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[0:14] Sarah Goodman: Hi, I'm Sarah. I'm a sound designer and professional lesbian theater geek. I'm a huge fan of all things Broadway, cabaret, and pop culture. I've got tattoos of Bernadette Peters and Liza Minnelli. In my podcast, I'm looking at theater through a queer lens and discussing the intersection between the craft and the LGBTQ+ community. My guest today is director Trip Cullman, who is directing the production of WE HAD a World at MTC Stage 2. I'm so excited to see this play. Thanks so much for joining me today, Trip.

[0:49] Trip Cullman: My absolute pleasure. It's a deeply personal play written by Joshua Harmon about the sort of thorny relationships between a grandson, his grandmother, and his mother. And it really is filled with a lot of affection and love for those characters, and also is unafraid of showing how complex and difficult those relationships can be.

[1:45] Trip Cullman: It's also very much about three different people who are tied together by blood who can have three equally valid but completely divergent perspectives on the same event. That's also something that the play certainly wrestles with. It keeps having these sort of three-way perspectives that keep shifting and shifting and shifting as the play progresses.

[2:11] Sarah Goodman: Oh, that's fascinating. That's truly like something that I'm very interested in is how people can have the same experience. They can experience something together, but have completely different perspectives on what happened. So yeah, that's really fascinating how people can have really, really different memories and perspectives about something that they were all there to experience together, especially family dynamics. This is something I've experienced also with my own family, my mother, my grandmother. How autobiographical is the piece? Is it really based on Josh's family, or is it just sort of like some pieces of his family have been integrated?

[2:47] Trip Cullman: You know, I will let the sort of the play speak for itself. I think that there might be some usefulness for your listeners who might be thinking about coming to the play to not have a definitive answer on that. But I will say that, like, you know, the character of the grandson is named Joshua. So like you take from that what you will about how closely it cleaves to reality. I guess this is my season of doing hyper-personal plays, because the last show that I did was a play called Cult of Love on Broadway, written by Leslie Headland. And that was also like super personal and also deals with characters who are queer doppelgangers for the playwright within the context of those family dynamics, and how that plays out is quite an interesting dynamic, I would say.

[3:39] Sarah Goodman: Yeah. What's your process like as a director? How do you approach this kind of work?

[3:43] Trip Cullman: Well, I think it starts with my relationship with the playwright. I think in both of these instances, these playwrights have been extremely vulnerable in putting forth so much of their own personal lived experience into the play. And so, in a way, my job is to sort of be a sort of psychological or emotional protective shield for those playwrights as they delve into the sort of exposed inner workings of their past, and yet also make sure that the play, I would say, through its specificity reaches a universality. In other words, the specificity of this family in Josh's play is that they're a middle-class Jewish family from the suburbs of New York City, which has all of its own dynamics and specificities, but people from all walks of life and creeds and identifiers can readily see themselves and their own family dynamics within the specificity of that family.

[4:50] Trip Cullman: There's an adage that says that really good directing is 90% casting. So I would say like doing an excellent job with casting a show is very important. And then creating a room and a rehearsal atmosphere that is deeply collaborative, deeply affirming of the artists who are in that room's agency and allows for dignity and respect for everyone in that space is very helpful because what we're diving into is such a sort of minefield of trauma. I think that the antidote to being brave and going deep inside of that is to create a really healthy dynamic around it.

[5:36] Trip Cullman: I mean, I think I it really, if this is helpful to hear, like it harkens back to like when I was a kid, and I would like to lose myself for hours and hours and hours creating worlds of my imagination with my toys or whatever. And in a way, those were like utopias that would counteract the harshness of the reality of the world that I saw around myself. And I think that my approach to rehearsal is very much the same, like creating a kind of utopian environment so that we can explore the dysfunctionality of reality.

[6:11] Sarah Goodman: Yeah. I really love that. And I love how that technique is sort of hearkening back to a childhood playfulness that I think is so necessary in creating theater. You know, it is called a play. And we should be approaching it from a more whimsical and free imaginative space.

[6:31] Trip Cullman: I agree. I mean, I think it is a play, but it's like serious play. It's like trying to find that energy of when you were a child and your imagination knew no boundaries and were not told by the culture that surrounds you to not think or imagine certain things, and you just had a sort of limitless possibility and depth of imaginative thinking is sort of how I always am trying to trick my brain to refine that energy within myself.

[7:03] Sarah Goodman: Yeah, and that can be really difficult, especially in the bleak world we're living in now.

[7:07] Trip Cullman: Correct. That is true. On the note of good casting, tell me what it's been like to work with the legendary Joanna Gleason. I've been obsessed with her since childhood. Obviously, the baker's wife, you know, she's incredible. What has that been like?

[7:22] Trip Cullman: I mean, it's been a real dream. You spend your whole life, you know, trying to create a career. And in my case, particularly, I grew up in New York City, and my parents took me to the theater the way how some parents take their kids to church or to synagogue or whatever. My parents are actors. They did regional theater when I was growing up. So I went to the theater all the time as a child. And so for me, like theater was church, you know, and especially as I entered adolescence, and because I'm super old, the plays that were like the plays that my parents took me to were like Falsettos, Angels in America, Six Degrees of Separation, Lips Together, Teeth Apart, Love, Valor, Compassion. And so for the very first time, I was able to see reflected back to me a possibility of life as a queer person that was not full of shame, that was not, you know, an isolation and secrecy. And so it helped me kind of come out to myself, you know.

[8:27] Trip Cullman: And so I'm trying to remember where I was going with that anecdote, but I think anyway, I think in terms of the casting of these people and working with Joanna, it's like for absolutely the same as you. Like I, you know, I Joanna was like a legendary legend that I was like, oh my God, if I could ever one day work with that diva, I would be very, very happy. And here I am. And so it feels like, you know, my 50-year-old self talking to my 11-year-old self, saying, Hey, look at what you did. Like you actually got to where you dreamed you wanted to get to in your life. And you're working with the people that you dreamed of working with when you were a little kid.

[9:05] Sarah Goodman: Oh, that's really cool. And that kind of ties into a question I was going to ask later about were you a theater kid growing up? It sounds like.

[9:11] Trip Cullman: Yes. I was in that I did see a lot of shows. I wasn't a theater kid in that, like I didn't go to Stage Door Manor or Belvoir Terrace or like those things during the summers. I went to like hardcore competitive all-boys' sports camps. For some god awful reason. I wish I had immersed myself even further within the realm of theater and the communities that I could have been exposed to. But I think this is true for so many people. Is that if you look back on your younger self, what is the biggest piece of advice I would give? It would be don't spend so much time worrying about what other people think about you. You know, and like I think I made a lot of choices in my childhood that were based on fear of judgment.

And I wish I could just be like, don't worry about that. Those people don't matter in the long run. Like follow your truth, follow your bliss, and see how you can kind of find your own self, your own self and your own pathway. And that would be what I would say. So I wish I did even more of it.

[10:13] Trip Cullman: Yeah. But I am lucky that I grew up in New York and I was able to see all these magnificent pieces of theater and have it inspire me to choose to make a life of it for myself.

[10:24] Sarah Goodman: Yeah. So when did that happen for you? When did your path sort of find your way into actually like working in theater, studying theater?

[10:31] Trip Cullman: I did a ton of theater in high school and as an actor, senior year, the theater teacher allowed some seniors to direct a little one act as part of an evening. And all of the other students chose these like very sweet little plays. And I chose Cowboy Mouth by Sam Shepard and Matty Smith.

[10:52] Sarah Goodman: Wow.

[10:52] Trip Cullman: Which was a play that they wrote over the course of three weeks where they locked themselves in a hotel room with a ton of drugs and just passed the typewriter back and forth between the two of them as they fell in love with each other. The teacher put my show at the end of the evening and told people if you were offended by profanity or sexual suggestiveness that you should leave. So it was like a totally intoxicating experience. And that was my first ever experience directing. And I was sort of hooked. I felt like as much as I loved the depth of exploration that comes from being an actor and sort of subsuming yourself in a character.

[11:31] Trip Cullman: I really loved the idea of being able to have my sort of fingers in all the pots of trying to create an entire universe. Like I said, hearkening back to the sort of deep imaginative play that I experienced as a young child. So I think then I went to college and I did a ton of acting as well in college and a ton of directing. Was lucky enough to be cast. I went to Yale University to be cast in the Yale Repertory Theater's production of Landscape of the Body by John Guare. So I had my first, you know, interaction with a professional environment. I was acting opposite Laura Linney in that show. It was super phenomenal. And then started working over the summers. I went to Williamstown, I went to New York Stadium Film, I met Joe Mantello, who became, you know, not just a really important mentor in my life, but like a really close friend, and then started assisting him a lot, met Mike Nichols, assisted him a lot, and sort of forged my own path through to grad school and then my first show in New York. So that was sort of my path.

[12:39] Sarah Goodman: I think that's really awesome. And it's I'm always interested to hear because I feel like everyone kind of finds their way to it in a different way. And it's always really interesting to me how people find their way into the theater space. What's been your favorite thing about the process of working on WE HAD a World at MTC?

[12:57] Trip Cullman: I think my favorite thing to kind of step back and look at the longevity of my creative collaboration with Joshua Harmon. We did a show a little over 10 years ago together called Significant Other, which was also a deeply personal piece about a gay guy in his 20s and his gaggle of best girlfriends, and how the intimacy of those friendships were tested as those women found life partners and married off and kind of took the intimacy of their relationships with this gay guy, and then kind of, you know, went to their, as they should, to their husbands, and but he never found someone, so he was sort of left adrift. And so it was a very personal play as well, and that it was coming off of like a massive breakup that I had just had, and just thinking about like where both Josh and I were in our personal lives as we worked on that play versus where we are now, and the sort of long-term joy of a kind of intensely close, deeply trusting creative collaboration with a playwright is just beautiful. The closest collaborative relationships of my career is with Josh. So that's what I would say is my biggest takeaway.

[14:19] Sarah Goodman: Yeah. And I think it's so important to have the director and the playwright be sort of like sympatico, you know, being able to speak the same language because you're trying to build the vision together. You know, you really need to be on the same page.

[14:32] Trip Cullman: I think it can be very useful actually to have some creative friction. But I think the most important thing is to have trust. In other words, like you can sort of like get into a really intense dialectic with a playwright where you end up maybe somewhere that neither one of you thought was the right path. But as long as there's love and trust within that, you can achieve that in a way that feels creatively satisfying rather than contentious.

[15:04] Sarah Goodman: Yeah, say more about the creative friction. I want to hear a little bit about that. Give me an example.

[15:09] Trip Cullman: It can be everything from a little moment of staging where I have an idea that I want to show the playwright and the playwright has in their mind something completely different. And I think it's sort of a beautiful experience to show and to work on my vision, then to try it their way, and then oftentimes to meet somewhere in the middle. But it could also be a costume choice, whether to wig an actor or not, it could even be a cut suggestion where I'm like this section has to go and the playwright's actually like this is the most important section to me that I wrote. So, you know, and then you kind of like then you get into a conversation, well, like why? And then, oh, okay, I understand why this is so important, and now I can direct it rather than feeling like it feels like an outlier in terms of the entirety of the piece, if that makes sense.

[16:01] Sarah Goodman: Yeah, it does. I think the why is really important. And if you agree all the time, maybe you aren't asking that question as often.

[16:09] Trip Cullman: Exactly.

[16:10] Sarah Goodman: So you've worked on a lot of plays with queer themes. I'd love to hear what you think about queer representation on stage. What's been your experience of working on shows that have queer themes?

[16:20] Trip Cullman: Well, immediately what comes to mind is a musical that I did last season called The Lonely Few.

[16:26] Sarah Goodman: I love The Lonely Few. I saw that show. It was incredible. One of my favorite pieces I've seen in New York.

[16:32] Trip Cullman: And something that we all talked about quite extensively was in fact, musical theater as a genre was pretty much created by queer people. Like it is a genre that was made for by that community. And yet throughout its history, any conversations around queer love had to be coded within a heteronormative context inside of a musical. And so it felt really revolutionary, I guess you would say, like that we were like, okay, this is gonna be a story about two women who fall in love, and that's foregrounded and unapologetic, and also not about being closeted, or in the case of gay guys, like having to suffer through the AIDS crisis, but like just a really mature complex evocation of what it means for two women to fall in love with each other and navigate that love.

[17:32] Sarah Goodman: And they don't kill themselves.

[17:33] Trip Cullman: Exactly, exactly, exactly. And I think, like, you know, it felt like a, in a way, like a homecoming, in that we were, you know, inside of a genre created by queer people, but finally able to foreground a queer love story, which just makes my mind. Like, I, you know, if you really think about like how many queer love stories are at the absolute center of a musical. It's like I don't think truly so I mean so really nothing. I mean, the only, I mean, as far as lesbian specific representation, like Fun Home has a love story, but that's not the center of the story. The story is about her and her father, right? So, like, yeah, it's really rare. It's usually a side character, you know, the neighbors in Falsettos or Maureen and Joanne in Rent, or you know, they're kind of like on the peripheral. But Lonely Few was so spectacular because it really really did like put it right there in the center of the story, unapologetically, and it was so beautifully done.

[18:36] Sarah Goodman: Thank you. I so yeah, more you know, more representation is always a good thing, and I'm interested, I'm interested in stories that center that because that's my own experience too. So it's like my own lived experience.

[18:49] Trip Cullman: I think that's awesome. What are some of your favorite plays? Just generally, playing.

[18:52] Sarah Goodman: Generally plays, plays musicals. What are some of your favorite shows?

[18:56] Trip Cullman: So musicals, I would say, you know, Caroline or Change is like for me one of the most beautiful pieces of theater of all time. It just breaks my heart every time I see it. I think the writing is so beautiful and the music is so beautiful. There's a musical called Nine, yeah, by Maury Yeston that I'm just obsessed with. Again, like you can see like a common thread here. Like that's a musical that has one man and 23 women. Which just to me feels like, I mean, it's just glorious. It's based on the Fellini classic, eight and a half. It's just a beautiful piece of writing with gorgeous, gorgeous music, like truly stunningly beautiful music. I'm a Tennessee Williams like complete fanatic. My thesis in grad school was A Streetcar Named Desire. I've always wanted to do, you know, Glass Menagerie and all and sort of all of his work.

[19:50] Sarah Goodman: Yeah.

[19:50] Trip Cullman: I don't know if you got a chance to see the Long Day's Journey Into Night that was done at the Roundabout a couple years ago with Jessica Lange.

[19:57] Sarah Goodman: I did not, unfortunately. I just moved to New York a handful of years ago, so I missed that one.

[20:01] Trip Cullman: Well, I love Jessica Lange. I would have, I mean she was so incredible, and I do feel like that play may be my favorite play. It's so so so so intense. So that's a big one for me. Like I like I mentioned before, I love John Guare, and I think Landscape of the Body, which is a sort of very underknown play, is one of my absolute favorites. I'm dying to do a revival of that one day. So those are just a couple examples. What do you think makes a good show?

[20:31] Sarah Goodman: Oh, that's a great question.

[20:33] Trip Cullman: I guess I would say it starts with really excellent writing because I am so interested in the art of directing, you know, it would have to be brilliantly directed. I do kind of get that for the lay person, kind of understanding what makes good directing is kind of tough to analyze. But I would say that like looking for the, are all of the actors in the same world, are they, you know, so that they're all in the same play with each other is a good question. And then more most importantly for me is like, what are the transitions like? I'm obsessed with transitions. I feel like they're the a direct a really good director's bread and butter. And I think I ultimately I also would say that like, and I've said this before that like if the author, if a playwright rather, is the author of a text, a director is the author of a production.

So all of the elements, the design elements, the performances, the pacing, the way how it moves and the story unfolds is all at the director's purview. And I think to me, that's another thing that makes a great play and a great production. And I think the, I guess the last thing I would sort of, the last response I would say is that does this, does the experience of watching it transform my view of the world? I don't love it when a play simply reinforces a viewpoint that I already held. I am much more interested in a play that rocks me to my core and makes me feel, for instance, intense empathy for a person or a group of people that in before having seen that play, I would never have identified with before. To me, that is the great project of theater is to teach people to have more empathy and to recognize the humanity of all people.

[22:35] Sarah Goodman: I really love that answer. And I'm curious to ask a follow-up about transitions.

[22:40] Trip Cullman: I'm working on a project right now where I was listening to an interview with Julie Tamore, and she was saying she doesn't do blackouts. What do you think about blackouts? I have my own personal opinion about it. It's a great listen, I think it's really interesting because I also am normally pretty averse to blackouts because I think there's such an op, I mean, to me, it feels like a little bit of a cop-out to just blackout, make a transition, lights up, and we're in a new place. To me, what that does is number one, it can often kind of curtail the forward momentum of the experience of a piece. And it deprives a director and an audience of a potential further complication to the story, because you can keep a story moving forward and reveal things about characters or about the narrative in a transition that could be very helpful or can be a poetic evocation of an emotion, or can prime you for the next thing that is about to arrive in ways that I think is really useful.

That being said, I think sometimes blackouts can be incredibly effective. For me, they are most effective when they're not expected. In other words, it's very easy to like you finish the scene, blackout. But like if this if the blackout can feel jarring and disorienting, and then oh my god, oh we're in a totally different place. Then I think it could be really useful. And I certainly I certainly love a blackout at the end of a show.

[24:14] Trip Cullman: Yeah, I did a play by Simon Stevens called Punk Rock several years ago, which was about a school shooting. And end of the play, at the end of the play, we were so the penultimate scene is where one of the students comes in and like kind of mows down a bunch of his classmates, which is horrifying, and all of those bodies were on stage. And then there was a little coda of a scene where that kid was in jail and talking to a therapist, and I kept all the bodies on in the space at the end of the scene and then as the final scene ended we had this amazing piece of music that came on and there was no blackout but like very slowly one by one all of the bodies kind of came back to life and came down to the lip of the stage and as the music reached its climax everyone bowed and it was like kind of a really give me goosebumps it it was it it is so I like breaking rules that way like of course you want to put a blackout at the end of the play to signal to an audience that the show is over but sometimes sometimes it might be fun to subvert that expectation as well.

[24:34] Trip Cullman: What's important about theater today in 2025? I mean I think the simplest answer it is maybe the most obvious which is that we are in a moment where disconnection is even more intense than it has ever been in human existence. I would say even look at us right now we are meeting for the first time in a virtual space like you know it the temptation to stay at home and just turn on your television is so easy but in fact the reason why you know when people say oh the theater is dying the theater is gonna be dead blah blah blah I never subscribe to that because I actually think that like at the end of the day there is a fundamental human need to be told a story in a community and so what theater does gloriously, is it forces an immediate community, all these people in a theater trapped you can know, you can't leave, you can't press pause, you're trapped in your row, the lights go down, and you have to see, you have to be told a story.

[26:29] Trip Cullman: And so to me, that is like an actual fundamental human need. So I think like because our world is becoming more and more and more isolating and disconnected, that theater's necessity is even more intense, I would say.

[26:48] Sarah Goodman: Yeah, absolutely. Being in the same room, breathing the same air with other people, I think is so much more powerful than some people give it credit.

[26:57] Trip Cullman: Agreed.

[26:58] Sarah Goodman: What are your hopes and dreams for the theater landscape, especially Broadway?

[27:01] Trip Cullman: I feel like, you know, you like you said, people are always saying the theater's dying. They've been saying that since like forever. Since this it's like a line in a chorus line, you know, it's like an old, old thing that's that's still happening. But we are in a time where, you know, late-stage capitalism is really affecting the economy. Broadway tickets are getting really expensive, there's still a monopoly on theater owners. What do you think in your dream world is the future of Broadway and theater?

[27:25] Trip Cullman: Well, I mean, that's interesting because you're you're sort of framing it at politically, which I think is a really useful lens to question the future of Broadway. I would I I guess I was gonna start by saying something about aesthetic, because to me, I don't know if you were able to see Sunset Boulevard. Yes, uh, the revival that's playing right now. So I thought that was like freaking brilliant. It was thrilling. Yeah, I truly see it again. In fact, yeah. In particular, was so so good. And to me, what thrilled me about it most of all was like, oh my god, look at this. We are at a moment where a deeply avant-garde, deeply non-realistic representational take on a musical is on Broadway. Like that thrilled me.

Like, oh, look, an audience can go along with something that is formally challenging. And like the thing that I also think, like, and maybe this is an answer to your prior question, too, is that like, you know, I'm obsessed with film and television. I love it. But the thing that that media, those medium do is that they don't, you know, that they fill in all the blanks for you. You see a completed world when you're watching a film.

[28:42] Trip Cullman: Yeah, you're not using your imagination.

[28:44] Trip Cullman: Exactly. And theater, I think is so exciting because it forces an audience to be a creative participant in the storytelling.

[28:52] Sarah Goodman: Yeah.

[28:52] Trip Cullman: And to me, I, you know, a piece like Sunset Boulevard, where there's zero nod to naturalistic staging, is so exciting because it is asking the audience constantly to be a creative participant in the telling of that story. So I'm very, very excited for that. I and I guess I would I would say, in terms of the political nature of the future of Broadway, you know, you're absolutely right. The it's a pretty grim thing that ticket prices are so expensive. And that's also because you know, making theater is so expensive these days means that there is even you know, even in a profession of scarcity, there it's even more scarce. The jobs are more scarce, the resources are more scarce. I'm saddened because you know, a play like Cult of Love, which has 10 actors in it, is the outlier.

Right now, it's like you, you know, playwrights that I know, they're like, oh gosh, I can only write plays for up to six people in it because the economics just don't support otherwise. So I think that's a bummer. But I am also very, very heartened by the talent that is out there. I mean, I think like a playwright like Brandon Jacob Jenkins, who I just find to be like gloriously talented, or Martina Maiok, or the it keeps going, is is thrilling. My one of my best friends is Best Wall. I don't know if you saw her play Liberation this season. Yes, yes. It was one of the most glorious pieces of writing I've had the pleasure and honor of witnessing. And I'm just like so grateful that those pieces exist and that those artists exist and that they're not forsaking the theater for film and television and never writing again for the theater.

It's that that all feels very, very exciting. I'm working on a bunch of musicals that I'm thrilled about. And I think part of the joy of working on those is that we have book writers and composer lyricists who have never worked in the theater before. So I'm also very excited about that. That like you can bring people's whose perspectives don't come from the theater to the theater and and give them a crash course in theater and then have them make something really really, really cool. So anyway.

[31:18] Sarah Goodman: That's awesome. Is there anything you can share that you're working on?

[31:21] Trip Cullman: Well, I this summer I'm I'm I'm headed to London and I'm doing a lab of a musical I've been working on for eight years. Wow. In anticipation of the its first production, which will happen uh hopefully in London in the next season, and then come to come to New York, come to Broadway. And that's Felman Louise, the musical.

[31:41] Sarah Goodman: Oh, how exciting! I've been hearing a lot of buzz about this for quite a while.

[31:45] Trip Cullman: So that is really thrilling. It is, I mean, it is super, super, super, super, super, super good. A story that shockingly from 1991 feels even more relevant now than it did then. Um there's more urgent need for the the things that that that piece is expressing to be heard and seen now than it and it did even in 1991. So I'm super excited about that piece.

[32:10] Sarah Goodman: Oh, wonderful. And taking it back to WE HAD a World, tell our listeners what do you want them to leave the theater with after they see the show?

[32:19] Trip Cullman: Well, I mean, I I would say that for me as an audience member, it does all the things that I love the most, which is that like you are hysterically laughing one moment and then absolutely gutted the next. And the as a director, the privilege of hearing an audience kind of move in the last section of the play into sniffles and sobs and ugly crying and feeling like like that that the story is affecting people on such a deep level is so thrilling. I've heard more than one audience member tell me afterwards. Uh I I finished watching the play and I immediately called my mother to tell them how much I love them. So uh that's really sweet. I think if you want to laugh and cry, this might be the play for you.

[33:05] Sarah Goodman: Well, I can't wait. I will bring my tissues. I am a big crier, so I'll be prepared. And listeners out there, if you have the ability, call your mother. Thank you so much, Trip Cullman, for joining me today. This has been such a great conversation. I really appreciate it.

[33:14] Trip Cullman: Thank you so much, Sarah. It was lovely to talk with you.

[33:27] Sarah Goodman: Thanks for listening. Follow Good Show on TikTok and Instagram at Good Show Podcast. Good Show is available at bpn.fm slash goodshow on the Broadway Podcast Network and everywhere podcasts are found.