‘When the world is mad, does embracing madness make you sane?’: A Q&A with Dysfunctional Theatre Company

Artistic Director Amy Overman discusses her feminist take on The Bacchae

As part of their summer residency on Governors Island in New York City, the Dysfunctional Theatre Company has created a uniquely feminist take on The Bacchae with an all-female cast of singers, dancers and actors.

We spoke to Artistic Director Amy Overman over email about what it’s like to create an immersive work on a 43-acre public park, why stage a play where a group of women tear a man to pieces with their bare hands, and Dionysus being, well, a dick.

This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.

No Proscenium: For folks who aren’t familiar with your organization, can you tell us a little about the Dysfunctional Theatre Company?

Amy Overman: Sure! Dysfunctional Theatre Company is a twenty (!) year old off-off-Broadway theater company. We produce theater primarily in the East Village and Brooklyn.

Our focus is on making theater accessible. We want to bring new audiences to small productions: people who’ve only been to Broadway shows, or seen a high school play, or who’ve never seen live theater at all. Our primary mission is the production of new works, but we also have a division called “Dysfunctional Classics,” which focuses on staging underperformed plays or presenting a new viewpoint on “classic” works by highlighting the dysfunction that’s always been part of these pieces.

The “Dysfunctional Collective” is our program on Governors Island, which is open to all artists. Our aim is to fill our Governors Island house with art: visual, performing, interactive, all types.

I’ve been the Artistic Director of the company since 2005 and I conceived and directed The Bacchae.

NP: This is your third summer doing a residency on Governors Island. What inspired you to create an immersive work using House 8B?

AO: It’s our third full summer on Governors Island, but we’ve actually been performing there for four years now. We started out doing two weekends in September 2014 at House 8B.

During 2014, and again in 2015, we performed Summer to Your Heart, which was a reimagining of our previous production, I Shall Forget You Presently. Both works are based on the poetry and life of Edna St. Vincent Millay.

I Shall Forget You Presently was a nonlinear, free-flowing show, so it was easy to break it down into smaller vignettes for House 8B. We immediately realized how special Governors Island is, and also how the space we were performing in affects the performance. We were close to our audience (no separation between audience and cast) and we encouraged them to move from room to room with us. That was the beginning of wanting to do a production that took over the whole house. It only took 4 years to get to this point!

When you remove the traditional barriers between audience and performers, your work becomes immersive whether you want it to or not. One of the wonderful things about Nolan Park, where our house is located, is these old houses. People love to open the closets, look into the fireplaces, and explore. People will sit on anything, move furniture, and even talk to the cast while the performance is going on. Kids run through with sticks, and desperate people come in looking for bathrooms. (There’s no running water on most of Governors Island.) We once had someone walk right into the middle of a performance and release a live cricket, so now we work that into our performances.

The last three years let us really learn how to use House 8B’s quirks, like two of the upstairs bedrooms which are railroaded together and the set of back stairs not open to the public. The connectivity of the rooms helped me set up the differing viewpoints between the Bacchae and their oppressors. The back stairs let us use practical stage craft to make the Bacchae seem even more mysterious and mystical. Our cast had a way to disappear and reappear on different floors without the audience knowing how they did it.

NP: Why did you choose to stage The Bacchae now? And what prompted the decision to have an all female cast?

AO: This production was 100% born out of the rage I felt in our current political climate. Watching attack after attack on women, especially women’s control over their own bodies, through the constant attempts to limit access to safe, legal abortions and to defund Planned Parenthood by elected officials who have never been and never will be pregnant…. All of that fueled a desire to produce a play where a group of women tear a man to pieces with their bare hands. So that was the beginning of the idea.

But I hadn’t read The Bacchae since college. The dismemberment was really all I remembered. When I went back to it, I was struck by how little voice the Bacchae have in a show that is named after them. It was all Dionysus and Pentheus talking to each other, at great length. And Dionysus not a nice guy. He’s as much of a dick to the Bacchae as Pentheus is. He just has different methods.

I was frustrated until a friend pointed out that Euripides had been dead for a long time, and I could take this story and change it. My focus became adapting the script to reclaim the voices of the Bacchae. An all-female cast was a natural progression from there. A lot of the original text is male characters talking about what the female Bacchae are doing or have already done. So the idea of having women playing the men seemed like a very good start to reclaiming the Bacchae’s story. I also wanted to give opportunities to the other talented women in the company. That’s part of the reason we have both music and dance in the show. They’re not my strong suit, but I wanted to give other actresses a vehicle to showcase their talents.

NP: Governors Island is a large park with outdoor activities and many places to explore. What happens when people stumble upon your production by accident?

AO: So far, our audiences have been a 50:50 split between people who came to see our show deliberately, and people who stumbled upon it, because they were spending the day on the Island and saw our posters, or they saw some crazy women on the lawn and wondered what was going on.

From our previous experience, we’ve learned a thing or two about drawing people into the house. Our whole cast is in costume and has a lot of crazy make up on. We make it very obvious who the performers are. The production begins on the lawn and front porch, with Bacchae scattered about, before being called to worship. The Bacchae enter the house and pull curious visitors inside with them. Once the audience comes in, the action continues on the first floor, then moves upstairs and further back into the house with us. The play builds in intensity as we move deeper into the house, with Pentheus’ death taking place upstairs. We move the audience and the action back downstairs for the final scenes of the play.

We also have one cast member whose only responsibility is to guide the audience around the house, in order to encourage more people to come in, and also to point them to the best viewpoints for the show.

NP: What else should we know about the Bacchae?

AO: This is a very free adaptation of the original text. As one of our actresses says, “It’s not your mother’s Bacchae and it’s definitely not your father’s Bacchae.”

We’ve cut the show down to 40 minutes by removing a lot of Pentheus and Dionysus talking. But we also added to the script. There’s a portion of the final scene which was lost from the original text, which contained Agave’s response, after she learns she’s killed her son in a Bacchic frenzy. We’ve recreated this scene and added extra dialogue with the Bacchae responding to the men of Thebes. What we’ve created is a combination of styles and text: both verse and modern speech. We have operatic songs; we have dance; we have comic scenes; we have creepy, bloody murder. So there’s something for everyone!

Well, almost everyone — portions of the show are fairly intense, so it’s not appropriate for small children, but those portions are primarily upstairs. Children (and those who don’t like stairs!) can wait downstairs and still see the play’s ending.

NP: Bonus Question: What work (be it theatre, art, dance, film, music, etc.) do you wish you had created?

AO: The Play That Goes Wrong by Mischief Theatre Company. I saw another one of their works, The Comedy About a Bank Robbery, in London last year and then saw The Play That Goes Wrong twice this summer on Broadway. Their work is farce and physical comedy at its absolute finest.

The Bacchae continues on Governors Island, September 30 and October 1, at 2:30pm and 4:30pm both days, in House 8B on Nolan Park. Performances are free.

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