Have I expressed how much I absolutely love working with collaborators? Directors and writers who invite actors to the table with mutual respect for the other's craft, skill and point of view. Collaborators who aren't threatened by but welcome a dialogue, at times robust, but never brusque, and always enlightening in a mutual discovery of new material? It takes a very special and confident director and playwright to welcome others to the table and I believe it makes for a richer, deeper and more expansive, meaningful end result.  

Today our director GT, writer Jen Silverman, dramaturg Sarah Lunnie, fellow actor Michael Braun and I sat around the table and dug into the meat of the play. As I've exposited before, the play is about the struggle of two brothers in the fringes of society who are caught in a tussle between the past and the future, of power dynamics, entitlement culture and the role of the minority. At one point, in trying to articulate a particularly confounding moment in the play, GT shared a 

What an amazing day of creative energy. A brown bag discussion of the plays being featured this week saw artists begin to share with us their backgrounds, inspiration, points of view and how they arrived where they did to create the works they are about to present. What struck me most about the panel of accomplished artists (from L, Aaron Malkin, literary assoc NYTW, Dael Orlandersmith, Neel Keller, GT Upchurch, Jen Silverman, Lola Pashalinski, David Zurak) was how everyone had come to the theatre perhaps purely by chance or happenstance, how everyone brought their own personal unique points of view to their craft, to mine and get at some truth about their lives, their journeys. At one point, the artists were asked to describe their journeys to their material. I don't know about you all, but I personally find it hard to talk about myself. It always seems somewhat narcissistic without the proper context, but even more so, it seems like a near impossible task. Lives are messy and complex and hard to name; to try to tell people who you are or how you arrived at where you are today is, without being too precious about it, ultimately reductive.  It can paradoxically, also be very ...

I've certainly been on studio sets, and indoor sets and even location sets. While on Delocated, we shot in an abandoned garage out at Red Hook, and on a particularly chilly day, even on a pier overlooking the Statue of Liberty. But I have to say I have never shot in a high security location like, oh, JFK for instance, and at a Terminal that, for all intents and purposes was still being used actively as, well, a place where international travelers DID board planes. So it was I found myself driven to a dirt road parking lot right behind said Terminal, temporarily housed in my honeywagon and costume fitted  before being ushered, passport in hand, to security where I was issued an actual Boarding Pass. Then it was getting in line at security checkpoints like the rest of the passengers, wands, metal detectors and all, and a good hour later before we finally made it past the duty free stores to our "set" - the Gate to our fictional flight to 

Beijing. Here, we were to enact a scene in which a mainland Chinese student refuses to board the plane back home while the teacher (yours truly) chides her for causing a commotion. Well, since a commotion happens, we find ourselves, over the next four hours, literally creating a scene at the airport. Besides the twenty something extras (some of whom, I have to admit, were characters themselves. One seemed to spend the larger part of the shoot being confused about why he wasn't being asked to speak while another seemed concerned about the American doctor struck with Ebola flying through JFK that morning.), we found crowds of visitors and passengers begin to gather. The costume department did such a wonderful job that it was hard to tell who were in fact background, and who were real security personnel. If it weren't for the "DC Security" badge they were sporting, I might've been worried about being hauled off by real airport security.  The props guys were meticulous- I was even issued a Chinese Passport! 

Oh, and did I mention that the episode was being directed by Eric Stoltz?