May 26 – June 28, 2009
By Michael Hollinger
Directed by Andrew Barnicle
Q&A with Andrew Barnicle
Q: Last season, you directed the West Coast Premiere of Michael Hollinger’s noir comedy Red Herring. Now, you’re directing the West Coast Premiere of Hollinger’s comedy An Empty Plate in the Café du Grand Boeuf. It sounds like you have an affinity for Michael Hollinger’s work.
A: I found in my work with Red Herring that, as a director, I very much “get” Michael Hollinger, and I think he agrees. In his insightful plays, he creates comedy that is particularly well structured.That being said, the structure is well disguised, so comic moments jump out of the honest moment-by-moment action.The trick is for actors to play those moments from the heart, so that it doesn’t seem like a punch line is being loaded up and fired like a WWI Howitzer. He also calibrates humor carefully.It helps to recognize that one moment may elicit guffaws, whereas another warrants a warm smile.My approach is always to find the truth in the moment, and let the laughter be the honest result of an honest moment.It’s kind of a Zen thing: rather than shoot an arrow at a target and be disappointed that you don’t always get a bull’s eye, we shoot the arrow, with integrity and from the heart, at a blank wall. Wherever it lands, we go paint a target around it.That way we don’t worry about what might have been, we concentrate on what is.Actors can make themselves nuts if they have a laugh meter running all of the time. That’s the surest way to disappointment in a comedy.An ounce of honest chuckles is worth tons of squeezed laughter.
Q: How different is Empty Plate from Red Herring?
A: Thematically, Empty Plate is very different from Red Herring, but in both cases Hollinger has a deep respect for the human condition, including its frailties. Regardless of the absurdity of some of the situations his characters are in, they always respond in a distinctly human way. His plays are deceptively thoughtful. Red Herring was a wild journey, but ultimately one was left with a lesson in love. The same is true of Empty Plate. Hollinger is also a master of the unexpected. Audiences won’t know what the play is really about until it’s over. That is a very good thing, by the way.Nobody should be sitting around waiting for the ending because they already know what it’s going to be. You know that they feel that way because they have a secret language they use to inform you.It’s called coughing.
Q: What are the challenges of staging a play like this?
A: The challenge will be in drawing the audience into a world that is somewhat askew from our reality.A wealthy man owns a restaurant that serves nobody but him.Sounds whacked.But then again, Howard Hughes took up an entire floor of a hotel room in Las Vegas for years and never came out. The trick is to make the weirdness plausible within the world of the play.Another challenge is that the play deals with rather deep philosophical issues. I’m calling it “romantic existentialism.”I have no idea what that means. The staging should be right in our wheelhouse: single location, elegantly appointed.Casting is always the most important element of the production.There is a character who plays the tuba, and that posed a slight problem.But it will be worth it--we all know that tuba is funny and French horn is not.That’s a basic rule of comedy.
Q: This is not a period piece written in 1961, yet is set in that specific time period. Is a familiarity with that era necessary, or does this play and its themes transcend time?
A: The play will invisibly guide audiences through the information they need in order to understand the time and place. Hollinger is also very adept at exposition. He buries it in humor, so you never feel like you’re listening to an instruction booklet, because you are laughing.Or maybe chuckling, I don’t know, but it works. The overriding themes of the play transcend time and place, however. I think that by locating the play in an exotic local and a time past, it will help us remove ourselves from our own mundane world.There is an element of the other-worldly in the play, and the location and time helps us go there.
A: What will audiences take away from this production, other than an enjoyable evening?
A: The play will hopefully give audiences a reason to ponder what they have and who they love, and to think about which is more valuable.It is about longing for what eludes you and appreciating what you have.And, it is about love.
