Interview by: LeeAnne Nakamura, Staff Writer
This is the first part in The Grappler’s Winter Lab Interview Series. This winter quarter, our team at The Grappler will be interviewing every director of a lab to showcase their exciting work and hear about their creative processes. Stay tuned for more interviews coming soon!
Sam Kerns is a director, writer, stylist, and experimental filmmaker from Cincinnati, OH. He has served on creative teams with Cincinnati Opera, Cincinnati Fringe Festival, Maison des Scénaristes, Playhouse in the Park, Opera America, and the National Alliance for Musical Theatre. His Theatre School credits include CLOISTERF*CK, The Lord, The Lady…, Brooklyn Bridge, and Miss Intergalactic 1967.
I recently had the great pleasure of getting to talk with Sam Kerns, who will be directing an updated version of The Maids for his lab this quarter. In this interview, I was able to ask Sam what made him drawn to directing this updated version of the play, learn more about the weirdness he feels exists within the text of this play, and what he is most excited about getting to direct this play, among other things.
LeeAnne Nakamura [LN]: How would you describe the show in a 30 second pitch?
Sam Kerns [SK]: The Maids is covered in plastic. It’s tight, it's pristine, but it's translucent nature reveals all the flaws in the garment hidden beneath the dry cleaning sheet. It is eaten with moths. It stinks. All of its sequins are falling off, and yet for some reason you go into your closet and it's what you choose to wear to the night out. That's how I describe The Maids.
LN: How did you choose this piece? Had you read this show before or were you assigned the piece in a class beforehand?
SK: I remember taking Interim Dean Coya Paz’s HDL class my first year and we read this play in her class. I remember her introducing the playwright Genet who wrote the original play which this adaptation is based on, and she said “this week we're gonna learn about a gay playwright from the 50s who was imprisoned and who wrote this play about real life sisters who killed the house owner who they worked for.” I was like, “that's my play.” I did an assignment on it and I just fell madly in love with it. I knew my first year that this was going to be the play I would direct. What I didn't know was that I would be directing an updated version of it written in 2014 by Andrew Upton and Benedict Andrews, in this radical new, new age, contemporary twist on who these people are into each other.
LN: What made you drawn to this reinterpretation? More so than wanting to direct the original or how it was first produced?
SK: I think this version is an already weird play and puts it through an even weirder lens of weirdness. It's much more guttier. Genet is known for writing below the surface, all of his characters and all their tension exists below the surface. I think that those waters were very still in his original play, but what we're looking at beneath the surface in this play, the waters are much choppier. It's this radical reimagination that blends all of the questions we have about wage gaps, gender roles, and hierarchies within society that make more sense in terms of where we are today.
LN: What kind of elements of this play are you excited to actually bring to life?
SK: I'm so excited for those moments where people get to be messy on stage. This play is all about keeping things clean and keeping things hidden. But my oh my, no matter how hard you try, you still are so messy in life when you try to hide who you really are. I'm just excited to get in the room and get on my feet with these amazing actors and tell them “follow your impulse, tear something apart, tear something down.” There's so much at stake for these characters, both for the maids and for their mistress, who they work for. I really want that to manifest physically, almost carnal and animalistic.
LN: When you're in the room directing, are you giving the actors little bits and pieces to feed off of what they create, or do you kind of have more of an exact image in your mind?
SK: These three actors who I'm working with are just wizards with text, and who are so committed to understanding every piece of punctuation, every word that is written in the text, and that is just such an exciting opportunity. Because having them be so focused on text allows me to focus on world building, and in giving them a frame for which this text comes to life and their deep understanding of text paired with that, what I think my strength as a director is my deep understanding of world building, physical tension, and stage picture that allows the actors to feel the emotions that they’re speaking, if that makes sense.
LN: Yes, it does. When you first started like, this is what I'm going to direct, did you dive further into the original play? Are you having some of your actors look into engage with that as well to shape some of their choices-
SK: Yes! It's interesting that this play exists. This is the third version, technically, the first version being the actual murder committed by the Papin sisters. That history exists on its own, and then it's filtered through the work of Genet, who in his original play had three cis men -well, that's regressive, like three men at the time- play the three maids. Now we're looking at this play through a contemporary lens, and casting is done so that it's two women playing the maids and one man playing the madame. There's a lot of work in terms of history, in terms of gender politics, and in terms of the multiple lenses through which one story is told throughout time.
LN: I really like how you said three stories included the actual events. That's really interesting.
SK: It's so fascinating. It's like, how can you get more theatrical than the actual event of two maids who decide to kill their madame, that in and of itself? That as a headline is so brilliant, and I think what's so great about these subsequent versions is that they look at who these people were, not just the headline. Of course, they're not actually the true story of what happened. It's like a mirror. It's kind of fragmented, but it's based upon those events. It's certainly not a historical retelling by any means.
LN: Were there any questions that you were left with after reading both texts? Maybe not things where you want a definitive answer, but what you want to make more clear in this version that you're directing.
SK: Yeah. It's interesting. In reading earlier versions, at times it's a bit stodgy and the queerness is more subtext. Whereas I think this play is just so vapid and so vile, and really upfront with miserable life can be for these people who are just so unhappy with themselves and with the societal hierarchies that they succumb to by no other choice. I think this play is just obviously more queer as opposed to the earlier version by Genet. That version is also inherently queer because it was written by a queer playwright who cast three homosexual men playing the role. So that is a queer play, but I think in this adaptation the queerness is just so apparent.
LN: What do you hope the audience will take away after watching it?
SK: I hope audiences will question their own performance in life, and what their mess is and how they clean it up. How does the audience clean up the messes of others? Even in our ugliest moments, there's beauty. Even in moments of total solitude and otherness, there is someone there who is willing to risk it all for you. No matter what role society imprints upon us, we can play pretend, and we can find a way to survive through those roles and beat the roles that make us unhappy. I also, I want people to be weirded out. I don't know if that sounds masochistic; I don't want to push people away, I want to draw them closer. I want to pique their curiosity.
LN: Were you pulling that concept from the text or did you feel like it was already there in the text and you're just bringing it to light?
SK: I think the weirdness is definitely in the text. It's very, very strange, and the relationships are so weird and don't make any sense at all. The only way for me as a director to make them make sense is to push them to their absolute limit and make them weirder and campier. When I think of camp sensibilities, it takes a lense on life which absorbs weirdness, grander, stranger personalities and makes it accessible, makes it relatable. That is definitely what the text is asking of anyone who works on it, which is: how do you make this world accessible?
LN: That's all the questions I have. Thank you so much for your time. I really appreciate it.
The Maids by Benedict Andrews and Andrew Upton, directed by Sam Kerns, will have performances from February 21 through February 25 in TTS Room 302, featuring the talent of Maeve Mollaghan, Casey Whisler, and Russell Norris.
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