INTERVIEW: Alex Riad continues exploration of Millennial generation
Photo: Alex Riad is the writer of the new play The Wild Parrots of Campbell. Photo courtesy of Molly Collier / Provided by Emily Owens PR with permission.
Playwright Alex Riad’s new show, The Wild Parrots of Campbell, examines what happens when a group of 20-somethings suddenly have their slacker lifestyle disrupted by the addition of a young woman who enters their group. The new play runs through Dec. 21 at the Cherry Lane Studio Theatre in New York City.
Directed by Padraic Lillis, Wild Parrots is the latest Riad play to engage audiences about the Millennial generation. Previous projects include The Floor Is Lava, If You Ever Come By Here, When You Go and Standbys, among others.
Recently Hollywood Soapbox exchanged emails with Riad about The Wild Parrots of Campbell, which is co-presented by The NOW Collective and Michael DiMino. Questions and answers have been slightly edited for style.
What inspired the creation of this play?
I’ve been writing a series of plays about my hometown Campbell that started with my last play, The Floor Is Lava. Lava was about the successful tech people from my hometown dealing with overnight success and failure, while Parrots is its spiritual sequel focusing on the unsuccessful people from my hometown, struggling to get by and maintain their community.
What do you feel the story and its characters say about being a twenty-something in today’s times?
I’m not really trying to say anything about twenty-somethings in today’s times, and that’s kind of the point actually. When I first started writing in New York, I felt very frustrated with how Millennials were portrayed in pop culture. TV, film, and theatre seemed to always portray as us caricatures or with judgment and never seemed to try to really capture our point of view nor our everyday lives.
Therefore, I made it my obsession as a writer to do my best to authentically capture the Millennial experience. I think Parrots is a great example of that because it doesn’t try to make any statements about these characters or claim they are in some way representative of our generation as a whole, but instead attempts to tell their stories and struggles with dignity.
How has it been working with director Padraic Lillis?
Padraic is the most important artistic mentor I have. Before he directed this play, I wrote Parrots in Padraic’s writing workshop at his theater company, The Farm Theater. He’s been a part of every stage of [development] from the first pages to the first draft to the final reading to this production.
Not only that, I’ve been learning from Padraic and writing plays under his mentorship ever since I moved to the city seven-plus years ago. No one knows my voice better, no collaborators know me better and no director has known one of my plays so intimately as Padraic. Working with him on this project is a perfect fit, and I couldn’t be happier collaborating with him.
How important was it to stage the show in a rundown house in a California suburb? Does that setting mean a lot to the story and characters?
For me setting is everything; it should always be a character in and of itself. Without a lived-in, nuanced setting, the play won’t have a pulse. Parrots has two layers of settings — the Californian suburb, Campbell, where it takes place, and the the rundown house the characters reside.
Campbell is an important setting to me as the writer because that’s my hometown. I’ve written four plays that take place there, and I’ll probably keep writing more. I want to put where I’m from under a microscope and tell the stories of all the different people with whom I grew up. The house in Campbell where Parrots takes places means something different to every character.
For some, it’s a cheap place to crash in an increasingly expensive tech suburb. For others, it’s a refugee from an unsafe environment. For the central brothers of the play, it’s a representation of their recently deceased mother. Both have completely different relationships with the matriarch, so they have opposing relationships to the house also. One views the house as a source of trauma, while the other a source of grief. Every character is fighting for or against this home, and that’s where the conflict of the play lies.
How long has this play been in development?
I started working on this play in December 2016. As I mentioned I wrote every scene in a writing workshop at The Farm Theater over a year in Padraic’s workshop. Then like many plays it had reading after reading, from the Actors Studio, to Crashbox, and then finally NOW Collective. Almost every actor in this play was a part of one or more of those stages of development, and that’s intentional. I wanted to bring on the people who supported and worked on this play in some capacity from day one, and NOW gave me the freedom to do just that.
This play isn’t just three years of my work, but three years of collaboration that included Padraic, Evan Hall, John DiMino, Adrian Burke, Kasey Huizinga, McKenna DeBose, Sean McGrath and many others who are a part of this production today.
When did you first fall in love with playwriting?
First time I did it actually. I always did theatre as a hobby in high school, acting in the school plays, but I never considered it as a career. In my senior year, through a program with a local equity company in the Bay Area, my drama class got to study with playwright Marcus Gardley, and he challenged us all to write a one act, which I had never done before. When I sat down to write those first pages, nothing ever came that naturally, and nothing ever made me happier. So I knew this is what I have to do.
By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HollywoodSoapbox.com
The Wild Parrots of Campbell, written by Alex Riad and directed by Padraic Lillis, plays through Dec. 21 at the Cherry Lane Studio Theatre in New York City. Click here for more information and tickets.
