Steps To The Stage
Steps To The Stage
Breathing Corpses: 3 on the Edge Festival
Death has a way of revealing who we truly are. In this captivating episode of Steps to the Stage, we dive deep into one of the most intriguing productions in the Three on the Edge Festival – "Breathing Corpses" by British playwright Laura Wade.
Director Lauren Bell and actors John Nisbet and Amanda Flanagan take us behind the scenes of this darkly comedic play that unfolds in reverse chronological order. Beginning with a hotel maid discovering a dead body, the narrative moves backward through interconnected scenes that reveal how death impacts various characters in profound, absurd, and unexpectedly funny ways.
What makes this production particularly fascinating is the creative team's approach to Wade's distinctively British dialogue. The script captures realistic speech patterns – complete with interruptions, false starts, and natural rhythms – creating challenges for the actors but resulting in an authenticity rarely seen on stage. The cast shares how they've navigated these complexities while maintaining the delicate balance between humor and heartbreak that defines the play.
"Every time the play tries to go deep," Bell explains, "something happens to bring it right back up." This tonal rollercoaster mirrors real life, where even in our darkest moments, absurdity and laughter often break through. The production doesn't shy away from heavy themes – including domestic violence and suicide – but presents them through a lens of human complexity rather than melodrama.
Perfect for the intimate setting of 7th Street Community Theatre, this stripped-back production focuses on the emotional journeys of its characters rather than elaborate staging. As Nisbet notes, without being "encumbered with props or entrances and exits," the actors can fully immerse themselves in the psychological depth of their roles.
Catch "Breathing Corpses" on May 8th, 10th, 16th, with matinees on May 18th and 24th. This 80-minute exploration of mortality and human connection promises to spark conversation long after the final blackout – you may even want to see it twice to catch all the connections you missed the first time around.
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Welcome to Steps to the Stage. A 7th Street Community Theatre podcast.
Speaker 2:Hello and welcome to Steps to the Stage, the community theatre podcast, where we talk to theatre professionals you know and love. I am Marlee Lane, one of the hosts on Steps to the Stage, and today we have a very special presentation of the Three on the Edge Festival featuring Breathing Corpses, savage in Limbo and Bending the Spoon. So we're starting off with Breathing Corpses and I have a nice little set of people involved, so we have the director and some actors. So if I just have you introduce yourselves.
Speaker 3:Hi, my name is John Nisbet. I play Jim.
Speaker 4:Hi, my name is Amanda Flanagan and I play Amy.
Speaker 5:My name is Lauren Bell and I am directing Breathing Corpses.
Speaker 2:Amazing. So obviously we have this Three on the Edge Festival, which is a fun thing everyone's always excited about, because I always like plays that like maybe we don't, we haven't heard about yet, but it's like, oh, we get a little chance to get a little something fun in. So, just starting off for our director, what connected you to this play? How did you feel when you first read it? Or, like, why did you want to like make it come to life?
Speaker 5:Well, back in college I was collecting a lot of plays and I would go by like playwright and I realized that there was a lot of male playwrights there, like a lot of Odettes and Simon, and they're all great, they're lovely people, they're lovely playwrights. But then, more recently, I wanted to focus more on female playwrights and so I stumbled upon Laura Wade, and she has an incredible litany of wonderful plays.
Speaker 5:She is pretty fearless with her humor, her shock, and she's from Britain, so everybody here has a British accent in the play and I stumbled upon one of her collections and Breathing Corpses was part of it, and I really couldn't believe what I was reading and I thought has anybody else done this? I haven't seen this over here on the West Coast a whole lot. It was just. It was interesting. And it was also it's very much an actor's play. Every actor here has a really nice chonky role. They have some sort of heavy lifting to do, which is so nice.
Speaker 5:I'm an actor first and a director second, so reading it I was just like, wow, I would love to do this play, I would love to direct it, I'd love to be involved in some way. It's very enticing. It's also very interesting because it has a backwards timeline, so it's a bit of a puzzle piece about death. So we start off with the two actors that are with me today. It starts off with a hotel maid discovering a body inside of a hotel room and then the next scene. We go backwards in time to where that body, who is Jim, is alive and we start to piece together this puzzle Amazing.
Speaker 2:Amazing. And then, on the actor's point of view, it's such like an interesting plot we're dealing with and such interesting characters. So how did you feel when you first read it? And then how do you kind of feel like, okay, how do we feel now? From the beginning of the process to the end.
Speaker 4:Oh man, I would say. I read with one of the other castmates and we were freaking out. It was insane. Every single scene it was like new information. You're slowly just getting this realization of something and it's just, it's horrifying, it's wholesome in some ways and honestly it's just. I felt all the stages of grief in a way. Wow, it's very strange.
Speaker 3:Yeah, it's really interesting because you know this play is about death, you know there are corpses in it in the title, and so it's really about how those deaths can like affect people and as an actor. It's really interesting to play that kind of internal stuff where you know you haven't had an accident, where you're outwardly disfigured or injured, but really inside this is having a huge impact on you and changing your life.
Speaker 5:Wow. Yeah, it's interesting because it's about how death affects us and how encountering it, how it affects us in deep but also kind of absurd ways. Also kind of absurd ways, all of the act, all of the characters who encounter a dead person, react in a very absurd way.
Speaker 5:For example, amanda plays amy the hotel maid and she begins talking to the corpse as if it's alive, because that's just how she needs to cope with it, right? So there is actually a lot of humor in this. It sounds it's a heavy subject matter, clearly, but there is, because death is upon us, it's, it's everywhere, it's a part of our lives since, uh, the dawn of time. We haven't gotten used to it yet we really haven't.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I love it feels kind of like a british mystery tv show where you have like dark, like crazy like human concepts. But you're like it's a little funny. How is that like kind of taking on British humor and British sensibilities into America with an American audience?
Speaker 5:It's very dry. Some of the humor is very dry and it's very layered, as they are Some of it's shocking. British humor tends to push some of the boundaries that we're not really comfortable with the edge.
Speaker 4:See, like three of these, you're onto something.
Speaker 5:And I grew up on Monty Python.
Speaker 3:So I appreciate that kind of British humor and where they would often go into weird territory.
Speaker 5:Oh, there you go, exactly, and I think, yeah, it's almost, it's not quite a Monty Python, but yeah, but that's that similar, like just the lengths, and the culture of their humor is very much a part of it.
Speaker 4:We also brought up. We were talking about it. I was like this kind of reminds me of Fleabag. I love Fleabag. It's very just like quick comments, the dialogue is very natural, so there's like a lot of stuttering. It's not just like perfect sentences said perfectly, you know.
Speaker 5:It's written the way people talk Exactly I love that, and what's also really special about this play is each scene is it's kind of a vignette play. So a lot of these scenes the characters don't overlap but they affect each other. So because someone has found a body and then the next one is how they were affected by that because of some other person, and it just keeps connecting. You have to watch the play to see how everyone gets connected. However, each scene also has kind of a different genre. Very interesting, yeah. There's kind of a sitcom-y vibe with Jim's scene with his wife and his employee and there's a bit of a farcical scene at the very end. It's a surprise and we don't want to give away any spoilers.
Speaker 4:You'll have to watch it there are spoilers for this play.
Speaker 5:And then there's another scene which is quite violent and ends in a murder. Very raw, very raw, very violent, you know. So trigger warnings there is domestic violence and talk of suicide in this production.
Speaker 3:Something for everyone.
Speaker 5:Yeah, Absolutely yeah. So at the end of this play, when the curtain is down? Well, there is no curtain when the lights are down and the house lights are back up. You will explode in conversation.
Speaker 2:I promise you that's a lot to discuss. I promise you.
Speaker 5:Because every time I've ever read this, I've heard people read it in a group. People cannot shut up.
Speaker 3:Well, and we want people to come see it early so they can come back and see it again, because you'll want to, yes, you will, you will miss things.
Speaker 5:You will realize oh my gosh, this person said a thing about the next scene. I didn't notice it the first time and it's only like 80 minutes. So it's not that it's not that long.
Speaker 2:So, every detail counts for sure. I love that. I love. Okay, I'll be there. Please, please, come yeah.
Speaker 4:And I also wanted to bring up too. It also shows that, like there's no correct way to react to death, it's the one thing that's guaranteed in life and we don't. There's no way to properly prepare for it. I feel like everyone's like oh well, you know it's okay to be upset. What if they don't? What if your whole life? It's just an ever-changing way of just coping with this experience.
Speaker 4:You know, and the way it's just so like the spectrum of emotions coming out in this play has really shown me like, yeah, there really is no right way and you can't shame yourself.
Speaker 3:Well sure, Everybody reacts to death differently.
Speaker 4:Absolutely.
Speaker 2:That's what this really kind of showcases. Right, yeah, it seems like a very human play. I feel like always when something's about death, it's about life, obviously, but I think that's what people will attach themselves to. That's the exact word.
Speaker 5:I use to describe this, because whenever I tell people there's humor in this, they kind of tilt their head and I say, well, because that's life and humans are humans. We crack jokes at people's memorials because we want to know fun and exciting things about their life. We're not there to just cry and sob and kind of go for the obvious emotion. Humans are very complex creatures, dead and alive, and I think this shows that. And speaking of early, if you want to come early, our first show Actually we open on a Thursday, so we open May 8th and we're also on May 10th, 16th, and then we have matinees on May 18th and 24th Because we are in rep with two other awesome shows yes, so get your tickets now.
Speaker 2:As you can see, it's very interesting you might as well just see all three absolutely exactly you know, and if you just saw um little shop of horrors.
Speaker 5:If you want more blood, definitely come to this show.
Speaker 2:Yes, there will be more of some dark humor and explorations on life right yes, okay, going more on the production side, how's like you know what was like your vision design, like how's that been? And also, I always like to be like this is an interesting theater because we're such like a small stage, so how's that the whole production experience been for you? This theater is the perfect theater for a show like this.
Speaker 5:It is truly a black box show I've seen. I explored a couple like other productions and some of them have been very bare bones, you know, just really truly like black boxes as furniture and things like that. So I was willing to go that stripped back as much as possible and overall I knew I had to have a really, really good cast. I could not settle and I didn't. I absolutely could not settle and I had a few really amazing people show up at auditions and some of the roles were very hard to cast because I had a lot of contenders. But ultimately I knew that these people had to be emotionally mature. They also had to be funny.
Speaker 5:Everybody had to understand. That's a harder skill than you think it is Right it is.
Speaker 5:You can be a truthful actor and it's almost easier to be slapstick and inappropriate, but we also want it to be real and hit the human heart in a soft and cheerful way and that every single actor in this has that. They have truth, they have humor, they're all funny. They vibe really well together and it's been hard During the rehearsal process. We've been so separated because of the vignette style of the play, but now that they've been together they get along so well.
Speaker 3:And I love all the laughter.
Speaker 5:So, yeah, I wanted good actors stripped back show. I wanted to focus in on the story and the situations that these humans are in. And also music. Music is so important, so important.
Speaker 2:People don't think about it in a play.
Speaker 5:It sets everything.
Speaker 2:Yep, yeah, amazing. I feel like the audience can also feel when the actors are together and you just feel like something like you feel a little zing between the stage. Yeah, so that'll be cool.
Speaker 3:Yeah, go ahead. I was going to say it's just been a great experience working with the other actors, because not only are the people good, but, like Lauren said, this is kind of a black box type of show. We're not encumbered with a lot of props or entrances and exits or all sorts of that extra stuff that you have to think about, so we can really focus on the character development.
Speaker 2:Yeah, your mind's kind of freed up so you can just like put it all, put it all on the stage from the actor's perspective, and we also have, like, like what I'm hearing, we have a little interesting concept, we have a lot of cool things going on. What's been your best moment in the process so far?
Speaker 4:oh my gosh. I'd say my favorite part of the process is, um, oh, actually we did, uh, one of our rehearsals. Um, so, since I have to interact with a dead body, we were like, why don't we have the dead body like react to your, your conversation? So we had a rehearsal and I was doing my dialogue and our um, dead hard corpse was actually sitting up and listening to me. So it was very interesting.
Speaker 4:I was like, well, like I like I wonder, like how this is going to work, how I'm going to feel, and you know I it actually helped a lot. It helped, like the eye contact and doing those exercises that we would do to like practice, you know, keeping that chemistry there, not only building it, but keeping the chemistry there between me and the cast. So it's been a wonderful process. And I'd say another part is definitely going over lines with each other. I've never had anyone be like, oh, like you know, like I can ask, saying, hey, could you, like you know, read this scene for me and make sure I'm on book. I'm doing good. And I'm like, yeah, of course, and I feel comfortable with everyone.
Speaker 3:So it's amazing. Yeah, We've come together as a team pretty well.
Speaker 4:I think Pretty well yes.
Speaker 5:Very much so. I'm watching. The chemistry between everyone has been a blossom, and grow and develop has been such a joy, and I can't wait for people to see them.
Speaker 2:I know I love doing these and being like, oh my gosh, I'm so excited. Guys, how has doing the British accents been?
Speaker 4:You want to go first?
Speaker 2:on that one.
Speaker 4:Both of them are great. I would say it's oh man, it's challenging to enunciate, it's easy, it comes easy for me to project, so I'm not worried that, like people won't hear me speaking, it's more like what I'm exactly what I'm saying you know, and it does add another layer.
Speaker 3:you know, you gotta not only remember your lines, but then you gotta try to sound like you're from somewhere else exactly.
Speaker 5:Yeah, but it's written so britishly, so you're the syntax, the syntax. Well, it's like we couldn't. We couldn't Americanize this if we tried.
Speaker 4:It wouldn't sound right.
Speaker 5:There's just no way One actor is going to be an expat, we decided, but we actually had to change a couple of the lines because they are written with a very British syntax and they cannot sound correct in an American accent. It's tough, yeah. So she writes. The way Laura writes is very much the way people speak. There's a lot of interrupting, a lot of talking over people and there's a lot of what I'm about to do right now, which is like a start-stop conversation sentence, where you start a sentence and then you stop and you start it again, which is so interesting. Usually we just do that, naturally, but she actually wrote it into the play, which is so hard for these guys to memorize, and they have been, they've, they're absolute rock stars.
Speaker 3:I think I have one line where I say I felt four times in a row, yeah, because just that. He's trying to get the sentence out.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I love plays written. It always looks so scary on the page. But then, like, when you like, get into it and you're like, okay, no, it was worth it to like.
Speaker 4:Yeah, you're like, I've spoken like this before. You know it's just seeing it and trying to follow something, like consciously follow a script, you're like it's challenging in your mind, but we do it every single day.
Speaker 5:Right Because we don't even text that way. Yeah, right, text the way that we speak, exactly. Yeah, we text the way.
Speaker 4:We think maybe, but like she literally writes the way people speak, sentences Very impressive, yeah.
Speaker 2:Have you had anything like challenging to overcome throughout the process? Was there anything that you're just like stuck on for a second, or has everything been kind of in harmony?
Speaker 3:I mean, I think everything has gone really well. What's terrific about working with Lauren is that she will work with the actors. You know she said she's an actress as well, and so she knows. Okay, well, if we can't do it this way, we can do it this way, and you know what's going to work best for the dialogue and for staging and how everybody looks. So she's also part of the team. For sure that we've all been working together really well.
Speaker 4:Exactly. I'd say. A challenge for me was definitely putting the dialogue and the blocking together. That was definitely like it's just hand-eye coordination. Oh, like wait, what part are we on? When do I, on this line, I move right here. That's when you start doing this. It's hard, like rounding it out. That's when I'm like okay, okay, we have to, like you know, stay on the path. I know it's frustrating, but we got to keep going.
Speaker 5:Yeah, and it was nice because we had to kind of come up with tracks for her of where to go, because Laura Wade God bless her she gives a lot of like directions in some of her plays. But you don't. It's like, for example, one of the directions is Like but you don't. It's like. For example, one of the directions is Amy is cleaning, and that's about it. Like, where is she cleaning? When is she doing this? Like, how involved is she? You know that sort of thing, and it's kind of like in and out. So we have to decide on it, which is fine and that's part of the process.
Speaker 5:I think some of the challenges have been normal challenges, like deciding to what level are we going to push certain subject matters. You know, how far are we going to push certain humorous moments? How far are we going to push certain dramatic moments? A lot of the reviews I read if they critiqued the play, I noticed it was a critique of lack of chemistry between certain characters. So I thought, okay, we're going to, really we're going to hone in on that, or they would focus it. They would say that they missed the humor and I said, okay, we're going to hone in on that, or they would say that they missed the humor and I said, okay, we're not going to miss the humor, but we're also not going to push it so far that it's unreal. It's such a balance.
Speaker 3:It's not wacky.
Speaker 5:Yeah, but it's normal humor you would hear every day, but some of it's shocking, like every time the play tries to go deep, like it's, for example, jim slash. John has a really deep monologue at the end about the effect of finding a dead body hat on him. He gets really in there and he talks about the smell and how the smell is stuck in his nose and he can't get it out and it's so deep and heavy and the audience is going to get drawn in and then suddenly his wife, played by Christy Papay, she says have you tried VIXX?
Speaker 4:It brings it right back up To a hard stop. Yeah.
Speaker 5:It's every time that happens, and so to make sure that those moments are real, yeah, instead of like garish.
Speaker 2:Yes, yeah, finding the rhythm of the show, the show yeah well, this has been an amazing conversation and, as we wrap up, I would just like each of you to describe the show in one word, like you're gonna sell it in one word for our listeners. What would you say?
Speaker 3:oh, in one word, um introspective love.
Speaker 4:Man, I'd say insightful.
Speaker 5:Insightful. I love it. We're using a lot of N words. I was like N, I'm going to call it absurd.
Speaker 4:Absurd, that's good.
Speaker 2:I love it. Well, everybody, this has been Breathing Corpses. We have amazing actors and directors, so get your tickets now. Can you say those dates again for us?
Speaker 5:Yes, we are performing in rep with also alongside Savage in Limbo and Bending the Spoon Breathing Corpses is performing May 8th, 10th, 16th. We are also performing matinees on May 18th and 24th Amazing, thank you so much, thank you and 24th Amazing.
Speaker 4:Thank you so much Enjoy it.
Speaker 5:Thank you, thank you.
Speaker 1:Thanks for listening to Steps to the Stage, a 7th Street Community Theatre podcast. Follow us on your favorite podcast platform and leave us a review and a five-star rating. It really helps. You can also find us on Instagram, facebook and YouTube. Special thanks to Chino Community Theatre and Chino Community Children's Theater for their generous support and very special thank you to the listeners. Steps to the Stage was created by Joey Rice and Kirk Lane. Logo created by Marley Lane. Original music by Joey Rice. Your host, marley Lane. Engineer and producer, joey Rice. Engineer and executive producer, kirk Lane.
