By Claire Dietz
Imagine real-estate agents taking a motivational seminar in a New York City comedy club.
Now you have the basis of Red All Over, running tonight through Nov. 1 in Theater Building Theater B.
Red All Over is playwright Eric Micha Holmes’ account of the motivational seminar the comedy club he worked at hosted for New York real-estate agents.
“I eavesdropped on a lot of the lessons they were teaching, and I found them so fascinating,” he said. “I was riveted by how strange, and bizarre, and different their worldviews were from mine and the people I worked with. By the end of the workshop, I could start to see what people gained from them.”
Putting those viewpoints on stage came next.
“Describing the tone has been the most challenging part for me,” Holmes said. “It’s so close and so raw. The struggle to discover the right adjectives to describe the right colors of the play made up many of the conversations between me and [director Marina Bergenstock].”
Bergenstock’s struggles lay in not having worked with a playwright quite like Holmes before, she said.
“Here at the university, I’ve worked with a lot of plays that are really magical realism,” she said. “This play is very realistic in a very different way than I’m used to working on, so it was a definite challenge for both of us.”
Holmes’ challenges stemmed from the project’s differences from his past works.
“Every play is different; some of them are very much in dialogue with my own experiences and firsthand knowledge, while others emerge from a completely different meteorological system,” he said. “This particular play is very close to the skin; I know those people on stage. They’re composites of people I know.”
Holly Grum, an M.F.A. acting student, is responsible for bringing one of those people, Claire, to life.
“This being my first time working on a new work, it was a challenge for me to get a new version of the script each night and solely work from that script in front of me, not previous drafts,” she said. “It has been truly exciting seeing the changes in each character throughout this process and being an active part of the conversations for those changes.”
Finding those changes was gradual, said Julia-Kaye Rohlf (Judy).
“Eric is an excellent writer, and he knows what he wants, but he doesn’t spell every little thing out in the script for the actors,” she said. “Finally discovering things with my scene partners after weeks of work is always rewarding. It’s like you are beating against a wall, and when eventually it breaks down, you can see the stash of gold that was hidden behind it.”
THEATER
What: Red All Over
When: 8 p.m. Today-Saturday. 2 p.m. Nov. 1
Where: Theater Building Theater B
Admission: Free with UI ID, $5 for nonstudents
