This week the Mutual Friends Co-op presents the Canadian Premiere of Christopher Shinn’s Other People. The show tells the story of three New Yorkers struggling with sex, desire and their art. Featuring a cast of nine talented up and comers, the play has received rave reviews in the UK and buzz surrounding its Canadian debut has been extremely positive.
Ultimately this is a show about the struggle to connect and make art, told through the eyes of three separate characters and their friends. Stephen (played by Ben Lewis) is a frustrated writer, Petra (played by Tatiana Maslany) is his roommate and was most recently employed as a stripper, and Mark (played by Indrit Kasapi) is Stephen’s ex who is currently crashing on his couch.
BWW is thrilled to present this special feature with the three ambitious young leads, who took the time to discuss their current project, the nature of cooperative theatre, social media in the arts and their future ambitions:
Can you sum up the production for us in three sentences or less?
TM: This is the story of three young people living in New York City and struggling with their need to make meaningful connections and meaningful art. It is about our desire to communicate with one another, to touch one another and our inability to be intimate and really naked. Ultimately, it’s fun to watch these neurotic, narcissistic characters bump up against each other.
BL: Other People is an incredibly funny, sexy, moving and intelligent play about the struggle to connect and make art. It’s by Christopher Shinn, writer of Dying City (which recently had a hit run in Toronto) and directed by the brilliant, Dora-nominated Aaron Willis.
IK: Other People is a play about characters who are in desperate need for connection. Filled with raw emotion and written in a hyper realistic way, the story touches on our universal need to feel part of something and not be alone.
This production is being put on by a co-operative theatre company, what exactly does that mean and how did you become involved?
TM: Ben Lewis and I had been doing play readings almost weekly for the past couple of years. We were very interested in finding something we loved that we wanted to actually do. Ben found Other People and it was kind of this wonderful gem that no one seemed to know about. It felt like the right fit – a play so relevant to us that it challenged us in ways we were excited about.
BL: I found the play and brought it to my best friends Tatiana, Indrit and Mercedes as something we could all collaborate on. Then we brought on Aaron, who helped us fill out the rest of our cast and design/tech team. We also snagged the amazing Monika Seiler to be our stage manager, who’s a great friend of Indrit’s and mine from The National Theatre School. Co-operative basically means no one gets paid, we’re doing this purely for the love of this play and the opportunity to work together, and we split the profits at the end of our run. It’s really a dream team- I’m so proud of everyone’s work.
IK: An Equity Co-op means that a group of Equity Professional Actors, Director, and Stage Manager get together and decide to put on a play without getting a paid fee for their participation. Instead we simply split whatever profit is left from the Box Office revenue, which isn’t likely to be enough to even cover the expenses. In other words, we are all so connected to the story and feel so strongly about it, we are putting it on just because we love it. It’s not about the money.
I became involved after my friend Ben asked me to read the play. I fell in love with it and now here we are!
Tatiana Maslany as Petra
Describe your character and how you relate to him/her?
TM: My character’s name is Petra and she’s a young woman from Queens who is living in the Lower East Side of NYC and working as a poet and an artist while making money to fund her art by stripping. I relate to Petra’s desire to be authentic, her search for truth, honesty and reality. She’s passionate, angry, and opinionated and has difficulty expressing herself. I also relate to her hypocrisy. She rallies against the same social institutions that she ultimately engages in. I love that she has a disdain for pornography that claims to be art, yet she works as an exotic dancer. There is a lovely human contradiction to Petra.
