Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Welcome to the exclusive Cosmic curtain interview with Jennifer Goff. I'm Brian Kitson, head writer of the Cosmic Circus and the Cosmic Circus Broadway. Jennifer Goff is directing the grown ups at the Ringwell Theater, which began its run this past weekend. In this interview, Goff discusses what drew her to directing this play, what themes appealed to her, and how she transitioned a show developed during the pandemic for an outdoor theater into the Ringwalds. Enjoy.
Thank you so much for joining us today. I know that the grown up starts this weekend.
How has the rehearsal process been going leading up to opening night?
[00:00:34] Speaker B: It has actually been kind of idyllic.
It's been this really wonderful, creative, energetic process, and these actors are willing to really give themselves to this process. So it's been a really joyful room to be in. It's been great.
[00:00:54] Speaker A: That's fantastic. So I kind of got the press release. I don't know much about the play, so I was wondering if you could kind of give us your take on what the grownups is.
[00:01:04] Speaker B: Sure.
So the grown ups is a story of a group of senior counselors at a summer camp. Most of them have been coming here since they were wee itty bitties, and now they are the counselors. It's following them as the world outside of camp starts to become something they don't know how to deal with and starts to encroach on the world of camp.
[00:01:29] Speaker A: That sounds really exciting, and it almost felt like it from the sound of it, at least from the press release. It sounds like it kind of touches the genre of horror in a way of a realistic horror, because, again, I don't want to give too much away. But do you feel like it plays with that a little bit?
[00:01:48] Speaker B: There's definitely tension that we expect from a world of that, but I would say it's a closer. It's a much more realistic, human kind of fear that it's playing with than anything supernatural.
[00:02:03] Speaker A: Got you. Okay, so what drew you to the story, and what do you think makes it so unique?
[00:02:09] Speaker B: Well, I read this play a couple of years ago, and first of all, just the genesis of the play is really unique. It was written during COVID by a group of folks who were bummed that they weren't able to be making any theater, and so they wrote it and performed it in their backyard with.
And so it was intended to be done outdoors. It was intended to be intimate, and it also really.
So that's, you know, the mythology of the play is really cool, but then just reading it, I was so taken with what the play has to say about extremism and about othering in society. The fact that it takes, it uses these young adults. These characters are all in their early to mid twenties, and that it looks at them and kind of asks, when the grownups around you fail you, what does it mean to suddenly have to step into being a grown up?
And it's a really powerful.
I teach at a college level, and I work with 20 year olds all the time, and it really spoke to me.
[00:03:24] Speaker A: I was gonna say, I feel like that's something that all of us adults have experienced at one point in our lives of just when we became the adults. And I sometimes I'm a 30 year old man, and I still look for the adults in your room.
[00:03:36] Speaker B: Oh, man. I'm 45.
Who told me I was the grown up? This is unreasonable.
[00:03:44] Speaker A: No adulting today.
[00:03:45] Speaker B: None.
[00:03:47] Speaker A: And so it's kind of like this universal message then, of just, like you said, from such a scary time of in the middle of COVID nobody knew what was kind of happening, and the world's kind of falling apart.
[00:03:59] Speaker B: Yeah. And, I mean, you know, this play closes the day before the 2024 election. Oh, and there are some lines at the end of this play that are gonna hit pretty hard the day before that election.
And this is asking us to think about it kind of creates a bizarro world in which extremism goes to its extreme. And a lot of the time right now, it can feel like we're right on the precipice of that. So it's unfortunately, quite relatable.
[00:04:34] Speaker A: So did this kind of feel like this was the right time to tell the story, being so close?
[00:04:38] Speaker B: Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. We actually. We specifically, when I approached the folks at the Ringwald about doing a show, I'm on sabbatical this semester from my home, Mutant College, which is in Kentucky. And I said, I've got this time. It's going to be right before the election. Let's find something that is going to have a really juicy thing to say about this moment. And we did.
[00:05:03] Speaker A: So were you involved in the process of picking the show, or. Okay, so of all the shows that maybe you chose, like, what was it like? What were the themes that maybe, like, that you were like, this is the one? Because it sounds like maybe there was a lot to choose from.
[00:05:20] Speaker B: There were definitely. We had a couple of different ideas, and some of them logistically didn't work out, or some of them, you know, there was a lot of different pieces, but this one bubbled up to the top partly because of the sort of unique atmosphere that it asks you to create. There was a moment we actually considered doing the show entirely outdoors, but decided that October in Michigan is maybe not the moment for that. Very unpredictable, you know, but that it allowed us the challenge of creating this kind of immersive outdoor world was really exciting, and we felt like the messaging was more universal than it was in some of the other plays that we had looked at and more accessible in certain ways. So this one really bubbled to the top.
[00:06:10] Speaker A: I love that.
So what has been maybe the most challenging part of bringing the story to life on stage?
[00:06:16] Speaker B: Well, we're staging it in the round, so there's going to be audience entirely surrounding the actors, and they're going to very much feel like they're a part of this world, I hope. And so trying to create a space in which these actors can be sort of separate and tell the story and be who they are, but also make sure that they're going to invite the audience into this intimate space in a way that is more intimate than most theater experiences, I think has been a really interesting part of this process and an interesting challenge, and one that we won't really know is successful or not until we get a whole bunch of people in the room.
[00:07:05] Speaker A: Having seen a few shows at the Ringwald, I've seen two of them so far, and it is a very intimate experience, and you do get invited into it a lot more than the traditional, you know, separate stage and, like, you are a part of the show. So that's. It's a very exciting aspect, both, hopefully for those involved, but for the audience as well.
[00:07:25] Speaker B: Yeah, we did get to have a small preview audience last night of folks who are volunteers at the affirmations center.
[00:07:31] Speaker A: Sure.
[00:07:32] Speaker B: And it was so fun to have them in there with us and at camp. And, yeah, the energy in the room expanded from our rehearsal energy, which was very cool.
[00:07:46] Speaker A: What was that, I guess, for you as the director, what is that? How do you take the energy of the preview, and do you make changes with the show from that point, or do you feed off of it a little bit?
[00:07:57] Speaker B: I think there are directors who love to continue to give notes throughout the course of a run. I'm one of the folks who thinks that there's a point where I need to trust the actors and trust the work that they did and know that they have the talent and intuition to respond to their audiences as they need to. And so we had a great little conversation after the show last night and talked a little bit about ooh these moments were totally landing, and this was really exciting, and, oh, I bet we're gonna get a laugh there that we're not expecting and things like that. But at this point, I'm not really interested in changing or breaking anything that they've created, because they're really. They're really in it, and they're really great.
[00:08:43] Speaker A: So, as the director, do you have a specific approach to how you bring, like, the image from your head onto stage, or does it kind of develop as it goes?
[00:08:51] Speaker B: Oh, it definitely develops as it goes. I am a director who believes that the very best tool I have at my disposal is everybody else's brains.
[00:09:02] Speaker A: Sure.
[00:09:03] Speaker B: So I have this amazing design team that have created this gorgeous, immersive camp environment in this theater space, which was amazing and kind of beyond anything I could have imagined myself.
And then the actors themselves, we went through a process that is, I'm not going to get all minute and theater nerdy about it, but it involves a great deal of improvisational character work that these actors jumped into and created all this really rich backstory. And so there's information that they've created about these characters that I never could have by myself that came out of their work and their imaginations. And so they've made it a very, very bold world.
[00:09:53] Speaker A: So it's a very collaborative approach with the actors is that, you know, granted, I. As much as I love Broadway, I see shows is, do you feel like that is, like. Is that a traditional approach with directing.
[00:10:05] Speaker B: Or like, it is unusual? Okay. It is, yeah. The work that I do specifically is based. I'm gonna get nerdy for a second.
[00:10:16] Speaker A: Go ahead.
[00:10:17] Speaker B: In some of the very late work of Konstantin Stanislavski, who is a great theater practitioner, acting theorist of the late 19th century, early 20th century. And at the end of his life, he started thinking that instead of just kind of sitting around a table and talking about a play, we should find ways to live in the world together, so that when we talk about that thing that our characters remember, we're not just imagining something abstract. We're imagining. We're remembering that thing we explored together as actors. So now we have the same memory because we both did it. And so it's this really fun, creative way to do character analysis and world building.
And that's part of my personal work. I spent four summers at the Moscow Art Theater through the Wayne state program, where I went to grad school, and I got a whole bunch of Stanislavski. And I'm a nerd about it, and I love it.
[00:11:20] Speaker A: No, that's awesome. And, you know, like, from a psychological standpoint, you get people to buy in more when they get to be part of that process.
They want to be more involved, and they want to have those characters become more real when they get to buy into it a little bit more.
[00:11:35] Speaker B: Absolutely. Yeah.
[00:11:37] Speaker A: So what themes of the show do you feel like, resonate the most with you as the director?
[00:11:42] Speaker B: Definitely. For me, the word that keeps coming back to me as I think about this play is the word responsibility, because these characters are all wrestling with what it means to be responsible and to be not just responsible, but responsible for someone other than themselves.
And I think that's really meaningful to me personally, and it's really meaningful to me on a sort of larger scale because I think we have a tendency in society today to be very sort of insular and cut off and to forget that society is actually a whole bunch of people who are responsible to each other.
And so I find that really, really meaningful.
[00:12:23] Speaker A: I love that.
So you are doing two of the performances outdoors.
So how do you feel? Like, did you have to stage it differently, or did you have to approach it differently for having some shows inside to having them outside?
[00:12:37] Speaker B: Yeah. So we haven't fully even finished addressing that challenge yet because we have not yet rehearsed in the outdoor space. But we looked at a couple of different yards that were volunteered to us and kind of thought about the logistical challenges of each place and the stylistic challenges of each place. And so we've chosen this beautiful backyard that actually is the backyard of our lighting designer for the show.
[00:13:11] Speaker A: That's awesome.
[00:13:12] Speaker B: And it definitely is going to change some of our movement patterns. The biggest challenge is in the theater space. We have a pretend fire that we have created in the live theater space. In the outdoor theater space, they're going to be tending a fire and actually keeping that puppy going.
So that's going to be an adventure in making sure that they can sort of still tell the story, still do all the things they need to do, but also that's going to be our main lighting source, so we're going to need to make sure that puppy keeps, keeps going.
[00:13:47] Speaker A: That sounds like that's going to be quite the challenge.
[00:13:49] Speaker B: Yeah. Plus, I mean, the audience is going to have, like, s'mores and hot chocolate, and we're all going to want the s'mores and hot chocolate, too.
[00:13:56] Speaker A: Absolutely.
Final question for you is just what are you kind of hoping audiences walk away from with the show?
[00:14:03] Speaker B: Oh, gosh. I mean, I hope they walk away.
This is a play that could come across feeling pretty bleak.
But I think that we've specifically tried to approach it leaving with a ray of hope.
And we put the hope in the hands of the characters and then by extension, in the hands of the audience. So I really hope that they walk away with a sense of responsibility for carrying that hope forward.
[00:14:35] Speaker A: That's fantastic. Thank you so much for joining us. I know that the grownups is running through November 4.
[00:14:40] Speaker B: Yes, it does.
[00:14:41] Speaker A: November 4. So it starts this weekend and runs through November 4. And I'm so excited to see it, and we look forward to enjoying it. So thank you so much for having much.
