Stage Whisper
Whisper in the Wings Episode 562
(upbeat music) - Welcome back in everyone to a fabulous new Whisper in the Wings from Stage Whisper. We've got a full house today and a wonderful new theater company to introduce you to. And to do that, we've got four great artists joining us. We have Alex Draper, Olga Sanchez, Salt Bight, Sarah Collier, and Rebecca Ware. They are joining us to talk to us about dog team theater projects presentation of 100 Circling Camps playing July 12th through August 3rd and La Vida, which is playing July 10th through August 4th. All of this is happening at Atlantic Stages 2 and you can get your tickets and more information by visiting dogteam.org. We are so thrilled, so thrilled that we get to share this amazing company with you as well as these two fantastic shows. So let's not waste any more time. Let's go ahead and welcome in our guests, Alex, Olga, Sam, and Rebecca, welcome in to Whisper in the Wings from Stage Whisper. - Thank you. Thank you so much, Andrew. It's a delight to be here. This is Olga. - I'm so happy, excuse me. I'm so happy that all of you were here today. I can't wait to dive into these two great shows. But before we do that, let's have you familiarize our listeners with dog team theater project and Alex, could you go ahead and tell us a little bit about what this company is? - Sure, with pleasure. So Middlebury College for years has had, has supported a professional theater company and up until 2022, that company was called PTPNYC. Then that company retired and we got to reboot it and rename it. And so this is the new company called the dog team theater project that works in association with Middlebury College. And we produce plays every other summer in New York and the company is made up of half Middlebury College students and half professional theater makers. And we get to build, well, we work on an alternating building summer and then producing summer model. So last summer was our first building summer and we spent two weeks workshopping plays and training artists in Middlebury, Vermont. And this year, we get to produce in New York. So we spent two weeks rehearsing in New York, I mean in Middlebury and then we get to bring the plays down here and present them here. And our one, we have like a four week one that goes until August 4th. That is amazing. Oh, this sounds like such an incredible broom. I'm so happy we've been introduced to you all. So I wanna bring in one of our playwrights now so we can dive into the first of the two shows. And of course, I'm talking about Sam Collier. Sam, you're the playwright of 100 Circling Camps. Can you tell us a little bit about that piece? - Sure, thanks so much for having us, Andrew. So 100 Circling Camps started, I first started working on it in reaction to hearing about on I think an NPR interview, the story of the bonus army, which was a group of World War I veterans in 1932 who camped out in Washington, DC to demand immediate payment of their adjusted compensation for World War I. And I grew up in DC and I had never heard about this protest. And so I started reading about it and this was in 2017. And I was really struck by the similarities in the rhetoric between the 1930s and the first year of the Trump administration. And so I started working on this play, kind of putting those two times in conversation. And then as I worked on the play, more things started to emerge, which I will not reveal too much of, but people will see if they come to see the show. - Wow, wow. Let me jump over to another of our panelists, Olga Sanchez-Saltbait. You are the director and translator of the other show, La Vida, can you tell us a little bit about this piece? - Sure, so this is a play written and it's actually the first play written by Cuban playwright Maria Irene Furness, who was an important member of the burgeoning, the beginning of the Off-Broadway movement in the '60s and the '70s, winner of like an unprecedented nine OB awards at the time, an important teacher of playwrights to many of the then emerging important 20th and now 21st century Latine playwrights. And so this play is based on letters that she found while she was visiting in Cuba and they were written to her great grandfather from a cousin in Spain who had left Cuba in the middle of the 19th century. And you know, Furness was known for taking her work from sort of found materials. And in this case, she found these letters and just kind of started writing, first translating the letters and then kind of telling the story of this woman who is dictating the letters. So that's how it gets theatricalized. She's dictating the letters to a clerk and she's trying to make sure that she has her position in place because Cuba's in the middle of its revolutionary independence period. It's trying to get its independence from Spain in the mid 19th century. It doesn't work and then tries again. And so the play takes place at the end of the 19th century as the US is actually militarily taken over Cuba. So they have helped Cuba have its independence from Spain with what we call the Spanish American War, what Cuba calls its Cuban War of Cuban independence. And things are changing. So now Spain, where she is, is no longer hospitable for her. She's trying to figure out if Cuba's hospitable, but there's all sorts of things in the way so she's writing to her lawyer and running into a whole lot of roadblocks. And it's basically about the human spirit trying to figure out how to maintain its dignity when the system doesn't want to support your efforts as a woman in particular. - Wow, wow, that sounds like an amazing story. So we've got two incredible plays that we're bringing you today. Now I wanna bring in our final voice into this and that's Rebecca Ware. Rebecca, you are the director of the piece "A Hundred Circling Camps." How was it that you came up on this one? - Yeah, great question. Thanks, Andrew. It's great to be here with you. So Sam and I actually were at Middlebury College at the same time, a few moons ago, and we weren't in the same class. So we didn't overlap the ton, but we sort of knew of each other. And so when Alex reached out to me last year about the opportunity to come and experiment and play in Vermont with Sam, I jumped at the chance. - So cool. Alex, I wanna come back to you because as one of the co-founders, as the co-artistic and producing director, how was it that you all selected these two pieces? - That's a great question. When we knew in our new, it's for the new format. One of the things the previous company couldn't do so much of is reach out to newer writers and do new work. It was a lot of what we did was work was clearly established. Once it became clear that we could do that, and that's actually what we wanted to do, I had been following Sam's career since Middlebury. So I knew that once it became time that we were gonna be able to fold in some playwrights who were not, whose work was not already out there for years and years and years. That was a place I wanted to go immediately. And Sam sent us a bunch of plays and there were two really good ones of this one, really lit a spark in a lot of ways because of what it talks about, the spirit behind it, and also how it would fit with the company. So there's a very important mandate of the company that we do this sort of large cast plays that need to be evenly distributed sort of across the age range or whatever. So at the time it was just very exciting to read and to think about working on, and actually that just became more and more so as politics and things sort of on the world. We worked on it last summer before the whole notion of protest camps came roaring back into the national discussion this year. And that's sort of a bunch of things that triggered our interest. - That is fantastic. Olga, yes, would you like to add something to that? 'Cause you are also one of the co-artistic and producing directors as well as co-founders. - Thank you, yes, Andrew. Among our conversations, as Alex and I were discussing, along with Courtney Smith and also Mark Avantia, who are co-founders about what this new company, what its shape might be, what its focus might be. We saw the opportunity, as Alex said, to develop new work, but also to look at more global offerings. So what are the stories from around the world that we can also bring to the stage and sort of diversify our offerings, diversify the perspective, diversify the aesthetics that we are able to, again, bring to the larger stage. And so we were looking at translations and I happened to be working on this project and offered it. And we took a read and went like, yeah, okay, let's do this. And this has been a passion project of mine for a couple of years, so I really appreciated the opportunity that the Dog Team Theater Project also aligned with this project that we are now producing. - That is fabulous. Rebecca, I wanna come back to you 'cause I would love to know, you know, we are at the time of this recording, we're about to open these shows, you know? So what has it been like developing 100 certain camps? - Yeah, you know, so this is my first time working on this kind of contract. And so it's been both really exciting and really challenging at times to work within the opportunities and the constraints of what it means to be making fast and furious and relevant theater right now, which I think is true of almost every artist and that's working in theater in the US right now. I stand abroad, I'll say also. I think that one of the things that's really important to note about Dog Team is that as Alex mentioned, it's a combination of current undergraduate students, recent graduate students, or excuse me, recently graduated students and actors who have a whole variety of experience. So we have professional actors who are maybe newer in their careers and then we also have really seasoned professional actors who have been on Broadway and who have been on film and television sets. And so one of the gifts of being able to work with Dog Team Theater Project is to both be learning and to be teaching from everyone. So we're all learning from each other and we're all teaching each other given our variety of experiences and backgrounds. And so, you know, it's very rare that as a director, you get to work with a large cast right now. And so that's another huge gift, an opportunity that this piece is given. So it's really fun to play and it's also a wild to be, again, as I said, making theater right now. So I'm excited for audiences to see where we are in development with this piece and to help us figure out what it's saying right now. - That is so wonderful. Sam, I wanna bounce back to you because I would love to know, is there a message or a thought you hope that audiences take away from your work, a hundred circling camps? - Oh, you know, Andrew, I love that question and I always feel when I'm writing a play or, you know, I try to stay away from trying to send a message. I feel like I come to every play with a question or a set of questions that I am asking of the characters and the situation and the story. And my favorite thing about this medium is being inside of that question with a live audience. So I don't think I have a particular message that I would like to send to an audience. It's more than I'm, I think I'm posing a series of questions and I really look forward to hearing once we get it up in front of audiences, what ideas are sparked inside of them? - I like that thought. Thank you for that. Olga, I wanna ask you the same question regarding your piece, love you. - Thanks, Andrew. I so love Sam's answer to that. And in a way, and not to sort of, there's something about Fort Ness and Fort Ness's work over all over all of her oeuvre, which is 50 plays or so in varying degrees of abstraction and a traditional narrative, but mostly in the avant-garde. She is mother avant-garde or she's been known as mother avant-garde. That to say that there's a statement she wants to make or that I wanna make is kind of in contra to what she felt about theater making, which was there's an investigation that she's posing about how human dynamics work and she's more interested in that than plot necessarily. That said, the play is I think ultimately about how the human spirits strive so hard for liberty for independence, for self-agency, for dignity. And that struggle in particular circumstances can be a very challenging one to one's mental health. And I think that's part of the journey of this play, to see how this person who by rights should be respected and should have lived a peaceful life is struggling personally with not knowing where she stands and not being able to do anything about it for a variety of reasons. Sounds like a downer, but ultimately it's how the spirit fights on to stand on its own mixed metaphor but to stand on its own defeat. That is a fascinating idea. I love that, I'm living for this. Alex, I wanna come to you for my final question for this first part. And that is, who do you hook half access? Not only to these two pieces but to your theater company as well. - That's a good question, thanks for asking. Hopefully everyone, I mean we're, I have friends who are in place right now, I have a friend who's in a play, the cheapest ticket is around $450. I just find myself reeling at that notion. So on one level, we wanna make sure that economically it is something that makes sense, that you can go spend an hour and a half or two hours or less and not have it cost you, whatever, half your rent. So, we're hoping that it's younger audiences, artists who are here who wanna see this kind of work but also New Yorkers who have traditionally come to see the work that we do because it does have this kind of large cast, actor-centric aesthetic that we wanna embrace and hopefully spread. (upbeat music) (upbeat music) - Well, for the second part of our interviews, we love giving our listeners a chance to get to know our guests a little bit better, pull the curtain back, if you will. And I wanna jump right to my favorite question to ask guests. And that, of course, is what is your favorite theater memory? - Andrew, I'll jump in because I, one of the things that's so cool for me about this project is kind of coming full circle to get to work with middle very college students and faculty again, because that's where I went to undergrad, it's where I first started writing plays. And one of my formative theatrical memories was working on a 24-hour play festival as an undergraduate in our, it's called the Hepburn Zoo, which is kind of the student run black box theater space at Middlebury. And probably many of your listeners have a sense of what that format looks like, but just in case they don't, it was, we started at eight o'clock on a Friday night. The plays were all written by eight a.m. the following morning and rehearsed all day Saturday and then opened Saturday at eight o'clock. So that was, that was such a great time for me to get to be making work really, really quickly with a bunch of my friends and not being precious about it and just kind of experimenting. And I feel like it really set me up for the way that I think about writing plays even still today. - I love that memory though, that's amazing. - I'm just gonna follow up because you actually, Sam reminded me of, I don't have a specific memory, but I do have to say that part of the immense joy of working with all these people is this kind of cyclical sense of history that people get to bring back in. So I remember seeing both Sam and Rebecca on stage. As students and now to have them back and I get to work with Olga during the school year and seeing the play she does. And in the company, there are people who have come back as students, as professionals and it's this kind of, it's like this wheel of time that keeps going around and with each revolution, people have more to give on some level, but also still more to learn. And it's just, it's a beautiful setup that we get to have these kind of recurring histories with each other that build as they go forward. And I just feel like I feel very lucky to be able to be involved. - I love that. We always love hearing that as a memory, as a thought. Thank you so much for that. - I'm gonna jump in from a memory that I have from a few years back before I came to Middlebury before I actually went back to school. So be able to come back to Middlebury. I was artistic director at Milagro, which is a Latina identified arts and culture organization in Portland or again. And it's been around for a number of years and I joined them and was artistic director with them for about 12 years. And in that time, I started directing work in Spanish and I very clearly, and this is sort of a transformative thing for me, I very clearly remember the first round of auditions that I had. I was gonna be directing Lorca. Lorca's blood wedding, Bora as a somebody. And I held auditions and normally auditions, as many people know, you know, I'd be in the theater and the actors would be outside waiting in the lobby and they would come in and they would do their monologue or whatever and then they would go back in. So I don't know how it turned out, but I think because I was also like gonna direct it as an ensemble format, that I invited everybody in for an exercise and then they didn't leave. They stayed, which is fine. And we said, well, okay, let's start like, let's see who sings and who like they're, you know, not everybody had a monologue because again, it's the Spanish language actors in Portland, Oregon, but they could do the glamasion, which is poetry reading. Anyway, they would get up and they would do their song and they would do their the glamasion or maybe their bit of monologue or whatever it was. But the vibe in the room, like people would get up and they would do their piece and the rest of the group would applaud them. And I thought, what a beautiful other way of approaching this thing, not everybody's gonna be in the show. And people in essence, competing against each other, but there was such a sense of love and camaraderie and like, let's get this show up, that the show became a community effort that, you know, may the best person if you will win or just, yeah, you've got up and sang a song and we know you're not a singer, but yay you. It was just this wonderful sense of a community that knew that it would get to be in a show someday perhaps. But that was really just happy that the thing was being done and yay you for getting up and putting yourself in front of the rest of us to show your stuff and to show your willingness to get up on a stage and risk and risk. - Yeah, thank you. - That is such a fabulous, fabulous memory. And a brilliant thought, Rebecca, bring us home on this. What is your favorite theater memory? - Yeah, Andrew, I really wish that I had a specific one. I mean, I feel like it was such a meaty question, you know? And I feel like I could easily reference like the, you know, the neighborhood theater production that I did growing up or, you know, the first time I saw Gob Squad or when I was performing in India with a, you know, street theater, communist group, there's just like a lot of things that I could reference. But I actually think that the thing that I come back to is that my favorite theater memories are really actually not about my own work, but they're really about the pieces that I feel like have invited me to attend with people that I really care about that are like near and dear to be an, often my family or friends who don't go see a lot of theater. And so whether that's bringing my mom to, you know, some hilarious Edinburgh friend shows and having her be like, what is this ritual that I'm seeing or bringing my sister to the first like silent mine piece that I saw in LA, you know, I think for me, it actually comes back to, well, as an artist, it's about working on a project where it feels like everyone's labor is recognized and valued and we're all pushing towards the same dream and as an audience member. I think it's really about the invitation to enter and trust that somebody I love will be invited as well. - That is such a great memory as well. All of you fabulous memories, fabulous thoughts. Thank you all so, so much for that. As we wrap things up, I would love to know, do any of you have any other projects or productions coming on the pipeline that we might be able to plug for you? - Yeah, I have a few. I think the next one up that I have is gonna be at Marin Theater this fall, excuse me, this winter. It's gonna be the US premiere of a piece called It's True, It's True by Breach Theater. They're based in the UK and it is going to be, we'll see what it's gonna be, but I think it's gonna be a roller coaster of a ride about a 17th century painter's, Italian painter's rape trial and the satirical resonances it might have today. So because it's me, it'll have a lot of fun and maybe a few preffals on stage as well. - Yeah, so I have that one, Andrew, and then I have a few others, but I kind of have to wait until those season announcements happen to be able to speak about them. And as a director who specializes in new plays, I'm always developing new work and I love meeting new companies and new playwrights. So I'm always happy if people want to send me stuff. - Yeah, fantastic. - I'm not, I don't have a show in the works. I, you know, I'm reading stuff, stuff to be directing, actually at Middlebury College. And I'm looking at a couple of other devised pieces that I've worked on and kind of revisiting them, but I am, I just want to say that, you know, working on Fort Ness means research and what all the shows do, but I'm currently sitting in the NYU fails library, looking at special collections and hoping to refine this translation and get it out there into the world. So, you know, it's more accessible with a little bit of background information about human history and Fort Ness history, et cetera. So just putting that out there. - Very cool. My final question for our show today is, if our listeners would like more information about Dog Team Theater Project or a hundred circling camps for LabUDA or any of you, maybe they'd like to reach out to you, how can they do so? - The, the Dog Team website, you know, DogTeam.org has a lot of that on there, including a little bit of biography in terms of reaching out directly, that I don't know if people want to do that. We do have a contact us on the website. So if folks want to come to DogTeam.org and find the contact us, like Alex said, we've got bio, but just reach out. The message will get to whoever's involved in the company. We will forward messages, so feel free. - I would also share that I have a professional website with contact information on there. This is Rebecca, where, like you wear your clothes or wear like underwear. And I'm also a professor, so you can find me in multiple ways on the interwebs. What about you soon? - People can find me at samcallierplays.com. - Wonderful. Well, Alex, Olga, Sam, Rebecca, thank you all so, so much for taking the time to speak with me today, for sharing this amazing theater company, this project, and these amazing works, truly. This all sounds incredible. I know where I'm gonna have to get myself to this month to check out these great works. So, thank you all so much for your time. - Thank you. - Thank you, Andrew. Thanks, Andrew. - My guests today have been the amazing artist, Alex Draper, Olga Sanchez, Salt Vite, Sam Collier, and Rebecca Ware. They're all part of Dog Team Theater Project, and they spoke to us about the upcoming productions of a hundred circling camps, which is playing July 12th through August 3rd, and La Vida, which is playing July 10th through August 4th. Both of these shows are being done at Atlantic stages too, and you can get your tickets and more information by visiting dogteam.org. We also have some contact information for our guests, which will be posted on our episode description, as well as on our social media posts. But right now, you need to head to dogteam.org and get your tickets for these two amazing shows. We are gonna get ourselves there, so make sure you join us for a stage just for night out at the theater. Again, the shows are a hundred circling camps playing July 12th through August 3rd, and La Vida, July 10th through August 4th. Now, until next time, I'm Andrew Cortez, reminding you to-- - Turn off your cell phones, unwrap your candies. - And keep talking about the theater. - In a stage whisper. - Thank you. (upbeat music) (upbeat music) - If you like what you hear, please leave a five-star review, like and subscribe. - You can also find us on Facebook and Instagram at stagewhisperpod. - And feel free to reach out to us with your comments and personal stories at stagewhisperpod@gmail.com. - And be sure to check out our website for all things stage whisper and theater. You'll be able to find merchandise, tours, tickets, and more. Simply visit stagewhisperpod.com. Our theme song is "Maniac" by Jazar. Other music on this episode provided by Jazar and Billy Murray. You can also become a patron of our show by logging on to patreon.com/stagewhisperpod. There you will find all the information about our backstage pass as well as our tip jar. Thank you so much for your generosity. We could not do this show without you. ♫ Way from there'll swear ♫ ♫ I don't care anywhere near your town ♫ ♫ Makes me there ♫ [BLANK_AUDIO]