Stage Whisper
Whisper in the Wings Episode 643
(upbeat music) - Welcome back in everyone to a fabulous new whisper in the wings from stage whisper. We have a great, great production to share with you today. Perfect for the fall season and at one of our favorite venues. Joining us today, we have the playwright and director Alex Dawson and the fabricator puppeteer and artist playing the role of the devil, Dan Diana. They're here to talk to us about Frigida New York and rack and tour ventures presentation of the devil and daisy dirt. It's playing September 26th through the 28th at Under St. Mark's and you can get your tickets and more information by visiting Frigida.nyc. We are so excited to dive more into this and to be sharing this with you. So I don't want to waste any more time. I want to jump right in and welcome on our guests. Alex, Dan, welcome in to whisper in the wings from stage whisper. - Thank you, thanks for having us here. - Yeah, thank you Andrew, great to be here. - I'm so excited to have the two of you here and to be talking about the show you have the devil and daisy dirt. Alex, why don't we start with you? You're the playwright of the piece. Can you tell us a bit about this show? - Yeah, I also want to just minor amendment. Dan is playing the devil, but he's playing the Jersey devil. So just, I don't want to get anybody's hopes up in case they're expecting to see an iteration of Satan. It is a Jersey devil, of course, the most famous cryptid in the state of New Jersey. So we're awaiting the Hudson with our garden state devil and coming into New York. So as two Jersey boys with a Jersey devil in tow, we're excited to be doing that. - Yeah, I think the shortest and best description might be sort of a pine baron's arrow town, meets a cryptid ET in which featuring a shoulder shot, Jersey devil, instead of a stranded extraterrestrial, deer hunters, instead of federal agents, and a midnight portal that opens atop the apple pie hill fire tower instead of a alien spaceship. Shaped like a Christmas tree ornament, all backed by a high lonesome sound. So lots of bluegrass music that both furthers the narrative, doesn't just supplement the narrative, but in many instances, the story is moved forward by those songs, but also in other instances, the music might dig into a path, the history, or a future and a projection that's not contained within the present, the immediate story itself. - How's that? - I love that, I think that's fantastic. I'm really curious to know, Alex, what inspired you to to pen and to create this piece? - So without going back too far, so Dan and I have a history of Jersey-centric mischief. We're from slightly different generations, I think he's about 10 years younger than me, but we both grew up, I think, you know, with a lot of, you know, sort of, I grew up in the woods of Alabama, so on a horse ranch on the border of Alabama and Georgia, very inspired by movies like, you know, critters and gremlins and alien creature features, even movies that were kind of bad movies, but had great makeup, like legends, and also listening, you know, by way of my flinty ranch-owning stepfather, a lot of outlaw country, you know, things like Johnny Cash and Johnny Paycheck and George Jones and Merle Haggard. So a lot of my writing, I teach at Rutgers University, I teach grade writing classes that veer towards folklore and their speculative fiction, but a lot of my writing mixes those two, that sort of kind of Southern Gothic outlaw country upbringing with sort of elements of fantasy and horror. Dan and I did a haunt about, how long ago was that Dan, that haunt? Do you remember? - Yeah, that would have been October 2019. - So Dan had gone out to LA, we were working on a production of Nosferatu that we had staged way back when, that got some attention and he had gone out to LA to sort of kind of help incubate that. That ended up not happening. He stayed out there working on a bunch of really cool horror films and big films like Guardians of the Galaxy and Avengers. He came back, and as soon as he came back, he came back to get married, extensively by a house or settle in New Jersey. And soon as he came back within a month, I think, which is like, let's do a haunt. I have a pretty big, I live in Highland Park, New Jersey, right across the river from Rutgers, pretty big side yard with like a little patch of woods in it and pine trees. So we came up with this idea of this haunt called Catch the Devil, which was sort of like an immersive, more of a theater piece than a haunt, where groups of like 25 people would move around on my yard and meet different people who had seen the devil being led by this sort of PT Barnum-like hunter who was trying to catch the devil. And even people who knew me and knew what I was capable but I think we're really surprised because I don't know that we charged either very little, maybe five dollars or it was free. We had to make hundreds of people lined up on this sort of wet, sort of rainy, foggy evening get into our yard, my yard and groups of 20 or 25. And ultimately they're, something has broken free from chains and has ravaged wild animal. And then they go around this corner and they see this giant, I think that one was like 12 foot, 13 foot, Jersey devil puppet to rise up, you know, silhouetted against the streetlights. We had five machines going in the backyard but it was also a very thick evening. So lots of kids screaming. And one of the things we realized is if you're trying to usher people out of your yard showing them something as impressive as this is not a great thing to do right before they leave because there were also those kids, kids like Dan and I probably were that were just a gog that just wanted to drink it in that didn't want to leave. - Yeah, let's scare more intrigue by how this thing could be happening right in front of them. - So I think we had a great time and we've done many weird site-specific, immersive theatrical programs once since then but we always wanted to kind of come back to this Jersey devil thing. You know, we're both proud of our, despite growing up in Alabama, I definitely feel very Jersey-centered. I came up here for college for Mason Gross School of the Arts. And I think we were excited by that. And we were excited by his puppet though we knew we had to make some changes and Dan can tell you about that. And, you know, we started also, Andrew getting involved in these fonts at this historical village. So these fonts that were funded by the county and had a big, pretty, well for us, for artists like us, not for Dan and his sort of filmmaking past but for a theater artist, big budgets. And Dan and I started working together on those and we're like, we need to be able to do some of this without it being Halloween, without it being October, without being bound as amazing as this sort of historic villages without being bound by their buildings and, you know, their timeframe. And so I think that's, this show was born out of that. - That is so cool. That sounds so exciting. Dan, I wanna bring you in on this conversation because Alex touched a bit about how you came upon all of this but I would love to know, you know, what was it like for you to begin to create part of the, your part of the story? - You know, as Alex mentioned, I mean, I've always, since I was, you know, six years old, I've always been a monster kid, so to speak. And I don't think, and Alex included, I don't think we've ever really grown out of that. And so even at a young age, I was just predisposed to just figuring out how I could make monsters whether I'm drawing them or building them at a legos or whatever the case is. And then, you know, as I got older, I was inspired by some of the more, you know, risque horror movies that I could get my hands on, VHS. Funny you mentioned the Friday night fright, so a friend of mine who were still friends to this day, we lived in neighboring towns. And every Friday after school, we'd ride our bicycles to the local video store, which was halfway between my house and his. We'd get a stack of VHS horror tapes, monster movies, you know, some junk food and go to each other's house and just watch movies all night. And I think that influence from that, we were inspired at 13, 14 years old to start making our own monster movies in the woods and the lake near where we lived. So we started doing that pretty early, you know, figuring out how to build a body that gets ripped in half by monsters, you know, a no budget. So it was always kind of part of my DNA to get into that. And of course, as Alex mentioned, I had about a decade of or more a professional experience in the film industry building props, prosthetics. And I actually taught classes in Manhattan a few years ago for about three years, anatomy building, prosthetics, life casting and applying and essentially making custom prosthetics for film and TV. And that was super rewarding. However, I then moved into doing building and fabric art fabricating as a career. And with that was able to access a workshop. And then so when Alex and I started talking more seriously about building these more elaborate creature suits or puppets for lack of a better term, I had the means to do it with very little overhead and nights and weekends at my disposal. So when Alex brings that information to me, he gives me the script and I'll read it and then kind of put it through my brain box, throw some concepts and looks at Alex, we'll talk about it and he's pretty much just trust me. You know, we're both coming from the same planet here. So the description resonates with me, the imagery resonates with him and it just always works out. About the Jersey Devil specifically, we knew that it needed to be, of course, low budget. I mean, when we started this, we had no money about our own, really. And from the puppet that I did for the haunt, it was really just on a very simple PVC frame that would allow it to stand up and sit down. I had the head on a stick with a concentric plastic rings as the neck that I made out of flower pots, you know? So I could get this really, and I think a bungee cord. So I can get a really nice movement with it, a nice organic movement. So all these things inspired the puppet, but when I started looking at, Sir, Alex, what was that one polar bear that you had sent? - Yeah, that was from a London staging of the Golden Compass, you know? - Right. So Golden Compass, I mean, it was very simplistic, very minimalistic polar bear puppet. I think it was a polar bear head with some wire framing around the body. So the actor was really in focus. And after seeing that and researching a little bit more, I got out of the mindset of building a creature suit for film where you don't really see the actor or they're removed digitally in post, into being more comfortable with actually seeing myself as the puppeteer on stage and not trying to really hide it too much. And even with that, we were thinking that we needed several people to puppeteer this thing. Of course, on like the DIY, you know, black box theater aesthetic that we try to bring in, where we just couldn't bring more people in specifically just to puppeteer this. So it was just on me to figure out a redesign of how I could do the walking, the arm movements, the head movements, the wing movements and all of this just on my own while I'm on stage. So I went through a few iterations of design, but ultimately I was inspired by two things. One was the tiger puppet from the Broadway adaptation of "Life of Pi" and that was a really impressive piece if anybody out there is familiar with it, it took three people to puppeteer, but I mean, the way that it moved was so realistic and convincing that you can easily forget that there's puppeteers operating this thing. And it's a really vibrant, impressive design and you can focus on the tiger and its movements and kind of alternate between the puppeteer action and the puppet itself and still have it be a really enjoyable experience. So after seeing that, it gave me a little more confidence and so inspired partly by that and then I'm gonna pull an old classic here, but the other thing it's inspired by is Carol Spinney's work in Big Bird. So it's kind of a mashup of like those two puppets in the way that it was built and the way that I operated inside. And of course, there's always little iterations and improvements to make as we do more shows, things that work, things that don't work, but I think overall we've had a really nice response from the crowd. Those pictures you mentioned that you saw on our website really, really shown it in its best light. Those are done by a photographer, friend of ours named Nina Westerbelts in New York City. And she just took these, she kind of is our, our little ace of our sleeves when it comes to art that you make that doesn't live on film and you can show it to somebody. She has a tendency to come by for us and photograph our productions just so beautifully and it really communicates the tone so well. And yeah, and that's pretty much it with how the build goes. - Yeah, I wanted to say Nina from way back when was instrumental in getting us, well, at least in theory, out to LA. So I think that was probably almost 20 years ago, maybe 15, 16 years ago when she photographed our interpretation of Nosferatu and Dan did the makeup for that as well as collaborating on all sorts of stage effects like when Nosferatu won warlock bites. - Is it Nina? I forget whether it's Nina in the German production. You know, he dragged huge clumps of wet red yarn across her like pale neck and chest. - The white gown and the white bed spread with that dark red, wet yarn across it really, with the blue lights, it really popped. It was, it was a really nice effect. - I want to say too, how important so Dan talked about the head movement and the head movement is really important in that our sense of monsters, maybe even leather face. Leather face is misunderstood. But our sense of monsters is almost always, certainly if they're creature-able, as misunderstood things, you know, the other animals bordering on being run into extinction, things that aren't supposed to be here. If you ever had a wild animal like trapped in your house, like even something as small as a swallow or, you know, a squirrel, I mean, this is how we sort of the monsters become monstrous 'cause they're in places that they're not supposed to be. So our interpretation of the Jersey Devil is very much something, if not to be pitied, then something to be helped. There is a villain in the piece that's a deer hunter named Tasty Murder, but the Jersey Devil isn't the monster. So the tilting of the head, and, you know, he mentioned the co-centric flower pots, he used something different for this. There's a lot of, I've talked about this puppet or this character as being a combination, maybe it inadvertently a gossamer from Bugs Bunny, but definitely like the titular, you know, animal and your favorite boy and dog or girl on horsebook. So the tilting of the head, the eyes don't move. They're these sort of, you know, black, you know, eyes, you know, sort of like a doll's eye. Yeah, exactly. You know, like the biggest pine nuts, as I say in the show, but black is conifer tar. But somehow Dan, as the puppeteer, and also as the designer, is able to convey this just wealth of emotion, right? And so Daisy, who's the central character, she's who you feel for, for the most part, but I'd say the collaboration of Daisy and the Devil, it's that sort of hybrid that breaks your heart and their sort of interaction, you know, there's just, I don't wanna get too much away, but, you know, there's these sort of almost old yellow moments in the show that are really kind of heart-wrenching. I love all that. That is so fascinating. The detail and the inspiration of the craft. This is so wonderful. So turning to this upcoming production that you're bringing to "Under St. Mark's." Dan, I would love to know, I mean, at the time of this recording, we are just under, I think, or just over, excuse me, three weeks away from the show opening. What has it been like developing this current iteration of the Devil and Daisy dirt? Well, it's been, so we, I built this back in April, and we actually workshopped this a little more locally to us, kind of on our own turf, and we workshopped it just to put it up, get some response back, work the kinks out, so to speak. And so I built the first version, we'll say, you know, prototype went to stage, of course, like always, and I was pretty happy with it. After the workshop, brought it back into the studio here, and made some modifications, like just some silhouette modifications on how it looked from different different profiles, to sleeken it up a little bit, and then just basic mechanism things that could be improved on. And so there wasn't really that much that had to be done after the initial build, except for a few maintenance points. And speaking of points, I tried something new on this build originally. I have, I don't know if you can see behind me here, but I do have access these days to 3D printing technologies. So I was able to 3D print some very lightweight, and quick and affordable versions of the head. So the design came out, I 3D printed and assembled this thing for weight, and the compromise there was the integrity of it. So there were actually a lot of moments. Actually, our first night, I walked out of backstage, and the antler got caught and broke right off. And the show must go on, so I just went with it. And the funny thing was that after that show, people recognized it didn't have a full set of antlers, and felt we had done it intentionally, and then even spoke to the fact that it made the character seem more vulnerable. And so we actually kept it like that for a few shows. Ultimately, when we go out and do promo with this, if we-- I believe for our St. Mark's show a week or so, maybe four or two weeks before, we're going to go and do a little walk around in the East Village. I'm sure people will be excited to see that. But when we have it outside of the show, I did build both antlers on just to have the expected look. It's a little more impressive looking on its own, out of context, in the show to have the full set. But if I had to do it again, I would definitely make it a little stronger. So we didn't have to worry about transporting it like a delicate piece of China every time we go out. Wow, that is one-- I mean, I shouldn't say wonderful. That's just very interesting. I can only imagine the moment the antlers just got caught, and it's like, oh, oh, oh, well, we're going to just have to make this work, swing for it. Also that as well. It's one of the reasons I love theater. Dan comes from a more cinematic world. And growing up in Alabama, even the movie theater was an hour away and across the state line. I didn't have a lot of access to regional theater, to my school had no theater program. Certainly the town had no theater. So the film was what inspired me. But what I did-- I mean, I made super eight movies and whatnot. But I was really interested in putting shows on in the barn. I mean, it was very like-- was it Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland, right? I mean, let's put on a show. I was also being fed by the DC punk scene, and people like E. Mackay and Henry Rollins, very interested in this sort of producing things on my own, and still am. But theater, to me, that's what's exciting about theater, right? I mean, the downside is it's kind of fleeting. But the upside is the reason I picked under St. Mark's Andrews, I had a theater company in residency with Eris, and back then they were called Horse Trade. Frigid NYC was Horse Trade Productions for about seven years. And I did a lot of really fun shows in the crayon in the red room and in under St. Mark's. But one of the things, you know, you-- Andrew, as you know, as an actor, you know, as Dan said, the show must go on, but I would often book the shows well before I'd even started writing the play, you know? And it keeps you from tinkering, you know? I mean, it's like you just drive towards that show date, you know, and whatever happens that night happens. My experiences, my adult experiences with film have been so frustrating because there is sort of an expectation that you get it right. There is the same kind of embracing, and it looks different, right? Something you've got wrong on film, whether it be, you know, audio or-- I mean, it just is-- it can be painful to see where something you get wrong in theater, right? It incents and lists the audience. You know, they know that something, you know, maybe happened that singular and that they're a part of it and that wasn't supposed to happen. And so they've experienced something that is unique to them and unique to that night. And I also think theater audiences-- I mean, for the most part, I mean, they want to apply, right? So, you know, if you give them just enough, you know, they want to embrace it, whereas, you know, film, I mean, it's so easy to turn off the TV, right? Or to change the channel or, you know, to-- I guess nobody's watching on tape or DVD, but to stop whatever you're doing and just move on to something else, whereas theater, you're in it, you know, for an hour or two hours, it's-- I mean, I know people have walked out on things, but I never have. Yeah, I don't think I have. Maybe an opera once or twice, but anyway, so that's one of the things I particularly love about theater. And I also-- I want to sing the praises of "Under St. Mark's II" because in creating this, I love theater and I see a lot of theater and I had the theater company, but I would say I'm a non-traditional theater artist in that I would collect actors that were sort of-- that were-- that did other things. I mean, my company was composed of people that sort of, you know, they might have been, you know, like a boxer or, you know, like a Navy SEAL or, you know, whatever. And Dan being-- I've taken Dan to see quite a bit of theater now, but I would say we're non-traditional theater artists. And so with this show, we look to do it in, you know, I think of all the places as if Tom Waits was a nobody where he'd perform, you know? And so we've done it in breweries and in bars. Where we developed it was sort of this bluegrass cow-punk listening room in central New Jersey, but barbecue joints, you know, and barns and-- and it was-- it's tricky. It's not like I had-- Joe's pub wasn't knocking on my door. You know, it's not like I turned down all these sort of fancier places. But under St. Mark's had exactly the level of sort of, even though it's a theater and a proper theater, sort of non-traditional space, the brick walls, sort of on a very, very cool street, right? The street where the Solonius Monk got to start next to the building that Led Zeppelin made famous. So it's really cool to sort of come back to this spot. The perfect, I think, New York house for us. And it was funny, Dan and I went and took a look at it last week, making sure, you know, like, you know, antler clearance for one thing. But we went into the dressing room and I had done a play. I was a bartender and a bouncer in this bucket in New Brunswick, New Jersey for six, seven, eight years. And I wrote a play based on it called Barman. And I did it a couple places, including the crayon, but it started in under St. Mark's. And in the dressing room, I had written, it opens with the Sam Cooke song, There Stands the Glass. And I had written There Stands the Glass in the dressing room on the pine plank walls. And it's covered, right? I mean, it was covered then. But it clearly hasn't been changed or resurfaced. Just a, you know, sort of vines of quotes and names and graffiti and pictures. And I looked for that, we couldn't find it, but we did find the words Mother Leads. And we figured that was a pretty good sign. Mother Leads, of course, the Lord has it that Mother Leads gave birth to the Jersey Devil. So it felt good to come back to a place that I loved, but it felt particularly right for this show in part because of seeing that little snatch of graffiti on the wall. I loved that, that's so cool. I want to snowball off of all that, Alex. And I want to know, as the playwright and director of this piece, is there a message or a thought you're hoping that the audiences will take away from it? - That's tricky. And I was definitely, when I looked over the questions, that was one, I said, Dan, you take this. I mean, I would say hope, you know, hope in the content, like in the arena of having lost a lot. You know, the characters in this show are people who have lost a lot. And it ends on a fairly profound note of hope and optimism. So I guess I would say that. Dan, you have anything to add to that? - Yeah, not much, but yeah, I would definitely echo the sentiment of against all odds. It's definitely a little more pointed. It's definitely a statement of patriarchy and how that has, you know, worked its way to the current day in our society, especially in maybe more rural areas. And really sticking, even though it's not, per se, a horror show, like it's not a scary show, there is a monster and it really, I don't know, challenges you as the right word, but yeah, maybe it challenges you to think about who the real monsters are in the world and who maybe just because of being familiar with something, we're not afraid of it or cautious of it. And I think it makes the audience consider those things. - Yeah, just to say again, Andrew, the monster is not the thing that looks unlike us. You know, the monster is human, is, you know, yeah, so. - Yeah, which I think is really, really great commentary and really, really smart because the worst monsters out there are not the scary looking things. It's the people among us that do the scariest things. Dan, I wanna come to you with my final question for the first part and that is, who are you hoping to have access to the show? - You know, really at this stage, anybody who's interested, I mean, whether you're a fan of cryptids, the bizarre, avant-garde performance, horror, bluegrass, outlaw country, music even. I mean, we have live music in the show, the Arlen Files, who does just an amazing job at really like filling the gaps and driving the emotional tone of the film, of the play. But like Alex said before, I mean, when we're doing this and we don't really have an intention for who we want this to be. I mean, we have an intention for the setting we wanna put it up against, you know, the experience and the atmosphere and the tone we wanna put forth. But as far as our audience, I mean, like Alex said in the last time we did this, we had all in the same. I mean, such a variation of, you know, I think there was a row of like eight or nine-year-olds, maybe four or five kids sitting in the front row and I could see them through my little viewing slit in the creature suit, just their mouths were hanging open the whole time and it's a 55-minute show. So I mean, they were just enthralled the whole time. And then in the same breath, we would have, you know, an elderly couple, specifically a couple of older women came up to say like how they were essentially like holding back tears of emotion during some of the more tender moments in the story. And then that juxtapose with me, you know, sitting back behind, backstage in the suit, you know, just sweating, waiting for my part. And I could just hear what's happening and I could hear Alex, you know, casting his magic across the crowd and, you know, he's got some dark humor in there as well. And just, you know, every 10 minutes, the whole place just erupting with laughter too. So really anybody, I mean, I think anybody who likes live performance will get something out of it. I think it has a lot to offer. And even from the point where Alex shared the script with me, something really resonated. I mean, as he mentioned, I think very cinematically about a lot of things on the page. And just every scene I could really see 100% visually in a cinematic realm. And that really inspired me. It really showed me that he had done something great here. And I even said to him, you know, we tend to do a lot of projects. We just, we do something really quick. We put it up and then it goes away when we move on to the next thing. And this one specifically, you know, I made a point to say to Alex, you know, like let's not let this die on the vine. You know, let's hang onto this for a while and really, I think it deserves to be out there a little longer and just give people this experience and just see what it yields. - I want to say too, Andrew, so it's not confusing to your listeners. So I also play the storyteller and tasty murder in the show in there. So if you hate the sound of my voice listeners, don't come to the show because you're going to hear a lot of it. I also think one of the things Dan and I have talked about is this sort of mix of it is an avant-garde piece in a lot of ways in that we use, you know, fully for sounds, so a lot of the, you know, the sound, the flavor. - Live fully, yeah. - Yeah, yeah, thunder drums and things like that. And, you know, puppets, obviously. And, you know, it's a campfire tail, right? It's a tall tail, but it also in many ways, and this speaks to those eight and nine-year-olds, you know, kids are a wonderful mix, actually, of the avant-garde and the mainstream, right? They're simple and they're sophisticated and, you know, they have these fat-cune imaginations. But it has, because, so this author, Lev Grossman, recently blurred it and he called it Jim Henson meets Johnny Cash. So it has this, I write with a very sort of flinty, kind of, you know, rural poetry, right? I'm not using a lot of, I'm not using a lot of big words, right? You know, I hope it's poetry, but I try to write in a way that anybody can understand it. And so on the surface, it has this appearance of being, you know, a very, like, sort of, you know, kind of homespun, provincial, you know, kind of, you know, contrified, you know, cracker brown kind of story. But really, it's this very weird, naughty, layered avant-garde thing. And what's really exciting to me is when we have, you know, when we have kids or real, you know, like, just movie lovers, you know, and not to denigrate movies, I love movies, but movie lovers maybe is a slightly more mainstream audience, you know, like somebody who loves creature features. And we have them seeing this thing that is really unlike anything they've ever seen and really getting it. I think that's, that's very gratifying for me. (upbeat music) (upbeat music) - For the second part of our interview, if you love giving our listeners a chance to get to know our guests a little bit better, pick your brains, if you will. And I know we're a little short on time, but I can't let you go without asking my favorite question, which is, what is your favorite theater memory? - I'll start, Dan, to give you a little time to think about it. I mean, I have, I have tons, you know, despite growing up in Alabama, my mother was an artist and an international tour guide. So we went to England a lot, lots of West End shows, you know, lots of great, you know, I was very interested in big things happening as a kid, you know, seeing Tommy with Kim Wilds, right? And the sort of, you know, that pinball machine on hydraulics, you know, certainly seeing the, you know, the chandelier plummet and phantom, the helicopter fly off and miss Saigon, the car chases and sunset boulevard and that very ornate set. So I've always done like small kind of black box things, but I've always brought like this thing, like it's always, I did a lot of, I was very interested in and elaborate sets. And even for the friend New York, so I did the New York Fringe Festival, like three or four years in a row. And I would build these sets that could collapse easily, but they really looked like off-Broadway sets, you know, even though we had to get out of there in a half hour. And, you know, Dan's puppet is definitely doing that. As many wonderful shows as they have had in "Under St. Mark's", even a regular attendee of those shirts shows, I think will be blown away by this. But I think probably my most recent memory is, I took my son to see King Kong, my son's just turned 12. And so he was probably a nine when I took him to see King Kong. And the show itself, the music, for instance, like we both forget that it had music was okay. But the stage craft was incredible. The most magical thing I've ever seen. And, you know, this is one Dan and I were talking about what you should see or not see with the puppet. You know, his puppet is, it's not like a Lion King puppet. It's not like he's front and center. He's hidden and you, if ever, you see him in shadow barely see his face. You know, he's, he's costumed in this thing, right? It's a wearable puppet. But I remember watching, you know, like 20 puppeteers, like swinging like ninjas around and on top of this, this, this, what, 20 foot tall puppet. And it was like, is there last show, right? They were closing, that day they were closing. And we definitely got to move down and close after intermission. And it's like, you know, I mean, even like four, five rows away, man. This thing was so, it just looked real. When it was charging through the streets, when it was climbing the building, when it was falling. And when she went up and sort of, you know, it was dead there in the street. It just, just, just incredible. And then the other thing I'll say is, and maybe Dan, I'll touch on this, because we definitely saw this as Dan and I started seeing. So I think Ray House, we saw last year together. I don't know how many plays Dan had seen before that. But we went to see a dead outlaw. At the Mineta about a month before our show went up. And our shows are very different, but there's definitely some similarities. And, you know, I thought that was fantastic. - Wow, that is amazing, amazing. Thank you for sharing that. Dan, what about you? What is your favorite theater memory? - I don't have as deep of a theater history as Alex does. But I will say around the time where I was doing, and this will ping pong between stage and film, but when I was making these, you know, DIY low budget monster films with my friends in the woods, I also had the chance to get involved with the high school production of "Little Shop of Horrors." And even though they rented a big Audrey II puppet, I got to play with that thing and operated a bit. And it was my first time operating a puppet to that scale. It stuck with me. And fresh forward up to, of course, we did "Ospheratu" on stage production on our own that was really rewarding to be able to, you know, design a stage design a bit with Alex and build set pieces and do the makeup and just, you know, kind of mold this show with Alex was rewarding. When I had gone to the West Coast to work on film and TV, I bounced around a lot doing a lot of different things, learning a lot of different skill sets, a lot of different experiences on set and in the workshop building things. And in retrospect, the funnest and best time I ever had was building a puppet, whether it was, you know, a radioactive worm that was, you know, chomping teens heads off in the woods somewhere, where it was, you know, a cartoon version of like "Silo Green" and "Goodie Mob" for a music video. It was always just really rewarding. And I always felt the most spark from building something out of nothing and then bringing it to life in front of camera. And so I wanna attribute that to that early high school moment and then with that, I think it really inspired me to just really sink my teeth into this theater experience with Alex building this puppet, bringing it to life, of course, making some other stuff for our haunts that we did, which were essentially like walking theater on its face. And right, and like Alex said, we've gone to see Grey House and we had a great time. I mean, the set was awesome. It was a really cool show. It really started to show me kind of, you know, what we can do with a stage and, you know, lack of, you know, without it being too busy or what the right level of busy or interactiveness with a stage needs to be for a show. And then of course, seeing that outlaw where it was a pretty minimalist stage with a lot of transformation. It really, I think those two shows seeing them back to back and then running into our own production here helped give me a direction as to where I had not been so comfortable with theater as Alex. It just helped guide a few things. And of course, a lot of encouragement from Alex and wisdom passed down made me more comfortable with being on stage. And in fact, you know, I think maybe one of the more rewarding things is going from, you know, being in my early twenties and playing music on stage and performing that way where you're exposed. And even though I played drums and percussion, I was still exposed and I want to say I definitely dealt with a certain level of, you know, stage anxiety, performance anxiety that always kind of pushed me away from the stage, but something about operating and even though you can kind of see me becoming this other thing inside of this Jersey Devil puppet, I'm not even thinking about myself. I mean, I know people say it. It's kind of contrived to say, I mean, obvious, but when I'm in the puppet, I am the puppet. Like I'm not really thinking about like the bills or, you know, I think the bills are worrying about mortgage or, you know, what's due at work and all this stuff. I'm really just thinking about what the puppet should be thinking about, what that character's thinking about. And so that's really helped me kind of get out on stage and be a little bit more authentic to myself, you know, in my, in my off stage life as well. - And it's also some wonderful memory right there. Thank you so much. Thank you both so much for those fabulous memories. As we wrap things up, I would love to know if our listeners would like more information about the Devil and Daisy Dirt, or about either of you, maybe they'd like to reach out to you. How can they do so? - Our website is the devil and Daisy Dirt with and spelled out dot blogspot dot com. That's a good place. There's a lot of, well, this will be posted there as well as other interviews. We're gonna be on NPR towards the end of September, right the week before the show. Also, there's the step-by-step dance photos of the builds. So there's a kind of a deep dive you can do on that. And my Instagram is linked there, but maybe Dan will give you his Instagram. Dan, where do you want people to reach out to you? - Yeah, the website's always evolving, so that'll get updated as well. But I'm on Instagram, slasherfx, just the letters fx, slasherfx at Instagram, and you could see postings about the show and previous builds that I've done, fabrication, stuff with Alex and also stuff from my personal life. - One thing we try to get in there, it was just a great conversation, Andrew. So we lost track of this, but is that I think folks got a sense that we've been working together in the past, but that we have a bunch of shows coming up in the future. So our next, and the devil in daisydirt.blogspot.com is a good place to sort of find out about those shows and get moved over to maybe another site that details them. But our next show is something called Full Earth, which begins with a barefoot boy in the woods of Alabama and ends on the surface of the moon. I have three words for you, wear wolves in space. It's sort of old yellow meets alien. So we're going to top ourselves with that because there's a lots of sort of outer space and just sort of intergalactic projection as well as Dan's building a puppet of a dog on fire and also sort of shattered astronaut helmets with the werewolf snouts poking through. So that's so go sci-fi or Southern Gothic science fiction. Should be a lot of fun. - Wonderful. Well, Alex, Dan, thank you both so much for taking the time to speak with me today, for sharing this incredible show that I am so excited about. I can't wait to see it. This is incredible. So thank you so much for your time today. - Thank you, Andrew, it was a pleasure. - Yeah, really, really great. Thanks for having us on, Andrew. - My guests today have been two incredible artists, the amazing playwright and director, Alex Dawson and the amazing fabricator puppeteer and the person playing the role of Jersey Devil, Dan Diana. They join us to talk about Frigid New York and Raccoon tours, ventures, presentation of The Devil and Daisy Dirt. It's happening September 26 through 28 at Under St. Mark's and you can get your tickets and more information by visiting Frigid.NYC. 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 make sure you head to Frigid.NYC now. Get your tickets before they're gone to check out this incredible show, The Devil and Daisy Dirt. Again, playing September 26 through 28. And we wanna add for our American listeners that Election Day is November 5. Make sure you are registered to vote, have a plan to cast your ballot and 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. (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 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. ♪ On way from there I'll swear ♪ ♪ I don't care anywhere near your town ♪ ♪ Makes me there ♪ You