Stage Whisper
Whisper in the Wings Episode 618
(upbeat music) - Welcome back in everyone to a fantastic new Whisper in the Wings from Stade Whisper. We are very excited about the show we're bringing you today, especially the connection we have to it. One of our dear, dear friends, one of the assistant artistic directors over at Frigid NYC, Jimmy Lovett. Her father, who's joining us today, has a great new work. So the playwright, Charlie Lovett, and performer, Luther Harrell, are joining us today to talk about their new work, Escaping Dreamland. It's playing September 8th and 9th at Under St. Mark's. And you can get your tickets and more information by visiting Frigid.NYC. We are really, really excited about this piece. We can't wait to learn more about it. So let's not waste any more time. And let's go ahead and welcome in our guest, Charlie Hunter. Welcome into Whisper in the Wings from Stade Whisper. - Thank you, good to be here. - I'm so happy to have the two of you here. I'm so happy that we're talking about another fantastic production happening down at Under St. Mark's with Frigid NYC. I'm just over the moon. And I can't wait to learn more about this show, Escaping Dreamland. So Charlie, can we start with you to the playwright? Can you tell us a little bit about this show? - Absolutely. So this show is based on a novel that I wrote that was published in 2020. And so it was a difficult time, obviously. I didn't go on any book tours, like it usually do. I didn't get a chance to talk to readers face to face. But before the pandemic, a local theater producer had come to me and said, "Hey, would you consider adapting one of your novels "into a play?" And I said, "Yeah, let me think about it." And then the pandemic happened, this book came out. And then a friend of mine who was a designer and director contacted me. And he just said, "Hey, I just read your book. "I really, really like the new one." And it suddenly hit me, "This is the one we could adapt for the stage." And so, you know, in adapting a book for the stage, obviously you have a 300 plus page novel. You want to have a two hour play. You have to cut a lot of things out. But we ended up focusing in on this part of the novel that's set in New York City in the early 20th century and is centered around these three characters. Magda, who's played by Hunter, who's joining us today, is a young woman who, she came to America from Germany with her family when she was two years old and she wants more than anything to be American. And she is constantly sort of bumping up against what we would now call the glass ceiling, bumping up against gender stereotypes about what women can and can't do. And then she meets Tom, who is this young man of sort of wealth and privilege, who even though he has wealth and privilege is kind of rebelling against what his parents want him to do. He doesn't want to go into the family business. He wants to forge his own way. And then Jean, who is this brilliant scientist and who is kind of exploring his queerness and his sexuality and trying to figure out who he is. So the three of them come together through this mutual interest in writing children's series books. And the whole novel really started with my remembering reading The Hardy Boys and these other children's series books when I was a kid and looking at some of those books that my grandfather had read when he was a kid and thinking about the way those stories sort of echoed down from generation to generation. But the play really became about these three characters, about the way they formed friendships, about the things that got in the way of those friendships about their search for identity. I really wanted to write a novel about identity more than anything else. And every time I see the play, every time I see Hunter and Tanner and Charlie play these three characters, I go, oh, it's about something different than I didn't realize because they just bring so much richness to the story. But we also love the fact that, to us New York City kind of feels like a character in the story. So we're really excited about bringing the play to New York. - That is so wonderful. I love this. So you mentioned that this is based off of a novel that you read before. So I'm curious to know what inspired you to write these things. - So I had written a number of novels. I used to be a rare book dealer and had an antiquarian book business and I've been a book collector all my life. So I've written a number of novels that kind of touched on books and the history of books and writers. I'd written one that kind of was Shakespeare related. I wrote one where Jane Austen was a character. And I started thinking about, well, I've written about these grand, of people that you read in high school and college literature classes. But those weren't the books that originally got me excited about reading, the books that got me excited about reading. As I said, it looks like The Hardy Boys and not to argue that they're great literature, but I think they have an important place in American culture. And so just that idea of like, okay, let me think about that world a little bit from a novelistic point of view. I also knew a little bit about how those books were created originally and it was a really fascinating story to me. And then I picked up one of these books that belonged to my grandfather and on the back of the title page, it had the publisher information and it said, "New York City, 1906." And I thought, okay, what's going on in New York City in 1906? And I started to research the time period and it was just so rich with these wonderful, lost historical stories, some about people that we've all heard of and some about things that we've never heard about. And I just love the idea of inventing fictional characters and then weaving them through this real historical tapestry and early 20th century New York was the perfect place to do that. - That is so wonderful. So Hunter, I wanna bring you into the conversation out. I would love to know how is it that you came upon this piece? - So I just came to Winston a few months before I auditioned for this show. I just like saw an audition piece online and I was like, okay, escaping Dreamland. Tried to look it up on Google and I could not find anything much to my terror because I wanted to be prepared, right? I wanted to make a good impression in this new city that I'm in and this new company that I'm potentially working with. And so I realized that it was quote unquote a local author who wrote it and that made me incredibly excited. So I started researching about Charlie. I immediately went to the library. I got escaping Dreamland. I read cover to cover and like, you know, a few days span and I fell in love with it. I was like, okay, I'm excited. I'm dedicated, I'm gonna come in with some information. And thankfully I was what they had envisioned. They trusted me with the character of Magda, which I'm super grateful for because it's been a really cool experience and it will be an even better experience where we're about to take it right now. - That is super to hear. I actually wanna snowball off of that last thought you just said and ask, you know, what has it been like developing the piece so far? I know we're still just under a month away from the show going up, but, you know, what has it been like giving the play its legs? - Well, I have to give a lot of props to Charlie because Charlie is a child at heart as most people are, but Charlie is incredibly whimsical and really keeps his child self at his side. So naturally when he writes, I mean, everything is kind of his child and like most writers, right? So it's hard to give up things that you think are important or integral to the story because there are so many complexities to what he's written or maybe we perform and we add, you know, complexities that the audience or he has not thought about before, but he has been incredibly forgiving like whenever he's pulling out something or he can see us working out a scene and, you know, he can kind of sit back, put his, you know, hand on his chin and be like, eh, this isn't really working. We cut this out, maybe trim the fat or maybe we can make the central point this or that in the third. So Charlie has always, I mean, we've had a ton of meetings just, hey, what's not working? What is working? What's best for you? Where do you think this scene is heading or should head? So it's been a constant communication and collaboration which I feel incredibly grateful for and humbled to have experience because I feel like that's not common. It's always like, this is mine and you're just the puppets, right? But what's so great about working with Charlie is that he understands that every single human that is working on this piece, designers and all bring something that make it more complex and beautiful to bring to life. - That is a fantastic answer. I love hearing that about the development and I would love to check back in closer to the show as you continue to put this play up. Now, Charlie, just yours, is this the world premiere of this play coming up at Under St. Mark's? - So we did a production of the play here. We're in Winston-Salem, North Carolina and it was the little theater Winston-Salem that came to me and said, would you adapt the play for the stage? And yeah, I started working with them. We actually took sort of a right turn in the middle of this. I was having a conversation with the artistic director and he was complaining about their Christmas season and said, oh, I wish we just had a nice, fresh, new, fun adaptation of Christmas Carol. And I said, are you asking if I'll write one? And he said, yeah, sort of. And so I did that and we run that. We're getting ready for the third season of that. But yeah, we did have a, the world premiere of this play was here in Winston-Salem back in March with most of the cast that we're taking to New York was in that original production. The way the plays written there are the three main characters and then there's a small ensemble that plays all the other characters. We're making that ensemble smaller than it was in the original production. My original idea was the whole show could be performed by six actors, if need be. If it's, you know, the idea is if it's a professional theater and you don't want to use too many actors, it can be as few as six. If you're a college or community theater, I mean, I think we had 11 people in the original cast. So you can, you know, you can adjust that ensemble size. But before, before we did that production and before Hunter and the other really talented actors that we have came on board, we spent about two years in development. I mean, not working that whole time, but I worked with a group of actors. We started out just, we had about four or five of us and we, I just said, everybody go read the book. And you think about Magda, you think about Tom, you think about Jean and when they all came back, I said, okay, now tell me what are the scenes in the book that are absolutely indispensable for telling the story of your character? And that was the way we started working on the script. I really came to it without a lot of, you know, preconceived notions. We had, we had a notion about the fact that we were going to use projections that we were not going to have, you know, blackouts and the scene changes. It was going to be very cinematic in the way it moved. And I knew what the last line of the play was, but other than that, I didn't have a lot of, I didn't have a lot of preconceived notions. And we worked for several months. I would meet with these actors and we would talk about it. I would write scenes, they would come up with ideas. I'd go back and write more scenes. We'd read the scenes. We eventually did a small public reading just for, you know, for theater people and got a lot of reaction from them that led to some more rewriting. And then as Hunter said, after we did the world premiere, I sat down with the three main actors and we, you know, we took a chopping ax to the script. You know, they were great. They were so honest about what worked and what didn't work. I mean, we had a wonderful response from, from the audience at the original production. But, you know, you always want it to be even better. I knew it needed to be trimmed in terms of time a little bit. And my actors were just fantastic in terms of saying, what if we combine these two scenes? 'Cause they're kind of the same thing. And do we really need to have this? And we even added a few things, you know, although we mostly cut, we even added a few things where we saw possibilities. One of the actors said, what if I had a slightly closer relationship with this character and things like that? So, it's been very collaborative from the moment somebody said, you know, do you wanna adapt a novel until today? It's been a collaborative experience. And I've worked in the theater, you know, as a children's playwright for many, many years at a school. And so I love that collaborative nature. It's so different from writing a novel where, as Hunter says, that really is kind of your baby. And you, you know, you have to make your editor happy, but mostly you do it. You know, whereas a play is much more of a collaborative experience to the point where I kind of feel guilty that it's my name on the page as playwright. 'Cause so many people have contributed to the text of what you see on that stage. - What a stellar answer I love. I love that you spread the credit around too. No, I'd love to stick with you for this next question, Charlie. And I wanna ask, what is the message or thought your hoping audiences will take away from this piece? - You know, it's, as I said, almost every time I watch it, I maybe have a different answer to that question. But the thing that I see that these three characters really have in common is this kind of search for identity. They're all young. I think, you know, in the book, I think they're all 24 years old. We may have taken out the reference to exactly how old they are in the play, but they're in that point of life where they're adults, but they maybe don't quite yet know what the arc of their adult life is gonna look like. And they're living in this time period, which is at once very, very hopeful and very, you know, looking towards the future and everything seems possible. And yet people are telling Magda, you can't do this because you're a woman. People are telling Jean, you know, you can't express your queerness in the way that you want to. People are telling Tom, you have to go into this business and you're not allowed to be created. And so they're, it's very much about their search for identity in this specific historical, a very American milieu. And so then it becomes, I hope people go away with the idea of not only how do I find my own identity and how do I establish it, but also how do I express my identity in a world that might be pushing back against that in different ways? And the ways that it pushes back in 2024 might be different from the ways it would push back in 1906, but it doesn't mean they're not, they're not still there. So now I think that's one of the big things that we wanted to explore. And then the other thing is just the nature of friendship and how friendship can have ups and downs, but still be such an incredibly important thing in people's lives, how friends that we haven't seen for years and maybe won't ever see again are still a part of who we are. And then the last thing I'll say is that each of these characters before the play begins has been through a very traumatic experience. And they each have to figure out how to deal with that. And they're all sort of major historical experiences. One of them is, I won't tell you what they all are, but one of them was in San Francisco during the 1906 earthquake, for instance. And I learned from my father when I was, my mother died when I was two years old and my father remarried and I had a happy childhood and everything went along. But I learned from my father whenever we would, he would talk about my mother. And I can remember specifically talking about him 50 years after she died. And he still would get emotional when he talked about her. I learned that the traumas of our past are always with us. They're always a part of who we are, but they don't have to define who we can become and who we will be. And that's really what I wanted for Magda and for Tom and Jean, not to deny the scars that they have, but to allow them to exist in ways that go beyond just the bad things that may have happened to them in the past. So, it's a long answer to a simple question, but there are just so many elements of this story that kind of come together that hopefully every audience member will walk away with something different that comes out of that. Those ideas about friendship and about identity and about overcoming the traumas of our past. - Brilliant idea there, I love that. I think that's so wonderful. Hunter, anything you'd like to add to that? - I'm glad Charlie and I are on the same page because as I awoke today, I was like, "All right, wait, I'm doing the podcast today." Okay, how would I surmise this play? Okay, I whittle it down to friendship, identity, and storytelling, the art of storytelling. And this play really is about the interplay of those three elements, how we find friendship and shared identity and how we find identity and friendship and how we identify with characters and stories and the essence of stories or feel like we are friends with some of the characters and stories. But ultimately the story is about life experiences and what we gain from them, what we lose from them, but ultimately is not about the past, even though a lot of the story is talking about the past, it's always about what's happening now and how it affects you now and what you should gain from those past experiences now, how that affects your behavior because no matter what happens or what you try to recreate, if it was a good experience or ignore, if it was a bad experience, you are better for experiencing period and that's why we have stories to preserve everything that has happened in this life. And I think this story is a celebration of that, which is storytelling. - And I think just to piggyback on that, I don't think anybody does a better job of that than Magda. I, Hunter and I both have a great love for this character and she's a great example of how your past can just be a part of you, a very rich part of you, but it doesn't limit what your future might be. - I think those are fabulous ideas, wonderful ideas. Thank you for sharing those. And it leads to my final question for this first part, which is who are you hoping have access to escaping dream wind? And Hunter, can I start first with you on them? - Access, that's an interesting word to use. I'm going to interpret that as, who do you think should view this story or experience it? And I'm going to go back on something that I said earlier about the whimsy of Charlie and how Charlie is a kid at heart because when I first read the story, I was like, oh, this is like very childlike, not like in that it's, you know what I mean? Like whittled down or like less complex or not like PG-13 in any way. It is, even with its complexities, like somebody who was like barely experienced life could get something very complex from the story if that makes any sense. And I think it's a queer story. I think it's a story about the complexities of gender, of social class, but also about the whimsy of being a child and losing that innocence and trying to find it again. So I think all of those little pockets of people should and could have access to this play. - Yeah, I think, I mean, I agree with what Hunter said. You always imagine people in your audience and imagine what they might get out of the play in terms of a message or in terms of themselves. I mean, the people, this will be a nebulous question, but the people that I would like to have access to the play are people who are going to come and see this and go, okay, who I am is okay, who I am matters. My story matters because these are three ordinary people and yet their stories resonate with us. And everybody's story matters. And so yeah, I would love for people to come to the show who need to hear that message, who need to be told your story matters, your voice matters, your identity matters. And as Hunter said, there's a variety of identity in this show from, you know, you call Magda a proto-feminist and, you know, Jean is a queer character. And Tommy, even though he sort of is the white privilege guy, he still has that same struggle for our identity and bumps up against walls the way everybody else does. And so I think the other thing is just this idea that when we're in our little bubble of whatever it might be, whether it's of queerness or of straightness or if anything else, we think that the problems that we bump up against are just ours. And I think it helps to see that, you know, we're all human, we all have stories, we all have problems, we all have barriers in front of us. They're higher for a lot of people than they are for others, but there's a shared humanity that we can have. And I think this story is for everybody, but for people who want to feel a part of that shared humanity. ♪ Well, for the second board of our interviews, we love giving our listeners a chance to get to know our guests a little bit better, picture brains, if you will. And I would love to start by asking the two of you what or who inspires you? What, play your rights, composers, your shows have inspired you in the past? Or are just some of your favorites? You know, I'm lucky enough to have been going to see plays since I was a child and see plays on Broadway and in the Western and London since I was a teenager. And, you know, the first show I saw on Broadway started Catherine Hepburn, that tells you how old I am. But the shows and the playwrights that I always tend to gravitate to are the ones who find new ways of storytelling without losing track of the fact that it's about the storytelling, not about the new way of storytelling that you're exploring. You know, sometimes you see things where they've lost track of that. And it's all about the method and not about the story. So I think about plays like, you know, from my early theater going years, like the original Broadway production of Amadeus just completely blew me away. I can remember not being able to really get out of my seat after the soliloquy at the end of the first act where Celieri declares war on God, you know, just had never seen anything like that. And from the middle of my theater going years, I think of shows like Angels in America, which I didn't know that much about when I went to see it. And I was one of those people who saw it all in one day, Matt May, and evening on Broadway with F.M.R.A. Abraham, is Roy Conan, and oh my gosh, just absolutely transporting. And I thought I've never seen a story told like this. And yet it was still all about story and about relationships between characters. And then more recently, when I was working on this show, I remember going to see the Lehman trilogy on Broadway, which again thought was absolutely brilliant storytelling and brilliant relationship building. But also they were using a lot of the sort of methods of storytelling that we were talking about using and escaping Dreamline. So it felt like, okay, maybe we're on the right track here because I, you know, oh, we're going to try these projections. And there they were with all these projections. And we're going to have characters who are constantly changing the, you know, actors who are constantly changing what character they're representing. And that was happening on Lehman trilogy. We're going to have actors turn and address the audience directly and tell them what's going on. And that was happening in Lehman. So there were a lot of things that they were doing, that we'd been doing on our script development. And I thought, well, gosh, if we can work for the National Theatre, I mean, everything I've ever seen that's come out of the National Theatre from that to his dark materials to one man, two governors to, I mean, I saw their guys and dolls back in the 80s, you know, just has all been fantastic. But it's, it was really, I love to see new methods of storytelling. And it's really exciting when you see it working on stage and you know, it's something that you've been exploring yourself. And it's almost like, you know, you can see it in a, see it in a workshop to see, oh, yeah, this method of storytelling works, what we're doing is going to work. We're on the right track. And I don't know, there's so many others. And you know, we just were in New York recently and saw Merrily. We roll along and I thought, here's a story about three close friends who are creative together, which is what escaping Dreamland is about. But also told in a new way, told, told, you know, backwards. So the things that excite me are when, when I see new methods of storytelling that still keep story and character at the forefront, it happens less often when you've been going to the theatre for the half a century, you know, but it does happen. And it's always a really exciting night at the theatre when it does. I love that answer. Some of my favorite shows also listed in that answer. Hunter, what about you now? What inspires you? So when I think about sort of renowned plays, playwrights, performers, I do get inspired by them, but it's very fleeting. I mean, I just watched the movie version of Chicago last night. And I was like, wow, Catherine Zeta-Jones, very good. But what I always turn back to what actually inspires me to my core is are things that are within reach. Whenever I see a friend or a local actor or a local company put something on, it inspires me like nothing else, not a celebrity or things that are kind of in the nether to me like that is not tangible at all. But when I see someone who is known by maybe tens of people, do something excellently is on top of their craft and bring such sincerity to a piece that really inspires me. Because you know it's not for money, it's not for celebrity, it's because they're really darn good at what they do. And they do it out of love. And that is incredible to me. It's also a competitive spirit. Like I'm like, nah, oh, they were so good. No, that should have been me. Like the theaters in Winston, I've seen some really, really top-notch stuff here and like these little black box theaters. And it just makes my heart grow, you know, 10 sizes seeing it. And it feels, it feels reachable, it feels doable. And that's what's most inspiring about it. That is a fantastic answer, I love that. Let me ask the two of you know, what is your favorite part about working in the theater? And Hunter, I'd like to kick that question off with you if I'm in. Working in the field of theater? I think it exercises a part of me that is probably my weakest because theater is the art of collaboration. And I'm unfortunately a product of America and that I'm a staunch individualist. You know, thank you, Charlie, he gets it. But it really has exercised my muscle of friendship. And oh, these people actually, you know, like I said earlier about where I get my inspiration from, it's what drew me to this project. It's because I was like, oh my God, it's a person who I went to the back cover and I was like, what? He lives in Winston? This person looks like he could live in London for, you know, with his dapper little suit. And you know, that photo, I love that photograph. Anyways, but seeing people work really, really hard on something that is going to live and die. Within a weekend or a few weekends, something that often is not recorded, something that you never get to like see yourself doing. It's always you see your work in other people. You only see the product of your work in other people's reactions and what other people get from it. So it is the art of communication with other people. It is loving people. It's studying people. That's what I love about theater is the people is talking to people, observing them, loving them, appreciating humanity even more with each show and working together and figuring out how to well oil the machine in a loving and caring way to create a story for other people, you know. I love that. I love that. I think that's a fantastic answer. Charlie, what about you? What is your favorite part about working with theater? Well, I mean, it's going to overlap some with what with what Hunter said. And certainly the creation every time I'm involved in a show, whether it's as an actor or as a playwright or whatever in whatever form I contribute, I get a new family, you know. I mean, you build the family and most of my close friends are people I've met through the theater. And, you know, I have my I have my two kids and then I have Hunter and Charlie and Tanner who played the roles in this way. They're they're like my children, you know. And I said, when we had the cast party, I said, you know, with this this show, if this show goes to Broadway, you guys are still going to be my my three kids, you know. And so that's part of it. But also I do love collaboration. Some of it I think is because a lot so much of what I do is sitting alone in a room, you know, staring at a computer screen, whether I'm writing a novel or starting a script and and so to get out of that and to talk to other people and get other people's ideas about, you know, what the set's going to look like, what the costumes are going to look like, everything else. And you see it all come together. But but really the collaboration that I love the most is so I see the if I write a novel, I see that as the first half of the creation of a piece of art. And that creative process isn't completed unless somebody reads that novel. Otherwise, I've just created a pile of paper and ink. But as soon as somebody reads that novel, we've created a work of art. And every time a different person reads it, we've created a different work of art together. And that's that's an amazing thing. It's even more amazing in the theater, because you can sit there and watch it happen in real time, because the audience is your most important collaborator. No matter how great your set designer is or your actors without an audience, it's not theater. And and to see the audience literally collaborating in the way that they that they breathe and that they don't breathe in a tape lap and they cry and to just sit there and be a part of that is really an amazing thing. And so I love collaboration, I love collaborating with theater professionals and with actors, but the best is the opportunity to collaborate with the audience. That is a wonderful answer. Wonderful answer. Thank you for that. Well, that all leads to my favorite question and ask guests. And that, of course, is what is your favorite theater memory? Okay, well, I have one. In the early 2000s, my wife got a job as a as a director at a local independent school that I'd gone to as a child and we had been volunteering in the theater department there. And she got a job directing a play for third graders. They did a third grade play every year. And she came to me after a couple of months and she said, I can't find a script that just fits the idea of what we've been talking about that that in the third grade, you shouldn't have a star every kid should have more or less an equal part that it needs to not talk down to the children, you know, all these things. And she said, you're a writer and you're you know, a theater person, you're a theater major in college, write a script for me. You got me this job. And so I did. I wrote a, I wrote a play called Twinderella about Cinderella and her twin brother Bob. And, you know, we, before the third grade play had been kind of this kind of pageant where all the kids are on stage and they stand up when it's their line and everything. And my wife's idea is no, this is going to be a real play. It's going to be exactly what it would be if you saw it in New York or anyplace else. And we're not, yes, there are little, there's shorter actors than you usually see, but other than that, you know, so she worked and worked and put it together and I was the technical director. So I'm up in the booth, you know, running lights and sound and it built the set and, and we're just hoping that it worked. And we got the performance for the parents, you know, when I was in college, my college professor even then was complaining about too many standing ovations. And he said, you know, true standing ovation, you shouldn't even realize that you stood up. It just happens. And I've only seen it a couple times in my life, but I saw it that day. And I saw the whole audience because I was in, I was in the booth. And yeah, it was their kids, sure. But the C as the playwright and as the husband of the director to see an audience without even realizing it instantly rise as one. That was, that was a fantastic moment. But for memory, I love that. Love that. Thank you for sharing that. Hunter, how about you? What is your favorite theater memory? Well, congrats on that, Charlie. I wish I could have seen that. That's so cool. Oh, how lovely. Well, immediately my head jumped to when I was in proof and I got to act with my mentor and favorite professor of all time, Todd McNerney, my senior year of college, but and shout out to Todd McNerney. He's awesome. CFC. But I just remembered. So Todd actually did this playwriting contest. And this was, yeah, my senior year. So this was like two years ago of college. And we put on a staged readings of some of the finalists. And I was lucky enough to be trusted with one of the characters of the winner, the winning play. And so barely anybody came to see these, you know, staged readings. It was like maybe four people, you know, maybe 10 on a good day. But the playwright, Jane Lee, who is from New York, lives there now, flew out, came to see it. She was there every rehearsal, you know, the two rehearsals and then, you know, the three performances or whatever. And she's very quiet and me and very appreciative. And I remember the first day of performance, we did it, you know, the typing, clapping. And then, you know, the three or four people leave. And Jane comes up to me and she says, thank you. And she was, it took me back a back because she was very emotional. And she said, I would love to have your contact information. This experience has made me realize that like, I should keep going with this. And playwriting is the loneliest profession in the world. And in that moment, one of the many moments, thankfully, that I've had now, that is the most rewarding thing to do in theater is to work with artists who have a little bit of belief in themselves, just a little enough to be like, you know what, I'm going to put this out there and just go with it. All these voices that I have written down in my head, that's just me, but I've given them different, you know, names. I have no idea how it's going to sound or look, I just have a belief in the story a little bit. And to have something come out of that is like, it almost brings me to tears thinking about it. It's everything that's beautiful about this, about what we do is to give people self belief in their art and to give people visuals and sound and life to something that previously was just a feeble thought in their mind. And so also on this trip, I'm going to see Jane, which I'm super excited about. And I'm going to bring something to life of Charlie's, which is, I'm so humbled and gratified to do. That is so spectacular, some great memories, thank you both for sharing those wonderful memories with us. As we wrap things up, I would love to know either of you having any of the projects or productions coming down the pipeline, you might be able to plug. My biggest project right now is to have an 18 month old grandson, so he's kind of my project these days. And he like, we're starting, my wife was playing goes to Christmas present in my presentation of Christmas Carol last year. And so he wasn't even a year old. And I took him into the theater one day, you know, as a matinee. And I just kind of hit over on the edge where nobody could see us. And he was just watching, absolutely wrapped. And he kept turning back and looking at me like, how is it that I've been alive for nine months? And you're just now showing me theater, you know. So I think that's going to be a great project, bringing theater into his life. And you know, Christmas Carol has continued, we have a new director this year, who's a great friend of mine and a fantastic director. I've worked with him as an actor. So that's happening. And yeah, I have a new novel that I'm shopping around. So who knows? I'm never quite sure what's going to be the next big push. But right now, we're trying to get Dreamland back on its feet for New York, for under St. Mark's. So wonderful. Congrats on the grandchild. That's so wonderful. That leads to my final question, and which is, if our listeners would like more information about escaping Dreamland, or about either a new, how can they do that? So escaping Dreamland, there are tickets available on the Frigid NYC website. We're doing a Sunday matinee and a Monday evening performance because we want to be able to invite people who are involved in theater in New York to come see the show. And a lot of times Monday night is their dark night. So come on out on Monday night and see the show. And you can also go to my website, which is just charlieloveit.com. And you will find a lot of information about the original book there with review quotes and book club guides, if you happen to read the book and that sort of thing. But we're excited to come to New York, and it's just such a great cast that we're working with. Well, Charlie Hunter, thank you both so much for taking the time to speak with me today for sharing the incredible work you are bringing up here to New York. So excited to see you. This is so wonderful. So thank you both so much for your time. Absolutely. It was a pleasure. Thank you. Thank you, Andrew. My guests today have been the amazing playwright, Charlie Lovett, and the incredible performer Hunter Carroll, who joined me to talk about their work escaping Dreamland. It's playing September 8th and 9th at under St. Mark's. And you can get your tickets and more information by visiting fidget.nyc. We also have some contact information for our guests, which we posted in our episode description, as well as on our social media posts. But make sure you get your tickets now. Under St. Mark's is not a huge venue. So the tickets are going to go very quickly. You've got two chances to catch the show September 8th and 9th. And again, the show is escaping Dreamland. We also want to add for our American listeners that Election Day is November 5th. Make sure you are registered to vote and have a plan to do your democratic duty. You can find out how and where you can register to vote by visiting vote.gov. The future demands that we fight for it now. So 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. 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 Jazzar. Other music on this episode provided by Jazzar 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. [Music]