Candida
TheaterLab, 357 36th Street (3rd floor) · Tickets on sale through Oct 12
nytheatre.com q&a preview by Sean Williams
August 29, 2013
What is your job on this show?
Actor.
What is your show about?
A young, sensitive artist sows seeds of self-doubt within the heart of Candida's self-indulgent pastor husband, and, caught between loyalty and passion, it is Candida who shows both her boys basic truths about themselves
Where were you born? Where were you raised? Where did you go to school?
I was born in San Jose, California but we moved three weeks after to Cedar Rapids, Iowa and then just kept moving. My parents were musicians, my dad's a conductor and my mom's a composer, so we basically kept floating wherever the work took them. I ended up in the midwest, the south, the northeast, the west coast, London, Nairobi... just about anywhere you could land. So, we weren't really *raised* anywhere, we just sorta grew up wherever people were willing to pay musicians. And what's interesting about that, to me, is that it was never Los Angeles or New York or San Francisco or whatever - it was Norfolk, Virgina and Basking Ridge, New Jersey... those kinds of towns.
I also ended up going to a whole string of colleges. After essentially dropping out of high school, I joined a performance troupe at Citrus College in Southern California, then studied music at The University of Iowa and then acting at UNC, Chapel Hill.
I think I got *really* lucky because I began my career in Musical Theater, learning to project, to face the audience, just to understand physically what happens on stage. Then, when I got to Carolina, we did a lot more of the internal stuff, all of the stuff that actors talk about. I didn't plan it this way - honestly, I've barely planned anything in my life - but it means I spent *years* focused on creating instincts for stuff like finding my light and playing out and letting your voice resonate, and now I don't really think about it. Now, when I'm desperately trying to keep up with the brilliance of the actors around me, I know I don't have to worry about being seen or heard.
Who is more important in the theater: the actor, the playwright, or the director?
Oh my God, I love this question. My wife is a director and my best friend is a playwright, and their relationship with each other is very possibly closer than my relationship with either one of them so I'm reflexively protective of their work and terrified to commit to an answer.
I think a writer has a more direct impact on a piece of theater than they do on a TV show or a movie, so it's tempting to say that the playwright is the most important. But anyone who thinks that ought to watch Jordana and Mac work together, when Mac is acting in one of his own shows. Mac will deliver the line that he meant to write, Jordana will suggest a *totally different interpretation*, Mac will try it and, seven times out of ten, will like it better than what he was initially thinking. It's absolute goddam magic. I mentioned before that I was lucky, but getting to work with these guys is astonishing good luck for me.
In answer to the question, though, I always joke that the actor is more important. The director and playwright can do whatever they want before and during the rehearsals, but as soon as the show starts there isn't a damn thing they can do about us. We can do whatever the hell we want!
Is there a particular moment in this show that you really love or look forward to? Without giving away surprises, what happens in that moment and why does it jazz you?
Two ideas are presented at the beginning of the play and much of the rest of the play is a debate about who's right. The end of the play gives an answer. I am REALLY looking forward to how the audience responds to the answer.
Which “S” word best describes your show: SMOOTH, SEXY, SMART, SURPRISING?
This show is intensely smart. The ideas are elegant, the dialogue is pointed, funny and lyrical and the construction is brilliance. It's strange to think a play by Shaw could be shockingly feminist, that a female character created in 1890-something could be so casually powerful, so elegantly crude and so shockingly liberated. It's a hundred and twenty some years later and *still* when we see women being sexual or powerful, we say, "She should be *ashamed* of herself."
As Candida says, "Oh you're only shocked, are you? How conventional all you 'unconventional' people are..."
