INTERVIEW: For Tommy, ‘Everything Is Super Great’ … sort of
Photo: Will Sarratt and Xavier Rodney star in Everything Is Super Great at 59E59 Theaters. Photo courtesy of Hunter Canning / Provided by Karen Greco PR with permission.
Stephen Brown’s new off-Broadway show, Everything Is Super Great, has a title that seems to suggest everything will be 100-percent fine. However, after peeling away some of the layers of the show’s main character, Tommy, one begins to realize the dark humor of the piece is masking a sense of hurt and longing.
Brown’s play, which has been in development for a couple of years, continues through Dec. 14 at 59E59 Theaters in New York City. The production comes to the off-Broadway theater complex courtesy of New Light Theater Project and Stable Cable Lab Co. Sarah Norris directs the 95-minute piece, which stars Lisa Jill Anderson, Marcia DeBonis, Xavier Rodney and Will Sarratt.
“It’s been a really long road,” Brown said. “Strangely, I submitted a play to the Bay Area Playwrights Festival, a totally different play, and then one of the readers for that competition also worked at the company Stable Cable Lab. And so she reached out to me and was like, ‘Hey, I read this play that you submitted to the contest,’ which I did not end up winning or doing well in at all, but she was like, ‘Hey, I read this play. I really liked it. I’m just reaching out to new playwrights. Would you want to sit down with me?’ And so I did, so that was with her and the woman who runs Stable Cable, who is going to be in the play, Lisa Anderson. And they read another play of mine, which is Everything Is Super Great, and they were like, ‘We really like your work. We’d love to keep talking and be involved with you in some way in the future.’”
At the same time, these two theater-makers were partnering with New Light Theater Project, so Everything Is Super Great was sent over to see if a collaboration was possible.
“I think they read it, and they liked it,” Brown said. “And I met with Sarah, who is the director of the production, and that meeting ended up going really well. And we talked about it for a year of them possibly producing it, and then they thought that it could run at 59E59. So we got a reading together, and we did an audition reading for 59 back in June of last year. And based on that reading, 59 greenlit the production, and now we’re here. It’s been about a two-and-a-half, almost a three-year journey, I think. It’s been a long time.”
The playwright described the play as largely a comedy, but with some dark themes. The undercurrents are grief and longing, and they center on the main character of Tommy. His older brother has been missing for six months when the play begins, so now he lives with his mother and tries to cope with life. There’s also an assistant manager at Starbucks that he is starting to fall for, but he’s not sure she’s that interested.
“It’s also about this therapist who has to force Tommy to do these art projects in order to help him cope with everything, so it’s a lot about loss and longing with a lot of comedy over it,” he said. “It’s taken me a long time to write this play. The first scene that came to me was scene two, and that’s when Tommy is in the break room with Alice. And he’s basically just trying to get her attention and be able to talk to her, so those two characters popped into my head immediately.”
After this initial scene popped into Brown’s head, he started to think how he could build a play around these two Starbucks employees. He eventually broadened the scope of the story to include Tommy’s mom.
“Tommy’s relationship with his mom is very much my relationship with my mom,” he said. “I’ve always kind of been very close with her, and we talk in a frank kind of way, in a very sarcastic way. We make fun of each other a lot.”
This led to him drafting a story involving a missing older brother, and the play as it stands today started to take shape. That doesn’t mean the development process was easy; in fact, this was the toughest show he has ever created.
“I will say this has been the hardest play I’ve ever written,” Brown said. “Usually I’ll write a draft of a play, and then that’ll pretty much be what the play will be. And then the next draft will be fine-tuning, but with this thing, I wrote the first draft. And then I threw out probably 60 percent of it, and then I wrote another draft. And then I threw out 40 percent of that and started over again. It’s been a journey of me figuring out how to write while writing this play, so it’s been a long time.”
By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HollywoodSoapbox.com
Everything Is Super Great, written by Stephen Brown, plays through Dec. 14 at 59E59 Theaters in New York City. Click here for more information and tickets.
