Filial Piety :: Andrew Joseph Clarke and Stephen Pick Talk BTP's Premiere of 'Faithless'

A long-fractured family comes together at a time of crisis. What better analogy to our own current situation as a deeply polarized and divided nation? And what better time than the holiday season for a new play that explores themes of estrangement and deep ties?

With their mother in her last hours, estranged siblings gather in a hospital waiting room, knowing that their family is about to endure the agony of loss. But will they also be able to build bridges that sooth past resentments and salve their common bereavement? The premise is dramatically enticing, and the cast -- Maureen Keiller, Abby Knipp, Greg Maraio, and Christine Power -- are enough to make the heart skip beat or two.

"Faithless" is the title of Andrew Joseph Clarke's new play, which is being premiered at the Boston Playwrights' Theatre (which describes itself as "the professional wing of our Graduate Playwriting Program at Boston University") as part of BPT's 35th season. Clarke is currently completing his MFA at Boston University; "Faithless" is his thesis, and is billed as being "A BU New Play Initiative production, produced by Boston Playwrights' Theatre and the College of Fine Arts School of Theatre."

The play is slated to run December 8 - 18, and is directed by Stephen Pick, who, like Clarke, is working on his MFA at BU. Though he's a veteran director, "Faithless" marks Pick's first show with the Boston Playwrights' Theatre. Pick is also associated with BU's College of Fine Arts.

EDGE had a chance recently to speak with Clarke and Pick and hear about the play, and its context in the times.

EDGE: Stephen, you came to Boston from Portland, Oregon, to pursue your MFA in directing at BU. How to the two cities contrast and compare when it comes to their respective theater communities, traditions, and audiences?

Stephen Pick: Portland is a smaller community, but it's on the underrated theater community list. There are a couple of companies in town doing really, really good work; a lot of small scrappy companies in addition to some of the mid-sized to large ones.

I've found Boston to be quite similar in that there are a lot of bigger companies that are doing quite a bit, and then you find smaller, more flexible companies popping up around town as well. Overall, I feel there may be more large and mid-sized companies here than there are back in Portland, but the environment feels comparable.

EDGE: Andrew, what about you? Are you a Boston native?

Andrew Joseph Clarke: Yes -- I was born in Cambridge, went to New York for school and the year after, and moved back home for BU, and currently live in Arlington. There are actually a lot of references to specific places in Arlington sprinkled into the script, but if you read it without context you would not necessarily know it was that specific Boston suburb.

EDGE: You share a connection through Boston University. Stephen, did that institutional connection play a role in your being tapped to direct the play?

Stephen Pick: Yeah, actually, there is. My program advisor has been working with Boston Playwrights theater and Andy's advisors over the last couple of years to strengthen the connection between the programs, and I believe that just in the last couple of years they've been starting to have the MFA directors work on thesis productions of the MFA playwrights. That's an ongoing relationship that's still in development.

EDGE: Stephen, are you and Andrew collaborating much on bringing his story to life on the stage? Do you have much input on his rewrites, if any, or does he have much input into your directorial choices?

Stephen Pick: Yes, its very collaborative. It kind of goes both ways. The way that we've looked at it is, you take the script and you put it in the table in front of everybody and we're all working on it together -- actors, director, playwright -- so that it's not a personal thing when an actors says, "This doesn't really sound like my character," or "This moment doesn't quite feel right." It's not a personal affront to Andy that he has to defend, but rather a question directed at making the work the best that it can be. And he's really good about going, "Gosh, you're right; this is what I was trying to do with that moment; obviously it's not working," and that's where I kind of come in and offer, "What if we staged it in this way, would that work?" If it works, great; if it doesn't work, then we know we need to maybe go back to the writing and see if adjusting something there would help clarify the issue.

Andy and I have been working on this together since May, actually; we did some workshops on the drafts at the end of the spring semester and then carried that over into the summer. Now, having the actors on board, their feedback has become really important for Andy's writing, as well as [my work as director].

EDGE: Andrew, from your side of things how does this collaborative process work?

Andrew Joseph Clarke: I've been realizing more and more lately that this is one of my few plays with both feet firmly planted in reality -- as such, realizing when things don't make sense to the actor and might not make sense to the audience really is something to address, because I am used to working in more bizarre worlds, and characters who are not exactly supposed to sound real.

This play is largely about people almost twice my age. There is a ten-year difference between me and the next oldest and youngest characters. Having smart actors -- and these are very smart actors -- has been vital to knowing exactly where and when it's too obvious I'm "writing," as opposed to just letting the characters speak. Most of the actors have been doing readings for the script long before rehearsals started, and Stephen has been working on it since last spring -- so if something does not sound right to them, I know there's something there to question.

Really, what you do when you're working with other people is remove ego from feedback -- you can't be proud of a good note because you still have to be critical to see if the line works, and you can't be hurt by a bad note, because everybody is working on the same goal -- making the work as good as it can be for an audience.

The fun part of collaboration is that it's no longer writing a play to keep on your laptop forever, but doing work to make a specific performance, a specific production better -- and that means worrying less about your play and more about the performance. Going along we've all developed a good back-and-forth and vocabulary for how to know when something works, and the first thing I always look for is what the actual problem is -- sometimes if a line or a moment or a scene seems off, it's just the writing that's not there in that moment, and other times the solve is actually 20 pages earlier, and sometimes we just try it a few different ways to learn more about the moment. In all, it has been a very collaborative and wonderful process.

EDGE: I think your cast is terrifically exciting! What's it been like to work with them?

Stephen Pick: They're great! They're a wonderful group of people and they definitely know their stuff. I think all of them have had experience with new play development in the past, which is kind of a unique skill set for an actor. In addition to all the normal things they have to think about, they also have to have a good sense of dramatic structure in order to provide that valuable feedback. We're talking a lot of character arc and what each moment does -- does it set us up for the next moment? Do these ten lines kind of kill the energy before we have to get to this next important moment? So they've been an extremely valuable asset. On a personal level, they're been really great to work with every night for hours and hours. They've been a joy.

EDGE: Andrew, how does it feel to see the cast bringing your characters to life? Do they surprise you?

Andrew Joseph Clarke: Characters develop in the writing process, and since starting to work with these actors, knowing their style and their capabilities, I've been able to adapt the characters as written a little bit to the actors -- sometimes that means cutting down the language to get out of the actor's way, because they can achieve the intention with fewer words, or can get there with just silence.

And at the same time, there are things so specific to these people, these individual characters that are unchanged through many different drafts, and it's amazing to see other people who just understand it. That's what a performance is, really, is a group of people expressing themselves towards an audience -- and seeing people who understand what I'm saying in my text and really make it sing has been a very exciting and surprising process. Surprising, I suppose, because you never know what only makes sense to you and what is universal until you expose those thoughts.

EDGE: Andrew, this is of course a tiresome question, but naturally what people wonder about any text is how autobiographical it might be. Do you care to address that here?

Andrew Joseph Clarke: I actually love fielding this question. I write a lot of plays about broken families, but talk to my parents almost every day about almost everything going on in my life. These characters are all voices I know and understand, and putting them in Greater Boston setting means I really understand their world -- additionally, I grew up Catholic, and lifted minor details from reality here and there -- but none of the plot and none of the major character conflicts are based on anything actually autobiographical. These are just the voices I hear and characters who make sense to me.

Honestly, a lot of it's about people being able to understand and accept each other -- or not able -- because everyone's right and everyone's wrong, and that's the heart of conflict. And what I like about these characters, the reason these are flawed people, is because they don't have that innate ability to just know themselves perfectly or articulate their feelings directly all the time, which is both very human and very personal for me.

So, in an indirect and distant way, the autobiography in the piece comes from my concern about people never being able to fully understand one another, and just having to do their best.

EDGE: It's always such a treat to interview someone about a brand new play, when you only have the description from the press release to go on! Stephen, what can you say about the play as its director?

Stephen Pick: It's a family drama. The family dynamics that are interpersonal but also group-wide -- you've got these four different characters and these different relationships and combinations of people, and working through them it's a high-stakes environment. They're in a hospital room, so it's not an everyday kind of interaction but rather, literally, life and death circumstances. That brings out the best and the worst in people, especially in families with complex histories. We've been able to mine all that history; the play just dredges all that up, and it can be really powerful and poignant, and also quite funny as well. It does a good job balancing all that.

EDGE: One thing that the press release's short description talks about is that the family has a black sheep named Skip who joins the family to deal with this crisis. What makes him a black sheep?

Stephen Pick: Without giving too much away, he was estranged from the family at a young age and left home. Then, coming back into the family because of his love for his mom, the siblings have a lot of past to work through. Who did he really abandon when he took off? Was it his father? Was it his siblings? How are they going to move forward? Can they can move forward?

Andrew Joseph Clarke: I would add that Skip is what makes the play what it is, instead of just being about what happens with their mother, because his re-introduction to the family introduces the question of whether or not they really are or can be a family after their mother is gone. That is a more interesting question to me. What is a family, what are they to each other when this is all over, how much can they forgive, and do they even really need each other.

EDGE: I think it's interesting timing that this play is premiering during the holiday season, which for many families is a time of perennial tensions. Is that coloring this production?

Stephen Pick: It's interesting you ask that because we all just came back from Thanksgiving holidays and had a conversation at rehearsal last night where we're working on a scene and one of the actresses says, "If this were me and my brother, there's no way that I would want to reconcile with him -- unless these given circumstances were true." She was able to bring experiences with her family [to her work on the play]. I think all of us have been able to do that -- say, "Oh yes, this makes sense," or, "No, that doesn't make sense, because why would I want to reconnect with my brother when there's so much history?" I think all the personal experiences of the people involved have definitely made our work more true to life. I don't know whether the scheduling was intentional or not, thematically for the holidays, but its a great fit.

Andrew Joseph Clarke: Realizing my slot in the season, I definitely threw in some Christmas references.

The scheduling wasn't intentional, and I kind of always pictured it taking place around early winter, and seeing the show going up in December, just weeks before most of the audience travels somewhere to spend a holiday or two with family gave me a bit of an opportunity to drive it home a little more -- I definitely appreciate the timing.

The play has also been about growing up Catholic and what that means for these characters in their adulthood - so while we spend very little (no) time pondering the true meaning of Christmas, the themes of family and religion being so closely tied together are certainly aided by the timing of the production.

I'd also like to note that this show is not happening on Christmas Day, but is certainly based in December, which again is a nice supplement to what is already there. I wrote the show to adhere to the Aristotelian unities, so it's all one room, all one scene, and happily, also the same time of year in reality as it is in the show.

EDGE: Andrew, this sort of family drama can't be easy to write -- you have to conceptualize the conflicts and motivations and interactions of four people and make close observations about how they bounce off one another. How did you go about creating these dynamics?

Andrew Joseph Clarke: Honestly, the process starts in archetypes and then they become characters with rewrites. If you start with each person's basic stakes and basic point, then you can very easily write a rough draft of these four very different people, saying all the same things for 90 minutes. What comes next is refining and rewriting and redefining each character -- so now, I hope, they sound like people. They sound complex, they have specific flaws and opinions and relationships to one another. So the process works by establishing the scaffolding and then discovering more bit by bit.

EDGE: Stephen, from your standpoint as director, it seems like this would be a very ambitious kind of play to put on, especially given that it's written by such a young playwright. What are the challenges for you, bringing this story to the stage?

Stephen Pick: I think [Andrew] could speak better to that from a writing standpoint, but from where I'm at, it feels timely and also universal. People are people through the generations, no matter what age they are. I know a lot of adults -- older adults that still act and relate in a childish way in given circumstances, depending on their situations. This has been really interesting to see. I have a three-year-old daughter and some of the same behaviors that she has, I'm seeing in these fifty-year-old people in the play. When she doesn't get what she wants, she has certain reactions. She'll shut you out. Some of the same tactics for survival, you might say, are present in humans across every age, so that's been really interesting for me to bring into the work.

EDGE: Andrew, the title "Faithless" must refer to filial faith -- to the expectation that family members will stick by one another no matter what. But is there also a religious strain to the play?

Andrew Joseph Clarke: Oh certainly. If you can't think of a descriptive title, think of a short one. And the fewer words, the more connotations available. The title is definitely meant to refer to both faith and to abandonment, in the contexts of both family and religion.

EDGE: Are you sketching out ideas for new plays, or maybe even working on drafts of works to come?

Andrew Joseph Clarke: I've been itching for fiction. I'm going to try to write a few short stories this winter and see where that goes -- most likely my backup hard drive to be forgotten, but who knows, it'll be fun to get back to it for a bit.

As for theatre, I took the approach of only writing first drafts throughout my MFA, except of course this play which is my thesis and has been in development for a year. As such, I have several complete first drafts of plays I could always go back to, and a couple I actually want to go back to. There's a one-man-show I very much enjoyed writing that I think I could get back into, and there's a reconstruction of an older play I worked on a little first year, and a smattering of other plays I thought might be good to come back to.

Lately, however, I've lessened the load on side-projects to focus on Faithless. So in two months I'll have a more specific answer to what comes next, but for now it's just vague plans and thoughts.

"Faithless" runs December 8 - 18 at the Boston Playwrights' Theatre, 949 Commonwealth Ave. in Boston. For tickets and more information, please go to http://www.bu.edu/bpt