Interview: Domenico Leona of PULLMAN,WA at THE PHOENIX GROUP

PULLMAN, WA is a play from acclaimed American playwright Young Jean Lee. The Phoenix Group is producing this regional premiere, which will run at the MATCH from August 14th through the 17th. This is a play about what to do if you're unhappy, and everyone around you is kind of a well, an a-hole, including yourself, of course. BROADWAY WORLD writer Brett Cullum got to speak with Director Domenico Leona about this silly and fun existential exercise that marks the birth of a new theatre group in Houston.  

Brett Cullum: Okay, tell me about this play, PULLMAN, WA. What is it about?

Domenico Leona: It's funny, because you look at Young Jean Lee and her history in playwriting and in music, and you liken it to the obscure. I think that this play, while maybe obscure in execution, is very simple. So three ordinary people try to deliver this life-changing TED talk and address an audience directly and tell them how they should live their lives, and as they attempt to do this, and usually fail, they get into these hijinks. What starts off as this well-intentioned self-help seminar becomes this brutal disintegration of all of their egos and the way they live their own lives. It acts as a commentary on how people who try and influence us often don't always have their own lives together, and hilarity ensues from there.

Brett Cullum: Would you call it more of a comedy?

Domenico Leona: Very much so. I would call it a comedy. It's a romp! If I can, let me share the story of how it came to be. I was sitting at the Rec Room's Happy Hour Readings, which are run by Brenda Palestina and Emma Bacon. They did PULLMAN, WA, and this play burned through in 75 minutes. It's absolutely hilarious! It goes to such bizarre lengths! One of the characters is obsessed with mermaids and unicorns, and makes everybody feel optimistic whenever they're down. One of them has the candor of an evangelical pastor. Then one of them is just trying to deliver a TED Talk, trying to seem educated and consistently failing to get her point across. And whenever we're watching this, we're all just cracking up, and the play ends, and we're like, “What was that?” But then these questions start arising about the characters as societal pressures, and the play felt like we were inside three people's minds, or that we were in three different aspects of someone's own mind. That was really interesting to me. Then we start delving into politics, society, and the election at the time.  It was very interesting to me, a play that is essentially three people just talking about, “How do we live our lives?” moved people on a very human level, especially one that is absurd and bizarre as this one is, and especially when it's entertaining, you know, and I think that all derives from the fact that it's more relevant now than ever. This play was written in 2002. Three people from three completely different generations can all ask the same question, “How do I live my life? How should I? How should you?” That struck a lot of people in that room, and that led to me producing it.

Brett Cullum: Tell me about the Phoenix Group, because I am not familiar with this group at all. 

Domenico Leona: This is our inaugural production. We made a joke whenever we kind of first brought this together, we being me and my good friend Josh Harris, who's incredible and does a lot of improv comedy. He went to SFA and has done some great work around the State, and this will be his first production in Houston. He's going to be playing the role of himself in this play. I hadn't mentioned the names of the characters in this play, but always in every production, the trio of characters carry the names of the actors, which is another interesting aspect of it. 

Back to The Phoenix Group, though. I look at this recidivistic buffoonery that is the attack on the arts currently. You look at the issues with the Kennedy Center and what's going on in the current administration, and rather than forming a new company to have a specific mission. I really just love theater. You know the people that are working with me on this love theater, and we just want to be a part of the reason that there's a little bit more out there. I wish I could give you this elegant response that “Oh, the Phoenix Group is a representation in its title! We’re transient, but we have a permanence to it. It stays in us, and you know a phoenix can be reborn! In reality, it's just named after my niece. Her name is Phoenix Araya Sunshine Reynolds.

Brett Cullum: Well, you're directing this one, and you have help from a woman named Ashley Galan. How did you get together with Ashley? How do you two know each other?

Domenico Leona: Oh, man, Ashley and I go way back. So, Ashley has been a veteran of the Houston Theater scene for a long time. She's acted with Teatrix for their La Vida Es Cortos festival. She house manages and stage manages all over town. She just stage managed KIM’S CONVENIENCE STORE over at Main Street Theater, and whenever I met her, like most of my interactions in Houston tend to be, you know, incredibly pleasant, and I found this city to be at least this community in that being in theater to be very polite and welcoming to the point of whenever I've shared scripts that I've written, or I've done auditions I felt like everything I get is so so positive and encouraging. But with Ashley, there was something interesting. When we first met. We had one long discussion about theater, and she pretty much disagreed with everything I had to say, and had just eloquent, educated reasoning for why she was disagreeing with me so much.

My impression working with her was that this is someone who would never sugarcoat anything and would keep me in check. I come from a poetry background. This is the first time I've ever directed on stage. I wanted someone with that kind of strong, singular, unique voice to come onto this production. Especially with the broadness of the play, these characters are asking such open-ended questions. How do you live? I always seek to bring from as many diverse backgrounds as I can into my team, because I want as much perspective as I can possibly get going into a play like this. 

Brett Cullum: Well, your first play, and you pick a play by Young Jean Lee. Jump right in there into the fire. Just don't even warm it up. Go swing big. But what made you want to enter this fray? You have a poetry background. So, what made you want to direct and produce? 

Domenico Leona: Man, with this play, it's so interesting because I never thought I would go into directing or designing anything. I've worked as an actor and a poet. I enjoy having full control over what I'm writing and performing. I perform regularly at Avant Garden and places like that. The more I got involved with Houston Theater, and the more I got involved in particular with the Rec Room’s Happy Hour readings, I found myself getting the itch to create something. But I think the big thing that happened to me was that I heard someone talking about poetry versus a novel. They were saying, “A novel is like riding a bicycle. You have to ride your bicycle, and you have to stay in your Lane. You have to stay on the trail; otherwise, you'll get hit by a car. But poetry is like walking on the moon.” And while it's a lovely sentiment, and has great syntax. I strongly disagree. I think whenever you're working on a sonnet or a poem there are things whenever you're looking at it that says, “Oh, these are rules, you know the 16 lines in a sonnet, the rhyme scheme, the 5, 7, 5, nature of a haiku,” and then you go to college, and a college professor says, “Oh, these are these aren't rules. They're guidelines. And then I look at my own creative life moving here to Houston, and I've learned that in poetry, it's more conditions. And what is the reason for those conditions? Why do you have to work within those 16 lines within that 5, 7, 5 parameter? It's because conditions like that force the innovation to come from inward, if that makes any sense. And I don't think that a play is any different from that. I have a certain number of pages and words that only exist on the page, and I can't go outside of that, and there's room for improv. But it's set in stone, and I have to take this production that's never been done in Houston and create something that relates not only to people in general, but people from Houston. And I think finding creative solutions to that problem is what enticed me into directing, trying to prove that directing is no different from poetry, and it is also just as freeing as walking on the moon, I think, was what really pushed me to this one in particular.

Brett Cullum: Well, I think what I extracted from that, particularly, was creatively solving problems. I think that that more than anything, encapsulates what I see with the companies that you've mentioned before. Rec Room Arts, Catastrophic Theatre, Dirt Dogs, Main Street Theater, or even the Alley. They are giving these parameters of a script and trying to figure out how do we present this in a way that is expressive, and that represents what we want to get out of it and everything like that. So in that sense, I can see the poetry thing, and it totally tracks. I can see that. So that'll be interesting.

Well, I certainly wish you all the success! PULLMAN, WA is the play obviously at The MATCH. One weekend, Thursday, August 14th through Sunday, August 17th. Tickets are available through the MATCH website, and they are “pay what you can,” which is always an amazing way to go. Really lets people kind of put their own value on it, which I think is really cool. The suggested rate is thirty bucks, which is pretty cheap for a production here in Houston, and especially one that sounds like it's going to be as much fun as this one, because I'm certainly signing up for any self-help group that goes wrong. I could probably conduct a few!

Domenico Leona: I'm banking on it myself.

Brett Cullum: Maybe that's what we can do afterwards. The Phoenix Group, you and I, we can just do self-help groups.