Alison Stewart: This is All Of It on WNYC, I'm Alison Stewart. The story goes that playwright Joshua Harmon secretly recorded his last conversation with his dying grandmother. That recording inspired his latest work, We Had A World, a play that shows how differently people experience the same thing. The show tells the story of a playwright named Joshua who wants to understand better the fraught relationship between his mom and her mom. At first, we learn about his grandmother's cultured life on the Upper East Side. She loves taking him to museums and plays. She's a bit eccentric. As a child of immigrants who grew up in Brooklyn, she weirdly talks with a British lilt.

Joshua also learns that his grandma has a complicated past and some present-day demons. His mom is a high-achieving lawyer who has had a difficult relationship with her family, and she's a little resentful that Joshua gets along so well with his grandma, until the day when Grandma lets Joshua down. Mom tells Joshua the truth.

The truth that brings us to a gut-wrenching, messy, and humorous rollercoaster journey into this complex trio of grandmother, mother, and son. We Had A World is a New York Times critic's pick. It's running Off-Broadway at the Manhattan Theater's Club City Center Stage through May 11th. It features Joanna Gleason, Ellen Sierras, and my next guest, Andrew Barth Feldman, who you might recognize from Dear Evan Hansen. Hi, Andrew.

Andrew: Hi.

Alison Stewart: Also with us is director Trip Cullman. Hi, Trip.

Trip: Hello.

Alison Stewart: And remotely, playwright Joshua Harmon. Hello via Zoom.

Joshua: Hello. Thank you for having me.

Alison Stewart: Joshua, you recorded your last conversation with your grandma. What made you hit Play?

Joshua: Is that bad?

Alison Stewart: [laughs] Hit Record, I should say.

Joshua: Yes. When you're a playwright, you're starting out, you're encouraged to record things to hone your ear, to train your ear in terms of dialogue, and it gets to be kind of fun. Now I'm getting peppered with these questions all the time, "Are you recording me?" but I'm not. It is occasionally fun to do it. It just felt like I knew this was going to be the last time I talked to her, and I wanted to make sure that I remembered what we said, so I did. I hit Record.

Alison Stewart: What was your process of turning that into a play?

Joshua: Prior to that recording, she'd asked me on her-- It was about a month that she was sick, and she asked me to write a play about our family. She said, "I want you to promise me to make it as bitter and vitriolic as possible." In other words, giving me license to tell the whole truth and nothing but the truth. I wanted to honor that promise. I found her really complicated. I probably understand character in part because of how complicated she was. When the pandemic hit and I had nothing to do, it felt like a good time to go through old family letters, to transcribe this recording, and to sit down and see if I could turn all of these things into something dramatic.

Alison Stewart: The play starts sort of casually. All of a sudden, Andrew, you come out from the side of the stage. Seems he's kind of ready to the crew. You strip down to your underwear-

Andrew: Yes.

Alison Stewart: -and the play begins. Trip, how did your team develop that as a way to start the play?

Trip: Well, the play is very much about a playwright trying to figure out how to write this play about his family. I've never asked Josh this personally, but a lot of playwrights, when they write, they're in their underwear in the privacy of their own homes. Because the piece is so vulnerable and exposing of all of these secrets and emotional nuances inside of this complex family dynamic, I thought it was a perfect visual metaphor to get the writer stripped down and exposed.

Alison Stewart: What does the audience get from that moment of you in your underwear?

Andrew: Immediate intimacy, which is crucial for the rest of the show. That I'm standing there in my underwear looking at all of these people, making eye contact with them. I can see every single person in the audience every day. It feels like a nightmare. [laughter] There's also a little bit of a bait and switch because when the grandmother character first arrives, it feels dreamlike. He's in his underwear, which is also such a trope of nightmares. You think that there's almost like a romantic or sexual energy between the two of them, and then they pop out and they're like, "It's your grandmother." You're like, "Oh, okay. All right."

Alison Stewart: We got it. Joshua, can you explain to us where the title of the play came from?

Joshua: I can, and let the record also show that I do write dressed. I am dressed now. [laughter] I wanted to try to capture something about my childhood, but also something more global about the world. It occurred to me as I was working on it that my sense of my own family and the disintegration of the idea of what it had been was happening at the same time that climate change was really taking hold. I am in my early 40s. I am of a generation that experienced winter in New York differently than people who are new here or have recently been born do now.

It was about looking back at very small, this family, these three people, and very big, and how part of what this play is about is bearing witness and documenting something.

Alison Stewart: The stage is open, no curtain, not many props in the round. Andrew, as an actor, how does performing on this intimate stage compare to something huge like Dear Evan Hansen?

Andrew: It's truly the most thrilling work I've ever done. You have to communicate these ideas differently every day because the audience is different every day. I find new scene partners from line to line, moment to moment. Sometimes I really lock in with somebody who's so present. Sometimes I'm taking it to a lot of people at once. Sometimes there's a friend in the audience, and so I can come to home base with my friends or family that are here. There's nowhere to hide. You have to be alive, you have to be listening, especially when you have scene partners as incredible and as present and as generous as Jeanine and Joanna.

All you can do is listen and be proverbially in your underwear the entire time.

Alison Stewart: [laughs] Trip, what does that do for you creatively, that sort of set? Very little props, no curtain.

Trip: I always like to think that what makes film and television so extraordinary is that they show you an entire world that's fully realized. In theater, I like that an audience is required to utilize their imaginative process. To me, I always like to keep a lot of blank space for the audience to have to have that creative imagination to fill in, and to be a participant because they are there. To me, the way which this story is told purposely asks the audience to engage with it, both from their hearts, their minds, and their creative imaginations.

Alison Stewart: I'm speaking with Andrew Barth Feldman, director Trip Cullman, and playwright Joshua Harmon. We're talking about their play, We Had A World, running Off-Broadway at the Manhattan Theatre Club City Center Stage through May 11th.

Let's talk about the two women in this play. I don't know who I should say this to because I have a feeling you're all going to have something to say on this. [laughs]

Andrew: Oh, yes.

Alison Stewart: We've got Joanna Gleason as Renee. She's part of the Broadway legends that we just finished talking about, and Jeanine-- pronounce her last name for me.

Andrew: Serralles.

Alison Stewart: Serralles, who plays Ellen, your mother. Andrew, I'll start with you. What do these two women bring to the stage for you as an actor?

Andrew: Oh, my goodness. What's interesting, especially, is that we're all three very different actors, so we are attacking these things very differently. Joanna is so smart and so funny, and she is playing. I'm watching her play in real time with words and ideas that are coming to her. That's been a massive inspiration. Not to mention the acute joy that comes from all of those especially early scenes between us. This love that we get to pass between us and then through to the audience.

Jeanine can't tell a lie. Jeanine cannot lie. She would crumple onto the floor if that's what was true in this moment. That is another huge, inspirational, heart-opening thing. Like you said, she's the one who sort of pivots the play. She's the one who takes us in a different direction from that easy adoration that Joanna and I have at the beginning, then it's all Jeanine and her heartbreak that she's really feeling. There's no way to not inherit that when you're standing next to her.

Alison Stewart: Joshua, for you, what did Joanna and Jeanine bring to the roles that maybe you didn't even know that you'd written?

Joshua: Joanna is in the legends, and Jeanine, if there's justice in the world, will be someday. There is just nobody like her. I think I felt my obligation was to put it on the page, but I wasn't interested in impression or impersonation, so I wasn't asking them to-- There was almost never a moment where I said, "Oh, actually she would say it like this," or, "Could you do this?" It was about watching what they brought to these words. I think what was surprising to me is the depth of emotion that all three of them display, and how quickly they have to ping pong between this intense pain, and then life keeps going and they're moving into the next scene. That ping pong is, I think, for an audience, really thrilling to watch.

Alison Stewart: Trip, Ellen is such an interesting character, a complex character. She does change the pivot of the show quite a bit. When you think about her internal struggles, what is she wrestling with in this play?

Trip: That's a great question. I think that she is wrestling with something that's maybe irreconcilable, which is that she inherently loves her mother, and also no one in the whole world has caused her more pain than her mother. How do you square that circle? How do you make sure that you don't pass on that dysfunction to your progeny, your son? How can you allow yourself to correct the mistakes that you experienced as a child growing up, or how do you inevitably pass on dysfunction that's in our blood, in our DNA, in our emotional truths? I think that's part of what she is in deep conflict around.

Alison Stewart: We see in the beginning of the play, the grandmother and the son, they start loving up on each other, and Ellen is lingering by the side of the stage. Trip, why make her visible at that point to us, the audience?

Trip: This is not in the play, but in a way, it felt very true to me that, again, in a play, the structure of which is a playwright trying to organize and make sense of all of these events from the past, in a way, I think Joshua, the character, has enlisted his mom to reluctantly show up at Stage I of Manhattan Theater Club and participate in this excavation of the past. I wanted her to be-- again, in terms of conflict, she wants to be present, she wants to be there to help her child out, and yet she's not a creature of the theater, so she doesn't feel as comfortable talking and acknowledging an audience or certainly going through reminiscences of her own past.

There's a great line at some point in the play where the character says, "Is this just the greatest hits of the worst moments of my life?" It's both really torturous for her and also a great act of love on behalf of her son.

Alison Stewart: Andrew, you're from the area, yes?

Andrew: Yes, I'm from Long Island, and now I'm on the Upper West Side.

Alison Stewart: How much do you see of yourself in Joshua?

Andrew: Very much, and very little in the way of the actual experience. My family experience is very specific and very different, but what I do connect to is using theater to ask the question, "If you do get a chance to connect with somebody that you've lost again, what is the best use of 100 minutes of that time?" That's the question that I, as an actor, get to ask every single day through Josh's writing.

Alison Stewart: When you're thinking about Josh and his mom, what are their most intense disagreements about?

Andrew: Who's got the blame? If you ask Ellen, it's always her mother. It's always Renee. It's always Josh's grandmother, but Josh sees it as more complicated than that. In fact, if his mother is the one who is providing access to the problem and saying, "This is what it is," then Josh is saying, "Well, then it's your responsibility to fix it, if you're the one I get to talk to. I don't get to talk to my grandmother about her disease. I get to talk to you about it. What are you going to do to fix this for me and for my sisters?" Where she sees herself as blameless and just wants to shove it down and move forward, and anticipate everybody else's needs and ignore her own.

Alison Stewart: Josh, it was interesting with the mom because for a while, you're like, "She's kind of the bad guy. She's the bad guy." It takes this turn when really your heart opens up to her. I was curious about your pacing when you were writing it. When to make that point to us, the audience. We're like, "Oh, wait a minute. This woman has been through something."

Joshua: It's really a Rorschach because I don't see her that way, but she is, I guess, the killjoy at the very top. It's early in the play when you understand what she's actually been through, what her childhood really is like, and it just causes a paradigm shift. Hopefully, that's what keeps happening throughout the course of the play, is that it's sort of what the play is about. That you think you see things one way, but actually, if you look at it from this point of view, or you consider it from how this person sees it, you can see it in a whole different way. It makes it very confusing, and it's very hard to hold all of those different truths in your head.

I think it's probably why I wrote the play. How could this person, my grandmother, be so incredible and so awful at the same time, so cruel? It's an impossible task, and I think that's why I was drawn to it as a question for the play, because it is unanswerable. That, for me, is the most exciting place to write from, when you're trying to answer a question you know you'll never actually be able to answer.

Alison Stewart: We're speaking with Andrew Barth, Trip Cullman, and Joshua Harmon. Their new play, We Had A World, is running Off-Broadway at the Manhattan Theatre Club's City Center Stage through May 11th. Joshua, tell us what Andrew brings to the role.

Joshua: Very Little. No. He is--

Alison Stewart: We're talking about you like you're not here.

[laughter]

Joshua: He's very special. He is able to play 30 years of this character, from 5 to 35. He is our MC. He's our guide. He's the person who takes us through it. Of all three of them, he has to be the most accessible to the audience, and then pivot immediately into some very difficult scene. Then try to lighten the situation with something funny, and then he's pulled back. I think Andrew is just an incredibly elastic actor. He has access to the highs and the lows, and he's pretty fearless.

I think all three of them are unjudgmental, which is essential here because they don't sit in judgment of their own characters. They do what they do, they all make mistakes, they all hurt each other at different points, and I think, like the other two women, Andrew does it fearlessly.

Alison Stewart: Trip, what was a decision that you had to make, preferably with Andrew, that was a little hard? That you couldn't quite get right but it was a decision that ultimately you're glad you made. Directors always make decisions. That's their job.

Trip: That's true, we do. I hate to be sort of a cop out, but it was a truly joyful process from start to finish and one where I just felt in deep creative collaboration with all three actors from the get. Part of what was interesting about this particular piece with Andrew is that, as he mentioned earlier, in some ways the most important scene partner for him didn't arrive until four weeks into the process, which is the audience.

Alison Stewart: Oh, interesting.

Trip: Trying to prepare to have that experience is tough because the audience isn't there. At some point, when we got into run-throughs in the room, Josh and I would invite some friends and stuff like that and put them around the room so that Andrew could start to experience what it's like to actually have to talk to people. For instance, when you do a musical theater audition, so much of the time you see an actor come in and they start singing above your head. That's the opposite of what we wanted. If Andrew's gaze is going to alight upon you, he's actually communicating to you specifically. I think that was a really fun challenge that Andrew met. The challenge of beautifully, perfectly.

Alison Stewart: I was going to ask, how did it change once the audience got in the room?

Trip: Not only did it change, it keeps changing. Speaking to what you guys were talking about before, Alison and Joshua, there are moments that are usually moments where you see characters differently or your allegiance changes. Every single audience, sometimes they come in and they are on Jeanine's side from the beginning to the end. They're on Joanna's side from the beginning to the end, or my side to the beginning to the end, or they're laughing so hard at something that the audience the night before was completely silent about.

This is like nothing I've ever done before, where it's like this is the laugh line, and we have to get it right. This is where we make people cry, and this is where we make people gasp. The audience reacts completely differently every night. It is chemistry that I am fascinated by because I don't even know how much of a role the three of us play in that. We're very different every day, but it's everybody, collectively and individually, is bringing something so different every day, and I get to do the work of being the conduit for them. That is the greatest gift for an actor in theater.

Alison Stewart: Were you expecting that, Joshua?

Joshua: We had done a few readings of it, and I think what had surprised me was how-- I think what I was dreading is that I would be peppered with questions after. Did this really happen? Is this true? Instead, I just became kind of like a priest and took a lot of confessions. People wanted to open up about their parents, their grandparents. It became clear that it was for each person a very personal experience. I guess that's the beauty of it, right, is that you put a lot of yourself in there. There was this Joni Mitchell quote that I really held onto as I was working on this, which was that in order to strike against the nerves of other people, you have to be willing to strike against the nerves of your own life.

Something about that has proven very true by being vulnerable, raw, personal. The response is that people just want to open up to you, so I think people are watching it. We realized, actually, about halfway through the show, people are drifting away from the play in their heads, and they are starting to really process something personal, and that's exciting.

Alison Stewart: I've been speaking with actor Andrew Barth Feldman, Trip Cullman – he's the director, playwright Joshua Harmon. We were talking about their play, We Had A World. It's running Off-Broadway at the Manhattan Theatre Club's City Center Stage through May 11. Thanks so much for being with us. We really appreciate your time today.

Andrew: Thank you for having us, Alison.

Trip: Thank you so much.

Joshua: Thank you. Thank you very much.