Tom Story is one of DC’s beloved actors. He’s appeared in a dozen plays at Studio, around the area at The Shakespeare Theatre Company, Ford’s Theatre, Arena Stage, Synetic Theatre, Round House Theatre, and others. He’s also performed around the country at major regional theatres and Off Broadway in New York. Story is making his directorial debut this spring with Studio 2ndStage’s Moth.
Story and production dramaturg Adrien-Alice Hansel had a chance to sit down and discuss Story’s experiences directing the US premiere of this dark and theatrical Australian play.
Can you tell us a little bit about Moth and what drew you to it as a director?
Moth is the story of Sebastian and Claryssa, 15 year olds in high school, and the lowest of the low. These are the kids who are on the margins of the margins in the pecking order of high school. The ones who have no status, who are so on the outskirts even the teachers are repulsed by them. Claryssa the Emo girl poet loner. And Sebastian the anime-obsessed smelly freak.
One of my ways into the play is something Declan [Greene, the playwright] said, that Moth is a play about the erasure of peoples’ identities through constant humiliation. But the play is also a kind of piecing together of a shared horrific incident; part a kind of reckoning, and part solving the mystery of what actually happened here, the unraveling of their mysterious violent fate. The most exciting thing, I think, is that it takes on this mystery with humor and wit. And love. The more I work on it, the more I understand that at its core, the play is a kind of a love story between freaks.
I was drawn to it because thought that it was a terrific challenge for young actors because there are multiple voices in the play. It’s a play I’d want to be in as an actor—the characters are really vibrant and interesting, and the play is structured like a kind of puzzle.
The central challenge of the play—there are many—is getting believably young actors to transform into different people and paint a kind of complicated sonic narrative. The actors are creating other characters vocally, not in a way that a virtuoso one-person show artist might create them, but in the way that children create them, particularly by infusing other people with their opinions of them.
This is your first full production as a director, but you’ve been acting for years. Can you talk a little bit about how your preparation to direct this play compares to the way you prepare for a role you’ll be playing?
Obviously when you act in the play it’s a less-big picture preparation; you want to understand the world of the play but you’re getting into the play through the lens of a play—you read through it and notice things like, “Oh, that person says this about me. I must be mean sometimes.”
But when you’re directing you read through the lens of all the characters, and you have to think about the kind of place the play occurs. And if it’s a memory play, like this one, you think about how to abstract a real place to help unravel the play’s story.
Every aspect of the play is your business. I mean, if I’m honest, I’ve made it my business before, but as an actor, it hasn’t been my business.
Can you talk a little bit about the physical production?
The set is an abstraction of high school, purgatory of high school—a kind of Hades High, really, with a set of lockers and abstracted physical movement to complement the emotionally intense performances.
I am super visual person, and I love theatricality and visual gestures. I love sound design and its power in telling a story. So hopefully what we will create here is a unique memory space. A kind of high school purgatory where tenderness occurs in unexpected places. Where the sound of a moth in a jar can be terrifying and the noise of a demon robot comforting. A place where a small red light can be a single magical moth that reproduces into a tornado of moths and then morphs into the terrible scope of a police snipers rifle. Where objects and sounds have a kind of fluidity and multiple meanings as they would in a dream, and where they are present only when they are necessary in telling this story.
Can you tell us a little bit about these actors and why you were drawn to them? Was casting for this play relatively simple?
It was a hard play to cast. These actors came in and looked so physically different but have such a palpable chemistry—a chemistry and an authentic, inherent sweetness. Even though Declan wrote people who he want to be unlikable, I thought that the kind of sweetness shining through all of the flaws made something really compelling.
In this kind of play, my central task is to guide the acting and storytelling so that it is clear and skillful, immediate and risky, comedic and emotionally full. It is the kind of play that I would have wanted to do. It has many acting challenges as Sebastian and Claryssa not only portray themselves but a host of other people. I am lucky to have found Allie Villarreal and David Nate Goldman. Casting is a huge part of the success of a play. I was struggling to know what to do and then these two read together and the play came to life in all its comedic freakish heartbreaking glory.