Episode 10: Julia Brothers, Actor & Playwright
Lacey: [00:00:00] Hey, Julia. It's so nice to meet you.
Julia: [00:00:04] it's great to meet you too.
Lacey: [00:00:06] I'm so glad that the fabulous Anna Garduno thought to introduce us,
Julia: [00:00:10] she is the fabulous Anna Garduno And fabulous in, in, in all things voiceover in acting in producing. She does it all that girl.
Lacey: [00:00:20] And also in, creating cool match-ups between people who might not otherwise meet.
Julia: [00:00:25] Oh, absolutely. Yeah. She's like a quintuple threat in life.
Lacey: [00:00:29] Hi, Anna, we're giving you a shout out. So this is, what's so exciting about meeting you today, because up until this point, While The Applause Is Paused has dealt entirely with artistic directors and talking about the pandemic experience of the various theaters and how they differ.
And, interestingly, there's a lot of similarities. But you are an actor and you've been all over the country, have done a million regional shows , and you're a first time playwright and you just had your first commissioned piece produced and streamed. And and it's called I Was Right Here.
And so we get to talk about that today because it's a whole different side of the pandemic theater experience in regional theaters. Oh, I should say it was at the San Francisco Playhouse.
You had said that you actually started writing this in 2018. So why don't we start there?
Julia: [00:01:23] Sure. There's an incredible director who's based in San Francisco, her name is Becca Wolf, and I had worked with her on a bunch of other projects and we were really good friends and she was very encouraging to me about starting to write about this thing that I had been thinking about for a long time about.
Disappearance in all of its forms, how not just people passing away, but like how a grifter, like their personality disappears when they go on the grift. How messages disappear how things aren't just go and they're gone. And what is that and. And so we started to work on this piece and it was a very cerebral and high tech and it was going to be this one character play that was loosely based on.
Kind of a thing like craps last tape. And, but there was one gonna be a lot of multimedia and, we were like, oh, you don't care if nobody understands it, it doesn't have to be linear. It's an experiential piece and blah, blah, blah. And And then she got really busy because she's so incredible and amazing.
And she had to step away from the project. And and I was getting tons of acting work. Tons of which was great. It was really great. And I was in overlapping projects. I didn't have time to write and the whole thing got put on the shelf and she went off to do her thing and I went off to do my thing. And then I know bill English very well and his wife, Susie Don Malano, they both run San Francisco Playhouse. And I knew about this commissioned thing that they had, where they had slots to commission new playwrights, mid-career playwrights, and very well-known playwrights. And so I wrote an email and said, listen, I don't have ideas for 15 plays.
I haven't written 10 plays. I have an idea for this and I would like to write it and I've started maybe writing it and I pitched it and I got the commission in 2019, late 2019.
Lacey: [00:03:35] Ooh. I feel like we're right on the precipice.
Julia: [00:03:39] And and I was going from one job to another and then COVID happened and I got sick immediately. I was a very sick didn't go to the hospital or anything, but New York closed down the weekend of the 14th and 15th on the 16th, the day of New York being , definitively closed down, I got really sick and I tested positive for the virus.
Lacey: [00:04:04] Must've been so scary because we knew so little at that time,
Julia: [00:04:08] for some reason, it wasn't scary for me because I absolutely knew that this was not going to take me out. I just knew it. I did breathing exercises every day but people say things like surreal and I D I haven't found the language to describe what this was like, but while I was sick and New York was very dark and very quiet except Mount Sinai, which is two blocks away from me.
And, there were more refrigerator trucks showing up and they were parked up and down the streets
Lacey: [00:04:41] At the time I lived a block from Methodist hospital in Brooklyn and it was the same. It was the same thing. Yeah.
Julia: [00:04:49] Yeah.
While I was it just laying around being sick I lost five friends within the first I guess six or seven weeks, of COVID.
Lacey: [00:04:57] I'm so sorry.
Julia: [00:04:59] It was a profound, it was profound. That's the palest word that I can come up with. But I started writing in earnest again on this and the whole project took a completely different sense of urgency, which was to talk about love and loss and memory and how we hold things.
Why we hold them the way we hold them. What do we do when we lose something? And how do we get through these things? And what I chose to write about, which was love and this disappearance woven in there too. And memory was very good, very personal. And it was about me coming of age politically at 11, and falling in love with Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther king and witnessing their assassinations and that sort of being my my entree into wake up and grow up and, The world is what you make it.
And look at these two shining stars and it was Al and also I wrote about a
my soulmate who passed away and lots of different things, my mom in a nursing home, but because the whole world had just been going through this COVID thing. Everybody had lost something, whether it was a job or money or opportunities or the things that they fill their time with, or hobbies or lost a family member or a friend
And I think that because we all had that common thing, that this play spoke out to a lot of different people on a lot of different levels because of where we are right now. It's not about COVID and it's not about the pandemic, but somehow or another, it is about the COVID and the pandemic. And so I started writing it and I sent in my first draft and Bill English read it and said, we're doing this.
And I said, what are you talking about? What are you talking about? You've never written a play. This is a first draft. What do you mean? And he said we have, are like one of the first theater to actually iron out a thing with Actors Equity, an agreement. And we're going to film it with three cameras on stage
and I was like, oh wow. What? And then I was, I thought, wow, I've really have to do this. And so that's what I did for the year. Is I wrote and I have was working with this incredible director. His name is Padraic Lillis. He is the artistic director of The Farm Theater. He's a big baseball fan. And in baseball they go, farming talent
Lacey: [00:07:44] and
don't, they also have the farm team. Isn't
that kind of the minors is called? The
farm
team.
Julia: [00:07:49] Oh, yeah. And so he fosters new playwrights and new playwriting talent. And he's amazing and smart and funny. And hands-off, and hands-on, he's all of the, all the good things. At the right time, all the time.
And I would write stuff and send it to him. And on Tuesdays we would talk for an hour and a half and an hour and 15 minutes of it would be about life. And then 15 minutes of it would be about the show, but you know how things are, it's all about life and it's all about the show. And so the draft kept getting revised and worked on and then.
I went to the Playhouse and filmed it in March and it ran for a month and then got extended for another week. And it just closed, which I'm doing air quotes
Lacey: [00:08:36] I got to see it on closing night. Air quotes.
Julia: [00:08:40] That's so good. I being rather timid and humble when talking about this piece and because I'm new, and Padraic Willis, that director reminded me and said, Julia, you got a commission, wrote a play and got it produced in a year. That doesn't happen.
It just doesn't happen. And I, when I start to feel like, oh, I don't know if I can do this. I hear Padraic saying that and it makes me feel like okay, I guess I belong here. Now I can call myself a writer as well as an actor.
Lacey: [00:09:17] I have in my notes, actor and playwright, so it's official now, if it wasn't already, it's now it's official.
Julia: [00:09:25] Lacey Tucker has made it official ladies and gentlemen
Lacey: [00:09:29] yeah, that's what you needed was me to make it official. Obviously,
Julia: [00:09:33] Yes.
Lacey: [00:00:00] So I I have a couple of follow-up questions that I really wanted to ask you. First of all, I just wanted to double-check you had no live audience. So this was you performing in an empty theater for several nights to get the recordings.
What was that like? Did you just do the show as though there were an audience or where were they stopping and starting and saying, let's do another take
Julia: [00:00:19] No. So it was a live edit, which means that I did not stop and they edited as we went. So it wasn't like we're going to take the first five minutes of run number one and the second five minutes of run number four, it was one run all the way through, take it or leave it. And also it was, listen, it was a bunch of theater people, who all of a sudden he had, cameras.
And I am so impressed with how it came out. But
Lacey: [00:00:47] too. It was beautiful.
Julia: [00:00:48] thank you. Thank you. The head of the box office was running one camera and everyone was so talented. It was amazing. The guy who did the editing had never done it before. I, it was just, it's it's incredible, but that's, again, what theater is, when push comes to shove, your back is up against the wall and everybody gets super creative and everybody pulls their weight and more and create something incredible.
That is the best of what theater is. And in, in the case of this, it absolutely was the best. So it was three cameras. And I played to the cameras in the theater and the artistic director Bill had said stopped thinking of it as theater and think of it as a live television performance.
So the cameras were the audience and the audience that wasn't there was the audience. And and it was a very interesting and disassociative thing for me because I had, first of all, I've worked in that theater a bunch of times. So I knew the space really well. So walking in felt like home.
And so I just had to get used to the cameras and everything we were supposed to do three days of filming six run throughs. And we finished our third, took a dinner break and we're gonna come back and do a long notes session and then run the fourth one. And I was sitting in the dressing room and I just got really quiet and just thought you cannot be distracted by the newness of all of this and the filming and the microphone and the this and that. Do what you do. You've been doing this forever. You know how to do this? You wrote this piece, do what you do best. Just go do what you do. And I did, and it ended and they said, that's a wrap. That was incredible. And we got what we got.
Lacey: [00:02:42] So if I understand you correctly, you had to pick between them and it was like, you were either going to use all of this one or all of that one. And is that the one you used then? That last one?
Julia: [00:02:50] And it was absolutely a no brainer because there were next to no technical flaws in it. I felt good about my performance and everybody else felt good about it. Yeah. So That was that it was, and it was quite a sense of of relief and accomplishment.
Lacey: [00:03:04] So what did it feel like? I guess when you do film and TV, this is always the experience, but you did a play and it was running while you were not in it at the time that it was running and you're home and you could be watching it yourself. That's a strange feeling, I would think.
Julia: [00:03:18] it was a strange feeling. My sister was up from Texas and we watched on air quotes, opening night. There's a guy that I know who didn't know that when people did that air quotes with their fingers, he would say bunny ears and he didn't know that it was quotes. He just wondered well did 20 years anyway. Yeah.
Opening night, I, I didn't realize how exhausting the whole process would be. First time playwright writing about my life, really open, very vulnerable. Really hard round the clock pushed toward the end of rewrites, this, that the other thing, enormous amount of pressure. And then boom, it was over and I watched it and I could see nothing but flaws.
I was in no frame of mind to be able to watch it, But my sister was there and she'd gotten champagne and flowers and balloons. And the two of us watched together. It was really, it was great to be with her. And then it closed bunny ears. Air-quotes yeah. And the night that, that was last Saturday night and I was here in my apartment in New York by myself and I was just doing, I don't even remember what it was doing, not feeling particularly anything.
And I burst into tears, because I just felt such a sense of loss that even though the experience had technically ended for me, that it was ending again in an emotional way, and , it made me say goodbye to Becca Wolf who I had first started working on it with and all the people along the way who, had to help them given me notes and whatnot.
And there will be I going to do it live someplace. I know for sure. I don't have the job yet, but I will have the job, but it was really interesting to just feel this incredible sense of loss. On a Saturday night alone in my apartment.
Lacey: [00:05:12] Yeah. I think that there's a delayed reaction, I often say I've, I don't know how I'm feeling. And it takes me a while to figure out how I'm feeling. But in this case, it's like, the specifics of the situation where the play is running, but you're done, but then you're not done because the play is running.
Julia: [00:05:28] But, so it's just, it was an interesting year. I'm really happy that I had something constructive and creative to work on that demanded of me. And now that things are starting to come back.
I noticed that one of my favorite artistic directors in the universe that you have already interviewed was Mr. Sean Daniels,
Lacey: [00:05:51] Oh, yeah.
Julia: [00:05:52] Yeah, I've worked with him three times and four times, and I'm going to be working with him a fifth time doing Women In Jeopardy at Arizona Theater Company in January, February
Lacey: [00:06:03] Oh, amazing.
Julia: [00:06:04] Yeah. And that's so funny, everybody plays the, six degrees of Kevin Bacon. I think that in the theater world, it's one degree of Sean Daniels, has anybody that you run into. If they don't know Sean Daniels, then they know somebody who does
Lacey: [00:06:19] yeah. So you're my second person with a one degree of separation. The other person that I know is going to be if you haven't listened to the episode yet his first show back in the theater. My friend Charissa Bertels is doing her one woman show in fact
Julia: [00:06:33] oh, My 80 Year Old Boyfriend.
Lacey: [00:06:35] yes, exactly.
Julia: [00:06:36] I know her. She's amazing. She's amazing.
Lacey: [00:06:40] totally amazing.
Yeah. So I think that I should just come out to Arizona so I can see all of your shows. I can see her show. I can see your show. I can just hang out in Tucson.
Like why not?
Julia: [00:06:51] Yes, absolutely. Why not?
Lacey: [00:06:53] So I wanted to go back for a second and something that you said that really caught my attention was the way you changed the concept of the piece. You had been working on it and it was going to be this kind of cerebral experience. Very Experimental and then it changed how did you what was your thought process there, I guess is the question.
Julia: [00:07:13] I think that what happened was the idea of disappearance and memory before COVID. And disappearance in memory after having gotten COVID and having five friends die in a matter of weeks and seeing, the refrigerator trucks and seeing what was happening around the world and and in Black Lives Matter.
And, and just the series of events that were happening. We're, we're demanding to be listened to. While I was sick, I just got, was really quiet and I just listened to the world. And when I started writing, I didn't care about high tech stuff. I didn't care about non-linear weird tricks of experimental theater.
I cared about heart and I thought I have to write from my heart right now. And that was so important to me
Lacey: [00:08:11] I think that's a really important story because, clearly we're going to see a lot of theater about the experience of COVID and yet yours was not directly about COVID. So that's what I think is so interesting. Is it obviously what you just said, it really informed what you chose to write about, but you didn't actually write a story about having been sick with COVID
Julia: [00:08:35] rent
Lacey: [00:08:35] and I wonder how that's going to play out over the next, however many years.
Julia: [00:08:40] Yeah, it's a, it is a universal experience. It's something that everyone is still struggling with. And we all know what our fellow human beings are going through because it really truly is a universal experience. Some people are luckier than others where, they have more money or, they live out in the middle of nowhere and the physical threat isn't quite as great.
But it has impacted everyone and continues to, and, and I think that the whole thing that I discovered and the point of my show was that you'd stand in the loss with love in your heart, because love will bring you courage and love will bring you community. And love will bring you strengths to get through what you need to get through.
Lacey: [00:09:26] Yeah that's certainly universal and loss is universal. And the particular form of loss that we're experiencing right now is universal in a way that it never has been before. I think in modern times anyway.
Julia: [00:09:40] Yeah, absolutely. This disease is a great leveler.
Lacey: [00:09:44] So the other thing that you and I had talked about in our emails and I loved this idea when you said it to me, because I had thought that this might be a direction. I want to take the podcast maybe in season two.
You had talked about that you have had a very full and long career in regional theater, and you've always been New York based, and that is also very much the model for a lot of actors.
Julia: [00:10:08] actually was not always New York based. I was New York based for about 10 years. And then I was out in LA for about five or six years. I was the only person ever in the history of theater to move from New York to Los Angeles and get more stage work in LA than they got in New York. And then I was up in the Bay Area for 11 years and came back to New York and I've been in New York for the past 10.
Lacey: [00:10:35] So you've been in some major markets besides New York.
Julia: [00:10:40] Yes.
Lacey: [00:10:41] I guess the question is why do we choose to live in a place like New York or LA, just so that we can leave and go do a show in. Missouri, and this is the model. This is what a lot of people do. And I'd love to hear your experience with that.
Julia: [00:10:54] I think that I think that.
you. As someone who, as a creative person, you want to go where the most opportunities are. And if you are a person who likes the big city, you go to New York, or you go to Los Angeles. In the course of my life, this has changed quite a bit. When I was coming up through the ranks, that's what you did.
You didn't go anywhere else. Unless you happen to have gone to graduate school there or something, you you went to the two big places. But now there's, the Bay Area has got, I think the theater in the Bay Area is amazing. Berkeley Rep, Joanne is just there.
She took over for Tony to cone and Pam MacKinnon just came in at ACT and she replaced Carey Perloff. Tim bond replaced. Robert Kelly at Theater Works. Josh Castello replaced Tom Ross at Aurora. There's. Shawn San Jose just was announced as artistic director at Magic Theater. There's so many incredible theaters Marin Theater Company with Jason Minnetonka's amazing. Amazing work. And a really strong theater community. And so a lot of people were starting to go to San Francisco. We're in such an interesting time right now, because is theater going to hold on to the idea of film? Is there going to be a hybrid now?
Are they going to say, Hey subscribers, if you can't make it, guess what that's okay. Because you can watch it, you can stream it and we're going to have both now. It's a big new world. There are a lot of people who haven't had a voice in the theater in a long time, and that is changing.
And I am really excited about having all of it get turned on its head. I really just think that it's time. It's time for theater to get shook up and let's see what happens.
It's just what we were just talking about how, when, you put your foot on the gas and go, and if things fly apart, then it's time to create. And I think that's really what's happening right now. And I think that artistic directors are looking for new ways to reach new people. And, people are always saying that artistic director every single time at the beginning of the what do you want to do? We'd like to reach new people, blah blah . But they really are because of COVID because people say, we want to hear new voices because Black Lives Matter because Asian lives matter because where are these people represented?
They haven't been represented before. Let's hear from somebody different. And it's a very exciting time. And financially, it's terrifying. I'm glad I'm not running a theater. I can't imagine the pressure that these people are under. I cannot imagine it. But they are all responding with grace. The people that I know, Kristen Curry down at Gulfshore Playhouse in Naples, Florida.
Amazing woman. She's doing wonderful things down there. Courtney Sales at Merrimack Rep, doing amazing things. Everybody's working so hard to find a new way for theater to express itself.
Lacey: [00:14:06] One of the things that Sean Daniel said in our conversation was that some of their streaming offerings had 14,000 people watching and. The kicker was that when they looked at the the details of that, none of them were their patrons.
They were all new people. So to your point that, these new ways of reaching people, they are in fact actually reaching new people.
Julia: [00:14:30] Yeah. Yeah. To be sure streaming does not take the place of live theater with all of the power and magic that live theater has. Live theater is the best thing on earth, but when you can't get it
Lacey: [00:14:51] Yeah and that is the interesting part because when you can get it live, As we go back into some of that, not everyone will be able to get it live, even when it's available. And I guess that's really the point of continuing to do the streaming and to have that awareness now and, having the technology now, I would think prior to the pandemic there wasn't the time or the money, or really the inclination to have streaming technology that was really high-end and, made it worthwhile for people to want to watch because it wasn't what theater is about.
Julia: [00:15:21] Yeah, Wooly Mammoth just announced their whole season is digital. Their whole next season is digital.
And, it's really fun to, to see what theaters did what. Like Buck Busfield at B Street Theater in Sacramento. He and Lindsay Birch and Dave Perini and Jerry Montoya.
They all got together. They have game shows. They've got programming every night of the week, no five nights a week. And it's murder mysteries and, call in. And if you guessed this right, the B Street Theater is going to send a pizza to your house and it. Yeah, because it was like we can't, our hands are tied.
And it was amazing because they had stuff in, people were tuning in. Because it was like to them, it was like having another television channel.
Lacey: [00:16:12] That is, it's the amazing thing. I've heard several people talk about pointing out that, when we come out of the pandemic, it's going to be like the roaring twenties again, because that was coming out of a world war one and the Spanish flu. And the world went, yeah.
Crazy with relief and wanting to do wanting life to be fun again, basically. And there was a lot of creativity and that's the Harlem Renaissance and all of these wonderful things. People have said, that's, what's going to happen with us when we come out of this pandemic. And maybe all of this.
New technology and streaming. And maybe this is the beginning of that. There, there is a theatrical creativity that isn't about necessarily just putting on a show live in a, in an, a theater on a stage. And that doesn't mean that we don't still want to do that because of course we do very badly, but.
Maybe this is the beginning of all kinds of, creativity where we're thinking outside the box, because we were forced to, and because we realized that it's fun, right?
Julia: [00:17:09] Being able to create against all odds.
Lacey: [00:17:12] That's the title of of your next play? I think that's really great. Speaking of which do you have plans for another play? Not to put
you on the
Julia: [00:17:22] I'm actually, it's really funny. I was joking around with some friends and they said, this is a great title. I Was Right Here because you can do the sequel, And I Was There and Just Hold On, I'm Almost There and I'm On My Way and
Yeah. Yeah, I actually I'm still fascinated by this idea of disappearance and what memory does and how we hold things. And and there a particular things that have happened in my life. And one recent occurrence was a relationship that ended.
And I am very interested in exploring that sense of disappearance and, just what everybody went through as relationships. Major shifts in relationships, happening these days,
Lacey: [00:18:07] Yeah.
Julia: [00:18:08] Yeah.
Lacey: [00:18:09] Even the casual relationships that we didn't realize we relied on in our daily lives, like the baristas and the clerks and the people at the post office you miss that too. You miss the casual interaction .
Julia: [00:18:22] Yeah. Yeah, that's true. I remember one time, man. I just, I fought, I, if I can't go out to a bar and sit not to drink, if I can't go to a bar and sit and just talk to somebody. Just talk to another human being. The grass is always greener, I did the pandemic alone and, I would think, oh God, you guys are all so lucky if you're married or you're living with somebody or blah, blah, blah.
But they all say it's really great to have somebody, but 24 seven, you're so lucky you're on your own.
Lacey: [00:18:56] I have the same thing. I've also been alone and I. Would sometimes find myself thinking I'm going to get super vulnerable on a podcast, but Hey I would find myself thinking, Hey, my friends with families, why are you not checking in on me? But from their perspective, they're like, oh, you're so lucky. You're alone. My God, I can't get away from these people, so that was a real moment of me like reversing my point of view and realizing how it could be for somebody else.
Julia: [00:19:23] Yeah.
We can talk about, what I was doing when the lights went out,
Lacey: [00:19:28] Cause I have asked everybody, what were you doing in March of 2020 when everything ground to a halt.
Julia: [00:19:33] I was rehearsing a play that was so fun and everyone was so psyched about it. In the eighties, Arthur Miller was invited to the people's Republic Theater in Beijing to direct an all Chinese cast it, a Death Of A Salesman, and he didn't speak any Mandarin and they didn't speak English. There was one guy that spoke English, and this really wonderful writer, Jeremy Chang wrote a play that was loosely based on this occurrence for an all female cast. So I was cast as Arthur Miller and there were four other women who were all fluent in Mandarin and of Asian descent and they played multiple other characters and we were in rehearsal for that.
And it was going to be at Target Margin in Brooklyn, which is an amazing place
Lacey: [00:20:35] an amazing place that I used to work at. So hi, David, we're talking about you. Hi David Herskowitz.
Julia: [00:20:40] Shout out to David
Lacey: [00:20:44] out to David Herskowitz.
Julia: [00:20:45] And this piece was lots of, let's do all the shout outs. And so this piece was called A Salesmen and it was being directed by Michael Liebenluft,
Lacey: [00:20:58] Yeah. Michael Liebenluft. Yes. He was passing through Target Margin. I think he might've had his first experience there perhaps when I was working there and he did one of the labs. So yeah, I
Julia: [00:21:11] well. That's great, nice Jewish boy. Who's also fluent in Mandarin and really amazing cast. These women who are just all such extraordinary artists. And and we were rehearsing that, and it was to have it like a five week run at Target Margin and Thursday, the 12th broadway closed. And Friday the 13th, we all got together and, but didn't rehearse because they said we got canceled and all of us are really excited about the possibility of coming back and actually being able to do it sometime in the future.
And like I say, new voices. The play went from being something that was more Arthur Miller centric to the experiences of the people that were in China and particularly the women. I'm really excited about that.
Lacey: [00:22:07] And then after you do it, and by the way, we didn't say Target Margin is a theater in New York city. But once you do it at Target Margin, then it can have a life, hopefully in some regional theaters as well.
Julia: [00:22:18] Yeah. And I think that, it's a really interesting subject and it's a pretty amazing thing. And Arthur Miller, Death of a Salesman, theater icons, so that's pretty great. And it was really fun for me because just before that I was playing God in a rock opera by the Kilbanes called Weightless. Which they've gone on to do different things with the script and they just filmed their piece actually. And they have a different God. But so it was just, it was awfully nice to say Yes. I was God in a rock opera, and then Arthur Miller.
It was a good run.
Lacey: [00:22:55] Yes. Yes. And then playing yourself.
Julia: [00:22:59] Yeah, then I got to play me.
Lacey: [00:23:02] What was that like? We didn't even talk about that aspect of it.
Julia: [00:23:05] It wasn't like playing me. I was me playing me. I wasn't me being me, which sounds very strange, but there's a huge distinction. Because when you go and see a play, everything is boiled down to its essence. And there aren't extraneous words. People do things in a certain manner for a specific reason, and there's a dramatic arc and you go on a ride.
You travel with the peace through these different terrains and that's mapped out for you. So yes, I was playing me, it was me at 11. I wasn't playing an 11 year old. I was talking about the feeling of Robert Kennedy's assassination. And it was very demanding, actually very demanding because it required complete honesty because if it wasn't completely honest, it was nothing.
It would be nothing. And I remember thinking when we first got there the first day and I saw the cameras and everything, and I thought, wow, Oh, my God, people are going to watch this. I don't know what I was thinking for the 11 months that I was writing it. Okay.
Lacey: [00:24:19] You are working in a different medium at that moment. So maybe it was, you were a little divorced from the experience of then going on to perform it.
Julia: [00:24:28] That's true. There was no audience in my living room on 57th street.
Lacey: [00:24:33] You do any rewrites when you got there, when you got on stage and found that something didn't work exactly how you anticipated
Julia: [00:24:40] no because it was because I've worked so hard on it. When we went in front of the cameras, it felt good. There were some little things that got changed. Like this line gets cut. This word gets changed. We cut a whole section out, but that was, that's just like a cut.
That's not like a big change. There wasn't time for me to do rewrites. But we did do a bunch of big changes right before the three days of tech and the three days of filming. But but that?
was good. It's good to be on your toes.
Lacey: [00:25:14] did you watch the, each performance back before
you did the next one?
Julia: [00:25:20] no, I didn't watch any of them ever. Yeah, I'm not, I don't, I'm not good at watching myself.
Lacey: [00:25:26] No, neither am I, but it's something that I've gotten used to as I do self-tapes for auditions. And I try to take something from watching this take, and then I try not to get too attached and to just say, oh, you know what?
That little section didn't work. Let me change that. Let me do it again. And try to use it for the best, rather than hating it.
Julia: [00:25:47] I will say that. I'm good at being able to look at something that I've taped, that I'm going to send in for an audition and go, no, that's not good. Oh, that's good. Oh, I hit that. Oh, that's nice. Oh, okay. I'll use this one, but watching myself do this thing that I wrote this solo piece. Was extremely difficult.
And I don't know, I can't remember what it is. It's your inner critic or the critic on your shoulder or the voice in your head all of that just went into high gear and I just thought, you know what, this is, it's a very vulnerable place to be. And it, but when you were on stage like I used to do standup, which is nothing compared to this.
Standup was easy cause you just made people laugh. I wrote my material and I went out and I said it and people laughed. And most of the time they laughed every once in a while. They didn't. That was horrible. But but when you're on stage there's a conversation going on. You say something and the audience responds in kind, you feel it.
And if that isn't happening, then there's no theater. Everybody might as well just go home. And so to do that and have it all put out there. And then it's just there and then there's something about, oh, wow. It's just hanging out there. It's not like at 10, o'clock the experiences over and you go talk to people in the lobby and you share your thoughts and your feelings and you go home and it's gone. The experience has gone. It's not hanging around in the ether somewhere.
Somebody can't punch it up on their computer. It was a shared life experience that's now over. And so there's something that was terrifying about this being there
first.
Lacey: [00:27:28] I understand that completely and I think as much as we can be excited about and grateful for the new versions of theater that we're seeing and the way that we can share those versions with people that we might not have been able to before, what you just described is exactly what you know, many people think is the heart of the theatrical experience.
It's shared it's live and it's ephemeral. And so to me it's a real. It's a real push and pull to live with both of those realities,
Julia: [00:27:58] right. Yeah.
Lacey: [00:27:59] I just want to ask you, as we wrap up, this has been so great. What a wonderful journey of a conversation. What's making you happy right now.
Julia: [00:28:07] Wow, what is making me happy right now? Okay, this is what is making me happy right now. There is so much pain in the world and there is so much suffering. And I don't mean in the world, like way out in the world. When I walk out on the street and people are in bad shape, people really hurting. And if it is hurting because they don't have a place to live or, friends that are hurting because of, something that's happening in their lives.
And I wake up every morning and I say out loud, thank you universe. I love my life. I love my problems. I'm so lucky. I am. I feel lucky to have lived through COVID. I feel lucky to have gotten commissioned by SF Playhouse to write this piece. I feel tremendously lucky that it got produced. I feel lucky that it's going to have a life in live theater. I feel lucky that I have a home. I feel lucky that I have health insurance. So what's making me happy right now is that I have so many blessings that I choose to acknowledge. I choose to acknowledge that and to choose, to let whatever my problems are, be over on the other side of whatever, because I am a lucky human being.
Lacey: [00:29:32] Wow. That just really hit me. I'm going to go back and listen to this. And there was a couple of things there that I feel like will you set it at the beginning, it's like a daily mantra that just felt like it was saying to me, wake up and listen to that.
Lacey, maybe you need a little bit more of that.
Julia: [00:29:47] oh, okay.
All right.
Lacey: [00:29:50] for that.
Julia: [00:29:51] Oh, sure. Yeah.
Lacey: [00:29:52] Thank you, Julia,
Julia: [00:29:53] oh my gosh. This was so great. You were really wonderful. Thank you for having me on.
