INTERVIEW: Frank Wood on how he ‘interprets’ his new stage role
Photo: The Meeting: The Interpreter stars Kelley Curran and Frank Wood. Photo courtesy of Carol Rosegg / Provided by Candi Adams PR with permission.
With the national news focused on the upcoming presidential election between Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump, the United States and its electorate are seeing dramas, setbacks, triumphs and reconfigurations of the monumental contest on an almost daily basis. One could be excused for forgetting the many chapters in the book of Trump and the consequential events that have occurred since he descended that escalator at Trump Tower almost a decade ago and announced his first run for the presidency.
The Meeting: The Interpreter, a new play by Catherine Gropper and directed by Brian Mertes, uses an infamous Trump Tower meeting in 2016 as a backdrop to further explore this unique moment in American history. Gropper, according to press notes, created this play after her chance encounter with an actual government interpreter, and that conversation inspired her to put pen to paper. The result of her creative effort is now playing at the Theater at St. Clement’s in Midtown Manhattan.
The show stars Tony Award winner Frank Wood, known for his stage roles in Side Man, Network and Angels in America. He’s joined by Kelley Curran, who can be seen in The Gilded Age on HBO; her stage credits include everything from Half-God of Rainfall to Mother of the Maid with Glenn Close. Press notes indicate that although the play is a two-hander, the cast and creative team have been able to leverage the art of multimedia, pre-recorded film and puppetry to have many more characters represented on stage.
“It is beautifully multimedia and beautifully devised by Brian Mertes and Catherine Gropper,” Wood said in a recent phone interview. “The production of the play has been expanded around the heart of her contact with this interpreter, so it has now been expressed in stage performance and [pre-recorded] film. When you put those things next to each other and have them interact, you get a very interesting tension about what’s the truth.”
When Wood received the script and considered whether to join the project, he needed to have a conversation with the creatives to fully understand the dramatic weight of the play. It’s a unique theatrical experiment that required some context and explanation.
“It definitely took a conversation with Brian to get me to understand how much the way the story was told would influence what the story was,” he said. “What I got was this really strong sense of the interior lives of people that are being exposed to a lot of press, exposed to a lot of rumor, gossip, innuendo and judgment. I definitely got that sense from reading the play. How it would be performed and how it would be dramatic, I did not immediately understand.”
To better comprehend the characters, Wood did what he’s done his entire career: He threw himself at the text. He started testing out the lines of dialogue to see what would naturally land, and then when he reached question marks, he reached out to the creative team for an explanation.
“You sort of fall into holes,” he said of his acting process. “You walk along the ridge of solid ground, understanding the language and the circumstances and what reflects back at you. This guy is an interpreter, so he talks about his job as an interpreter, what his job means to him. And so those things you let effect you because they seem like solid information. I approach it by saying, ‘Yeah, I can understand that.’ Then there are places where he talks about stuff that doesn’t correspond to all of that, so you have to ask questions. That is always true of a text.”
Wood is an ever-dedicated actor who wants the director’s vision to come to life, so he followed Mertes’ every request. The actor would be on stage during rehearsals, listen to the director on what he should be performing in a given scene, and then he would add some unique interpretations of his own.
“The other day [Mertes] said, ‘You’re going to peel this piece of plastic off this glass, and you’re going to get it off as quietly as possible. But you’ve got to get around to the microphone and say these lines in time.’ And so as I was pulling the plastic off, I realized I wasn’t going to make it around in time, so I just kept interrupting the pulling of the plastic and going to the microphone, talking, and then going back and doing more plastic pulling. That is an example of how I grew to understand who my character is, how I understand what the conflicts are,” he said.
Much of the puppetry in the show is captured on film and then broadcast in the theater. Wood is respectful of this theatrical art form, but he is thankful there’s not more puppet work being staged in real time. He had to laugh about his skills in this particular area of the show.
“We spent a lot of time trying to handle the puppets, and it’s been very funny to the people watching how bad we are,” Wood said with a laugh. “And so that’s been part of the storytelling is how we’re not natural puppeteers, but slowly it’s being winnowed down to the best storytelling possible, which is as few interactions with the puppets as possible. The puppets are so beautiful in their details that the filming of them and our mistreatment of them tells a lot of story, so we rely on the puppeteer, Julian [Crouch].”
Wood said he follows political news — he’s an avid listener of NPR — but he had to remind himself of the ins and outs of this Trump Tower meeting to better place himself in the recent past. For him, the power of the piece comes less from the political consequences on display and more about the humanity (or lack thereof) of the characters who are depicted on stage.
“There’s an element to grabbing people’s attention, saying this deals with politics and with an historical event and possible crime, and then … using that to question what we really know about ourselves and each other,” Wood said. “When it comes to holding ourselves accountable, what control do we really have over events? It’s much more about that than about, do you remember this time, and who was guilty and what they did and how we all got lost in the shuffle or something. It’s more about the soul. We look at ourselves through the anatomy of two people’s interactions with those times.”
By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HollywoodSoapbox.com
The Meeting: The Interpreter, starring Frank Wood and Kelley Curran, continues through Aug. 24 at the Theater at St. Clement’s in Midtown Manhattan. Click here for more information and tickets.
