting me know where this is going. As a, you know, when you were primarily music, when did you start to, like, were you always music and theatre? Or were you like music, and then you came to the theatre a little later, in terms of not just watching things like Carmen at school, but like things that you wanted to do? I think the first theatre for me was improv in Vancouver.

I don’t know if you’ve ever seen the Vancouver theatre sports people, but they’re still going strong there. They are among the funniest, most clever troupe I’ve ever seen, still to this day. They’re great improvisers here in Toronto.

Certainly, I think it may just be that I saw, I fell in love with improv in my teenage years, seeing those guys perform in Vancouver. And so I have a tremendous amount of affection for that. So maybe what these both have in common, the musical side and the dramatic side, for me personally, would be the spirit of collaboration, of improvising, of trying things out, of going for the idea, no matter how stupid it is, of rolling with your mistake, which happens in jazz all the time.

Just roll with it and see if you can maybe build something out of it, and a kind of fearlessness that goes along with that. And putting the cart before the horse is a huge part of improv, both musically and dramatically. So I think it was soon after getting into improvised music that I started to find through friends in high school and through the Vancouver Theatre Sports League, that there is a lot of excitement going on through improvisation and drama as well.

Did you go to any theatre school? Did you study for theatre? Or did you jump straight into the world of music as sort of like a profession? I went to university, so I’m not an autodidact by any stretch. I went to school on the west coast and I studied theatre English literature. I studied some music theory, but I started to let go of the music.

So it’s really only in the last four, really since Oubu Maire, which is 2014, that I’ve started to come back to music in a serious and consistent way. What was it that, I mean, in terms of it being your first musical, play with music, whatever you want to call it, Oubu Maire, what was it that made you want to write? What started that play? What was its genesis? Well, the genesis of it was one of the members of the Four Horsemen, Steve McCaffrey, I went to a reading of his and when the reading was over, knowing that I run One Little Goat, the theatre company, he knew about us because of the work that One Little Goat did with a play by Claude Gauvreau called The Charge of the Experimentable Moose, which is this extraordinary piece of theatre by the Montreal playwright. Gauvreau, McCaffrey said, you know, it would be great if you took the Rob Ford shenanigans.

And I think he was the one who linked it to the whole Alfred Jarry, Oubu Roy, Oubu the King, Oubu Rex concept. I think the origin was with him, which is rare, because so often, when people know that you write, they will come to you. I’ve got a great idea.

I’ve got a great idea for a play. It actually does happen quite frequently. And I really appreciate it.

But that one really stuck with me. And as the Ford shenanigans, the Rob Ford shenanigans, and also Doug Ford, for that matter, became more and more pronounced, I kept thinking about Steve McCaffrey. And I think it’s because that was the genesis of it, this concept of taking what is really the biggest flop in history, but a deliberate flop, Oubu Roy, in the late 19th century, right at the turn of the century, when Alfred Jarry wrote this play where he almost deliberately sabotaged his own play so that people would riot, to combine the spirit of that play with a play, quote unquote, about Rob Ford, but really just about the spirit of political brazenness and stupidity and insensitivity.

When those two came together, somehow bringing music into play with that just seemed like a natural fit. Music allowed Oubu Meir to become even more extreme than the writing was. So it allowed it to just blow everything up and come out really strongly.

Of course, you need great musical theatre actors like Astrid Van Weeren, like Michael Dufay, like Richard Hart. Sure, you need that for sure. And you need strong music.

But there’s something about music, no matter what, that can just let you take it to the next level. So that’s what happened with Oubu Meir. And the experience was such a positive one that I couldn’t let the music go after that.

I’ve had to hold on to it. And again, someone like Balanchine, I remember hearing him talking about how he could never work with canned music. He always needed orchestration there.

He always needed live music. We’re in an era now where people can listen to this podcast while they’re walking on the street, while they’re sitting at home, while they’re in the bath, wherever. But let’s face it, live experience is something that we all, is maybe the last thing that we need to experience in person.

And for all the incredible recordings that are out there, live music is really special. There is nothing like it. And I’ve seen musicals that use a canned orchestra.

I remember watching Evil Dead the musical and realizing, oh, there’s nobody conducting, there’s no live music, it’s just a recording. And actually watching actors kind of struggle with the music because there’s nobody conducting. So there’s nobody who can go and all together now you have to be ready to go.

And also, I think it affects the audience because the audience knows that it’s not live. We’re used to recorded things, something happening in there. That’s why theatre and live performance pops so much.

And not having a live orchestra or any live music really sort of affects us, I think, or we see a lack there. I totally agree with that. And with live music, to put it however touchy feely that this may be, there’s just more vibration in the air.

There’s also the benefit of being able to change it up a little bit. Maybe we want to just pick that up a little bit tonight. When you’re working with canned music, which I’ve never done, and I just can’t imagine doing it, you are really beholden to that tempo as well.

So what if everyone’s cooking a little faster that night and we want to just get moving? There’s no room for that. There’s no room for… Yeah. So there’s no comparison.

And what would it be? It would be the Victorian notion, Walter Pater notion of all great artists aspires to the condition of music. And I think all great music aspires to the condition of live performance. And to see… I come back to a great piano player like McCoy Tyner.

To see McCoy live is an extraordinary experience. And part of it is not just the vibration in the air. It’s also knowing that you are there in that moment with him as he is generating that.

And you can follow him as he’s moving. So this is one of the great actors, great performers, and we have a terrific cast in this play, Music, Music, Life, Death, Music. We have actors who are able to make it fresh every time.

That is one of the difficult tricks of theatre. How do you do that? How can you be, as I now am just thinking through my line, as I’m having this conversation with you, coming up with the responses, the thoughts on the spot? There’s a freshness to that action. How do you maintain that action in the theatre when you’ve rehearsed it however many times? And that’s a big, big trick.

The beauty here, we have a little advantage in the way that we are working with our music. And that is that often in the musical, and with Ubu Mer, this was the case too. I felt like the band was strong.

The band was great. We had Jeff Hallastrick on the drums, Tyler Imone on the bass. I played the piano.

We were solid. But we really became such a well-oiled machine that we kind of got locked in to this is how we do it. And yes, we kept it fresh to a degree each night.

But what I’ve done with Music, Music, Life, Death, Music is given some space in several songs for the band to improvise. So we have Linneculus on drums. We have Joshua SkyEngle on guitar.

We have Tyler on bass. I’m playing the Fender Rhodes. So I would say it’s mostly Tyler on bass and Josh on guitar who are going to step forward, improvise, and give a little space.

What action is happening on stage? I haven’t quite staged it. We’ll see. But I wanted to build some space for the band to loosen up a little bit, to improvise, and to try to find something that only will happen on that evening.

Sure. I mean, one of the magic things about theatre is that it’s never going to be exactly that ever, ever, ever again. Years ago, I worked with a company that was, we were developing a performance style of doing silent film on stage.

And that was, we were creating plays in the style of silent film. And our initial vision was that we would play, we would do whatever we were doing with recorded music until we managed to find a brilliant pianist who came in. And as soon as we were working with the pianist, it was like magic because it was a conversation back and forth.

So I can definitely see how building in those conversations into this piece is an important way of making it fresh. Yes. Yes.

And I have not done that much with text. The text at this point, we’ll see. There will be a few little changes along the way, but for the most part, we’re all pretty confident having done our table work that the text is going to stand as it is.

Maybe a couple of moments that are improvised in terms of dialogue, but I’m really just talking about less than a handful. Whereas in the music, we are going to have several minutes minimum where we just open the band up a little more. So I’m excited to pursue that, explore that, and see what comes with that.

It’s not something that you would necessarily want to do with the spoken text because not every brilliant actor’s forte is improvising. Not everybody can do it. And so a lot of actors really need their text to be really strong.

And if you deviate, people can get lost. Yeah. Yeah.

That makes a lot of sense. So how long have you been rehearsing this as we record this? About a week-ish. Yeah.

And how much rehearsal time have you built in for yourselves? We rehearse for roughly a month, and then we are going to run May 25th to June 10th, so about two and a half weeks here at the Extra Space. Yeah. And do you, are you feeling, like you’re basically just at the start of your rehearsal process, and so you’re learning a lot about the play.

Yeah. Is there been anything in particular that has surprised you that you’ve learned so far? I think what’s surprised me is not so much the text. What has really surprised me is that this cast, these four cast members get along like a house on fire.

Now, Jennifer Villaverde and Richard Hart had worked together before. They were in a production of Merchant of Venice about a decade or even more ago. Tova and Richard Hart and I have worked together for over a decade.

Teresa Tova has not worked with any of them or with me. Same thing with Sierra Holder, who just graduated a week before we started rehearsing. She graduated from Sheridan College, so she certainly not worked with any of us.

Maybe it’s that so much of the opening of this play is built around this couple, and the couple is played by Richard and Jennifer, that no ice needed to be broken for the couple. To do a, let’s call it a love scene, as the first scene of your play, it’s enormously helpful when the two actors know each other, trust each other, and respect each other, and get along so well. Maybe that is the biggest surprise for me and a huge help and a huge relief too, because to get to that point where you can be lovers on stage, I would think if you didn’t know the other person would take some time.

So that’s been a big, I think, head start and a kind of fortunate moment. I had no idea when I cast them that they had a history of working together. It’s funny because every actor, when you have to play lovers with somebody, you can get there, but if you’ve worked with somebody before, you already have a certain level of comfort, which definitely helps.

Well, Jennifer put it to me the other day. She says, it helps when you know the person. I know that that’s an obvious statement, but it was good to know because I was really impressed with how well they clicked.

Yeah. I mean, the thing is that it seems like an obvious statement, but I think it’s not necessarily because a lot of people, they think, oh, they’re actors. They just get them in the room and it’ll work, but it doesn’t work that way.

You don’t immediately have comfort with somebody. I think that’s simple human nature. No matter how good an actor you are, you can’t create or fabricate on day one of rehearsal, an entire history with someone.

All the good times, bad times, frustrating times, whatever your history is, you cannot create that in one fell swoop. Now, thankfully, Jennifer and Richard have a very positive history because could you imagine if it had been the opposite? Yeah. We worked together a decade ago and we hated each other.

Okay. Scene one, you’re lovers. Good luck.

That probably wouldn’t have gone quite so well. They wouldn’t have had the chemistry that you were quite looking forward and might’ve changed how the scene initially played. Yeah.

Yeah. But I mean, this is an industry where people have good experiences and bad experiences and you work with people again and again, and occasionally that’s a thing that can happen. In terms of the things that you’re exploring, because like you said, you’re a weekend and there are things you’re still learning about the play.

Are there things that you know going, like before you start rehearsal, were there things that you know that you needed to learn? Yeah. Going in, there are a lot of questions in the text. There are a few things.

Let me talk about one that’s kind of on a very basic level. When I wrote Music, Music, Life, Death, Music, as with a number of plays I’ve written recently, there’s hardly one stage direction in the entire text. So on a very basic level, I’m really curious to know where people go, how they move, what the space is like.

Jackie Chow, the set designer is obviously a humongous help with that. But I don’t really picture what is going to happen. Some people think more visually than I do, I think more sonically.

The whole musical angle that I have makes sense. But when Jackie comes up with a set, I’m really just wide open. I’m wide open to whatever kind of, let’s call it, visual appearance is going to unfold.

So that’s one on a very basic level, no stage directions, no set, hardly any, I should say, indication of how people move through the space and what the space physically looks like, its appearances. So I’m very curious about that. And the other thing is, I’m really curious to see what these lines, not just how they sound, but more importantly for a play, what they do to each other, what they do to the person who’s saying them and what they do with that to the other person.

So I’m watching that very closely. The beauty is that I wrote this in the summer, I revised it and found my final draft sometime in the fall. So it’s been roughly half a year.

We’re now in the spring of 18. So we’re talking about fall of 17. I put it away.

I didn’t look at it. I read with it when we were auditioning and meeting and what have you, a couple of short moments, but I have done my very best to ignore it and to forget about it so that when I’ve come in, I’m coming fresh. So when you ask, what are you curious to learn? I’m curious to learn everything, right? What’s happening here? What are their relationships? What are they doing to each other? What do they look like? And how do they move through the space? And how does that influence me as someone who is viewing? So a lot of it, as strange as this may sound, I’ve developed a kind of convenient amnesia and I’m coming at it pretty fresh.

Do you find that putting it away like that has allowed you to approach directing it without being precious about it? Yes. You’ve got enough distance from it that it’s not your baby anymore. It’s not a thing that you wrote.

Absolutely. Yes, you said it. And if at any point anyone wants to change a line, rewrite, there’s no me there anymore.

It’s just what works best for the scene, what works best for this moment. And I think that it really only took about an hour or two of all of us being together. Richard Hart knows this because we’ve worked together for so long, but for the other three actors, Sierra, Teresa, and Jennifer, we very quickly came to this understanding of whatever you need to do, if you need to do something to the text, go for it.

And I have no problem with that. I have no issue with that because really the writer’s long gone now. Let’s make this play breathe.

Let’s make these scenes dynamic. Is putting something away for a long time something you had to learn how to do? Because some people will finish their play and they’re immediately like, oh, now let’s put it on. Let’s do it right now.

And they don’t give themselves any distance. I’ve done both, and I think both are a great way to approach. It totally depends on the kind of play.

Something like Ubu Meir, you write it, the municipal elections are coming up, let’s go. We better roll really quickly. So that’s timely, that’s political satire, and we better keep with the times because the times move very, very quickly.

And we want to respond to this moment now. This moment is going to pass. So that would be an example of a play that from the moment I finished it, we just jumped right in.

And maybe that makes for a less quote unquote perfect play, but what it lacks in perfection, it makes up for in liveliness, in spontaneity. So I think that there really are those, to put it very basically, if you have to choose between those two approaches, putting on a play right away, even before the ink is dry, versus giving it time, I think it completely depends on what your approach is. And coming back again to improvising, I’ve seen scenes improvised that blew my mind that were fabricated, right? And if people didn’t have the guts slash stupidity to just go out there and go for it, those wouldn’t have happened.

So I think that one of the things that I think would be great for a lot of us in general is just to have a lot of permission to suck out there, because you have to do a lot of sucking before you can find or amid all the sucking, there can also be some greatness that happens. So if we just kind of try to make it perfect or too perfect, maybe it’ll be dead on arrival. We’re not really good at allowing ourselves to suck in this industry.

And maybe we can talk about it, but the industry is not forgiving and doesn’t really allow the suckage that it really should. We should be able to go into something like the Fringe Festival and have something that’s half-formed and almost monstrous, and we’ll figure it out during performance. But we tend to go into something like Fringe and people are like, well, it just seems half-formed.

And you’re like, but that’s the point. It’s supposed to be my chance to experiment, but we’re not good with that. Yeah.

Now, I don’t know if the best headline for this podcast is C-Link allows himself to suck, because we definitely, having said all that, we definitely are going to work hard at this. But let’s face it, these early days of rehearsals, that’s actually one of the mantras that we all have here. Okay, let’s just allow ourselves to suck.

Let’s see what happens. Let’s just be bold about it. But that’s something that’s sort of important in rehearsal.

And a lot of times we forget about that as actors. We want to come in on a first day and be brilliant, and we don’t want to… Yeah, yeah. So I’m glad you mentioned that.

I’m glad you mentioned that, because one of the first things I told this cast, and I’ve told prior cast too, is I’m not coming in with any preloaded ideas of how this is going to unfold. So I recommend the same for you. Let it happen here.

All of the most brilliant ideas that any of us had outside of the rehearsal hall paled in comparison to the worst ones we had in the live moment of rehearsing. So this is a collective creation. This has to happen here.

It’s not to say that we don’t do our homework, and we don’t review our harmonies, and we review our parts. And for me, in this case, playing the piano, I have to practice my piece. Of course, we have to learn our lines.

Sure. But do you want a fully formed character, a fully formed song before you’ve come in and tried it in the context? Absolutely not. It has to happen here.

Yeah, if you have that right off the top, and you still have three, four weeks of rehearsal, it gets tired. That thing that you did at the beginning is now tired at the end. So it’s better to come in with nothing and develop it over time, and that way it doesn’t become tired.

You don’t peak too soon, which I’ve been in productions where we peak too soon, and then we’re like, shit, what are we doing now? And I think we’ve all been through that. Yeah, the play is… So you open on May 25th. You’re at the Terragon Express Space.

Yes, indeed. And is there anything that you would want an audience to know coming in? Maybe the one thing I want to be sure I get in here is just a shout out to everyone who’s involved in this production. It’s phenomenal.

You don’t mind if I just… I need to credit everyone who’s involved, because it’s such a phenomenal team, and they are the play. So we’ve got Richard Hart, Sierra Holder, Teresa Tova, Jennifer Villaverde, phenomenal cast. We’ve got a wonderful band.

I’m very excited to play with Tyler Iman on bass, who’s also the music director, Joshua Skye Angle on guitar, Lynette Gillis on drums. I’m playing the piano, Slash Vendor Road’s electric piano. And then we’ve got Jackie Chow doing sets and costumes, which we’ve been working together, I think now for over a decade, doing One Little Go Theatre Company productions.

Laird McDonald, also about a decade of us working together, lighting designer. Laura Baxter’s our stage manager, Ashley Bell, our publicist, Annie McKay, assistant producer, and the wonderful Derek Chua, who it seems like absolutely everyone knows, executive producer. So I’m really, really happy to be working with this great group.

And I think the positive energy of everyone coming together to work on a play that is, as scandalous as this may sound, fundamentally joyous, despite the death in the title, or maybe simply because of knowing how finite our days are here. And because of that specter, knowing full well, it’s not a matter if we die, it’s a matter of when we die. And that is even a song that is sung in this play, whose refrain is, when I die, what will you do with da-da-da-da-da? And I think knowing that there is a real celebration of embracing of exploration of life that pulses through this play with a lot of music to boot.

So I think that’s something that people know that coming in. I’m delighted for them to come in and share that experience with us at the Terragon Extra Space. Awesome.

That’s as good a place as any to end. Thank you so much. Thank you so much.

This has been a Homebody Productions production.