This week on the podcast, host Phil Rickaby talks to writer, actor, and friend of the podcast, Ryan M. Sero. We’re taking an in-depth look into his upcoming production, Best Bard Bits, and peeling back the curtain on his one-man show. Listen in as we navigate the challenges of writing for theatre, from staging combat scenes to making a silent character intriguing, and the pressure of creating an unforgettable experience for the audience.
Immerse yourself in the artistry of live theatre as we explore the relationship between the performer and the audience, and how breaking the fourth wall transforms the viewer’s journey. Ryan reveals his knack for creating scenes of chaos through the smallest of moments and how Best Bard Bits is the embodiment of this talent. We’ll also dive into the importance of supporting independent creators, and the crucial role experts play when firearms are used onstage.
In this enlightening episode, we’ll also address the creative and logistical challenges Ryan faced when producing his one-man show. Hear about his unique concept of being buried alive on stage and the suspense it created for the audience. We’ll also discuss the magic of live theatre, the power of theatre experiences, and how to market them effectively.
Bio
Primarily a writer and actor, Ryan M. Sero is always seeking ways to be creative and to help others create, too. Since graduating from Redeemer University in 2008, he has worked in the arts primarily in Hamilton, but has found his way almost across Canada, and a little bit into the US.
He co-founded Make Art Theatre in 2010 and became the sole artistic director in 2014, using his position to further the voices of Hamilton’s theatre community. One of his most satisfying achievements has been to bring live theatre to the Supercrawl Festival.
Ryan is a member of the Mohawk tribe, as well as having Scottish ancestry.
Best Bard Bits
Sept. 22 & 7PM
Gage Park, NW corner, Hamilton, ON
Tickets are Pay What Its Worth at the park.
Support Stageworthy
Donate: tips.pinecast.com/jar/stageworthy
Transcript
Transcript auto generated.Â
0:00:04 – Phil Rickaby
I’m Phil Rickaby and I’ve been a writer and performer for almost 30 years, but I’ve realized that I don’t really know as much as I should about the theater scene outside of my particular Toronto bubble. Now I’m on a quest to learn as much as I can about the theater scene across Canada. So join me as I talk with mainstream theater creators you may have heard of and indie artists you really should know, as we find out just what it takes to be Stageworthy. If you value the work that I do on Stageworthy, please consider leaving a donation, either as a one-time thing or on a recurring monthly basis. Stageworthy is created entirely by me and I give it to you free of charge, with no advertising or other sponsored messages. Your continuing support helps me to cover the cost of producing and distributing the show. Just four people donating $5 a month would help me cover the cost of podcast hosting alone. Help me continue to bring you this podcast. You can find a link to donate in the show notes, which you can find in your podcast app or at the website at Stageworthyca. Now onto the show.
Ryan Sero is a writer and actor based in the Hamilton area. He joined me to talk about his upcoming production Best Barred Bits on for one night only, on September the 22nd, at Gage Park in Hamilton. In this conversation we talk about how Best Barred Bits is more than just a Shakespeare review, how he was once partially buried alive as part of a site-specific theater project, how Monty Python’s Flying Circus may have been what first made him love Shakespeare, and much more. Here’s our conversation. I have so many tabs open in any given time that I also have programs for saving things that I might want to have open later, so they don’t have to be open now. That’s how bad it is. It’s a strange addiction.
0:02:39 – Ryan M. Sero
I think everybody does that. There was a bit of a fib when I said I have a few tabs open. I have many tabs open. They are all things that it’s like I’m going to get to that.
0:02:48 – Phil Rickaby
Yes, that’s the problem with tabs and, of course, if you’re in the process of writing something, there’s all of the tabs that are things that you’re referencing for all of the things that you’re working on and you can’t close them. What if you forget?
0:03:01 – Ryan M. Sero
about them. I’m using those that’s right. I was actually in a writing session earlier today and I was pretty good about that actually, so I had opened a couple of tabs I had to reference. It was like a Christmas show, right, I was doing a rewrite on a Christmas show that a friend of mine had hired me to do. He’d originally hired me to give him some notes and I gave him the notes and he was like do you want to do the rewrite?
0:03:33 – Phil Rickaby
I’ll pay you extra money.
0:03:35 – Ryan M. Sero
And that was the magic words, and so I was doing the rewrite and working on it this morning. I mean, I’ve been working on it for a couple of weeks, but I was working on it this morning and I had these tabs open. It’s a Christmas show and so I’m having the angel character reference Bible verses and I was like I mostly remember what that verse is talking about, but perhaps I should bring up the actual words and get it right, because I feel like the angel might remember that.
0:04:04 – Phil Rickaby
Yeah, no, it’s bad when you think you remember something and you write it and then somebody’s like actually, yeah, yeah.
0:04:15 – Ryan M. Sero
And I am 100% that guy, if I get the inkling that anything like that is off, is that really, was that when that battle was fought, when that, you know, just whatever it is.
The one that I’m very pedantic about and that I make fun of. All the time there have been like. There’s like one theater show that I can think of off the top of my head that I’ve seen where two factors happened. One they used firearms and two they got them right. I cannot tell you Now. I don’t think I’ve seen anything at like a Shaw Stratford kind of level where I feel like they probably had firearms. Experts come in and tell them how to do stuff.
So I can’t recall seeing anything there with firearms. I’ve seen several at like fringe festivals or things like that, and this is going to be a surprise to everybody. But the Venn diagram of people who know about firearms and people who make independent theater shows that is not. That. Looks like goggles staring at you. Right, there is no overlap on that.
0:05:28 – Phil Rickaby
Venn diagram. It’s rough the whole. You know, when you’re writing something, you’re thinking like I know enough about this, and then you’re like putting it on the stage and you’re like it’s fringe and we don’t have any money. And then you’re like you do something and anybody who knows anything about the topic that you’re doing like drugs, or drugs like guns, swords, things like that there’s always somebody who’s like nope Well the sword people are.
0:06:01 – Ryan M. Sero
ironically, I think the sword thing on stage is a bit of a double edge, because if you get it right it probably won’t look good on stage, and so there are certain things. I’ve actually done a bit of exploration on YouTube but watching these HEMA it stands for historical European martial arts and they do. They study like ancient medieval sword manuals and figure out how to actually fence like a knight. And when you see enough of those videos it kind of messes with your brain the next time you see a stage combat thing, because they are not the same thing. It’s like real martial arts and then stage fighting.
It’s not the same thing, because you’re never actually trying to hit anybody. It’s too slow, it doesn’t work right. There’s a flurry of moves on stage or on screen because you want to see this exciting martial arts demonstration, but that’s not what it really looks like. It really looks like people kind of feeling out each other’s guards and then one guy pummeling the other guy in the head.
0:07:09 – Phil Rickaby
Yeah, doesn’t really look like anything you actually want to watch. That’s not dramatic, and that’s the difference. And my friends who are, you know, fight choreographers, they will talk about that because you know they’ve studied the actual. You know what it actually looks like. And then you they’re like yeah, it looks like this, this is what an actual sword fight would look like. And they show you and they’re like but that’s boring, yeah.
0:07:35 – Ryan M. Sero
A lot of people make fun of the fight between Obi-Wan Kenobi and Darth Vader in the first well, okay, the fourth Star Wars movie, depending on how you want to count it in a new hope and they say, oh, it’s these slow old guys barely able to move, and some of that is practical because they couldn’t actually smash these light bulbs together. But if you watch I did at some point, just completely independent of anything Star Wars, I just wanted to see what a real Kendo match looked like and I looked one of those up and I watched a bunch of Kendo masters fighting. It’s really close to the way that that duel actually goes.
They almost like tap the swords together a few times, Like they’re very, very much like slowly feeling the other one’s defenses out before there’s a couple of quick cuts and then they’ll back off again and it looks very, very similar to what they wound up doing in the New Hope duel and that’s one of those things where, like, I can kind of watch it now and go. That looks like what real Kendo masters look like. So it doesn’t look slow to me anymore.
0:08:38 – Phil Rickaby
But if you don’t know that it does, well it’s also. I mean, it’s very different from what they did in subsequent films. So it does really stand out.
0:08:49 – Ryan M. Sero
Yeah, and that’s totally on the subsequent films. And again, there were physical limitations. If they could have swung them faster, they probably would have Well first off.
0:08:58 – Phil Rickaby
I mean Alaganus was old and the other guy couldn’t see, he couldn’t see.
0:09:02 – Ryan M. Sero
yeah, so there’s all kinds of things that were coming up against them in terms of that.
But of course what makes it work is that it’s the story, which is what we’re getting at, which is when you use the fight choreography to tell a story and to reveal character and to have a moment on screen or on stage. That’s what makes it exciting to watch. It’s not actually whether or not it’s good Kendo, or whether or not it’s good fencing, or whether or not it looks cool. It’s all about whether or not it serves the story, which is why, to me, sword fights like Wesley versus Inigo are going to be some of the best.
0:09:38 – Phil Rickaby
It tells you everything and that’s why that’s such a brilliant sword fight and why they shot it last. I didn’t know they did. They did. It was one of the last things they shot because they were learning it and learning how to look like they knew what they were doing. For the entirety of the filming process they would have like training in the morning or like first thing or at some point during the day, and they would go and they would run the fight and then they would go and they’d film their other stuff. So by the time they actually got to it they looked like swordsmen.
0:10:11 – Ryan M. Sero
Yeah, that’s amazing. That’s really cool. I didn’t know any of that. I looked up at some point what are the most accurate, not just the best sword fights, but what are the most accurate sword fights on screen? And most sword fighting guys seem to think that it’s the duelists, which is a movie from, I want to say, the 70s it’s got to be the 70s by Ridley Scott. It’s one of his earlier films. I think it’s Pre-Alien, which would de facto make it the 70s. It’s Keith Kerrardine, I think, and Harvey Keitel. They fight a series of duels through a movie called Duelists. In case you were worried about that, they apparently get the sword fighting very, very accurate to what they should be doing.
0:11:13 – Phil Rickaby
Let’s jump in to talk about. Just before we digress to the point of no return, we don’t end up talking about the things that we’re supposed to talk about. I want to talk about Best Bard Bids, which sounds like a great time. Could you describe this show to me?
0:11:32 – Ryan M. Sero
Yeah, best Bard Bids is. The concept is that you’re sitting down to watch four people who are going to basically do a review of Shakespeare’s greatest hits, if you will. They come out and they introduce the show and they say we’re going to do scenes from Hamlet and we’re going to do scenes from the Beths and Romeo and Juliet. One of them, mike, comes flying in and goes Ann, symboline. The other three go no, shut up, mike, shut up. We talked about this. We’re not doing Symboline. Nobody came here to see Symboline. We don’t even know what that is.
The show is about this guy, mike, attempting to upstage the rest of the show and by Machiavellian subterfuge create enough sabotage and chaos that he can sneak bits of Symboline into the show. The other people responding to that, the other characters are in it. I played Kilgore, who is a pompous, egomaniacal, constant leading man type. I typecast myself on that one. And then there’s Jenny, who’s kind of always the leading lady, and then there’s Stacey, who is always the secondary actress, and so of course at some point Mike comes over to her and he’s like you ever notice how Kilgore and Jenny get to be the leads and everything.
0:12:50 – Phil Rickaby
If you use.
0:12:51 – Ryan M. Sero
Symboline with me.
0:12:59 – Phil Rickaby
I mean as far as the average person, the really average person, who doesn’t know Shakespeare at all, doesn’t know that Symboline exists.
0:13:08 – Ryan M. Sero
To them, probably, all that exists is Hamlet, romeo and Juliet and Macbeth and maybe Midsummer Night’s Dream, the ones that they actually want to do, the ones that they’ve seen or whatever the ones they’ve heard of, and even among people who are in the theater, people who know Shakespeare, many people don’t know much about Symboline.
Oh yeah, very little. I had to do a refresher on it. When I sat down to write Best Bard bits, I had seen a film version with Ethan Hawke which is very good, to my recollection, but it had been long enough that I went. I got to go back into it.
0:13:46 – Phil Rickaby
Is it because people don’t know, symboline, that you were like? This is the one that this guy’s going to want to play in?
0:13:52 – Ryan M. Sero
there. There are many plays that we could have picked. We could have picked Two Noble Kinsmen or Mary Wives of Windsor. There’s a lot of ones where people won’t even know the title. Average people who, even people who go to the theater, even people who’ve seen quite a bit of Shakespeare, they might not remember that something like Symboline is there.
Why Symboline happened was because when this show was being developed, I was sitting down with some people who wanted to do some theater, get some more theater stuff going in Norfolk County, and specifically they were interested in Shakespeare. They’d heard through a mutual friend that I did this kind of thing, and so we were just sitting around at a cafe talking about possibilities and one of us said it’d be great to do a review, basically just doing the show without the gag angle. And I said the thing is, I would like to do something where there is a through line, so you’re not just sitting down and watching people go and now a scene from Hamlet and now a scene from Romeo and Juliet and so on. And in further conversation she said that she had been to. I feel like she’d been to England and had seen what the show that happened to be playing at the Globe when she went to see one was Symboline, and so we got talking about that for a little bit, and that’s when it hit me like a thunderbolt out of the blue.
Okay, here’s the through line and I pitched them this idea about Mike trying to sabotage things. I don’t remember if I called him Mike at the time, but just said there’s going to be these four people and one of them is going to try to sabotage it and he’ll be pushing Symboline because we were talking about. She was saying it was a good show, she enjoyed it, but she’d never heard of it. Nobody knows what this is. I thought that’s funny. The idea that there’s somebody out there who’s just obsessed with this show, wants it to happen, is going to push it on everybody else, and there’s just great comedy there to be had in any kind of awkward tension like that, a great drama or a great comedy out of it. And so that’s how it started.
0:15:51 – Phil Rickaby
I mean right from the start. I mean there’s comedy in the fact that somebody is obsessed with Symboline, because who is obsessed with Symboline, of all things?
0:16:03 – Ryan M. Sero
Yes, and his name is Mike and he’s in this play. I think that’s it. That’s the character name. The actor is Carlos Jimenez and I kind of wrote it hoping that Carlos would take the part. That was true of all the parts. Annalie Flint plays Jenny and Liz Buchanan plays Stacy, and these are people that I’ve known for a while and when you’re crafting the script you’re kind of going this person is going to have a lot of fun with that and I think they’ll say yes. But boy, I really hope they say yes to being in this show because they’re going to really make something wonderful out of it.
0:16:39 – Phil Rickaby
Right Now. I have to say that there have been reviews of Shakespeare. People do those and it is literally like and here’s a scene from such and such, which I guess if you really love Shakespeare you would go to see that, or if you’re looking for some kind of primer on Shakespeare, like beginning entry. I don’t see them very often, I think it’s only seen them in theater, school and things like that. But giving it a through line and like a comedic idea and throwing some chaos into it, to me that sounds like a lot of fun and what elevates this beyond just a review?
0:17:29 – Ryan M. Sero
Yeah, and that’s what I wanted to do, because I do love Shakespeare and I think that I would probably enjoy. I love it enough that I think I would enjoy watching people do it as just a straight up review. That would probably be fun, assuming it was well acted. I mean, they can go very wrong very quickly, but for me a lot of it comes back, weirdly enough, to my obsession, slash interest, slash respect for Monty Python, and one of the reasons I think Python works, where a lot of other sketch comedy shows I’ve seen haven’t worked, is that Python always had that through line. It’s anarchic but it.
Python flows, the way a conversation flows, the way that we went from sword fighting to best barbed bits. The way that trains of thought go, where you’re thinking about one thing and, oh, here comes another. The way that a Wikipedia rabbit trail goes although I guarantee you that they weren’t thinking about Wikipedia back when they first developed the Flying Circus but there was a logic. It was a chaotic logic, but there was a reason. The way that it loops around and to me that’s what sets it apart. And there’s this glue with Terry Gilliam’s animations and things like that, and it’s something that I’ve thought about, where every now and then I go, do I want to try and put together a group of people and do some sketch comedy? And every now and then I think, yeah, I’ve never actually done it yet.
And one of the things that it’s not necessarily holding me back, but one of the things that goes through my mind every time I think about it is okay, but what’s the thing? It’s the thing that’s going to stick this together and to me that was as soon as I was talking to these people and Joy was her and she said what about a Shakespeare review? The first thing that popped into my head was okay, but what’s holding it together? Because you’re going to kill your momentum If you just go from one scene to another, just introducing it, and then thank you for your applause and here’s the next scene. It kind of kills the momentum between the thing. But if you’re waiting to see how Mike is going to disrupt this one or how angry is he going to make Kilgore now, that creates an added level of tension that’s going to hold between the scenes and even during some of the introduction things, because you do have to throw that to the audience as well. You can’t count on everybody knowing the exact circumstances in which Friends, romans countrymen, is delivered.
0:19:54 – Phil Rickaby
Right.
0:19:55 – Ryan M. Sero
It’s a much better monologue if you realize that this monologue is delivered not just as a eulogy to Julius Caesar, but also that he is trying to win over the people to his side. And also very important, I think that if he fails at this, mark Antony will be torn to pieces by an angry mob of people who hate him, because Brutus and the others have created this story where and I think some of the fun of Julius Caesar the play is picking whether which story is actually the true story. But they’ve at least created a narrative where Caesar was bad and his allies are bad, and so the mob are kind of out for blood, and if Antony cannot swing them with this speech, he might be dead, literally dead, and you have to give that to an audience because not everybody’s going to remember that or have ever known it. To begin, with Right.
0:20:49 – Phil Rickaby
Yes, yes, yeah, because I think sometimes people think they know things about Shakespeare and then that sort of falls apart as soon as you jump into a scene in the middle of the play and then they’re like wait, who’s that? Why do they care about this? What’s going on?
0:21:04 – Ryan M. Sero
Yes, why is there poison? There’s always poison. There’s almost always cross-dressing. A remarkable number of times does it come up in Shakespeare that somebody goes how am I going to get together with the love of my life? Yes, I know, I’m going to pretend to be dead. And then, when they come to get me, in two plays they use a fake potion, a fake poison, to create a comatose state. Much ado about nothing. And Romeo and Juliet both use it to create a romantic response in somebody. I don’t know what was going on, elizabeth in England, but… I mean, they had an odd notion of how love potions work.
0:21:50 – Phil Rickaby
I mean, there’s also Mid-Summer Night’s Dream where there’s all kinds of like stuff being dripped into people’s eyes yes, make them fall in love.
0:22:01 – Ryan M. Sero
Yeah, one of them never gets out of it, that’s true.
0:22:06 – Phil Rickaby
That’s true.
Demetrius Remains hypnotized at the end of that show you know, that’s one of the things that I think we don’t deal with very often is you have a situation when in that play, the fairies are like you know what, we’re gonna fuck with these people. And you know what? Even bottom gets his real head back. He doesn’t get the head of a donkey forever, and all the lovers they get, they get adjusted, so they’re back to the person that they’re supposed to be in love with, except except for Demetrius. Except for Demetrius, who’s still like. They’re still like. Well, I guess you know we think that you should be in love with this person.
0:22:37 – Ryan M. Sero
So boom, there you go boy be really convenient if you were still in love with her. So, yeah, I, we’re gonna do that. I I love imagining Shakespeare writing this play and then coming to the Cast, that that he’s assembling the parts and they go. What have you got for us today? Well, it goes. You’re never gonna leave this. I’ve got this great play it’s I call it character bottom and I give him a donkey head. His name’s bottom, you guys bottom, and I think that’s another. There’s so many kind of Misconceptions we have about Shakespeare. It’s amazing how many people still don’t realize how fun he is and how kind of stupid like that he can be. I mean, we think of him as the, as the Bard, as this poet supreme, as this incredibly high art. But if you read a comedy of errors she’s got range.
0:23:40 – Phil Rickaby
You know, I think I really blame it on the, on the Victorians, for for taking the fun out of here because they were the ones who are like they were, like this is literature and we’re still dealing with that today and people don’t know how fun it is.
I mean, yeah, midsummer night’s dream, I call it a gimme like. There are so many chances in that show To like make the audience have a great time and fall in love with the show. Yeah, if you fail all the way up to the end, you still got the play within the play and that is almost impossible to fuck up almost. Yeah, you could like if you were, if they were like you know about this play. If you do that right, you’ve got a good show.
0:24:19 – Ryan M. Sero
So yeah, yeah, that’s actually the, the Introductory monologue to that is one of my favorite monologues. Yeah, the the. I don’t remember it, I don’t have it memorized. I used to. I did it for an acting group. We kind of it was called the actors forge, and we used to get together to. It was kind of like a class with no teacher. You just kind of learned from each other and it was really cool. And so a couple of times we would do some Shakespeare stuff and I, for one of them I brought in the that monologue Can’t even I can’t even keep the rude mechanicals names straight, but the director the director I want to quence.
Yeah, and the way that I approached the monologue Was that he was just sweating the field like just Just couldn’t, because he’s standing in front of the king of Athens and his queen, theses and Hippolyta by the way, we literally mythological characters yes, right, be the queen of the Amazons, and the guy that killed the minotaur, no. And so he’s standing up there and he’s about to present their little weird play and he’s just he can’t remember what’s going on. I had a. One of the gags that I came up with was that I I was clasping my hands the whole time and at some point I would slowly unfold them and Deliberately check them for lines that I’d clearly written down on my hands because I couldn’t remember them in front of Theseus and Apollo. And that was the way that I played.
I had a wonderful time Doing it that way and and if I ever did the mid-summer again, I would I would probably want to play Peter quence at least, if not doubling up with something, but I want to play Peter quence just so I could do that bit, because I think that that’s really. I really had enjoyed that. Not a lot of fun.
0:26:11 – Phil Rickaby
It’s such a good, it’s such a good bit the whole thing.
0:26:13 – Ryan M. Sero
Yeah, good bit, yeah Now there’s nothing quite like competent people pretending to be incompetent.
0:26:19 – Phil Rickaby
For a loud is there I mean, I mean, but see, that’s the difference. Because because in incompetent people pretending to be competent is tedious and terrible oh yes, yeah, it’s awful pretending to be incompetent, because you know the dining Kruger, they don’t know that they’re incompetent, but the, the competent people playing like completing competency is is always yeah, although.
0:26:40 – Ryan M. Sero
I’ve long said at fringe festivals that the best shows are the best, second best show the worst shows. There is Kind of a crazy I don’t know if it’s shot in Florida or just, or what it is, but there’s something about watching somebody just gum up everything Not deliberately, hmm where you just kind of Especially if you see it with a friend and you can go to a cafe later Like what was that?
0:27:07 – Phil Rickaby
Sometimes it’s just too painful, sometimes it’s yeah, sometimes it is sometimes.
0:27:11 – Ryan M. Sero
It’s so the. The worst shows, in my opinion, are the ones where they kind of were there, but they were just very boring Do you know what I mean. Like there wasn’t really anything to latch on to yeah, For sure yeah and those ones you kind of go. That was fine. To me that’s the worst is if you go because it didn’t leave you with anything.
0:27:31 – Phil Rickaby
You have nothing to take away.
Yeah, now, no, we’ve, we have, it’s been, it’s been like I said, it’s been a while since we had the chance to talk. Yeah, and I want to. I want to talk about, about your, your, your theater, your passion for theater, because you’ve done, you know, you’ve done, you’ve done Shakespeare, you produced your we last time we talked I think we’re talking about Richard the third- yeah, and at that time we probably would have been, because I I was doing Richard the third At the same time that I was putting on the first one-man show I’d ever written and or performed.
0:28:07 – Ryan M. Sero
Right, and it was a wonderful experience in many ways and I’m super glad that I stuck it out with both of them. But there were points when I was trying to memorize Richard Dialogue and then immediately switch over to memorize my one-man show dialogue, and so that was, you know, 70 minutes of me talking to myself. We had a couple pre-recorded bits, but it was a 70 minute show and it was it’s a one-man show, so it was mostly me and then Richard doesn’t shut up in Richard the third, even in the cut, trimmed, truncated version that I’d I’d put together. And there were points, like one in the morning when I was trying to jam all this stuff into my head and I’m like what was I thinking?
Oh Went through my head going, this would be a great idea and I had a blast and I’m glad I again, I’m glad I stuck with it because I love Richard, it’s he’s my favorite part in Shakespeare to play and and I loved doing the one-man show, but it was, it was rough for a while. Anyways, I I waylate us again.
0:29:06 – Phil Rickaby
No, that’s fine, I’ve Conversation the. The thing about think about a one-person show having done a couple. Yeah, and the thing that I think a lot of people don’t realize and tell me if you found this Some it. You think that, especially the first time, it’s gonna be so easy to learn those lines Because you wrote it right. Yeah, how hard can it be. You wrote it and then you get down to it You’re like who wrote this? Why can’t I remember it? It’s a different part of the brain.
0:29:35 – Ryan M. Sero
Yeah, I do. I do find my stuff easier to memorize than other people’s stuff because it has a natural flow to me. But easier does not make it easy, no, and I I’m very proud of this. I used to have what I would call fights between writer Ryan and actor Ryan while I was getting ready for Kuther, and Actor Ryan would basically come to writer Ryan and go you know, if you cut a bunch of this, I don’t have to memorize it, and writer Ryan would invariably reply just learn your lines.
0:30:12 – Phil Rickaby
Yes.
0:30:13 – Ryan M. Sero
Yeah, and I’m proud of that, because I never sacrificed the quality of the show, the quality of the writing, for the convenience, and so I never went. I never did actually say I’m just gonna trim this paragraph, I can’t memorize it were, and so to me that was putting the work first. The writing came first, which to me that’s the, the bedrock of the show. If the script stinks, you you can elevate scripts, but you can’t save bad ones completely. Yeah, I guess, unless you send them up or something like that. But but you can’t really do it and and so to me that’s that’s the core, and I and I not an egomaniac I don’t think that that writers are the Be all, end all, to borrow one of Shakespeare’s coin phrases.
I Don’t think that they’re the most important, but they are the first element. It’s like the first threshold you have to pass over. If you don’t clear that, you’re not gonna. It doesn’t matter how good the actors are, doesn’t matter how great the director is, the designer, that they’re all gonna. If the designers brilliant and your script stinks, you’re gonna be looking at a, at a wonderful looking bore, yeah, and that’s the end of it.
0:31:21 – Phil Rickaby
That’s a fact, and that’s a fact. And some people I, you know, there’s people who like, it can’t be that hard to write a play, and then they Do it and you’re like, and then you watch it and you’re like yeah, well, I.
0:31:32 – Ryan M. Sero
Have seen it a couple of times. Yeah, I’ve seen it a couple of times where somebody’s come in and said I’ve, I have always wanted to write. I’ve heard it once with a play and once with a musical, mm-hmm, and I’ve always wanted to write, whichever one. And I thought it was gonna be really hard and it turns out it was a lot easier than I thought and inevitably those scripts dunk, yeah, as soon as you do the read-through ended. You were like, yeah, that you thought it was easy because you did it wrong. Yeah, yeah, it’s not.
0:32:04 – Phil Rickaby
And you failed at it. One of the best pieces of advice I got as somebody who you know writes and performs my own stuff, yeah was Decide on a date when the writing stops and you are yeah.
And I got that from somebody who hadn’t done that, who had Not turned off their actor brain during Rehearsals and performances, and so they were always tweaking them, always tweaking, always tweaking, even after performances, and they never actually felt like they settled into the show and really sort of like knew this show, and so they were like just decide on a date when the writer is done yeah to that, and then the writer doesn’t come back into the room until the show is over.
0:32:48 – Ryan M. Sero
That is good advice. I didn’t follow it with mine, hmm, and I don’t 100% regret it. Hardly that was, I think, because so Kofir was an interesting journey though, because it started in a group called the. The what are we was that one. That was the junction, and it was designed for performer creators and there.
So I, the first year that that went up at Aquarius, I Was trying to write the first one-man show that I’d ever done and worked on it for a while, and then the junction year was over and I independently emailed Luke Brown, who was running the group, and I said would you mind working on this with me? And he said sure, and then he offered me a slot in Aquarius’s studio series to do the show while we were working on it. So it was a bit of a. I Don’t think of it as a workshop production, but it was a script that was still being Finished and polished, and so I think that’s why it probably wasn’t a problem that I never really turned off the writer. Now I did. I did turn it off once I hit the stage right. Interestingly, we turned it back on on Monday morning and we refined it based on kind of how it had felt in front of an audience.
Right and so we refined it for the next couple of days and then the next weekend. For the second weekend of the run we had an even tighter piece. Hmm and I don’t know if it’s a unique aspect of my psyche I find it easy to turn on and off switches like that right. Right, I think it’s one of the reasons why method acting is never really appealed to me, right? Yeah, because I’m like what, why don’t you just turn it off? I did condescendingly to Daniel Day Lewis. Yeah, I definitely.
0:34:42 – Phil Rickaby
I definitely had to turn off the writer part of my brain, yeah, yeah, cuz I don’t think I could have done. I could have really like been able to really do this show if I hadn’t turned it off, especially also because I knew, because I did, learning lines was not particularly easy for me for something that I wrote as a solo show. So I knew that if I was gonna tweak it and run and try to learn it, it was never gonna happen. So I had to just turn that off like a switch.
0:35:09 – Ryan M. Sero
Yeah, yeah, and I think that that is good advice, and if I ever Come back to the arena of the one-man show, I Probably will try that, because that does sound like a creation method which would be very advantageous.
0:35:27 – Phil Rickaby
Certainly.
0:35:28 – Ryan M. Sero
Yeah.
0:35:28 – Phil Rickaby
Now, speaking of one-man shows, was there? Was there anything in particular that that inspired you, that made you want to write a one-man show, to do this? Was there, cuz I think everybody who, anybody who writes a one-man show, they have. They often are inspired by something else. So, was there a show? Was there something that that made you want to do a man show? Or was just like I haven’t done this before?
0:35:53 – Ryan M. Sero
I think. Well, that was some of. It was kind of the challenge of that and can I do this? Because I’d never tried. So that was certainly some of it.
I think it was partly the nature of the group as well, because it was this thing that, as I said, it was structured for performer creators and I Kind of was thinking of it in those terms. A lot of the other people in the group were kind of working on one person shows as Well, and so I think that that sort of nudged me in that direction. And then, just I didn’t have a super clear idea about what I wanted to write about when I went into the group and after a couple of sessions it sort of emerged that this was something that I was interested in, and as it took shape it kind of shaped itself, I suppose partly because I was going I’d like to try the one-man show thing, but it sort of it didn’t want to break out of that mold either. It was a one-voice operation, hmm. So If if I recall correctly it’s, it was a while ago that I wrote it.
0:37:00 – Phil Rickaby
Yeah, yeah. Um, I want to ask you about a couple of things. I know that at one point In the past you had yourself partially buried alive as part of a theater show. Can you tell me about? Yeah, yeah. First off, what was that show? Why so the?
0:37:18 – Ryan M. Sero
festival was called the Dark Crop Festival. I haven’t checked to see if it’s fired up again post pandemic, but it it ran for, I think, at least three or four years prior to the lockdowns and it was on in Kitchener, and in the corner of Kitchener there’s a suburb, and in the corner of the suburb there was this. I sort of described it as almost like a hobby farm, like they had chickens and a few goats and things like that. It wasn’t acres and acres, to my knowledge, I mean, if it was, maybe it was bigger than I thought, but that seemed to be what they had. And they had an all-night theater festival. It ran from 7 pm To 7 am.
And so when you applied to this thing the first year, I couldn’t do it. I was super busy. But the second year I applied to this thing, and Maybe third year, and so they say what, what hour would you like? Do you want like the seven to ten, the ten to midnight, the midnight? Well, I think I’m thinking to myself I can do a 7 pm Show anywhere. I’m going at midnight, so then. So then you start to think, okay, what am I gonna pitch them? That’s perfect for this site-specific thing. And so they’ve got like a wooded area.
Okay, so the concept that I came up with was a bit inspired by the, the telltale heart, and a bit inspired by by stories of thieves that have had fallings out, and so the story that I came up with was that it starts with these two guys digging a hole and they’re just shooting the breeze. Almost the one guy is kind of monologuing about, he calls it the woo, like just mysterious things that are kind of silly, right. And and the other guy eventually is like hey, did you hear that? What’s going on? And it it becomes clear that he’s a little bit more nervous than his friend huh.
And as the show goes on, they bring over the card, the, the coffin Hmm, I guess it’s more of a casket, it’s a box that has a body in it and it turns out that these guys were thieves and there were three of them and they had a falling out and they killed the other guy. Now they’re burying the evidence and one of them is slowly breaking down and he starts to hear like Right, coming from inside the box and he goes off into the woods to. But he starts hearing that coming from inside the box and then he hears the the dead body, talking to him and then the they get. He goes. He’s still alive in there. We got to get him out. The other guy’s going. You’re crazy, I you know. Let’s just get him in there Into the hole the ground and bury him and they get into a fight and the nervous guy kills the other guy. He breaks open the box. You know he was hearing things. It was a telltale heart situation.
And it was just his nerves and the but he’s. So when he’s pulling the guy out, he’s not alive, he’s, he is in fact dead. And then this guy runs off, terrified, into the woods, hmm, and so somebody had to be in that box. Now, the best part, the best part was I Made them seal me into the box before the audience showed up. So the audience doesn’t know there’s anybody in that box, right? And in fact, the, the guy who ran the festival.
Afterwards, he came over to us laughing he goes when they, he goes. It was so funny, he goes, I didn’t know, you were in there, he goes. And when they were pulling the box over, I thought, boy, they’re doing a really good job of pretending like that’s a heavy box, like there’s a real body in there and so what’s really kind of was cool as a performer. And so they they partially buried me, so they were like throwing dirt on it. At a few points they didn’t get a lot of dirt on there. I mean, it’s a 20 minute show, so there’s only so deep that they can bear, and half of it they’re. They don’t even have the box in the hole. So I wasn’t like Fully in turn or anything like that.
But they were throwing dirt on this box and slowly filling up the earth around it and so when I knocked on the on the inside of the box, even inside of the box, I could feel the energy of the audience shift Because of the, the nervous guy and the and the other guy kind of like Pontificating about random stuff. We actually got a lot of laughs, in addition to a spooky vibe, and I asked a couple of people afterwards Was it funny to you or was it? Was it Spooky? And they said it was both, and I thought that’s perfect anyways. But but when the knocking happened, there was definitely an energy shift. And then when I had my first lines as this hallucinating, hallucinated body like guys, guys, this kind of thing from the audience, I hear somebody go what.
Right, because nobody was in there and even though there was knocking coming from inside the box, that could have been one of the other guys thumping surreptitiously on the side without him noticing. But that confirmed it that there was actually a guy in the box and it freaked him out or thrilled him or something like that. It was really cool. It was a really cool experience, very unique. I would tell people about it too and they’d go oh, that sounds great, because I told people about it. You got to come to the Dark Crop Theatre Festival and see me go on after midnight doing this show, and that’s a hard sell.
Drive up to Kitchener Most of the people that I know are from Hamilton Drive up from Hamilton to Kitchener and come and see the show. My friend Liz, who’s in Best Barbed Bits, she came to see the show, and so I tell other people about it and they go that sounds great, are you going to do it again? And I kind of be like where am I going to do it again? That’s the thing I’ve got to be able to dig a four-foot hole, do it anywhere, which was why I wanted to do it.
0:43:00 – Phil Rickaby
Absolutely, and the only way you’d be able to do it is if you could go into a theater where they had, like you could, build a false stage that had a space to dig into and fill it with dirt.
0:43:10 – Ryan M. Sero
Yeah, and you’d need a lot of dirt. I’ve seen people dig on stage before and it’s always done very gingerly because they only have like a foot and a half of dirt.
0:43:18 – Phil Rickaby
And you would evidently hear them hitting the stage.
0:43:21 – Ryan M. Sero
You’d need literal tons of dirt. It’s not going to happen. And even then, even then there’s something very different. Because of rain we actually wound up getting pushed back from midnight. We went on closer to two in the morning but, like you’re, on at two in the morning, in a wooded area you can barely see the lights of civilization peaking through the trees and there’s a hole in the physical earth and you can hear those shovels shifting earth and you can hear that dirt hitting that box. Is that there’s just a visceral level to it where it’s like I mean, it was a site-specific show when I make a site-specific show.
I’m trying to make sure that if I took it somewhere else it would lose a lot in the translation at best. And this is one of those where it’s like look, if you’re not in a cops of trees at two in the morning with dirt earth being shifted. It’s just not the same experience. So maybe someday, maybe someday, but the question of where is very much a factor.
0:44:19 – Phil Rickaby
But that is always the thing about theater, right? It is this magical thing that exists in a moment even if you go to see the same run night after night.
Except for there are some big budget shows that have a tendency, because of the way that they are Machines, they run pretty much the same every night. Most other shows if you go to see that show, it’s never going to be exactly the same. There will be variations, there will be differences, yeah, and that’s what makes it great. That’s what makes it. It’s the thing that somebody will talk about. There are people who saw that show that are still talking about that, about that moment today.
Yeah, yeah, and there’s no way for them to share that with other, to share that experience with people who weren’t there.
0:44:59 – Ryan M. Sero
No, it’s gone. You can, even if we had a recording, it’s gone. And yeah, that is something magical and I think that’s the thing that we have to lean into as theater creators as well. This is a thing, and it goes away, because that is one of the things that theater has, that I see a lot of usually bigger budget stuff and don’t get me wrong, I’ve enjoyed the heck out of a lot of really great musicals and lavish productions, but they’re kind of competing with Hollywood and they can’t, because we’ve seen Iron man fly around.
0:45:36 – Phil Rickaby
Yeah.
0:45:37 – Ryan M. Sero
And, okay, there’s certain things like the circus arts, where it’s still always going to be great seeing a trapeze artist do it live. But that’s the point is that, because you’re seeing this thing, that’s happening right there in the moment. That’s what’s so magical about it, and theater creators need to lean into that, because otherwise we’re competing with, because we talk about this, we talk about how we’re competing with Netflix and other streaming services, and we’re competing with YouTube podcasts, and we’re competing with movies and we’re competing with all kinds of stuff, and so, to me, the thing is, if you’re in competition, is that what you actually want to do? I think, is stop it being a competition entirely? Well, there is no competition, because if you want to see something that’s live and connected directly to you, you have to come to a live performance, and so, if you lean into that, you’re not actually competing with Netflix anymore, because Netflix can’t do that.
0:46:33 – Phil Rickaby
As theater makers, we have to lean into the experience, because people will pay for experiences. People will pay $50, $60 more for the experience whether they’re seeing, I don’t know, giant projections of Van Gogh that fill a room or a stranger things experience. People will pay for experiences. They’ll pay for something that they get to experience. We need to talk about that more as theater practitioners, as theater makers, rather than like acting as if we are in competition with a movie, because it is not. If we can give people a sense of what the experience is like, they won’t be able to. This is different. This will be different from what you would see in a movie and, in fact, we were to record this and show it to you, it’d be completely different.
0:47:23 – Ryan M. Sero
Yeah, and I have a few archivals over the years. I sort of regret not taking more of them, but those are kind of more for me, just that I can kind of skim back over them every now and then and go, oh yeah, that was fun and that was neat, but it’s not something that I really want. I don’t want to market them to anybody, I don’t want to show them to anybody as a product, because that’s not the product.
That’s not what it is. Yeah, I think that this is true of when I sit down to write a script. It’s important to know what this script is. Is it a five minute comedy sketch or is it a full length theater piece? Because those are different. And it’s the same thing with when you go to market or sell it or put it on. What is this? How is this different? What am I going to do with this and why should people come and see? This is all related to all of those things. Do you like this kind of experience? Then you’re going to love this show.
0:48:12 – Phil Rickaby
Yeah, I think that’s the key and I think that we don’t. A lot of theaters don’t do that. A lot of theaters just say here’s the aim of the play and here are the people that are in it. Somebody will ask what it’s about, and they give some explanation of the deeper meanings of the story, and people who think the average audience is just like I just want to know if I’m going to enjoy it.
0:48:34 – Ryan M. Sero
Can you tell me?
0:48:34 – Phil Rickaby
more about what I’m going to have fun.
0:48:38 – Ryan M. Sero
How fast do you turn off when you say, why should I come see your show? And they go. This is an important work of theater that’s talking about major issues in our times and you’re like great, you’re going to feed me broccoli.
0:48:50 – Phil Rickaby
If you look at the way that Hollywood markets movies, they are actually trying to mark you on an experience and trying to give you a sense of what this is going to feel like when you see it.
0:48:58 – Ryan M. Sero
Yeah.
0:48:59 – Phil Rickaby
That was the tagline for Superman. Yeah, you’ll believe a man can fly You’ll believe a man can fly.
0:49:04 – Ryan M. Sero
Yeah.
0:49:05 – Phil Rickaby
Exactly this is the thing that Hollywood does really well and theater doesn’t really do that often is we don’t sell the experiences. There was a moment when I was doing Macbeth a number of years ago and I was one of the murderers that kills the McDuff children Spoiler alert for people who didn’t remember this before we gave Lady McDuff a baby for that scene. She had a young son she talks to and the son is obviously going to get killed. And I came in and I took her baby from her it’s going to be okay and I hugged the baby. The baby is going to be fine.
Then in this little swaddling doll there was a little piece of balsa wood, so just gave her a little crack. It was just the tiniest little sound in the audience, but the entire audience would shudder and you could never get that on film. You could never get that in a movie because it’s not happening in the room. But when we make somebody suspension of disbelief, that’s the thing that we do in the theater and an audience is willing to do and then you just just that little sound and it just has the slightest echo in the room and the entire audience shudders and reacts vocally. That is the experience of live theater that I think that we need to sell somehow. Yeah.
0:50:26 – Ryan M. Sero
Yeah, and it’s hard to tell people that, because it’s hard to tell them hey, you’re going to feel differently when you’re in this room.
0:50:32 – Phil Rickaby
Yeah, it’s somehow the idea of like this is an experience that you have together, not like a movie. Yeah, you know the other thing I tell people. I had somebody ask me once like so why theater, why not just film? And I said because if there’s a dramatic scene on a theater stage and somebody gets slapped, the entire audience will react. If you’re watching a movie and somebody gets slapped, not a single person will flinch or react.
0:51:02 – Ryan M. Sero
Yeah, yeah, yeah, that’s very true. And because everybody’s locked in together at the same time doing this thing, I kind of approach my theater making in a very similar way. First, I love breaking the fourth wall. I hate that thing. I have an imaginary sledgehammer that I used to bludgeon it as often as possible. Okay, there’s some shows where it works and that’s fine, but I tend to get rid of it in my writing. My block shows on the rare occasion that I’m directing or when I’m working in close collaboration with the director and we’re developing together.
I like the blocking to be, while nailed down, not so specific that I have to stand on very, very, very clear. X’s all the time. Right, I acknowledge that there are certain stage pictures that sometimes you’re making and some movements wind up organically filling the same slot over and over and over again. But I kind of like things to be a little bit potential for chaos. There’s a little bit of wiggle room there, because your show will change from night to night and you allow yourselves the brilliant, wonderful moments of change and possibility.
The moments that are so small, by the way, that I think a lot of audiences could watch it three nights in a row and not necessarily notice them, but the actors feel them and what the audience will notice, whether they know it or not, is the fact that this still feels real, it still feels live, it still feels in the moment. This doesn’t feel over rehearsed, this doesn’t feel overly massaged. This is live. And, of course, if you break the fourth wall, all bets are off. I have nothing but contempt for people who break the fourth wall and then the audience responds to them and then they get that deer in the headlights. Look.
0:52:49 – Phil Rickaby
And you’re going well. You started it, pal, it’s so true. I think that it could be fun as a performer on a stage to play games that nobody knows about and that nobody would notice. It can introduce a little bit of healthy chaos into a scene. Of course it shouldn’t I mean it can’t disrupt the scene.
0:53:09 – Ryan M. Sero
Of course not. Yeah, of course not.
0:53:13 – Phil Rickaby
Years ago, I did a production of Dracula and I was playing Van Helsing, and it didn’t take me long to realize that he does a lot of standing on stage and watching things. It was the exposition machine, but you don’t really know much about what he’s feeling. And so there was this cigarette box on stage, and so my goal was to, when nobody was looking to be able to get a cigarette and I never got one, but it gave me something to. There were times you’d be on stage waiting for somebody to come on and you’re like I need to be doing something here, just a little thing. That was like it kept the scene alive, and it kept me alive in a scene where I was waiting for somebody or watching for something, and it just kept things slightly interesting.
0:54:06 – Ryan M. Sero
There was a production of Dr Faustus that I did years ago, my friend, sean Emberley, who you would have seen because he was droid in anybody else.
He was playing Faustus. We were doing the Seven Deadly Sins scene. It wasn’t really working for me. It was kind of felt a little flat until at some point Sean started responding the way that a little kid does when he’s being shown new toys Clapping with delight and being horrified. He was almost like a one-man audience at a pantomime. As the Seven Deadly Sins were trotted out, he was booing them and into them and clapping for them and laughing and all this kind of stuff.
The scene came popped suddenly alive to me. There was something wonderful about that. You kind of reminded me of it because he found a way as an observer. Faustus is just sitting there observing. Okay, he has a couple of exchanges with the Seven Deadly Sins, but mostly they’re getting trotted out and delivering their Seven Deadly Sins monologues. Sean Faustus is mostly just sitting there observing. But he had turned that observation into action and allowing, I think, the audience or certainly me, because I was mephestopheles watching him watch the Seven Deadly Sins. He had made the scene come alive by finding a way to be interactive, even in an organic way, in a way, as you say, that was not disruptive to the scene. It was perfect, it fitted it in. I thought that was wonderful. I’ve kind of taken that lesson into my guts and think about it every now and then.
0:55:50 – Phil Rickaby
Being the character whose job is just to listen in a scene can be really difficult. If you look at, say, for example, as you like it, the character Celia does a lot of listening or watching other people, but it still has to find a way to be present and active on the scene. It can be so difficult because there’s other people doing things and she’s just watching.
0:56:17 – Ryan M. Sero
And that can be really tough.
0:56:19 – Phil Rickaby
Exactly, it’s tough. It’s so hard to do, and I’ve seen good ones and I’ve seen bad ones.
0:56:24 – Ryan M. Sero
And you’ve got to do something that’s interesting but not so interesting that you’re going to pull focus, that’s right.
0:56:29 – Phil Rickaby
That’s right. Yeah, it’s a tough one. It’s a tough one.
0:56:33 – Ryan M. Sero
Yeah, that is tough. It’s been a while since I’ve been one of the listening characters. I discovered this or sort of remembered it, because in indie theater you do everything You’re your own yeah.
Because you don’t have money to do anything. So you don’t have money to hire a costume wrangler, so everybody’s just responsible for their own gear. And at one point I was doing a couple of walk on parts in theater Aquarius’s sound of music and at the end of the night the first night everybody else had made it home somehow, or at least left the theater, and I was still there because I’d put away all my stuff. And this tiny little woman, who I’d never seen before, came over and she was like, did you hang up your costumes? And I was like, yes, thinking.
I am a responsible grown adult male and I can do that myself. And she was like I do that. I was like, oh right, this is like a real people show.
0:57:41 – Phil Rickaby
This is like a professional show, where they have a person who washes the clothes after they’re done.
0:57:48 – Ryan M. Sero
And I left them at their various stage because I was worried about her mental checklist and I didn’t want her running around backstage looking for things that weren’t there. But I was always very respectful and I did fold it all up and left it in neat little piles, at the very least for her.
0:58:09 – Phil Rickaby
That’s good. It’s always weird when you’re doing like indie theater and everybody’s doing everything else and you’re like, all right.
So, after this show, we’re going to spray all of the shirts with some water and vodka just to make sure that they’re fresh tomorrow, because we can’t afford to do laundry. And then you see, like a big budget show, and everybody finishes their first costume, throws it on the floor and somebody comes around and takes it and takes it immediately to the laundry where it is washed, dried and pressed so that it’s ready for the next show and you’re like these are two different worlds entirely. Yeah.
0:58:48 – Ryan M. Sero
Yeah, and I have fun in both worlds. I don’t look down on the big thing for being too overblown and I don’t look down on the indie thing for being chintzy. I think that they’re both really fun. I think, actually I think I have more fun in the indie world in this kind of odd chaos that happens, yeah, yeah.
0:59:13 – Phil Rickaby
I mean there’s something about that chaos. There’s something about the scramble to make sure that everything gets done that works. You can kind of get a little addicted to it. I can imagine missing it in the bigger budget stuff.
0:59:27 – Ryan M. Sero
Yeah, there was a giant crossword puzzle backstage that we all kind of worked on. I would kind of wander the halls do the crossword read a book. That was my cue. Oh, I better get backstage.
0:59:40 – Phil Rickaby
Okay, there we go.
0:59:42 – Ryan M. Sero
And sound of music, in particular because I was a party guest and a priest and a Nazi in different scenes and so I only had these little walk-on roles, one-line tops, kind of thing.
But I had a blast doing it. I had a lot of fun doing it. There was a lot of really great people that worked on that show and I had a lot of fun on talking to them and hanging out with them backstage and it was very relaxing and nice, because when I write shows I tend to do that. I’ve done the writer-performer thing for so long that I don’t know, maybe I have trust issues or something like that, but I’m always one of the prominent characters on stage. They’re like I know how I want this done. I know how I want the role done, so I’m just going to do it. And I know that this show is important to me. So even though I can’t afford to pay people for rehearsals, I’ll definitely show up for all of them.
1:00:37 – Phil Rickaby
that kind of thing.
1:00:39 – Ryan M. Sero
Yeah and yeah, so I do that. And so then when I get into something where somebody else is taking care of that stuff whether it’s a really big budget production or just something where I’m just not the writer, director, producer, actor, whatever multi-hat guy then it’s very nice, it’s very relaxing, it’s like, oh right, all I have to do is memorize my lines and blocking and then show up and do them.
1:01:02 – Phil Rickaby
Wow, that’s cool, I like that.
1:01:06 – Ryan M. Sero
My prop is laid out on a table for me in a little sectioned off square with tape. This is great. I don’t have to remember to bring it from home.
1:01:15 – Phil Rickaby
No, absolutely. Is there just getting back to best Bard bits? When can people see that?
1:01:26 – Ryan M. Sero
So people can see that on the 22nd of September, so I guess in a few days when this comes out in about a week. I think by the time this comes out. It’ll be on the 22nd of September. It’s playing in Hamilton. I have been looking into we’re looking into doing it in a park. By the time that this goes to air, we will have solidified it, of course, but we’re still looking at a couple of different park areas at this point.
1:01:52 – Phil Rickaby
Is there a website that people will be able to go to to find the details?
1:01:56 – Ryan M. Sero
There will be a Facebook page once I’ve got the details. They’re being solidified as we speak.
1:02:02 – Phil Rickaby
I will put it in the notes I will send.
1:02:04 – Ryan M. Sero
If you leave me, I’ll remember to send all this stuff to you. So, yeah, everybody will have it. And so, yeah, there will be a Facebook page, which is what I do makearttheatre.weebly, I think is the Maycarte Theatre website in general, although we don’t have anything on Best Bard Bits on there just yet, but we’ll update that soon. By the time you hear this, dear listeners, you will be able to find all the information you need for Best Bard Bits Awesome.
1:02:32 – Phil Rickaby
Awesome, and thank you so much for joining me. I really appreciate it.
1:02:36 – Ryan M. Sero
Thank you for having me. It’s really nice talking to you too. Absolutely, it’s good talking to you. It’s really great.
1:02:41 – Phil Rickaby
This has been an episode of Stageworthy. Stageworthy is produced, hosted and edited by Phil Rickaby. That’s me. If you enjoyed this podcast and you listen on Apple Podcasts or Spotify, you can leave a five star rating, and if you listen on Apple Podcasts, you can also leave a review. Those reviews and ratings help new people find the show. If you want to keep up with what’s going on with Stageworthy and my other projects, you can subscribe to my newsletter by going to philrickaby.com/subscribe. And remember, if you want to leave a tip, you’ll find a link to the virtual tip jar in the show notes or on the website. You can find Stageworthy on Twitter and Instagram at StageworthyPod, and you can find the website with the complete archive of all episodes at Stageworthyca. If you want to find me, you can find me on Twitter and Instagram at philrickaby. As I mentioned, my website is philrickaby.com. See you next week for another episode of Stageworthy.