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[0:09] John Wesley Shipp: Time for you to step into the belt line.

[0:12] David A. Gregory: Lady Christ will go away, exhaust your shy.

[0:15] John Wesley Shipp: Time for you to step into the body and it's going to make time for you to step into the belt line.

[0:15] John Wesley Shipp: Time for you to step into the belt line.

[0:26] John Wesley Shipp: Time for you to step into the bell.

[0:29] John Wesley Shipp: Time for you to step into Beltline to Broadway.

[0:41] Lauren Van Hemert: This is the Beltline to Broadway podcast. I'm Lauren Van Hemert, your host, and on this episode, I'm chatting with John Wesley Shipp and David A. Gregory. Soap opera fans may know John and David from One Life to Live, but since then they've worked together on quite a few projects and have developed a bit of a bromance, which is why it was so much fun to talk to them. Now the pair are in Pinehurst, North Carolina, performing opposite each other in the courtroom drama Caine Mutiny Court-Martial. John is playing Naval Lieutenant Commander Queig, whose mismanagement and paranoia leads his crew to usurp him of his duties. David is taking on the role of Barney Greenwald, a hotshot lawyer defending those crew members accused of mutiny.

Now I will say before we begin, I had some technical problems in recording this podcast, so some of what you're going to hear was edited with an eye for clarity. But I hope that won't deter you and that you will take away what I did from this interview, and that is that these two men have the utmost respect for each other and for the work. Here's our conversation.

[2:11] John Wesley Shipp: There is no harder working actor than the daytime actor. So how did working on soaps inform how you approach acting on stage?

[2:24] David A. Gregory: Something I can speak to right away. Of course when we're doing daytime, what's great about it is you have multiple cameras and you get to do the whole scene being able to do a scene beginning, middle, and end. You do get a run at it like you do in theater.

[2:41] John Wesley Shipp: I can dovetail on that and say that because of that sometimes they want you to only do one pass on it. And if you get it, they're like, we got it. We're going to cut print. Everything's ready to go. And so being word perfect is not necessarily the name of the game. Whereas in theater, the word is the most important thing. So if you're not careful, you can develop a habit of substituting in the way I would say something versus the way in the case of this play, Mr. Wong would say something. So I have found even working on this play, I'm like, oh I'm saying a word that's kind of like that. And it needs to be very, very precise, which like I said can develop into that habit. You know, the playwright writes with such rhythms.

All of the stutters, all of the ellipses, all of that is written in the theater and you have to honor the playwright's rhythm and words and structure. I'm going through the script and I'm circling all of my that's because I don't want to change a syllable. Even the film is so theatrical in its rhythm and language.

[3:41] David A. Gregory: Um, I think what I love about theater so much is that it demands its audience be active and present and engaged.

[3:52] John Wesley Shipp: You both have appeared on stage in these courtroom dramas before. So, what did you learn from the audience in doing those plays that you're able to bring into this production of Caine Mutiny Court-Martial?

[4:09] David A. Gregory: That's a great question. You always forget, or at least I did, when the audience comes in, who's essentially the jury, you forget that they're going to react in real time in a way that you've already made those discoveries. So they're gasping, they're laughing, they're doing things because they're discovering it. Everybody should be on equal playing field. I am somebody presenting my case in a courtroom. And over time, the pieces of not just the courtroom drama itself, but also the personal biases that will come out start to bring their way to the surface. And that's when the character sort of gets formed. And I think about this a lot from the writer's perspective. What is the writer's intention?

Also, if you sit down with the words, it is very challenging about what its views are about the military, what the views are about morals and ethics and who's right and wrong. And it's deeply uncomfortable. And if you present it just as it is, people will walk away thinking so and so is the bad guy and somebody else is the good guy, or that there's no bad guys at all. And that is what I think makes it a perfect play. And that's why I also think that if it does challenge you, if it does make you feel uncomfortable because of whatever you brought into the room, that it's doing its job.

[5:23] John Wesley Shipp: I also want to say to an audience that you may see the title, The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial, and think, oh, this is an opportunity to bash the military. Well, nothing can be further from the truth. There's so many ambiguities. It's not so much right and wrong. It's about like which tactics, um, whose ethics are best, why did this person make that decision? What were the stress factors? I read about sanitary conditions at the beginning of World War I. And then you lithiatoll, there were 300 battleships with over a thousand men a piece. And at the beginning of World War I, they did not have tanks to carry the sewage. So they dumped it into the atoll, which is basically a lagoon protected by reefs.

So the ships are sitting on basically seawater and sewage. And they used to dip the mops from the upper deck into the sea and swab the decks. Well, diphtheria broke out, diseases broke out, uh, there were deaths. But I could understand, it gave me a new understanding of why is Queig so obsessive? Why does he lose his mind about a shirt tail being out, about discipline, about respect for authority? Well, a lot of these other young officers were in Princeton and Naval Academy. He has worked his way up through the ranks to the rank of captain, and what has that cost him? Then you begin to get all these different human levels that humanize a courtroom drama. It's not only interesting from a legal perspective, but it then becomes interesting from a human perspective.

What does it cost us? There's so many of these things, I think, which we, from a contemporary perspective, can make our production of the Caine Mutiny honor the military. It's not about tearing it down at all.

[7:21] David A. Gregory: And so I'm gonna just jump off of what you just said. To me, even though the play was first written in the 50s, it still feels really timely and relevant. Do you think that this play has a political bent and will land differently with audiences in the wake of the political climate we're living in?

[7:50] John Wesley Shipp: I want to hearken back to a production of Julius Caesar that I did with the Eugene Shakespeare Festival. It was during the Iran Contra hearings. And uh the director very cleverly, as the audience was filing in, played the hearings, and then we went into the play. What could have been more timely? To that same effect, we're very focused right now in the military about who achieves what position, who comes up through the ranks, who has certain attitudes or opinions about the military, which may or may not be ultimately hopeful. Um, and very topical because the military, the democracy, our republic, our constitution is very much on our minds right now. There's no question that when people sit down to watch this play in Pinehurst, that people are going to be bringing many different perspectives based on what's happening in our country today.

[8:53] John Wesley Shipp: But this play is a little bit of an allegory for something broader that I think is an important question that is never going to go away. I was actually thinking on the train to your house how my character seems to resemble Mark Anthony, and you seem to resemble Julius Caesar slightly in this particular context. Because Mark Anthony has this whole thing about him of people being honorable men. I know who's guilty here, but I also know who's not. And the reason I'm taking on this case is because I have to make sure the person who's not guilty is not punished for something that he's not guilty of. But I have to do the wrong thing in order to do the right thing. And that is something that keeps grown men and women up at night.

And that's for me, that's why I'm doing the play. You can't help but watch that and go, I know who that is, I know that that's me, or I know what I would do in that situation. I don't think we would know. And I think that's ultimately the definition of courage is how we react to these situations. And 50 years from now, this play will still be relevant for that reason. I feel like when you're doing a courtroom drama and you're playing, in this case, the captain and a young prosecutor, a young lawyer, um, that there has to be trust in order to get to these really high-intense emotional scenes. How does working together on previous projects elevate a performance like you're gonna go into a play like you're gonna go into?

[10:23] David A. Gregory: We have never stopped working together since we met in 2010 on One Life to Live. John wrote produced podcast drama, Powder Burns, where I played the blind sheriff in the late 1800s. Uh he won and graciously shared with all of us the outstanding storytelling and performance award for that, the society of vocal arts and sciences. And uh, and then after that, we workshopped to play about Henry Fonda and Jimmy Stewart, Hank and Jim Bill Deplane. And uh, and now uh I was supposed to do a production of 12 Angry Men following up on the production we did in Pinehurst. I had to drop out. Uh, the obvious choice was this fantastic actor John. I went to see the production, it was fantastic. Um, and now we're doing this, so it builds, you know.

Uh, there is a level of relaxation. I know that he's coming from a place I try to come from, which is how do we get to the truth? Not just the surface of the courtroom drama, not just the fireworks, but what's happening with these people? And let's bring our A game every minute to rehearsals, and let's talk during the five-minute breaks. What did you learn there? What did you we do? This we do it's already established, and it's great.

[11:54] John Wesley Shipp: I think also because we've worked together so much, there's a comfort in knowing how it's gonna go. Like, I know because we there's scenes, it were antagonistic scenes also in the podcast drama where I'm the hothead deputy coming at him and he's like, whoa, calm down. So we know how that goes, and I know we could get into rehearsal and have a similar dynamic to that, but I also know David well enough to know he's gonna flip the tables on me, and there's gonna be rehearsals, maybe even performances where I'm like, what? What is he? What is he doing? It's all about surprise. So all that to say is I know that if I see David going into surprise land because there's trust, I know exactly that it's gonna I I know what he's gonna do without knowing what he's gonna do, if that makes sense. It's like being a Jedi.

[12:40] David A. Gregory: No, no, we totally react. Like who knows how he's gonna, you know, the one thing that Green Wall does very effectively, somewhat reluctantly, is he has all these stories and tales that have been told about Quee, and he fires him at them one after the other and traps him in contradictions, and how's he gonna do it? You know, and it will change performance to performance, and that's where the listening comes in because I can't predetermine a response if I you know, if he gets a different impulse, and we trust each other enough that if we do, we go with it.

[13:22] John Wesley Shipp: Yeah, yeah. Um, you both had these incredible experiences on TV and film and um the audio drama, which I love. Do you have a favorite medium?

[13:37] David A. Gregory: A favorite medium, I wouldn't pick because they're such different energies. I would not want to do one to the exclusion of the other. It's like in doing television and film, it's like you can be so minimalistic. You know, it's a matter of the energy of pulling the audience into you. Whereas in the theater, you know, I might be having very realistic scene with John, and I'm here talking to him like this, and you can't hear me past the third row. So you gotta step it up, and you gotta reach the person in the back of the theater. And it's just a different discipline, and I like both of them, and I wouldn't want to do one at the exclusion of the other.

[14:21] John Wesley Shipp: I think it's also, at least for me, it's can I say this sounds so obvious, but can I say good words with good people? It doesn't really matter what the medium is. We've done this will be stage, but we've done audio and we've done television. But if the script is good, and I've said this before, but nine times out of ten, the script in a play is going to be very good because the word is everything, and because it's been through a process to get it to that place. This is nothing against television, but when we did soaps, the scripts were being cranked out at such a rate where we would sometimes have to fill in the gaps, and the writers knew this to make sure that we could uh piece it together in a way that was making sense.

Uh, so I know that when we get the script for Caine Mutiny Court-Martial, we know it's already a solid piece of writing. That said, an audio drama isn't that different from a close-up because the microphone is right here. So there's really a lot more crossover than I think people realize. And as long as I'm saying good words with good people, I'm great. I feel great.

[15:24] John Wesley Shipp: What do you both hope audiences will get from seeing this production of Caine Mutiny Court-Martial?

[15:32] David A. Gregory: One of the reviews of the play, because as John pointed out in a previous interview, the novel, of course, tells you everything that went before the court martial and everything that goes after. The play takes the court martial, and so as we said before, the audience gets to be the panel and gets to look and parse through what information is being given and how it's being given and who they sympathize with. You know, they're an active part of it. People will get what they get. What I get from the play is a surprise, a constant surprise, particularly at the end. You may think it's going in one direction, and it may flip around and head back in the other direction. And so that what you come away with is this wonderful sense of inspired ambiguity, if that makes any sense at all.

You know, that nothing is set in stone, that nobody is a hundred percent right, and nobody is a hundred percent wrong, and that there are all points of intersections where we can relate to and identify with everybody in the play. And like good theater, it lets the audience draw their own conclusion, and that's what I love about a beast like this.

[16:53] Lauren Van Hemert: John and David had so much more to say. So if you would like to read a full transcript, you can do so on my website at www.beltlinetobroadway.org. The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial opens April 24th at the Judson Theater in Pinehurst. I'll put a ticket link in the episode notes. If you like what you've heard on this episode, please subscribe to this podcast, follow us on social media, on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, or Blue Sky at Beltline to Broadway, or check out the website. Until next time, I'll see you at the theater.