Tortured Artists

Coming in March 2012 from Adams Media.

About the Book:

It is sometimes said that all great art comes from pain. Van Gogh painted The Starry Night while in emotional torment; Lennon and McCartney forged their creative partnership following the death of their respective mothers; Milton penned Paradise Lost after losing his wife, his daughter, and his eyesight. Such unremitting grief would send even the most grounded among us into a frenzied Xanax binge and associated fetal position, but these celebrated artists chose not to recoil in passive suffering. Instead, they turned their sorrow into something the world would cherish.

Tortured Artists examines the maladies that drive creative types to the brink of despair and the inspired works that are born from their anguish.

Order your copy today on Amazon, Barnes & Noble or the Adams Media Bookstore.

Visit the website at TorturedArtistsBook.com.

Adapting Anton Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard must be almost as challenging as an all-night chess match with Garry Kasparov. This complex study of social change, upper-class denial and the inevitability of suburbia demands a calculated strategy and iron will. While Resonance Ensemble makes a valiant attempt with its updated rendition at Theatre Row’s Beckett Theater, the uneven results force the group, and director Eric Parness, into a stalemate.

Aristocratic spendthrift Lubov Ranevsky and her teenage daughter Anya have just returned to their estate after five years in Paris. Lubov’s brother, Leonid, and her adopted daughter, Varya, are there to greet the weary travelers, but this is not a happy reunion. Lubov and her family — and their entire team of servants — are in a state of angst over the imminent loss of the family’s nationally known cherry orchard, which is to be auctioned off to pay the mortgage on the estate. Lopakhin, a close family friend who rose from the ranks of peasantdom to become a successful merchant, warns Lubov that the loss of the orchard is unavoidable. He suggests cutting down the beloved trees, building a subdivision of cottages and renting them out, insisting that the new real estate will transform the land into a veritable cash cow. Lubov and her brother won’t hear of it, though, and instead choose to cross their fingers, throw a wild dinner party and hope for the best.

Parness, who adapted Orchard from Julius West’s translation, understands the play’s thematic core but has difficulty getting at its emotional underpinnings. Updating the story from turn-of-the-20th-century Russia to the American South of the 1940s is a promising device, given that both settings bare repercussions from a recent change in social order. But while the parallels between the Russian emancipation of the serfs and our own Emancipation Proclamation may be intriguing, Parness’s comparison is inconsistent. Consequently, we’re given characters with Southern drawls and a proclivity for New Orleans jazz, who trade in rubles and reference Moscow.

The cast lacks energy as a whole, although individually some of the actors do have their moments. Chris Ceraso scores laughs as Lubov’s billiards-obsessed brother, and Jessica Myhr captures Anya’s innocence with her delightfully blank expressions. Elizabeth A. Davis’s haunted gaze draws our sympathy for Varya, a woman with few options who waits endlessly for a marriage proposal that may never come. James Ware turns in the evening’s most commanding performance as the capitalistic Lopakhin, bringing life to an otherwise static bunch. Susan Ferrara, who plays the matriarchal Lubov, shoulders an admittedly heavy burden as the central character, but she simply fails to draw us into Lubov’s plight. We know this well-to-do woman is unstable, with an emotional need to fritter her money away whenever someone needs a handout, but Ferrara gives us no reason to believe it.

Legend has it that Chekhov, who wrote The Cherry Orchard as a comedy, was horrified when famed director Constantin Stanislavski first interpreted Orchard as a tragedy. The play has since found its bearings in both genres, depending on the director’s whim. Parness’s take lies somewhere in the middle. Like any stalemate, it’s not really a loss, but it’s not a win either.

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Originally published in Show Business, October 2007

Don’t forget to visit me in A Modern Hell. It’s low in starch.

BLOOD, SWEAT & TEARS

Playwright Tarell Alvin McCraney talks about how he gets his ideas from his head to the stage

The rising-star playwright Tarell Alvin McCraney may only be 28, but his career has hit enough high notes to last a lifetime. The Miami native attended the Yale School of Drama, where he formed a lasting working relationship with the famed theatrical innovator Peter Brook, author of The Empty Space. McCraney graduated in 2007, and made his New York theater debut that same year with The Brothers Size, part of the Public Theater’s Under the Radar Festival. A year later, McCraney’s Wig Out!, a portrait of the Harlem drag-queen scene, opened at the Vineyard Theater to rave reviews. Last week he became the first-ever recipient of The New York Times Outstanding Playwright Award.

I recently spoke with McCraney as he rode the New Jersey Transit to Princeton, where the McCarter Theatre is producing his Brother/Sister trilogy.

Show Business: Congratulations on the New York Times award. When did you first hear that you were being honored?

Tarell Alvin McCraney: When I was in England, and I was still working on Wig Out!, they called me and said, ‘Oh, we’re going to give you an award, but we don’t know the name of it yet, and we don’t know what it is, so you can’t tell anybody.

SB: What is your process like when you become inspired to write something?

TAM: Usually something haunts me for a while, like I’ll just keep thinking about a subject over and over again.

SB: Are you one of these focused, ‘I have to write everyday’ types?

TAM: Not at all. I had this conversation with Peter Brook very early in my career. I kept talking to him about the fact that I didn’t think I was a real playwright. The way he described the writing process was that he would sit at his desk for hours and sort of cry and write. He’d get up at eight and be at his desk until five.

SB: But every writer has a different way of working.

TAM: They do. I can’t start writing on the page until I can imagine what the play will look like in a theatrical space—or until I’m actually in a space and I can feel what the scene is going to look like. Until then, I can’t put it down on the page. When I said this to Peter, he was like, ‘Oh, no, that just makes you a playwright and not a novelist.’

SB: Where did the inspiration for The Brothers Size come from? I know it’s based on West African mythology.

TAM: It is, partially. You know, I had seen so many plays about brothers, and I really felt like there was still more to add to the conversation. So it wasn’t like, ‘Oh, I’m inspired.’ I really sat down and I planned to write a play about brotherhood because there’s a little more to the conversation that I wanted to talk about.

SB: Your plays have been produced in London. What’s your impression of the New York theater scene compared with theater over there?

TAM: It’s easy to compare the two because a lot of the same shows run over there, but the way in which theater operates there is so different. It’s mostly funded by a council. The government is really influential in underwriting the arts scene, so there’s a little more room to experiment.

SB: It must be nice to have that freedom.

TAM: It’s not totally free, but there’s a little more room to say, ‘Oh, we can try this bold new show,’ and theaters aren’t as terrified that if they make a flop that it will be the last thing they do and they’ll go under.

SB: Do you have any plans to become a bona fide New Yorker in the future, or will you eventually return to Miami?

TAM: I think I’ll definitely go back to Miami at some point. Right now, I’m just taking it a day at a time.

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Originally published in Show Business, May 2009

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IT’S NO SURPRISE that aspiring reality TV stars will sometimes go to extreme lengths in the hopes of landing a big break. From the island-bound tribes of “Survivor” to the bug-eating daredevils of “Fear Factor,” a certain unabashed subset of the fame-chasing population has long been attracted to the reality genre. According to a new French documentary, however, many would-be reality stars would do more than eat a few bugs for a shot at television stardom, and some would even commit murder.

Producers of the documentary “The Game of Death,” which aired last Wednesday on French television, recruited 80 ordinary people and told them they were appearing on a new reality quiz show, one in which contestants are zapped with jolts of electricity whenever they give incorrect answers. When those same 80 participants were placed in charge of administering the voltage, the vast majority were willing to deliver potentially fatal shocks to contestants who answered incorrectly.

Fortunately, the contestants on the faux program were actually actors, hired by the film’s producers to flail about in feigned agony as the phony shocks were delivered. Producers also recruited a minor French celebrity to pose as the show’s hostess — a sexy weatherwoman who commanded the 80 participants to increase the shock voltage each time one of the contestants got a question wrong. Most of the participants ignored the contestants’ screams for mercy and continued increasing the voltage until the contestants pretended to die. Of the 80 participants, only 16 walked away from the show.

A studio audience was also present at the taping, although the audience members were unaware that the show was a fake, and in fact many seemed to welcome the maltreatment of the contestants. Like a scene out of the 1987 film “The Running Man,” in which Arnold Schwarzenegger played a convict trying to survive a televised execution, the audience of the phony quiz show raucously encouraged the cruelty, chanting “punishment” whenever contestants failed to answer correctly. The experiment seems to suggest not only how far ordinary folks will go to achieve their 15 minutes of fame, but also how quickly society can regress to the gladiator contests of Ancient Rome, where death was routinely put on display to entertain the masses.

“The Game of Death” was inspired by controversial experiments performed in the 1960s by Stanley Milgram, a social psychologist at Yale University who found that a sizable percentage of the population could be coerced into administering fatal shocks at the behest of an authoritative figure. Milgram devised the experiments to answer the question of how liable society should hold Nazi subordinates for atrocities they committed during the Holocaust. The psychologist reasoned that Nazi war criminals such as Adolf Eichmann were only following orders, and that many of us, when put in similar circumstances, could be coerced into committing similar deeds. Milgram’s experiments, while considered unethical by contemporary testing standards, are often cited in situations where the nature of human obedience comes into question. Similarly, “The Game of Death” may prove equally influential in exposing a celebrity-obsessed culture that fetishizes fame for its own sake.

The brainchild behind “The Game of Death” is the French producer Christophe Nick, who came up with the idea after watching “The Weakest Link,” a game show in which contestants routinely back-stab their fellow contestants in order to win. As Nick’s project progressed, however, his faux quiz show began to reveal the seductive nature of fame at its darkest level. “Television is a power — we know that, but it remained theoretical,” Nick said in an interview with the daily Le Parisien on Wednesday. “I asked myself: Is it so strong that it can turn us into potential torturers?”

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Originally published in Show Business Weekly, March 2010

Zachary Booth and Preston Sadleir in Me, Myself & I. (photo: Joan Marcus)

Written by Edward Albee
Directed by Emily Mann
Playwrights Horizons
416 West 42nd Street
www.playwrightshorizons.org

***

Within seconds of meeting the dual protagonists of Me, Myself & I, you may find yourself dwelling upon the backstage logistics faced by the show’s production team. How, exactly, does one cast a play about identical twins? Perhaps not surprisingly, the producers of this often-entertaining absurdist comedy by Edward Albee did not limit their search to real-life twins, hoping to come across a pair of capable twin thespians within the New York theater community. Instead, Zachary Booth and Preston Sadleir, two unrelated but eerily similar-looking young actors, are tasked with playing the sour, squabbling brothers — both named Otto — at the center of the story.

Me, Myself & I, which opens the 40th anniversary season at Playwrights Horizons, owes much of its charm to Booth and Sadleir, who play against each other’s nuanced mimicry with adept precision. Indeed, theatergoers who suffer from even a slight case of the perception disorder prosopagnosia, also known as face blindness, may have trouble telling the two actors apart. And yet there is an understated contrast between them that works so well. The more extroverted Otto, played by Booth, has just enough of an edge to convince us he is the elder sibling. Equipped with an appropriately stronger stage presence and even a slightly better build, Booth is simply a more charming actor than his doppelganger. Still, he and Sadleir are a great team, and their easy chemistry, evident from the outset of the play, makes it all the more frustrating when the pieces of Albee’s wobbly story fail to come together in any satisfying way.

The play’s inciting incident takes place early on, when the elder Otto storms into the bedroom of his mother (Elizabeth Ashley) and her longtime psychiatrist (Brian Murray), with whom she has been living since the twins’ father deserted her 28 years earlier. Otto informs the couple that he is leaving for China because “the future is in the East.” He then goes on to insist that, for reasons he refuses to expound upon, his twin brother no longer exits. It’s a silly revelation, of course, but Otto’s conviction is so strong that he soon has the entire family doubting the existence of his more reserved sibling, despite the fact that they can all see and hear him perfectly well.

Like much of Albee’s work, Me, Myself & I hones in on the comic barbarity of domestic dysfunction with characters who seem unable to understand each other — or their own motivations — on even the most basic level. The twins’ overbearing, queen-bee of a mother goes into fits of circular logic, attempting, for instance, to justify her unfathomable decision to give identical names to her identical sons. At the same time, she laments that she herself can’t tell the two boys apart, and her inability to do so has predictably turned the Ottos into whiny bags of alienation and insecurity. Albee, who himself was adopted, is clearly exploring the existential side of identity and duality. However, his use of twin characters to indulge his preoccupation with the self will draw inevitable comparisons to the 2002 film “Adaptation,” in which the real-life screenwriter Charlie Kaufman conjured up a fictionalized version of himself and the twin brother he never had. But where Kaufman did not shy away from exposing the abject humanity of his dual alter egos, Albee seems more concerned with abjectness for its own sake.

The actors in Me, Myself & I are ready and able to take on the material, but it’s not clear what, if anything, we’re supposed to feel for these detached characters. Thanks in large part to the steady hand of director Emily Mann, the play moves at a brisk and graceful clip, and Albee’s script does get us from point A to point B with a few really nice chuckles. But if we accept that a good play, even a comedy, is one that ultimately justifies its existence, then a play about an existential crisis should get no free pass. Mind you, this is not a plea for sentiment, warmth or likable characters — dark comedy typically gets by without any of these elements. But, even as Albee’s twins do a fine job as temperamental bookends in an amusing play, their peripheral journey ultimately reminds us that their story has no real emotional center.

***

Originally published in Show Business Weekly, 2010

Directed by Jason Reitman

Jason Reitman’s Thank You for Smoking pulls us into the world of Nick Naylor (Aaron Eckhart), a slick PR whiz who makes his living speaking on behalf of the much-maligned tobacco industry. Though Nick’s job is understandably a thankless one, he carries it out with unapologetic pride, boasting about his ability to put a positive spin on a product that kills roughly 1,000 people a day. But when an opportunistic senator, played by the always off-kilter William H. Macy, sets out on a campaign to tag all cigarette packs with poison labels, Nick is forced to kick his spin-control tactics into high gear.

Based on Christopher Buckley’s popular 1994 novel, Thank You for Smoking earns top marks for its politically incorrect premise. Unfortunately, the film doesn’t maintain the ferocity it needs to keep us along for the entire ride. Instead, Reitman aims for broad-comedy sensibilities that simply feel out of place. There’s much focus, for example, on Nick’s relationship with his young son, a subplot that feels like an unnecessary attempt to humanize the character. As for Reitman’s adapted screenplay, although it contains some effectively sharp dialogue, it doesn’t do much to update Buckley’s original story. In the dozen years since Buckley’s novel was penned, smoking prohibition has gained an unprecedented foothold in this country. Yet Reitman’s rendition still treats the topic with its Clinton-era innocence, superficially foggy about how the smoking wars have played out.

Despite the film’s flaws, there are still plenty of laughs throughout its trim 92 minutes. The best scenes involve quips between members of the M.O.D. (merchants of death) Squad, a weekly lunch group consisting of Nick and his fellow spinsters from the alcohol and gun industries. Watching this trio of flacks bicker over which of their respective industries causes society the most harm, we get a glimpse into the unflinching satire Thank You for Smoking could have been.

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Originally published in Show Business Weekly, 2005

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Photo courtesy of Night Shade Shadow Theatre

No one embarks on a playwriting career expecting to make a boatload of money. Mamet aside, the number of living American playwrights who are able to draw mass audiences on sheer name recognition is undeniably slim, even smaller perhaps than brand-name screenwriters and book authors. Now the hardships faced by American playwrights are the focus of an ambitious new study by the nonprofit arts organization Theatre Development Fund, underscoring both the economic unfeasibility of surviving as a playwright and the continued sputtering of the administrative engines that drive American theater as a whole.

The study, dubbed Outrageous Fortune: The Life and Times of the New American Play and published in book form last month, draws on six years of comprehensive research, including surveys of 250 playwrights and nearly 100 nonprofit theaters, most specializing in the production of new works. TDF also held a series of roundtable discussions with artistic directors, playwrights and theater experts in Los Angeles, Minneapolis, Chicago, San Francisco and New York — five cities known for their robust theater communities and support of the arts.

The study’s devastating results — to call them grim would be a serious understatement — show a theater industry plagued by ailments at every conceivable level, from dwindling audiences and shrinking cast sizes to a growing disconnect between American playwrights and the nonprofit theaters that produce their work.

Todd London, artistic director for New Dramatists and the study’s chief author, called the results of his research complex and contradictory. “On the one hand, we have a playwriting profession that is larger, better trained, and more vital than at any time in our history,” he noted. “On the other hand, we have a profound rift between our most accomplished playwrights and the theaters who would produce them, an increasingly corporate theater culture, dire economics for not-for-profits, and, perhaps most troubling of all, a system of compensation that makes it nearly impossible for playwrights to earn anything resembling a living.”

London cites the payment structure of many nonprofit theaters — a royalty system modeled after the commercial sector — as one of the major factors prohibiting playwrights from earning a living wage. Commissions to playwrights, London says, are far too meager to support the time needed to fully develop new works, leaving the majority of plays unproduced and a great number of playwrights washed up by mid-career. This latter finding will come as little surprise to New York theatergoers familiar with the dearth of new works, particularly straight plays, being produced by larger theaters, commercial and nonprofit alike. Those plays that do make it to the stage can expect to struggle to fill seats almost without exception. Consider Neil LaBute’s Reasons to Be Pretty, which opened at Broadway’s Lyceum Theatre last year to much fanfare and a slew of solid reviews. The play, despite three Tony nods and LaBute’s nearly unmatched off-Broadway renown, failed to find an audience and closed a financial flop after only 106 performances.

Admittedly, if any of TDF’s findings signal the imminent demise of theater, it would hardly be the first time the art form’s death knell has been sounded. That the theater has survived the advent of radio, motion pictures, television and the Internet should offer some degree of comfort to anyone addicted to a heartfelt monologue and the warm glow of floodlights on an actor’s face. For its part, TDF continues to be proactive in improving a dire situation for theater artists. With support from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the organization plans to moderate discussions with theater communities in eight cities early this year, looking for solutions that will stimulate new play production at a time when theater lovers need it most.

The full text of the Outrageous Fortune study is available at the Drama Book Shop, 250 West 40th Street.

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Originally published in Show Business Weekly, February 2010

Bill Tangradi and Tobias Segal in Little Doc (photo: Sandra Coudert)

Written by Dan Klores
Directed by John Gould Rubin
Rattlestick Playwrights Theater
224 Waverly Place
www.rattlestick.org

***

Every American demographic eventually faces that disheartening moment, that wake-up call when its affiliates look around at their contemporaries and realize, much to their dismay, that their generation has already peaked. For the baby boomers, if we are to believe the testimony of playwright Dan Klores, that moment came sometime around 1975, the year in which his wavering new drama, Little Doc, takes place. The play centers on a group of longtime friends who are approaching 30, which is to say they are coming down from the high that accompanies being young and having the world as their oyster. The days of political activism and Vietnam War protests have given way to extended hang-out sessions at the Brooklyn apartment of Ric, played by Adam Driver, a hard-headed burnout who spends much of the play complaining about, or arguing with, his equally hard-headed father, played by Steven Marcus. Ric announces early on that he and his girlfriend, Peggy (Joanne Tucker), are going on a road trip, but when it is revealed that he has not yet paid back a sizable debt to his father’s friend Manny (Dave Tawil), suspicion begins to mount that Ric is looking to skip town for good.

Little Doc, while not quite a talking-heads piece, contains a fair amount of talking, but this is really its most enjoyable attribute. As the young friends banter, their conversations shift quickly from playful ruminations about the good old days to mean-spirited bickering over old grievances. Because they know each other so well, they are experts at pushing each other’s buttons, and their precarious exchanges will ring true for anyone who has ever been part of an overextended social clique.

Klores, whose roots are in documentary filmmaking, is adept at spitting out taut dialogue and creating genuine moments of dramatic intensity, but he hasn’t quite mastered the more basic craft of storytelling. His plot veers into several different directions involving Ric’s relationship with his father and his debt to Manny — an aging mobster who treats Ric like his own son. Through it all, however, we mostly find ourselves wanting to see more of the central clique. The young friends’ nihilistic jousting shows a rarely seen side of the baby boom generation, whose cohorts are known less for their cynicism and more for patting themselves on the back and bragging about how cool Woodstock was. Little Doc proves that the boomers, for all their idealism and ambition to change the world, also had their fair share of disillusionment. Like the Gen-X slackers who came a few years later and the recession-weary Millennials of today, Klores’s boomers face the end of their youth with clenched teeth, angry that no one had warned them of their limitations. As this was the first American generation to grow up with the opportunities provided by postwar economic prosperity, it was also the first to squander those opportunities. And while Klores poignantly reminds us of this, he then goes on to squander opportunities of his own. The more compelling aspects of Little Doc are treated as a subplot, while the playwright pours an unnecessary amount of energy into Ric’s possible betrayal of Manny. As the wounded father figure confronts the fallen hero, we realize we’ve seen this type of climax many times before, and Klores brings nothing new to the device.

Still, this pitfall doesn’t stand in the way of Little Doc’s first-rate cast, whose combined graces make the play well worth its 90-minute running time. While the central character of Ric is self-serving and, at times, downright underhanded, Driver keeps him likeable in a spacey, Zach Braff kind of way, and by his final monologue, we can’t help but root for Ric’s redemption. Tobias Segal, who plays the group’s requisite spaz, Billy, isn’t given much to do outside of a few comic non sequiturs, but he readily handles the role’s one-note humor. Early in the play, we catch a small glimpse of Segal’s true dramatic range when Billy nods off, chillingly, into a womblike stupor, a fresh syringe full of junk coursing through his veins. Bill Tangradi as Lenny, the quixotic hippie whose grand plans for free love haven’t quite panned out, is the standout of the cast. While Lenny’s preset smugness makes him sharply critical of his friends’ sedentary lifestyle, it’s hard not to notice that he isn’t doing much with his own life aside from popping Quaaludes and dealing coke. And yet Tangradi’s keen awareness of these contradictory traits fleshes Lenny out in a way that makes us wish the character had a larger role in the story.

Somewhere between the Summer of Love and the inauguration of Bill Clinton — the first president born after World War II — the baby boomers learned to look back on their youth with an inflated sense of accomplishment. Little Doc, if nothing else, adds balance to the conversation. It assures us that every generation has its underachievers.

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Originally published in Show Business Weekly, June 2010

Kate MacCluggage with co-star John Behlmann in The 39 Steps (photo: Carol Rosegg).

Tales From the Farce Side

Actress Kate MacCluggage talks about doing comedy, why she actually loves auditioning, and how she keeps up with the frenetic pace of The 39 Steps.

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The last few years have been rewarding, albeit busy, for Kate MacCluggage. The Connecticut native, who earned a BA in theater from Wesleyan University before receiving her MFA from New York University’s graduate acting program, has appeared in such plays as Jessica Goldberg’s Stuck and the Assembly’s The Three Sisters. She also worked as an understudy on Broadway in The Farnsworth Invention, Aaron Sorkin’s 2007 drama about the invention of television.

Now MacCluggage is starring in The 39 Steps, the willfully manic send-up of Alfred Hitchcock’s 1935 spy thriller of the same name. The show, which ran in three different Broadway houses between 2008 and 2009, has since found a new home at off-Broadway’s New World Stages, where it is currently playing an open run. I spoke with MacCluggage last week as she was gearing up for a Friday-night performance.

Show Business: How did you first get into acting?

Kate MacCluggage: I grew up in southeastern Connecticut, in Groton, which is right by New London. My mom worked at the O’Neill Theater Center, so I hung out there a lot. I think I just sort of got bitten by the bug early.

SB: Now you’re building up quite a résumé.

KM: I’ve been pretty lucky. I graduated from NYU in ’07, so it’s been kind of a weird time to get out of school with the recession and everything, but I’ve been pretty blessed.

SB: You’ve done a lot of comedy and especially farcical plays — Noises Off, Midsummer Night’s Dream. Do you consider yourself more of a comedic actress?

KM: When I first graduated, I had done mostly dramatic work, because that’s mostly what we train in. My father was always saying, “I wish you would do more comedy. You’re so funny.”

SB: There is also the old adage that comedy is actually harder to do than drama.

KM: It can be. As a performer, you learn a lot quicker when you’re doing comedy, because you get your response right away. It’s very easy to tell when it’s working and when it’s not working.

SB: How valuable has your training been in your career so far?

KM: For me, training was 100 percent necessary. If I hadn’t gone to grad school, I wouldn’t be doing this. I think I would have hoped that I would be making a living as an actor, but I wouldn’t have been. And it’s not so much because of the connections and the prestige that it’s on my resume. I think it’s really that I’m better now than I was. I know more about how to coach myself, how to audition.

SB: Speaking of auditions, how do you deal with them? Any special preparations?

KM: I’m one of the weird ones. I actually like auditioning a lot. I think you have to say, I’m not going to worry about the judgment part of it — I get to play this character for the next five minutes, and nobody else does. So I’m going to do my best at it. I mean, why not get the most out if it that I can?

SB: The 39 Steps is incredibly fast paced. What do you do to maintain that energy night after night?

KM: It was really hard the first few weeks because, first of all, our bodies weren’t used to it. It’s so fast. I was so afraid I would miss something, or forget, so I was operating a little bit under panic mode. And now that it’s more in my body, I can just relax a little bit and know that I’m going to get where I need to go, and I can just enjoy the ride.

SB: Has the show changed much from its Broadway incarnation?

KM: I wasn’t with the Broadway version, but I haven’t felt like the show has lost a lot. There’s a group of people who, I don’t know if this is their technical name, but we sort of all call them “The 39 Steps Heads.” They’ve seen the show several times, in various different theaters, and they keep coming back, because they really love the show.

SB: It’s almost like you might have another Rocky Horror on your hands.

KM: [Laughs] I might get a little nervous if they start acting along.

SB: Are you a Hitchcock fan yourself?

KM: I am. I was one of those PBS kids. I was only allowed to watch something if it was in black and white anyway — or made by the Brits.

SB: Well, the show is such a good time. I remember after I saw it at the Cort, with all the energy, and all the running around. I thought to myself, my god, these actors have to do this every night.

KM: [Laughs] It is kind of crazy. And I get to do it every night in heels.

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Originally published in Show Business Weekly, May 2010