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Dying City Interview
Photo by Jason Fagg
An Interview with cast members
Dana Marks and Jay O'Berski
from Manbites Dog Theater's production of
Dying City
by Christopher Shinn
Interviewer: Katja Hill
See a video clip from the interview
Christopher Shinn’s greatest skill as a playwright may be his refusal to say too much. His plays depend upon a cast’s emotional fluency to articulate what is felt, if never said.
Actors Dana Marks and Jay O’Berski are familiar faces to Manbites Dog Theater audiences. Ten days and counting until their opening night of Christopher Shinn’s DYING CITY directed by Artistic Director Jeffrey Storer, we intercepted this busy cast of two for a quick interview before rehearsal.
MDT: Thanks so much for carving out a little time to chat about the show. We know every minute of the final stretch to opening a show is precious to your work. An obvious question first: Didn’t we just see you in there for EUROPE CENTRAL earlier this month, or even just a little over a week ago? Dana, you were in it, and Jay, you directed it – to great critical acclaim, no less. How do you cram so many irons in the fire and not get burned? Where do you find the energy?
MARKS: We just like to do it so much. Well, God. We just get to do it so much, you know? And not many people do. How can you complain about that, really?
O’BERSKI: We take a nap every day.
MARKS: We do. It helps.
MDT: Naps? Is that it? With rehearsals overlapping a bit between EUROPE CENTRAL and DYING CITY, was it hard to shift gears between the worlds of dueling plays, or did one world illuminate the other?
MARKS: Ooh, that’s a good question. No, I tend to separate them out. You know, I leave one alone in this home over here, and then work on another in that home over there, if that makes sense. What about you, Jay?
O’BERSKI: I directed one so I was useless when it opened.
MARKS: (Laughing) You’re useless now!
MDT: A sense of suspension between two worlds may have been a good vantage point for you both, considering Shinn’s play balances perilously on the edges of two dying cities: Baghdad trapped in the crosshairs of our war on Iraq and New York as it comes to terms with its new place upon the world stage after 9/11. What are your thoughts on the title’s other meanings, Jay?
O’BERSKI: I think the play is really about post-traumatic stress disorder, and how it affects everyone—not just soldiers. So, everyone who’s living in these two cities is completely stressed out and hollowed out, and made into a sort of walking dead by mutual atrocities that have been committed there. And the way it’s expressed here in the play is through a dying, festering relationship.
MDT: And there are yet more dualities within the play. Tell us a little about the twin brothers you play. Who are they and what are they like?
O’BERSKI: One of them is Peter, a Hollywood actor doing a Broadway play in New York City who comes back to see his sister-in-law, trying to reconnect with her after not seeing her for a year. The other is an American soldier who went to Iraq and was killed under mysterious circumstances – seemingly a friendly fire accident – and he appears in flashback.
MDT: Isn't the soldier also a scholar of William Faulkner?
O’BERSKI: Yes, that definitely plays into the whole piece. There’s a character in Faulkner named Quentin Compson who appears in several of his novels. He’s young and hyper-intelligent, but he’s reliving the sins of the family, almost as kind of a House of Atrius thing. And he can’t bear the pressure of what’s going on. So he goes to Harvard and he commits suicide. And the soldier character in Shinn's play, Craig, has also gone to Harvard, where he’s experienced the ghost of his father, a Vietnam veteran and an abusive man.
MDT: So right away with a character bio that includes Harvard—a credential earned on an ROTC scholarship, no less—we know that Mr. Shinn isn’t writing the standard-issue war protest play—
O’BERSKI: No.
MDT:—or a reprise of Fahrenheit 9/11. In fact, it seems the war itself is more of an offstage specter, right? Something beaming out of the TV or a faraway job that Craig can disappear into.
O’BERSKI: I think Dying City is the first—at least as far as I can tell—of the sort of second generation war or 9/11 plays, just like in the late 80s and early 90s you had all these second-generation AIDS plays that where only tangentially about AIDS and more about the aftershock.
MDT: Does it take as much work to create what makes Peter and Craig similar as brothers as it takes to reveal their differences as men?
O’BERSKI: The similarities are easier because you just let that be you and your stuff. And then the different stuff—and the reason I responded to the role/roles—was that they were written so differently. You just can’t not play them in different ways. One’s a real ADHD squirrelly chatterbox guy and the other one is very terse, straightforward and disciplined. Basically, if you just say the lines this distinction comes out.
MDT: Dana, who do you play?
MARKS: I play Kelly Conners, Craig’s wife.
MDT: That’s the soldier’s wife, right?
MARKS: Right. She’s a therapist living in New York City.
MDT: How did she meet Craig?
MARKS: They met in school, I believe, in undergrad. Actually, she was in graduate school at the time, then he went on active duty. Yeah, their relationship has been hard. They’ve spent a lot of time apart during their wooing and when they became engaged. (Laughing.) They met in school, long story short!
MDT: Now, to some audiences, we'll guess that the more obvious tour-de-force might appear to belong to Jay, who plays two completely different people as the twin brothers. But Dana, you too must navigate as many shifts in your role as Jay does as the play ricochets back and forth in time. Without an obvious change in who you are, how do you manage the shifts in time through the play and through you?
MARKS: It’s easy because of Jay’s characters, Peter and Craig. As he said before, they are so very different from one another that my responses naturally become different to each of them—whether it’s a response to Craig as his wife in the past, or to Peter, here in the present. It’s been a year since Craig’s death, so you can imagine in that time what has happened to her. You see it in the shifts back and forth.
MDT: Kelly’s journey in the play is fascinating, as are the personas she seems to adopt for everyone else around her—she’s a wife, she’s a widow, she’s a caretaker for her patients, and at one point, she’s a woman invaded by a surprise visitor she may or may not welcome. In fact, do you wonder how Kelly would counsel herself if her own doppelganger walked into her practice? What do you think she would say to herself if she could?
MARKS: God. I think that, again, going back to the great things that Jay has said, I think she too is suffering from post traumatic stress disorder.
MDT: Really?
MARKS. Absolutely. She has isolated herself. She is basically hiding, which comes in the form of all this television watching, and watching it at any moment that she can.
MDT: Yes, tell us more about the all the TV that keeps creeping into the play.
MARKS: Yes, well, whereas she was never before Craig’s death a TV-watcher, after he died she all of a sudden started watching TV to deal with the insomnia and the stress. She would just start watching all of these Law & Order shows to the point where she kept it on at all times, whenever she could. To me, that's is a huge sign of something that she has to deal with and isn’t, and she’s choosing this method to medicate it. And that, in turn, has isolated her from friends and family. She’s dealing with it the only way she knows how.
MDT: Having only read the play—and eagerly waiting to see it, of course—Mr. Shinn’s mastery of structure is tremendously compelling. Despite the strict borders he imposes upon himself with only two actors, one apartment, and no intermission, he makes you feel as though you’ve covered a lot terrain. And yet, the play is rather short, isn’t it?
O’BERSKI: Yes, it’s only 70 minutes long.
MDT: Well, that may be great news for those audiences worried about the baby-sitting bill....
MARKS: Yeah right!
MDT: ...but there’s nowhere for the actors to hide, right? You’re supported by thoughtful design from Derrick Ivey’s sets and costumes, and Andy Parks on lights—and Jeff Storer’s direction, of course—but at the end of the day, you guys are the show and it’s take it or leave it.
O’BERKSI: Take it!
MARKS: Yeah, take it! It was exciting to me, you know, not to have anything to lean on or hide behind. I think it’s any actor’s dream to be exposed like that. It’s exhilarating, truly. I like it.
MDT: Again, thanks for talking with us. We can’t wait to see it. Remind us, please: When does it open and run?
MARKS: We open February 21 and runs through March 8 here at Manbites Dog.
MDT: Okay, folks. Back to rehearsal with you!
Manbites Dog Theater Company presents
Dying City
by Christopher Shinn
February 21-March 8, 2008
at Manbites Dog Theater in Durham
More about the show
Photos from the show
Video preview
Reviews of Dying City
Purchase tickets online
Or purchase tickets by phone:
Box Office Phone: 919.682.3343
Box Office Hours: Mon-Fri, 2:00-5:00 p.m.
LOCATION: Manbites Dog Theater, 703 Foster Street in Durham.
Directions and map
Manbites Dog's 2007-08 Season listings
Manbites Dog's Home Page
Questions? Email us at manbitesdog@earthlink.net
Manbites Dog Theater’s 2007-2008 season is made possible in part through gifts to the Durham Arts Council United Arts Fund, and by grants from the NC Arts Council, an agency supported by the state of North Carolina and the National Endowment for the Arts.
(c) 2001-2008 Manbites Dog Theater Company, Durham, NC |
