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[0:10] Charlie Murphy: Hello, hello, happy 2024, and welcome to Mapping the College Audition, a podcast where we explore the landscape of the college theater world and try to demystify this daunting audition process.

[0:21] Charlie Murphy: I am still your host, Charlie Murphy, director of MTCA. That's Musical Theater College Auditions. And today we've got John Cariani on the show.

[0:30] Charlie Murphy: I first knew of John through the Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival world and him being very close with my close friends Katie and Ryan, though we never crossed paths there. And then John was kind enough later to be a supporter to Esperance during our Halcyon days, brightening the New York City off-Broadway world.

[0:45] Charlie Murphy: And then most recently, I got to connect with John during Elizabeth and his ragtime run this spring, where he played a beautiful Tate. And as you'll hear a bit in the episode, we are both big NBA fans. Yes, we snuck in a bit of NBA analysis in there during our discussion of Drew Holiday as a gentleman baller.

[1:03] Charlie Murphy: And I'm gonna try to convince John. You'll hear me mention it, but I'm gonna try to convince him to come play some pick up basketball with me in 2024. He's into it, I'm into it. We'll see if it happens. Hashtag New Year's Resolutions.

[1:14] Charlie Murphy: How was everyone's holidays? I hope you got some rest and had some peace and joy during this holiday season. We had a very family-filled time in Texas with my in-laws, and it was generally a great success, despite a bit of illness catching us in our restive moments there.

[1:30] Charlie Murphy: For our seniors, I know you're gearing up for Unifieds in a few weeks, starting in New York City at the end of January, and then in February in Chicago and then LA. We have lots of unified specifics coming up in our next webinar, that's Thursday the 11th. So please tune into that.

[1:44] Charlie Murphy: But one of the many things we're gonna chat about then is finding your own warm-up. What do you need to get yourself physically, vocally, and psychologically prepped for the experience? We're gonna talk about that a little bit in our next couple of episodes. Each episode, I'm gonna try to drop a little bit of a warm-up nugget as well.

[2:01] Charlie Murphy: Um, I'll say our MTCA coaches do help warm up our students at Unified's, but for those who are MTCA students who are doing on campus auditions, online auditions, or those out there who are listeners who are not MTCAers, what is your plan? This is something that should be practiced and ritualized for what helps you the most, just like an athlete.

[2:19] Charlie Murphy: It can shift based on the needs of the day for sure, your physical state, your vocal state, et cetera. But it is not something that should be left unattended. It can make a huge difference in the way you walk in that room with confidence. Make sure you're attending to all three of those areas that's physically, vocally, and psychologically.

[2:34] Charlie Murphy: And one of the things we've heard most recently, as our students and families have gotten politer these days, I don't know why you're all politer than you used to be, but I keep hearing it in the past couple of years, is where do I warm up vocally? People are just feeling bad, singing full out in hotels.

[2:48] Charlie Murphy: Well, my big answer is where there's a will, there's a way, and a bit of healthy selfishness might have to take over if you need to jump in the shower at 8 a.m. and sing. If that's where you like to warm up, then you gotta do what you gotta do. These are your auditions, and please don't let politeness or fear of embarrassment hold you back from doing what you need to do.

[3:05] Charlie Murphy: That said, I know some of you are getting up very early and you just are too polite at 6 a.m. to be warming up in your hotel rooms, or have some other strong reason that you just can't make a lot of noise in whatever circumstances. So we are gonna recommend a product for you, which is checking out the belt box.

[3:20] Charlie Murphy: We don't know the people who made these belt boxes, they're just a group of actors. I think they're Elon grads, if I remember correctly, um, who invented this for this specific purpose. If you haven't heard of it, it's basically like a mute that you put on an instrument and it's intended for your voice. You sing into it and it deadens the sound.

[3:34] Charlie Murphy: So if you need a solution and you just can't think of another one, if there's not a hallway or you don't feel comfortable singing into a pillow, these are available to you for $50. And just because I love you all as listeners, I reached out to Beltbox knowing I was gonna be doing this little advertisement for them, and I got you a 10% discount.

[3:51] Charlie Murphy: So if you go to Amazon and type in the code MTCA2024, that's MTCA2024, the numbers, you're gonna save five bucks. See, this podcast actively is saving you money. There you go. Five bucks off, 10% off the $50 product if you type in MTCA 2024.

[4:08] Charlie Murphy: And whether you pursue a product like this, again, we don't care if you buy this belt box or if you sing into a pillow or come up with whatever solution you do, please use these next few weeks to think about and visualize your travel experience. Are you traveling with humidifiers and steamers for your vocal health? Are you warming up vocally in the car while mom goes and grabs Starbucks? Where are you warming up?

[4:26] Charlie Murphy: Physically, for you, what is that physical warm-up? Is it a stretching routine? Is it yoga? Do you actually wanna get a sweat going to feel fully awake? And perhaps the most important, the neglected one, that's psychological prep. What are you doing for yourself to get yourself in the right mindset to give your best audition? This one takes some forethought and maybe even some practice.

[4:45] Charlie Murphy: And I would say in general, the psychological might be the most tweaked during your audition season. You might have an idea of a vocal warmup or some idea of a physical warm-up, but you might not know. What do I need to do psychologically for myself? Do you like to listen to music? Do you like meditating? Do you like talking to your dad in the hallway because he keeps you calm and conversational and easy? All of these can be good.

[5:03] Charlie Murphy: And you could try out a couple different things if you're not sure. But I also would invite you all to consider not just nervously running your pieces in the hallway. So the default of going, I guess I'll just warm up in the hallway psychologically by kind of running my material. I would say that normally I have found this does more harm than good if you're just rotely running them in an attempt to soothe your nerves.

[5:22] Charlie Murphy: It normally leads to the kind of nervous planning and too much control that we've talked about, where you don't want to control every aspect of the artistic audition. And it can really throw you off if you mess up when you're running in the hallway. And now you're entering in the room in the panic and go, what is that? Second sentence? What is that word? Oh no, I cracked when I was going through vocally. Does that mean I'm a crack in the room?

[5:39] Charlie Murphy: I would just invite you to consider trusting yourself that you've done enough work on these pieces that they are ready enough, or at least they are what they are, and you are enough, that rather than frantically reviewing them, you might consider what do I need to do psychologically for myself to put me in a good place. That's not to say that you can't ever run your pieces in the hallway if you prefer to.

[5:59] Charlie Murphy: I would just make sure that's not an autopilot choice. You're not just doing that on road, but it's something you've consciously chosen to. If you're doing it for a certain reason, for instance, vocally, if you need to hit a certain note, etc., that's totally understandable. But I wouldn't just make the default running your pieces, and I would look at it and be honest with yourself. Am I actually making myself a little bit more nervous by just kind of frantically running these pieces? Is there something else I might want to do for myself psychologically?

[6:20] Charlie Murphy: Okay, that's a long intro, and we have a long outro as well. It's just a long episode. Nothing else can say about that. Making up for taking a week off. Uh, I do think you'll really enjoy this one. If you stick around to the end, I really, really love John's advice to artists in terms of identifying passions and interests. But I also just enjoyed talking to John and the whole interview, and I hope you enjoy it too.

[6:43] Charlie Murphy: Well, we are so excited to be joined by John Cariani. Uh John has a BA in history from Amherst. He's been on Broadway in Carolina Change, the band's visit something rotten and fiddler on the roof, all over TV and film, including in Law and Order. And he is very well known as a playwright for many plays, but especially Almost, Maine, which was one of the most produced plays in the country.

[7:04] Charlie Murphy: I'm always hesitant to say that because I accused Kate Hamill at one point of being the most produced playwright in the country, and she said she was at like top four was her highest. But I do believe at one point the most produced play in high schools across the country, and certainly as a monologue coach, one of the most used monologue resources out there. John, welcome on the show. How are you doing?

[7:22] John Cariani: Good, how are you?

[7:24] Charlie Murphy: I'm doing okay. How do you feel about that bio in terms of uh the quoting of you as the most produced playwright at high schools? Is that true? Can we verify that as a fact?

[7:30] John Cariani: Yeah, that was true for 10 years.

[7:33] Charlie Murphy: Ten years. Unbelievable. And now it's not true.

[7:36] John Cariani: And now it's not true.

[7:37] Charlie Murphy: You're like, and now I'm not the most played. I'm fine with that. I'm very happy about that. Luckily, still showing up deep in our monologues for MTCA students and others, deep, deep into the concept.

[7:48] Charlie Murphy: You're not actually great. You said you're doing great. Thank you, John. That's true. But you know, I think I am doing great. Psychically, my physical uh health is not the greatest, but uh okay. I'm gonna start you off with the same question I ask everyone, um, which is often just about sort of their approach to college, but I want to preface it because we know we were talking about the college experience.

[8:06] Charlie Murphy: You have had two incredibly successful full careers as both an actor and a very successful playwright, right? We're gonna talk a little bit about both of those um sort of paths, but your degree is a BA in history. So I just want to talk a little bit about 16, 17 year old John. What did you know about what you would eventually want to do? I mean, did you go to school thinking, I'm just gonna study history? Did you think about theater? Do you think about playwright, acting? Where was that interest?

[8:34] John Cariani: I have I have a bunch of cousins on my dad's side. College was very, very important to them. And so I watched them all go to college and found out what a big deal it was and how good college can be for a person and how much it can change a person's future. And they helped me find small liberal arts colleges in New England. Um, so I ended up going to Amherst College, and I that's that's why I didn't know what I wanted to do, but I wasn't worried about it.

[8:59] John Cariani: We weren't worried about not knowing what we wanted to do when we were 16. And I think it's really important to not worry too much about what you want to do as long as you can afford to not know what you want to do. You know, most of my decisions were made by having to work. So I think that's a blessing in disguise.

[9:13] Charlie Murphy: Yep. And you when you said you knew you wanted a small liberal arts college was that because you go, I know I want as many opportunities and I'm not I don't know which path I'm gonna take but I want to have many different paths option open to me.

[9:23] John Cariani: Where I grew up you didn't dream about being an actor or musician because that's not what people did. People people work. That's not work. So and I now know that's not quite true. But I think it's really common for people to not I think you have to have quite a bit sometimes to learn to dream. And I grew up in a town where people don't have a ton and so people became farmers because that's what people do and they went to college and became engineers and a lot of my friends that's what they did.

[9:51] Charlie Murphy: And so for you the dream was college. It was just I want to I want to capitalize on this get to college and then there'll be more opportunity. Work hard and figure out what I want to do.

[9:57] John Cariani: And um in college I declared my major when I was a sophomore and I declared my major by looking at what I had the most classes in and it was history. So I as I didn't do a great job of deciding what I wanted to do. But I knew that I had fallen in love with music. I had a friend Wendy Rich Stetson who's a successful actor here in New York City.

[10:17] John Cariani: Yeah and she was my model like she majored in theater. She went and every summer did internships and acted in plays at summer theaters in Pennsylvania. I really learned a lot from her and watched her audition for grad school. I watched her career and I couldn't admit that I wanted to do it because I was so scared. But eventually at the end of my senior year of college, I decided um I'm interested in that. But I ended up after college. I I majored in history. It was an awesome major. I loved every second of it. I thought I was gonna be a teacher, got offered a job as a teacher at a school in I think Wisconsin somewhere, a private school, and I said no because they asked you to sign a year-long contract, and I thought, I can't sign a year-long contract. That's too long.

[11:00] John Cariani: Isn't that hilarious? Like 21 years old. You came out a whole year? Yeah, I couldn't. I just couldn't do it.

[11:04] Charlie Murphy: Yeah.

[11:04] John Cariani: And I I think I got offered a job at GE too.

[11:07] Charlie Murphy: Uh-huh.

[11:07] John Cariani: And my dad freaked out when I said I didn't want to do that either. So I moved to San Francisco with two friends from college, and we just lived there for a year, and we were supposed to start a band, but we only played in our living room.

[11:17] Charlie Murphy: And you said you knew you loved music, you knew you loved theater. Was it was playwriting at all part of that? What when did that pop up for you?

[11:22] John Cariani: It must have been not too far far after college. I took a playwrighting class in college, and my play wasn't picked to be produced, and it wasn't an awesome play.

[11:31] Charlie Murphy: Well, you showed you showed them, John.

[11:33] John Cariani: I guess, right? But I love the professor who taught because he was a really practical, very practical. Um very much about the work you have to do, the right part, uh, W-R-I-G-H-T part, you know, like a wheel write, a barrel write, playwright. He was about the work part.

[11:44] John Cariani: Um and I never thought much about what I was gonna do. I never have had dreams. I know that sounds kind of weird, but tried to stay happy, and that kind of led me to talk about that path a little.

[11:55] Charlie Murphy: So you graduate, you moved to San Francisco to start a kitchen-oriented band. Um what are you, you know? So how does because imagine you should you also don't have a lot of industry connections? You may be following a Wendy, but you don't, you're not like, oh, I'm super connected into I know how to get theater and TV and film and all this stuff. How how are you becoming what you eventually become? What is that path that you take as you're stumbling forward?

[12:15] John Cariani: I just kind of followed my gut and um I while I was in San Francisco, I really I wasn't super happy there because I didn't I worked for a high rise in San Francisco and I was the telephone guy. So whenever somebody's phone wasn't working at their desk, I would go up and go underneath their desk, fix their phone, go back downstairs, make sure it all's hooked up in the basement.

[12:33] John Cariani: So I spent all my time like in the bowels of the s of the high rise and then underneath people's desks. It was really interesting.

[12:39] Charlie Murphy: And your dad's like, you could be a GE right now. What are you doing? This is a better job.

[12:41] John Cariani: Right. I learned a lot about status.

[12:46] John Cariani: And people thought I was kind of dumb and not well educated because I was the phone guy. Uh-huh. And it was very interesting to learn how people talk about things when you're around them, but when you're invisible, they talk about things they shouldn't be talking about. And I learned a lot about people, and I started realizing, wow, people have really interesting lives. And I think that's when I started thinking about writing, because I was like, wow, this woman is so beautiful and so cool. One of the women whose phones I fixed. And she was a mess. And I was like, this is fascinating.

[13:13] John Cariani: But anyway, um, I would recommend to people who want to do this if you don't know a lot about the world, you can't be a good actor or a good writer. And I think a lot of artists insulate themselves from the world or separate themselves from the world. There's this whole thing that's going on right now where artists are becoming aristocrats. I don't like it, I'm against it. I think artists have to be of the world, have to be a part of the world.

[13:33] John Cariani: Uh-huh. And I think too many artists are insulated from it, so they don't know what's going on. And it's reflected in our art currently. Our art is all about rich people, high culture people. We don't have much about working class people. We don't have much about poor people. And most people are working class and poor.

[13:45] Charlie Murphy: Anyway, um, back to the question, which was what I forgot.

[13:49] John Cariani: It was just about your journey.

[13:50] Charlie Murphy: No, it's just really good. But so you're here, you are you're you're fixing phones in in San Francisco, but eventually you're gonna do four Broadway shows, you're gonna be on law and order, you're gonna do all these. How how is I mean, imagine you have an agent at this point? How how are you getting to eventually get these auditions and figure out your your way forward?

[14:05] John Cariani: I think it was Wendy who suggested I look at internship programs because back in the it was this is 1992 now. So I graduated in ninety one and then ninety one ninety two, I applied to internship programs, acting internship programs at theaters all over the country. I applied to a bunch of them.

[14:17] John Cariani: And I remember going to these cities and staying with friends from college, auditioning, and the only program I got accepted to was in Springfield, Massachusetts. It's a theater that is now defunct called Stage West in Springfield, Massachusetts. A lot of the people who taught who worked there as company members became the city company. Kelly Maher, Will Bond, Ellen Lauren, some of the greatest, greatest American actors. They were my teachers and they were company members there.

[14:41] John Cariani: So I got this internship at Stage West in Springfield, Massachusetts. Eric Hill was the artistic director, his wife Ellen Lauren at the time, ran the theater. They got on the cover of American Theater Magazine for a production of Hamlet. They did. It was a big deal. They were really important, interesting theater. And we took Suzuki Method of Actor Training classes, which was that, you know, stomping and Shakuhachi and all that stuff.

[14:59] John Cariani: Oh, yeah. My knee, my knees remember it well from a semester at Carnegie Mellon. I'll never forget. But we did children's shows that were funded in part by the Geis Foundation, the Theodore Rice Foundation, which is Dr. Seuss. And so we did these incredible children's shows with massive budgets. And we got to do them. We toured them in schools with these incredibly clever sets that we could pack into a van, bring to the school, and then they would turn into like a forest. Do you know what I mean? I remember one of the sets was like four columns that we brought in, and those columns contained all the costumes, all the products, and turned into a forest with all this cloth that we pulled up. It was like some of the best theater I've ever made.

Anyway, it was kids' theater. We traveled to the schools in the area, and we also got to perform these shows on the main stage for a week every January in between their mainstage shows. And in addition to that, we understudied mainstage shows if there was a role appropriate for us. Some of us got to be in those mainstage shows. I got to play somebody's son in a play. And then we also did stuff in the office. We cleaned the toilets, we tended bar, we did everything. It was really awesome. That was a seminal moment for me. It was one of the most thrilling artistic experiences of my life. I learned a lot about regional theater. I learned a lot about one of the best things that the artistic director did is every time casts would come in from New York to do a play at Stage West, we would convene and have a meeting afterwards, and he would talk to us about our experience with the actors.

Some of the actors paid no attention to the interns. Some of them offered to teach us classes in acting, teach us classes in the business of theater. Those were the great people. And some of them were terrors, like expected to be treated like kings and queens. Uh-huh. And the artistic director would say, "So who are we going to emulate? Which person in this cast are we going to emulate?" And we would all conclude that it was this person. He was trying to remind us that you don't want to be a jerk to people because if you're a jerk to people, like we remember the people. I still remember the people who were jerks to me. And I see them and remember them. And now they're older. And I just want to say, I don't care much about you or for you because you were not very nice to us.

I remember being shocked by that coming out of theater school. Because like you, when you go to school, you're all kind of you're all equals. You're all contemporaries or whatever. And then seeing the sort of different statuses of these regional theater gigs, it's actually like it's not that high stakes. You're not some huge, but people will come in and they'll be like, "Lick my boots. You are an apprentice." Because that's what the first job I did at school as apprentice to. And it was like, but wait, I'm also an actor on stage with you. Like, we're in the same level. We should be, right? But this feeling that status difference is significant. But I think it's the desperation that what we do and genders, you know what I mean?

And it comes out in strange ways. Um, I love that. And the experience was tremendous, like tremendously fulfilling because we also did Stage West had a main stage that was 500 seats, and then it had a black box, and we got to do like we did so many crazy versions of like awesome classic plays like Twelfth Night. We did an adaptation of The Little Prince. Now coming to Broadway, is that true? The Little Prince is coming to Broadway? Were they really? I think so. I believe so. Oh, it's not ours. Like it wasn't the one we did in that black box, I'll tell you that much. Um wait, but so but so you're still many now, you're many years out of school, or at least a couple years out of school, but you're in Springfield at this point.

So you're not finished up in Springfield because we had a meeting at the end of our time there. Like the program was for one year, and then if you were invited back, it could be for two years. And then if you were invited back for a third, you could. And I went back for a third because I did a play on the main stage and I got to do a lot of cool things. I did some directing, I got to do some things. Um it became a little bit of a job. Um but I got at the end of that third year, the artistic director had us in he would have like a what do you call it, like a post-mortem of how the year went and what he thinks we should do. And when I met with him, he said, "So listen, if you want to do this, be an actor, you should move to New York or Los Angeles or Chicago, because those are the three cities.

Now you can move to Seattle, you could move to Atlanta, you could move to Minneapolis, you could move to Dallas. There are a lot of cities you can move to. But he recommended New York, Los Angeles, Chicago." I was like, "Los Angeles is too far away from my home because I still wanted to be, even though New York is a 12-hour drive from where I grew up, it's still close enough." It's almost me. Yeah. And I Maine. Yeah. And Chicago, I had no idea what Chicago was, so I didn't want to go there. And I thought, well, I'll go to New York because I had and one of my friends from the program and I, we were roommates in New York. And I just started hustling and but so moving with no connection. It's not like you're moving with an industry showcase and I know an agent, and I know you're really moving with a friend to room with.

Yes. But what was cool is that Karen McDonald, she probably doesn't even know what an influence she is on me because I haven't talked to her forever, but Karen McDonald was a member of the American Repertory Theater Company, which no longer exists, but that was at Harvard. Uh ART. Um Diane Paulus runs it now. And they she was a company member with Cherry Jones. And before we moved to the city, I had done a play. My last play at Stage West was with Karen. And she said to us, us interns, she said, "Listen, if you decide to move to the city, let me know because I want to take you to a couple of plays that are running right now." So when we before we moved to the city, it was the summer of '95. We got to go to New York, and we got to see The Heiress starring Cherry Jones, and we got to see A Delicate Balance starring Rosemary Harris and George Grizzard and Elaine Stritch.

She asked us to read both plays before we went. And we read The Heiress, which is a Claire Louise Booth play. I thought it was the most boring, square thing I had ever read in my life. I was like, who cares? Like, you know, I'm young, so I'm like, what's the big deal? You get jilted. Move on, lady. Like, what's your deal? And you think you're ugly, but like, so am I. What's your big deal? Like, just don't worry about being ugly. Find somebody who doesn't think you're ugly. You know, that's how I that's which I guess is probably a pretty healthy attitude. But I didn't really care for The Heiress. But when I read A Delicate Balance, it blew my mind. I was like, who is this? And I learned about it.

Albee. And she wanted us to read both plays. And then we went to see both plays. When I saw A Delicate Balance, it was everything I imagined it could be. When I saw The Heiress, it was nine million times what I thought it was. Uh-huh. Because the performers infused complexity, psychology, being a human being. Uh-huh. And Karen wanted to talk to us about how she had struggled with us a little bit when we would read scripts. We'd be like, "Well, these people are just dumb." Like, you know, even working on Shakespeare scenes like the ingenue, the girls would complain about the ingenue. She's like, "Well, find the interesting stuff then. Don't just dismiss her. Use all the cool things about you and put them inside the structure you're given and see if you can make it interesting instead of just dismissing her."

And it was so interesting to hear her. She knew that we didn't like The Heiress very much, but seeing it, we were I remember just being like, "Oh my god." You know what I mean? Like, this is an extraordinary achievement. You know, it's one of the best things I've ever seen. Well, you're saying it's your job, right? You're saying that's your job as an actor is to go, even if it's not the most thrilling play or whatever. It's like, what do I infuse into this? I have this is what I bring to it. Yeah, figure it out. And like Almost, Maine, it's a very sweet play. And sometimes people think it's corny, and when they think when I and I tell them it is corny, it's your job to not make it corny. You know, um, but anyway, um after seeing those plays, that's what I thought Broadway was.

Ha ha ha. Uh-huh. Ha ha ha. Not quite. You know what I mean? Like, those are two of the best productions ever, you know. Right. Um, and also those are both plays in Broadway. A lot of plays. Yeah. Yeah, and they were plays starring not, well, I guess they were pretty famous people in A Delicate Balance. But famous for, and also more famous for being actors as opposed to, I mean, what Broadway is currently, which is maybe a little bit more sarcasm. Yeah, famous for being famous. Though, of course, there are many great, wonderful Broadway actors, even some of those famous movie stars are like also great actors too. Not to denigrate that. But wait, this still doesn't make any sense. You're just a student reading these plays.

Great, you learned about acting, but how the hell are you booking Fiddler on the Roof from that? How the hell are you on Law and Order? I wasn't from a good college. I wasn't from an acting school. I was a nobody, so I had to get work. I couldn't impress people. I couldn't get into audition, so I couldn't impress people. I did tons of open calls at equity. Back when we had to get up at like four in the morning and stand outside and wait for them to open and sign up. My first break, I would say I also signed up for like I met casting directors at those things like called Actors Connection. That was honestly one of the best things I did. And I didn't do it until I was ready. I highly recommend making sure that you don't go meeting.

Right. Like meet until you're ready to meet. Don't meet great casting directors like Ellen Lewis. Don't go meet her until you know what you are and what you're doing. Like, wait. And so I did that. Started out with commercial agents and commercial casting directors. Um and then I my first big break came when I went to did a job. I got this job at the Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival where I met Ryan Cain. Shout out out shout out. Yep. Yes. Yep. Terry O'Brien was the artistic director. Yep. I did an open call and I got cast as Sylvius in As You Like It. That was my first gig. Yep. And it was a heavenly engagement, I have to say, because that place is so beautiful. They do Shakespeare, I think, the way it's meant to be.

It's not. It's like excellent, excellent storytelling. And Terry O'Brien was committed to clarity. Yep. Yep. And that was thrilling for me because I don't feel like that's the commitment often here. And that irritates me quite a bit. Yep. I feel like there's another agenda going on. I don't know what it is, but it's not clarity and telling the story for people. Yep. Um but at Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival, I think Rich Topel was playing Touchstone. Uh-huh. In As You Like It. And his agent came to see the play, and they signed up, signed me up. From Sylvius too, which Sylvius is not an easy role to knock out of the park. It's not easy to start and turn this in a Sylvius. Who is a great actress, and we kind of crushed it.

Just that the comedy duo was just like it was super. It was really super. You know what I mean? It was like a like, you know, those gems of scenes you get in Shakespeare. It was memorable. And it was because of her and me together. It was special. You know, and it was also a really special good production. Some of the I'm still in touch with some of those people. And anyway, so that's when things really got started for me. Like I did a ton of commercials and after that. Yep. But now this is almost a decade after graduating school, right? You're you're yeah, I didn't move to me until I was, I think, 26 or 27. Yeah. Um, and then I did a couple of regional theater gigs at Delaware Theater Company.

I did something at Studio Arena in Buffalo. And then my agent said, "I think you shouldn't go out of town." And then I got some really good auditions for some off-Broadway stuff, and I did really well. I didn't get the jobs, but I did well. You know what I mean? Yep. Yep. Um, impressing people, you never know. Like, I've gotten auditions recently from stuff I auditioned for 20 years ago because the people remembered me and just didn't have anything right for me. Totally, totally. Yep. So every time you go in that room, you know, you never know what they're thinking. And you at this point have already been laying groundwork even before that, where you're you're putting you're meeting people, you're you're you started putting in the dues of I'm really hitting the pavement and doing that.

[29:00] And so then now, as you're getting into some other rooms, this isn't a new experience. You it's you you are now maybe have a maturity that can seize on those opportunities in a different way than you would if you had it. [29:05] And I was ready, like back in the day, you always had to have a monologue in your back pocket. So I would meet with casting directors, I would meet with people, and they would say while you're sitting at their desk, "Can you just give me a quick monologue?" Uh-huh. And you have to learn how to do a monologue sitting at someone's desk. You can't shout at them, you can't do it like you're doing it in a theater. You have to learn. I always tell young people practice your monologue in a huge space, in a medium-sized space, and in a tiny space, and make sure you can do it in all three spaces clearly, can clearly and with the appropriate amount of like volume.

Uh-huh. Tears if you're gonna cry, you know, like I think snot works for big stage, and I think snot doesn't work as well at someone's desk. Not gonna work, you're not gonna get the agent for the snot. They're not like, "I wasn't helping you snot all over me." Yeah, yeah. Um there was a bunch of agents though before I got Red Adams and didn't get selected by any of them. Um but I continue to go to these classes where you work on monologues in front of casting directors. Stephanie Clapper casting was a huge fan of mine. She helped me a lot at the very beginning. Yep. On Marcy Phillips at ABC. I did a really cool thing when I was young. I didn't have any money, but I was taking Marcy Phillips was teaching a on-camera sitcom class.

Uh-huh. And I had auditioned for one thing for her, and she thought I was in. I think I had met her at one of those actors connection events, and she thought it was interesting. And she said, "You should take my class." I said, "I can't afford it." She's like, "Do you want to run the machine, the equipment, and sign people in and out?" And I did. I signed people in and out and ran the equipment. At the end of every class, if there was time, she let me work. So I didn't get to work every class. Right. But I got to do it. So you got to watch every class too, and you got to learn. Yeah. And when I did those, after that, I started auditioning at ADC all the time. Uh-huh. Do you know what I mean?

And that was really cool. And that was because of Marcy, and because she knew I could do it and did a good job and was prepared. And when she gave me a slot, I made the most of it. Yep. [29:44] Charlie Murphy: Um, let's talk about so. Okay, uh, in the first kind of biggest break, at least as I'm reading your Wikipedia here, it seems like it was Fiddler's now, it's gonna be put you on the map in a different way. You're gonna go to Tony Nom. This is very exciting, right? Like, but can we talk a little bit about? I guess I understand from what you did in Springfield and maybe some of the stuff you've done in Amherst, or maybe you had a proclivity for Shakespeare. But they're kind of two big parts of your resume that you've both Shakespeare and musical theater.

I think both of which are often things that people go to a conservatory-style training to feel confident in terms of go, you know, most people off the street, they're not shocked to think, "Oh, if I'm gonna walk onto a soap opera, I kind of understand what I would do," but I think a lot of people wouldn't be like, "Don't give me a Hamlet right now. I need a little training," or "Don't make me sing and dance," right? So how did you, you know, the without necessarily a sort of conservatory style training, how do you walk into a musical? I mean, other than the kitchen band, I guess experience you've had maybe singing, but how do you walk into the Broadway musical ver or a Shakespeare show? How did you sort of figure out those more, you know, sort of specialized techniques or to specialized?

[29:44] John Cariani: Well, we worked on classical theater all the time at Stage West. That was all of our classwork and our even the with the Suzuki method, all the text we worked on was Shakespeare's classical. You really had some Shakespeare training. But what about the musical of it all? I mean, if you're gonna be you've done four Broadway musicals, I think. Well, I was in an a cappella group in college. I was an a cappella dork, and we didn't know, you know, it's so cool now. It wasn't really that cool then. But um Wait, would we say it's so cool now? People seem to love it now in a way that's people seem to love it. That's uh the but people love comic books. It's a very confusing world that we live in right now, John.

We don't know. That's I mean, we well, it's interesting though, like the Marvel universe seems to be not a sure thing anymore, which is just Well, that's true too. So now and maybe a cappella's coming down with it. Maybe now the acafellas are dropping alongside the superheroes. No, anyway, but okay, so you were an acapella group. So sing and obviously musicality. Well, maybe talk about your amazing playing, right? You put the clarinet came back in a Carolina Change, which I got to see you in, it was wonderful. Um, but what about like just like being in a musical? To me, like doing an a cappella group and being comfortable singing, the delete from that to being in a Broadway musical is significant. Well, I I couldn't really audition with songs because I can't I couldn't sing in front of people.

[29:54] John Cariani: I still have a hard time. People are like, "What's in your book?" I'm like, "I don't have a book." I'll sing stuff from your show, but I'm not singing you a song, so you can hear me sing.

[30:01] Charlie Murphy: That's right. But so how do you do the audition? So you're just given Fiddler and you go, "I'm gonna learn this material."

[30:05] John Cariani: Yeah, I just I that's what I said I would do. And if they said, "Can you sing something else?" I would say no. I know nothing else. I'll sing "Happy Birthday."

[30:11] Charlie Murphy: And they would be like, "Oh, okay. You don't have anything?"

[30:14] John Cariani: I was like, "No." And I wouldn't apologize. I would simply say that's what I can do for you.

[30:20] Charlie Murphy: Yep.

[30:20] John Cariani: Um, but as far as Fiddler goes, I mean, honestly, my first breaks were movies. The first movie I did, I had a scene with Christopher Walken. The second movie I did, I had a scene with Robert De Niro. Not kidding. So those were my first big breaks.

[30:34] Charlie Murphy: And then I started doing quite a bit of television.

[30:35] John Cariani: Uh-huh.

[30:36] Charlie Murphy: I was on Law and Order for five years.

[30:38] John Cariani: I didn't know.

[30:38] Charlie Murphy: And Law and Order comes before Fiddler.

[30:40] John Cariani: So that was a couple years before.

[30:41] Charlie Murphy: You already have a little TV clout for you now to be doing some of these Broadway auditions.

[30:45] John Cariani: Yeah. As much clout as Law and Order gives a person, yes.

[30:48] Charlie Murphy: Yes.

[30:50] John Cariani: I saw it seems like you broke the rules of Law and Order. You are in two different Law and Orders as two different people. That feels like it's cheating on the Law and the Order.

[30:56] John Cariani: I think they lost somebody last minute on Criminal Intent, and at the last minute they asked me to come in and play this part.

[31:03] Charlie Murphy: But you're like, that's breaking universes.

[31:05] John Cariani: It was a little weird, yeah.

[31:07] Charlie Murphy: All right, but anyway, so you've done some Law and Order at that point, right? You've hit some big films, at least that put your name out there with some cool scenes.

[31:15] John Cariani: Um, but then so now you're into the Fiddler, you're getting a Tony nom, unbelievable, sort of changing potentially your acting trajectory of go now, potentially opening up other worlds of what can't you do.

[31:28] John Cariani: Well, the funny part, okay, so I auditioned for Fiddler on the Roof in 2002. I think it was December of 2002. I went in and auditioned for the assistant of I think it was Jim Carnahan's assistant.

[31:37] Charlie Murphy: Uh-huh.

[31:38] John Cariani: I think his name is John. I could be wrong, but I can't remember. I auditioned, and we never heard anything because the production was cancelled.

[31:46] Charlie Murphy: Uh-huh.

[31:48] John Cariani: What happened was it, I think it was supposed to be like a Roundabout production and it turned into a commercial production.

[31:54] Charlie Murphy: Uh-huh.

[31:54] John Cariani: So I believe I'm probably remembering incorrectly, but I believe it turned into a commercial production.

[32:00] Charlie Murphy: Yep.

[32:01] John Cariani: And in June of 2003, I got a call that I had a callback for Fiddler on the Roof.

[32:14] Charlie Murphy: Mm-hmm.

[32:15] John Cariani: And all I had done for John was sing "Miracle of Miracles." That's all I did.

[32:20] Charlie Murphy: So I was like, a callback.

[32:22] John Cariani: So I went in and I did my audition. And I remember the room was a bit puzzled because I had nothing on my resume to indicate that I could be in a musical.

[32:36] Charlie Murphy: Yep.

[32:37] John Cariani: But I know it was a good audition because they were quite surprised by—I remember David Laveau asking me, "So who is Muddle to you?" And I just said, "He's joy." That's what he is. He's really happy.

[32:48] John Cariani: And I think a lot of times when we play characters who have tragic endings, you forget that they're really happy. And that's a good note to all young people listening who are actors. Don't play the end of your monologue or your scene. It's super boring.

[33:04] John Cariani: Anyway, so I think that's what got me the job. He told me that in a—you know, later on, that when I said, "He's joy."

[33:11] Charlie Murphy: Uh-huh.

[33:11] John Cariani: You know, and then I had to audition a whole bunch of other times though, for all the other people because they were like, "Can we trust this guy? Who is this guy? We've—there's no track record."

[33:21] Charlie Murphy: Yep.

[33:23] John Cariani: Right. Well, and then in July, right the day before my birthday, July 22nd, 2003, I got the part, and I had to wait until I think December is when we started rehearsing because we were opening in February.

[33:32] John Cariani: Um, that was it. That's this whole story. And then so concurrently, and make at least some as I look at years of publication, this is where you can maybe fill in some of the gaps. Concurrently, it seems like playwriting has become something you've at least started to dabble in, right?

[33:43] John Cariani: So it's the same year, it looks like that Almost, Maine gets published as Fiddler. Is that true?

[33:48] John Cariani: Almost, Maine premiered at Portland Stage Company in 2004 while I was doing the other. And I got to take my week's vacation and go up to Portland and see the production.

[33:55] Charlie Murphy: So, how are you seeing yourself? Because now, so it's like first you're doing this TV and film, great. That's probably a little more of what you picture when you moved to New York, and maybe you'd already thought about playwriting by then. But now you have these kind of two things that are becoming successes.

[34:06] John Cariani: I know Almost, Maine was not an instant success, but you know, you've got these two different paths. It seems like it's gonna be over a decade before you're back on Broadway in a musical, so it doesn't necessarily mean that like I'm gonna be doing nothing but musicals.

[34:16] Charlie Murphy: What are you thinking of yourself in terms of, you know, back then we might not have used the word my multi-hyphenate artist, but like as the multi-hyphenate that you are here, are you thinking of like, I think I'm now gonna make a career as a musical theater actor or continue as an actor, or were you starting to think, I think I might want to write a lot of plays, or where were you at that stage?

[34:35] John Cariani: Well, one of the little stories I skipped was back in like 1999, 2000, 2001. Uh, NBC's comedies were the Friends and Seinfeld. Seinfeld might have been ending. Um, their comedies were middle-aged or getting older, and they were starting to like create a farm system for new comedians, actors, writers, and this guy named Lou Viola.

[34:57] John Cariani: I think because of my manager at the time, her name was Marla Ratner. These are wonderful people who have done so much for me who are no longer a part of my life, which makes me so sad, but that's just the way life goes.

[35:07] John Cariani: Um, just, you know, that's they—Lou, this guy Lou Viola from NBC had a place, a space called PSNBC, Performance Space NBC. They were in residence at Here, Here Art Center.

[35:21] Charlie Murphy: Totally.

[35:21] John Cariani: Yeah. And they, like I said, were looking for new comedians. And Lou thought that I might—my show, he had seen my friends and I did these variety shows, I call them monologues, songs, scenes.

[35:36] John Cariani: I think I wrote all the scenes. I'm not sure if we actually did songs, but I thought we were going to. I don't, you know, it's so funny how memory is, you can't quite remember, but one of these scenes were all—my friend Gabe Barry saw one of these evenings of these variety shows that we would do.

[35:52] John Cariani: And one evening he said, "You know, all the scenes that you did in this evening are these little love stories set in northern Maine in the winter, and they all have a little element of magical realism to them. I think this could be a play." So that's kind of how the idea for Almost, Maine came to be.

[36:07] John Cariani: It's when I was doing these little shows for NBC. The cool thing about the NBC gig was that they would give you free space at Performance Space NBC. They were gonna assign you like four dates a year. May 17th, June 17th, October 17th, November 17th.

[36:11] John Cariani: They would give you these four dates, and you would perform on those dates. They would give you tech support, all the marketing you needed. People would come because they wanted to see who the new people were, and then in return, they owned your material for 60 days.

[36:34] John Cariani: If they didn't move on it, you get it back. They never moved on mine to make it into a TV show. But what was cool is that it became what has become Almost, Maine.

[36:42] John Cariani: And I had never really thought about myself as a playwright. But what I learned when you do movies and TV, like I did this movie in Los Angeles with Robert De Niro called Showtime. I was in Los Angeles for six weeks, and I worked about five days out of the whole time I was there.

[36:55] John Cariani: And I had money because I was getting paid for it. And I was trying to figure out like, "I'm not—this isn't fun." Like, I don't like doing this. And also, like, not that the movie isn't a great movie, but it's not a great movie. It's like a fun, silly movie.

[37:07] John Cariani: And I was like, "This isn't—I don't know what this is, but I'm not sure this is what I want to be doing." And I realized I had time to kill, and I started really seriously thinking about writing more, and that's kind of where the rest of these can be.

[37:30] Charlie Murphy: Like, is it like more like I think I'm gonna be on TV as an actor, or was it to be a TV writer? Like, what was the sort of goal of this? You know, were you gonna be a stand-up comedian? I guess what was the goal of writing these and what you thought where you thought you might get from them?

[37:44] John Cariani: You know what? Charlie, I don't—I never really had goals. I just didn't want to be sad. And performing and writing and creating makes me less sad.

[37:52] John Cariani: So I know that for me to be a healthy person, I've got to do those things. And if I don't do those things, I get a little sad.

[37:58] John Cariani: So I've just been—I mean, I have—I—my parents are really good at taking care of themselves. I think I was raised to learn how to take care of myself.

[38:04] John Cariani: And I know that for my own mental health, I have to feel creative in some way. And so I never really had goals. I think I always did want to be in a sitcom, and I tested for a bunch of sitcoms when I was younger, but it never happened.

[38:16] John Cariani: Um, but I don't know what I want because the things that you know, there are more things in heaven and earth that can be dreamt of in your own philosophy. That's what that Hamlet, and I've learned that I don't know what's out there.

[38:25] John Cariani: I never imagined being in musicals ever.

[38:27] Charlie Murphy: Uh-huh.

[38:28] John Cariani: You know, the funny thing about Fiddler on the Roof is like I got a Tony nomination, and everybody was like, "Oh my god, here you go." And then it was 11 years before I did my next one.

[38:35] John Cariani: It's crazy, right?

[38:36] Charlie Murphy: And but now you look at your career, you're like, "You're a musical theater actor." Like, but for those 11 years, you must not have thought that, right?

[38:41] John Cariani: No, I was doing other things.

[38:42] Charlie Murphy: One musical, yeah.

[38:43] John Cariani: Yeah, yeah.

[38:43] John Cariani: And the weird thing is like, well, I did one, it just didn't go. You know, like two of them didn't go, so that's life.

[38:49] Charlie Murphy: You mean you did like a lab, but it just never—or you did an out-of-town one that never goes Broadway.

[38:53] John Cariani: Yeah.

[38:53] John Cariani: We did an out-of-town. And one of my favorite things I've ever done. It was called Minsky's. I got to play Rachel Dratch and I were boyfriend and girlfriend.

[38:58] John Cariani: And we had a song together that was "Bring It Back."

[38:58] Charlie Murphy: Bring it back.

[39:02] John Cariani: Minsky's. Let's go. We're putting it into the universe. It's still got time.

[39:05] Charlie Murphy: She's the best.

[39:07] John Cariani: And that was like, but it was just sad because it just didn't go. And like when I did Something Rotten was the next thing I did, which I started working on in 2012.

[39:15] John Cariani: But like people would ask me like in interviews, "Why did you take such a long break from Broadway?" I'm like, "I didn't, I didn't get hired, I didn't get cast."

[39:21] John Cariani: I would have to took a break for me. I was not taking a break from it.

[39:23] John Cariani: Then I got to do three in a row.

[39:26] Charlie Murphy: Yep.

[39:27] John Cariani: I did Something Rotten, Band's Visit, and Change in my 40s.

[39:31] Charlie Murphy: Yep.

[39:32] John Cariani: And that's when everybody tells you you're done.

[39:34] Charlie Murphy: And so I had all my success in my 40s.

[39:36] John Cariani: I don't know why, but that's just what happened.

[39:37] Charlie Murphy: You can't decide anything.

[39:38] John Cariani: You can't decide if you're right or wrong for things.

[39:42] John Cariani: You can't decide if they're gonna want you. You can't decide that you're the wrong color, the wrong shape, the wrong weight. You can't decide any of those things.

[39:48] John Cariani: And I've done it my whole life. You just can't decide it because you just don't know anything about what the other people are thinking.

[39:53] John Cariani: All you can do is be prepared, go in there, do a good job, do well enough that you don't feel like really sad afterwards.

[40:01] John Cariani: Like you gotta have—you gotta figure out how to deal with the bad auditions in the bad days.

[40:06] John Cariani: And I have a system where I have friends who I text and I say, "Very bad audition, please help." And we kind of rally and get each other to the movies or go to Dave and Buster's or do something stupid to kind of help us not sit on the couch and watch Netflix for a week.

[40:22] Charlie Murphy: Uh, I love it. I mean, John Cariani is joy. This is what we're learning is that you can't lean into your sadness, or you have to fight against it.

[40:28] John Cariani: Um, but wait, I want to talk a little bit about so I love this idea. You don't know for sure the purpose, but you're doing this creative skit thing, and then you have a friend who says, "Hey, this could be a play."

[40:37] John Cariani: How do you then pursue that? Because I think a lot of people who are like, "I like writing," but aren't necessarily so sure, like, what does that look like in terms of then going to become a playwright?

[40:45] John Cariani: Like, how are you pursuing turning these skits?

[40:49] John Cariani: You know, make it into a play, I guess to some extent I can understand how that process works. But then how do you go pursue like getting it produced somewhere and then getting it published and then making it now eventually the most produced high school play in the country for a decade?

[41:00] John Cariani: How does that—yeah, how does an actor who has some acting connections, but isn't necessarily like, "I set out to be a playwright," how do you make those steps happen?

[41:08] John Cariani: I mean, I'm lucky I'm an actor and I have friends who are actors, so we could just show people my play.

[41:12] John Cariani: We would just show that to them. And because it's a collection of short plays, we would say, "Here are two scenes from the one. You don't have to read the whole thing. Just read one."

[41:18] John Cariani: And we would show them and they were good.

[41:21] Charlie Murphy: Yep.

[41:22] John Cariani: We were like, "Oh wow, this is interesting."

[41:24] John Cariani: Um, I got lucky because people—sorry, but people are directors, people are agents, right?

[41:29] Charlie Murphy: You know, literary agents. Who are you sort of taking it to when you say, "I would like to make this happen?"

[41:33] John Cariani: It's funny because I can't quite remember, but Andy Polk, who's an actor who was in The Band's Visit, one of the best, he has been done more for me than just about anybody because he kind of found Almost, Maine.

[41:46] John Cariani: The Cape Cod Theater Project. I don't know how or why, but he wanted to workshop it at the Cape Cod Theater Project when it was only five plays.

[41:55] John Cariani: And I got people like Johanna Day, Trisha Pelluccio, um, Billy Ragsdale, like these incredible Justin Hagan was in the early readings, these incredible people to read it.

[42:08] John Cariani: And it was actually, you know, Johanna Day was like, "Dude, this is a good play." Like when she said that to me, I was like, "Johanna Day thinks my play is good."

[42:16] John Cariani: And then she said, "No, it's just kind of easy because the stakes are high, the scenes are short, there's no fat. It's just gonna be so good if you can keep working on it."

[42:23] John Cariani: And I think I just realized that I had a good sense of how to tell stories in that space.

[42:27] John Cariani: Um, I think what theater does that everybody forgets is theater tells stories, and it depends on actors more than any other medium.

[42:35] John Cariani: Um, it allows actors to do the heavy lifting. No CGI, no fancy special effects.

[42:42] John Cariani: Plays used to be people sitting in a room and duking it out, and people don't trust that anymore, and they gotta trust it because it's the only thing we do better than TV and film.

[42:50] John Cariani: Um, like when you watch a long scene in film, it's tricky. When you watch a long scene in a play, you can be riveted, you know.

[42:55] John Cariani: No cuts, you know, and I just love it when plays are like four scenes, each scene's like 20 to 50 minutes long. It's let the people do the work, you know.

[43:02] Charlie Murphy: Uh-huh.

[43:03] John Cariani: Um, anyway, so that's what Andy Polk and the Cape Cod Theater Project really got me started because then Daryl Roth was interested.

[43:08] John Cariani: She thought it was really interesting. I was young and dumb and didn't know that like some of the not-for-profits approached me, like the Roundabout wanted to do a reading.

[43:15] John Cariani: I was like, "Oh no, that's okay. I've got people who want to do it." I didn't know how important that, but I didn't know the not-for-profit world.

[43:20] John Cariani: I didn't understand because I didn't come up in that world, you know, I came up in the commercial world.

[43:23] Charlie Murphy: And but at this time, so this is now still, I mean, I think it wouldn't have—you wouldn't have been—people wouldn't have like denigrated a multi-hyphenate, but it wouldn't have been like, "Oh, I'm an actor playwright."

[43:32] John Cariani: Like, that's what I like that wasn't necessarily understood, I think in the same way that it is now, or maybe it's starting to become at that time.

[43:38] Charlie Murphy: Like, are you a million things now?

[43:40] John Cariani: Right? Everyone, we want that, right?

[43:43] Charlie Murphy: How are you thinking?

[43:44] John Cariani: Like, I imagine that's why I'm sort of saying it's interesting in that it's concurrent success with your biggest at the time, you know, Fiddler happening.

[43:50] John Cariani: What how were you thinking of yourself? Were you thinking, "Hey, maybe I'm gonna spend the next 10 years writing?"

[43:54] John Cariani: Were you thinking, "No, I'm still an actor, I just wrote it for one play?"

[43:57] John Cariani: I don't think that way. I don't think in terms of brand and how to sell myself.

[44:01] John Cariani: I feel like if you go in those rooms and do a good job, you go in those rooms and knock it out of the park, good things happen.

[44:08] John Cariani: I hate to say it, it's that simple.

[44:09] Charlie Murphy: Yep.

[44:10] John Cariani: And when you get jobs and you don't knock it out of the park, good things don't happen.

[44:14] John Cariani: And when you go into auditions and aren't prepared, I've had plenty of bad auditions. I've lost relationships with casting directors because I have tanked too many times, and it's not fun.

[44:22] John Cariani: What I don't like about auditioning is that you can prepare and prepare and prepare and go in and tank, and you can get at the last minute and go in and nail it.

[44:29] John Cariani: Yeah, and all you can do is just chalk it up to that's life, you know.

[44:33] John Cariani: And then go to Dave and Buster's, shoot some weird little mini hoops, you know, have some chicken wings and feel better.

[44:40] John Cariani: Also, I was really passionate about making like love stories for not hot people. That's what Almost, Maine is. That's what all my plays are.

[44:44] John Cariani: I love watching people fall in love, and I'm tired of watching only beautiful people fall in love because not hot people have sex and have kids and are awesome people.

[44:53] John Cariani: And I'm really interested in like people who work ugly jobs kissing each other and people who are dirty, like from the jobs they do kissing each other, and you know, I just want to see like not hot people.

[45:03] Charlie Murphy: I could not agree more with that statement. I do think it's like I shouldn't say the last bastion, because I'm sure there's so many more bastions that we've yet to discover, but in all the things that we put on television now, and I think we're very smart about going a lot of different kinds of diversity, a lot of different kinds of even sometimes like size diversity. It's not like everyone's skinny, but everybody is beautiful. Like it's just so other than like reality TV, we just don't cast people who are not beautiful in some way.

[45:27] John Cariani: But there is something about the art of cinema and the art of making movies and TV that the light does love certain people with obviously we do with social media. I mean, we are attracted to attractive people.

[45:39] Charlie Murphy: Absolutely.

[45:40] John Cariani: I could not agree more. It's like, of course, people who are not beautiful and who are relatively uninteresting and you know don't live high-class lives or whatever, fall in love and have kids and have interesting stories. Of course, it's so beautiful.

[45:50] Charlie Murphy: Yeah.

[45:50] John Cariani: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Looking at your resume, it seems like you've played a preponderance of Jewish roles from Fiddler to Band's Visit to Carolina Change, right? How do you sort of see this? And I'm gonna assume that I know this about you, that you're not a Jewish human being. That's not something that's true of you in real life. You know, you mentioned a little bit of this, but how do you see the role of identity in casting and especially how it's you know made decisions in your career? You talk about, you know, you're not into branding, but how do you sort of see that role? And again, I'll preface because we've had some version of this conversation for our listeners in advance that we're gonna presuppose that everyone and us, we agree that in terms of the polls of the issue, you know, in 2023, casting a white actor in blackface would be inappropriate, right?

And that a character with like a lived experience of being a murderer, we're not only gonna look at a casting pool of murderers. So we agree to some extent on the polls, but I think very few people can have a well-thought out middle place that they agree when it comes to religion or gender identity or sexuality, specifics of ethnicity, etc. So I throw that to you going, how did you think about that back then? How has that changed? And I guess how do you see that with that idea of something that has happened in your career and continues to happen?

[46:57] John Cariani: I think you're stuck with your casing, and you can't fight your casing. And people in power get to categorize. That's how it works. So the people in power who cast, who produce, who direct, it's their opinion of what you are that matters. I've never played an Italian person, and I am Italian. Uh-huh. But I also, there are people who do take issue with the fact that I have played these roles, but my heritage is from the Middle Eastern part of the world, a significant chunk of it. Um you're saying I look you look Sephardic, you look believably Jewish in some ways.

[47:35] Charlie Murphy: Yep, and you know, we found out from the what do you I think it was Helix? Yeah, the DNA. And and then it was kind of interesting to find out that a large portion of our heritage is from the part of the world that the Band's Visit might take place in, for example. Do you know what I mean?

[47:52] John Cariani: So I I don't I don't know what to do when people say I sh I think I I think when it's Jewish identity, I have turned down auditions because I feel like I don't identify as a Jewish person in this way. Um I remember having a conversation about yeah, exactly that. Just I think I've had good people around me who have just said, I think this is just a play about people, and you happen to fit the look of what it is like, you know, getting to play Tata in Ragtime. My grandpa was an immigrant, so I feel like I understand that story completely. I talked to my dad about the story. He was like, oh my god, this is exactly what happened to uh you know my dad or whatever. And so I feel like, yeah, I can do that.

Um I don't know. I don't give it much thought because I can't control what people think. So that's I think what's so interesting, interesting part of the question. I mean, there's there's an interesting philosophical question of like, what should casting people do? And what should we, you know, but but that's we're stuck with what the casting people think. It's just so infuriating, I can't tell you. So you have to just quietly and respectfully accept their opinion of what you are, and you can't change it. So all I can do is be the best actor I can be and see if I can convince them that, you know, how come I never get to play a farm kid from Maine? I grew up in a farm town in northern Maine. Do I ever get to play that?

Never. Never. I got to do I got to play do Picnic, which was actually pretty cool, with Emily Skinner off Broadway. That's the first time I played a small town American in my career. You know, except for doing Almost Maine, but that's different. Right. You know, because I I wouldn't even put myself in Almost Maine. Do you know what I mean? Because I don't really look like a northern Mainer for whatever that whatever that means. And that's I mean, I was just I I'm Jewish, and you would never guess it looking at me or knowing me. And I will never play a Jew in my life. You would be perfect in Almost Maine, but not for a Jewish role, even though that's like because the boys in Almost Maine are big guys who can move things and do things. You know what I mean?

[49:39] John Cariani: I just take the information. I try to be like my dad. My dad's really good at taking the information that he is given and moving forward. I remember when I told him I was gay, he gave me a hug and just was like, okay, so I don't know, are we still going golfing? Or are we still having dinner? Like, is there anything else you need to talk about? You're like, I don't golf, I'm gay, dad. Didn't you hear what I said? No, but like it was just like he took the information and went forward with it. And I just try to do that because every time I get all wrapped up in, they won't see me because of this. They don't think I'm right for this. You have to figure out a way to prove them wrong. And there are lots of ways you can do that.

And my favorite is when people don't think you can or don't consider you, or have said that they didn't like something that you've made. And when you see them out and about in the world, it's the sweetest revenge in the world to just go up and be nice to them and just say, hi, remember me? The guy that you wouldn't even see, who's doing well now? How are you? You don't say all those things, you just quietly kill them with kindness. You know, that's that's one of the fun things. You know, I'm not a saint, I like I get mad at people. Yep, totally. But you cannot get all balled up about things. I can't get in, they won't see me. Then they won't. So, what do you do? Don't just don't count on auditioning there. And don't look at what they're doing at Lincoln Center. Say, if you're not gonna get an audition, don't even pay attention. Don't pay attention to where you can get in, you know?

[50:56] Charlie Murphy: Yep. Well said. All right, we're gonna take a short break, and in the back end, we're gonna dive a little deeper into some playwrighting questions.

[51:01] John Cariani: So we're back in a flash.

[51:05] Charlie Murphy: Okay, we are back with the great John Cariani.

[51:09] John Cariani: We've added the great um to your name.

[51:10] Charlie Murphy: Would you great?

[51:11] John Cariani: I don't know about the great.

[51:12] Charlie Murphy: Okay.

[51:13] John Cariani: With the moderately good John Cariani.

[51:16] Charlie Murphy: Um the good John Cariani. And we're gonna talk about your phenomenal playwriting success. But also, I do want to zero in a little on a topic because you mentioned little hints of this of ooh, I've got magical realism in there and some of those kind of things. I want to talk a little bit about something that I think will be helpful to our multi-hyphenate actor writers, but also just our actor and musical theater performers, in just talking about kind of an artist's voice or an artist's style, whatever uh word we're gonna use there. So, first off, we're gonna presuppose that I think you have a distinct and distinguishable voice as a playwright, a style that, like, if I put it into chat GPT and wrote, write me a play in the style of John Cariani, it would write me a play that I could recognize in a style that is potentially yours.

So, first, before I go further, do you think that's true? And how would you define? You did a little bit of it, but how would you define your style or your voice? And I'll I won't I'll do a little bit myself too, if depending afterward. But I want to hear yours first.

[52:08] John Cariani: I think people don't understand how hard it is to play happy people and joyful people on stage. I think that's why people are allergic to a lot of musicals because people do like a pasted-on version of happiness and joy often in musicals or in comedies, rather than like finding the depth and truth of the joy that's emanating. We do all that work whenever we do O'Neill or whenever we do like the deep, heavy, dark stuff. We love to get in there and figure out where all that stuff is coming from, like in August: Osage County. We love all that stuff. We don't seem to have a lot of interest in it mining the drama of joy and happiness and hope. And I think that's why it comes off looking a little corny sometimes.

And I think that I've always been interested in I'm the kind of guy that when there's a really good commercial on during the Super Bowl and it's hopeful and happy, this guy's crying. Uh-huh. And I'm like, why am I crying? How did they do that? And then I'll watch the thing over and over and figure out how they did it. It's because of the way they mapped it, the performances, it's just beautiful and it feels authentic and it makes you kind of feel things. And that upswell, that feeling of like that is becoming a little bit absent in the theater. Um because the theater is becoming something for I think smart people are cynical and sad, it seems, and we say that's not true, but it's totally true when you look at what is getting done.

[53:24] Charlie Murphy: Right, joyful is equated with naive or whatever.

[53:27] John Cariani: Yeah, and innocence, and you know, I'm just trying to. I guess that's what it was interesting to me is like making building in upswell of emotion, feelings like what does it feel like when your heart is so full you feel like you're going to laugh, cry of for joy, giggle? You know, just how do you do that? That's something I had down completely. Hopefully, joyful is already part is definitely part of that that style. What about like in terms of you know, did you think about like I almost would want to say like lyrical, but I feel like it's not quite the right word?

[54:01] John Cariani: Well, literally I don't like because I'm not a poet, and I don't like I don't like poetry in my writing in place. I like poetry in what I'm seeing. Yes. But do you feel is there some distance between what would be completely naturalistic contemporary quotidian writing and yours? Do you feel is it only joy that you think that lifts it?

[54:20] John Cariani: If we were to say your writing is in some way elevated, I I like to feel like whenever I see something, I like to feel like I'm in a world and I know where I am, and then all of a sudden something happens, and I it's like magic. I don't even see what's happened, and I realize, wait a minute, I'm not where I thought I was. Uh-huh. That makes sense, kind of like something recent a recent example is just like case for the existence of God when the two men turn into their daughters. And it happens so suddenly they're like, wait a minute. Oh my gosh, I feel like I'm floating in this theater. You know, it's just that magical realism. I guess it is, yeah. There's a lift. You know, that's why it's like it's almost like whimsical, is almost the and again, it's not that the adjectives are not so important, right?

In terms of the how, but there's there's some lift that goes. This doesn't, it doesn't sound exactly like it doesn't sound like other people. There is a voice to it, because I think I would say in your writing, that not every other playwright has.

[55:18] John Cariani: Honestly, you know what it was influenced by? It was influenced by a class I took in Latin American literature because all those Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Laura S. Alguero, all those writers. I remember I remember reading like Water for Chocolate, and at one point a woman's water breaks, and the kitchen fills with water, and I put the book down, I'm like, oh my god, what is happening? It's so beautiful. I love this. And I think that's what and also in songs a lot, you'll and in and in Shakespeare a lot. You get just like a lot of metaphor. Yes. What would it be like if we realized these metaphors? What would happen? And I'm just really statue really coming to life right now. Is it real? Is it not?

Is it what is it? Is it we don't have to know? Don't worry about it. And I was in a really good production of Winter's Tale, speaking of statues coming to life, and I was just fascinated by all these smart people in the Hudson Valley. These are smart people who have really nice houses who went to really good colleges, and they're sitting in this audience, and and Hermione comes back to life, and I'm not kidding. I'm in the VOM waiting to come on, and I hear people going, and you're just like, how do you trick them? What do you think that actor was? You thought that actor was actually a statue?

[56:23] Charlie Murphy: Yeah.

[56:23] John Cariani: Well, but the fact that we tricked him is a testament to what the director did and what we did as a company.

[56:29] Charlie Murphy: Well, and somewhat the magic of theater of like we want to be tricked as an audience. We want to, we want to take that leap and be transported in that way. But okay, but so my big question the reason I went down that painful and kind of vainglorious path of of you know defining in some ways, and I'm sure it's not fun to have your own style defined. But I I'm just interested in like, especially as a young artist, how do you develop that voice?

[56:52] John Cariani: So, in the ways you're saying, I'm influenced here by this writer, I'm influenced by this class I took. I think it's all the plays that I've done. I've done so many plays, and I've been in plays where like all of a sudden in the 11th hour, someone has a monologue. And always as an actor, I want to say the play, right? Nobody cares at this point. They want to go home. Uh-huh. This is not the time for a big, meaty, juicy monologue. This is time to wrap it up and let's get on with it. So I've always been kind of aware of that. I'm not from a high art, high culture family. I'm not from people who love the theater, so they don't know how to fake it. Like my parents saw Almost Maine when they first saw it.

My dad said, John, it's really good. It's a little too long, you know, right? It's too long. And I think he was right. So we made it shorter. Yeah. And I think that there's not enough. I think a lot of artists, we think that we're awesome, and we should think we're awesome, but we forget sometimes that we don't know it all, and we've got to be careful that we're not tiring out our audience. And I think that's a really important thing about. Because a lot of our audiences, well, audiences in New York are pretty well to do and have time and money to go. But like audiences where I'm from work really hard and don't have the time to sit and take in part. You know, it's gotta be special if they're gonna be able to take it in.

To expect working people sometimes to drop everything and like watch the news or go to plays or symphonies are kind of like, well, I can go to symphony if you give me a five hour car ride to the Portland to see it. You know what I mean? Like there's just not a lot of thought about it. So I just wanted to write plays for people like where I grew up and that make the place beautiful because rural America is never really pretty anymore. It's always ugly, ugly, ugly. And I think where I'm from is one of the most beautiful parts of the world, especially in the winter because the snow, it's white, and then the sky is crazy. You know, it's beautiful.

[58:36] Charlie Murphy: So that's all. I mean, you you seem to be someone, I mean, you know, obviously it's a little easier when you're looking backward of like, hey, what when I'm plugging in phones under people's desks and I'm listening to them, it is cultivating my artistic experience of the world. Um obviously it's not true for everybody. There are people who go through life and fix people's phones and don't necessarily say, I'm gonna write a play about this later, right? Like, was that something you I guess how did you learn to cultivate your taste and your experience of the world into writing?

[59:03] John Cariani: Like, I think that's just not something everyone does. I can tell you why, because people who didn't go don't go to college or didn't go to good colleges or who work with their hands, people who don't write well have the same thoughts and ideas that we have, they just can't articulate them the same way that people who are good writers can. And right now we live in a world where the good writers win, the good communicators win, and I think that's the new tyranny that we have. The new tyranny of educated people. Educated people who have can communicate their ideas effectively are the new tyrants, and they don't realize it. And we, if you make things and do things, you don't like right now, it seems that all play development is about who can promote their play the best in essay form and and answering the questions that those the O'Neill Center asks you to qu answer.

[59:45] John Cariani: And I have nothing against those places. I'm not interested in giving those places my stuff because I don't want to go through the hassle of filling out all of those forms and answering all those questions. I don't think that's how good art gets made. I think what you're getting there is a lot of people who are really good students who can like make you them make you make you fall in love with what they're doing in as an instant the institution will fall in love with the ideas that they're presenting. But I don't, I'm not convinced that those are the best playwrights. I think the best people the best playwrights are the workers. I'm a worker, I'm not even an artist, I'm a worker. I love to work in rehearsal.

I love to get to work as a writer. And I'm all about like the work. It's all about working and being told, you know, I was just working on a new play, and I'm working on something that I wrote when I was 28. That's about when I wrote Almost, Maine, and a lot I have some plays that didn't make it into Almost, Maine that are becoming a part of a new collection. And my friend Sally was like, John, I gotta stop you right here because this play is good until 54-year-old you started to ruin it. You know what I mean? And she just yelled at me and I was like, Sally, shut up, that hurts my feelings. You know what I mean? But like, that's the she'll just say in my friend Sally Wood, who works with me on my plays at Poor on the Stage Company, she's a director.

I'll be I'll give her a new scene and she'll look at me, she's like, Hey John, guess what? And she'll snore because it's so boring. And I'm like, hey, thanks, Sally. That really makes me feel good. She's like, I'm sorry, it's so boring. It's gotta be. But that's kind of you want that kind of feedback. You want that work, you don't want the BS.

[1:01:07] Charlie Murphy: Yeah. I mean, it reminds me so much of I often make this complaint about colleges. Of course, we're very connected to the college world and sort of how they hire. So often in those processes, I'm like, none of this has to do with teaching. Like, you're not in the classroom with what this person is actually like. You're seeing their resume, of course, their training, but then often like it's what they write about their philosophy of teaching or how they interview. Like, you're not actually seeing the work that's gonna happen in the classroom with these students nearly enough. That's not nearly enough of the part of the hiring process. Feels like that's true for playwrights and you know, plays.

Actors actually get to do some of the scene in a little bit of a different way where we get to go, we actually get to watch what hopefully what you'll be like in the room in auditioning, but so much of yeah, the sort of you add industry and you add you know, bureaucracy, and it sort of becomes a lot of BS and not necessarily about the work as much.

[1:01:53] John Cariani: Well, I wish we would take a new, a new there's gotta be a new way to get to for development of new works because like my friend works in Kentucky. She's from we grew up together in northern Maine, she works in Kentucky, she runs a foundation that this rich guy died, left all this money to the county, and they learned that the people in this county in Kentucky, it's a very rural poor county, they don't know how to ask for things because rural people, poor people don't know how to ask for anything. And the reason they didn't ask for money from this foundation is they had to write grants to get the money. Uh-huh. And that's not their skill set. Yeah. My friend Alyssa just basically, and this is I'm probably totally ruining what she does, and I apologize, Alyssa if I am, but like she she's saying they can take their phone out now now and go, hey, my name is John, and I'm at the rec center in this town in Kentucky, and we have a hole in our roof.

Look. And they can point to the roof in the rec center and go, we need about $15,000 to repair it. So can you help us? Because a picture's worth worth a thousand words. It's gonna be a leaking hole in the roof. Tells everybody there's a hole in that roof, give them money. Don't make them write about the philosophy of why they need to fix it. Why they need their ceiling, yeah. Build community because it's a friggin' rec center. It's already pretty clear that it's a community center, you know.

[1:03:04] Charlie Murphy: Yep. So so true. Sorry. I wish we could do that in the theater. Like, I wish people, instead of having thinkers, I wish we had more doers. That's what I wish.

[1:03:12] John Cariani: Mm-hmm. Well, I mean, it is, I mean, it's talking about sort of the model you grew up in versus more and more, and of course I'm a part of this bureaucracy now as I help people get into college, but more and more students who are coming, uh uh young actors coming, are coming out of conservatory, coming out of you know educational institutions, which are not that kind of apprentice style learning by doing, figuring it out, fixing the phones, or right, like there is a different version of coming out a little bit more. I already know everything because I've graduated and I'm and I've spent four years training and studying this, and I expect to be at this level, which is a more intellectual understanding of acting, than it is of like I've been in a black box sweating and making terrible theater until I made slightly better theater, you know, that kind of thing.

[1:03:54] John Cariani: Well, yeah, and I think I mean to all the young people out there, I would say I didn't move to New York till I was 27. I didn't get my first Broadway show till I was 34 years old. So if you and a lot of people think that they feel like failures if they're not like wildly successful in their 20s, I'm like, I was a loser. And you're by your in and on your terms, I was kidding people's terms today, I was a loser. You know? And I I think there are a lot of great people who had to wait a really long time for people to recognize that they were any good.

[1:04:32] Charlie Murphy: Yep.

[1:04:32] John Cariani: If you were on social media from 22 to 28, you'd be like, I suck, everyone else is so much better. Yeah, I'm the worst. What what am I doing? Yeah. And to a lot of them I say, to your friends who are on TV shows already, if you're young, they might not be in 10 years. That's facts, you know. You know?

[1:04:48] Charlie Murphy: So what does 2023 find you? So you're working on uh a new play that you're ruining at 54 from what you wrote at 28. Um, where do you find that balance? Of I know you said you're not like I'm an actor or a player, right? You're not concerned about them one or the other or any kind of branding, but where do you find in terms of your life, like where you're putting your energy? Are you putting more energy into auditioning? Are you putting more energy into writing? Are you putting are there other hyphens you've yet to explore that you're thinking about? Or what what does your artistic life look like right now?

[1:05:15] John Cariani: I really like the second half of 2023 because there were no TV and film auditions, which was kind of awesome to not have to do yet, uh just because of the time it takes. So it was kind of nice to I know that's coming again, and I'm like, uh oh. But like I get up every morning and do my writing first because it's the hardest thing I do. I hate writing, I don't like writing. I like creating things for people to to act, to do on stage and on screen. Um I do that first thing in the morning. I do a lot of working on old things. I mean, I have so many things going that I get I have the luxury of working on editing things I'm working on. Um I gather with people and read my stuff all the time because I do not like being alone.

I don't like working alone, it makes me pretty sad, and I have to work hard to keep the sadness at bay. It's a theme in my life. People think I'm such a happy guy, and I am a happy guy, but I have to work really hard to not be a sad guy. You know what I mean? So um and I feel very fortunate that I have enough to do now that there's no question every day of what I have to do.

[1:06:10] Charlie Murphy: Yep.

[1:06:10] John Cariani: But like I just signed up for an on-camera class because I feel like you know what? It's been a while since I've done anything on camera. Pandemic, strike. It's just been a while. Yep. And I just wanted to look at that. But I also feel like you're given what you need, and I know that sounds really weird, and I'm not like a super like I don't know if that's I don't know what that is, but I last year was my year of doing concerts. I've had a lot of stage fright recently, and I got to do a concert with your lovely wife Elizabeth Stanley. When I got asked to do the ragtime concert, I thought, me and a concert? No. No, absolutely not. I'm not doing that. Yeah, what if they asked you to sing something not from the show?

You won't be able to do it. Right, right. What if they're like, can we do another thing? You're like, nope, that's it. I'm doing ragtime. Yep. But I said no at first. Yeah. And then my agent said, Well, this is what they pay. And I said, Oh, oh, I'll be right there. And I have struggled with my singing so much that I had great stage fright during Band's Visit, great stage fright during Carolina Change. And I was starting to wonder what I was going to do. And then I talked to some great friends, Emily Skinner, some other people in the middle of their careers, midlife, who said it's just part of growing older. It's partly because you're aware of so much more than yourself, because that's part of developing, is to become aware of others, you know.

Um and I and she said, do it. And she said, I guarantee you it's preparation. And she was absolutely right. I take longer to learn things now and to understand things now, so I have to prepare longer. Like I'm so jealous of my young friends who can learn things so quickly and answer questions so quickly. I can have and so I've learned that my fear factor is directly related to my preparation. And if I'm not prepared, I'm gonna be a mess. So I've learned if I feel like I'm not gonna be prepared, I do not go into the audition. I just don't I have that luxury, but but I got to kick my stage fright and in these concerts that I did, and it was just such a great because it's made me feel so much freer in every other part of my life. Because I was thinking I was gonna have to give it up. I was like, I guess I can't do musicals anymore.

[1:06:10] Charlie Murphy: Yep.

[1:06:10] John Cariani: You know?

[1:06:10] Charlie Murphy: Yep.

[1:06:10] John Cariani: So you're taking an on-camera class to work on that. You're you're doing some concerts to work on your stage fright, and now you're gonna come play basketball with me, and I'm gonna take you to school um athletically. This is a great year.

[1:08:16] Charlie Murphy: Probably will, but I'm I'm like, I'm I'm lion hearted.

[1:08:22] John Cariani: Oh, there's no doubt. And it's gonna be about the learning, too. It's gonna be about the process of it, is what's gonna really be uh important there. Um you're just so everybody knows, he's 6'4, yeah, and I'm 5'11. That's a significant height advantage, so that's gonna be hard.

[1:08:34] Charlie Murphy: Right.

[1:08:35] John Cariani: You can't be lion hearted if you're 6'8, then you would just be good. You know what I mean? The whole lion heart has to be uh that you have uh something to overcome, right? That's why you have the heart of a lion.

[1:08:42] Charlie Murphy: Well, my brother and I do joke that we love sports, but we're terrible at them. Like I love sports, and I want to be a good basketball player so bad, and I'm not, and I've tried. But I'm fine, like I can play, but I'm just well, we'll see after a little bit of work to go.

[1:08:46] John Cariani: So bad.

[1:08:56] Charlie Murphy: I promise I'd ask you a little bit about the 2023 Celtics. How are you feeling? Are we feeling you're a big Celtics fan? We must be excited.

[1:09:01] John Cariani: I feel much better because last year we started off on such a tear. Yes, that we could not sustain it. I feel good, but I'm very concerned about Minnesota and um Phoenix. And this is how you know your team is good is when you're firstly concerned with the other conference. You're not even worried about your you're like, all right, when we make it into the final Philadelphia, Philadelphia, okay, fine, good. And the Bucks a little bit, but I'm not convinced on their about their defensive.

[1:09:31] Charlie Murphy: Yeah.

[1:09:31] John Cariani: That was just for Ryan Quinn. You just said that for him. So you'd be like, the Bucks suck. I get it. I get it. Um I I don't hate the Bucks, but I don't love the trade. I I'm so lucky. Hey Ryan, we got Drew. Drew Holiday is so good. I love him so much. He's my favorite. And you know what? My favorite thing about Drew, do you mind do you have time?

[1:09:48] Charlie Murphy: Of course.

[1:09:48] John Cariani: What else are we doing doing? This is all this most of our musical theater hopefuls are really into NBA basketball. They love it when I talk about it. Most most well, Drew Holiday was interviewed after they lost to the Pacers, who were fantastic. Um in the in the in-season tournament, which we're big fans of. Which was a lot of fun. Yep, I enjoyed it. Who knew Tyree Talburn? Wow, wow. What a player. And what a I mean, these people are all so incredibly skilled at talking in front of the camera now. Uh-huh. Such skilled in like interviewers, interviewees, I guess. They've all been coached. I mean, they all they're all taking classes on like public relations to do this.

[1:10:22] Charlie Murphy: Oh, absolutely.

[1:10:22] John Cariani: Yeah. That's not just natural. Like they are take they're taking this as like part of their NBA training class, like media relations training.

[1:10:28] Charlie Murphy: Oh, that explains so much because they're just so wonderful.

[1:10:31] John Cariani: So good, I know. Aren't you exhausted right now? How are you ready to do this? Can you just play a game? But Drew Holiday was asked, how do you feel about the in-season tournament? He said, because they had to beat. Remember they had to beat the Knicks by 27? Was it the Knicks? I think they had to beat somebody by a lot in order to qualify for the next round. They had to beat them by 23 and they ended up beating them by 27. Uh-huh. And so they kept their starters in and kept pounding the Knicks. I think it was the Knicks. And so Drew Holiday said, I don't know, man. I'm just of a generation where you don't do that. Like once you won the game, you relax. Yep. And you do not continue to like put up all the time.

He said, I just that's gonna take some getting used to. But I guess if they do it all over the world, and I guess this is the new way, and I guess I'll have to get used to it, but it just doesn't feel very gentleman. And I was like, oh my god, are you even better than I thought you were? Gentleman? You're a gentleman player.

[1:11:19] Charlie Murphy: Yeah, yeah.

[1:11:20] John Cariani: Gentleman baller. Um that's funny. Yes. Well, I do I think you guys have the best chance. I I would say you're the number one favorite right now for me for the to win the win it all. I do think your team, your starting five is unbeatable. Unbelievable.

[1:11:34] Charlie Murphy: Um, okay, we're gonna wrap as we wrap all of these pods with just a little bit of advice. You've given some wonderful advice already, but you know, especially to a young artist out there, maybe who likes 16, 17-year-old John is not totally sure of what where his path or their path is going. They want to grow up to be John Cariani. What would your advice be? What what do you want to say to those that young person out there or the parent of such?

[1:11:56] John Cariani: Well, you know, grow up to be you, first of all, and be you, because being you is unique, and I think it's really important to remember that and make sure you're thinking for yourself. I mean, we have to figure out as theater people how to do what musicians get to do. Musicians, like a piano player can practice. So, how do you practice being an actor? I don't know the answer to that question. That's the age old question. So I think the answer is do your monologues for your friends. If you're writing plays, make sure you're reading them out loud with your friends. Um, do scenes with your friends. If you think of something funny, film it. Uh-huh. And put it on whatever. You know, I don't know anything about socials, but do that.

Like, but also like, don't be afraid of not being totally present in the virtual world. Uh-huh. Like, I think be present in this world and then occasionally be present in the virtual world. Like, unless you're become an influencer or really successful, but like, I don't think you need to feel pressure about posting, posting, posting about all your successes. I think that's really important. Oh gosh, I don't have any good advice.

[1:13:02] Charlie Murphy: But John, that that's almost, and that's exactly, I guess, when you say how do we practice? I guess that was some of what I'm like, what how do we help art young artists with that? And I say young artist, because I think so much they know how to practice, especially let's say our musical theater people. They know how to practice singing, they know how to practice dance. They even, I'm gonna say, know how to practice monologues, insofar as it's like an audition skill that they're working on.

[1:13:24] John Cariani: Yeah.

[1:13:24] Charlie Murphy: But I think what what they struggle with, and I think what you know, something that we try to help with um, you know, in my company, and some of the times with this podcast, is this like, you know, all the colleges will tell them, and we've certainly told them a million times, you have to be your authentic self. It's all about being you. That's how you get into school, right? But I think it's in developing that authentic self. So it's like practicing your artistry that I think most young people are going, I have no idea what that means. I know what it is to drill the monologue and memorize it, but what is like developing my artistic voice or developing who I am as an artist, that part of things is where I think young people go, this is what I have to say. When I when I do teaching, sometimes I ask people what they're passionate about. And right now, at certain schools that I go to, what they're passionate about are things that they see on the news.

[1:14:00] John Cariani: Yeah.

[1:14:11] Charlie Murphy: And I call bullshit on that. I don't think that's always true. I don't think that you can be, you can care deeply, but I don't know if you're necessarily passionate about human rights, say. But you know what I'm passionate about? Women's college basketball. I get enough of it. I read about it every second of the day. So that's passion. That's like it's I think passion is related to addiction a little bit.

[1:14:40] John Cariani: Do you know what I mean? It's like the thing that your heart just can't wait to read about. I can't wait to read about the University of Connecticut women's college basketball team because they were good when I was in college. They got really good after I left college. Uh-huh. And I followed them forever, and I love their coach and I love their players, and I love the WNBA. I don't know what it is. Also, you can see the game so beautifully in the women's game because it's really smart the way they play, and they play through like sets and like it's like chess, you know what I mean? Anyway, so be honest about like what you're passionate about. And I asked these kids, and they were talking about like climate change, and they were talking about peace, and they were talking about racism, and they were talking about very important things.

Yes. There are people who are so passionate about those things that they start organizations like Black Lives Matter. Yeah. There are people who are so passionate that they help us understand our world in a brand new way, but those are the passionate people. I'm like a soldier in those in that way. Like also, you're not a general in that army. You're a general for women's basketball. But I don't have the vision or the passion to start it. What I'm passionate about is like cooking, making an apple pie. And don't be ashamed of the things that you absolutely love, love, love to do and pay attention to that. I love writing dialogue for I love writing things for people to say, and I love hearing the things people say and stealing it and putting it in my plays.

My mind always goes to that when I'm not worried about the Yukon women's basketball team. Do you know what I mean? Or my self-fix. Yep. My passion is that. My passion is music. I'm not great at it, but I love it, and I play a little music every day. Do you know what I mean? Like don't be ashamed though if your passion is like grooming dogs. Uh-huh. Do those things. Right. Because it will remind you how great you feel when you do them. And it'll help you try to figure out how do I replicate this as an artist and not I'm not so I'm not always sad, trying to get a job. And also don't say, like, if you're not acting and you're waiting tables, say if someone says, so are you what do you do when you're not waiting tables?

I wait tables. That's what I do. And then I go and watch Netflix. Do you know what I mean? Like, don't say I'm trying to be an actor, I'm trying to be a writer. That's like, I think that's that's gonna defeat you right there. Uh-huh. I always just try to be honest about what I'm doing. What am I doing right now? I was an actor last week as I was working on a new musical. Now you're just a women's basketball fan. No, I'm a women's basketball fan, but I'm also a writer this week because I'm doing a lot of writing this week. So this week I'm like last week I was not a writer. Do you know what I mean? Like, so I try to be honest about what I'm doing. And it also makes you honest with yourself. Like, and sometimes you find yourself doing things like having to make money.

You know what? You have to make money sometimes, and there's nothing wrong with that, and that you should take pride in that, that you're making enough money to do what you love to do. Yep. Just make sure it doesn't like completely crush your soul and make you a mean person. That's when you know, when people are mean, it's because they're unhappy with their lives. Try to figure out a way to be happy with your life. Find a job that you can stomach, you know. Yep.

[1:17:23] Charlie Murphy: So that's such a great answer. And it feels like if I'm burrowing down on a little bit, it's like what you're really saying is like it's a version of actually being honest with yourself, right? If you say Israel Palestine is your most passionate thing, you go, some people might be, but is that really you?

[1:17:37] John Cariani: Like, yeah. It's like when someone says, What's your favorite movie? Like the Godfather part two. And I'm like, what is it really? Like, what is it actually? Is it the Godfather or is it the notebook? Like you really, and I don't like it when people say, Well, this is a really guilty pleasure. I'm like, no, no, no, it's not, it's a pleasure.

[1:17:49] Charlie Murphy: It's a pleasure.

[1:17:50] John Cariani: There's no guilty pleasure, there's just pleasure. If you enjoy watching Housewives of Atlanta, watch it.

[1:17:54] Charlie Murphy: Yep.

[1:17:55] John Cariani: You know?

[1:17:56] Charlie Murphy: Yep.

[1:17:56] John Cariani: I don't know what to say. If I have a whole other podcast just about the television show Survivor, that's okay. It's okay for me to have that, and it's true for my life.

[1:18:04] Charlie Murphy: Yes, I do.

[1:18:05] John Cariani: Well, that's awesome. Recording that later tonight. You know, we give these people, we give them NBA, we give them Survivor, we give them whatever they want. That's this is what the people really want is a 20-year-old reality television show.

[1:18:15] Charlie Murphy: Um, John, this was such a joy to get to do. Um, any other final words for the people? Anything else that you needed to squeeze in there? Any other shout-outs to um various athletic organizations?

[1:18:26] John Cariani: No, I don't. I want to know why so many women are tearing their ACLs in the basketball world.

[1:18:31] Charlie Murphy: Okay, somebody get on that and find that out for John. Because it's just happening too much, and it's really sad.

[1:18:38] John Cariani: John, you're making it impossible to end this podcast.

[1:18:41] Charlie Murphy: I'm trying to put a cap on it, a button. I'm trying to make a swish, have the buzzer.

[1:18:47] John Cariani: Um, this is stuff I meant.

[1:18:48] Charlie Murphy: Thanks so much for this.

[1:18:49] John Cariani: I'm sorry, I'm sorry.

[1:18:55] Charlie Murphy: Oh man, that was a fun interview. And you're getting a long intro and a long outro today. Can you tell it was tough for me to take a week off? I have so much to say.

[1:19:04] Um, but also, I thought John gave so much great fodder for takeaways, and this is a juicy time of year to talk about takeaways, so let's hit them.

[1:19:12] Um, first off, I have to do a Mia culpa on me saying that the little prince was coming to Broadway. Fully was on Broadway last year for like two months. That's how old my information was. I just remember seeing it coming and thought, well, I want to catch that and fully missed it that it happened. It's already over.

[1:19:27] There you go.

[1:19:28] I have a young child. What can I say? I also really love that part at the end about your passions versus your interests and what causes you're a soldier in versus which things you are truly deeply personally passionate about. That is to me so interesting. I think it's one of the best bits of advice given on this podcast.

[1:19:44] You know, it's honest and it's kind of usable, I think. You know, it's so hard to figure out how to be yourself. We've asked that question so many different times, but I think that is one avenue that is phrased really cogently. If part of what is preventing you from being yourself is that you're trying to pretend to be a more idealized version that you think people want you to be, there's almost always a more interesting answer underneath that answer you think people want.

[1:20:07] I mean, that's especially true for stuff like interviews. It's true for material choice, so many things. What do you think is actually interesting versus what do you think I'm gonna think is interesting?

[1:20:16] Uh, I might not actually think women's basketball is interesting myself, but I will learn much more about your essential humanity if you talk in detail about that passion than if you tell me why you're passionate about Moby Dick, assuming that you're not actually passionate about Moby Dick, right?

[1:20:29] That's not to say, again, like John says, that's not to say that you might not be the person who is genuinely most passionate about Israel-Palestine or racism or transgender rights. And maybe you do have a unique and specific perspective on it that is different than other people's who are passionate about those things, or even if it's not different, but you really are truly genuinely passionate about that, go for it.

[1:20:48] But it's really just to say it is okay if the answer is not one of those things. It is okay if you like Love Actually better than The Godfather, if that's true for you.

[1:20:58] I also thought this interview was another great example. We talked about, you know, John said he had no goals whatsoever. That might be a little bit more extreme than where we talked about in the past.

[1:21:06] But you know, he talked about there are more things on heaven and earth than can be dreamt of in your philosophies. We've talked about that kind of control of what you can and can't control in this crazy career.

[1:21:16] And John talked a lot about just, you know, seeking art and avoiding his sadness. And I think that's a really healthy way to look at the control you have of your career. We've talked about that on other takeaway, so I won't go too deep into that.

[1:21:27] Another thing we've hit before in terms of continuing education, but did you love that John casually dropped, I just signed up for an on-camera class? What a flex.

[1:21:36] Very cool. I want to take that on-camera class now.

[1:21:38] Also, stuff we talked about directly, especially in Carrie Butler's recent episode. Um, but we love John's director of Stage West, I think it was called, was his reminder about the people who are jerks versus nice people in their interaction with interns, that kind of status difference of when you're climbing the ladder or falling down at it.

[1:21:54] And I really like the empathy of John saying that it comes from their desperation and insecurity, as opposed to them just being jerks, which I think is really true. You know, looking back now, I can see people who were more disappointed in their careers at the moment, you know, being why they didn't always choose kindness.

[1:22:09] But of course, as listeners, let's be those people who are constantly choosing kindness. Yes?

[1:22:13] Charlie Murphy: Okay, but my big takeaway from today, it's one I've wanted to do for a while, and it isn't particularly about John or this episode, but was relevant in today's interviews, as it has been in many episodes.

[1:22:23] And it's just about the potentially changing likelihood of different paths in their relevancy. Especially when we talk about the sort of BA to apprenticeship to sort of stumble my way into New York City kind of path that many of our guests have had on the show, especially some of our guests in their 40s, 50s, 60s, and olders.

[1:22:41] These paths are and continue to be absolutely valid and absolutely can happen. You know, the randomness of what it is to bump into somebody here, you work with somebody there and you make a strong connection, that could be every bit as large as connection through school.

[1:22:53] Plenty of people still meet their agents through a friends from a show, as opposed to, or taking an industry class, like John talked about, as opposed to a showcase.

[1:23:00] But also when we talk about the ages of most of our guests who are not in their 20s, whether that's my beautiful wife, you know, creating her BS major later in college, or so many people talking about that kind of backward stumble.

[1:23:11] Some of that, by the way, we should just acknowledge, is a more of their humility in hindsight, you know, as opposed to their very hard work that they likely had to take to get there.

[1:23:19] But just I want to say, and the reason for this takeaway, I do think it is harder and different now. You know, I wish I could have all of our amazing MTCA students who just went through the process come on now and tell you their whole paths looking into the future, because there would be much more relevancy to what your likely day-to-day experience will be where you're on the ground as a 23-year-old, or if you're listening to this as a 20-year-old, where you're gonna be in a couple years.

[1:23:41] Of course, most MTCAs who are recent grads that I'll have on the show, they're gonna have had an atypical experience because I'll likely have had very quick success if I'm having them on at 25.

[1:23:50] And the ones who work hard for 10 years and then pop are still gonna be 10 years away from popping. So, you know, let's be honest, you're not gonna listen to too too many episodes from people who don't have any credits yet to back up their words.

[1:24:00] But I just want to make sure that that was spoken to. That's not to say there's a lot of actionable advice there, since I think the ethos of John's path is beautiful, and like so many of our other paths that we've had on the show, including ones that still absolutely happen to this day, but to say the economy of the business is different now, that it is significantly changed by the prevalence of excellent BFA grads, and really what's more relevant here, so many of them who tend to know sooner.

[1:24:24] And so a higher percentage of working graduating actors are likely gonna have BFAs, that is undeniably true. So when John was going to school, there were many, many fewer BFAs, and therefore many, many fewer competing actors with BFAs.

[1:24:36] So there's a little less of a squeeze on that path than there is today. I think it's likely comparable, though of course I'm not an expert on this, to the value of a BA versus a post-grad degree in other fields.

[1:24:45] We've seen that happen in the past 30 years, right? That the same way that, you know, as things get more competitive, you might now expect a master's degree for a certain job over a bachelor's or a PhD over a master's, right?

[1:24:54] I think there is a comparable feeling in this industry of like, where did you train that exists more strongly than it did 30 years ago, which is a point of reference for plenty of our guests.

[1:25:02] They're talking about when they hit the business 20, 30 years ago. So just to say, yes, I hear you, and we're gonna keep trying to have on different paths, including I'm gonna try to sneak on some other very young guests in the future as well.

[1:25:12] But the odd thing, and this is the other reason I want to bring this up, and what I'd love for you all to pay attention to, is that to this day, those odd paths are still totally relevant and possible. You could absolutely still be a bartender for a random producer who comes into your restaurant and asks you to audition, and that's how you book the big big break.

[1:25:28] That's totally possible. And if you're saying to yourself, okay, but the only musical training John had was being in an a cappella group in college, yeah, I would point to many of our other non-musical theater trained guests, like we just had Dan Weschler of Pig Pen Fame and all those Pig Pen boys.

[1:25:42] They're in their early 30s and they only trained as actors, or John Bellman is, I think, is early 40s, same idea. But yes, I do think there are now more trained MTs because of that rapid increase in BFAs.

[1:25:52] And so does it make it trickier and a little more competitive for non-trained singers? For sure.

[1:25:56] Uh, and I think maybe more relevant, and this is what I was trying to say in this bigger point, that in general the pound the pavement mentality of 30 years ago is certainly harder in a more competitive world where there's an online pre-screening process, which can make it a little harder to get physically in front of people without that initial foot in the door.

[1:26:12] Certainly those open calls still exist. You know, now it's online signups as asking for a kind of digital fluency compared to waking up at 4 a.m. to stand in McDonald's line, you guys have heard of.

[1:26:22] But I do think that path is just harder than it used to be. I know my first open call that I ever did led me directly to an audition and then two callbacks for a Broadway show.

[1:26:30] This was a production of Romeo and Juliet with Orlando Bloom, if anyone remembers that production. I mean, that's a bit more recent than John's experience, but I think even then I was pretty lucky.

[1:26:39] And that was with me having a fancy BFA and lots of credits already on my resume. And I do remember feeling like hey, this is a bit unfair to the people who are waiting in line who don't have any training.

[1:26:48] I've done this show already, I've played this role, I've trained for years in classical text, and I'm attending this open call. It's a big leg up compared to a kind of dewy-eyed kid who just rolled out of a BA program where maybe they've only read Shakespeare, or they've done one Shakespeare production or whatever it is.

[1:27:01] So just that to say, again, I'll say if you're out there feeling like some of these older theater stories from our artists who are in their 40s and 50s and 60s, or in Dakin's Matthew case in their 80s, sort of feel like those millennial memes comparing how parents afforded their homes and why can't you?

[1:27:16] You know, there's like you just gotta work hard or your blue-collar job and you'll qualify for a down payment, and there you go. Your investment quadruples in value.

[1:27:23] Um that's all just to say we hear you, that is granted. If you're out there screaming at your phone that it's harder now and different than it used to be, you're right, and stop screaming at your phone.

[1:27:31] And I think it will be interesting to see how that bubble bursts or doesn't with so many BFAs now. It could be that in 10 years they will be even more expected, or maybe it could be there'll be less valued.

[1:27:41] You know, we'll see. Other professions they're sometimes are getting rid of a need for a four-year degree and things like trades, where we know in Pennsylvania the governor just eliminated degrees as a requirement for government jobs and some other places are following suit.

[1:27:52] There, the focus being more on skills and experience rather than degrees for jobs that might not need it. And unquestionably for the acting biz, it is about the training and the skill set, much more than the piece of paper that ultimately lands you the job.

[1:28:03] However, like in many jobs, having that validation and pre-screen verification of ability as a reason to get your foot in the door can be a real factor.

[1:28:11] I will say it is hard, for instance, to get an interview at MTCA if you haven't gone to a competitive BFA or NMFA training program. It's not impossible, and we absolutely believe in the equivalent and relevant skills as experience.

[1:28:23] But when you have boatloads of excellent candidates who have that training on their resume, of course it's a leg up to get in the door for us.

[1:28:29] So all that say, yes, I hear you. We're gonna keep trying to speak to what is most relevant in 2024, as well as bringing you as many different kinds of paths to all the infinite and myriad paths ones might find to success on the map of this college edition process.

[1:28:42] And there it is. We've worked our name into the outro, so you know it's time to thank Meghan Cordier and Kelly Prendergast for their work on this episode.

[1:28:49] Check us out on Instagram at mapping the college edition, check us out on TikTok, check us out on the new BPN website if you've seen it. It's very fancy.

[1:28:56] You can listen directly if you hate downloading us onto your phones. But if you love downloading us on your phones, go ahead, follow, subscribe, hit us with a five-star rating, leave us a sweet review.

[1:29:05] Who's gonna be the first review of 2024? If you leave a nice one, I'll even read it on the show. How about that?

[1:29:11] Don't forget to order your belt boxes this week. 10% discount with the code MTCA2024, and the link will be in the show notes.

[1:29:18] And to my young artists out there mapping their journeys, don't forget to not snot on potential agents, but do snot in your belt boxes. We'll see you next week.