Interview with director Andrew Barnicle
Laguna Playhouse artistic director Andrew Barnicle has the challenging assignment of directing the Southern California premiere of Michael Hollinger’s noir comedy, Red Herring. He talked with Callboard editor Christopher Trela about the project and what it’s like to delve into a Cold War-era world.
CT: What drew you to Red Herring?
AB: I had read one of Michael Hollinger’s other plays, Incorruptible, about ten years ago and wanted to do it, but it didn’t fit into our season at the time. It was very irreverent, which I always like in a farce. After reading Red Herring, I knew I wanted to do it and we were able to find a spot in our season. Red Herring is a different type of play than Incorruptible in that it includes three different plots centering on three very different couples. One couple is in their 20’s, another in their late 30’s and another one in their mid 40’s. The play is basically a love story, and everything these couples do intertwines with various international events. The couples all come together in the end and figure out how to solve their problems.
CT: Can you reveal some of the plot of Red Herring?
AB: The plot involves the FBI, dead bodies washing up at fishing docks, missing people and a Russian fisherman spy. It also involves the experiments with detonating the nuclear bomb. There are many other elements that are all from the 1950’s era that create the events that connect these characters with each other.
CT: Do you think that people need to know much about that time period to be able to understand and enjoy Red Herring?
AB: No, I think that what they need to know is already pretty well known by most people. One thing that is important to know about is Senator Joseph McCarthy and the communist witch hunt that occurred after World War II. [See related article about 1950s history]
CT: Based on that description, Red Herring sounds more like a detective/noir mystery than a romantic comedy or a farce. Is the main character a detective?
AB: He’s not a gumshoe detective, he’s an FBI agent who is romantically involved with a local female detective who is trying to solve a series of murders. The play defies categorization in the ordinary way. You could call it a political thriller farcical romantic drama—it has qualities from just about every genre. I like the idea that it is so unique. Comedy is generally categorized as a play in which no one dies. For Red Herring, that isn’t true at all. People die, and yet parts of the play are hilarious and depend on the notion of people bumping into each other at the perfect time, allowing the plot to progress in such a great way.
CT: What are the tricky aspects of staging a play like this?
AB: Well for starters, the fact that it takes place in 30 different locations and it’s such a fast-paced play. Instead of changing the scenery for each of these scenes, you have to develop a sort of generic setting that will create all of the environments that the play requires. These settings are vastly different. For example, there is a Boston harbor and a wedding dress boutique. This play progresses like a movie, it’s constantly moving with very little time between scenes for a transition. The stage that has been developed will be able to do a million different things while the audience follows along. The actors play multiple roles, so they’ll go out through one door and come in through another in a completely different costume as a different character. While this is certainly challenging, it’s also part of the fun.
CT: I would imagine that getting the right actors is critical for Red Herring. How difficult is it to cast a production like this, where a handful of actors play multiple parts?
AB: The playwright realizes that it is going to take actors with some real chameleon-like skills to pull this off. At the same time though, the characters that these actors portray have roughly the same characteristics, both physically and emotionally. For example, the woman who plays the landlady in the hotel is also Joseph McCarthy’s wife. Changing costumes as well as dialect plays a huge role in being able to pull this kind of thing off properly. But of course those are some of the elements that make this production so interesting and exciting not only to produce but to see.
CT: Red Herring sounds like a play that almost any audience will enjoy.
AB: I think the fact that this play is a really smart, really funny play will appeal to most audiences. Michael was able to weave into the play different ideas about relationships that are germane to members of our audience, while at the same time spotlighting a very important time in American History.
