Marty Tucker, a recently minted member of New Haven Theater Company, recalled how he was asked to join the troupe. “One night Kevin” — that is, J. Kevin Smith, NHTC’s president — “bought me a beer and said, ‘hey, I got a question for you.’ How are you going to say no after someone buys you a beer?”
The clear conviviality among NHTC’s members, new and old, is being both (jokingly) tested and (actually) strengthened in the company’s upcoming staging of White Rabbit Red Rabbit, by Iranian playwright Nassim Soleimanpour. As NHTC describes it, the play — which The Guardian called “an absurdist adventure which sits on the boundary of comedy and drama” — demands “no rehearsals. No director. No set. A different actor reads the script cold for the first time at each performance.”
The round-robin slate of performances, which runs May 11 through May 20, “features new NHTC members Jenny Schuck and Marty Tucker, as well as founding members George Kulp and Steve Scarpa, and longtime members Deena Nicol-Blifford and Trevor Williams.”
That NHTC has taken on new members isn’t terribly unusual. Several founding NHTC members are still with the company, but Smith noted that its personnel has changed over the years. Peter and Megan Keith Chenot were two staple members of the company who bade farewell with jobs on the West Coast beckoned. And “we’ve invited people periodically here and there to join the company,” Smith said.
More unprecedented was the company’s decision to approximately double in size at the beginning of the 2022 – 23 season. But that decision was years in the making.
“This wasn’t something new that just came up,” said Nicol-Blifford, who has been with the company since 2013. She noted that new members for the company meant new ideas for productions and an expanded network of people to work with and communities to reach. “The more people you work with, the more interesting it gets,” she said. “Even in those early productions I was part of, everyone was having those conversations.”
Trevor Williams, who has been with the company since 2015, said he was “confronted with it really bluntly one day at a rehearsal” when he mentioned a script he’d just read that “called for a deaf character and three women of broadly different ages,” he said. He was interested in staging it, but “I realized I could cast one character out of the company and that’s it.”
By 2019, Smith said, company members (who are all volunteer) agreed that “we needed to get younger. We needed to get more diverse in terms of our gender.” And “we wanted to get more ethnically diverse.”
“We’re not done with that,” he added. “But we had a good start to that process.” Expanding the company would give it “a broader selection criteria for shows we could do. We could tackle things we couldn’t tackle before.”
J. Kevin Smith, Marty Tucker, Drew Gray, Trevor Williams, Deena Nicol-Blifford.
The company was planning to extend invitations to new members right around the time the pandemic began, Smith said. NHTC didn’t want to do Zoom theater. So they waited to ask people to join them, he said, until “we had something to invite people back to.” In May 2022, with the company’s production of Sharr White’s Annapurna, they could make good on that promise.
“We have an unwritten rule to work with people a couple times before we invite them to join the company” to “make sure the ensemble is right,” Smith said. And “we really wanted to scale the company up pretty dramatically coming out of Covid.” NHTC ended up putting out invitations to 10 actors. “I didn’t buy them all beers like I did Marty, but for some reason they said yes,” Smith said.
“He bought some of them cars,” Tucker deadpanned.
The NHTC personnel now numbers almost 20 actors, which presents challenges as well as opportunities. “The way our bylaws work is that creative decisions” about play and season selections “need to be arrived at collectively and by unanimous consent.” More people means more consensus building. More people also just means more scheduling. “All of us have day jobs and families,” Nicol-Blifford “It’s growing” the company, “but it’s growing it after hours.”
Yet with White Rabbit Red Rabbit, the company will have managed to get every new member in either an actor’s or a director’s chair during the season by the end of the run. Schuck and Tucker, Smith said, “got to finish out the list of new company members who hadn’t been on stage.… That was part of the reason we really loved this project.”
“It really is a different show every night,” said NHTC member Drew Gray of White Rabbit Red Rabbit. “Marty’s show is not going to look like Trevor’s show, which is not going to look like Deena’s show.… You would be in for different experiences every night.”
The play premiered in 2011 and, as NHTC’s website points out, “has been performed over 3,000 times by some of the biggest names in theatre and film, including actors Whoopi Goldberg, Nathan Lane, John Hurt, F. Murray Abraham, Brian Stokes Mitchell, Richard Thomas, Alan Cumming, Cynthia Nixon, and Martin Short.” This also means it has been reviewed a lot, and some of those reviews give away elements of the play. Gray and Smith have told the actors not to read any of them.
“All we know is that 48 hours in advance we’re going to get something,” Tucker said. “For the actors it’s an exciting mystery. We’re going to open up the envelope and see what happens.”
“You don’t know if there’s an envelope,” Gray said.
In another sense, however, White Rabbit Red Rabbit is only amplifying certain elements of live theater that exist every time a company takes a stage. Even in typical productions, in which every line is memorized, elaborate sets of cues are hit, and the timing of lines is analyzed, calibrated, and revisited, small details can change. Over a run, a role can grow and deepen. And, as Smith pointed out, the actors and audience always feed off one another.
“If you’re doing comedy and hear nothing back from the audience, your experience of that show as a cast is completely different than … when you’re riding those laugh crests,” he said. There’s a thrill in “hearing laughter in places you’ve never heard it before.”
Perhaps especially if you don’t even know the lines beforehand.
White Rabbit Red Rabbit runs at New Haven Theater Company, 839 Chapel St., from May 11 to May 20. Visit the company’s website for tickets and more information.
