March 25– April 27, 2008
A CONVERSATION WITH CATHERINE BUTTERFIELD
Catherine Butterfield began her theatrical career as an actress, performing extensively in regional theatre. She started writing plays initially with an eye toward giving herself interesting roles to play, which she did in her plays Joined at the Head, Snowing at Delphi, Where The Truth Lies, and No Problem. Her last play, The Sleeper, was staged at The Laguna Playhouse in 2006 and is currently enjoying productions around the country. Ms. Butterfield was a writer/producer on the CBS hour long drama Ghost Whisperer, and is developing film versions of her plays Under My Skin and The Sleeper. She talked with Callboard editor Christopher Trela about her dual careers as an actress and writer, and how she came to write – and also direct – Brownstone.
Q: You’ve often acted in your own plays, but this time around you’re directing. How did that come about?
A: I’ve directed my own plays in smaller theaters, but nothing at this level, so I’m very excited, and scared, about directing at The Laguna Playhouse. This nice thing about directing your own play is that you have a good idea of what you want to see on stage. I used to write plays I could play a role in, but this is the first play I have written that I could not play any role. I remember I had a discussion with a theater professor, and he said why don’t you write something for a younger person, so I thought I’d try it.
Q: Do you find it difficult to be both the playwright and the director? Who gets final say during the rehearsal process?
A: I’ve had a number of readings of this play and rewrites based on those readings have become more focused and actor friendly, so my goal by the time we get into rehearsals is that we are dealing with a dead playwright who can not be consulted for rewrites. It is what it is.
Q: What made you want to write a play set in a New York Brownstone?
A: When I was younger and lived in New York, I had friends that lived in a Brownstone, and I lived in a fourth story walkup. I also had a lot of odd jobs that took me inside a lot of Brownstones. You’d never guess from the outside how cool they are.
Q: Were there any guidelines given to you when you received the commission from The Laguna Playhouse?
A: The Playhouse placed no restrictions on what I wrote, but they wanted it to be one set, and visions of kitchen sink dramas went through my head. I felt hampered by the one set thing. I felt claustrophobic. One night around the time I was supposed to turn in a draft of the play I had a dream about people in different time periods but the same locale. I woke up and had the whole thing in my head. It was one of those moments when you run to your laptop, and I started the script the same way it starts now, with a couple from 1937.
Q: The language in the play sounds very natural in each time period, particularly that 1930s couple.
A: I thought about the way people talk, and the way language has changed over the course of the past 80 years. I love talking to older people because I love the vernacular. There’s something so charming about the way they used to talk back then, like in a Noel Coward play.
Q: How much of yourself is in your play?
A: The two girls from 1978 are the most autobiographical. In fact, I tried to write a play about just those two but I put it on the back burner. Next thing I knew, they started to make an appearance in this play. Their story is closely related to something that happened to me when I was a struggling actor in New York. I think of how New York has changed since I lived there, and when my mother used to live there. In the 1970s, when I lived there, it was a dangerous place with bad stuff going on, and it never crossed my mind it would be a place where I wanted to raise children, but now it is so amazingly different. New York has become more corporatized, so much is good about it. It’s safer there. I was more naïve back then, more than the young people who live there now.
Q: How did you come up with the idea to tie all three stories together?
A: It happened as I wrote it. One of the characters is partially based on a women I met when I was in New York. One day she came into my apartment and said she was planning on killing herself and told me her life story. She had a tragic back story, so I used the essence of a nasty old lady with a sad background to tie everything together. As I as writing the play, I felt like I did not have that much control over the story. I was following where it took me.
Q: How would you describe the tone of Brownstone?
A: The play has themes of lost illusions and the disappointments of age. It’s kind of a memory piece in a way, a bittersweet dramatic comedy.
