Interview with Clyde Simon — Carver Bishop in Finn in the Underworld
Tom: I’m sitting here with Clyde Simon, Artistic Director of convergence-continuum, who is playing Carver Bishop in convergence’s upcoming production of Jordan Harrison’s Finn in the Underworld. And, Clyde, why don’t you begin by telling readers a little bit about this play…without giving too much of it away.
Clyde: Yeah, that’s hard. There’s a rich family from up the hill. I’ll tell it from Carver’s perspective, I guess. And I lived in the little red house down at the bottom of the hill: the eyesore of the neighborhood…the poor family at the bottom of the hill. But, I was friends with them. Well, actually, I was friends with one of the daughters. And as teenagers we were good friends, we used to hangout. My little brother, however, was kind of adopted by her father, and he died under mysterious circumstances in that house. The play actually starts many years later when Rhoda, that’s who my girlfriend was in high school, her father had died and they’re back packing everything up…the mother has been moved to a nursing home, and the house still has this creepy vibe from the death that happened there. I was never satisfied with the explanation that was given about my little brother, but things have moved on and I’ve come back to pay them a visit and meet Rhoda’s sister’s son, Finn. And actually, Finn and I hit it off in a rather unexpected way. Carver is trying to get, I hate to use this pop psychology word, but he is, trying to get closure, and…uh…he does.
Tom: (Laughs) Now, Jordan Harrison has described this play as a ‘psychosexual gothic horror story’ and some of the things you’ve said kind of hint at that, but could you perhaps talk a little bit more about why you think it is?
Clyde: The horror story. I’ll start at the end. It, uh, people are not, well especially Carver is not who he might appear to be on the surface. He’s got motives in gaining closure that aren’t real friendly to the family, you might say. He’s got a rather devious and dark purpose for coming back. And the gothic is that it is very dark, dramatic and…well, when I think of gothic horror it’s a romantic horror…and it is that. The psychosexual makes it a bit of a…kinky romantic…take on things. That’s pretty good without giving too much away, I hope.
Tom: So, how is this a convergence play?
Clyde: Well, for one thing, an awful lot of stuff that we do is…and actually, a lot of things good plays and good novels do is look at human identity. And I see it now as being very fractured. In our contemporary identity we’re so many different people in so many different situations, and a lot of the plays that I’ve selected deal with that under the surface. That’s not what they’re about, but they contain and awful lot of that. And the people in this play, take on multiple identities a lot…and I think everybody does. You’re a different person when you’re out with your parents, or with your children, or with your friends, or you partner, or your work colleagues…and now you can be all kinds of different people on the internet…you can avatars in SecondLife; and people like to be somebody else…and try on lots of different identities. And theater itself…obviously actors do that a lot. But this play does that and it is a convergence play to because…not just thematically, but they way it’s presented: it messes with the conventions of theater: time jumps forward and backward, the audience gets engaged in trying to figure out things. I don’t like to do plays that lay it all out on a silver platter and you know what’s going to happen and you can comfortably say: ‘yep, I knew that.’ I like to continually surprise the audience and keep them off balance, off kilter…and this one sure does.
Tom: So tell me a little bit, you already did touch on this, but tell me a little bit more from your perspective about the character of Carver. The character you play: Carver Bishop.
Clyde: Well, he’s haunted. Both figuratively and, we find out, literally too, that there’s this experience in his past…the loss of his brother…being beaten down by life, pretty much…in comparison with the rich people up the hill. And he has his own identity issues as well, because he was growing up, it would have been in the sixties…in the fifties and sixties. He had a girlfriend, but that’s not where his interests…lay…and, so he had led a very, I think, tortured life in many ways. And so, by the time we meet him in this play, he’s a very he’s haunted by the past, and, I think, very unhappy in the present, that life has gone by and he’s trying to reconcile all that throughout the play…maybe in ways that other people don’t approve of, so much.
Tagged Clyde Simon, Finn in the Underworld, Jordan Harrison
