Q&A for 'Cape Disappointment'

Last Tuesday, I got a chance to see Cape Disappointment, a darkly funny series of intertwined vignettes that take place in hollowed-out, bleak places, written by The Debate Society's Hannah Bos and Paul Thureen now showing at P.S. 122 through Dec. 7.  The stories range from two perky tour guides trying desperately to extol the virtues of Detroit,  to two linoleum salesmen seeking their dreams, to a pedophile and a little girl on a tense but riveting road trip.

One thing remains consistent: a dreamlike, deliberately depressing set that features a simulated drive-in, a car (with working windshield wipers!), projections and haunting audio that sounds like old-fashioned radio.   Curious what kind of brains could formulate such a thing, I asked Bos and Thureen a few questions.

How on earth did you tech this show?

Hannah:  We didn't tech the show. The whole thing is improvised.

Paul:  That's right. We bring in a different lighting designer each night and a DJ and just let them go nuts.

Hannah:  We are lying.

Paul:  Yeah, actually tech was...  actually it was crazy but I thought it was going to be much worse.

Hannah:   Especially sound- and light-wise, it's a pretty complicated show. But our designers really kill themselves prepping for tech week and, of course, during tech week.

Paul:  We've worked with a lot of the team for a long time and they're all amazingly creative and also have an idea of what to expect when if comes to working on a Debate Society project. Oliver runs a tight but fun ship, and the crew at PS122 is top-notch, so that helped a lot this go round.

Hannah:  We also feed people all the time so everybody forgets how hard they're working.

Did you have the set in mind while writing  Cape Disappointment?

Paul:  Totally. We're really interested in architecture and objects.

Hannah:  And the ghosts and stories that inhabit them.

Paul:  The way the mood and feel of a place connects to things that may have happened there, or things you imagine could have happened. So yeah, I think anytime we write a play, the first step of it is imagining a world. From the very beginning we're sort of dreaming of the environment and look and feel of the place, and then the stories and characters grow from that. I think a kind of dreamy, ethereal idea of what the set may end up looking like is always floating around in our brains.

Hannah:  Yeah. With this one we always knew the location of this play was a drive-in. Which was great because we have been working a lot in boxes -- small, square boxes.

Paul:  All of our other plays take place in places  like motel rooms and little houses. So a drive-in was a way for us to preserve our interest in architecture and intimate spaces but still have a vast landscape and stretch the world into a widescreen format.

Hannah:  It went through a lot of evolutions, though. The drive-in speakers were always a part of it, but for a long time there were actual car parts...  like full cabs of trucks and things on stage. We used a few smashed-up cars for our workshop in Austin, which was wonderful to try.

Paul:  But it's just so so hard to find good junkyards in Manhattan.

Hannah:  And it's hard getting cars up the stairs at PS122.

Paul:  Amanda Rehbein, who did and the set for our last play, The Eaten Heart, helped us out a lot with formulating ideas of how the space should work.

Hannah:  And then when we brought Karl Allen in to design the final production, he just went nuts on it; helping us realize these more vague ideas and really come up with specific, beautiful set pieces that would look right and also facilitate the action of the play and our movement in and out of different characters.

Have you been to Cape Disappointment,  Washington? Was it an inspiration at all?

Hannah:  Yeah, actually Oliver and I were there.

Paul:  You got shot at.

Hannah:  Yes we did. We got shot at.

Paul:  The three of us were in Portland,  Oregon a couple years ago touring our first play, A Thought About Raya, and we had a couple of days off.  I had a visitor from out of town...

Hannah:  Paul was making out with his girlfriend.

Paul:  So?

Hannah:  So Oliver and I wanted to do some sightseeing. We drove up the coast and actually took a wrong turn and ended up in Cape Disappointment. It is where Lewis and Clark ended their journey west. There's a lighthouse... 

Anyway, on the drive back to Portland, one of the backseat windows of the rental car just exploded. Oliver thought I'd been shot and was dead. I was hysterically laughing because I thought a monster flew in the car. The cops came and were looking for bullets, but I was still sure that it was a monster. The flying kind.

Paul:  And to this day...  you don't know.

Hannah:  Exactly. It was probably wind from the cliffs as we came around a curve. But it is a possibility that we got shot at or attacked by a monster.

Paul:  A year ago, when this play was called Untitled Auto Play, Hannah proposed the title Cape Disappointment and I hated it.

Hannah:  He always hates the names I come up with and then changes his mind. He is often wrong.

Paul:  That's true. I'm the worst. Anyway, The Eaten Heart, The Debate Society...  Those were Hannah's ideas -- that originally I hated and had totally solid arguments against -- that she was right about. I always come around.

How do you two collaborate? How do two people working on such an intense show keep from killing each other?

Paul:  Well, we take about a year to a year and a half to create a new play, so a lot of it is generating a huge mass of ideas and then sort of paring down and intuitively reworking things until we're just left with the details we love.

Hannah and I do the writing together, a lot of it by talking through images or ideas and then giving each other little assignments, breaking apart and then coming back together. Usually we end up sort of magically filling in what was lacking in the other's text. I'm probably a little bit more poetic, Hannah's probably a little funnier and crazier and we're both strange and dark.

And I guess it just kind of works out. We bring new text into rehearsal with Oliver, work stuff, and he contributes a lot through suggestions, questions, in-rehearsal experimentation...  so the creation of the play is definitely a three-person collaboration.

Hannah:  I don't know how we do it, but we just really get along well. I should also mention Paul and I live together and have been best friends for years.

Paul:  You should mention that.

Hannah:  I just did.

Paul:  I hate you.

Hannah:  Cool, see you at the show. Clean your room.

Paul:  Love ya!

-- Halley Bondy

Cape Disappointment is playing through Dec. 7 at P.S. 122 (1st Ave. and 9th Street, Manhattan), $18 . For tickets visit www.ps122.org.   (Photo: courtesy of Hannah Bos and Paul Thureen)