Action/Adventure in Just Out Magazine
October 2007
Gender Bending? Try Genre Bending
Here is Timothy Krause's full interview with The Fall of the House director/creator Tamara Carroll and company member Miranda King, who is the guest director for the Halloween special.
Timothy Krause: How did you guys come up with this live serial soap-opera format?
Tamara Carroll: The initial idea to serialize this particular story had been swimming around in my brain for years, actually. I had started to write a play based on a house where a group of my friends from college were living together. Of course, because I was still living it while I was trying to write it, the "end point" kept getting moved to include more and more of the unfolding story, so I came up with the idea of doing it in four parts. When Vivien Lyon (my co-director from last season) and I decided we wanted to work on a project together, we had a primary objective of creating something that would give the audience a sense of involvement and immediacy. We considered a number of ideas that involved varying degrees of improvisation, because that always seems to infuse a live theater experience with a great energy of anticipation, and because it gives the actors such an opportunity to do what they do best: develop a character and let that character guide them through whatever may come up. Vivien and I share an obsession with the relatively new culture of one-hour HBO/Showtime series (Queer as Folk, Sopranos, Deadwood, etc.) because the format allows much deeper character and plot development than a half-hour prime-time show peppered with commercials. We both got very excited about the idea of creating something like that, a universe that people could become submerged in, characters and stories that an audience would become invested in.
Ultimately, I think we really managed to achieve both the feeling of immediacy that the improvised dialogue created, and characters that were real and likable. By keeping all of the action restricted to a single location, a living room, you limit the kind of activity and the kind of drama the characters can be involved in, and this is something we continue to struggle with. We worked very hard to find interesting storylines for the various characters, but ultimately you end up with, by necessity, a very "living room" drama. I don't want these characters' lives to be limited to the people they're fighting or sleeping with, and I don't want them to be reduced to partying laze-abouts, so this season we're continuing our quest to show a larger spectrum of these characters' lives. Last season we kept a pretty tight rein on the ordered progression of each scene, trying to make sure that dialogue was efficient and tight, as well as off the cuff. This season we're allowing a little more room for play, relying on the actors' instincts to take the scenes where they need to go. The biggest surprise from last season, I think, was that the palpable presence of improvisation was what counted for most of the audience's enjoyment. The fact that the scenes are improvised was more out of necessity than anything else to begin with, because we couldn't write, rehearse and memorize four hours of actual script, but this season we're letting it do a lot more of the work, which is greatly helped by the fact that we've absorbed a number of top-notch improv artists into our fold.
I would also like to mention that, like the best of genre shows do, we are starting to attempt to play with genre and convention. Things like being explicitly self-referential, having a "very special Halloween episode" and an attempted audience sing-along, because there just aren't enough of those.
TK: How does the creation process work? How does the performance work? How much changes from night to night?
TC: The creation process works in two parts: ensemble-building and story-building. Last season when we cast we had a pretty specific story and a definite idea of the characters we were looking to cast. This season is completely different. We cast a handful of people that just really impressed us in auditions, and then tried to figure out ways they could be worked in to the existing story. We start throwing the actors into possible situations that might arise in a house and letting them make character decisions with pretty much nothing to go on. We say, "We don't know what we're looking for, so show us anything!" and, again, actors do what they do best and they find reasons to be there, they create conflict, and as a director I just latch on to what was compelling and intriguing and little by little piece together a story. Themes emerge, parallels between multiple characters or storylines emerge, and we start fine-tuning the characters to make the most compelling and dramatic choice for the scene. It can become complicated pretty quickly when you put so much in the hands of the actors. They have no script telling them what their character would do, so it becomes very much a matter of director and actor coming to an agreement about what works best for the scene, while not asking an actor to do something they feel to be unrealistic for the character they've created.
By the time we perform an episode--and believe me, sometimes it's barely in time to perform an episode--the actors have a scene-by-scene breakdown of who is in what scene, a brief description of what they're doing in the scene and usually some key information that needs to come out. Usually, through rehearsal, we've tried to identify some natural flow to the scene, such as "Olivia demands to borrow Julie's car, Julie refuses and Olivia gets hysterical and accuses her of sabotaging her relationship," etc., to keep the actors on track and to make sure all the necessary points get hit. While we want to maintain spontaneity, we also need to keep a level of consistency. Someone who comes on a Thursday and someone who comes on a Friday should both be able to go to the following episode and know what's going on. Even some of the dialogue has the potential to repeat from night to night, but dialogue is the most changeable of the elements. Of course, when dialogue changes, so can pacing, as well as how funny or dramatic a scene is. Sometimes an actor can fire off a real zinger to a completely unexpected line. Sometimes they can't, but I think it's equally enjoyable for the audience either way.
TK: What was the reaction to the first season of The Fall of the House?
TC: The reaction was incredible, completely beyond what we had hoped and for different reasons than we'd anticipated. The main feedback I got was that the improvisational element made the experience feel more honest and immediate than anything people had seen before in theater. I remember someone commented on Followspot [a local theater blog] that they felt compelled to boo or cheer the characters' decisions because they really felt as though they were watching the decision be made before their eyes. There were times we worried there was too much drama and not enough comedy, but no matter how serious the situation, there is always humor in watching how people react in real life, which can be inarticulate or inappropriate, and therefore feel very genuine and, well, funny. There was, to our great delight, much more laughter and vocal appreciation than we'd expected. The actors were frequently told that the characters and situations were very relatable. This is certainly the closest to seeing anything resembling my life on stage that I've ever encountered, and I think because we simply drew from our lives and experiences without any deliberate "message" to convey, we managed to create a very true and nuanced reflection of the life of a Portland 20-something. Art is supposed to mirror life, so I think it had a large appeal to a crowd who has never seen their lives portrayed on stage.
TK: For some reason, this feels very Portland--and not just because of the topical references, but the whole tone and style feel very Portland. Why is that, do you think?
TC: Well, probably the biggest reason is that the characters were developed by Portlanders and reflected a lot of Portland "types" that we all know. They all have college degrees that they aren't particularly using because, for the most part, everyone in the house has some sort of artistic ambition (Brian with his performance art, Nick with his filmmaking, Olivia as the aspiring actress) that they are attempting to pursue on their own terms, while they work various jobs to pay the rent. As a theater artist I'm intimately acquainted with just how many people work 40 hours a week at a coffee shop so that they can call themselves an actor. At any rate, I honestly don't know how it is in other cities, but there is certainly a whole culture in Portland of people who live with roommates into their late 20s and 30s because they aren't on a career path and the average age of marriage keeps going up, or because they just feel the value of living in an artistic community. And then, of course, we take a very matter-of-fact attitude about things we feel Portland is all about--a haven of liberalism, vegetarianism, environmentalism, casual dress, casual drug use and brunch.
TK: What storylines from Season One will continue?
TC: Well, one of our actors from last season, Steve Brian, who was playing the filmmaker, Nick, has moved to Chicago. So Nick has been given a plausible excuse for being gone. However, all the other members of the household are returning, and their stories pick right up. The season starts approximately three weeks after the close of the last season, so some new relationships and issues have had a chance to form. Sam has a girlfriend this season, after her terrible heartbreak with Luanne, the closet evangelical lesbian. When we start, this relationship is already a few weeks old, and Betsy (the girlfriend) is a fixture in the house. We get to show the opposite of the Luanne situation, with the focus on the relationship, instead of the sexuality. Betsy and Sam have a lot of development this season, and there is a continuation of Brian and Julie's friendship/relationship as well as Julie and Olivia's love/hate dynamic.