Dominic Rains and Alexandra Hoover in "Love Sick"
What is “love sick”? The phrase likely conjures up images of teenage girls scrawling hearts on their class notebooks. Or perhaps young Romeo comes to mind, calling out to his Juliet beneath her ivy-laced balcony. Does the term inspire vengeful thoughts and result in a dead guy lying on the floor of a dingy bathroom? Probably not. That is, of course, unless you’re in tune with the psyches of the Elephant Theatre Company, whose premiere comedy Love Sick opens this Friday.
Sitting down with playwright Kristina Poe and director David Fofi (also the Elephant’s co-artistic director), it was hard to ignore the maniacal glint in both of their eyes as they talked about this play. According to Poe, “love sick” is more than just a state of mind; it’s a gruesome state of reality. “’Love sick’ is a place of existence where it’s not about being sad or depressed, it’s about going into a place that is so hard to crawl out of that you can’t see light. The lead character of the play goes there and has been living there for quite some time. When the play opens, she finally sees light because…she’s killed somebody. [Laughs] It’s her journey of what she thinks is reality, and about finding what she really wants in life.”
Kristina Poe
For Poe, who is a member of Off-Broadway’s LAByrinth Theater Company, the inspiration for her first play, Love Sick, came from this idea of coming to terms with reality and the pursuit of passion. “When I was in my mid-30s, my husband and I had been married for about 10 years and we hit a point where we realized that we weren’t living the lives that we wanted to be living. We’d had a child and we found ourselves in this suburban lifestyle that works for some people, but just wouldn’t ever work for us. All of a sudden, we realized that we’re unhappy…and the worst part about it was that we didn’t understand that it was happening until it had already happened.
“This play came from the realization of how bored we were, and how for me boredom was a huge issue. So then my husband and I moved to New York to kind of break out of the mold that we were in, and I was standing in line for a nasty bathroom in St. Mark’s Place and I thought to myself ‘Wow, it would be funny if I started a play with a dead guy lying on the floor in this nasty bathroom.’” She laughs. “So I kind of married those two ideas together.”
“Passion is a huge part of life, and this play is about what happens if you deny yourself that passion. Passion is about living, and when we deny ourselves from living, that to me is when things start to break down. And it’s hard…it’s hard to make the choice to live that passionate life. For me, as a writer and an only child, it’s so much easier to stay in my head and just be in the status quo.”
David Fofi
According to Fofi, it was the fundamental human truth in Poe’s story, as well as the signature “Elephant” theatrical twists and turns, that attracted him to the piece. “The plays that Elephant likes to do are contemporary, honest, funny, cutting, poignant, provocative, absurd—all of the emotions that I see people going through right now. We try to do world premieres and new theater that I feel talks to contemporary audiences. One of the Elephant’s missions is not to do theater for ‘theater people’, but to bring people into theater who maybe already have a preconceived notion of what ‘theater’ is. I always look for a play that grabs people, that shakes you up through humor and all kinds of insanity—works that are reflective of what we do every day and that we are able to laugh at and get emotionally invested in, without being didactic in any way.”
A play about a woman who is unhappy about her life and her relationships? That may not exactly sound like “groundbreaking” territory or a “hot button” issue to delve into with a play, but Fofi and the Elephant Theatre Company have never been about soap boxes or fads. “This season, I was looking for a piece that had a strong female lead, and I wanted to get the voice of a female writer who comes at things in a way that we wouldn’t expect. I think that the truths revealed in the play are pretty surprising, and Kristina really breaks through any preconceived notions about what you think she’s going to say. I think it’s intelligent and honest, and it doesn’t presume to speak to any particular audience. This isn’t the type of piece that says ‘We’re only speaking to this group of people, or we’re anti this or pro that.’ It’s going to bring a lot of people together, and we’re all going to have a funny, dark experience and perhaps a little bit later have some feelings and emotions…maybe some lingering remnants of past relationships and experience that we don’t necessarily share with other people, but are still there in the back of our minds. I think this play allows you to talk about things that are maybe not so perfect or weren’t so perfectly laid out in our lives. There are no answers, per se, but a lot of great behavior. I know right now, in the times that we’re living in, there are definitely certain topics that are prevalent in theater. And I’ve done some of those. But I also think that it’s sometimes good to just say ‘I’m going to offer you something that’s really just about you, or about us, on a personal level.’”
Etienne Eckert, Kenny Suarez and Laura Harman
Granted, with a LAByrinth playwright, how conventional could this play really be? “Of course I wanted to really theatricalize this piece and the feelings that went into it,” explains Poe. “So there’s some killing, and a mysterious man that comes out of nowhere…”
“And singing!” Fofi pipes in.
“And singing,” Poe admits, with a shrug. “I realized that I’m a big fan of people singing onstage in awkward ways, which somehow makes it into everything that I write. I realize now that singing is just a natural form of expression for people—we sing in the kitchen while we’re cooking breakfast, we sing in the shower—as odd as it may seem, it’s actually something very natural that people do.”
But Poe immediately returns to the idea that this play, though the lines of reality may be a bit blurred in the storytelling, is grounded in truth. “Even though this piece is very stylized and noir-ish, it’s very honest. People always ask me ‘What’s real in the play?’, but to me, everything is real.”
Of course, a strong female-centered play requires a bold heroine (or anti-heroine, as it were) and an adept actress to fill the part. Both Poe and Fofi are confident they have found both in the central character “Emily”, played by Elephant company member Alexandra Hoover.
“I love Emily so much!” exclaims Poe. “She’s a different kind of character, but one that it’s very easy for people to recognize themselves in, especially women. She’s a seemingly normal woman—she’s strong and you’d think that she has her shit together, but she doesn’t. She’s stuck in her pain and she’s crazy. You can be a strong woman, and at the same time be strong in your misery. Women like holding onto misery and heartbreak. Heartbreak is so devastating that it literally makes you crazy. The journey that we go on with her is one of self-awareness. The people in her life love her, but she’s been so morose and depressed for so long, that it’s all she can see. She’s unwilling to make the choice to come out of her pain, because like we all do, she wants to hold onto her misery. When I first met Alex, I apologized to her, because the way Emily is written, she has to make these emotional hairpin turns, which to me is how people often cope with things.”
Etienne Eckert and Laura Harman
Fofi, who has been doing theater with Hoover since they were in college, has the utmost confidence in his leading lady. “This character of Emily isn’t just a beautifully-flawed woman, she’s a beautifully-flawed human. This is a woman who goes to work every day, and is funny, damaged, crazy, and sexy as hell. That’s how I think people should view themselves. What makes a true comedian and what inspires those real laughs are when the audience recognize themselves so earnestly in what the comic is saying and doing, and I think Alex really has that quality. You can look at her and say ‘She is so beautiful’, but she is also so honest and completely embraces her own craziness. That was one of the reasons why I wanted to do this play. We have such tremendous women in the Elephant company—women like Alex—and that’s always one of my goals, to find challenging roles for these strong women.”
For Fofi, it isn’t the shock value or the accolades that keep audiences returning to the Elephant Stages. It’s the quality of the experience. “I don’t think it’s possible to shock the Elephant audience. The work that we’ve done has been recognized and well-received, which is nice on one hand, but for me, the greatest joy has come from bringing the people in. I have a lawyer friend who had never seen a play in his life come to one of our shows, and since then he’s attended our last six plays and brought friends. I think overall, we have the caliber of people here that work well together and trust each other to the point where the audience can come in and feel like they are in really good hands, sit back, relax, and feel confident that they are in the company of a really great ensemble, seeing the work of a truly great writer, maybe even some capable direction, and just let it happen without worrying about what the experience has in store for them.
“I think in general people have a little trepidation when they go to the theater. With the Elephant audiences, they trust that the experience that they’re going to have is going to be quality, but I don’t think our audience ever comes from a place of expecting to know what they’re going to see. And even if they did think that they know what they’re going to get with Love Sick…they’re wrong. There’s no preparing yourself for what you’re getting yourself into with this play.”
***All Love Sick production photos by Salvator Xuereb
Opening night is Friday, September 23 at 8. Admission is $20 for regular performances, and $30 for opening night, which includes a post-performance reception with the cast. Thur-Sat, 8 pm, through October 29. 877-369-9112. www.elephanttheatrecompany.com. Elephant Space, 6322 Santa Monica Boulevard (just west of Vine), in Hollywood. Street parking is available.
