S2E10: Annapurna: Pull up a Chair for Table Work

Join us for a captivating behind-the-scenes glimpse into the rehearsal process of our latest production Annapurna by Sharr White. In this episode, Director Aaron White and Assistant Director Kimie Muroya invite you to sit at the table with them and the stellar cast-- Elizabeth Dowd (Emma) and Rand Whipple (Ulysses). Together, they engage in an in-depth "table work" session, dissecting their roles, discussing their personal connections to BTE, and uncovering the layers of meaning in this profound play.

Annapurna will run from May 23rd through June 9th. Don’t miss the opportunity to witness Elizabeth Dowd in her final mainstage appearance as a full-time company member, where she delivers a powerhouse performance in a role that explores resilience, the search for forgiveness, and the indomitable human spirit. Tickets are available at www.bte.org.

Recorded and Edited by: Amy Rene Byrne
Original Music by: Aaron White

Transcripts of all Season 2 and 3 episodes are available on our Buzzsprout website.

Check out our current season: http://www.bte.org
Ensemble Driven. Professional Theatre. Arts Education. Rural Pennsylvania. For Everyone. With Everyone.

Transcript

Bloomsburg Theatre Ensemble: Down Center
S2E10: Annapurna: Pull Up a Seat to Table Work

Aaron: Welcome to Bloomsburg theatre Ensemble Down Center, a podcast where we pull back the curtain on our company, our people, our art, and our town and put it all front and down center. My name is Aaron White. I am the director of our next show Annapurna by Sharr White, no relation. I'm also a resident actor here at BTE and I'm sitting with Elizabeth Dowd and Rand Whipple, and I'll let them introduce themselves and what the relationship is to the company and where they are in their careers. Cause that has some significance for this particular show.

Rand: Well, I'm Rand Whipple. I'm one of the founding members of the company and returning to perform in Annapurna with Elizabeth Dowd, who is my wife. So I play Ulysses, who is this cowboy poet who has ended up in a little bitty trailer in Paonia, Colorado, by himself, with a dog.

Elizabeth: So not really by himself.

Rand: No, with this dog, he's by himself. So, that's where I am.

Elizabeth: I'm Elizabeth Dowd, and I am not a founder, but I am one year shy. I was on the junior varsity team of founding BTE. So this is the conclusion of my 45th season at BTE. This is my last mainstage as a full time member. And Rand and I haven't worked together in a while, so this is notable. I do have Velveteen Rabbit ahead, so I have a nice, family summer show I'm looking forward to, but this is the last mainstage.

Uh, and I play Emma. She's an anti sentimentalist with a big heart. And she has a degree in writing. We don't know if she's a poet. But she has definitely got an advanced degree in English. And that language and editing are the world that she has pursued professionally until recent years in which that focus shifts to some comic result.

Aaron: Slightly less romantic. 

Elizabeth: Yes, more practical. And I work with Aaron White and Assistant Director Kimie Muroya a lot, and our audio and podcast engineer and wizard, Amy Rene Byrne, and we're all in the room and that's pretty special.

Aaron: Yes, it is. Yes, it is. I do want to throw the mic over to Kimie Muroya, who is our assistant director.

Kimie: I'm also here.

Aaron: So she'll be chiming in from time to time as we're having this conversation. So this is actually a new sort of format that we're going to try out today. We had our first read through of the play yesterday and we, uh, wanted to share sort of how we talk through the beginnings of a play.

We call it table work and that can be details about the play, things that maybe aren't necessarily written down in the script, but are referred to in the script. And we, chat about what things we might be curious about and what we'll be exploring over the next three weeks as we rehearse the play, just trying to identify what those things are.

But before we begin that, I want to just talk a little bit because we, picked a play as a vehicle for, a celebration of your 45 years, Elizabeth. I'm just curious, and this actually goes for both of you too, that these are, are two folks with life behind them in a lot of ways. The first time we see Ulysses, he's wearing an oxygen tank and it's very clear he's not at the peak of his health.

 And I just wonder what this play feels like in relationship to being your last mainstage show and returning after six years and not having played with your wife in a while, Rand-- 

Rand: Yeah-- 

Aaron: --as an acting partner. So if we can, yeah, just speak on that a little bit.

Elizabeth: I feel like if I focused on it being the last mainstage as a full- time, BTE employee, Resident Acting Company member, I couldn't get through it. I can't, so I can't focus on that. I just can't. I have let it in on occasions, but mostly, this is an important play, it's a great role, this is a wonderful opportunity.

And so I'm trying to just stay present in the moment and not play a destination. Cause that's going to be hard. It's hard to bring that along. But I'm eager for joy in the room

Aaron: Sure.

Elizabeth: I would like for this one to be joyful as well as hard work.

Rand: Yeah, there's so many things I love about the opportunity. One is to be able to be here with Elizabeth on her last mainstage show. To be able to stand there, take the curtain call, and watch her get her due. I don't know, just to see the response to people on her last mainstage is hugely important to me.

And then it's a great role. I perform constantly, but I don't do this type of play anymore, other than when I, you know, did Scrooge a few years ago. So the ability to have an arc of a character that goes the length of the play, and a phenomenal character as well. Is really something I'm looking forward to.

Even the type of character. He's kind of a Western cowboy. And I grew up in Texas. And when I first started my acting, not even professionally, but back at Northwestern, I came in with a dialect. It was a Southern dialect. I remember auditioning for Romeo and Juliet and going, Ah, but soft, what light yonder window breaks it-- I was a dancer.

Aaron: yeah-- 

Rand: I was a dancer. Yeah was a I had not a line in the play, but I had a great teacher. And I spent that year going, It's not light, it's light. It's not bike, it's bake. And so it's kind of nice to come back at the end of all this and just let the Texan out. So I'm looking forward to so many things about the show.

Aaron: How well the characters are written I think is certainly one of the things that attracted us to the play when we first read it. And having, uh, an older woman who's well drawn, I think is significant too.

Elizabeth: Oh yeah. Oh yeah. Absolutely. I really admire Sharr White's crafting of this piece. I think it's got such mountains to climb and valleys that you can drop into and then you climb a little higher and I just think it's very well crafted and that the characters are revealed. You know, as an actor, the words are what you have to invent from, and I feel like he's given us each a lot of things to imagine.

They invite imagining of a whole life, rather than just people in a moment. To me, that's really rich because so much of what I do anyway, is trying to imagine all that life that the audience doesn't see, but that fuels every decision that happens that they do see, and there's plenty to imagine.

I love that. I will sit there and just think, well, what was it like when this, well, what was it like with that? And I'll journal, and some of my happy, happy work is that imagining. I feel almost like a-- an assistant playwright, but none of those words get spoken.

Well yeah 

Aaron: Well, yeah cause there is so much alluded to that we don't delve into.

Rand: They're the conflicts within the play that we're playing off of one another, but there's also this life of a married couple. And so you have that rhythm to the scenes as well of, you know, where they connected, where they didn't, but the whole rhythm of conversations where you just get to a point and go, okay, I'm going to stop.

I'm not going to talk about that. I'm going somewhere else. And Sharr White's done a really wonderful job of creating that rhythm to the conversation that is that of a life lived with another person.

Aaron: And when you choose not to say the thing you actually want to say, 

Rand: Right, yeah? 

Aaron: That, that, that's real apparent to me. It's, that's actually one of the things I'm excited to discover where we-- cause seldom does he say, no, I'm not going to say that, right? Oftentimes it's couched in a, someone posing a question and then the other person taking it in the entirely different direction.

Elizabeth: Deflection 

Aaron: Deflection for sure. Yeah. So I think there are some other subtler ones as well that I'm excited to find when we don't say what we want to say for sure.

Elizabeth: I think too, that these are people, at least the script leads me to believe that this pair, they know each other to the bone in a way that other people in their lives don't know them and that's the thing that though they have been apart for more time than they were together There's something they understand about each other.

That is essential and I think that's a fascinating thing to play.. Cause I do think you have people who just know you, and it's not the amount of time that you've known them, they just know you.

Aaron: And lasting, right?

Elizabeth: Yeah, yeah, that it lasts, that, that, that time of course matters, but when you're back with that person, there is something so essential.

in the communication. And yeah, I can think of friends like that, you know, I just go, yeah, you just, you know, me in a way that nobody else knows me.

Aaron: I think that plays into the title. Here's where we could bump up against spoilers. And so we can be thoughtful about how we speak about it, but the title, right? Annapurna, has significance. It's actually a mountain in the Himalayas, right? 

Kimie: A massive part of the Himalayas. 

Elizabeth: I forgot my drum. 

Kimie: North central Nepal. It is the 10th highest mountain in the world and is well known for its difficulty and danger involved in the ascent.

Aaron: Gotcha. So it is in Nepal in the same mountain range as Mount Everest. Thank you, Dramaturg as well that on your credits. But there's an equation of the mountain range to the relationships that we have with people, and that the beauty and allure of that challenge or how quickly we know that person, right, or that tie we feel to that person cuts into us and is, is devastating, I think, to a certain degree I will say that one of the significant parts of these two people, you had mentioned words. That, uh, Ulysses is a, a poet, a published poet, and a well known poet, the character that Rand plays. And, that poets often examine something trying to find something essential about a thing. And trying to call out any extraneous things about a certain thing they might be describing. And then can also extrapolate it into metaphor or equate it to something other than what the object would be obviously attached to. And Annapurna certainly, I think is something that Ulysses uses as a jumping off point to describe experience.

Rand: Oh most certainly, yeah, the mountain plays huge in what his experience is, what the sort of drama of the play is, and the language is so great in the play. And that's one of the wonderful things about this, is that Sharr White has created two characters that are hugely different, their backgrounds are geographically different, their temperaments are different, but they do have that connection, and they banter, and what you describe as the tennis game of the scenes is fantastic to perform-- they just keep coming back and back and back and it's fun, it's witty, it can be devastating at times, it is honest, it is funny. 

Aaron: Mhm.

Elizabeth: Yeah, these are witty people and they know how to play off each other. They're worthy partners.

Rand: You can see where they met in language. Yeah, you really can.

Aaron: Yeah, there's a certain quality almost like a Noel Coward couple or Beatrice and Benedict, right? That they are evenly matched and what's part of the fun is seeing how they one up each other, right? So, along with the weight of a past and maybe hurt, it's a very funny play, I believe. And I'm excited to find that, for sure. That was the thing that I think I was attracted to first reading it, was how much fun it was to hear them banter back and forth, or to, in my mind, as I was reading it.

Rand: I loved too when you said it was like a tennis game, because one of the first things when we worked with Ms. Krause was she would have us play the scene as a tennis game. So that you get, instead of just saying your line at the end, there's follow through, there's bringing it back. And so it's kind of fun to come all these years to loop down and have the same metaphor used as to what's happening in a scene. 

Aaron: Whoohoo! That's fun.

Elizabeth: I also like the fact that there is a mystery to this play. You know, Rand is a big fan of detective stories, and I really appreciate that there is something to be discovered for both of these characters. Something really significant that they have to discover in this time that they have together.

And their audience gets dropped clues along the way, which I love because then that makes it an active journey for the audience. They're not just watching something that is predetermined, they're watching discovery.

Aaron: Yeah. Yeah. And it's a pressure cooker, right? So we, we, we, we did a read through yesterday and it was a whole 94 minutes, an hour and a half, with no intermission. And you get on the ride, you're on it, right? It's, a roller coaster from start to finish, I believe. I'm excited to build that for sure.

Any other things about what the show is about, like just big, that, that we want to make sure that we don't miss as we're going through the show? This is part of table work , there are some themes I'm excited to unpack. I'm curious what you're feeling.

Elizabeth: Well, I think a lot of it's about hard truths, telling hard truths, yeah, I have to be careful not to give much away. Telling hard truths on both sides, being at a place where you can hear them when you haven't been able to hear them, and ending in a new place. You know, I guess I want to say forgiveness.

I don't even know if that's the right word, and I don't know if that gives too much away. 

Kimie: I think the word for me is understanding--

Elizabeth: Mmhmm 

Kimie: Is knowing where you're both at. I don't think Emma's purpose is to forgive. I don't want to step on your toes as an actor, but like, the reasons she states in the play for being here are not about forgiveness for me.

Elizabeth: No, I don't think that's what she arrives with at all. I think the journey of the play and what she learns makes her view the past with more understanding. Yeah. And I wouldn't argue with you that she doesn't arrive to forgive or with anything, even approaching that there's a very important external reason that she needs to be here that has nothing to do with this man and everything to do with this man, but I can happily settle with a different understanding for sure.

Aaron: That's actually one of the things that I'm curious about. I'll say there's, substance abuse that comes into play in the show and probably the source of the 25 year parting between the two characters, right? That's not a big surprise, I think. But, when we were picking the show, there was a conversation I remember very clearly about whether we should be telling stories that would absolve Ulysses for his behavior. Or absolve Ulysses for the span of 25 years and I personally don't think that that's actually what the play is pointing toward, but I do think that it is something that I am curious about if there are sensitivities for audience members coming in. I view substance abuse, particularly, that it is a disease.

There's reasons why people medicate themselves in certain ways. And that points to the person who is abusing the drug is vulnerable, right? And I think in Ulysses case is probably acting out of a vulnerable place. Rand, I'm curious what your, what your thoughts are on that?

Rand: It is. It's not about that as such, though it's massive in there, but it feels to me like it's the burden of a life, the journeys we take. And, Ulysses has massive burdens, he's also, some things he's forgetting or not, are not there, but he's brutally honest with himself, or the struggle, the burdens he carries, he carries them.

And that's a great power into me, so there's nothing, when we say this, there's nothing maudlin about this journey for this character, at all, I think it's quite the opposite, it's, you know, it's plosive, it's physical, it's like almost an emotional sport, watching this interaction between the two of them.

And that is, there's so much, I mean, playwrights and theatre and actors love opposition. And there's massive opposition in this character, massive between the two of us, but within the characters too. There are those, you're going back and forth and back and forth within yourself within a scene and an arc of a scene. And as one takes you a place, another one takes you another place, and that's the fun of it. I mean, it's a road rally of a play, in a way, emotional. Emotionally, a road rally.

Elizabeth: I'm surprised how hard it is to talk about it without giving things away because there's so much satisfaction in the audience discovering every little nugget that they get to offer context or to build an understanding of why these two people are in this room in this moment. So, everything we've talked about, part of me goes, "Oh, I want them to discover that." They don't know that when they sit down in their seats, they don't know anything about us. And it's is so skillfully parsed out. And I love plays that do that, that it's like a puzzle and I put down one puzzle piece and then I put down the other.

I guess. All good plays are that way. 

Aaron: Yeah, I think so

Elizabeth: But I find myself sort of not wanting to say too much of anything because I just want them to have that journey and not see what the picture on the box of the kittens.

Aaron: That's the last play!

Elizabeth: That's the last play. Don't jump to kittens.

Aaron: I think that we were actually just speaking about this before we turn on the microphones, that is the plopping down of new points of information is something we're gonna be really thoughtful about in our rehearsal period and punching those things up and maybe as with all subtle things, like sometimes they're slid, sometimes they're plop, sometimes they're bombs that here's the information and it blows up the scene.

So I'm, I'm excited to discover how many different ways we can release those pieces of information.

Elizabeth: I do appreciate even the simple things of you know, that this play takes place in a place where altitude is a factor. So you have one character who is struggling for breath. For medical reasons and one person who is struggling for breath because of altitude. And I think that's such, a clever thing that we meet both of them in the first moments and they are both trying to find breath.

And for very different reasons, but this is something right off the bat that they have in common and they are in some ways breathless with each other.

Yeah, it takes place in Pe I think we said it, but it takes place in Peonia. Paeonia! I keep doing it wrong, but my peonies are coming up. Paeonia, Colorado, and Mount Gunnison is in the background, but it takes place in a trailer. Rather a neglected trailer that Ulysses is occupying and Kate Campbell, our set designer and Jen Rock, our lighting designer are really excited to render that on our stage.

We've been looking at so many really pretty pictures of Colorado, but it's interesting that Ulysses has chosen to be there at this point in his life. And speaking of writers, where we seek solitude, as creative people, I think is always an interesting thing. We're collaborative artists, theatre artists.

 writers can be collaborative, but very often they create in solitude. And Ulysses has picked this trailer in a really bucolic location. I'm excited to see it rendered, I'm curious, Randy, do you have any thoughts about that? Have you put any thoughts on that?

Rand: Oh, yeah, because I think part of it is his seclusion that he uses to write. And it's also purgatory, as he says, he's put himself there for other reasons as well. So this is a brutal and honest environment in which he is both physically and emotionally. So yeah. I think the place it is, it's beauty, it's aridity, it's heat, and how hard it is to breathe and live there.

They all play really viscerally in the play, and so it's, yeah, it's a great place for it to be located.

Aaron: Pretty quickly, we see it's a pretty spartan existence. Right? Th there's there's very few creature comforts that he's allowed himself.

Rand: Yes, yeah, There's something, I think, I think people who love country western music would love the play. Because I think the character Ulysses is, there's a great Hank Williams III song about I might get drunk and rob a bank, shoot my car if it won't crank. And he goes on to all these things and in this interview about it he said, "Well, I wanted to be this country western star and I feel like I had to just kinda turn into a drunk and lose my wife and lose my family and everything."

He said, "so I did it and that's what kinda happened." Yeah. And so it's, there is that also cowboy, poet, country, Western singer vibe to this guy of I'm going to do this poetry, this music, and to do it, I'm going to live this life. 

Elizabeth: I, those images, well, number one, that's a song that Ren has told me he once played at his funeral.

Rand: What, no, not just played, everybody has to sing along with it.

Elizabeth: That's right. And I want Appalachian Spring. So there's our,

Rand: There we go!

Elizabeth: There's our divide.

Aaron: There may be some parallels in this, in this instance.

Elizabeth: Uh, yeah, but also I just can remember back in the early days being out at the Hans, Chris Hans parents house, and they had horses, and I tried to get on the horse, and the horse kept going back to the barn.

Barn with me on it and putting its head in the oat bag and they'd lead me out and then I'd try to be assertive and the horse would turn around and go back to the oat bag. And Rand, who had spent a summer in Minnesota, in rural Minnesota, taking care of a horse on their family's farm, got on his horse and rode bareback on the mountainside.

And it was like, look at that guy, look at that guy. And I won't say it wasn't sexy because it was. But I was also the person who's like, come on, come on, come on, girl, come on. And trying to get my horse to, I don't know, you didn't see me going back and forth with the horse to the oat--, I definitely remember thinking that guy loves me.

Aaron: Oh, that's fun. Well, there, there is very much a revelry of that Western persona. I think, I mean, Ulysses certainly puts it on. I think it's very, Sharr is from Colorado and has an affinity for it for sure. I think. In the Broadway debut of this Nick Offerman played Ulysses and and he's certainly someone who is sort of covered himself in that mantle of uh,, uh, 

Elizabeth: A rugged guy. 

Aaron: A well spoken rugged guy.

Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely.

Elizabeth: A thinking rugged man. 

Aaron: Yes. And Ulysses certainly embodies that. And then Emma being the person who is certainly attracted to that. And surprised by that, but we've also spoken a bunch about Ulysses authenticity in the few conversations that we've had and questioning, you know, because like the Bob Dylans of the world and the Tom Waits of the world, maybe even the Kris Kristophersons of the world leaned into certain personas as they created their art.

And I was curious whether Ulysses played that way, but I do think that the authentic- ness of him. Is what Emma was attracted to, for sure, as we've been talking more and more about it. I'm sound designing it, and I've been picking up, speaking of songs, I've been trying to collect a bunch of songs to try and frame the world for myself. And John Prine is one of those people, and he's one of those folks that I just, you hear him talk in public or in interviews or whatever, and it's just like, no, he was a Minnesota mailman. That's who he was. But he can embody this person and these songs with such a great sincerity and authenticity that its really attractive.

Such a 

Elizabeth: great eye for a story behind. I think he's just a, such an amazing observer. You know, that another person would walk past and not see the story and he imagines the story behind them.

Aaron: And humorous

Elizabeth: Yeah, and that's great. That's really helpful to go. This is definitely John Prine's Colorado, not John Denver's Colorado.

Because John Denver's Colorado is spectacular and beautiful and sentimental. And this is not sentimental. This is hard, hard love.

Aaron: Yeah, yeah, yeah, and we've also been thinking about Emma's, music spirit animals, Emmylou Harris and, uh, Bonnie Raitt for sure,

Elizabeth: Laura Nero.

Aaron: um, a little bit of Fiona Apple, the spurned Fiona Apple, you know, we've been enjoying trying to create the soundscape in our, in our brain. 

Elizabeth: I'm going to start singing, "I'm a hot knife, he's a pat of butter."

I forgot my tomtom. I forgot my drum. Great.

Rand: Could I interject one thing I meant to say earlier?

Aaron: Yeah. 

Rand: We're talking about the pleasure of doing this show with Elizabeth Elizabeth and I have been married for over 40 years now. But we never really were paired that often on stage when I was with BTE. So we did Stella and Stanley. And we did Monograms where I came in as another poet, 

Elizabeth: Vachel Lindsay. 

Rand: Lindsay, but we haven't really had this type of arc through an evening with one another, really ever, right? Yeah. That's another pleasure, just to be able to do that after all this time.

Elizabeth: Yeah, it's kind of fitting because I met you in your last eight days at Northwestern before you left to come to Bloomsburg, love in the nick of time. Now, I'm going to cry.

Rand: Well, I always say we're the best match ever made on tequila.

Elizabeth: Yeah, yeah, it's true. Uh, and I will remember well when our good friend Martin Shell put his fist through a window-- a door.

Rand: illustrious early BTE member. Yes. Yes.

Elizabeth: Yes. What a night. Uh, and, so that here as I'm like, you know, sliding into the home we would get to do that thing in, you know, before I'm, you know, I don't intend to die. I just want to say that it's not my intention that I will never work here again. Uh, it, that could be, and that will be okay if that's how it pans out.

But I'm not retiring from theatre. I am retiring from full time BTE membership. And I just want to say that because it makes it more bearable. You may never see me again, but at least at this moment, it's the end of a chapter.

Aaron: As with the characters in this play, you never stop being a creative person. Right? Once you are a creative person, that's how you view the world. And I know that you are a creative person and a happy collaborator. So I think that that's, that's the way I like to frame it too. Cool. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. 

This has been Bloomsburg theatre Ensemble Down Center. Ensemble Driven, Professional Theatre, Arts Education, Rural Pennsylvania, For Everyone, With Everyone. We would like to thank the foundation of the Columbia Montour Chamber of Commerce for the use of the equipment that makes recording this podcast possible.

Annapurna runs May 23rd to June 9th. The first three performances are Pay What You Decide, and it's a great way to see professional theatre for whatever your pocket allows. Please come out and celebrate Elizabeth's long and fruitful career by supporting her in her final mainstage show as an RAC member.

But not a creative person.

Kimie: It's not lost on me also that the most recent RAC. Member and the candidate are the people well. 

Aaron: . Circles. Right? Cycles.

Elizabeth: Yeah. And yeah, and fertility.