Tom
So, are you finding certain aspects of the show, maybe certain initial ideas you had about how you saw the show that are going to be difficult to see through?

Nic
Nope.

Tom
Are there any challenging visual or set aspects to this that still waiting to be resolved.

Nic
Absolutely.  And when I said no to your first question it’s only because I didn’t have a whole hell of a lot of preconceived ideas.

Julie
But yet you were harassing the design staff.

Nic
Yes, because I was trying to provoke them into starting to circulate some ideas.

Julie
Okay

Nic
There are certain plays that you’re dragged to because of the subject matter – there are certain plays that I can see, when you think about doing, you can see it in your head.  I could see Measure for Measure, I could see almost every scene of it, I could see it for years.  I was compelled to do that play.  When it came to doing Green Bird it was more about “This would be an amazing thing to build with this group of people who I know and love.”  You know, so there are a couple of ideas and I’m really heady and I’m also kind of paranoid about feeling unprepared so I do an inappropriately dorky amount of analysis work at the beginning of the play.  And that’s what I was harassing all of the designers about.

Julie
Did you know whom you wanted to work with as far as the design team?

Nic
I got set up with a lot of them.

Julie
And how early on did this whole process start.  When did you start working on this.

Nic
When did I start getting it set up?  We had our first design meeting…

Tom
December, I think.  Or, no, even earlier, you’re right, it was around the end of Ivona.  So it was probably at the end of October.

Nic
Yeah, middle of November, top of October.   By then I had everything put together I had come back into town sometime in the late summer to do ensemble auditions and figure out all of that stuff – or sometime in the fall, I can’t remember exactly.  But I got introduced to Debbie Baer who is doing the costumes.  Jenny Avery did a lot of work introducing me to people.  Sarah Gubbins who has become my new want-to-talk-with-her-about-whatever-I’m-working-on-forever person.  She’s so brilliant.  The way her mind filters this stuff, is incredibly insightful

Tom
Sarah Gubbins, who actually wrote a transition scene…

Nic
Not as much a transition scene as it is an actual complete stand-on-its-own-two-feet scene.  But yes, we actually rehearsed the second iteration of it tonight – she dropped off a second version of it.  Yeah, like I said, we’re having at – you know, like I said we owe the most to the production and that story line was built in a little bit lop-sided.

Tom
Early on you asked the cast to read The Empty Space by Peter Brook.  Was there something particular in The Empty Space that lent itself to thinking about this show?

Nic
Yes.

Tom
And that would be...

Nic
I’m not going to tell you because then, seriously, you’re going to tell this other guy and he’s going to tell everyone, and then everyone’s going to be using this book.

Tom
I just want to know who did it.

Nic
Ohhhh – um, yeah, it was kind of in the same spirit as some of the workshop stuff – it’s as close to a bible of important theatre tenants as I’ve ever found, and the first time I read it, ironically enough, was when I was interning at Berkeley Rep.

The book identifies four kinds of theatre: Holy, Immediate, Rough and Deadly – there’s hunks of this play that should epitomize each of those different kinds of theatre.  There’s tons of Rough Theatre, it’s a Commedia-based piece, but there’s also this really tragic arc, which takes it into the Holy realm.  There’s a kind of contemporary/post-modern thread to it as well, which brings it into the Immediate realm.  And what I want to be able to do eventually is qualify with the cast exactly, okay, this is the style moment that I think this is, and being able to chart them through.  Like I said, I’m so much of a dork that I’ve done scene-by-scene intensity charts, labeling what kind of theatre I think each scene epitomizes.  And try to figure out a through line and build a rhythm for it.

Tom
And you identified certain scenes as being Deadly Theatre?

Nic
Unfortunately, I did.

Tom
Which is not something you want.

Julie
Explain to our website readers what Deadly Theatre is.

Nic
Oh, Christ, you gotta read the book.

Tom
Yeah, but of the four types of theatre he talks about the one type, Deadly Theatre, is something not to be striven for [Editor’s Note: use of the term “striven for” indicates early stage inebriation], it’s a failed theatre.

Nic
Actually, its… I guess at the end of the day that’s his subtext about it but he does raise a couple of important ideas about popular theatre in that section of the book as well, which he also mentions during rough.  But, I mean, if nothing else, it did help me identify which scenes – here, at this point in the interview Nic Dimond actually pulls out a scrawled-on mad scientist graph.

[Nic Dimond did indeed produce a scrawled-on mad scientist graph and showed it to us]

Tom
What is the Y-axis on this?

Nic
Tension, my man, tension.  And, if you notice: a couple of these scenes in the middle fall squarely into the not very interesting.  They happen right before the denouement scenes.

Julie
What kind of workshops did you have the actors participate in to prepare them for their roles in this play?

Nic
I wasn’t trying to prepare them for their roles in this play; I was trying to prepare them for the performance style.

All of the work we did in the workshops was not show-specific, there was a lot of movement-based stuff, there was some puppetry stuff, there was some music stuff, all kinds of miscellaneous type things.  Just increase people’s ideas about the width and breadth of what I was thinking about and also to build some kind of vocabulary to walk into the rehearsal process with.

But, mostly, just to have this group of people around each other and [get] used to doing stupid shit around each other [so that] by the time it gets time to rehearse they feel safe.  I’ve already done inane and idiotic things around these people; it doesn’t matter if I really take risks during the actual context of the scene.  It just makes it a little easier, I think.

Julie
The non-ensemble people: were they familiar to you or were they completely new to you?  And, in which case, what was the process that went behind getting them in.

Nic
After we did the ensemble auditions we figured out what roles we didn’t have cast and then I spent time talking with Mike Dailey and Jen Avery and setting up auditions with outside people. 

Shannon [Hoag] I didn’t know at all.  I met her once and I knew that she went to my alma mater, she’s a Fightin’ Titan from Illinois Wesleyan University.  Represent.  And I really liked the look of her.  One of the main ideas that I had about the play was some of the stuff that was happening between Renzo and Pompea: the idea of this woman transforming herself from an object, purely an object of desire, to all of a sudden growing into a significant love relationship.  It happens for real.  He starts out completely objectifying her and then, through her directness and simplicity and her beauty, he completely falls in love with her for real, as a person.

But I had this image of what the character needed to be like, and when I met her she fit the bill.  A really, really beautiful girl.  I called our old college professor that we have in common, Ficca [Dr. John Ficca, who wrote Friday in America] as a matter of fact, and I said hey, what’s up with this girl, is she worth checking out?  And he said, absolutely, so I called her in for the audition and was really pleased to find out that she seems to be quite a fine young actress as well.

Cherise [Silvestri], I’d seen her do a couple things and during outside auditions she actually made me cry during her scenes as Ninetta when she was stuck under the sink.

[at this point the tape ends abuptly]

Tom
Is that the other side?  I didn’t know these things had a second side.  These machines frighten me.

Julie
There’s an A and a B side, so…

Tom
Well, we lost a couple minutes there, but –

Nic
I talked nice about all the rest of the people who weren’t in the ensemble, and I mentioned –

Tom
Like Kat.

Julie
And Gregor [Mortis].

Nic
I mentioned Gregor several times.

Tom
Wanted to make sure Gregor’s name was mentioned.

Yeah, and Oona [Kersey]’s good too.

Tom
Yes.

Something about the Def Star [the band from Howard Bowl and Ball of Justice which featured Green Bird Guitar Ninja Aaron Shelton].

Tom
And Dan Stuckey [AKA Green Bird Ninja Gary Price].