On February 23, we visited our first rehearsal of The Great Indoors by Josh Kaston. We caught the actors at the round table with Kaston and the play’s director, Julek Neumann, to discuss how they want to handle their roles.
Neumann says The Great Indoors is a light comedy with some farcical moments that probes the possible reactions of four people from different cultures to a situation that is well beyond their grasp.
The play is set in a room in a cabin somewhere in America that has mysteriously come under siege by animals rebelling against humanity. The play’s four characters (an intelligent older American lady Olsen, an American redneck bigot, an Englishman and a pregnant Czech girl) react to this unusual and potentially dangerous situation by using their culture as a touchstone. All of them are changed in the process of coping with the situation, without ever really realizing the extent of the danger that menaces them. The actors cast in the play – two Americans, one Czech and one English – are all of right age for their parts.
Neumann is Czech actor and director who has collaborated with the Prague Playwriting Contest in the past. He graduated from DAMU as an actor and worked at famous Studio Ypsilon for ten years. In 1984, he left the country and worked as a director and as a journalist for the BBC. He came back to Czech Republic in 1997 and besides directing, he translates and writes plays and teaches drama.
We asked Neumann how he intended to directing a play which has such an interplay of cultures and characters.
“As a director, I am attracted by the dreamlike mood of the play and by its irrational setup,” he says. “In the staging, I would like to stress both the humor in the writing and the clash of cultures and misunderstandings it causes. I am also attracted by the contrast between the seemingly down-to-earth, Hitchcock-like situation and the surreal conflict that goes with it, both the one between the group of people attacked and the nature that attacks them, and the almost farcical struggles going on between the people involved. There is plenty to explore in the characters which should be fun with the cast we have.”
