Bonus: Maeve Duffy’s baby face on the promotional poster!

This semester, The CU Players are tackling Jonathan Marc Sherman’s Things We Want. The playwright describes the show as a “dirty, sexy, suicide comedy,” and the cast seems to agree. The show goes up this Thursday night, October 22, at 8pm in the Lerner Black Box theater. But before the lights go dim, Bwogger and theater enthusiast Lila Etter got the chance to sit in on a rehearsal and talk to the cast and crew about their process.

Moments after sitting down in the corner of the rehearsal room (which happened to be a classroom in Hamilton that night), I heard the line, “Send her your puke!!!” screamed loudly by one of the actors in front of me. The run-through had not yet started. The warmup had only just begun and I knew I was in for a treat. The next line uttered by Eric Wimer, the director, as he and the cast prepared for their rehearsal? “I’m a big girl!” Next? “Whenever I look at the moon I’ll think of her.” These phrases, albeit less aggressive than the first, started to give me an idea of the play I was about to witness. Now knowing that those specific lines would appear at some point in the show, I was eager to get some context.

The play centers on three siblings – Teddy, Sty, and Charlie – and the ways in which they cope with the suicides of both of their parents. Ten years prior to the play’s opening, when Charlie was only thirteen, their father jumped out the living room window. Five years after that, their mother followed suit. Now the three twenty-somethings are living in the wake of their parents’ deaths, and each sibling has their own manner of combating their pain. Teddy, the eldest, uses a self-help guru named Doctor Miracle to stay afloat. Next in line is Sty, who turns to alcohol and carries around a bonsai tree as her own personal talisman. And for Charlie, the self-proclaimed “baby of the family,” it’s the rare addiction of love, or rather, of co-dependence. At twenty-three years old, he has just dropped out of culinary school and moved back home after a bad breakup when the play begins. When Teddy labels him as “recovering from a nervous breakdown,” Charlie’s correction is to call it a “heart breakdown,” as his real crisis is that of a broken heart. His first lines are a mumbled mantra of “Zelda, Zelda, Zelda, Zelda…” (the name of his lost love) and it soon becomes clear that Charlie is having a quarter-life crisis. As the siblings come together on stage, the play finally begins to take shape.

Amidst the craziness of rehearsal, I had the chance to sit down briefly with Maeve Duffy, a junior at Barnard College and the actress portraying Sty. My first question was, “How would you pitch the show?” to which Maeve replied, “It’s a dark comedy, I guess. It’s a suicide comedy, which sounds weird even saying out loud. But it is funny, just in a very dry way. It plays with language a lot.” What I witnessed was exactly that. Much of the comedy draws from wordplay, such as a scene in which Teddy references his self-help guru, Dr. Sydney Ernest Miracle. Even after repeating her full name multiple times, he is unable to see why it’s most likely not her birth name. So yes, the play is funny, but it simultaneously deals with themes like addiction, mental illness, religion, and – most prominently – suicide. So how does one reconcile the extreme horrors of a harsh reality with humor? Joey Santia, who plays Teddy, explained, “Everyone’s probably telling you how funny this play is. They’re not wrong. But it’s really dark. It’s serious. It borders on too serious. It’s so serious that sometimes all you can do is laugh.” And by the end of the first act, I certainly was.

The second act picks up exactly one year later on the same day, the 30th of October. In just one year, everything previously established in Act One has been flipped upside down. As Joey explained to me before their rehearsal began, and before I knew what I was getting myself into, “One thing that’s cool about this play in particular is that each character initially fulfills a certain trope, and then by the second act these tropes completely change.” This transformation is evident across the board. Sty has just received her 365-day chip from AA, while Teddy has become a full-fledged alcoholic. Charlie now has a job as a sous chef and is planning on moving up even further. He and Stella are in love and celebrating their anniversary. Over the course of the opening scene, it becomes clear that, while the lives of his siblings have greatly improved, Teddy has hit rock bottom. Once described by his younger brother as “pathologically positive,” he has become bitter about… well, everything. In the past week he was called into court on account of public urination. His mood swings have become more extreme, and he has developed an hostility toward others that just wasn’t there before. He has gone off the deep end. From here, Act Two only builds upon itself in hysteria and frenzy. It’s quite a whirlwind until the very end, but I refuse to give that away.

The experience of watching even a run-through of this show can only be described as cyclonic. The scenes ricochet: from whispered confessions to sloppy drunk speeches; from crude jokes to existential questions; from boisterous, self-deprecating monologues to silent pauses that last almost minutes. It’s hard to keep up, but that might be the best part of the show. What ties it all together is the quick-paced, witty nature of the dialogue. It’s the playful banter one expects between siblings, which brings the story – somewhat outrageous at times – back down to earth.

The beauty of theater is in its vulnerability; in order to act, and act well, one must be prepared to expose him or herself on stage in front of a live audience. (The phrase is overused, yes, but it rings true here.) You can find that level of vulnerability emerging from most actors, in most productions, to some extent. But watching the rehearsal for The Things We Want is observing the exposure of characters as well as actors. The play’s central themes include religion, addiction, romance, and mental illness, but it’s the inherent vulnerability of each character that is emphasized more than anything else. As Joey pointed out, “Partly because there are only four characters, you end up spending so much time with them that you feel as though you’re getting inside their heads just by watching them on stage.” Inside those heads you’ll find a myriad of thoughts and feelings: sometimes disturbing, often hilarious, and always compelling.

After watching the run-through, I had the unique opportunity to meet with Eric Wimer to discuss the show. What follows are excerpts from that interview.

What other plays have you done in your history as a director?

“My freshman year I was involved in the One Acts festival. I directed a play called This Is A Play, which was about actors narrating their internal monologues as they performed this awful play about, like, heads of lettuce and forgotten brothers and sisters. It was hilarious, and a great way to experiment with physical movement and just have a really good time. It was pure comedy. I also produced Mother Courage and Her Children. That was one of the heaviest works of theater I’ve ever dealt with, because [Bertolt] Brecht’s language is both the most rewarding and the toughest I’d ever encountered. Mother Courage and Her Children is, to steal from Lincoln Chafee, like a giant block of granite: the times change around it, but it still remains, in my opinion, the center of the theatrical canon.”

Why did you choose this play?

“Things We Want has a depth of language and an unpredictability of storytelling that really make is unique among other plays. The cast is top notch, and the team has really worked on making this something special. This is not just another student play. No offense to other student plays. It deals with relevant issues that most people here on this campus think about every day. The idea of drive, of creating meaning out of an unspectacular life, of what we cling onto in order to keep moving forward. Ideas of depression and suicide, and how to communicate with people who are depressed or suicidal. It delves into those issues in an honest and fearless way, in a non-dramatic way that other plays can’t seem to escape. It seems that we’re usually drawn to these spectacular portrayals of suicide. Someone curled into a ball in the corner of a room. Javert jumping off the bridge after singing a dramatic aria. There’s never a serious depiction of the ambiguities and of the positive action that meaninglessness or depression drives you to. This play handles that in one the most resonating ways I’ve ever seen.”

Originally Sty is a male character, and all three siblings are brothers. How did the choice to switch Sty’s gender come about? Was it simply because of Maeve’s fitting the part, or was it a choice made prior to casting?

“I’ll start by saying that there were a lot of reasons. I looked at the cast, and there’s always a wealth of female talent, so I always like to have a role that’s gender-flexible when I feel that the gender is irrelevant. My default is gender flexible, but I opened up the roles of Teddy and Charlie, because they’re both experiencing crises of masculinity. So they are more male – not merely because they have sexual and romantic relationships with a female. A female Sty could have that, too. But it’s because their breakdowns are crises of masculinity, and their roles focus on the ways in which they artificially contort themselves to fit into this idea of the man. Sty, meanwhile, is definitely sexual at points, but she isn’t experiencing a crisis of masculinity.

“The other answer is, of course, the audition process. There were good male actors who came in for the role. Maeve was hilarious, and she had the combination of being funny and also serious emotional depth. She was certainly the actor who most fit the role in my mind. And at some point I realized, ‘Oh, this could just be three white men on a stage.’ That’s a different play. Having that female voice in the room when it comes to certain discussions will, I’m hoping, change the presentation of the play’s themes. So far, it has also made the play less explicitly about heterosexual sex, which is expressed thoroughly by Teddy and Charlie. They contort themselves again into what they believe heterosexuality and male sexuality is supposed to be. But Sty serves as a thorn in that, and that thorn becomes so much stronger when Sty is a woman.”

You plan to work with campus mental health groups to host a talkback after the production. What is your goal in discussing the play in the context of mental health?

“We have a plan to host the talkback with Student Wellness Group, most likely on Sunday afternoon, October 25th. This play brings up some serious issues and can be triggering, which is why we’ll be putting a trigger warning on the program and making an announcement beforehand. Theater is such a great way to enter into issues like this. It’s hilarious. It’s an absolute ball, but at the same time, it forces you to think about issues that are on this campus right now. Depression and suicide need to be discussed, and this play brings them up in the context of ambition, of finding meaning, of being a young adult living on one’s own. It’s really about living in the absence of parents, and that’s something we’re all dealing with. Not so much homesickness, but the responsibility of making yourself, and deciding on a path, and choosing your own future. And the idea that if you don’t like it, there’s a serious cost to starting over. That’s why the character of Stella is so compelling: she has worked all her life at being a great concert pianist, and all of a sudden, her hand just stops working. Now she has to figure out what the fuck to do with her life, and that resonates with the audience. It hits us like a freight train, because permanence is such a scary idea to all of us.”

Things We Want is a production of the Columbia University Players. Opening Night is October 22nd at 8pm, and the show will run Thursday through Saturday. I know I’ll be attending the production, if only to hear the line, “Payback will be swift and smell like salmon,” one more time.