Quince Productions, known locally for bringing thought-provoking LGBT-inclusive theater to the stage, needs the audience to bring its latest show to life.
“Overexposed: A Slightly Awkward Peep Show” revolves around three writer/performers — Jennifer MacMillan, R. Eric Thomas and Daniel Student — as they regale the audience with theatrical storytelling, finding common ground in their different backgrounds.
“I think of it as a coming-of-age story for a slightly older group,” MacMillan said. “The two boys just turned 30 and I’m 28. When you think of coming of age, you usually think of teenagers. But we realize we’re dealing with big-life stuff like buying houses and relationships — questions about identity, sexuality and marriage. For me the piece is really about truthful, revealing, interesting stories that are specific and universal in their theme surrounding how people come of age with their bodies and their identities.”
In the show, the three performers are exploring sexuality by playing themselves and telling stories about their experiences.
“We wanted to show looking at sexuality in a mature way,“ Thomas said. “It started looking at sex and sexuality and what is our approach to sexual maturity for the rest of our lives. For each of us it’s really different. Jen is looking at a boyfriend to find or a house to find. Daniel is looking at what is the sexual role of the straight man. These are progressive ideas. I’m looking at what manhood means to the gay man and whether I can have male friends that I don’t sleep with. These are concerns that I never really had in my 20s, but now I’m starting to think about.”
MacMillan said for her performance, she’s trying to put as much of herself into her stories as possible.
“I have an improv background,” she said. “I like to work from a place of personal truth. That’s the kind of improv I do and that’s the kind of theater that I’m interested in doing. I’m trying to strip away character as much as possible and I’m trying to be the most genuine version of myself, completely honest. I try to let go of the fact that this is going to be in front of an audience and, once they know something about me, they can’t un-know them. I’m holding my own feet to the fire on this one. Everything that I have written is true: They are my own personal thoughts, there’s crazy stuff about my family. So I think the comedy comes because I’m a really good underdog and I think the audience will like that. I think it’s funny to be the underdog and have all the cards stacked against you. The comedy comes from this deep need that borders on manic desperation to be a high-functioning person in the world.”
Thomas said he is also drawing from deeply personal experiences for his stories.
“It’s a story about a relationship of mine with a guy that failed,” he said. “I tell it in different ways, looking at it as my first adult relationship and what failed. It touches on a lot of different themes as varied office politics, racial identity and, at one point, I go on a tangent on how to cook fried chicken. The second story I tell is more straightforward. It’s about friendship. I live with a guy who is extremely attractive and my thought is we’re going to set up house and become boyfriends. And nothing happens. It’s a story about relationships, finding a platonic kinship and reaching a point where you learn how to actually be part of a relationship, as opposed to being a taker looking for love or sex.”
Both performers said the stories told throughout the show’s run will be the same, but the discussions among the performers themselves and the interaction with the audience will be different from show to show.
“We’re telling the same stories, but we do keep it fresh,” Thomas said. “In between each story we do a take-off on ‘The View.’ We talk about what the individual just talked about. That will be different every night. We may talk about what happened that night before or something that happened in the past.”
“We have these improvised conversations and interludes between stories,” MacMillan said. “We try to create thematic threads between the stories we’re telling so they won’t be completely disparate. My relationship to them is definitely one of camaraderie. I feel like our stories build nicely on each other’s backs, the way a natural conversation would evolve. You could say something and then someone else would say, ‘Oh yeah, right. That reminds me of this.’ Even though our pieces are solo pieces, they feel more like a dialogue between friends. The nature of this kind of work is that it’s revealing and honest and gritty. You become very close in the process and I think it’s going to show on stage.”
MacMillan added that the participation of the audience is helping her resolve one of her stories.
“There’s one piece I was struggling to write, which is about learning to love yourself,” she said. “I just didn’t have an ending. If it were a movie or a book, it would be easy to craft something the felt tidy and complete, you know — have an epiphany. But it’s not a movie. It’s honest and I don’t have the answer. Working on this piece, I thought, Oh my God. I’m really fucked. I can’t end this piece because I don’t have the answer on how to love myself. So in rehearsal, I went through the entire piece up to the point where I stop and said, ‘Help me write the ending. What happens?’ And they thought that was part of the piece and that it was brilliant to have the audience help me write the ending. So I’m going to work that in and see if the audience can help me at all on this journey to figure out what self-love is. They may not have any response for me. It’s improvisational. It’s a little bit dangerous, but we want to encourage conversation.”
This all might sound like heavy and profound musings, but Thomas assured us there’s a humorous and lighthearted vibe to “Overexposed.”
“Jen is an extremely funny comic actress,” he said. “Daniel’s stories are kind of shocking and funny. I can go from touching and pathos to hilarity really quickly. That’s where I like to be. I don’t like to be overly serious. We’re talking about things that people don’t talk about, awkward things. It’s more fun to talk about it in a funny way that to just be downtrodden about it.”
Quince Productions presents “Overexposed: A Slightly Awkward Peep Show,” Feb. 10-12 at Laurie Beechman Cabaret at the Arts Bank, 601 S. Broad St. For more information, visit www.quinceproductions.com.