Part VI: Stephen Brown-Fried

Stephen Brown-Fried

Home Town: Madison, NJ

Current Town: Brooklyn, NY

Tell me about Orestes:

Orestes is a play about what happens at the end of a seemingly endless cycle of violence — when there have been so many retributions and revenges that people start to lose sight of where it all began.  And it’s about how a society attempts to make monsters out of the people who it deems to be the causers of that violence — despite the fact that those people may actually be the victims.  Euripides wrote it incredibly late in the 5th Century, BCE — so by the time he wrote it, Athens was falling into the Second Peloponnesian War — a war that would essentially end the Athenian Golden Age.  You can feel Euripides’ anger and pessimism throughout the play.  It’s a play written by someone who knew his country was falling apart, and was attempting to scream from the stage that something was horribly wrong with the entire society.

Tell me about your process and concept of this show.

Knowing that I was going to be working on it with New School BFA’s who may have had little exposure to Ancient Greek drama prior to this process, my primary focus was to make the play’s themes and arguments meaningful and urgent for young people today — so we spent a lot of time talking about the similarities between Euripides’ world and our own — the seeming endlessness of violence in our world.  I was initially drawn to the play because Orestes’ situation — having just commit a seemingly incomprehensible crime by murdering his mother — made me think of the many young people in this country who have commit incomprehensible murders — the Columbine murderers, the Tsarnaev brothers, Dylann Roof, etc… — seeing all these tragedies enacted by adolescents made me wonder if there’s something larger than their individual hatreds that leads all these young people in our country to turn to violence — is what we’re seeing the legacy of a society obsessed with violence?  So we set the play in a version of the modern world, and began our work on it looking to see what it had to say about all that.  As we got deeper into our work, I think I grew to find the initial parallels to contemporary terrorists less useful, as Euripides does seem to sympathize with Orestes in a way that I don’t think he would with people like the Tsarnaevs or Roof.  Still, he seems to be calling out his society’s obsession with violence, and the seeming impossibility of ever climbing out of the morass of that violence — and so really, the majority of our work was to occupy a world in which all that violence had actually occurred, and then argue the individual points of view expressed throughout the play as truthfully and honestly as possible.

What else are you currently busy with?

I’m prepping for a production of Richard III in the spring at Trinity Shakespeare in Texas, and then a production of The Tempest right after that.  And I have this longer-term project to develop a two-evening Henry VI that I’m in the early stages of development for.  I’m also one of the two Heads of Directing at The New School, and I teach the MFA directors’ intro to Shakespeare at Yale Drama.  And I recently started working with David Staller at Gingold Theatrical Group / Project Shaw to help him develop that company around its mission to be a theatre that advances human rights and the freedom of speech as inspired by Bernard Shaw’s core values.

Tell me, if you will, a story from your childhood that explains who you are as a Director and/or as a person.

When I was in the second grade, we moved into a new house that was up the street from our old house.  The thing about the new house that I was the most excited by was that in the basement, there was this window in the wall between the laundry room and the rest of the basement that I think was intended to be used as a bar for parties.  At that point, I was really into puppets and magic shows, and so my parents sold me on the new house by telling me that there was a miniature theatre in the basement.  Shortly after we moved in, I decided to create a magic show for my family.  My brother stole a bottle of sulphur powder from his school’s chemistry lab which he swore would make the perfect smoke effect for my grand finale.  The effect ended up being a little more than I had planned for.  At the end of the show, I lit this pile of sulphur on fire and it erupted in a massive plume of fire that would have burnt the house down had my father not grabbed a cardboard box and smothered it.  The basement of our new house smelled like rotten eggs for weeks.

If you could change one thing about theater, what would it be?

Its perception in most areas of the country as a rarefied luxury.  I wish that going to the theatre was something that every single American did, weekly, and took for granted, so that the theatre would actually serve as a space for civic dialogue.  There are of course a lot of things that need to change in order for this to happen — ticket prices, access to the work, the work itself — and there are a lot of people across the country trying to move things in this direction.  But this is what I admire about the Greek theatre — it meant something to them that I fear it doesn’t really mean to us anymore.

Who are or were your theatrical Heroes?

Joe Papp, Zelda Fichandler, Tyrone Guthrie, Michael Langham, Peter Brook, Jan Kott, John Barton, Cicely Berry, Ariane Mnouchkine, Ming Cho Lee, Michael Kahn, Julie Taymor, Mia Katigbak, Euripides, Shakespeare, Shaw, Odets…

What kind of theater excites you?

Anything that makes an audience member reevaluate themselves and their relationship to the world and to history.

What advice do you have for Directors just starting out?

Listen to your gut, but also find mentors and heroes and role models.  If you see work that really inspires you, don’t hesitate to contact the director and say “I loved what you did - can we get coffee and talk more about it?”  I never used to do that because I was afraid I’d seem like a stalking freak, and then a young director did that to me and I realized that most directors love hearing that their work touched someone, and this is a great way to connect with like-minded artists.  Try not to worry too much about what everyone else is doing (oh, the hours I could have saved if I had learned this sooner…) — there’s only one you in the world, so try to make that mean something.

Anything else you’d like to add?

I think that America needs good theatre right now more than it ever has in my lifetime, so get to work.  It’s a very exciting time to be an artist.  To quote another gay Jewish lefty, “The world only spins forward. We will be citizens. The time has come… More Life. The Great Work Begins.”

Shout out to the designers and stage crew.

The Orestes team was Doss Freel on scenic, Nicole Slaven on costumes, Ethan Steimel on lighting, Toby Algya on sound.  Matt Bumgardner composed the music and also played piano for the show.  And the SM team was Christopher Kee Anaya-Gorman and Will Rucker.

Plugs, please:

Ugh… having just come out of rehearsals and then a doozie of a post-show cold, I’m horribly behind on seeing things.  I haven’t yet seen Sweat at the Public, but want to — I may have to wait to see it on the Broadway.  I just went to Declan Donnellan’s Winter’s Tale at BAM and the Bohemia scenes — particularly the sheep-sheering festival — were probably the best take on that part of the play I’ve ever seen.  Oh, and if you still haven’t seen Moonlight, it’s one of the best movies I’ve seen in a very long time.