BWW Special Feature: The Cast of OTHER PEOPLE

This week the Mutual Friends Co-op presents the Canadian Premiere of Christopher Shinn’s Other People.  The show tells the story of three New Yorkers struggling with sex, desire and their art.  Featuring a cast of nine talented up and comers, the play has received rave reviews in the UK and buzz surrounding its Canadian debut has been extremely positive.

Ultimately this is a show about the struggle to connect and make art, told through the eyes of three separate characters and their friends.  Stephen (played by Ben Lewis) is a frustrated writer, Petra (played by Tatiana Maslany) is his roommate and was most recently employed as a stripper, and Mark (played by Indrit Kasapi) is Stephen’s ex who is currently crashing on his couch. 

BWW is thrilled to present this special feature with the three ambitious young leads, who took the time to discuss their current project, the nature of cooperative theatre, social media in the arts and their future ambitions:

Can you sum up the production for us in three sentences or less?

TM: This is the story of three young people living in New York City and struggling with their need to make meaningful connections and meaningful art.  It is about our desire to communicate with one another, to touch one another and our inability to be intimate and really naked.  Ultimately, it’s fun to watch these neurotic, narcissistic characters bump up against each other.

BL: Other People is an incredibly funny, sexy, moving and intelligent play about the struggle to connect and make art. It’s by Christopher Shinn, writer of Dying City (which recently had a hit run in Toronto) and directed by the brilliant, Dora-nominated Aaron Willis.

IK: Other People is a play about characters who are in desperate need for connection. Filled with raw emotion and written in a hyper realistic way, the story touches on our universal need to feel part of something and not be alone.

This production is being put on by a co-operative theatre company, what exactly does that mean and how did you become involved?

TM: Ben Lewis and I had been doing play readings almost weekly for the past couple of years.  We were very interested in finding something we loved that we wanted to actually do.  Ben found Other People and it was kind of this wonderful gem that no one seemed to know about.  It felt like the right fit – a play so relevant to us that it challenged us in ways we were excited about.

BL: I found the play and brought it to my best friends Tatiana, Indrit and Mercedes as something we could all collaborate on. Then we brought on Aaron, who helped us fill out the rest of our cast and design/tech team. We also snagged the amazing Monika Seiler to be our stage manager, who’s a great friend of Indrit’s and mine from The National Theatre School. Co-operative basically means no one gets paid, we’re doing this purely for the love of this play and the opportunity to work together, and we split the profits at the end of our run. It’s really a dream team- I’m so proud of everyone’s work.

IK: An Equity Co-op means that a group of Equity Professional Actors, Director, and Stage Manager get together and decide to put on a play without getting a paid fee for their participation. Instead we simply split whatever profit is left from the Box Office revenue, which isn’t likely to be enough to even cover the expenses. In other words, we are all so connected to the story and feel so strongly about it, we are putting it on just because we love it. It’s not about the money.

I became involved after my friend Ben asked me to read the play.  I fell in love with it and now here we are!

Tatiana Maslany as Petra

Describe your character and how you relate to him/her?

TM: My character’s name is Petra and she’s a young woman from Queens who is living in the Lower East Side of NYC and working as a poet and an artist while making money to fund her art by stripping. I relate to Petra’s desire to be authentic, her search for truth, honesty and reality.  She’s passionate, angry, and opinionated and has difficulty expressing herself.  I also relate to her hypocrisy.  She rallies against the same social institutions that she ultimately engages in. I love that she has a disdain for pornography that claims to be art, yet she works as an exotic dancer.  There is a lovely human contradiction to Petra. 

BL: Stephen is a frustrated young movie “blurb” writer who, in the days leading up to Christmas, has to cope with the return of his roommate Petra, who has been working as a stripper in Japan, and his ex-boyfriend Mark, who’s just left rehab and has become a born-again Christian. I love this character. His struggles to co-exist with Mark and Petra are so heartfelt and hilarious. It’s so well written- he has this amazingly acerbic verbosity. I don’t know if I’m as articulate as Stephen, but the way he uses words and humour to mask his true feelings and vulnerabilities is something I definitely relate to.

IK: My character, Mark, is a young filmmaker who hit it big with an independent movie he made and ended up with a two million dollar three picture deal. Halfway though shooting his second film, Mark suffers a breakdown and ends up in rehab after abusing on drugs. He goes through treatment and five months later he is sober, a born again Christian and en route to visit his ex-boyfriend Stephen in NYC.  He’s a very nice guy who is genuine and trying really hard to make a better life for himself.  He has a tendency to make bad decisions which lead him into situations that he can’t really handle.  I feel like I’m different from my character in that I’m a stronger person when life throws me a problem – I’ve learned how to keep it altogether, whereas Mark seems unable to do that.  What we have in common is a shared feeling of what it’s like to have death creep up on you.  I suffered severe anxiety attacks in my early twenties that felt like something I couldn’t control – and Mark goes through something very similar in this play.

Ben Lewis as Stephen

The show has taken a very active and creative marketing approach through social media. Do you make active use of social media? What do you love and hate most about it?

TM: I use Facebook, and I think I love and hate it at the same time.  There’s this voyeuristic aspect to it and also an exhibitionist aspect and I love them both.  They are exciting but also repulsive.  Creeping Facebook is literally the ultimate time-waster and brain-numbing activity, yet it’s completely addictive.

BL: I had actually always wanted to try Twitter, but was too ashamed! We’ve actually talked a lot in rehearsal about having to take on a certain grandiosity as an artist, to believe that you have a voice and something to say that’s worth hearing- and that’s what I struggled with when it came to Twitter.  I have really used the play as an excuse to start my Twitter account, and now I’m obsessed! I tweet vicariously though our @OtherPeopleTO handle as well. What I don’t like is how it's consumed my life!  I need to work on moderation, but that’s another theme that’s explored a lot in the play – the desire to be seen and heard and how addictive that can be.

IK: I use social media a lot. I have always been a fan of it because it fascinates me that I can spread the word so quickly about anything. I have asked people for props via my Facebook status and have always gotten an answer within 5 minutes. The world is easier when you have friends. So when you have networks of friends all around the globe the world really does seem a lot easier and a lot closer. There's something so awesome about it. I do hate that we are becoming less about actual human contact and connection and more about human connection through technology. So I do like to turn my phone off when I am having dinner with a friend or family. I think it's important to maintain that.

Do you think that the rapidly expanding social media field (and growing number of bloggers, tweeters, critics etc) is changing the landscape of Toronto's theatre?

TM: I can’t believe the scope this play has reached as far as publicity and promotion goes through the Internet.  It’s incredible.  As much as I resent how the Internet is taking over the world, it has given a voice to an audience of people interested in smaller theatre ventures.  It certainly puts indie theatre more in the mainstream than ever before.

BL: Absolutely. I’ve discovered what an incredible resource it is. It’s a great equalizer- a free way to hype the shit out of your show- and anyone can do it, you just really need to be committed and dogged about it. We’ve certainly used it, and I hope it pays off!

IK: I hope so. It would be great to see more young audiences in the theatre and social media has the potential to reach out to them. These days a lot of young people don’t read theatre reviews in the newspaper.  But they do like to read them online, or even in a tweet.  I think that information is more accessible to young people when its online.  So in a way I think that landscape of Toronto theatre must change to reflect the fact that it has a different kind of audience.

Indrit Kasapi as Mark

 

If you could play One Dream role - what would it be?

TM: I’m kind of obsessed with Gena Rowlands character in A Woman Under The Influence. She has this rawness, this vulnerability, this animal-life presence.  So I guess it’s less her role and more the way she attacks her role that appeals to me. Her embodiment of the character, her spontaneity and specificity and inventiveness.  I don’t know if I have a dream role, but more a dream of being the kind of actor who can take a role and breathe such vitality into it.

BL: I’m always reading plays, on the lookout my next dream role! I’ve been really lucky and already gotten to play a few of them.  Dog Sees God was a show I had seen off-Broadway, and Beethoven became my dream role. I brought the script to Michael Rubinoff in 2008, which set in motion our production in Spring 2009 - where I played Beethoven. I brought Tatiana into the mix on that show as well, where she played CB’s sister, because she’s my favourite person to act opposite. If I could only act with one person for the rest of my life, it’d be her. I love her- she’s amazing. Since Dog Sees God, I’ve been actively looking for another show that spoke to me as strongly and as viscerally as that one did, and I found it in Other People. In the future, I’d love to be in Douglas Carter Beane’s The Little Dog Laughed and Theresa Rebeck’s The Understudy, and play pretty much every male role in Angels in America.

IK: Alan Strang in EQUUS. Ever since I read it when I was in theatre school, I've been dying to play that role.

Finally, what is the one reason you would encourage a young audience to come out and see the production?

TM: I think this kind of production is great for a young audience because it’s relevant to people in their twenties, or people who will be in their twenties soon.  It’s accessible and funny and yet it doesn’t pander.  It’s challenging and demands the audience to engage with the unspoken desires of the characters.

BL: I know how viscerally this piece spoke to me, and I’ve found that every person I’ve introduced it to has had a very similar reaction.  The show just feels vital. It’s young, it’s fresh, it’s sexy. It’s an incredibly honest, human story about universal themes - love, art, relationships, fear, connection, success, failure, consciousness. It’s exciting. I think, I hope, young audiences will really embrace it.

IK: This is an incredible show about young people struggling to get their lives together. It is also performed by a group of extremely talented young people and so I think young audiences will really dig it.

When and Where?

Other People

The Young Centre for the Performing Arts – Tankhouse Theatre

January 19^th – 28^th

Monday –Saturday at 8PM, Saturday Matinee at 2:30PM

Tickets can be purchased in person at the box office, by phone at 416-866-8666 or online at www.otherpeopletoronto.com