INTERVIEW: Bernie and Mikey take memorable ‘Trip to the Moon’
Photo: From left, Margo Singaliese, Jordan Lage and Stephanie Gould star in Bernie and Mikey’s Trip to the Moon at 59E59 Theaters. Photo courtesy of Michael Kushner / Provided by Karen Greco PR with permission.
Bernie and Mikey’s Trip to the Moon, the new play at 59E59 Theaters in Midtown Manhattan, details the lives of two siblings brought together amidst the trials and tribulations of that difficult transition from adolescence to adulthood. Mikey (Forest Malloy) feels a loyalty to his sister, Bernie (Stephanie Gould), but also yearns to break away and kickstart his budding career. Bernie lives with a cognitive disability and “longs to find her voice but faces a world unwilling to listen,” according to program notes.
The work is the creation of actor-turned-playwright Scott Aiello. He created the piece while a student at The Juilliard School and developed the show in the years after graduation. Now he is having his off-Broadway debut thanks to Strangemen Theatre Company, who is producing the play through Sunday, Dec. 2 at 59E59.
He was inspired to tell this story about an Italian-American family in 1990s Chicago because of his own upbringing and the relationship with his sister.
“I’ve always felt that her story needed to be told,” Aiello said in a recent phone interview. “She’s had such a profound impact on my life. I could go on about it forever. It’s probably part of the reason that I became an artist. I come from a very blue-collar family, and when you have a sibling who has a cognitive disability, I think that your empathy factor has to go up, the whole family’s does. You see the world in a different place.”
THE DEVELOPMENT STAGES
While enrolled at the drama program at The Juilliard School, Aiello was assigned a unique task known as the “Ancestor Project” by his acting professor. There were no specific rules, only a few guidelines and encouragement from his professor. The more he thought about the assignment, the more Aiello realized he wanted to tell a story about his family and sister.
“I did this performance piece in his class that he really loved and really encouraged me,” he said. “Basically it was a combination of spoken word and music and movement. … That piece stayed with me.”
After graduation, he became an actor and appeared on stages for a few years. During his downtime, he would work on his passion projects, and Aiello’s goal was to turn this school project into a full-length play.
“About two years ago, I was like, let’s see what I can do with this small piece that I made,” he remembered. “It was really just a few lines of poetry is what it was, and I took those few lines of poetry and started writing a play. I wrote the first scene and didn’t know what to make of it. It was very autobiographical, and I was sort of like, I don’t know that anyone would be interested in this except for my immediate family. But I showed it to my artistic colleague, Claire Karpen, who is the director of the play, of Bernie and Mikey’s Trip to the Moon. Claire Karpen took a look at it, and she loved it. She encouraged me. She said, ‘Listen, I think you’re on to something here. I think you should keep going.’ So I did, and I finished the play about a year and a half ago.”
Throughout the process, Aiello received a lot of support from Juilliard and his old classmates. He actually conducted a reading at the school early in the process, and his friends and some alumni came together to hear the words spoken aloud for the first time. The same professor that originally assigned the project turned up and kept on encouraging Aiello to move along in the development process.
Then came a more formal staged reading at Juilliard with professional actors like Peter Scolari and John Glover.
“We invited a bunch of people to it, and from that reading, Strangemen Theatre Company came to me and said, ‘We love the play. We’re interested in developing it,'” he said. “Together we worked for about two months. We came up with a couple cool ideas for a major rewrite of Act II. I don’t want to bog anybody down with details, but it was very, very different. I went away and worked diligently and then came up with the current form of the play. We did one more reading for Strangemen Theatre Company. They seemed to really love the new draft, and they said, ‘We want to do this. We want to do this in our 59E59 residency slot.'”
THE OPPORTUNITY AT 59E59
The theater company had a few weeks reserved at 59E59, but they did not have a project yet, Aiello said. So the decision came approximately six months ago to put Bernie and Mikey’s Trip to the Moon in the spotlight. Everything then changed rather quickly.
“So we were put into high gear then,” the playwright said. “I was like, oh my goodness, here we go. It’s been honestly a whirlwind six months of helping fundraise, casting the show.”
The result of that whirlwind is now on stage at 59E59. With a cast featuring Stephen D’Ambrose, Stephanie Gould, Jordan Lage, Malloy, Ismenia Mendes, Benjamin Rosloff and Margo Singaliese, the production has been receiving solid reviews and continues Aiello’s quest to bring the story of his family and his sister, plus lessons about disability awareness, to a wider audience.
Here’s how 59E59’s artistic director, Val Day, summed up the play in her program note to the audience: “Though this story is deeply personal and firmly rooted in a place of honesty, it doesn’t remain in the mundane routine of suburban life, as it swings sideways to discover the fantastical and mystical ways in which close relatives connect and divide to eventually become even more closely bonded,” she wrote. “The characters with disabilities featured here are some of the most honest and surprising individuals that I’ve ever encountered, and I hope you’ll have as much fun and enlightenment in getting to know them as I did when I first read this play.”
Aiello conceded it was a long, difficult process to bring this story all the way to its world premiere, but he seems more than content with the outcome.
“There have been some ups and downs,” he said. “It’s been a lot of work. I have run myself into the ground and actually dealing with a pretty bad cold right now, but it was worth it. What has been the result is the production that is currently up off-Broadway and running, which I’m very, very proud of.”
By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HollywoodSoapbox.com
Bernie and Mikey’s Trip to the Moon, written by Scott Aiello, is currently running through Sunday, Dec. 2 at 59E59 Theaters in New York City. Click here for more information and tickets.
