Well, the judge has ruled, and it seems that Superexclusive Interview is the Superexclusive property of SophiePC - so from now on, my interviews will simply be titled - well, Interviews.

Now, on to the good stuff! Here's Part 2 of the interview with Elissa Kozlov of the American Story Project, focusing on their Current Play, their Process, and their Interdisciplinary Approach.


The Cynical Romantic: Tell me about your current play.

Elissa Kozlov: Current production: Daguerreotype. Based on the life of Matthew Brady, famed civil war photographer and father of modern photography.

He lead an amazing life, one that people know little about. And there is a lot of stuff people think they know that they don't. For example, Matthew Brady is credited with many shots of dead people, but he never took pictures of the dead, that was his assistant. So the play revolves around Brady's truly difficult decision to go photograph the war or to stay at home with his sick wife – between the life he has built and the legacy he wants to leave behind. 

CR: So when you do research for these things, do you mainly do book and internet research, or do you interview people as well? 

EK: It depends on the project. It’s difficult to research people on this one, as our characters all lived in the 1800s. 

CR: Right. Unless you had a medium or something. 

EK: Right. But with Hartford, I did a lot of interviews with survivors. I had a monologue in the play that was entirely from quotations from an interview with a woman named Jenny Heiser. Our dramaturge, Stephen Aubrey ‘06, does amazing research. He gets into a project and then doesn't stop until he knows absolutely everything about it. 

CR: Wow. Ok, here's the pretentious question: how did your Wesleyan liberal arts education inform (or not inform) what you do? 

EK: Ha okay. Well, the work we do is not strictly theater. There is a ton of history, a ton of research, a ton of psychology. 

CR: So it's interdisciplinary? Very Wesleyan. 

EK: Very. The great thing about our plays and our company is that a lot of us are either double majors or not a theater major at all. So whenever we start a new project, we each bring out specialty to it. It's impossible for me to watch a run or read a script and not add my psych background to it – either in character choices and motivation or in interesting social psych phenomenons. We’re all constantly bringing texts that we find relevant to the table as we work on a new play. 

CR: Hmm. Wow. 

EK: Stephen was a COL major, so he has a pretty different knowledge base than I do, or Jess or anyone else. And Hayley, one of the actresses, was anthropology -- we come from all over. 

Tune in next time to learn more about the company's past...and their connection to Finding Nemo!