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The off-off-Broadway podcast
March 31, 2015
Lisi DeHaas and Jay Stull of “Leave Me Green”
Photo by Russ Rowland
What scares you the most? And would you do if those worst fears were realized?
It was starting from that question that playwright Lisi DeHaas wrote her beautiful new play Leave Me Green, currently playing at The Gym at Judson.
Listen in as Lisi & the show’s director, returning podcast guest Jay Stull, discuss plays that are of the moment, grief, relatable stakes, and how it’s a miracle we don’t all fall apart.
“…I wrote it sort of to remind myself, ‘you’re ok…you’re gonna be fine. We’re all gonna be fine…'” Listen to the interview >>
New York Theatre Review
April 7, 2015
She's Lost Control Again: Rachel Kerry on Lisi DeHaas's Leave Me Green at The Gym at Judson
Everyone has different coping mechanisms for dealing with loss. For some, it’s attending group therapy or expressing themselves through music. But for others, it’s drinking themselves into oblivion or using hard drugs. Whether helpful or hurtful, the road to healing can be a long and bumpy one. Leave Me Green, Lisi DeHaas's well-directed, thoughtful drama explores the way loss and grief impact our closest relationships.
Leave me Green focuses on Gus (a heartfelt Oscar A.L. Cabrera), a teenage boy who has lost one of his two mothers to a random act of violence. His other mother, Rebecca (Charlotte Booker), struggles with the loss of her partner by descending into alcoholism. To cope, Gus plays Joy Division songs on his keyboard, befriends his pot-dealing neighbor, and even attends a help group for teenagers affected by addiction. When he meets Lia (Emma Meltzer), another teenager damaged by loss, their subsequent romance forces them to confront their grief head-on. Cabrera portrays Gus with a gentle volatility, never falling into a caricature of teenage angst. As Lia, Meltzer embodies both the heartbreak and absurdity of working through tragedy. One moment her neurotic fear of mice provides comic relief, the next an anxiety attack reminds us how fragile she is. It’s a fine line to walk.
Jay Stull is a razor sharp director who knows when to approach the material with a light tough. In lesser hands, DeHaas's writing could come across as heavy handed, filled with melodramatic sandpits. When Gus’s neighbor reveals a deep secret about Gus's birth father, it risks contrivance. But, Stull encourages such specificity in his actors that Leave Me Green develops into a deeply affecting story. But that isn’t to say that it is always easy to watch. A birthday dinner scene where drunken mother and passive-aggressive girlfriend sling vitriolic zingers over Gus is an exercise in schadenfreude. Later, in a gay club, Rebecca throws herself at a young woman, desperate to pretend her partner is still alive. In portraying these deeply uncomfortable moments, Leave Me Green showcases the ugly mediocrity of grief.
Jeanne Travis's thrilling sound design is an exceptional work of art. She subtly coaxes the focus of the audience using audioscapes that range from practical to deeply expressive. To set location Travis crafts street noises and muffled salsa records playing through the wall; to underscore Gus’s panic, she warps and reverses Joy Division’s, “She’s Lost Control.” It’s the perfect complement to the imaginative scenic design. Jessica Parks’s set sections off the The Gym at Judson into a collection of small, rectangular apartment rooms, creating impressionistic slices of life. It is this tremendous design work coupled with Stull’s directing that elevates the script from indie film fodder to a work of poignant theatre.
Leave Me Green is a tender if difficult drama about trauma, confronting deep pain, and, ultimately, healing through it.
Leave Me Green Written by Lisi DeHaas Directed by Jay Stull
Cast Charlotte Booker, Oscar A. L. Cabrera, Michael Gaines, Emma Meltzer
Scenic Design: Jessica Parks Costume Design: Lux Haac Lighting Design: Nicholas Houfek Sound Design: Jeanne Travis
April 8-11, 2015, 8PM Tickets: $18
The Gym at Judson 243 Thompson Street
Theater is Easy
April 1, 2015
Leave Me Green
By Lisi DeHaas; Directed by Jay Stull
Produced by APT 10C Productions and Kindling Theater Company
Off Off Broadway, New Play
Runs through 4.11.15
The Gym at Judson, 243 Thompson St.
by Keith Paul Medelis on 4.1.15
BOTTOM LINE: Lisi DeHaas’s script includes poignant and exciting moments, despite some unfortunate clunkiness in the production.
The Gym at Judson is such a neat space. Making no apologies for it’s gym-ness, we get to see all but basketball hoops on the white-washed, cinderblock walls. The potential is limitless. Lisi DeHaas’ Leave Me Green opened recently here. It’s an interesting frame for a story. It seems that one half of a two-mother-helmed relationship has recently passed away. Rebecca Green (played by Charlotte Booker), the remaining matriarch, is a washed-up actor turned real estate agent with a long history of alcohol abuse and a complicated, strained relationship with her son Gustavo (Oscar A.L. Cabrera.) And there’s another sticky situation happening just next door with the loud-record-playing tendencies of eccentric neighbor Myron (played adeptly by Michael Gaines.) We can sense that his strange presence here will have some payoff, and indeed it does.
Gus attends his first Al-A-Teen meeting- for young people affected by their parents' drinking. Judging by the mood, mouse-bitten cookies, and open seats, not many ever attend this thing, save for Lia (Emma Meltzer). In a perhaps noticeable plotline, the two begin dating. At an awkward dinner date, wherein Gus introduces Lia to his mother, he also helps himself to wine just to get himself through. Some unexpected turns soon follow, which can’t spoiled here.
Sadly, I find something not quite lived-in enough about Leave Me Green. Booker, as the grieving, conflicted, alcoholic mother, comes across as, well, a bit normal. And while Cabrera’s Gustavo finds much more color and depth, his interactions with his mother and Lia tend to border on forced.
I’m afraid there are also some complications with DeHaas’ script. With it’s peculiarly challenging filmic nature and five distinct locations it’s not easy to get away with beautiful theatrical tricks. Jay Stull’s direction makes the most of this by having us see characters in their offstage moments, thinly illuminated and more-or-less frozen. It’s a solid way to move through this difficult terrain.
I found myself a little lost for placement amongst Jessica Parks' set. There’s mention of selling real estate in Tribeca on the background of some solidly suburban digs. And our foreground, a large swath of Astroturf, isn’t quite carpet enough to behave as the floor of a dingy church basement, yet far too carpet-like to match the beauty of DeHaas’ final nostalgic scene. I heard an audience member comment on the way out, “I wish my apartment was that size.”
Nicholas Houfek's lighting and Jeanne Travis' sound design concoct some really successful environments here, taking advantage of the Gym’s expansive space and immersing us in the sounds of sizzling (and burning) onions, and a myriad of sounds from records on turntables. Travis’ most exciting moment comes as she propels us forward into a passionate make-out scene with some thumping, explosive instrumental music. It links two disparate worlds in a way I wish could be found throughout DeHaas’ play.
I was happy to find solace at the end of Leave Me Green. In a tidy package, the world seems to have righted itself. Despite the crazy past and uncertain future, this created family will make and remake itself. It’s a powerful statement of queer families everywhere. We make our own rules, our own problems, and we trust it’ll all turn out all right, like Leave Me Green itself, unevenness and all. There's an offering of an important voice and strong message here. Check it out.
Charged.fm
April 1, 2015
'Leave Me Green' Tackles Alcoholism and Grief
by Natalie Sacks
This LGBT-centric play tells a story of addiction and the lives we never lived.
Leave Me Green by Lisi DeHaas is a play about grieving, and not just those people we have lost but the lives we never lived. It is the story of a has-been soap opera star, her son who never got to know his birth father, her nemesis of a neighbor who was once a dear family friend and, of course, the love of her life, who has passed away far too soon. So how do we manage the lives we do have while mourning the ones that never came to be?
Unfortunately, in this world premiere production by APT 10C Productions and Kindling Theater Company, a good part of that answer involves alcohol. More than simply being about loss, Leave Me Green is a complex and engaging portrait of alcoholism and its effects on already struggling families. As Rebecca O'Reilly Green tries to accept the death of her wife Inez in Iraq and continue her job as a real estate agent to support her son, she never seems to quite be sober anymore, and before long that becomes the true tragedy.
The play is more Gus's story than Rebecca's, however, following the teen as he meets his girlfriend in a support group for family members of alcoholics, pursues a familial relationship with neighbor Myron and tries to manage the everyday tasks of the house that his mother quite clearly is no longer up to. It is also very much a musical story, with record players, iPods and salsa clubs of yore permeating the fabric of the performance and recalling the members of the family who are no longer with them. Rarely does a minute or two go by without some fitting musical accompaniment, an engaging addition to the otherwise stark script.
Leave Me Green starts off rather slowly, only picking up energy once Rebecca's condition truly starts to deteriorate and the secrets start coming out. Who is Gus's father? What is really going on with Lia's family, itself full of alcoholics unable to come to terms with her brother's suicide? Just who is Myron, the neighborhood pot dealer, to Rebecca and Gus? And how could getting pregnant with her son have ruined Rebecca's acting career when, by definition because of her and her partner's sexuality, it could not have been an accident?
In a show such as this one, with a small cast and a strong family focus, it is the acting that truly carries the show. From Gus's (Oscar A. L. Cabrera) compelling struggle to be the adult in his family to Lia's (Emma Meltzer) entertaining abrasiveness, this is not a story about charming characters. Rather, it tells the tale of people warped by grief, typified in the character of Rebecca (Charlotte Booker) whose startling and repulsive depiction of a middle-aged alcoholic is nonetheless deeply sympathetic. Michael Gaines rounds out the cast as Myron, the fatherly drug dealer and music lover with his own dark past.
Perfectly fitting for the world of New York City apartments with paper-thin walls, you are always aware of where the neighbors are and what they're doing in this show. The set is divided up into four main areas so that scenes can blend effortlessly from bedroom to kitchen to Myron's living room, an inventive conceit that emphasizes how linked the four characters are to one another. When either Gus or Myron decides to play a record, the whole stage knows what they're feeling.
Ultimately, there is not a lot of action in this play beyond outbursts of emotion and whatever Rebecca's next drunken escapade may be. But what Leave Me Green excels at is the messy bits of life, the day-to-day affairs of people who can't bear to look any further ahead. It swirls together issues of the Iraq War, LGBT families, drug use and more to concoct the story of one unique family and what brings them to their breaking point.
Adam Szymkowicz
March 23, 2015
I Interview Playwrights Part 731: Lisi DeHaas
Hometown: New York, New York.
Current Town: New York, New York. (Since 2009)
Previous Towns: San Francisco & Los Angeles (1991-2008)
Q: Tell me about Leave Me Green.
A: LEAVE ME GREEN explores the relationships among a group of New Yorkers touched by loss. It takes place in the winter of 2009 when Gay marriage was not yet legal in New York State. It centers on Rebecca Green, and her son Gus, who have just lost their third family member, Inez, to the war in Iraq. It addresses issues I have written and performed about over the last two decades: gender and sexual identity, how the personal is political, GLBT rights- specifically marriage equality and the importance of speaking openly about our families. It’s a good old American “kitchen sink” drama. It’s a story about a non-traditional family struggling with grief, in a traditional dramatic container. The play is a dramatic reflection of my worst fears. What if I lost my life partner and was left a single parent? What if grief overcame me and I became an active alcoholic? What if my son felt betrayed by not knowing the origins of his birth story? The play formed out of my recent experience mourning three sudden deaths in my family, one of which left my nephew without his mother. As I struggled with my own grief, and my family’s grief, writing the play became an affirmation of the fullness of life. It was in and of itself a practice, a commitment to living.
Q: What else are you working on now?
A: A couple New York City plays. One, in very early stages, is a full-length four-character play about two misfit middle-aged people who reconnect upon returning home to their neighboring childhood apartments after the deaths of their respective parents. The other, Balloon Man & Cat Lady, is a one-act about an alcoholic ventriloquist who sells balloons in the park, and his feral cat rescuer wife. They play explores their doomed co-dependent sinkhole of a relationship the only escape from which is death. The play needs some work to become the comedy I hope it will be.
Q: Tell me, if you will, a story from your childhood that explains who you are as a writer or as a person.
A: One of the first stories about my childhood is that at three years old I pounded on the locked door of my parent’s room and yelled, “Someone open this fucking door!” – and lo and behold, they stopped whatever it was they were doing in there, and did. My, “If you Hear something, Say something”, strategy was very effective. Unfortunately my take no prisoners pre-school attitude waned in the face of my childhood fascination with ballet. I studied at the American Ballet Theatre School near Lincoln Center, which has long since been torn down. It was a very cool building- featured in the classic film The Turning Point. What they didn’t show in the movie was the epic roach infestation throughout the school. The older students had a great show where they would pull back the cork board in the lobby to reveal what was behind it: a shiny rectangular teeming mass of roaches. I would stand at a safe distance from this horror, as other kids feigned terror with delighted squeals, and wonder at their bravery. At age nine I was cast as “Fifth Position” in the ballet Etudes and I got to do a grand plié (in fifth position, of course) and a little jete on the stage of the Metropolitan Opera House. Suffice it to say that is the largest theatre I’ve ever had the privilege to perform in. In college, I discovered that if I did something called “Dance-Theatre”, I could actually talk while dancing. This was a welcome discovery. I decided to become a Performance Artist and move to San Francisco; because the birth of my literal and figurative voice coincided with my realization that I was batting for the, “Other”, team. At 22, I made a performance called, “Recipe For Grief”, about a Midwestern housewife testifying to the murder of her transgender lover by her husband. At the end of this piece, having stripped off my 50’s housewife attire and hung it on a clothesline behind me, I did a naked movement sequence consisting mostly of back bends, then smashed eggs on my head to represent the bashing. The piece ended with a blood-curdling scream. Eventually the text in my work became central, even though the characters I portrayed were discovered through improvisation in the studio. Twenty years later I’m writing stories for other people to perform, but my writing evolved out of my own experience of being a performer.
Q: If you could change one thing about theater, what would it be?
A: Three things: More diversity, More accessibility, More resources.
Q: Who are or were your theatrical heroes?
A: Jean Genet, Antonin Artaud, Mabou Mines, Bill T. Jones, Tony Kushner, Larry Kramer, Lisa Kron, Peggy Shaw & Lois Weaver, Alvin Ailey, Paula Vogel, Eugene O’Neill, Tennessee Williams, Paul Rudnick, Peter Brook, Kate Bornstein, Justin Vivian Bond, Lee Theodore, Jerome Robbins, Bob Fosse, Holly Hughes, Suzan Lori Parks, Sonya Sobieski, Tommy Kail & Lin Manuel Miranda, Karen Hartman, Tanya Barfield, Aristotle, Anna Halprin.
Q: What kind of theater excites you?
A: Theatre that isn’t afraid to get personally political in service of the greater good. Lisa Kron’s, “Well”, “Fun Home”. Doug Wright’s “I am My Own Wife”. Suzan Lori Parks, “Father Comes Home From The Wars”. I like theatre that is physical, embodied, an emotional journey for the performers and the audience. I loved the Anne Washburn and The Civilians’, “Mr. Burns: A Post-Electric Play” Virtuosic spectacle. Musicals. Melodrama. Theatre of the Absurd. Drag. Transformation. Catharsis. Work that opens our mind and heart simultaneously.
Q: What advice do you have for playwrights just starting out?
A: Share your work regularly, get feedback from a group. Bearing witness and supporting other people’s creative process feeds your own. Find a writing routine, a sustainable ritual, and stick with it. I get up very early in the morning, make coffee, light candles, burn sage, and write for a couple hours. If I don’t have to go into work and my family life allows it, I write for longer. If I stick with this structure three, ideally five, days a week, I enjoy writing much more than if I stop and have to get started all over again. Momentum is key. It’s always my goal to see as much theatre as possible: new work in progress as well as full productions. This being said, I am nowhere near close to seeing as much as there is to see on any given week in this city.
Q: Plugs, please:
A: My new play LEAVE ME GREEN, directed by Jay Stull, is at The Gym at Judson, 243 Thompson St., in a limited run through April 11th. You can find more information on our Facebook page: https://www.Facebook.com/LeaveMeGreen or call: (866) 811-4111 for tickets.