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Foreign.
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Hi, I'm Lauren Klasschenider with Class Notes for Broadway Radio. I'm here with Marianna Gaylis, co starring in Newborn at the Minetta Lane Theatre. Welcome.
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Thank you so much for having me.
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Of course. We're going to dive right in. Newborn is the story of a man uprooting his own life. A young woman searching for answers on the prairie, and a new mother consumed by an unlikely celebrity friendship. The play is written by Ella Hickson. What were your first impressions reading it? And did you see yourself in the role of the young woman searching for answers on the prairie?
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So, I mean, a sort of quick answer to your question. I'd actually only read the monologue that I would end up doing. Initially, during the audition process, I knew about Hugh Jackman's involvement. I knew it would be at the Mineta. I knew about his incredible work with his theater company together, which he co founded with Sonia Friedman and Ian Rickson, our director. But so I didn't get to read the other two pieces until I was cast. So what was kind of great about that was I just really got to. In the couple of days that I had to work on the text, I got to dive into it and imagine all these things. And because, as you say, I'm the young woman on the prairie, mine sort of takes place at the end of the 1800s in Wyoming. And the name of the entire piece, at the time, I think they were calling it Deadwood, which is the title of Hugh's monologue. But in any case, I sort of assumed, ah, so perhaps Hugh will be a sort of roving cowboy. And I don't know who the third person will be. And it turned out it's not Wild west themed at all. No, but they all. They all have Ella. What Ella's done is really special because I think all three pieces are so different. Just the language is different, the characters are different, the rhythms and the tempos of the speech are so different. And yet I think there are a lot of themes that come up about love and loss and grief and parenthood and decision making and regret and so many other things.
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Yes. And they hang together beautifully as an experience in the theater meant to be taken as a whole. Compared to the other two stories, yours isn't contemporary, which you alluded to. Did that have an effect on the rehearsal process for you?
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Ooh. I think the biggest thing that it changed for me was I think our conversations about what my character's relationship to the audience would be. I don't want to generalize too much about Hugh and Seppi's pieces or their characters. But I do think, you know, a contemporary person, it's a little, it's a little more. It's easier for them to sort of reach out to the audience and go, hey, I mean, we can, we can kind of connect over this shared experience, right? Don't we all kind of. Can't we all kind of share, share, you know, our experience with phones and texting and dating and all that sort of stuff. Whereas my character, I think that level of comfortability telling a story to a lot of people is very, very different. And I mean, at the end of the day, it's an evening of theater and she will be speaking for 30 minutes whether she's comfortable or not. But I think it definitely changed our conversations about what she needs from the audience. I think, I mean, all three characters need different things. But. But I think we had to really filter through some of the things that might be true for a young woman, you know, who probably wouldn't feel very comfortable speaking or being vulnerable in front of a huge crowd, you know, in 1898.
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Although she, she approaches it with such. We see her power throughout the story that you're telling and we see you show us or it's written her growing into this power, which is so remarkable. So in addition to Hugh, who else is in this cast with you? And tell us about working with these other actors, but not exactly working with them.
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Yeah. So in addition to Hugh, we also have the wonderful Sepideh Moafi. So definitely early on, I mean, we all. We met and we had a couple read throughs of the play all together together. But then our first, you know, week and a half or two weeks of rehearsal, we were pretty much working one on one with our director and our sage management team. However, Ian. Ian's amazing. He's so inventive and he. It is really a, a foundational part of together this theater company. Is that it? It really is everyone together. So when we all do, you know, little improvisational acting exercises, stage management involved, our associate directors involved, anyone who's in the room, you know, can get up and, and take part in, in our little imagination exercises, you know, it's not just for the three of us who are going to be on stage, it's for everybody. So we did have in those first few weeks, a couple of sort of sessions where it was all three of us either, you know, exploring the. Ian calls them constellations. There are so many other characters in our plays that we don't, you know, meet Physically, but that are mentioned. So how can we invest those characters with reality and how can we get them to affect the character though they're invisible. So we did a lot of that and then eventually by the end, we were running it a lot. So then we did get to really be there for each other, which was great. And just feed off of each other. And they couldn't be more luminous and generous people to work with. And I'm so grateful.
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I look forward to the day when I get to see the three of you in a play when you're actually doing scene work together.
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I know, wouldn't that be great? I know the big, the big joke that I keep making. So last year I had the tremendous good fortune and pleasure of understudying Andrew Scott in his one man version of Uncle Vanya. And so the joke is that off Broadway, I'm only allowed to talk to myself. I'm not allowed to be on stage with anyone else. They just won't let me.
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B
At least not yet.
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Not yet. Yes, exactly.
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B
You refer to Ian, of course, Ian Rickson, the director. Had you two ever worked together before and how did the audition process come about for you?
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No, I'd never, I'd never worked with him before and it wasn't until the audition started that I put together, you know, who he was. I mean, obviously he's done so many things, but I, with so, so many people, you know, Jerusalem, his work, directing Mark Rylance in Jerusalem absolutely changed the trajectory of my life in terms of what I think about theater and ritual.
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In the role that you play, the story you tell, the history that's revealed, is really quite remarkable. Two questions. Did the material change much during rehearsal and how much of that history did you already know going into it?
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Yeah. So to your first question, we had the brilliant playwright with us in the room, Ella, and she was able to share a lot of information with me and with the room as a whole, because she had actually spent a lot of time in Sheridan, Wyoming during residency to write this. So she shared pictures that she'd taken, primary source documents that she'd looked at, you know, journals of frontier women that she'd read. And we had maps of Sheridan, pictures of the prairie. So many, so many things. I actually, while I was in Los Angeles, during my audition process, I went to the Gene Autry Museum of the American west, which is awesome. It's across from the zoo. 10 out of 10 recommend. It's like a wonderful afternoon. They have all these amazing galleries of contemporary indigenous art as well as historical Artifacts and things. And that was so, so useful. They had whole rooms of, you know, just different kinds of barbed wire. They had an amazing room. Breaking down all the different kinds of populations that would be living in a. In a typical town. You know, from the black population, the Mormon population, particular European immigrants from different countries, the indigenous population, Mexican population. Right. So many. So it's such an intercultural place. So that was really awesome. Just as a way to dive into the material culture of the world, because I. It's always helpful for me to think about objects and. And things that, you know, these people would have touched and experienced life with.
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Well, and a museum you might not have seen under other circumstances.
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Exactly. Yeah. Definitely would not have gone. Wasn't top of my list. And then went right up to the top of my list.
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This is what the New York Times has to say about your work, if I may.
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You may.
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It's thrilling when Marianna Gaylis dives so fully into the second monologue that we're instantly in olden times, Wyoming. Funny, vulnerable, tonally protean. Her interpretation is the kind that makes you urge other people to see this actor now while she's still unknown. So I love that. To me, you're not unknown. I've known your work for quite a while. But my question is, with this monologue in particular, what's the most challenging element to the storytelling?
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Yeah, no, that's a great question. So I think something we talked a lot about, you know, so these are three very different characters. The. The characters that Hugh and Sepide play are contemporary. Certainly Sepi's character, because there's a lot of referencing to phones and texting and social media. Hugh maybe is a little bit more ambiguous, but still, we're talking at least sort of late 20th, early 21st century, actually. He mentions texting, so it must be in the era of the cell phone. And so those two characters have a very different way of relating to the audience than my character does. So there's a lot of going back and forth about, you know, how much does this character trust the audience? But then I think the most difficult aspect is actually the. The quality of time and how time operates in these monologues because, you know, simultaneously, you are a character who is telling the audience about an experience that has already happened, and yet there are other parts of the story that almost seem to be happening to the character in real time, in the moment. And so we spent a lot of time figuring out the kind of vocabulary of what that looks like, you know, how much is reenacted for the audience, how much is just told to the audience. And I found that really challenging the way that time almost warps my character. She kind of says exactly how old she is at the very start of the story, but at times it almost feels like she ages 20 or 30 years. And that's very deliberate. I think it's meant to be slippery, but it does make keeping track of the character's point of view on the events very difficult. You know, are you relating information as it is occurring? Are these revelations that are happening in the moment or are they reflections after years and years and years of, of thinking and reflecting? You know, and so I found that to be the sort of technical high wire part of, of working on this piece.
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Technical high wire. You've, you've identified it in such a complex and articulate way and I thank you for that.
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Thanks.
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I'm Lauren Klashchneider with Mariana Gaylis co starring in Newborn at the Minetta Lane Theater. Presented by Audible. Thank you.
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