Hello lovely readers! As some of you know next week is the Theatre Department’s annual fall production, and this year they are putting on a selection from The Saint Plays, written by Erik Ehn. These plays include several world premieres, and promise to be an excited night of theatre. I sat down for an interview with Professor Wes Savick, who is one of the directors of the show.
So my first question is what originally drew you to The Saint Plays?
Samuel, the truth of it is I go to bookstores and by habit always go to the drama sections and there is almost nothing on those shelves, and I think I was in New York City and I saw the volume and it just said “The Saint Plays” and it intrigued me and I looked at them and they were short and they were intriguing and I didn’t understand them as I was paging through them at the bookstore. It was just from a hunt at a bookstore that I first even heard of these plays. And then they sat on my shelf, geez I bet I bought these things in 2004. So a good ten years they’ve been staring back at me and I’ve been thinking about them and possibly doing them at Suffolk and thinking maybe they’d be a good project here, but they’ve been sitting here for a while. Want to know how I finally pulled the trigger to really get the nerve to do them?
Sure
Marrying Lori, because when I got married to a minister there was something about these plays that intimidated me because as know from rehearsal I really wasn’t raised with any kind of religious background so the references in the plays were a little intimidating to me, I wasn’t quite sure where they were coming from or if I understood them deeply enough, I needed help. And I got have got a dramaturg but instead I have a wife who’s a minister,and that helped me a lot, feeling confident that I could understand these plays. I mean that wasn’t the whole story but it’s part of it.
My second question is what was the most important thing you were looking for when casting The Saint Plays?
Samuel you know this because we’ve done so many plays together, I look for students who are game, who are up for anything, who seem to come in and they don’t have a preconceived idea of what theater is but they have a strong desire to be a part of something that is potentially meaningful and involving. You know, it’s hard to tell all that from an audition but you can get a very good sense of people who are curious…but I’m looking for those students who are up for an adventure, ready to commit the time, because as you know it takes so much time, and have kind of an open mind and an open heart to the process, that’s the main thing I look for.
Okay, and so what’s been your favorite part of the rehearsal process so far?
Well my favorite part is always making discoveries about things I didn’t know when I started the rehearsal process. I love that, and it happens all the time, and with these plays in particular. I also, it’s going to sound so, oh I don’t care how it sounds if it’s true. I love working with Suffolk students, it’s the best gig I’ve got all year. I mean it really is, working with professional actors has it’s own satisfactions, but Suffolk students are so generous to each other and to the script and to me and they’re curious and they have a very good sense of; I always found in all the years I’ve been here Suffolk students have a very good…they’re people smart. They understand other human beings very well because I’ve worked at other universities too and I always felt that Suffolk students have a special insight into their fellow human beings and I’m sure I’m biased but I’ve seen it and that comes out…there’s no greater space for that quality to come out in a students than in the rehearsal room. I see it come out in the rehearsal room and it is a pleasure to see students make sense of people and characters who are not themselves.
And that kind of leads into my next question, has putting on/rehearsing The Saint Plays given you any new insights into how you view the plays at all?
Yeah, it’s given me nothing but insights because I read them, these plays, I think any play doesn’t, of course is incomplete until you get actors on them. Death of a Salesman, Hamlet, There’s pleasure in reading these plays of course, but they don’t really make sense until human beings are on stage saying these lines with belief, that they believe what they’re saying . These plays in particular because the language is so poetic and often times opaque as you know. That there’s a story running through it and obviously themes.I think they’re beautifully written but they work on a very different level from most plays I’ve dealt with and so the only way to see the sense, like when you guys were auditioning for me, hallelujah because I had spent the previous four months reading them over and over and over and I don’t want to say it was all intellectual, but I think the majority intellectual understanding of the plays because they’re poetic, and then when I saw you actually saying these lines, well that made sense on a whole new level, the level it was intended to make sense, which was the theatrical level. so yes every day has been loaded with discoveries about how these bloody things work.
And so you’ve had several world premieres before with shows like Car Talk and Fab/Whatever, do you think putting on a world premiere of a show has any kind of specific challenges associated with it?
Yes Samuel, I always consider it like the biggest game in town, and I want our students here at Suffolk to have the experience. Any play that’s been done before-and there’s nothing wrong with doing plays that have been done before-it’s just that it doesn’t interest me as much because there’s a precedent. That there is a way…there’s a precedent for doing those plays. Sometimes we know what the precedent is, sometimes we’re ignorant of what the precedent is and so it’s almost as if you’re doing a new play. But to do plays that are brand brand new means that for me of course as a director if something isn’t working I don’t know what the problem is, is it the script, is it the directing, is it the acting is the set, you know I don’t know. So if you’re doing Death of a Salesman and it isn’t working it’s probably not the script it’s likely the directing or the acting. It reduces your variables, and when you’re working on brand new stuff, you’re almost like,I don’t know,I always feel like you’re kind of rediscovering the very thing that you’re working on. It’s like if you were painting and every time you started a painting you were rediscovering what painting is, as opposed to “oh, another tree”. And I feel that way about new work where “oh my gosh” there’s no guidepost on how to do this, so, and especially when the play gets really strange like The Saint Plays. They’re unusual plays, so it’s almost as if you have to meet the play on it’s terms and you can’t cross reference it to precedence from the past the way other people did these plays, I have no idea, they haven’t been done. Some of them are brand new, no one’s ever done these plays before, and some were done once or twice, I don’t know the production history of The Saint Plays but they weren’t done very often.
Okay, so my final question is: what’s one thing you hope the audience will take away from The Saint Plays, or what’s the most important thing you hope they’ll take away?
Oh gosh that’s always a really great question and a hard one to answer. I think in a way one thing I hope the audience can take away from the plays is a sense of wonder and mystery and joy. I think the plays do not explain themselves, they kind of create a state of wonder for the audience, there are some things that are very relatable in the plays, and some things that are very mysterious about these plays. After all they’re dealing with saints who were also human beings so there’s a real tension between our understanding of what a saint represents and what a human being is, and these particular plays in the way that they’re structured I think is a profound celebration of the human capacity for wonder, goodness, and if an audience member that that away from this and leaves feeling a little elevated in their spirit for having encountered these stories and the way that they’re told, oh that would be a dream, I hope people walk out with that.
Well I hope you enjoyed the interview! If you are interested in seeing The Saint Plays (and you should be), they are running from November 13-16 at the Modern Theatre. Tickets can be bought at this website: http://www2.suffolk.edu/moderntheatre/101.html . I hope to see you all there!
-Samuel Zeiberg
