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[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 Director Anne Kaufman. I call her Annie because we go way back. That's right. We've been in this business on the hustle together. Welcome, Ava. Welcome, Annie. Thank you for being here.

[1:07] Ava Geyer: So good to be here. Really, really good to be here. And it's very fun to talk about this piece of work.

[1:13] Robert Bannon: I love that because Audible, everybody, and the work that's being done, where some incredible works are... People complain, Ava. Peter Lovers complain. They can't afford to see all the shows.

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

[1:34] Ava Geyer: Oh, well, so I created this baby for Audible. 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. And 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] Ava Geyer: That's very moving to me, Annie, because I moved from New Jersey to Detroit two years ago for my husband and his job. And everyone said, you will leave New York. You will never have art and culture in your life ever again. And there's culture and art everywhere. And now with the Internet and with things like this, people that don't have to be in Times Square or in New York City can enjoy this. Annie, is that appealing to you as a director that it's for everyone?

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

And I find that to be incredibly gratifying, both on the theater making part of it and a listening part of it. And also this 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, you know, 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. 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.

[4:40] 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, a spooky secular capitalist Christmas felt like fun. The mom works at a I don't call it a Williams-Sonoma, but it is a Williams-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?

[6:27] Anne Kaufman: Well, thankfully, when I read this, I thought what was so incredible about it was, I love that it takes the mother-daughter relationship 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 that 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, or so, you know, it's an incredibly detailed and deep collaboration between Ava, me, the actors as well, and the sound person, to be honest.

[8:25] Anne Kaufman: Yeah. The wonderful Timothy Kim who did really excellent work on it. Yeah. 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, 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?

[9:08] 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, it 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 theater, 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...

[14:28] Robert Bannon: What does 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 Johanna 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.

[15:22] 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 theatre, I'm so down. I think, you know, as Annie was speaking to, 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 protagonist talking directly to the audience. So there's potential there. Yeah.

[16:55] 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

[17:19] Ava Geyer: Wow, Robert, you've really done your homework.

[17:23] Robert Bannon: I am Slovakian, a quarter. And my grandma used to say Zima because she was cold. That's probably not even right language. But that's the, that's what I got.

[17:35] Ava Geyer: That's so hilarious. Yeah, there's tons of Slovak, I mean, not tons, but there's more than just Russian in that Slovak. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[17:44] Robert Bannon: If I was 20 pounds lighter, you would see my Slovakian cheekbones, but there's deep dish pizza stuck in here right now.

[17:51] Ava Geyer: Oh, my God, I love it. So they're, they're brilliant. They have incredible, and that was Stanford. So they're very smart. So you're all there. 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, I don't sleep. I'm, I'm, I'm too new.

[18:24] Ava Geyer: 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.

[18:31] Anne Kaufman: That is perfect. When you're vacuuming, cleaning, this is your moment.

[18:36] Ava Geyer: Taking the dog for a walk.

[18:38] Anne Kaufman: That's perfect.

[18:41] Robert Bannon: Before I let you all go, what, what, Ava, where, where do you find inspiration for your writing?

[18:48] 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.

[19:22] Robert Bannon: I love it. And Annie, what makes you say yes when someone sends you a script and you're going to invest years of your life and get no sleep and stress to put a show up on stage or on tape?

[19:35] Anne Kaufman: Yeah, I mean, I think it's, it's hard to even, it's hard for me, even me to know sort of what, what attracts me. I think when I look at, if I look at my history, I think there, I'm, I work on stuff that I'm, I'm wrestling with myself and my own life over. This is my way of figuring, of figuring shit out in my own life. So, yeah, so I think that's where if there's any kind of pattern, I think that's where it is.

[20:07] Robert Bannon: Incredible. So get it, get Audible. Shout out to everybody that's over there creating art for everybody. Ava, I have an idea. So there's this, there's this young lady, she's learning slow, she's a Slavic.

[20:17] Ava Geyer: Yeah, yeah.

[20:18] Robert Bannon: She goes on to be a Tony nominated director. There's a whole journey. I think there's something there.

[20:24] Ava Geyer: Yeah, totally.

[20:25] Robert Bannon: Barbara, you are so delightful.

[20:27] Ava Geyer: She's in like a green hoodie, I think maybe.

[20:30] Robert Bannon: Yeah, green hoodie. Thank you both so much for being here. It was a pleasure and a joy to talk to you. I love what y'all are doing.

[20:36] Ava Geyer: Thanks for having us.

[20:37] Anne Kaufman: You too.

[20:38] Robert Bannon: Come back anytime.

[20:39] Ava Geyer: What a pleasure. All right. Bye.