Georgia Clark
Bring a Weasel and a Pint of Your Own Blood
Bring a Weasel and a Pint of Your Own Blood
East 13th Street Theatre
136 East 13th St.
Thurs. Aug 4, Fri. Aug 5, Sat. Aug 6 @ 8pm
Tickets: $18/15 students, reserve tickets at bringaweasel@gmail.com
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| Award-winning playwright Alexandra Collier has her play "The Red Letterbox "staged in Bring A Weasel And A Pint Of Your Own Blood, an experimental festival that's fast becoming an exciting platform for America’s downtown playwrights. |
Inspired again by the genius of scribbler Mac Wellman,
this year's 6th annual Weasel festival features talented playwrights Caitlin
Brubacher, Alexandra Collier, Sara Farrington and Ariel Stess with director
Sarah Rasmussen. This experimental festival is fast becoming an exciting
platform for America's downtown playwrights who are taking over from Broadway's
blandness. This year's plays take inspiration from a 1943 hard-boiled detective
novel by Norbert Davis, with a whiskey swilling detective and his disapproving
Great Dane sidekick, numerous corpses, and a desert road trip under the
watchful eye of wise-talking vultures. All framed by the philosophic musings
of Wittgenstein, the festival promises to be three nights of rapid-fire
plays by wholly original playwrights working outside the canon. We talk
to award-winning Australian playwright Alexandra Collier about her play
"The Red Letterbox."
Q. Tell me how you came to write this play.
Mac Wellman chose this year's Weasel festival inspiration/adaptation text
in the form of a 1940s hardboiled detective novel called "Sally's in
the Alley." The novel is hilariously dry, and was written by Norbert
Davis, who was being outdone in life by his wife (who was a much more successful
writer). Wittgenstein, a favorite philosopher of Mac's, loved Norbert Davis'
work. Sadly, Norbert Davis never heard about this and committed suicide.
So Davis' novel is being adapted by three playwrights (Sara Farrington,
Ariel Stess and myself) and the framing device is Wittgenstein's musings
about language (in a play that interweaves throughout the night by Caitlin
Brubacher). Typically, given Mac's love of the esoteric and experimental,
the unlikely pairing of abstruse philosophy and wisecracking detective fiction
are being mashed together.
Q. Can you describe what your play "The Red Letterbox"
is about?
I have taken a section of the play where the detective (Doan) and his sidekick
(Carstairs, who is a Great Dane) are on a road trip and they pick up a sexy
hitchhiker by the name of Harriet Hathaway. This section keeps looping in
my play and playing out in repeated ways with unexpected results. There
is some gender bending, a lot of power play, a dog being played by a woman,
some musing about love and Kanye West's "Gold Digger" in the mix.
Q. What else inspired the play?
It's inspired in some way by the playwright Sheila Callaghan's work -- who
cheekily challenges ideas about gender in a way that I love. We are four
female playwrights using dead white males as a source and I wanted to show
that up, so I made the sidekick character of the Great Dane a woman and
fleshed her out as the most three dimensional of all the characters, with
the most to say.
Q. What sort of other pop culture works is it in the vein of?
I've borrowed a lot from Davis' book and I definitely reference those 1940s
noir films (which Sara Farrington heavily references in her play even more
than I do, and does it in a very funny way) and there's an Andrew's sisters
type song that I wrote (with the genius musical styling's of Pearl Rhein,
who is the actress playing Carstairs, the Great Dane.)
Q. Can you tell me a funny anecdote or nerve-racking moment from
the rehearsal process
Well there's some awkward crotch grabbing going on -- we're still trying
to nail that down! But really, the rehearsals are constant hilarity -- the
actors are like these charming little wind up talent machines, who are so
fun to watch (don't tell them I said that.) I seem to spend a lot
of time in rehearsals with a desire to kneel on the floor and watch the
action -- I don't know if I'm praying that my words will make sense or if
I'm devolving into a three-year old in playgroup, but that's where I want
to be most.
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