Notes from Forum Theatre

Adam Jonas Segaller and Peter Stray

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Hi Adam. Take a second to tell us a little about yourself. Where did you grow up? When did you move to DC?

I was born in London, England. My father is an Englishman and my mother is from Flushing Meadows; they met when she went to England to study. We lived in London until I was six, then moved to Massachusetts and finally New Jersey.

I moved to DC just under a year ago, in order to play the eponymous character in Rorschach Theater’s Kit Marlowe. They put me up for the run of the show, and at the end I found I didn’t want to leave. So… I didn’t.

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What are your experiences with Caryl Churchill’s writing before this production?

I saw a community production of Far Away in Charlottesville, Virginia when I was at UVA. Much like Drunk, it was a short, sparse, chilling little work in which the surrealism of the premise and the minimalism of its execution made for an audience experience that I would describe as scary but fun, and which caused little explosions of understanding– not just of the play, but of the issues addressed– in one’s head for days after the performance. I believe it’s her most recent work before Drunk, and the plays have two major themes in common: making government atrocities more palatable, and a caution against the disastrous wages of global mistrust. I’ve also loved reading Cloud 9 and Topgirls.

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Continued…

Now that we are into rehearsals, what are your thoughts on the text and how to approach it?

Drunk is vacuum-packed. A critic has noted that Caryl Churchill’s plays are getting progressively shorter, and suggested that this is constantly getting better at condensing their potent impact. In this one, she has even eschewed full sentences, which on an admittedly hurried pre-audition first read was maddening. But after some extremely meticulous table work, complete with Michael or Fiona googling every minimalist allusion to American manipulations or atrocities on the world stage, the play seems to be revealing its secrets to us in some important ways. There now seem to be at least three good reasons for the fragmented text: it sets the tone for a romantic relationship that is codependent, painful, passionate and intimate– Sam and Guy, especially by play’s end, have their hooks so far into one another that neither of them can pull away without taking a piece of the other with him. They finish one another’s sentences, repeat one another’s rhythms, and are so expert in their communication that there is often no need to elaborate. (My favorite example: SAM: let’s just/ GUY: ok).

The device also serves to bring into parallel two fairly disparate kinds of abbreviations: that of lovers, and that of policy wonks. Sam and Guy are doing “work”, and while it isn’t directly clear how that work is done (we agreed early on that having our laptops out was overly literal), it is clear that they are detailing foreign policy methods, most of them violent or clandestine, that the American government has implemented over the past half century. This work is the basis of the relationship, and the standard by which both men define and appraise the relationship. I think this might be the really brilliant triumph of the play, and the element I’m most interested in conveying to an audience: the private language that two people in love develop is akin to the vocabulary of references and abbreviations that people in a specific professional field learn to use. Sam and Guy have mastered their chosen jargon— and this allows them to disguise the sickness of what they are engaged in.

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Adam, Peter, and John Vreeke (lower) rehearsing in the theatre

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Any thoughts on how things are going so far? What’s it like working with Peter (Stray, actor) and John (Vreeke, the director)?
Every once in a while during rehearsals, someone will go “woof!” This is potent stuff we’re rehearsing: references to torture, dense content, meticulous, impressionistic phrasing which requires the actors to make every single word work to their advantage, and in the first week or so we’ve all gotten a bit overwhelmed at one point or another. On a few days, I’ve walked into rehearsal without a clear picture of what will develop, but whenever I leave there is a sense of “Oh! We figured it out!”. I won’t go so far as to call that feeling surprise— Peter is a very generous and inventive acting partner, and John, while admitting what he hasn’t discovered yet, guides us with a steady hand. Sometimes he asks us how a moment should go and sometimes he tells us, but I always feel that my work is being honored. All in all, I think it’s good, gritty, honest and dedicated work we’re doing, and I look forward to more of it.