This transcript was automatically generated and might contain errors.

[0:00] Robert Bannon: Are you ready? It's The Roundtable with me, Robert Bannon.

[0:10] Robert Bannon: Well, welcome to The Roundtable, everybody. My name is Robert Bannon. You're listening to us on Broadway World, the Broadway Podcast Network, iHeart, Spotify, wherever artists talk about art. Sometimes art, artists, and theater can come to you right from your phone, your car, your headphones. You can be at the gym, you could be anywhere, and we're going to talk about a brand new piece of work. For an hour and 27 minutes, you can get a full cast audio drama with some of your favorite Broadway superstars. I love this whole thing. I love it, I love it, I love it, and I want you to... It's about mom's daughter's life. The writer, the director is here to tell us all about it. Ava Geyer, who wrote Feeding Frenzy, is here, and then Tony nominated Annie Kaufman. I call her Annie because we go way back.

[0:58] Annie Kaufman: That's right.

[0:59] Robert Bannon: Annie. We've been in this business on the hustle together. Welcome, Ava. Welcome, Annie. Thank you for being here.

[1:06] Ava Geyer: Thank you.

[1:07] Annie Kaufman: So good to be here. Really, really good to be here, and very fun to talk about this piece of work.

[1:14] Robert Bannon: I love that because Audible, everybody, and the work that's being done, where some incredible works are... People complain, Ava. Theater lovers complain. They can't afford to see all the shows.

[1:25] Ava Geyer: Right. The accessibility conversation.

[1:26] Robert Bannon: It is expensive, and they want to see new works. We want to support new works. How did they sell you, Ava, to take your baby and make it an Audible?

[1:36] Ava Geyer: Oh, well, so I created this baby for Audible. Yeah. They have had this commissioning program for a few years. It's called the Emerging Playwrights Commission, where they just get emerging writers to write plays. It can be anything that you want. You get a nice, let's say an adult-sized sum of money, which was certainly more than I'd ever gotten to write a play before. I was very happy to do it for more than the nothing I usually do. Yeah, it's a really wonderful opportunity to make something and know that it's going to be realized in a way that we don't always when we're playwrights, and make something, as you're alluding to, that people who aren't in New York City can consume and can consume in the middle of their day.

[2:21] Annie Kaufman: That's very moving to me, Ava, because I moved from New Jersey to Detroit two years ago for my husband and his job. Everyone said, you will leave New York. You will never have art and culture in your life ever again. There's culture and art everywhere. Now, with the internet and with things like this, people that don't have to be in Times Square or New York City can enjoy this. Annie, is that appealing to you as a director, that it's for everyone?

[2:46] Annie Kaufman: Oh, I love that. Yeah, I think the accessibility conversation is huge. Also, I think that this is a really different kind of art making. I'm very, very drawn to it because I think, first of all, it's accessible to everyone and the resources are nil. I will tell you, I mean, that's not entirely true, but I will tell you that there are so many actors who love doing this work because they can come to work wearing pajamas or whatever. There's not a lot of planning or just sort of fussy. There's no fussiness with it. It's in the genre of the radio play, which I think is also such an incredibly engaging type of theater because what you're really engaging is audiences' imagination. I find that to be incredibly gratifying, both on the theater-making part of it and the listening part of it.

[4:02] Annie Kaufman: And also, sorry, I'm just going off because I'm such a fan of this genre and what was put to Ava and how she delivered on the sort of tactics in making this an exciting thing to listen to. And you're playing with very, very specific things, Ava, in this that do not necessarily happen in live theater, you know, visual theater.

[4:33] Robert Bannon: Right. It's exciting. You got to check it out, everybody. So, Ava, tell us a little bit about Cindy and River and how this show came to be your inspiration.

[4:43] Ava Geyer: I wanted to write something about a mom and a young adult daughter coming back together after their first significant chunk of time apart, like two people who have sort of lived in parallel forever, and now they're going off to live separate lives. And the tension of, particularly in that relationship, what it can be to sort of circle each other and wonder, are you still the same person? How much have you changed? And horror felt like a really fun way to do that because then the question of, like, is it still you in there can be literal. So, yeah, that was my way in. And a spooky, secular, capitalist Christmas felt like fun. The mom works at a, I don't call it a William Sonoma, but it is a William Sonoma.

So, yeah, and really about what does it mean to try and save somebody that you really love and the mix of deep love and affection and kind of also like aggression and frustration that we can have with people in our lives who we love but have struggled for a long time. Like, what is the sort of risky unilateral version of, like, I'm going to save you whether you want it or not. And again, doing that in, like, a horror, supernatural way felt very fun.

[5:59] Robert Bannon: It's a trip that there's a mother who's got a daughter who has a roommate. And what will a mother, a mother knows no bounds to save her daughter, I guess is really what this, or thinks she's got to save her daughter. What a fun premise. It's really fun to play with. Annie, for you, when you read this, what were your first thoughts? How do you add the suspense to an audio? Like, how do you get the actors to be suspenseful?

[6:28] Annie Kaufman: Well, thankfully, when I read this, I thought what was so incredible about it was, you know, I love that it takes the mother-daughter relationship, you know, and sort of plays it out to its sort of, like, horror ends. Meaning, like, it feels very expressionistic in a way. Like, you know, the daughter trying to save her mother and literally, well, I'm not going to, I don't want to spoil anything, but, you know, sort of making a deal with the devil because that's how much it means to her. And also the sacrifice that the mother makes for the daughter in terms of not trapping her daughter in a space where she'll be doomed to live out her mother's legacy or to burden her daughter. So, in a way, it sort of, like, takes those desires and just continues to iterate on them until we get to a very, like, spooky place.

I mean, I think, you know, Ava did a lot in the writing of it to make it feel, you know, sort of make the suspense so alive. And it really is, to be honest, a real collaboration with our sound designer and our tech, you know, and the tech people because they're crucial in terms of how, you know, what the tempo is, what the silences are, how those are filled, what is the sound landscape or music landscape that adds to the tension, you know? So, it's an incredibly detailed and deep collaboration between Ava, me, the actors as well, and the sound person, to be honest. Yeah, the wonderful Timothy Kim, who did really excellent work on it. Yeah.

[8:31] Robert Bannon: It's exciting. Go to Audible. It's an Audible original. If you have Amazon, you can try out Audible for free. You can get this for, like, under 11 bucks. It's, like, $10 and change. You can have it, listen to it. It's great. It passes by your time on a ride home or if you're trying to chill out after a day at work or at the gym on the elliptical machine when I really want to throw that machine out the window and I'm tired of listening to my workout playlist, this will give you entry. It will make the time fly on by. So, check it out. Ava, what's it like to give up your words and then give them to actors and to a director and now they're not yours anymore? They add their own spin. Is it thrilling? Scary? Judgy? Like, what's it like?

[9:12] Ava Geyer: Judgy. It is all of it. I'm no stranger to it. I've been writing plays for a long time. One thing really, I mean, right, which should be said, I've handed my words over to a lot of really amazing directors. To hand them over to Annie Kaufman is, like, not a burden or not a scary thing at all. It's, like, very much trusting. And then what's funny about the audio play thing, which I think is also something that actors like about it, but that I found is it's this funny mix of, in a way, you get so much more control than you do in theatre, where, especially as a playwright in a new playroom, I can give a note to my director that then they're going to pass on in as concise and clear a way as I want.

But then, right, as we all know, it's why we love it. It's the tricky thing about it. It's, like, ephemeral. It's a little different every time it happens. And the ability to sit and listen to multiple takes and be like, oh, I like the first sentence of this take and the second sentence of that take. You know, it's a, I think it's a dangerous proposition to give.

[10:20] Robert Bannon: Writer that much like post-production control, but was also really fun to be able to nail this is the story as I heard it in my head. And as you know, you're a performer, like you can really change the storytelling of something, the tone of something, the pacing by how it's performed. So for me and Annie to be able to be like, this was the version that was sort of how I heard it, it's thrilling and very cool.

[10:44] Robert Bannon: Yeah, and I think that like part of, the thing that I also really love about the quick and dirty of an audio play is, unless you're recording a performance of something that you've done on stage, I mean, which is what Audible does, right? If you're only doing it in the Audible tradition or whatever, like the actors have, you can just go like do three different takes of this and stitch it together. You can also, I also feel like there's less of a full investment, sort of ownership. I mean, we all, no one really has ownership over the character in a way in one of these things. I mean, Ava probably has the most, but there's a sense of the play is much, it can go quicker, deeper, because there's less of a like a possession of the character by the actor.

[11:53] Robert Bannon: Yeah, I would say that too. I love that. It's get in there, get it done. Annie, for you, if people have been going to Broadway shows over the past few years and seeing incredible award-winning plays, then they know that Marjorie Prime and The Sign and Sidney Brustein's Window and Mary Jane is all of your work. So when you're working with Oscar Isaac or you're working with Rachel McAdams or you're working with Cynthia Nixon, they're such physical actors. You're seeing them, you're giving them blocking, you're explaining to them how to move their body. How do you do that when you have a cast, which is an incredible cast, people who have been here, incredible cast? They don't have, you don't have the physicality to tell the story. So what does that, how does that make you think of direction differently?

[12:40] Annie Kaufman: Well, that's such a good question because I also think that it's so different doing a recording of, let's say, The Sign and Sidney Brustein's Window versus Feeding Frenzy, which is made just for this. In a way, I remember just having to sort of like pull, have the actors really pull back when they had done the play and then we're recording it because, you know what I mean? I feel like there's just an, to bring a theater performance into the recording studio feels completely overdone. You actually need to kind of make it, you know, your audience is here instead of way out there. And that's what I really like about this is that it's so intimate and that it actually is in a weird way more natural because people are not trying to hit the, you know, the lady at the back of the hall. It feels like everyone's literally in the same space. So yeah, it just feels a little bit more natural, I would say.

[13:54] Robert Bannon: Annie must've been in my television auditions then where they're like, you don't have to do that much. You do way too much.

[14:01] Annie Kaufman: Exactly, exactly. I mean, I think about that a lot and I think about how actors who were normally working on television and film when they come to this, you know, come to a theater space, how it's just a totally different ball game. So if you love Joanna Day, if you love Jen Colella, if you love these incredible actors who have wowed you on stage, you gotta listen to this. So Ava, tell me, you were a part of the emerging playwrights. They pick your play. What has that done for you as a young writer? What does it mean for you to have that validation and to be picked out of the many submissions that have been sent in? They picked you.

[14:38] Ava Geyer: Yeah, I mean, right, it's given me access to this level of talent that I, you know, I can't approach Joanna Day on my own via email nor Annie Kaufman. And yeah, there's a legitimacy piece for better or for worse when people hear a corporate name next to your name, they say, well, somebody thought you were worth investing in and as we've been talking about, to have a proof of concept thing that is not just a script that is, as Annie said, when we first started working together, like it should really be a movie for your ears. And I think we've really delivered on that. So it's wonderful to have something that is not just a blueprint, but is the fully fledged thing.

[15:23] Robert Bannon: I know that this is made for Audible, but is there life beyond this? Is that a possibility or does it just live here?

[15:30] Ava Geyer: I mean, hey, if anybody wants to pay me to develop it for theater, I'm so down. I think, you know, as Annie was speaking to, right, writing horror, I've never tried to write a horror play for the stage. I think there are really smart people who have done that and this leans into the gore, like, right? I didn't have to be coy or elegant about what are we doing when there's blood on stage. We could just have there be blood squirt sounds and things could get like gonzo and crazy. And because of there's a sort of like chamber piece quality to this, where it's primarily mom and daughter, like psychologically trapped in a house together. And there's that kind of like cat and mouse thing. So, hey, I'll put it out there.

I think there's like wonderful potential for it as a very easy to make horror movie. But I think the stage version of it is also interesting because there's a hell of a lot of direct address in it. Johanna Day delivers these like wonderful monologues that are ranging over time and tone. And I've never done a play that has leaned heavily on that either. So I think that's always a fun thing to play with, like doing the thing that they tell you in playwriting classes not to do, which is to have the, you know, protagonist talking directly to the audience. So there's potential there, yeah.

[16:56] Robert Bannon: These two are brilliant, everybody. If you're listening, you know, Ava is a, just wait to see what Ava's going to do. She's got her fancy Princeton degree. She's got her, she's ready to go. Okay, everybody? And then, you know, Annie, everybody, has like a 15 degrees. She's taught directing everywhere. She even has a degree in Slavic language, which—

[17:20] Annie Kaufman: Wow, Robert, you've really done your homework.

[17:22] Robert Bannon: I did not know that. I am Slovakian, a quarter. And my grandma used to say Zima, because she was cold. That's probably not even the right language. But that's what I got, Annie.

[17:36] Annie Kaufman: That's so hilarious. Yeah, there's tons of Slovak, I mean, not tons, but there's more than just Russian in that Slovak.

[17:45] Robert Bannon: So—

[17:45] Annie Kaufman: If I was 20 pounds lighter, you would see my Slovakian cheekbones, but there's deep dish pizza stuck in here right now.

[17:52] Robert Bannon: Oh my God, I love it. So they're brilliant. They have incredible, and that was Stanford. So they were very smart. So you're all, you're very smart, smart, incredible people out here. Women making art and theater, getting to be writers and directors, putting a new medium out here that you can afford. If you're going to acting school, or you want to apply to a school like them, and you need a new monologue that has not been done 75 million times, this is a place to listen to it. If you're looking for something fun, it's the fall, it's spooky, it's the weekend. I don't know what you're doing, camping, sleeping. I don't sleep, I'm too New Jersey. Hey, doing dishes, doing the laundry. I mean, I love that, you know, audio can live with you in the banal moments of your life. It's kind of fun.

[18:32] Annie Kaufman: That is perfect. When you're vacuuming and cleaning, this is your moment. Taking the dog for a walk.

[18:39] Robert Bannon: That's perfect, that's perfect. Well, before I let you all go, what, Ava, where do you find inspiration for your writing?

[18:49] Ava Geyer: Mostly eavesdropping. Mostly hearing random snippets of conversations on the street. Yeah, the sort of really tender and awkward and sometimes kind of like surreal ways that we communicate with each other. Yeah, I mean, right as we were talking about before I work in a corporate office and there's a lot of wandering around being like kind of a ghost butler and I hear some pretty amazing stuff. So yeah, mostly that.