INTERVIEW: Carl Holder’s new play, ‘Charleses,’ looks at three generations of men
Charleses, the new play from Carl Holder, is set to premiere as part of The Tank’s Save & Print series. The drama follows three men, all named Charles, as they navigate the inevitability of time and the power and weight of one’s inheritance. Performances for the drama begin Thursday, April 13 at The Brick, 575 Metropolitan Ave. in Brooklyn, and continue through Saturday, April 29.
“So I started writing it, really writing it, in August of 2015, and I had just closed another play I had been working on,” Holder said in a recent phone interview. “During the process of getting that show up, I had also gone through a pretty sad breakup, and it had been with somebody I had been with for a long time. So when that show closed, it was the first chance I really had to kind of deal with anything in my life because I had been so swamped just making sure that other play got up. So after this really, really busy period, I suddenly had the exact opposite, which was this period where nothing was happening, and I kind of had to deal with my own life and bs. And during that time, I had had an idea for something that I didn’t know what it would turn into, but I knew it involved only three men on stage and something about that.”
Holder began writing scenes, not in any particular order and with no clear direction on where he was headed; however, he felt artistically rejuvenated and threw his energy into the project. He was interested in exploring what it means to be a man, a simple question that resulted in some surprising results.
“It’s kind of a silly thing to ask, what does it mean to be a man?” he said. “As I kept writing, that question took on sort of a tone of an elemental unpacking because I was definitely looking within myself to figure out what was going on in my life now that I was kind of in a new place that I hadn’t been in years. … So from all of this writing that came from kind of a deep, but at times silly, place of self-questioning, the play kind of came out. And then little bits of ideas came here and there, how a plot might unite certain themes, and then just over time it became clear that this started as a story of fathers and sons.”
The play features three characters of different generations, which means Holder needed to write characters who were younger and older than him. This required him to turn on his imagination to understand who these men were in their respective lives.
“I think what links it all is an interest in the passing of time,” he said. “I think the play is about a lot of things, but I think that the biggest theme that unites everything is what it means to be an individual existing in time. And that’s something I think about a lot in ways both interesting and probably boring of just how time is this huge inevitability that we really have no control over. … We’re just all on a conveyor belt, and it’s moving forward whether we like it or not. And I think that really interests me, and I think that’s something that kind of, for all the places the play goes, that’s sort of a central theme of how the only certainty is continuance. And so I think I am interested in that. I think I’m interested in what it means to be one person existing in time, and there’s so much that you can figure out while you’re here. And there’s so much that you’ll just never really grasp while you’re here.”
Holder said the play is not autobiographical, but he did say that in his own life, he is the third Carl, after his father and grandfather. He has been fascinated by this lineage. He shares DNA with these two namesakes and always found the similarities and differences interesting and odd.
“A fun secret fact that I don’t like to make a big deal out of is the name Charles means ‘man,’ like if you trace its roots,” he said. “It goes back to basically meaning ‘man’ or ‘son of man.’ … As much as this is an exploration of masculinity and an exploration of one family that is fathers and sons, I hope for it to be really about existence and what it means for anybody to be alive and however they identify and whatever they experience while they’re here.”
Charleses landed at The Tank thanks to a connection Holder made with Rosalind Grush, co-artistic director of the theater group. Holder was moving from one apartment to another and also working on Charleses. His friends, Carter and Holly Hudson, decided to help him out by staging a reading of the new drama in their home.
“I think they knew I was going through kind of a tough time, and they also knew I was working on something,” he said. “So in an effort to be helpful in every respect, they offered to do a reading of this thing that I was working on at their house, which I took them up on because I needed some kind of deadline to work toward. And it’s always good for people to hear things. So I took them up on that, and Rosalind somehow got wind of it and ended up coming to that reading.”
Holder and Grush would have casual conversations about the future of Charleses, and eventually their discussions grew more serious. Last summer, they started talking about dates and what creative team members should be invited into the project. They landed on Meghan Finn (The Offending Gesture) as their director.
“So when Meghan was suggested, I got really excited, and we put together another reading where we called in some big guns, people we thought might be interested in actually doing the play,” Holder said. “Meghan came and heard it, and then after that we got married. And now we’re doing this play together.”
That’s quite a full-circle moment for Holder and his new play, Charleses.
By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HollywoodSoapbox.com
Charleses begins performances as part of The Tank’s Save & Print series Thursday, April 13. The play runs at The Brick in Brooklyn through Saturday, April 29. Click here for more information and tickets.
