INTERVIEW: These are satiric, poisonous ‘Bitter Greens’ at 59E59
Photo: Clea DeCrane and Andy Do star in Bitter Greens at 59E59 Theaters. Photo courtesy of Brendan Swift / Provided by Karen Greco PR with permission.
“Going green” is a way of life for many good-minded people in the world; however, no one said adopting an environmental consciousness was easy. Take a look at Reyna, a character in the new play Bitter Greens, written by Clea DeCrane and directed by Kevin Kittle, and now playing at Midtown Manhattan’s 59E59 Theaters. She’s living on the top of the world (a world she has helped to save): good résumé, good health, good internship at a think tank with eco-friendly goals.
What’s the problem?
Well, when the decision comes for Reyna to land a full-time job with the think tank, she is beaten to the finish line — by her boyfriend. This unleashes a different side of Reyna, one that is poisonous.
Bitter Greens, which is playing through Dec. 23, comes to 59E59 thanks to Station 26 Productions and after many months of work from DeCrane.
“I went to school for acting, and I graduated three years ago,” the playwright said in a recent phone interview. “I started to realize that the parts that I really wanted to play and what I wanted to showcase myself and my friends in were not the parts I was going out for. For young women in their 20s, they are offering like one part in a play, if any, that are often ingénue-y. There’s a sense of innocence about those characters, and I wanted to depict young women in the opposite way of that.”
To remedy this problem, DeCrane started to put pen to paper and create the change she wanted to see in the theatrical world. She thought about characters that would attract the interest of her friends: complicated, strange women with dark secrets and demons. She wanted to explore these complications on stage, and Reyna and Bitter Greens were eventually born.
“Then I started to think about Millennials in general and what friendships are like after school and how friendships that have been cultivated in a scheduled world or cultivated at times of transition, at ages 15 or 20 or 22, and how those friendships either fall away or disintegrate once we’re considered ‘adults’ in the real world,” she said. “So that’s how the play started to gestate in my brain.”
DeCrane also acts in the piece, and she is joined on stage by Jessica Darrow, Andy Do, Ben Lorenz and Regan Sims. When she was writing the narrative, she needed to wear multiple hats: One hat was for the actor, and the other for the creator. It was her job to differentiate between the two.
“I definitely then pulled away and stopped thinking as an actor and really just tried to think about the story and how all of those characters would all develop,” DeCrane said. “But my acting background definitely helped with dialogue in general and how these characters would talk to each other. … I [previously] was thinking about how I would act something as opposed to being just totally honest and true to the character itself. I had to give myself a talking to and sit down and be like, think about this as if you weren’t acting in it at all and write it the way you would write it without any fear or any sense of self-consciousness if you were the actor.”
The satiric elements of Bitter Greens eventually turn dark, and they are packaged together as a biting social commentary on health, fitness, environmentalism, liberalism and life in the 21st century. Most of the jokes are just that, jokes, but a few are meant to hold a mirror up to the audience.
[slight spoiler alert]
“It gets really dark, but the idea that someone is poisoning her boyfriend with health supplements and things that are meant to keep us healthy is absolutely an ironic take on health, on how we poison the ones we love and also the culture I grew up in,” she said. “I’m from Los Angeles, and the people that I grew up around, and the world I grew up in, I think took health to a level that I found comedic — or took health supplements and vitamins and these things that we can ingest to make ourselves ‘healthy’ to a comedic level, in my opinion. And I wanted to put that in the play. I wanted to dramatize that.”
DeCrane has a dream that one day Bitter Greens will play in Los Angeles, the city that gave her so much inspiration. She believes it is important for theatergoers to see the inherent irony of having a character live an eco-friendly life, but so quickly turn violent when she doesn’t get what she wants.
“When she doesn’t get this thing that she expects to get, she starts to do one of the worst things we can do,” DeCrane said. “She poisons someone she loves, and I think that’s something I’ve tried to explore with the world, but also particularly with Millennials because I do think that as a generation we have been set up. We’ve been set up, and now we’re at the top of the diving board. And we haven’t had to climb the ladder ourselves, and now we have to jump. And we’re not really sure into what because the world is going crazy. … I don’t think we’re fully prepared for the world, and that’s something I’m trying to explore with this particular character. She’s been told her whole life that she’s great; she has awards and certificates, and she’s won everything and never really been rejected. And when she is rejected at this time in her life, she can’t handle it, and she lashes out in the most extreme ways. So, yeah, that’s what I definitely am hoping the audience will take away from it.”
By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HollywoodSoapbox.com
Bitter Greens, written by Clea DeCrane and directed by Kevin Kittle, is currently playing Midtown Manhattan’s 59E59 Theaters, courtesy of Station 26 Productions. Click here for more information and tickets.
