Interview: Andrea Gordon of MIRIAM AND ESTHER GO TO THE DIAMOND DISTRICT at Magic Theatre Excavates Her Own Family History to Create a Music-Filled Tale of Forgiveness

Director/playwright/producer Andrea Gordon says it’s her mission to honor the experience of older people and celebrate the talents of Bay Area theater artists, and she is doing just that with the world premiere of her new play Miriam and Esther Go to the Diamond District at Magic Theatre. Featuring a bevy of seasoned local theater actors and designers, it tells a story of two long-estranged sisters who meet at their wealthy stepfather's condo 45 years after their opera singer mother's death.  There to sort through their mother's things before their stepfather's widow sells the unit, they discover secrets about their past and are visited by ghosts of their mother and pianist father, finding much more than they bargained. Filled with song, music and dance, the play is ultimately about forgiveness, according to Gordon.

She has been making theater on the West coast for some 40 years now, winning awards for her work with companies such as Marin Theatre Company, San Francisco Shakespeare Festival, Berkeley Stage, the One Act Theatre Company, and Eureka Theatre, where she also served as Co-Artistic Director. She started her arts education early, attending the American Academy of Dramatic Arts and New York’s High School of the Performing Arts, and earned her BA in Dramatic Writing at UC Santa Barbara and her MA in Theater Direction from San Francisco State University. Interestingly, for the past few decades she has also maintained a highly successful career as a top-producing realtor in Berkeley and Oakland.

I had the pleasure of talking to Gordon by phone recently while she was giving her cast a brief hiatus from rehearsals over the holidays. We talked about what prompted her to write this semi-autobiographical play, her unorthodox upbringing as the daughter of an opera singer and concert pianist, why it’s so important to her to celebrate older women and local artists in her work, some significant changes she’s noticed in the theater world, and an overlooked gem of a Lanford Wilson play that she’s planning to direct next season. Gordon is one of those people who is naturally easy to talk to – warm and funny, and not at all shy about speaking her mind. She’s also inherently interesting just because of the life she’s led, including childhood encounters with the likes of Sydney Poitier and Leonard Bernstein. The following conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

What was your impetus to create the play?

Well, in 1994, I wrote a first draft, which was incredibly different - and it was terrible. It was done at A.C.T. Plays in Progress, which I was very proud to have been picked to be part of –

So that first draft can’t have been too terrible –

It wasn’t, but it was very much of its time. For example, I had a Bunraku puppet. [laughs] So during the pandemic I picked up a couple of projects that I had been working on and started looking at them again. I seemingly had more time just because we were all isolating and not running around like maniacs. I was spending more time thinking, writing, reading, and this play attracted me again.

It's heavily autobiographical, about me and my sister. I originally set it when I was in my 20s and she was in her early 30s, and we went back to New York to go through our mother’s stuff after our stepfather decided he didn’t want to have it anymore. Then I got to thinking about it, and I thought it would be much more poignant if it was after a much longer period of time and the sisters were in their sixties and early seventies. I thought it would be interesting to explore it from the point of view of people that were older.

I’ve been encountering a little bit of ageism in my own life, and I wanted to write some meaty parts for people that were older. And the fact that we get old but the child that was in us lives the rest of our life with us as who we were, if that makes any sense, and how when you go home for holidays or whatever, part of you regresses to that time period and certain elements of your relationship are set in time from that period, with your siblings and your relatives.

Then I got to thinking about the sisters, and I had help from Lee Brady, who is a marvelous playwright and has been my dear friend for over 40 years. She read the play and gave me a lot of dramaturgical advice and in fact became my dramaturg on the play.

I believe you wrote the title characters specifically with your actresses in mind?

Yes. I wrote the part of Miriam with my friend, Ellen Brooks, in mind. She’s been in a bajillion of the projects I’ve worked on, and she’s also been my lighting designer and a light in my life. She’s a wonderful human being and a really great artist. And then it fell naturally to me to use my dear friend and actress Janet Roitz in the part of Esther. Janet played Frankie for me in Member of the Wedding, she played Anne Frank in The Diary of Anne Frank that I did for the “Anne Frank in the World” exhibit, she played Kitty in my award-winning production of The Time of Your Life. She’s just been a leading lady in a bunch of my plays, and also she can dance. The play has a lot of singing and dancing, by the way.

How is that incorporated into the play?

In dream sequences for the sisters, and the mom comes back and there is one particularly poignant moment where she sings “O Mio Babbino Caro” from Gianni Schicchi to Esther, who dances to it. She also sings the “Embroidery Aria” from Benjamin Britten’s Peter Grimes to Miriam in a remembrance. And then after the girls have been going through letters and memorabilia and discovering all kinds of things about their parents, the parents kind of come on as ghosts to set the record straight and explain their version of events, sort of like Rashomon. The show also includes piano recordings from 78’s that my dad made back in the 1950s and 60s and were digitized by my sister’s company, so this whole production is like old home week for me.

You’ve certainly assembled a crackerjack design team.

Yeah, they’re amazing. [Costume designer] Beaver Bauer and I have been dear friends for, again, like 40 years. She’s been instrumental in a number of projects I’ve been involved with, and she’s also part of a girls’ group – I’m actually either gonna write a screenplay or a play about this. There’s a group of us – Terry Ross, Nancy Palmer Jones, Debra Ballinger, Beaver Bauer – who all get together now more than a couple of times a year, but it used to be just once a year, because we all were bridesmaids at Terry Ross’s first wedding. It’s sort of like Same Time Next Year, except girls getting together for dinner. [laughs] And yeah, so Beaver is marvelous, and [scenic designer] Nina Ball is brilliant. My set is so beautiful, I can’t even…

This play is especially fascinating to me because last year my sister and brother and I visited by my now long-deceased father’s second wife’s house to go through his belongings because she’ll soon need to move into some kind of elder care -

So you know exactly what I’m talking about!

And I went into it naively thinking “OK, we have specific tasks to accomplish so we’ll just go in and power through it.” But the process of going through his personal things was really complicated and profound.

Well, as a realtor I witness this probably 15 or 20 times a year, where people are selling a house because a parent’s passed away or has had to go into assisted care or some such thing. It’s such a profound experience for most people, and it certainly was for me and my sister. And it’s kind of universal – everybody who’s read this play has been moved by it.

I think you and I are of a similar age, and I know when I’ve tried to explain this phenomenon to younger friends and relatives, they don’t really get it.

Oh, absolutely, and a whole world of history is just about lost. You know, we’re the last generation who had relatives who were in World War II or relatives that grew up in the Great Depression. We’re the last generation that probably watched old-time movie musicals. I’ve reached an age where I can safely examine these things and turn them upside down and really look at them carefully in such a way that I might be able to get a person not of our generation to see why I’m thinking it’s important. At least, I hope so. Ultimately, the play’s largely about forgiveness.

I was fascinated to learn that you attended the High School of Performing Arts in Manhattan. Like most people, I suppose, I know about it mainly from the movie Fame. Was the experience of going there at all similar to how it’s portrayed in the film?

Very much so, actually. It was a mind-altering experience for me on so many levels. Every single person there thought they were gonna be the person who was gonna make it. I was very, very blessed as a kid to have an opera singer for a mom and a concert pianist for a dad. My mom, when she wasn’t doing opera, toured in a lot of musicals. I played Gretl, Marta and Brigitta in The Sound of Music because I had a growth spurt one year when we were traveling across the country. So I’ve been around theater literally my entire life. My very first purchase when I was a child was a vase, and then my second purchase was a subscription to Variety. [laughs]

You had the childhood I always dreamed of! Not to imply everything was perfect for you, but I grew up in small towns where I had no access to theater, and yet I was somehow drawn to it before I really even knew what it was.

Yeah, I was so profoundly blessed and so damaged by so much, just like everybody. And that’s the thing. Every single person there had a terrible childhood - even if it was idyllic, they had a terrible childhood. Every person has family issues. So I feel like this play speaks to a lot of different levels. My stepfather was a massive patron of the arts, and a very wealthy man. When we moved to New York from California, we lived in George Gershwin’s old apartment on Riverside Drive.

Omigod!

Then we moved to the Dorchester Towers on 68th and Broadway into Sydney Poitier’s old apartment, and I was like the poor little rich kid. I had my own everything, but I didn’t have two dimes to rub together, because I was a kid. One of his daughters had left behind this little mouse that was made of malachite and wood and leather, and I was horrified that his child had lost her toy, so my stepfather, Herman, had me call him. Sydney Poitier picked up the phone, and I said “I have this toy that belonged to your daughter. Do you want it?” And he was like, “Oh, no, she would want you to have it. Have a lovely day.” He was so kind to me.

But, yeah, I’d come home and, you know, Birgit Nilsson would be having coffee in our living room, or a couple times Leonard Bernstein, people like that. I had a very rarified childhood, filled with musicians and artists and dancers and Rudolf Bing and people from the Metropolitan Opera. My first job was ushering at the Vivian Beaumont Theater, and ushers would trade jobs around town, so I got to see, oh my goodness, James Earl Jones in The Iceman Cometh, I saw Moon for the Misbegotten with Jason Robards and Colleen Dewhurst, [etc.]. At the time they were doing repertory theater at the Vivian Beaumont, so I got to know all the people that were in the repertory company. And I was very young, too young to be working, but I got the job somehow, probably because Herman pulled a string, and so I was like a little mascot.

You’ve been making theater in the Bay Area for something like 40 years now, which is a pretty amazing accomplishment. When you think back on all that time being an integral part of the scene, what are the biggest changes you’ve noticed?

Well, a few things. First off, I think we have been really traumatized in the theater community by the pandemic, and it forced people to think in different ways. I can’t tell you the number of Zoom readings I’ve done over the last couple of years. Just in terms of financing, I think it’s brought everybody a lot closer because money is so scarce, and it was so hard to get people to be intimate in a theater space. I think that the rash of extremely interesting and intimate productions that have occurred on streaming television have inured audiences to very intimate small stories, which I think is actually good for theater in a lot of ways. However, it’s bad for theater attendance because people are getting their rah-rahs for that sort of thing out of TV and film in their living room, rather than going into a theater space to see them. Things like opera have been doing very well since the doors opened after the pandemic, and I think it’s because you can’t get the spectacle of opera on television. Theater is taking a little longer to come back.

On a broader level, there’s been a trend in advertising for years and years now for storytelling. Like it’s not enough to just put a product out there front and center and say “It costs this much and it’s great.” Nowadays, advertising always tells a story and I think that has something to do with the millennial psyche. Telling a good story gets you very, very far in terms of entertainment, in terms of attention, so I think it’s actually forced writers to be better, to tell actual stories that actually work. It’s not just car chases and bombs blowing up anymore, it’s full-on stories, although those types of movies [continue to] do very well. In terms of theater I think it’s forced young playwrights to come up with better chops, so I think we’ve got a wealth of better writing happening right now.

But I also do think that the political cancel culture, political correctness, that’s out there even among quote-unquote woke people is dangerous, because it forces people not to be able to explore every angle or else they’ll be canceled. I mean, I really feel sorry on some level for young, middle-aged white men right now because their stories are not [seen as] meaningful. The pendulum has swung and that’s because these other stories never were told. Now they’re getting told all the time, and it’s as if these other stories don’t even exist. If Tennessee Williams or Eugene O’Neill was coming up right now, they might not be produced even though their writing is gorgeous. Think about it. Pendulums always swing too far one way, and then have to settle back to the middle. I think that we’re probably in for a golden age of production and writing coming up, but we’re not quite there yet.

What do you mean by “we’re not quite there yet”?

Because there’s a lot of motivation to be politically correct, and I think that human beings are animals. We’re still primitive, we’re not emotionally perfect, we’re going to think wrong things, we’re going to do wrong things. We’re going to have factions and the tumult that always occurs being human, and if you can’t address some of that then you’ve got a problem.

One of my quests in what I’m doing for the rest of my life is to honor the experience of being older. It’s important to me to portray that in a compassionate and real way that communicates. The other thing that’s great about theater for everyone is that you are always surrounded by people of all ages. I’ve been very blessed to never discount the thoughts of a 20-year-old, because they’re always interesting to me. I think that theater in a lot of ways keeps you young, because you’re being exposed to that set of ideas and that set of experiences and the way in which that’s being perceived, so I don’t want to close myself off to that in any way, shape or form. I just want to make sure that the voices of older women are also being heard.

Yeah, and of course there are so many people of our age out there these days.

Yeah, I know – the Boomer generation, we’re it! [laughs] Another thing I want to champion in my work is local artists. We have an amazing wealth of talent in the Bay Area, and I want to see it utilized fully. One thing that really makes me sad is that I keep seeing companies like Berkeley Rep which built a whole building just to house people coming in from Hollywood because how you get your audiences in is to have movie stars come and play. It’s just kind of sad to me. I mean, the audience used to love to watch actors that they knew playing different characters every season. They got to see them grow as artists, they got to analyze their work, they got to think about who they enjoyed the most and to see that there was something marvelous about somebody playing, I don’t know, a young man in one play and then an uncle in another.  

You’re the first person I’ve ever talked to who is both a successful theater maker and realtor.

Yeah, I’ve been a top-producing realtor now for 26 years. Theater people always have to have a day job, so you might as well have a lucrative one, right? [laughs]

Do you see any commonality between the two?

A hundred percent. You’re always meeting people in real estate at the junctures in their lives that are the most profound – somebody’s died, somebody’s gotten married, somebody’s had a baby, somebody’s kids have gone to college. They’re all the points in people’s lives that are probably the most stressful, meaningful and important. As theater people we’re very used to the gamut of emotions that people go through, and we’re also very used to figuring out how to best get through those situations. We’ve studied psychology, we’re very good at being able to influence emotions, and if you’re a director you’re good at manipulating the situation where you need it to go. Actors ask themselves the questions “Who am I? Where am I? What do I want? What would I need to do to get what I want? What are the obstacles getting in the way?” Those are the exact same questions people are asking themselves when they’re buying or selling a house.

So they’re really analogous skillsets on so many levels, except one of them pays you lots and lots of money, and the other one you have to write grants for. [laughs] For me, it’s been very empowering to be a realtor, and it has given me the freedom to do what I want with my art. Back when I was trying to make my living 100% from doing theater, I was teaching at four universities and directing back-to-back Neil Simon plays in the Catskills. It was hard on me because I wasn’t doing what I wanted to do, but it was still theater and I was still proud that I was making a living doing it. But the living I was making was terrible. I was sleeping on board members’ couches, I was not able to buy my own home. I was barely making enough to get by and that’s the condition of artists in this country pretty much everywhere. It’s only like the top 1/10th of 1 percent that genuinely make it financially.

So real estate’s been incredibly good to me, and I love it. I also feel that when you sell somebody a house, you are empowering them in the community. When you community build by selling somebody a house, they get involved, they start caring about what their neighbors houses look like, they start voting about things that actually matter to the community. So in a way, I sort of regard my real estate work as a subversive act to change the world.

After Miriam and Esther, do you have any other projects in the works?

Next year, I’m gonna do a long-desired production of Lanford Wilson’s The Mound Builders. I bought the rights and I made them exclusive, just for the heck of it.

Lanford Wilson is one of my all-time favorite playwrights and I’m familiar with that play, but I’ve only read it. I’ve never actually seen a production of it.

Yeah, it’s not done, and I don’t know why. I think it’s brilliant. It’s one of my very, very, very favorite plays and I’ve always wanted to do it. I have a motto, which is “If not now, when?” So I’m just doing everything I want to do now! [laughs]

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Miriam and Esther Go to the Diamond District runs January 17 – 28, 2024 at Magic Theatre, Fort Mason, 2 Marina Blvd., Building D, 3rd Floor, San Francisco, CA. Tickets can be purchased online at miriamandesther.com.

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