Q&A with Brenna Geffers

With Brenna Geffers, director of Hotel Plays

Q: How have the specifics of the Harbor Hotel as an instrument for performance inspired your choices?

 The Harbor Hotel has a playful vibe. That really helped us shape the feel of Chronicle of a Demise, one of the Williams texts that we’re staging.  Focusing on the fun, rather than the darker themes, we let the space lead us in our approach to this unique story. Perhaps the most impact on the performances is the different scale of the different spaces. The rooms helped guide the performances to smaller, more intimate moments, while the outdoor areas asked us to expand the performances and help take in the whole space. 

Q: You work with an ensemble. How does the history of your work together contribute to the rehearsal process? To the performance?

 Die-Cast is often in non-performative spaces. We often have access to them for a very limited time. We have a trust within the team that allows us to know that, while we can make some choices in our rehearsal process in advance of working in the venue, many of our choices will be made in the space, together, and in a short amount of time. We have to be comfortable living together in a place of uncertainty. That kind of leap of faith is not for everyone, which is okay. But for us, it is exciting. It feels breathless and exhilarating but also very comfortable. We all have each other as we all jump. 

 Q: What does staging The Chalky White Substance in a hotel room do for that play? For the audience?

 Hotel rooms are amazing places. They are so temporary. When a story is placed within one, I think the audience can feel a sense of fleeting time. The characters in The Chalky White Substance live a very transient life, and the hotel room really helps support that.  The audience knows that these characters, who are on a precipice, will not be there very long. Also, a hotel room is such an intimate place to be. Hotel rooms are places that are not shared with other people beyond your closest community members. They are a private space, even if they are temporary. So, bringing an audience into a hotel room is an intimate act. They are not supposed to be there. That makes everything just a little more dangerous. That guides the performance style, too. We can be very small, and very delicate because of how close we are. It is pretty exciting. 

Q: DieCast has had a busy year! Is there some continuity to your work this year?

We have two festivals before the TWF and two more after, so it's been a wild few weeks for Die-Cast. But I think all of the different pieces we have been touring deal with a sense of struggling towards hope. Whether it is technology, trauma, problematic artists of the past, or, as in the Hotel Plays, the end of the world, there is a desire to pull something beautiful, sacred, and true out of the debris and let it shine.  The bodies of the artists themselves are also part of the continuity. To get this amount of work done, pretty much every Die-Cast artist had to be on deck. Some are part of one festival, and some are part of three. Each time, it is a different combination of the ensemble, but it still feels like something we are all doing together - rooting for the ones on the road as you recover from your own tour or getting ready for your next tour. Some artists helped to build the show but then were not on the team that actually performed it. It's part of the reason why collective creation is so important to us. 

Anything else you'd like to mention ?

 Die-Cast usually makes new work. While we do work on preexisting plays sometimes, it is not the norm for us. When we first gathered to read through the plays together, it was before we knew who would be actually be part of the ensemble for this festival. We had different people play the same role at times, just to hear it all out loud. When we read the Strange Play, we just had to laugh. We didn't write it, but it just Felt like our work. It felt familiar as if someone in the ensemble had written it. That doesn't mean we understood it fully. It was more like meeting a new person and just having a feeling that this was the start of a new and beautiful relationship. You just feel it.