Interview: Giovanna Sardelli of THEATREWORKS 23RD ANNUAL NEW WORKS FESTIVAL at TheatreWorks Silicon Valley

TheatreWorks Silicon Valley’s New Works Festival always promises a fun ride for adventurous theatergoers, but this year’s edition offers an embarrassment of riches. In addition to staged readings of six wildly imaginative new pieces - two musicals, two plays and a Hip Hop double bill - there are also some special presentations to benefit the festival. Cut from Away will be catnip for anyone interested in an insider’s peak into the creative process of musical theater. The married team who wrote Come From Away will perform songs that were cut from their show and share fascinating stories about how they winnowed down the many tales about the citizens of Gander, Newfoundland to craft their megahit musical that is currently the most frequently produced show in North America.

As if all that weren’t enough, Emmy-winning actor Mariska Hargitay will be offering three performances of Every Brilliant Thing to benefit TheatreWorks and Joyful Heart Foundation, the organization she founded that supports survivors of sexual assault, domestic violence, and child abuse. Hargitay is fresh off her wildly successful Broadway run in the play where she took on the impossible assignment of following Daniel Radcliffe and by all reports crushed it. The play is an especially apt fit for the New Works Festival since its script incorporates extensive interaction with the audience, making it virtually a different experience every time it’s performed. And it’s a natural for TheatreWorks since Hargitay just happens to be the half-sister of the company’s Artistic Director, Giovanna Sardelli.

I spoke with Sardelli by the phone last week to discuss the Festival and found her unbridled enthusiasm for championing new works and emerging writers infectious. We talked about the thrill of helping Come From Away’s David Hein and Sankoff gestate their new musical Vienna, the longstanding relationship TheatreWorks has enjoyed with many of the playwrights in this year’s Festival, and what it’s been like to have her own family’s story made public via Mariska Hargitay’s documentary My Mom Jayne. The following conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Can you believe you’re about to open the 23rd TheatreWorks New Works Festival?

I know! It’s amazing.

Folks who haven’t attended the Festival before should be aware that these are very much works still in progress. What does that mean in terms of what they can expect from the performances and the overall vibe?

What I think makes the Festival so exciting is the works are in varying degrees of development. Some are very close to being ready [for a full production] and others are really in the developmental phase, so those pieces may change quite a bit between presentations. What an audience is treated to is a little insider peak into what the team was working on. If there’s been a significant change we like to tell the audience. Usually, the teams are working right up until they present something publicly, which is very exciting.

The actors are behind music stands with the script in front of them, but what’s fantastic is it’s the best storytelling. They’re fully invested in the story, they’re fully acting out moments. It’s like hearing a genius read you or sing you a story, and your imagination completes the picture in a way that when there’s a production, we would do that with scenery and costumes and lighting. This is really asking the audience to imagine what the story could become when it’s ready for a full production.

Margot Melcon’s Floor 37 is a homegrown piece, correct?

It is, yes. A few of the pieces were developed as part of our Susan Fairbrook Core Writers Group. We invite 6 to 8 Bay Area writers to work on material over the course of a year, and Floor 37 was the piece that Margot worked on. So we’ve been excited about this piece, watching it develop ten pages at a time over the past year. It’s a beautiful story about healing and how we help each other through the most difficult times of our life. A woman unexpectedly experiences this catastrophic event when the elevator she’s riding in falls. So she ends up meeting the security guard in the basement level of her building and it’s just this amazing journey of this person helping her overcome anxiety and fear. It’s really special and Margot’s such a beautiful writer.

You yourself are directing Kimber Lee’s RE- which is being described as an “upside down romcom.” Without giving too much away, can you explain the upside down part?

Sure. There’s a newfangled process where couples who’ve broken up can examine their relationship, and this couple comes together to figure out the moments where it fell apart, because one of the members just can’t quite let go. So you know they’re broken up and you watch them go from the meet-cute through moments of their relationship as they seek healing and understanding.

It’s fun, it’s lovely to watch, and it’s so interesting because it’s really picking apart the dynamics of a relationship and the missed moments. And then, of course, it’s Kimber, so there’s a theatrical surprise as to how they’re getting this information. It’s a really lovely, human story. I’m noticing the theme in so much of this Festival is just human connection, and I feel like we’re in need of that right now.

Jaime Lozano and Tommy Newman’s Roja features traditional Mexican music and Mestizo folklore in a new twist on the Little Red Riding Hood Story. How is the music incorporated into the storytelling?

It’s very much a musical in the traditional sense, but fused with Mexican and Mestizo folklore, so it has indigenous, Portuguese and Spanish influences. My family is Brazilian so I felt that kind of Portuguese influence in the storytelling. It’s this new twist on the Red Riding Hood story and has this amazing theatricality, and the music is so gorgeous. There are parts that make you want to get up and dance, there are parts that are just beautiful and heart-rending. It was part of the National Alliance for Musical Theatre Festival, so we saw 45 minutes of it, that’s how they present in their festival, and we all went, “Okay, what happens next? We want to complete the story. We want to support this team and how they’re telling this story.”

I love that Tommy Newman was part of the Festival withTinyard Hill the year I met TheatreWorks, so he predates me in the New Works part of TheatreWorks. And then Jaime Lozano and I met when I worked on his thesis piece from the NYU graduate musical theater writing program. He’s an artist I’ve followed for so long, and they’re both just so talented and they’ve created something special. I love the mischievous magical feel to it, the words in it, the enchanting journey – it’s just a wonderfully theatrical piece.  

There’s also double bill of Hip Hop pieces - The Telltale Heart by Bay Area treasure Carlos Aguirre and Rap Monologs by Grammy nominee Dr. Austin Dean Ashford. How did his pairing come about?

Over the years, people have said, “Have you met Carlos? Have you met Carlos?” And he’s been involved in the Festival before, he’s somebody whose work I’ve seen. It was Jeffrey Lo actually – who by the way was just promoted to TheatreWorks Associate Artistic Director – who told me a long time ago about Carlos’ Telltale Heart and so we put it in our Festival two years ago. It was our launch on the Friday night. We just loved what he was doing, how he was taking this incredible poem that we all know and grew up with, but making it his own and digging deeper into the story.

And then he, too, became part of the Susan Fairbrook Core Writers Group and started really examining his piece. Like he had Edgar Allen Poe and he had that story, and the question became where is Carlos in the story? So he has infused it now with such depth, and he’s playing multiple characters – at this juncture. Part of the question he’s looking at in the Festival is should this be a solo piece, or shouldn’t it be? And what started off I think as a ten-minute piece has now developed into a 50-minute story that’s just so cool.

Jeffrey, who is producing the Festival, was so excited to pair Carlos with Dr. Austin Dean Ashford, a Latin Grammy nominated artist. I love that he’s a U.S. Embassy Hip Hop Cultural Ambassador. What I’m also loving about this is I don’t think you’d look at TheatreWorks and go, “That’s a theater where they must do a lot of Hip Hop.” [laughs] These two artists are taking such classical pieces, like Austin’s is very much pulling from Shakespeare, and making them their own. They’re exploring poetry, language and rhythm in such an exciting way. I cannot wait to see how these two pieces are actually in conversation with one another.

Last on the bill, but certainly not least, is Vienna, the hotly anticipated new musical from the writers of Come From Away. What is it like to be entrusted with helping in the gestation of such a high-profile show?

It is one of the greatest honors that we have. This is true of every single artist in our Festival, and certainly of David and Irene, given the success of Come from Away, right now the most produced musical in the country. They could go anywhere, so to be considered a creative home for these artists is such an honor, and we take that responsibility really seriously. What I love about it is it speaks to our audience and the space they create for these artists to come and explore. We’ve had some wonderful moments in the Festival where something just didn’t work, but because the audience was privy to what the artist was trying to do and that the artist knew it wasn’t working but was on the journey to finding it, there was this excitement around what it could be, where it was going.

For David and Irene, I think one of the hardest things is when an artist has tremendous success to do their next piece. What I find is, we are the limiting factor, because people expect perfection right out of the gate. They forget about the whole process that led to this great success. I remember when Nilo Cruz won the Pulitzer and talked in an interview about how he didn’t write for a while after that because he couldn’t allow himself to be messy and sloppy and creative. So I love that Irene and David Are coming in, and this piece is very much in the early stage of creation. That is so exciting, that they’re gonna figure it out with us and our audience.

You know, you feel the people in the audience. You can tell when you can hear a pin drop, you can tell when people are laughing or listening. Just being in a room of 375 curious, engaged people is the greatest gift we can give these artists, and them choosing to come to TheatreWorks is the greatest gift they can give us.

David Hein and Irene Sankoff are also performing in a very special evening to benefit the Festival.

Yes, it’s called Cut From Away and it’s basically their journey to creating Come From Away. They’re performing the songs and telling stories of the wonderful things they wrote that were cut. It’s such a perfect evening in the theater to hear these masterful storytellers talk about why this or that song didn’t serve the story. The songs they cut are so fantastic and you’ll never hear them again because they didn’t make it [into the final version of Come From Away]. That’s an hourlong show on the second Friday, and I think it’s the perfect way for people to celebrate the creation of the new.

As if all that weren’t enough, you recently announced Mariska Hargitay will be doing three benefit performances of Every Brilliant Thing, fresh from her recent highly successful Broadway run, and will be joined afterwards onstage by you and your sister Pietra to talk about family legacies.

Yes! We’d been looking ahead to celebrating our 25th New Works Festival in two years and were already saying, “Well, how do we top this one?!” And then Mariska was added to it. Omigosh!

Mariska is your half-sister although your family had kept that information largely private until her documentary My Mom Jayne came out. In past interviews I’ve done with you, you’ve described yourself first and foremost as a storyteller. So what was it like to have this incredible story about your own family that you didn’t feel at liberty to share?

Well, when we first found out we were sisters and we all met, it wasn’t a secret really because fame wasn’t yet a part of the equation. So we told our closest friends, we did talk about it. But because her father, Mickey Hargitay, was alive and my mom (also named Micki - hello!) was alive, part of why we didn’t talk about it was respect for the people in the story. It was an interesting question of what do we owe to strangers, and we decided protecting our family was the most important thing. You see in the movie Mariska’s own journey towards going public and what that would mean.

For me, I didn’t have the need to tell because it can be weird sometimes. Like when do you bring it up? I sat next to somebody on the plane watching that movie, and it was hilarious. I was watching them watch it, I watched myself pop up on her little screen and I was like “This is weird.” And then she just asked me to move so she could get to the restroom, right? [laughs] We did grow up having a relationship, we move as a family, we hang out. We just didn’t introduce ourselves [as sisters].

And then Mariska got really, really famous.

Really famous! And I think for her the timing was kind of perfect, because it would have been weird for a story just about that, but the fact that it is in the context of the exploration of her mother is to me so beautiful. She learned so much about her mom in the making of that movie, and we all learned a lot. And – separate from the cameo of the Sardellis – I just thought this movie was stunning. We were all so moved by it, so proud of her for doing it.

I happened to watch it on a redeye flight, just hoping to find something that would keep me awake. I had no idea what a profoundly moving film it was, not to mention that the final section involves the Sardelli family.

Yeah, it’s very funny at TheatreWorks when people refer to it as “our" movie. I laugh and go, “That’s right, Mariska!” It’s really interesting that I’ve heard people say like why is Mariska part of a new works festival? Number one: this is a new play, and because of the way the play is crafted it’s new every night and is such a shared story that’s created together with the audience.

But also, she’s new to theater – this incredible artist, this wildly accomplished actor. When an actor of her stature dares to put themselves onstage, I am always so impressed. And that it’s my sister who did that, is so exciting to me. To get to share my life’s work, my creative home, with both of my sisters as part of this Festival is just so meaningful.

I saw Every Brilliant Thing on Broadway with Daniel Radcliffe so I know that as a first-time stage actor, Mariska did not take on an easy assignment.

No! It’s wild. And she’s great. I saw Daniel Radcliffe, too. I left and called Pietra, our other sister, and said, “Oof, Mariska’s got some big shoes to fill!” [laughs] I knew she’d be great, but I was nervous, and then I saw her in a preview and I called Pietra back and was like “She’s nailing it!” I just sat there so proud, because theater to her, I think, had been this cute thing I did while she was off becoming this huge TV star. [laughs] So now I think there’s a deeper understanding of the life that I chose in the theater.

Looking ahead, you’ll be directing the musical Come Back to the 5 & Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean Off-Broadway early next year.

Yes! This makes me so happy. It is the perfect way for me to go back to New York, to bring a show that was developed at TheatreWorks through our Festival. And the best part is I think Classic Stage Company is the perfect home for it. [Artistic Director] Jill Rafson was instrumental in the beginning of my career. She hired me to direct a Jeff Augustin play [Little Children Dream of God] for Roundabout Underground. So it feels like coming home to be working where Jill is now an artistic director as well, on this show that I love. I’m just thrilled. I think it’s going to be fantastic.

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