INTERVIEW: Georgian-American Theatrical Feast opens with ‘A Toy Gun’
A Toy Gun, the new play from Tamar Bartaia, will help kick off the Georgian-American Theatrical Feast in New York City this week. The show, directed by Becky Baumwoll, follows a famous actor and promising singer as they grow up and grow old in Georgia.
Press notes for the production point out that this festival centers on Georgia the country, not Georgia the state. To the unbeknownst, the country sits north of Turkey and along the Black Sea, and the theatrical showcase intends to introduce American audiences to plays from the republic’s burgeoning theater scene.
A Toy Gun runs July 20 to Aug. 3 at Teatro Circulo on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. Tara Giordana and Luke Younger star in the production, which is produced by Red Lab Productions, led by artistic director Irina Gachechiladze.
Recently Hollywood Soapbox spoke with Baumwoll, founder of Broken Box Mime Theater, about her directorial efforts. Here’s what she had to say:
On what the audience can expect from A Toy Gun …
“Audiences can expect a group of American artists taking a story, a beautiful story of two people, two Georgians over the course of 30 or 40 years and their many crossings of paths for those years, and kind of making our own interpretation of that poem in a visual way. Tamar wrote a play that was not self-evident how to stage it or direct it, and we really decided, with Irina’s permission, to make our own of it and try to find what was relevant in these people’s stories for us as Americans, which we found was a lot. And I think in the end, we’ve sort of tapped into some themes that are universal, whether you’re from Georgia or America or anywhere in between.”
On the storytelling technique …
“Because I have this background in mime and physical theater, we really took a play that is about these two people’s stories, and it’s told in storytelling, in narrative. There isn’t a lot of dialogue in the play. We decided to activate that narrative through a lot of physical play and some kind of bold, artistic choices, and like I said, I feel like it’s sort of a poem brought to life with these two lives intertwining. And I hope it will be visually exciting and also very personal.”
On working at the Teatro Circulo …
“I wanted something really simple. We just have two actors on stage with really bold lights, and sound design and envelopes of sand. … Really the audience is our backdrop, and the audience is who we’re engaging with during the show as these characters tell their stories over the course of several decades.”
On reaching out to the playwright …
“We were stuck on a few things, so we emailed her a list of questions. And she was so sweet. She apologized at first for her English not being fluent and then wrote this gorgeous email back to us about her experience writing the play and what to expect, and she also, like Irina, gave us permission to really take it in our own direction. … We didn’t have a lot of time to rehearse the play. We just had a few weeks, so the kind of dramaturgy that we would need to really dig into the Georgian themes and places, we weren’t able to dig into as far as would have liked if we had more time. So it was great to hear from her. … She said, ‘I just want this to come to life, and I totally put it your in hands. And here was my experience writing it.’ It was very personal for her to write, so, yeah, she answered some questions and was really, really quite generous.”
On whether she knew much about Georgia before this project …
“No, I’ve never been to Georgia. We do do research as a cast. There are lots of references here because these are two Georgian characters, and it spans several of the wars that happened in Georgia. We wanted to make sure that we knew the context for these characters and understood the greater historical and geopolitical picture that this fits into. I’ve been doing some work on the sound design to pick artists and composers that are Georgian, so that has also given us a different sensory experience that kind of dips into the Georgian culture a little bit. I’ve never been to Georgia, but we wanted to understand where these places were and what the references were.”
On her entry into the theater world …
“Well, when I was 5, I went to see Crazy for You on Broadway, and afterward I asked my mom to rewind it over and over again because all I had experienced was seeing movies that we could rewind. And I was so upset I caused this big commotion, had a tantrum in the theater. … I love thinking about that story because that’s what I love about theater, that you can’t rewind it, that it has that ephemeral life that just exists in that moment between the audience and the actor and the designers. It’s an event. It’s an experience.
“After that, I studied theater all the way through school, through college as well, and then when I moved here, started pursuing acting as a career and then decided to make my own work with Broken Box Mime. And the real philosophy of our theater company is that theater needs very little ornamentation. When distilled down to just the actor and the story, it can just be outrageously powerful and beautiful, so that’s been sort of my workshop and studio over the six-and-a-half years, seven years, creating theater that is in mime just with movement and body language.”
By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HollywoodSoapbox.com
A Toy Gun, part of the Georgian-American Theatrical Feast, will run July 20 to Aug. 3 at the Teatro Circulo on the Lower East Side of New York City. Click here for more information and tickets.
