INTERVIEW: It’s ‘Monsoon Season,’ and that means biting humor is in the forecast
Photo: Monsoon Season by Lizzie Vieh stars Therese Plaehn and Richard Thierot. Photo courtesy of Maria Baranova / Provided by Glenna Freedman PR with permission.
Monsoon Season, the new play by Lizzie Vieh, finds a couple facing pills, paranoia, hallucinations and plenty of dark humor. The two-hander, featuring Richard Thieriot and Therese Plaehn, recently played the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, and now it has kickstarted a one-month run at Rattlestick Playwrights Theater in New York City. Performances continue through Nov. 17 at the off-Broadway venue.
The play comes to the Big Apple courtesy of All for One Theater and features direction by Kristin McCarthy Parker.
“The project started as a seven-minute play in 2015, and it started really as an assignment,” Vieh said in a recent phone interview. “I take part in a monthly play festival pretty often. It’s called Shotz, and it’s organized by Amios Theatre Company. And they basically get six playwrights, six directors, a group of actors together, choose a theme and then each playwright has to write a roughly 10-minute play based on that scene and that meets certain conditions. So that month it was a Halloween theme. I was given one actor, which is my friend, Richard Thieriot, who played Danny in that play and is continuing to play him to this day.”
Vieh knew she had to write a spooky play, and the conditions were that there needed to be a scream and some blood. What came out of that experiment was the first draft of Monsoon Season.
“I set it in Phoenix because that’s where I’m from, and it just sort of came to me,” the playwright said. “I was like, oh, that would be fun. I’ve never set something there, and then because I was only given one actor, I knew it would have to be a play that contained more internal drama than external. So it’s like OK, let’s do a breakdown story, and that’s where it began in 2015 with that seven-minute play.”
After that initial run, Vieh expanded the text to be 20 minutes in length, and it was presented as part of the Samuel French Festival in 2016. All for One Theater, or AFO, then helped her expand once again to 45 minutes in length.
“Then there was discussion of, OK, how about we turn this into a real full-length play, and at that point, in discussions with them, we decided it would be great to do Edinburgh over the summer and then do the New York premiere this fall,” she said. “So Edinburgh sort of came about as a combination of conversations with Richard and AFO, both of whom have produced shows there before.”
The storyline for the show came first to Vieh. She wanted to tell the story of a man who is isolated from the world and losing his grip on reality. In real life, Thieriot is friendly, charming and bright, so she found it fun to play against that type.
“Then the play was really only Danny for a long time in the development process until we got the idea to add another half to the play, which would be Danny’s ex-wife, Julia, and as I started to create her, I thought, OK, we’ve created this picture of Julia in our minds during this whole Danny section,” she said. “What is that picture, and how can we subvert that and surprise people with how she both is and is not what we expected. Then I got the idea of her being a YouTube makeup artist. I think those videos are kind of hilarious often and that there was a lot of theatricality to them.”
In the play, the proceedings grow fairly dark. There are hallucinations amidst a strip club neon sign that keeps Danny up at night. He’s also suffering from micro-blackouts, while Julia faces her Adderall addiction head on. The “monsoon” in the title is definitely a metaphor that becomes apparent throughout the evening.
The play has several unexpected developments, which Vieh hinted at when describing its final scene. “I think from the very beginning this has been a story that culminates in a …”
It would be too easy to divulge the ending, but here’s how Vieh finished those thoughts: “I have changed the circumstances of it, and there has been some back and forth about what to show on stage and how much gore and things like that. I don’t think dialing back has been an active goal on my part.”
It’s up to audience members to check out the play to fill in the grim details.
By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HollywoodSoapbox.com
Monsoon Season, written by Lizzie Vieh, plays through Nov. 17 at Rattlestick Playwrights Theater in New York City. The production comes to the Big Apple courtesy of All for One Theater. Click here for more information and tickets.
