She Interviews Directors

Part VII: Cezar Williams Cezar Williams Hometown: White Plains, NY but my soul is from Brundidge, Alabama Current Town: Yonkers, NY Tell me about: TFTT season 8 ten-minute plays The Fire This Time is an annual theater and art festival featuring artists of the African Diaspora and the ten minute plays are the center-piece of the three week festival. Tell me about your process and concept of this show. I have directed 10 minute plays in the festival before, but this was my first time directing all seven of the plays in a single season. So, I spent a lot of time trying to come up with a concept that would tie the entire evening together. I was blessed with seven wonderful plays and seven wonderful actors; all very unique and very smart. So, it didn’t take long for the playwrights and the actors to kind of show me the connection within all the work. The connection turned out to be that nothing is exactly what we think it is at first glance. If you look at som...

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 s...

Part V: Daniella Caggiano photo credit: Jody Christopherson Daniella Caggiano  Hometown: New York City Current Town: Still New York City! Tell me about Vinegar Tom : Vinegar Tom is a Caryl Churchill play from the 1970s. It tells the story of a witch trial that takes place in small English village in the 17th century, but in true Churchill fashion, there are also songs, a Vaudeville act, and tons of Brechtian fun. Churchill describes Vinegar Tom as a play about witches “with no witches in it”.  Tell me about your process and concept of this show. The fun thing about Vinegar Tom is that the piece switches back and forth between two worlds: the world of the 17th century village, which is told through 21 short episodic scenes, and the world of the songs, which is extremely undefined. Churchill stipulates only that these songs should be sung in modern dress and the people singing are not the characters you’ve seen in the scenes. While there is...

Part IV: Lana Russell Lana Rosalind Russell Hometown: San Rafael, CA Current Town: Williamsburg Brooklyn Tell me about Vigils : Vigils is an insane play. And I feel like I’m a bit insane for loving it so much and for directing it. In its most basic explanation the play is about a woman (a young widow) who lost her fire fighter husband two years ago and is unable to move on with her life. The play structurally mirrors the way memories “come in no particular order”. There are strings of memories that actually happened, memories the characters try to change, happy times, sad times, and explorations of what they wish they would’ve done differently. This woman has kept her husband’s soul in a box in her home and his body in a picture frame. Without them, she fears she will die. We explore the ups and downs of their relationship, their love, losses and secrets kept from each other. Can she find a way out? Can she can choose to let go and find her way into the future?...