DJ Q&A

DF: I am married to Anne Darragh, a well-known Bay Area actor. We have two kids: our youngest, our trans son, just graduated from Columbia, and our eldest just got a Ph.D in astrophysics from Stanford. If you go on my Facebook page, you’ll see a lot of wildlife pictures. That’s what I do when I’m not working in theater. I’m out at Point Reyes and anywhere else around the area taking pictures of our furry and feathered neighbors. I live in Lagunitas.

DJ: What is your first memory of seeing live performing arts?

DF: I remember seeing “Call Me Madam” with Ethel Merman when my parents took me as a kid. It didn’t have that big an impact on me. The thing that probably got me really interested in theater was PBS, or what was, you know, educational TV. They had their “Great Performances” series and seeing a bunch of pieces, including a very young Dustin Hoffman in “The Journey of the Fifth Horse,” was what really got my interest.

DJ. What was your path to becoming an acting teacher?

DF: When I was in college, I was at Yale and worked at the Yale Repertory Theatre as an assistant stage manager. And so I got to see these auteur directors like Andrea Wajda, Andrea Serban — all the Andreas. They had a mad vision, which everybody was expected to subsume oneself in, even if you didn’t understand it. I looked at what they did and thought, I guess I’m not a director. It had nothing to do with me. But then, I went to the South of France where I was at a painting school, The Marchutz School. It turned out I was a mediocre painter, but while I was there, I met an Israel expat, named Amir Abramov, and he had a real different approach to being a director. He was very collaborative, really liked to create pieces with fellow artists. So, I decided that’s what I wanted to be when I grow up. When I got back to the states, I started trying to pursue that, and that led me into directing in the world of performance art. At the time solo performance was one aspect of performance art. I also had a day-job at the Eureka Theater and at one point was organizing a school for them and ended up just giving myself the opportunity to teach solo performance. I had not been doing it very much, but I just thought I would try and somehow it really worked out. That’s like 35 years ago.

DJ. Are there teachers or mentors you would like to acknowledge?

DF: As I said, Amir Abramov really had a huge influence on me and working with my wife Anne Darragh — early on we collaborated for a couple of years with Bill Taken on a political farce called “Political Wife.” She taught me a lot about performing. So, I would say those two. And of course, I learned a tremendous amount from all my collaborators, and I still do.

DJ: How did you connect with The Marsh?

DF: We basically both came into existence at the same time. [Founder and Artistic/Executive Director] Stephanie [Weisman] was just starting to think about doing full length shows after having started doing the Monday Night Marsh at various bars around the city and I was just really starting to work with performers on full pieces, people like Marga Gomez, Josh Kornbluth and Charlie Varon. We started putting their shows on at The Marsh and that was successful. Stephanie and I have been working together ever since.

DJ: The Marsh describes itself as “a breeding ground for new performance.” Talk about that.

DF: The Marsh is designed to make it relatively easy for performers to gain access. Stephanie’s always kept the overhead low. She’s been very good at getting hold of real estate and using that to protect the theater when there were downturns or a pandemic or you know, when we were invading a third-world country — things that tended to reduce sales. I have a drawer full of T- shirts from other theaters that I worked with over the course of my adult life and most of them don’t exist anymore. Yet, The Marsh has been able to survive. I credit Stephanie with that. And then meanwhile, through my own work and through the classes, we’ve been able to create community around The Marsh. A community of performers/writers and that’s been an extraordinary gift. We’ve managed to create a system for making theater, which involves trying things out in front of audiences and creating theater in conversation with audiences, and I think this is why artistically The Marsh has been able to persist.

DJ: Describe your classes.

DF: The classes are designed to get performer/writers to think about creating work in relationship to an audience. The class becomes kind of a surrogate audience, and it’s very, very focused on the individual artist. The whole point of solo performance is to have artists speak in the language that is true to their soul and to be able to move on stage in ways that they naturally move. But at the same time, you’re trying to get them to stretch and discover new techniques of writing and performing. It’s trying to strike that balance between being authentic to the performer and giving them a chance to learn some new skills.

DJ: What would you tell someone who is interested in performing, but is uncertain how to begin?

DF: I guess I would tell them to take one of my classes because that’s how a lot of people have gotten into this. That might sound like I’m just doing a sales pitch, but I’ve tried to create these classes to become the easiest and best path to get some material that is authentic to yourself and to have a sense of how to put it on stage and in a way that will connect with an audience. And Stephanie and I have always had a very democratic view of who should be on the stage. We’ve supported experienced performers and total newbies and of course people of all walks of life.

DJ: What surprises students who are new to these types of classes?

DF: You should probably ask students what surprises them. But I can guess one thing that always surprises people is that time on stage works completely differently than time in any other realm. On stage you need to take your time to bring the audience into the action of the stories. It’s not that you’re telling the audience a story, it’s that you’re inviting the audience in, you’re saying stand up here with me in this moment’s experience. That’s the kind of writing and the kind of performing that I encourage people to do: to invite the audience into the story so that they’re not passive listeners, but they are confronted with the same choices, the same emotions and the same heartaches that the performer was confronted with. I like to say that people are like snowflakes, no two are the same. But snowflakes are also an awful lot alike. I’m struck by how with solo performance audiences are able to be listening to the story of somebody who is normally thought of as being a very different class type of person, say a different race or gender or religious belief, but then the audience is invited into that life. It’s an extraordinary gift of empathy. That’s what I live for.

DJ: What are some unexpected things that you have experienced working with people in your classes?

DF: Well, a lot of things are unexpected because, despite the snowflake analogy, people are very different. Individuals are individuals, so you kind of never know what’s going to come out. I remember when I was a young man I had a certain amount of impatience with Americans. I thought we were a bunch of complacent people, and I quickly came to find out that that’s not true at all. People live extravagantly complicated, difficult, wild and surprising lives. That’s true of people all over the world, but it isn’t any less true of Americans.

About The Marsh. Since its founding in 1989, The Marsh has grown from a one-night-a-week performance series to producing 600-700 shows annually on four stages in San Francisco and Berkeley. The name, The Marsh, a breeding ground for new performance, came out of several months Founder and Artistic/Executive Director Stephanie Weisman spent living in a house on stilts on the Delaware Bay. The teeming interplay of the marsh terrain and its vast fecundity seemed a perfect metaphor. The Marsh’s programs include artist-in-residencies, after-school workshops for at-risk youth, and performance development classes and workshops. For more information visit https://themarsh.org/.