It's been quite a year for you. You were selected as one of nytheatre.com's 2006 People of the Year; your theatre company, Rising Phoenix Repertory, took the 2007 New York Innovative Theatre Awards by storm; and now your play, What Happened When, is being published. How does it all feel?
It makes me feel really lucky and especially thankful to have all the RPR folks in my life, because I feel none of this last year would’ve been possible without all of them. It’s been wonderful to get to work together so much this year on things that have really kicked our butts and challenged us, and it’s been really cool to have people come check it all out and be so supportive of us.
Tell us a little bit about the play and your inspiration for it.
I can be really bad at describing stuff like this and at some point I had to write a foreword thing for the program that I think talked a lot about the inspiration for the play and where it kind of came from, so I’m throwing it below and hope that works as an answer.
“The play takes place late on a winter night in a small town in an old farmhouse from another era, peopled in the present and haunted by the past. A younger brother wakes up in the middle of the night to find his deceased older brother sitting in the dark in a corner of his bedroom. They spend the night sharing a conversation filled with old stories about their family and the people who populate their town. They are both haunted by the loss of their sister, and the recent sudden death of their father in a car crash. As they wait for the snow to start falling outside, an unraveling of memory and secrets begins that will hopefully lead to the beginning of a life for one and a release into death for the other.”
I think I’ve always been greatly influenced by my relationship with my brothers and sisters, and by the places we traveled to and grew up in as kids. I spent a lot of my life living in small towns all across the country, and have always been extremely interested in what goes on behind closed doors in the old, rundown houses that are scattered throughout America. This play is especially influenced by the time I spent in and around Sonora, California, and by the people who came in and out of our lives and the scene we were forced to be a part of growing up when we lived there. A lot of this play is fiction, some is closer to fact, but it all comes from the endless storytelling that we were privy to on the beds of rivers, on the rocky edges of lakes, walking to and from Crystal Falls, driving all over Tuolumne County, and at countless barbeques and bonfires held in our backyards. We would always laugh, even though they often played out like ghost stories—mostly about other people’s misfortunes, bizarre coincidences, and the many deaths that occurred while we lived there.
Why did you decide to make What Happened When a short play instead of a full-length? Was that a conscious choice on your part or divine happenstance?
I don’t remember if I thought a lot about the length or not. I think I just really wanted to make sure that it was going to be long enough to be able to have breath and silence and not make it easy on either of the brothers, not let them off the hook, and at the same time make it compact enough that the pressure really stayed on both of them and that there was a tight, almost claustrophobic, amount of time that they had to work through the problem at hand in the best way they could. I wanted it to feel like it could be a dream or an endless night, that the older brother could be stuck in the chair forever while at the same time hopefully always having a sense of running out of time—that their encounter is finite and could end at any moment. I think time is a really important part of the play.
You're quite a renaissance man: actor, writer, director, and artistic director. At this point in your career, do you prefer one over the rest?
No, they’re all very equally important to me, but I’m definitely first and foremost an actor and artistic director.
What led you to multi-artistic vocations in the first place, and what do you enjoy about all of them?
I know this is probably going to sound really dorky, but I just really love theatre and love every aspect of it; I want to try to be able to work in as many areas and be involved with it in as many different ways as I can. I also find that the more things I do in theatre the more it opens me up in the other parts of my life as a theatre artist. Like I think being a director has made me a much better actor, and vice versa, and being an artistic director has hopefully made me start to look at what’s going on in the theatre right now in a much larger and less singular, selfish way.
Give us a little background on Rising Phoenix Repertory and how the company first started.
I started RPR the summer after my first year at Juilliard. It had always been something I’d wanted to do, and actually had spent a lot of time as a kid talking about it with Julie Kline, who grew up with me in the Bay Area and who now helps run RPR along with a bunch of other folks. My thought was that if I did it while I was in school I could almost think of it as having three years to workshop the company where there wouldn’t be as much pressure and I could start to learn about it all while I was also training as an actor and begin to figure out how to try to do both at the same time. Julie and I and my wife Addie all grew up in the Bay Area and were really inspired by companies like Berkeley Rep, The Magic Theatre, A.C.T., Encore Theatre, and Shotgun Players to name a few. The Bay Area has such a wonderful, tight knit community of theatre artists who really get together and do work for work’s sake. I’d always been inspired by the whole storefront, grassroots, new play small theatre idea—the whole “great reckonings in little rooms” thing. It had been a dream of mine to start a company with people I really respect and love and admire, and get to do work together and have that be the focus. Our whole thing in the last few years has been doing the highest quality work we can for as little money as possible.
Your wife, Addie Johnson, is also involved with Rising Phoenix. How does that work with the two of you working together?
Well, I think it works pretty well (at least I hope it does). She’s one of the heads of the company and I’m sure she wants to kill me half the time, especially because she’s got to go home with me at the end of the night and listen to all my crazy crap on the subway and I’m kind of an insane workaholic. But we both have a lot of respect for each other and realize that for us making a life in the theatre as well as being a tight family is one in the same and takes a lot of love and hard work and is completely essential for both of us.
Two other Rising Phoenix plays - Crystal Skillman's The Telling Trilogy and Daniel Reitz's Fall Forward - are being published in this year's anthology as well. How does it feel to be published alongside your colleagues?
It’s the coolest thing in the world to me. I love Crystal and Daniel so much both as friends and artists and can’t even begin to say how lucky I feel to be included with those two, as well as with all the other folks in the book.
Interview with Daniel Talbott was conducted by Michael Criscuolo January 2008.