INTERVIEW: Falling in love with art and the artist in ‘Goodnight Nobody’
Photo: Dana Delany and Saamer Usmani star in Goodnight Nobody, now playing the McCarter Theatre Center in Princeton, New Jersey. Photo courtesy of T. Charles Erickson / Provided with permission.
Rachel Bonds’ new play, Goodnight Nobody, asks some deep questions about art, passion, family, friends and spirituality — all served with some exquisite-looking food, plenty of drinks and a shared history amongst the characters on stage. The world premiere, directed by Tyne Rafaeli, plays through Feb. 9 at the McCarter Theatre Center in Princeton, New Jersey.
Amongst the cast are Dana Delany, Ken Marks, Nate Miller, Saamer Usmani and Ariel Woodiwiss. Delany’s character of Mara owns a cabin in the Hudson Valley of New York; it’s something of an artist’s retreat that helps her focus on her sculpture work. This weekend, her son Reggie (Miller) has brought some of his old high-school friends, Nan (Usmani) and K (Woodiwiss), for a few days of drinking and catching up. What transpires within this family dynamic is both hilarious and heartfelt, and takes unexpected turns that the audience will likely never see coming.
“I had auditioned for Tyne, the director, for a different project, so we had a working relationship,” Usmani said in a recent phone interview. “I had a few auditions with her for something else, and then they were doing a workshop of this at the McCarter. She asked me to come in and read the part for the two-day workshop that culminated in a reading, and then that went well I think for everybody. Soon after that, they asked me to join, and I was thrilled to say yes.”
Usmani is an accomplished stage actor who has appeared in the theatrical adaptation of Shakespeare in Love and The Aeneid at the Stratford Festival in the UK. He also been on TV’s Succession, What If and Reign.
He’s now based in Brooklyn and has enjoyed his time in Princeton, and Goodnight Nobody has kept him busy throughout the play’s development process. Exploring the character of Nan, an artist, has been a welcome journey.
“There’s these things that are real clues into who this character is, even though for a lot of the play he doesn’t have a whole lot of language,” Usmani said. “There’s a lot of hope and a lot of magic. I love that he dips into the spirit world and that he can vibrate on that frequency, for whatever that means. That really excited me.”
Usmani said he is different than Nan. But he has practices in his life that are attempts to connect with the spiritual world, so he was not surprised that Nan would go deep into issues of faith and the divine, given that he’s an artist and driven to fully experience everything in life. And he truly wants to experience life to its fullest: there’s even a time in the play when Usmani’s character leaves the stage and heads for the nearby lake for a cold swim at night.
“He is so hyper-focused on the things that he wants and the way he wants to live his life and certainly to have meaning in his life,” the actor said. “I think I feel … some sort of kinship with Nan, my character.”
One of the revelations of the play — a secret that is learned in the first scene — is that Nan is having a relationship with Mara, Reggie’s mother. When everyone is in the house together, this love between the two characters is simmering under the surface of the conversation.
“It’s about her creations,” Usmani said about Nan’s love of Mara. “She’s a sculptor, not just an accomplished sculptor, but a supremely talented one. I think her access to her art to him seems so direct, the same way he has a direct connection to not just his work but also his spirit, which is I think part of his work. He sees that she does, and I think it’s that; it’s that shared line to creation.”
Also Mara has walked a path in life that Nan can identify with and perhaps wishes upon himself.
“I think for him in his life he didn’t have other mentors or other older people to look up to, so on one level, it’s just someone who has chosen to live their life the way that Nan knows that he is going to want to live his life,” he said. “And for that attraction, I think it happens quite young, and that’s why it’s so complicated. The play is about all these different manifestations of these relationships, like mother-son, old flame of sort, a new relationship, old friends, strangers. There’s so many different relationships, and I think that’s what’s so beautiful about this play.”
By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HollywoodSoapbox.com
Goodnight Nobody, featuring Saamer Usmani, plays through Feb. 9 at the McCarter Theatre Center in Princeton, New Jersey. Click here for more information and tickets.
