Posts Tagged ‘Finn in the Underworld’
Interview with Lauri Hammer: Rhoda, in Finn in the Underworld
Posted by hayes in Finn in the Underworld, Jordan Harrison, Lauri Hammer on September 24th, 2009
Tom: I’m sitting here with Lauri Hammer, who is playing the role of Rhoda in convergence-continuum’s upcoming production of Jordan Harrison’s Finn in the Underworld, from your perspective, Lauri, can you tell me a little about what this story is about?
Lauri: That’s kind of hard to explain…
Tom: Yeah, the caveat being, not to give too much away.
Lauri: Right. It’s hard to explain what the theme of the play is without giving away all the good stuff. But it’s about… it’s basically a haunted house.
Tom: Jordan Harrison himself describes it as a “psychosexual gothic horror” story. What elements in it evoke that for you?
Lauri: I think the main things that do are some scenes with Finn and Carver. Those are some pretty creepy scenes (Laughs).
Tom: You’ve been in…well, this is your second Jordan Harrison play, you were in Act a Lady. What differences do you see between Act a Lady and this play here, Finn in the Underworld?
Lauri: The language is completely different. I couldn’t believe that it was the same author because the language is so different. This one was a tough one to memorize… a lot of the lines that you’re…that my character…lines that are my cue lines they have nothing to do with what I’m going to say. And even the way he phrases things, he just does it in an odd way. The point comes across but the phrasing is…really elegant.
Tom: Yeah, Act a Lady was more of a traditional play.
Lauri: Right.
Tom: Even though you were, what, a German director?
Lauri: Correct. (Laughs)
Tom: How is this play a convergence play? You’ve been involved with convergence a long time, you’ve been in a number of productions. How do you think this is a convergence play?
Lauri: It’s got that intensity. And that intensity plays so well in this space. I always tell people when they’re going to come see a show: it’s like you’re in the show, without being dragged up on stage and embarrassed. It’s going to be an intense experience for anybody that comes to see it.
Tom: So, tell me about Rhoda. Tell me about your character.
Lauri: Rhoda is single. That’s a part that comes up a few times in the show. She lives in Missouri. Isn’t real thrilled about it, but doesn’t like to make a lot of changes in her life. And she’s basically just a Plain Jane. I don’t know what she does for a living, but she lives on her own, and she’s the one who’s kinda getting mom packed up to go into a retirement community.
Tom: Now, throughout the play there is some tension with her sister…so what’s that about, why is there this tension with Gwen?
Lauri: There’s some things that happened in our childhood. And I feel that the tension is because when we’re together those memories pop back up. When we’re apart we can put it in that place in our mind where you don’t remember anything. So, with the stuff that happened in our childhood, when we’re together that tension is always there…and it overwhelms the relationship.
Tom: Okay, thank you very much.
Lauri: Thank you.
Interview with Scott Gorbach: Finn, in Finn in the Underworld
Posted by hayes in Finn in the Underworld, Jordan Harrison, Scott Gorbach on September 23rd, 2009
Tom: I’m sitting here with Scott Gorbach, who is playing the character of Finn in convergence-continuum’s upcoming production of Jordan Harrison’s Finn in the Underworld. Scott, can you provide our readers with an outline the story (from your perspective), or tell them a little bit about the play.
Scott: The Story starts with Gwen and Rhoda, sisters who are brought together to clean out their parents old house after their mother is transferred to a nursing home and their father dies. Soon enough, Gwen’s son arrives, and he’s not exactly an angel. As the dysfunctional family cleans out the house, objects they find bring back old memories. The only problem is that the objects they find have memories of their own. Just as people remember old objects, these objects remember people. Unfortunately for the family, not all of the people from these memories are pleasant. In fact, some are quite scary- possibly even deadly- or worse..
Tom: Jordan Harrison refers to the Finn as a “psychosexual gothic horror” story, what about that description rings true for you?
Scott: The horror part definitely rings true. The entire work is chilling- and there are sexual themes as well as sexual action- but not the kind you might expect. The creepy factor definitely lingers in those scenes too. (If not most of all) it’s hard to picture what “psychosexual gothic horror story” means. It means that were gonna send some chills up your spine!
Tom: This is your second convergence play; how is this play a “convergence” play?
Scott: This is definitely a convergence play! Firstly, it’s not a show that will ever be popular or mainstream. It’s not a show parents will bring families to so that they can see a typical feel-good love story and leave humming catchy songs that are about as deep and thought-inspiring as dog crap. Rather, if you see this show, be ready to experience emotions that most theatre makes a conscious effort to keep us from feeling. You will probably be confused. You will probably feel uneasy. You will definitely leave with a unique experience.
Tom: Tell me about your character, Finn.
Scott: Finn is a 20 year old who is curious and fearless, which gets him into trouble a lot. Which he doesn’t mind. Although he’s self-centered and vain, I think I brought a softer side to Finn than the script suggests- because I want the audience to care about my character and what happens to him. He is also a homosexual, but not a typical one. I’m happy that the playwright is writing gay characters that can be real people and not stereotypes and I wanted Finn to be just that.
Tom: Tell me about Finn’s relationship to his family (Gwen/Rhoda)
Scott: Finn’s Mom can barely take care of herself, let alone a son. Which is why I think Finn is so rebellious. Probably, Finn was exposed to voices, ghosts, those kinds of things since a very young age because his mom is mentally unstable and hears things. The first scene in the play she talks about her new medication- so back then her medication couldn’t have been perfect. Finn, exposed to that as a kid, is more comfortable with these things–and I think he takes an interest in haunted houses and ghosts and things that happened to his mom to make her the nutjob that deep-down, Finn actually loves greatly. On the surface, however, Finn is agitated and offended by his mother and aunt’s mere presence. He knows that his lifestyle and choices are ones they disapprove of–even ones he can’t help. And that pushes the small part of Finn away that would care more about his family.
Tom: Great. Thank you.
Scott: Thanks.
Interview with Lucy Bredeson-Smith: Gwen, in Finn in the Underworld
Posted by hayes in Finn in the Underworld, Jordan Harrison, Lucy Bredeson-Smith on September 22nd, 2009
Tom: So, I’m sitting here with Lucy Bredeson-Smith who is playing the role of Gwen in convergence-continuum’s upcoming production of Jordan Harrison’s Finn in the Underworld. Lucy, can you tell me a little bit about what this play is about?
Lucy: Well, it’s creepier than hell. (Laughs) It’s what maybe happens with a lot of families in a more esoteric way? The layers upon layers upon layers of history in a family and how it scars or builds the people in the family.
Tom: Jordan Harrison describes this play as a psychosexual gothic horror story. Why does he describe it that way? Or, why do you think he describes it that way?
Lucy: Well, that’s what it is. Plain and simple, that’s what it is. If you can make this thing plain and simple. Because of what happens in the fallout shelter, because it’s creepy, because it’s a Halloween kind of play. I don’t know how else to answer that.
Tom: When I think of gothic horror, I think of something like Jane Eyre.
Lucy: Well, it has its dramatic turns and they are hyper-dramatic. But it’s not like watching a Turner Classic or something like that. Psychosexual certainly because it’s psychological…but it also deals with the sexual pieces as well.
Tom: So, how is this a convergence play? You’ve been in what, hundreds of them?
Lucy: (Laughs) Yes, hundreds… I’ve been doing shows here for almost seven years now.
Tom: And this is also the second Jordan Harrison play that you’ve been in.
Lucy: Correct.
Tom: Act a Lady as well.
Lucy: Correct.
Tom: Not only, how is this a convergence play, but how does this relate to your previous experience doing a Harrison play?
Lucy: It’s a convergence play because it’s dark, because it’s intense, because it is immediate, because it has fractured time, because it bounds right over top of…it tramples the fourth wall. Because it brings its subjects into very close proximity with the audience, and it plays with the audience: the audience becomes part of it…the audience becomes a part of this old house, too…just like we do. As far as its relationship to Act a Lady, it doesn’t seem to have any. It’s so different. Act a Lady was playful and fun, and yes, it dealt with identity and who are you at any given moment and how much of you is a reflection of the people who’ve gone before you and the people who’ve fed into your psyche. But this one doesn’t have the playfulness. This one is definitely a horror flick. It’s so scary; I have nightmares from it.
Tom: Now, you play the character of Gwen. And Gwen as a tense relationship with her sister, Rhoda. Can you talk a little about that? About their relationship?
Lucy: Yeah… Rhoda’s a bitch. (Laughs) She is… She tortured me when I was a kid! I mean, where else can you look for the tension? Yeah, Rhoda is the dominant one and was when we were children. And Gwen was the troubled one. She’s the one who saw ghosts and stuff and heard voices in her head and was treated like a lunatic all her life. And in a desperate attempt to become a normal person, she married Phillip, who is this drippy guy who likes real estate, and she is the one who…to the outside world would look normal. Whereas Rhoda has settled for a solitary life and looks after mom and all that kind of stuff. And the tension now comes partially from the fact that Rhoda is resentful of the fact that she has to look after mom and devote her life to mom, but also because Gwen now has this quasi-normal life. Rhoda feels some resentfulness for that. Gwen has always resented Rhoda for Rhoda’s top of the dean’s list, for Rhoda’s being the prim-and-proper, the favored one in the family. So, even though Gwen was probably pampered as a kid because she’s the baby, she didn’t quite make the splash that Rhoda did with her parents because she was troubled.
Tom: Okay, great. Thank you.
Lucy: Thank you.
Interview with Clyde Simon — Carver Bishop in Finn in the Underworld
Posted by hayes in Clyde Simon, Finn in the Underworld, Jordan Harrison on September 19th, 2009
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.
An Interview with Geoffrey Hoffman — Director, Finn in the Underworld
Posted by hayes in Finn in the Underworld, Geoffrey Hoffman, Jordan Harrison on September 18th, 2009
Tom: I’m sitting here with Geoffrey Hoffman who is the director of the upcoming production of Jordan Harrison’s Finn in the Underworld here at convergence-continuum and Geoff, why don’t you begin by telling the readers a little bit about what this play is about.
Geoff: The basic story is that two sisters are coming back to their old family home to clear out the final belongings because their mother’s gone to a nursing home and they’re selling the house. The house has an old fallout shelter from the cold war era and the sisters have always had a history of being scared of their own house because it’s just a little creepy to them. And one of their sons, whose name is Finn, he’s coming home to help them out and we soon discover that Finn has a connection to the house itself and this other-worldly… he’s drawn to the fallout shelter and the history that it contains. And then we encounter a character from the past who’s there to visit, who’s known the family for a long time and develops a connection with Finn. And then we’re sort of taken into a world of memory where they’re re-living parts of their childhood and that then blends with the present time and it becomes a mystery / horror story / thriller / love story.
Tom: You mention time there. Can you talk a little about time, because that’s one of the interesting aspects of this play: is how Harrison plays with time and there’s, of course, clocks which are dominant?
Geoff: Yes. Yes, the play takes place in the span of one day. But it’s not told in chronological order: it’ll jump from morning to evening to the afternoon. So you see some characters interact with each other in the beginning of the play and then later see how they first met. And it reaches a time where we go into the underworld, as the title would hint at, where time stands still and memories take over. And there’s also a big grandfather clock that is part of the set and pretty integral to the story as it helps the audience sort of keep track of the order that things are occurring, where at the same time being a little unclear about it too…so that the whole story isn’t clear cut. It’s up for interpretation…in terms of what really happened…what is just the way someone remembered it…and how that is different than the way that it really occurred. And one of the main things we see is how different characters…the character Finn in particular…interacts differently with the different people he encounters. And I think that parallels a lot of people’s real life. How, I, myself, act differently around my parents or my grandparents than I do with my friends…than I do with the people at work. And I like how, for a surrealistic play, it has a lot of stuff that people can really relate to in terms of relationships with family, and your relationship with yourself. And how your past, how your childhood, how your family memories influence who you are now. So, yeah, it’s a nice blend of the surrealistic and the realistic.
Tom: So, this is your third play that you’ve directed here?
Geoff: Yes
Tom: So, from the point of view of a director, what is it that attracts you to this play; what is it that’s attractive about it?
Geoff: When I first read the play I was attracted to the fact that I understood it…but I kind of had no idea what had just happened. And then when I read it a second time, I saw a completely…I saw a different character’s point of view as being the main character. So it was a completely different take on it. And the more times I read it the more it made sense and I understood it, but I also the more questions I had. So I think the fact that it wasn’t a cut and dry beginning to end story was the biggest draw for me. Because, not only in a theatrical sort of way, it’s entertaining and confusing…it’s not just the audience wondering what will happen next, but they’re wondering what happened already that we didn’t see. And will we see it or not?
Tom: How is this a convergence play? You’ve been involved in…hundreds of plays at convergence…
Geoff: About twenty productions, I’ve been involved with.
Tom: So, what is it that makes this a convergence play in your mind?
Geoff: One thing is that it’s not a clear cut story. The fact that it’s edgy, it has some… I guess I’d say… sexual interaction between characters that a lot of community theaters and even other professional theaters probably wouldn’t do on stage. Especially in such close proximity to the audience. And I think what makes it work very well for our theater is that the setting is in an enclosed space. And so the fact that we are a small theater and that confinement is one of the themes of the play…
Tom: Yeah, that was one of the things I was going to ask because the Liminis is space is, uh… comfortable…
Geoff: Yes… cozy.
Tom: Cozy. And I was going to ask how that worked with this play.
Geoff: What makes that work well is that we try to do environmental theater…where you don’t just go and feel like you sit down and watch something that’s happening between some people that are way up on a stage far away and you can get up and go to the bathroom and leave that world and then just walk right back in. We try to do theater that gives you the impression that you’re sitting there right with the characters sort of like a fly on the wall in the same room as them and this is just happening in front of you. Also, the way that time jumps between scenes… I think it just goes to the type of theater we like to do. All the answers aren’t given to you. It’s a mystery and you find out some of the answers, but not all of them. And I think that, depending on the audience member, you’ll get a lot of different takes that some people will find certain things really funny, some people find the whole thing terrifying. And I think it will have a lot to do with past relationships that audience members have had. Mostly with their families. I think that if someone came to theater and maybe had a similar experience to some of the things that occur in this play… I don’t know how they might react to it… I mean, there might be a true guttural reaction. I mean, we might have audience members crying their eyes out or they might get angry. I think this has the potential for really strong reactions and a wide variety of reactions.
Tom: It is a dark play and it does hit in some dark areas; and that’s why Harrison referred to it as a ‘gothic horror story’ it has that potential…
Geoff: Yes…and it also has…and with the way it approaches things that have happened in your past and interpretation of your own memories there…people have this sense of…even when something bad happened there’s a fondness in the memory of it, ‘cause it reminds them of a different time in their life. So, I think reflecting on bad memories is cathartic for people. Not to sound like this play is therapy for anybody, but it approaches the fact that this sort of thing, you know, can happen. People have good childhoods and bad childhoods and lots of times they grow up just fine. Especially with the relationship between the sisters…they did not get along as children. They don’t have much of a relationship with each other now. But you see the memories they share together and how it actually brings them closer and they realize that they’re more alike than they are different…and that really, the two of them are in the whole thing together the whole time because they share those same memories together.
Tom: And you get to see a little of that coming out two between Gwen and Finn.
Geoff: Yes.
Tom: And like you mentioned, you get to see a little bit of that generational…history of a family at play because you see the tension between Gwen and Rhoda and then that kind of informs the relationship between Gwen and Finn, as well…her son.
Geoff: Right…because Finn is certainly not a mother’s ideal son. I mean, he got expelled from school, and he’s like rebellious and he’s almost Goth; I mean he’s just kind of a brat. In one scene especially when they really start to talk to each other they find this connection that they’re so alike, and that’s pretty much the root of why they don’t get along.
Tom: So this play opens up this Friday, September 18th.
Geoff: Yes.
Tom: Here at the Liminis theater. Thank you very much.
Geoff: Thank you.
