Stefan Marks and Beth Patrik in "Hello"

Sometimes the briefest encounter can leave the longest impression. That sentiment seems to hold doubly true for Ovation Award nominee Stefan Marks and his play, Hello.

The fractured, non-chronological tale about a couple’s first meeting made quite the impact with Ovation voters, earning six nominations in total. Marks himself was nominated for his work as playwright, director, and lead actor, along with the production’s nods for best play in an intimate theater, lead actress (Beth Patrik), and lighting design. This feat seems even more impressive considering that Hello opened at the Stella Adler at the very beginning of the Ovations season (September 2010) and ran only six weeks. More than one year later, Marks’ intricate two-person play has once again captured attention.

Stefan Marks

An actor by trade and a playwright/director at heart, Marks is quick to list the catalog of plays he’s written and directed, but his acting credits are listed as “appeared on TV in some stuff”.  According to Marks, the decision to write the play and star in it came from the desire to work with co-star and fellow Ovation nominee Beth Patrik. They’ve known each other since their college days at Cal State Northridge, but never as professional colleagues.

The inspiration for the story itself, however, came from the lasting impression a different young woman made on Marks during those formative college years.

“The basic idea came from when I was 18 or 19 and I was working in a grocery store as a checker. A girl came into the store and I was just completely immobilized by her look. We could not do anything but remain frozen. I wouldn’t even call it love at first sight—it was incapacitation at first sight. She came in there two or three times over the course of a couple of weeks, and I just assumed ‘Oh, she’ll be back. I’ll just talk to her next time’, but eventually she stopped coming in. The line that came to me was ‘What if you never met the one who got away?’. That, for me, is where this play really started from.”

The encounter Marks describes happens almost verbatim within the play itself, but not until the very end of the piece. One could even describe it as the big “twist” or “reveal” in the story. Up until that point, the two-act play navigates through the relationship of a very quirky man and woman, jumping through time and showing the audience different points in their seemingly failing relationship. They can never quite come together, and you’re never quite sure why until the very end. The story opens with the birth of their daughter, only for Marks’ character “Clark” to realize that they don’t actually have a daughter. The story then jumps to Clark and Alice, newly married, at a party fielding questions about whether or not they would even consider having children.

Marks will be the first to tell you that the structure was a bit of a head scratcher for audiences. “I think some people were initially freaked out by it, because at first you don’t understand why these characters are behaving the way they are, and then it kind of comes together. Audiences were definitely working hard to figure out what was happening when we put the play up, because everything happens out of order. But at the end, I was really amazed and happy with how everything did come together. ”

Beth Patrik and Stefan Marks in "Hello"

Ultimately, at the end of the play, the audience discovers that the couple’s entire “relationship” is Clark’s projection of what could have been, based on that first significant encounter. “I never saw her again. You know, this was back in the days before Facebook, when it was really difficult to stalk somebody properly. So that’s why the character in the play is always making phone calls. He’s hoping that he’ll call the right number and she’ll answer. But, of course, when we did the play, people eventually understood why he was doing that, but not until the very end.

“What I wanted to do with this play was take a relationship and break it down into seven parts, and show those seven parts in the order of her actual phone number, rather than chronologically. Symbolically, by the end, he gets her phone number. That’s why he doesn’t understand that you can’t have a baby before you actually meet somebody. The play itself is not based on real experiences, but that’s where it started — that one little idea of being so completely enamored with somebody just on a look. It seemed to be mutual. She was either totally into me or horrified by how much I was into her. I think it was mutual.” He laughs.

Regarding working on the play itself, and all of the different hats he had to wear throughout the process, Marks is adamant that there was no room for getting ahead of himself or doing things out of order. “I knew I was going to be in the play before I wrote it, so I tried to compartmentalize and concentrate on the writing aspect of it first, not dwelling on how I’m going to direct or perform it. With any play I do, when it comes time to direct, I try to look at it as though somebody else has written it, because sometimes you find that something that’s written doesn’t work as well when you try to stage it. Figuring out how the characters are going to move in this world and what it’s going to look like has to dictate the direction, so things have to be adapted to suit that.

“As far as the acting goes, since it’s a two-person play, I was really focusing on knowing the lines so well that they would come out reflexively. My character was incontestably weird, and he wasn’t written autobiographically, so I needed to study that. Obviously there are a few things that I’ve put into the script that are me, but there are many things that aren’t, so playing the character was always new and exciting because he’s so odd, and I just had to react off of whatever Beth was doing.”

Stefan Marks

As a writer, Marks places a high priority on keeping his audiences engaged and involved, and fracturing the timeline was an effective tool in accomplishing this. “I think the top of love-gone-wrong is pretty universal. The material is certainly relatable, but it wasn’t presented in the typical A to B fashion, so I think people appreciated that it was an unusual take on it. There was something there for the audience to figure out as they were going along.

“Certainly when I was writing the play, I wanted it to be interesting for me as well. I’d never written a two-person play before this, and I felt that a full-length play with two characters really had to have a lot of substance there in order to keep people interested. Otherwise you’re just watching two people up onstage talking. That was really the tough part of constructing this — making sure that you’re telling a good story, even if it’s in the wrong order. I’m thrilled that the Ovation voters came out and enjoyed what they saw. I wouldn’t presume to guess what they really connected to with this play, but I’m so glad they did.”

Stimulating narrative structure aside, Marks is reluctant to speculate on why Hello has been so well-received. “Whenever I do a play, I realize that people are going to come away with different things from it. It’s a very subjective art form—this play even more so than other plays I’ve written. I wanted to do an unconventional, sweet love story with faults and flaws. I’m not very big into messages or themes, but with this play, I did want to get the point across that if you don’t take action, you’re not going to get anything.” Fairy tale ending or not, one thing is for certain — Stefan Marks’ story has certainly made its mark.

***All Hello production photos by Mark Bennington