MOLLY'S DELICIOUS
SUPERABUNDANT LIFE FORCE VITALITY
Aaron Posner, director of Molly’s Delicious,
has been a frequent collaborator with playwright Craig Wright.
Veronica Blanco, of ATC’s Education Department, recently
sat down with Aaron to discuss his work, his rehearsal process
and why he stills loves Molly’s Delicious after
ten years.
Q: As director of Molly’s Delicious,
what message do you think will most impact audiences today?
It is a message of hope and imagination. At one point, Allison
says, “I have more hope and imagination in my little
finger than the rest of this ugly world combined.” It
is people being held down by conventions, by other people’s
attitudes, and by moralities that are on the brink of breaking
open. And I think that is a celebration of hope and imagination.
One of the things that theatre can do is inspire us by seeing
people who are living perhaps more fully than we do on a day-to-day
basis. George Bernard Shaw, in one of his plays, called one
of his characters “a genius of vitality.” I have
always loved that phrase. It is an idea of somebody that is
so super-abundantly full of life that you just take inspiration
by being around them. This play is a portrait of young people
full of this “superabundant life force vitality”
who hunger to live with that kind of imagination, to explore
and to try to find their way through it.
Q: How do you think these issues relate to today’s
society and what the world faces today?
Molly’s Delicious is looking at the earlier
years of Vietnam and a young man going off to war and coming
back and how that feels to the people left behind. It is definitely
a different time. There is a kind of pristine naïveté
in this world on an apple orchard in the fall in Minnesota
that it is almost impossible to imagine today. We are so bombarded
with information, we are so cynical. The kind of hope we see
is harder and harder to hold on to and, therefore, worth thinking
about. The issues are about how hard love is, how hard family
is and the obligations that we all have to face in our lives
– plus the idea that actions have consequences. These
are all basic human things that haven’t changed in a
couple of thousand years. They are timeless issues of love
and family that will always be relevant.
Q: As a director in the rehearsal process, how
do you inspire the actors to create their roles and tell the
story as you feel it should be told?
Mostly, I just sort of joke and nudge a lot. I ask questions.
I try to get them to take wherever they are going a little
bit deeper, a little bit further, a little bit more extreme.
A play like this is relatively new, it is not well-known.
So I feel like I am an advocate to the playwright, trying
to guard his point of view. There is always a balance between
what the actors bring, what the playwright brings, and what
the director brings. Hopefully we all just meet in the middle.
It is very collaborative, and in this case, a very enjoyable
process.
Q: You and Craig Wright have had a long-standing
relationship, with you directing many of his world premieres.
What is it that inspires you most about Craig’s writing
and why do you continue to be drawn to his work?
He is one of my favorite playwrights. One of the things he
has said is that his plays are about very normal people asking
really big questions, which is something that engages me very
much. Another friend of mine said that “Craig writes
plays of people standing in the gutter looking up at the stars,”
and I also like that. Craig is a complex genius. I think he
has a view of the world that is entirely his own and he writes
from very deep places in himself and is very generous in his
passion for his characters. In this play in particular, he
is able to write real conflict with characters who all mean
incredibly well. There are no villains. There are real difficulties,
but no villains and that is something I have always loved
in any kind of work. Plus Craig is very funny! He is able
to get at real issues, difficult and human situations, with
a great deal of humor and with a great deal of spirit and
depth of soul.
Q: You directed the premiere of Molly’s
Delicious ten years ago with the Arden Theatre Company.
What did you discover about that process and how has it changed
your second approach to play?
I was a lot closer in age to the younger characters ten years
ago. I sit some place in between the younger and the older
characters now, so my view maybe is a little bit more complete,
more balanced and a little less skewed towards the young people
in the play. The play is still the play and I don’t
think my feelings about it have changed that much.
I do think that it has been a hard ten years for the world.
The play is such a hopeful and optimistic play that as the
world has gotten harder, it creates a kind of ballast for
the play in an interesting way. This production is very different
from the first production because the design is completely
different, the space is completely different, and these actors
are all different. They all bring other qualities and other
energies and other nuances to it that completely transforms
the event. So…incredibly different and incredibly similar.
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