What brought you to Cotton Patch Gospel? Why this show?
I’m not from the South, I quite honestly don’t know where my affinity for this material actually comes from, except that my grandmother was very much in the old time gospel tradition. I remember as a very little girl going to the Assemblies of God church with her, and honest to God this church was built out of logs; it looked like a log cabin. That whole revivalist feeling around religion and very simple storytelling was what she was attracted to and what she made sure I was exposed to. So, from the time I was a little girl, there was this attraction or this affinity for this style of storytelling and this style of preaching. There’s something about the simplicity of it; there’s something about the music, the bluegrass feel and the fact that Harry Chapin wrote it. He was somebody that I was very keen on when I was in college. Just basically the whole package was very exciting to me, and I’m very glad they asked me to do it.
This show is about the life of Jesus who is, of course, a major figure in Christianity. How do you feel this show speaks to Christians and how does it speak to non-Christians?
The story of Jesus, is one of the great stories that we have, regardless of where you are on the faith perspective. It’s always interesting to me to see the various ways in which it gets told. You have the big three theatrical tellings of it, from Jesus Christ Superstar to this show to Godspell. Those are all very different presentations of essentially the same story. The thing that strikes me about this particular telling is that what you’ve got is the message of Jesus distilled down to its very essence, which is essentially do unto others. At the end of the day, what they want you to do is treat everybody the way you want to be treated, and that’s what they present to you as the message.
You’ve directed Superstar, how does your approach to this show differ from how you directed that, despite both telling the story of Jesus?
Superstar has by intention a much harder edge to it. You know, the rock opera format is designed to drive things in a certain way. This is very much told in the way that we all told stories when we were kids: I be the bad guy and you be the good guy. And that’s all the instruction that you need and that’s all the context that you need in order to just branch off and spin a fantasy for yourself. The way that this is put together, Edward plays Matthew who is the narrator and one of the disciples. All he has to do is play the most basic of contexts for us and we instantly know where we are. There are no props in this show; there are no set changes. The spectacle is that of the inside of a barn and a Chautauqua meeting. It’s a fundamental storytelling style that we all grew up with and are so familiar with.
How has it been working with Edward? What’s it like to direct a one man show for much of the piece.
I worked with Edward one other time. He was wonderful, and ever since that time we’ve been in communication back and forth saying we need to find a time and a way to work together again. It all just sort of fell into place. He’s perfect for it. He understands this method of storytelling. He understands how this music works on a whole different level. He’s very generous with his emotional self in the telling of the story, generous to his fellow actors and generous with the audience. It’s been an interesting and lovely experience working with him. It’s a fascinating process to have just the two of you in a room trying to solve the problems of the text and make sure you’re telling it in as engaging and as theatrical a way as you possibly can. It’s fun.
Then there’s the trio, where did they come from and what do they give the show?
It’s really interesting, because the music is written to be sung by the band, which in the original production was four guys. That’s one of the interesting things about this piece; the authors recognized that you can take this basic structure and do a lot of different things with it. In all the notes that they send along with the piece they say “you’re probably not going to find what we created this piece with,” meaning one actor and these band members “so make it work for you.” When we had the auditions, it became clear that the three women we have were the best musicians to tell this part of the story. So instead of a four man quartet we have a three woman trio singing this. Rona Siddiqui, our music director who is also one of the singers, had to take the music and restructure the harmonies in such a way that they fell more naturally into the women’s range. She’s just done an amazing job, not only in recrafting all of that, but then creating that specific sound that the trio has. The sound that the women have is tight, rich and exactly right. It’s just thrilling. It is a whole new way of looking at the material.
You do have a bluegrass band as well, yes?
Oh my God, the band! Well if this doesn’t knock people’s socks off then I’ll throw in with you. The one thing that I knew from experience about bluegrass musicians is that they are a rare breed, a specific type of musician, and if they are any good, they are very good at what they do. One of those things you know to look for if you’ve done enough musicals is when the singers know that the band has got their backs and the band knows that the singers are worth it. It’s this incredibly magical thing that happens amongst disparate musicians when they become a unit. They become a whole sound of voices and instruments together, and I’m watching that happen in rehearsal. You can’t not dance a little in your seat when you hear this music, and you can’t help but be moved at the simplicity and genuine honesty of the lyrics.
As a director there’s always that moment when something’s working and you have some sort of infallible physical signal that happens to you. You know, when the hair stands up on the back of your neck, that kind of thing. It takes a lot for that to happen to me. The moment when Herod orders the henchmen to find baby Jesus and kill him, the massacre of the innocents for those of you that are following along in your hymnals, is heart-breaking. They end up killing all the babies under the age of two, and in this version they toss a bomb into a church nursery. Of course Jesus isn’t there, but it kills 14 babies and toddlers, which harks back to what happened in the South in the civil rights struggle. Erica Richardson, who is this glorious-voiced African American actress, is singing the role of the mother in that particular number. It doesn’t take a lot of imagination to see how far we have and haven’t come.
Anything else give you that sensation?
It happens several times, and I won’t tell you where they all are, but if I’m dancing in my seat that’s a pretty good sign. Katie Kimball, the other trio member, has the most open face. She understands the joy of the music in a way that is completely unclouded by any kind of guile or bravado or need to protect. She is just completely available to the emotional content of the piece and in the music that she is singing. When she and the rest of the trio started to sing “Going to
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