Interview: Dain Geist of LEOPOLDSTADT at MAIN STREET THEATER

Dain Geist is a Houston legend by now. He's an actor and a playwright; he had a world premiere of his play SEVEN ASSASSINS WALK INTO A BAR last year. He is about to appear in LEOPOLDSTADT, which runs from March 28th through May 3rd at Main Street Theater. It is Sir Tom Stoppard's last play, telling the tale of 50 years of a Viennese family's history and featuring over 20 actors on a smaller stage. This is a regional debut at Main Street Theater in Rice Village, and it is a very ambitious production. A BROADWAY WORLD writer sat down with Dain to discuss acting, writing, and LEOPOLDSTADT.  

Brett Cullum: I am looking at this cast, and 18 actors in the company, and I hear four or five kids are coming in. How are you all going to fit at MAIN STREET THEATER? 

Dain Geist: Rebecca Greene Udden loves to do these! You know, Becky did COAST OF UTOPIA back in 2012, which was three Tom Stoppard giant plays with lots of folks. She did WOLF HALL, which was a big play with lots of folks. She likes to punch above Main Street's weight and prove that you can do anything in her space. I don't know if you were there, but at one point, they made it rain inside that room, when Guy Roberts did, HENRY V. 

Brett Cullum: Certainly. It's a very versatile black box, and I've been amazed by what she's done up there over the past five decades! And of course, Rebecca Udden is the director of LEOPOLDSTADT, right?

Dain Geist: Yes. Becky is directing it. This is part of their 50th year!

Brett Cullum: Okay, first up, the question you probably get all the time. Where the heck does your name come from? I called you Dan for years when I first saw you in Houston, and you had to correct me constantly! 

Dain Geist: People call me Dan, they call me Dane, so Dain is a dwarf from THE HOBBIT. My brother's name is Thorin, and my name is Dain, and my sister was this close to being named Galadriel, but they went a different route and just gave her a nice Jewish name, so her name is Tamar. Dain is the guy who comes in at the very end with a giant dwarven army and saves the day.

Brett Cullum: Wow. You have a Tolkien name! That is amazing! 

Dain Geist: Well, growing up in the 80s, it was not very popular. It's very popular now. Now it's, you know, you've got Khaleesis, and you've got Aragorns, and all… like, there's a whole new generation of fancy names nowadays.

Brett Cullum: True. I was named after the James Garner character Brett Maverick, so I guess I am supposed to be a riverboat gambler. Well, tell me about who you are playing in LEOPOLDSTADT.

Dain Geist: I play Herman Merz. You have two families that are joined by marriage. You have Ludwig (which is Zack Varlea's) character, and my sister, played by Laura Caldis, who's playing Ava, and they're married, and that's how the two join together. And Herman runs Merz and Co., a textile factory, and he has married a Gentile named Gretel and, in fact, converts to Christianity. So one of the arguments that Ludwig and Herman have is sort of the direction that the Jewish people are taking in Vienna at that time, which would be 1899. It all takes place in my house over the generations, and I view myself as the financial backbone of the family. And, you know, Zack Varela and I have some hefty Tom Stoppard monologues, because he… he loves to talk! 

Brett Cullum: Well, this is one of his most personal plays. They say Tom Stoppard really saved this one for later in life, and it's ironic that it was his last, and unfortunate. It is based on his own family, his own identity, and a lot of other things that come into play, so I wanted to ask you: have you ever done a Tom Stopper play before?

Dain Geist: I have, I did ROSENCRANTZ AND GUILDENSTERN ARE DEAD in college. My roommate and I played the title roles. When I first came to Houston, one of the very first jobs I got was at Main Street doing COAST OF UTOPIA. So I did all three of those as well.

Brett Cullum: What is it like rehearsing with this huge cast? Is it just pandemonium all the time, or what? 

Dain Geist: Now, on occasion, it can be a little bit, because everyone's running around, or running lines, but you build a lovely little family, right? I remember doing COAST OF UTOPIA, and Clara Marsh was in it, and she was twelve at the time, and now she has since grown up, gone to college, come back, and we're working again. It becomes a little tight-knit family, and we're gonna have six kids running around as well! I have to start writing all my thank-you cards now, because there are so many people to thank. I realize, “Oh, I can't just do this at the last minute.” 

Brett Cullum: The cast party's gonna be lit!

Dain Geist: For sure, and there's a lot of different moving parts, and we're gonna have to figure that out, and that will be its own sort of experience, because we've gotten the blocking down at this point, and then the designers come in and start building a set and add costumes. Then we have to figure out what our individual tracks will be. So we don't, like, bump into each other. So, while folks are watching the show on stage, backstage folks are moving into position, getting costume changes, and figuring out how it's all going to work.

Brett Cullum: Well, what made you want to be a part of this show in particular?

Dain Geist: Becky. A year ago, Becky and I were having coffee, talking about SEVEN ASSASSINS at the time, and she said, “I'm gonna be doing this play!” It was actually two years. She said, “Keep this time slot open.”  I went out, read the play, and fell in love with it. I related to it a little bit, then I'd pick it up and read through it. Tom Stoppard has such a knack for language. It feels a little like surfing sometimes, but, like, we did a run the other day, and  I'm a little exhausted. Not physically, just sort of vocally, from having to talk so much. He's a very cerebral writer who likes to talk about big ideas, and what's funny is he'll gloss over historical stuff. It'll be one reference to the Social Democrats of 1923 Vienna, right? Which has its own connotation and history. But that's about as far as it goes. It's a blast to do, and it's a challenge to do.

Brett Cullum: What do you hope that LEOPOLDSTADT says to the audience? What do you hope that they walk away with?

Dain Geist: What I want people to walk away with is that every single family, of any cultural background, only exists today because of all of the blood and sacrifice and challenges that have come before. My mother's half of the family is Jewish, and my mother lives in Israel. And, I can remember talking to her. We had a conversation once, and she married my father, who is a Gentile. She did it in a way to protect her children. In the event that something like the Holocaust happened again, right? That shadow of history has always been prevalent, and still is to a certain extent today. But that's true of any family, in any culture. You have what's going on today in the United States, and you have a whole group of people who came here for a better life for their children, right? That's their only crime that they've ever committed, is… who, of course, are being systematically picked up and taken away, and which is not totally dissimilar to what happens in LEOPOLDSATDT, right? So what I want people to take away from the play is a sense that everyone is standing here today on the backs of their parents and grandparents, and everyone who traveled hundreds of miles and crossed oceans for a better life for generations that they would never meet. The pain and challenge that they had to go through to get us here.

Brett Cullum: Well, let's go back to your origin story. How did Dain get into acting?

Dain Geist: So I grew up in Alaska, and there was a little high school, West Valley, and my older brother was in a production of THE LION IN WINTER. My brother was up there; he was playing, John. I felt so jealous, like, I just wanted to get up there. That's what started the bug. Then the more I got on stage! In high school, I auditioned for a play, got a role, and was terrible at it, but I really enjoyed it, and that's what started the book. I went to Adelphi University out in Long Island, and then I went straight to grad school, where I studied at the Actors Studio Drama School, back when it was at New School University, before it moved to Pace. By that time, my barometer for success was: can I pay all my bills just by doing this thing I enjoy? Which I really haven't been able to do until very recently, because not only do I do theater, but I also teach theater up at Sam Houston State University. So, I feel like I've finally arrived at a place where I'm really happy doing the day job that lets me go do shows at night.

Brett Cullum: Tell me a little bit about how you got into playwriting, because obviously you had SEVEN ASSASSINS WALK INTO A BAR last year, which was a world premiere for Main Street Theater. How did this manifest?

Dain Geist: I started writing in college, and I am not quite as prolific as people who have dedicated their lives to playwriting. For me, it was this other thing I would do when I wasn't doing shows. I remember during COVID, I had a lot of downtime, so I started picking up on an idea I had had. So, in the theater, when you're in the middle of a show, and you go to the bar afterward. All the actors start telling stories about themselves, and people they know, and places they've been, and all that. And I don't quite know how it happened, but I saw a couple of plays, and somewhere in there just stated this idea for these, not actors having a conversation.: But… professional assassins. And so, then I started writing it, and it went through many, many, many drafts, and then I would, during COVID, grab a bunch of actors, and we got on Zoom, and we just sort of read it, and that helped me refine it and deal with some of the problems. Then I finally got to a place where I kind of liked it, and Becky somehow got ahold of it, and she's like, I heard you wrote a play, can I read it? And I was like, sure, and I gave it to her to read, and she seemed to enjoy it, and six months later, she called me up and said, would you like to do it at Main Street? And I said… I thought about it for about 3 seconds, then said, "Yes, please!" 

Brett Cullum: It was amazing to watch. It's so fun, so funny, and a really great experience for the audience. It was absolutely one of my favorite world premieres last year, totally.

Dain Geist: Thank you. I'm very proud of it, I'm proud of the cast I had. I lucked out. And so now, my wife and I are actually working on a new one, a new idea, I don't quite know how… It's not finished yet. We had a terrible first draft, so we're sort of working through that, but it's a different story. It's a love story about two people dating for the first time, each with an AI, and the AIs are also falling in love with each other, manipulating their humans to stay together. So it's a little topical.

Brett Cullum: Well, I know LEOPOLDSTADT runs through May 3rd now, so you probably won’t have too much time to do much else. Break legs! And please, invite me to the cast party!