by Becca Kinskey
What would make a theater company that produces only two plays a year choose, for its first production of 2011, a show about a couple who gives birth to something so formlessly screwed up – no arms, maybe a leg, missing a mouth and with only one big blue eye – that its own mother can only refer to it as “Smudge”? Audiences, apparently, are what would move Syzygy Theatre Company to stage the West Coast premiere of Smudge by New York-based playwright Rachel Axler as half of its annual season.
Katherine and Martin Bedoian, Managing Director and Artistic Director of The Syzygy Theatre Group
Syzygy, run by husband and wife team Martin and Katherine Bedoian, has committed, since its LA inception in 2001, to paying actors at Equity scale for their work, despite producing in theaters that would allow Syzygy to operate under Equity’s 99-seat Theater Plan. “By aiming for the compensation for our artists, we really force ourselves to say, ‘It can’t just be our friends who support this theater company,’” says Martin Bedoian, Syzygy’s co-founder and Artistic Director. “It has to be an audience outside our group who donates and supports us, or we won’t be able to do this in our financial model.”
And what makes a play about a no-armed, maybe one-legged, no-mouth, one-eyed baby that is never actually seen by the audience an ideal show for theatergoers? Bedoian, sitting in the lobby of the GTC Theater in Burbank amid fabric scraps and coiled rope lights a week before Smudge’s opening night, explains. “A good play is one that touches an audience’s humanity. When I was in grad school [at ACT in San Francisco] we got to work with [director] Joe Chaikin for six months. This was after he had his stroke and he spoke in very short but emotionally compact sentences. I was asking him about the breadth of work he did and he just looked at me, put his hand on my heart and said, ‘Marty, all same.’”
Darin Anthony, Syzygy’s Literary Manager and Resident Director, brought Axler’s dark comedy to the Bedoians’ attention. The play had been e-mailed to Anthony in 2007 while it was still being workshopped, by a New York actor who had read the part of Peter, the older brother of the play’s new father Nick and uncle to the eponymous Smudge. Anthony immediately sent the play to Bedoian who quickly sent it to his wife Katherine. She devoured it in one sitting at work.
She recalls, “I said, okay, I’ll print it and read it at lunch. I just started reading it and I couldn’t stop. I called him back and said, ‘Marty, we have to do this play. I don’t think I can watch this play but we have to do it.” At the time, the Bedoians’ first child, a girl named Roan, was only 18 months old, and they shared the concerns of most new parents.
Heather Fox and Mark Thomsen in SMUDGE. Photography by Katherine Bedoian
Four years later, Roan is running up and down the single aisle of the 50-or-so seat theater, happy and healthy, while her parents and extended family, the Syzygy ensemble members, prepare for a runthrough. She extends a juice box to her mother to open while onstage Heather Fox, who plays Colby, the unexpectedly withdrawn and harshly searching mother of Smudge, speeds through her lines with Mark Thomsen, who plays her husband Nick. As they zip around the set, they alternately lean over and must navigate around the large baby carriage that remains stationary, holding its own against the actors, stage left.
The carriage, which is a pram, really a navy half-shell with retractable roof, is both the stand-in for and permanent home to Cassandra, as the baby is christened by Nick, who blindly dotes and loves in opposition to Colby’s determined chill. An elaborate network of tubes and power cables runs into the carriage. As Cassandra reveals her sentience despite mouthlessness, the tubes light up to her otherwordly beeps and whirrs, providing a light show in place of an infant.
Axler, who began Smudge while studying playwriting at UC San Diego before landing work as a writer on The Daily Show, Parks & Recreation and most recently HBO’s Bored to Death, hopes audiences are able to understand that despite her titular character’s attention-grabbing malformation, the heart of the show’s meaning is much more commonplace. “I’ve always said as far as I’m concerned, there could be a grape in that carriage. I’ve tried really hard to wipe away any real notion of what this child’s physical reality is because it’s really, really not supposed to be a play about deformity or disability or health or abortion or medicine. I was writing about the terrible fear of not loving, or connecting to, your own child.”
For the parents of Roan Bedoian, this fear was the “all same” that grabbed them from the first pages of Axler’s script. “Probably partially because I was a fairly new father, when I read this play there was just something about the depth of humanity in it that hit me pretty hard,” says Bedoian while his wife nods vigorously. “As well as the brilliance of the writing, which managed to tackle that subject and be hysterical at the same time. The pain is inextricably linked to humor; darkness is inextricably linked to joy. I tend to be attracted to dark plays that are super funny.”
In Smudge, Axler attempts to embody that undercurrent of fear that motivates Colby’s and Nick’s journeys – together and separately – to parental maturity. “I think my theatrical sensibility has always been to take something emotional and make it tangible or physical. Like loss or desire or anxiety, manifested. It’s what I’ve loved, or found most fascinating, in stories for years: a bit of accepting bending-the-laws-of-physics magic in an otherwise emotionally real world.”
In leaving instructions to future producers on how to create Smudge’s emotionally authentic unreality, Axler was adamant that one technical element would be essential: “I always knew, as I was writing it, how the carriage sounded was extremely important – too lifelike and it becomes a baby which isn’t what Colby is hearing. Too mechanical and there’s no ‘voice’ there which means you can’t hear the anger, cuteness or ferocity Colby’s responding to or communicating with. And it does have to be a voice, in a way, because it has dialogue.”
Playwright Rachel Axler who wrote SMUDGE
That dialogue, literally made up of the call and response of Colby’s smirks and retorts to Cassandra’s increasingly elaborate booping and beeping, gradually gives way to the unfolding emotional dialogue of new parenthood. “I see Smudge as a very small but complete arc,” says Axler. “Colby and Nick go from having a baby – literally becoming parents – to recognizing they have a baby – mentally or more deeply ‘becoming’ parents.”
Because Axler began Colby’s, Cassandra’s and Nick’s story before her career in television, how has that subsequent experience deepened her realization of the differing needs of theatrical and TV characters? “It’s all in service of telling a story. If your story is a moment in a life, one huge emotional shift or change or realization, it’s probably not going to bear several seasons’ worth of episodes. They weren’t created to exist outside of this singular story – which probably means they’d suck as sitcom characters. They don’t have lives before or after the moments depicted because this is the story they’re meant to play out.”
This is not to give short shrift to the relative self-containment of theater. Axler gives an unintentional nod to the audience-focused philosophy that made Smudge so obvious a choice for Syzygy, saying, “With something compact like a play, it’s about telling one story or exploring one idea, still hopefully sending an audience off thinking. But instead of thinking, ‘I can’t wait to see what happens next week,’ they’re just thinking about what happened, and seeing that as somehow complete.”
For Martin Bedoian, five days away from sharing his company’s work to fresh eyes, those conversations overheard after the curtain comes down are what excite him the most. “Audiences embrace young theater companies because there’s a certain amount of risk involved. There’s a hunger for discussion that says, ‘You don’t have to agree with me on the topic as long as we discuss the topic.’” He pauses. The parents Bedoian communicate in a look, forming a sentence between them that Martin speaks for both. “For this company, the topic is, ‘All same, Marty.’”
Smudge, presented by Syzygy Theatre Group, opens Jan. 14; plays Fri.-Sat., 8 pm; Sun., 2 pm; special performance Thur., Feb. 3 at 8 pm; through Feb. 19. Tickets: $30. GTC Burbank, 1111-B W. Olive Ave. (in George Izay Park), Burbank; 323.254.9328. For tickets, 800.838.3006 or syzygytheatre.org.
