Dead Accounts: The Playwright's Note

America doesn’t know how to talk to itself anymore.

It wasn’t always like this. I was born and raised in the

Midwest, where people were taught that decency and in-

tegrity and community were all important values. We were

democrats with a little ‘d.’ We were told that hard work and

talent and character would get you somewhere. At school,

we learned it was important to share. On Arbor Day, we all

planted trees.

And we admired the people who lived and worked on the

East Coast. Writers like Arthur Miller and Tennessee Wil-

liams were heroic figures. The great museums and orchestras

and universities were, to us, the jewels of American accom-

plishment. It was an unimaginable thrill, to go New York and

see the Statue of Liberty and the Empire State Building and

Times Square. To see a play on Broadway - which cost I think

about $25 dollars - was a dream beyond dreaming.

I don’t know what New Yorkers thought about Mid-

westerners during those years—and this wasn’t all that long

ago; I’m actually not a hundred years old. I do know what

New Yorkers think of the Midwest now, and I know what

the Midwest thinks of New York. When I go to Ohio to visit

relatives on holidays, I am often astonished by the level of

casual dismissal which is offered up by way of discussion.

At a time when the country faces deeply complex challenges

around it’s future and the future of the planet itself, there is

a sense that only crazy east coast liberals worry about that

stuff.

There is a sense that the East Coast has lost its moral

center. The catastrophe of the banking industry, and the

scandalous waste of our character, perpetrated by our gov-

ernment and the media has offended the Midwest so deeply

they don’t want to even talk about it. Or, they do want to

talk about it, but they are so angry and simultaneously so

polite, they don’t know how to talk about it. So they bury

their heads in Fox News and pretend that reducing the deficit

will salve their anxiety.

Meanwhile, the East Coast cannot believe how stupid

the center of the country seems to have gotten.

How do you make this funny? There are times when I

wonder how I ever thought that I could dramatize the death

of a national discussion as a family comedy. But so many

of us are the spawn of this perplexing divide; we carry it in

our DNA. The question—How did we start there, and get

here?—is in fact a question of mortality. Which, as we all

know, is hilarious.

Death is coming to our little family, and so we fight to

live. Peculiarly, that is funny. And we do have things to teach

each other. As long as we can remember how to talk.

—Theresa Rebeck

Dead Accounts: Meet the Playwright

Theresa Rebeck is a widely produced playwright throughout the United States and abroad. New York productions of her work include Dead Accounts at the Music Box Theatre; Seminar at the Golden Theatre; Mauritius at the Biltmore Theatre in a Manhattan Theater Club Production; The Scene, The Water’s Edge, Loose Knit, The Family of Mann and Spike Heels at Second Stage; Bad Dates, The Butterfly Collection and Our House at Playwrights Horizons; The Understudy at the Laura Pels Theater in a Roundabout Theatre Company production; and View of the Dome at New York Theatre Workshop. Omnium Gatherum (co-written, finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 2003) was featured at the Humana Festival, and had a commercial run at the Variety Arts Theatre. Her newest work, Poor Behavior premiered at the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles in 2011. Dead Accounts, commissioned by the Cincinnati Playhouse, premiered January 2012. 

In television, Ms. Rebeck has written for Dream On, Brooklyn Bridge, L.A. Law, American Dreamer, Maximum Bob, First Wave, and Third Watch. She was the creator of the NBC drama Smash. She has been a writer/producer for Canterbury’s Law, Smith, Law and Order: Criminal Intent and NYPD Blue. Her produced feature films include Harriet the Spy, Gossip, and the independent features Sunday on the Rocks and Seducing Charlie Barker, an adaptation of her play, The Scene. Awards include the Mystery Writer’s of America’s Edgar Award, the Writer’s Guild of America award for Episodic Drama, the Hispanic Images Imagen Award, and the Peabody, all for her work on NYPD Blue. She has won the National Theatre Conference Award (for The Family of Mann), and was awarded the William Inge New Voices Playwriting Award in 2003 for The Bells. Mauritius was originally produced at Boston’s Huntington Theatre, where it received the 2007 IRNE Award for Best New Play as well as the Eliot Norton Award.  Other awards include the PEN/Laura Pels Foundation Award, the Athena Film Festival Award, an Alex Award, a Lilly Award and in 2011 she was named one of the 150 Fearless Women in the World by Newsweek.

Ms. Rebeck is originally from Cincinnati and holds an MFA in Playwrighting and a PhD. in Victorian Melodrama, both from Brandeis University. She is a proud board member of the Dramatists Guild, a Contributing Editor to the Harvard Review, an Associate Artist of the Roundabout Theatre Company, a Playwright Adviser and Board Member of the LARK and and has taught at Brandeis University and Columbia University. She lives in Brooklyn with her husband and two children.

Dead Accounts: Meet the Cast

Michael Champlin (Jack) Michael is a South Bay actor and director who has been part of a few dozen productions at theaters such as The Pear, The Dragon, Bus Barn, Northside and TheatreWorks. He was most recently seen in The Dragon's production of Waiting for Godot, and he couldn't be happier to return to this stage again so quickly with the incredibly talented cast and crew of Dead Accounts. Much love and thanks to his wife Katie and his boys, Jack & Henry.

Janine Saunders Evans (Jenny) Janine very proudly returns for her 8th show at Dragon and is excited to tackle this poignant and relevant play with such a strong and committed cast. She holds a BA in Theatre from Santa Clara University and has also worked at Santa Clara Players, Palo Alto Players, Renegade Theatre Experiment, Silicon Valley Shakespeare, Pear Theatre and Shotz SF.  Favorite roles include Meena in Rx here at Dragon - which earned her a Theatre Bay Area Award nomination in 2014 - and Ivy in August Osage County at Pear this past summer. A Bay Area native, Janine lives in Mountain View with her husband and 2 daughters. She thanks you for supporting the arts.

Brian Flegel (Phil) A life boomerang brought Brian back to the Bay Area from the hustle and bustle of NYC where he had been seen playing many a Shakespearean role. Here in the Bay Area Brian has worked with the Playwrights Center of San Francisco as well as SJ Real shows at the San Jose Rep. Brian has worked with The Dragon Theater Company in Redwood City being seen in both Rx by Kate Fodor and Smash by Jeffrey Hatcher as well as Superheroes with Wily West Productions in San Francisco. He has also been seen at the Pear Avenue Theater in both House & Garden by Alan Ayckbourn and Arcadia by Tom Stoppard. 2016 saw Brian in Palo Alto Players Death of A Salesman directed by Kristen Kaye Lo and at the New Pear Theatre’s Beard Of Avon by Amy Freed directed by Karen Altree Piemme. Brian is very happy to be in Dead Accounts. Not only is he back with friends but he gets to not have an English accent.

Kristen Kaye Lo (Lorna) Kristen Lo is so excited to be back at Dragon Productions. She was last seen on the Dragon stage as Holly in Jane Martin's Anton in Show Business. Some of her other favorite roles include Belinda in Noises Off, Miss Forsythe in Death of a Salesman, and Hilda in The Master Builder. She received a BA in Theater from Emory University and an MAT from Brown University. Currently, she teaches theater and stage tech at Gunn High School in Palo Alto. She would like to thank her mom, dad, in-laws and husband, Felix, for supporting her through this project, and her sons, Anders and Erik for giving her a good example of what siblings act like.

Jackie O’Keefe (Barbara) Jackie is excited to perform at the Dragon for the first time.  She has been performing in the Bay Area for over 30 years  Jackie was last seen at The Pear Theater in Tribes last year.  Recent performances include Pygmalion and Death of a Salesman both at The Pear, Looking for Normal at Palo Alto Players and August: Osage County at City Lights Theater. Jackie has studied with Richard Seyd and attended The New Actors Workshop in New York City.

Playwright to Playwright: Our Interview With Colette Freedman

Our Artist in Residence, Jeffrey Lo, recently had the chance to talk to playwright/author/all around fascinating person Colette Freedman, about her play, Sister Cities, how she got into writing, and what it means to be a woman writer in America.

Jeffrey: Hi Colette. Can you tell us briefly about your writing background? At what age do you think the writing seeds were planted into your brain and when do you realize you wanted to start taking it seriously?

Colette: The first play I ever wrote was in fifth grade when I penned my eleven year old masterpiece, An Archie Bunker Thanksgiving. Okay, I realize that totally dates me, but it was a fun play with every kid in the class playing a 70's sitcom character. And it was a big class, so one of the families coming to dinner at the Bunker's ended up being the entire clan from Eight is Enough. I was in a Jewish youth group and used to write plays for them as well. But I had always leaned more towards acting than writing. I moved to Los Angeles to pursue my acting dream and, along the way, discovered a lack of great women's parts in the theatre. After Chekhov and Shakespeare and Ibsen – yes I’m a classics snob - I felt left out. I didn't have a voice as an actress... so I started to write my own plays. At first I did them under a pseudonym (Naomi Lefkowitz for those who are interested), but as soon as people started to want to produce them, I came forward. And I haven't turned back. I still love acting and find that sometimes I'm better discovering characters as a writer from the inside out, I originated Austin in Sister Cities, but now I've turned to novels and screenplays so I'm constantly learning and expanding as well.

Jeffrey: That's great! Why did you originally write under a pseudonym and how was it when theaters began contacting you with interest in producing your work?

Colette: I wrote under a pseudonym because I was working with a great theatre company called Circus Theatricals and I wanted my work judged fairly. We had a ten minute play festival and I was on the reading committee. So many of the plays were crap that I decided to write one myself. It was called First to the Egg and was about a nerdy sperm convincing a self-important egg that he was 'the one'. Everyone loved it and it was my first professionally produced play. After that, the company's artistic director, Jack Stehlin, was very generous producing my work and he produced several of my shows. We're still in touch and he actually just commissioned me to do a modern film adaptation of Uncle Vanya for him so it all comes around - Chekhov to Chekhov!

Jeffrey: So at what point did you start writing full lengths and how did Sister Cities come about?

Colette: I wrote Sister Cities in 2005 because my best friend, Jill Gascoine, who was a famous actress in England, told me that she was retiring from acting and would not act again unless she played a corpse. So I started with the idea that I needed to write a play about a corpse which made me give the corpse a back story and a family. I had an aunt with ALS (more commonly known as Lou Gehrig's disease) and always thought it would be one of the most tragic ways to die.

Also, I love writing female characters, so I gave her four very different daughters who don't like each other very much; yet, must come together to fulfill their mother's wishes.

Before Sister Cities I wrote two full length plays which were produced: Iphigenia at Aulis, which was a modern day adaptation and Deconstructing the Torah.

Jeffrey: When you were acting in the first production of Sister Cities, what are some things that you discovered during the process?

Colette: How much fun it was! As a writer, you observe everything. You watch and you listen; yet, as an actress smack dab in the middle of it, I got to use my other senses too: taste, touch, smell. It informed the character of Austin and, in turn, informed the play.

Jeffrey: Looking through the Sister Cities website, performing the play at the 2008 Edinburgh Fringe Festival seemed like a real blast. How did the idea to bring it to Edinburgh come about and how was the overall experience?

Colette: The Edinburgh Festival was, by far, one of the best experiences of my life. I strongly recommend it to any writer, actor, direct, producer - anyone involved in the theatre. I had acted in a few plays with Sidewalk Studio Theatre and the guys who ran it, Kurt and Marc, absolutely loved Sister Cities and wanted to take the play there. So, the entire original cast... plus the NYC Dallas went and it was amazing. I cut the play down to an hour. All of the plays had a 10 minute load in, 55 minute run and 10 minute load out, talk about guerilla theatre!

We performed for 30 days straight from 6:45 to 7:45. We performed at The Gilded Balloon, which was mostly a comedy house; however, we got great audiences for being a play. Five star reviews. The rest of the time we saw loads of theatre, met some amazing people, took in the sites and took full advantage of the bar/social scene. It was a different world there and I want to go back.

Jeffrey: Earlier this season, Dragon produced Theresa Rebeck's Bad Dates. At around the same time - her great keynote speech regarding women playwrights was getting a lot of attention. Can you tell us a little bit about your early experiences about being a female playwright and if you feel your gender is still making a difference when trying to get your work produced today?

Colette: I loved Rebeck's speech regarding women playwrights; however, I'm a big fan of producing the best theatre out there, no matter which gender writes it. I make it a point to try to nurture young women playwrights because, frankly, I think the problem is that there are not enough of them. There's always been a huge gender disparity in Hollywood: women screenwriters, TV directors, executives, etc. So the fact that there are so few produced women playwrights doesn't surprise me, and it doesn't depress me; rather, it inspires me to work harder and try to make my plays as good as possible so that it is impossible NOT to produce them.

If you want to hear more about her upcoming projects, her work on Sister Cities, or more about her amazing Archie Bunker Thanksgiving play, Ms. Freedman will actually be attending opening night of our production of Sister Cities. A ticket to the opening night show and gala will also allow you to meet the playwright and you can ask her about her Jackie Collins play and upcoming book! See you at the show!