INTERVIEW: Piehole leaves incubation period to present ‘Ski End’ at New Ohio Theatre

New Ohio Theatre and IRT Theater have joined forces to help New York experimental theater companies, and they achieve this ambitious goal by hosting a development program called “Archive Residency.”

The program offers theatrical companies a professional home for two years, all with the goal to produce an original work at the end of the residency. Piehole stepped up for the opportunity, and they recently premiered Ski End, directed by Tara Ahmadinejad at the New Ohio Theatre. The show is currently playing through May 19.

Here’s how a press release describes Ski End: “In Piehole’s Ski End, an abandoned ski shop becomes the center of the universe. Rising from the ruins of economic and environmental dread, Ski End examines chronic patterns of apocalyptic despair and what it takes to face The Sublime.”

Recently, Hollywood Soapbox exchanged emails with Ahmadinejad about the new play. Questions and answers have been slightly edited for style.

What can audience members expect from Ski End?

There will be fog. And songs. Ski End invites audiences into a strange journey that a group of 30-somethings accidentally go on in an abandoned ski shop. The play layers the past, present and potential of this space, into a cosmology that only makes sense through the fog. Ski End employs layered realities, poetry and surprise to ask how we deal with the sense of never-ending doom that appears to surround us.

What’s The Sublime?

It’s the mysterious forces that inspire awe but also terrify. It’s that fuzzy murky horizon line in Romantic paintings. It’s standing on a precipice and beholding the awesome power of Nature, its majesty, and your own powerlessness in the face of it. It’s your own insignificance in the face of forces larger than yourself, but also the dreadful feeling that you’re meant to struggle against them.

What is the creation/collaboration process like for Piehole?

Our process varies from project to project, but particularly in the early stages, we make sure to set time for group discussions, reading, writing, reflection and image gathering, so we can get on the same wavelength in terms of the perspective of the piece.

We spend hours improvising, both quick brainstorm-y physical improvs that help us generate many ideas quickly, as well as really long ‘real-time’ improvisations that help us flesh out strange situations or worlds that we’ve conceived together. We also spend a lot of time transcribing, seeking resonant material in piles of transcripts, and rigging improvisation exercises based on what we’ve discovered through transcribing.

Although we conceive of projects collectively, we do take on specific roles in the rehearsal room. My job on the outside as a director is to work with everyone in a way that stays true to the group foundational conversations we have pre-rehearsals, and at the same time stay awake to what’s actually working in the rehearsal room. The questions/observations that help us follow what’s “working” can come from me, but they also come particularly from the dramaturgs, as well as the actors and designers.

Throughout every stage, we work out an ever-evolving structure for the piece, as well as the relationship we want to set up with the audience. A key to our process, which we’re constantly troubleshooting, is finding the right balance between these different modes of working, knowing when to shift from the rehearsal room to the writing room, to the personal check-in room, to the design-focused playing-around-with-objects room.

How have rehearsals been going? Has the piece changed as the actors have come together?

As a devised piece, this show has been changing constantly throughout the process. In the last week in particular we made some changes that helped me get out of the fog with some parts that just were not working, and that I hadn’t been able to crack since last summer. Now that we’re more familiar and have grown more confident in our own little invented structure, we’ve been able to make the necessary cuts a little more easily as a team of collaborators.

Some of the changes we’ve made since the last public workshop of this piece feel bold and … kind of risky! Not risqué, but risky. This is how we work, as “experimental” artists, making choices that have the potential for failure, taking risks in the way the form shifts during the course of the piece, with a kind of foolhardy conviction that when we meet an audience it’ll be worth it, because it will feel truly [be] alive and maybe even transcendent.

What do you think Ski End says about life and “chronic patterns of apocalyptic despair” in 2017?

Our ideas about apocalyptic despair have complicated over the course of this Ski End process, this being a show we’ve been developing from 2014 til now. Throughout, we’ve been tracking different ways of getting stuck in the face of bad news and the co-dependent relationship between nostalgia and apocalyptic thinking, which has been an essential aspect of the ski fiction in the show. The layers of past, present and potential uses of the ski shop land us in the feeling and process of apocalyptic despair and stuckness, and the show’s main question surrounds the attempt of getting unstuck.

Taking positive action in this world, otherwise known as “doing things,” doesn’t always seem possible in this apocalyptic mode. How do we combat the feeling of paralysis that can ensue when you feel powerless in the face of it all? How do we get to the point of fully knowing and believing we are part of “it all,” and therefore agents. How do we break the stasis? How do we avoid getting used to the bad news, while also not getting destroyed by it? We’re excited to gather an audience to get unstuck together!

By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HollywoodSoapbox.com

Ski End, created by Piehole and directed by Tara Ahmadinejad, is currently playing the New Ohio Theatre. Click here for more information and tickets.