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Kousha Navidar: This is All Of It. I'm Kousha Navidar, in for Alison Stewart. Thanks for starting your week off with us. I'm glad you're here. Coming up on today's show, we'll speak with writer Emmeline Clein about her new book, Dead Weight: Essays on Hunger and Harm. Filmmaker Carla Gutierrez will talk about her new documentary, Frida. Amy Chozick will join us to discuss the new Max series, The Girls on the Bus. It's based on her time as a political reporter. That's the plan. Let's get this started with The Effect.

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We've all heard the phrase, “Love is a hell of a drug," but the play, The Effect, dares to ask the question, "Is love actually just a chemical reaction? If a drug can stimulate that reaction, is the love any less real?" The Effect stars Taylor Russell as Connie, an educated young Canadian woman who loves to intellectualize. She's signed up to participate in a new clinical drug trial for a potentially revolutionary antidepressant. During that trial, she meets Tristan, a working-class Brit full of spirit and dreams. He's played by Paapa Essiedu.

Almost immediately, there is an attraction between them, despite the fact that Connie has a boyfriend waiting for her in the outside world. As their relationship deepens into love, Connie begins to wonder whether her feelings are just a side effect of the drug, and then she questions whether they're actually taking the drug at all.

The Effect was written by Lucy Prebble, who also worked on Succession, and it's directed by Jamie Lloyd. You might have caught his past productions of A Doll's House or Cyrano de Bergerac. It's running now at The Shed through March 31st. Today I am joined by Taylor Russell, who plays Connie. Hi, Taylor.

Taylor Russell: Hi.

Kousha Navidar: I'm also joined by Paapa Essiedu, who plays Tristan. Hi, Paapa.

Paapa Essiedu: Hey. What's up?

Kousha Navidar: Great to have you both here. Taylor, love to start with you. You made your stage debut in this play in London. What was it about this play that made you want to take that leap from screen to stage?

Taylor Russell: That's a great question. It's one of the first plays that I've read with the eye to maybe be a part of it. I immediately just felt really drawn to Connie. I felt like there was something that I wanted to explore through her. I knew Paapa was going to be in it, and I was a really big fan of him. There was a lot of factors that made me feel like, "Oh, this might be the right first thing for me to do in this world." I think more than anything, when you read excellent writing, you just want to live in that world.

It's not all the time you get to read or get a piece written by somebody as special as Lucy. Yes, it was a no-brainer to explore being a part of it. Then being able to do it just feels like, "Okay, I'm living in a wonderful person's world who's also incredibly gifted and complex. Yes, I feel really grateful it's the first thing that I've been able to do on stage.

Kousha Navidar: When you were thinking about that transition from screen to stage for your craft, what did you focus on not necessarily reinventing, but maybe evolving?

Taylor Russell: Well, I think there's such a different process between preparing for a play and a film, just in that you get a lot more rehearsal time usually to do something on stage than you do in film. Obviously, there's exceptions to that, but my experience has been not a whole lot of time with the cast beforehand in film and a lot of time in this production before we did it in front of an audience.

I think I probably had an idea that with rehearsing a piece so much that something would be lost, but the biggest thing I learned is that there's so much to gain, and it really deepens, and the layers of it just get more rich and beautiful and lived in over time. You can't get that unless you do it a bunch of times. That was a really beautiful thing to learn through starting work in this way.

Kousha Navidar: Absolutely. Paapa, Taylor mentions just living in that world of excellent writing was a gift in and of itself. I'd love to bring that to you. When you were reading the script for the first time, what drew you to the story and to Tristan?

Paapa Essiedu: Yes, the title is absolutely spot on. The thing about Lucy, obviously you've just remarked on how she's recently come to the wider attention of the public through Succession and her amazing work on that, but I've been an admirer of her work both on screen and on stage for many, many years now. Especially in the UK, she's what's referred to as a big dog. She's been doing [unintelligible 00:05:23] for a long time, so it was no surprise that I read-- This play had been put on in London maybe 10 years ago when I was at drama school, and it had a big hullabaloo about it. But you read it and it's so timeless, and the questions are so pressing and unresolved and active.

The thing about Tristan, to be honest, I don't even know if I was attracted to him particularly as a person, but there was something about the nuance of his relationship both with Connie and with the doctors in the piece that I found really curious and potentially rich and dimensional. Yes, it's lucky that we did have a long time, both in our first run and in our first rehearsal to explore that because it's a long journey and we're still finding new things now. In fact, we're finding a lot of new things now, so it's really exciting to be in New York and bringing the play here.

Kousha Navidar: It's fun that you mentioned discovering new things now and also comparing it to when you were back in school about a decade ago when this play first came out. It was 2012, and a lot has changed in our conversations and understanding of mental health since then. On that note, how do you think this show is maybe being received differently today than it might have been a decade ago?

Paapa Essiedu: Yes, you're right. Obviously, the conversation around mental health and medication, depression, et cetera, is different now to what it was 10 years ago. Also, what I mean about the play is that it's so robust that it doesn't feel topical. It doesn't feel like it's being trite in the way that it's trying to do a story of the day type thing. It feels like it's asking questions that are bigger than the trends of time. It's asking questions about deep, deep love and deep, deep sadness, and grief, and jealousy, and relationships, which are as true today as they were 10 years ago and probably will be in 10 years’ time.

I think, yes, it is interesting from an audience's perspective because you're coming to the play with a different context and that will allow you to take a different thing from it. But I think the play is, like I say, so robust and dimensional that you could do it today, you could do it in 10 years’ time, you could do it probably in 50 years’ time, and it will still stand up.

Kousha Navidar: Taylor, we're listening to Paapa talk about these maybe evergreen questions that the play evokes. Were there questions for you that you found especially affecting or challenging to think through for yourself?

Taylor Russell: Yes, so many. Actually, what's really interesting is that the questions that I had probably in the first run of doing the play in London have evolved in a way from just in the time period of doing it now and revisiting it in New York and having some months off in between. The brilliance of the writing of it is that you think you have something, that you understand something about the piece or your questioning, or what you've taken from answers that you've got maybe through doing it over 10 nights or something, and you actually realize somebody can say something to you and you think, "Oh, maybe I don't understand it at all."

That feels really linked in a lot of ways to how you understand yourself, and your journey, and your psyche even, and your own limitations and edges. It feels like it takes time to fully understand parts of yourself and to get answers and if they even come. Yes, it's hard to say one or a couple particular things of specific questions because it feels very deeply in this piece at least that there's a lot of different subjects and topics that we talk about all the time that feel like they're evolving within how we hear things every day from people and from each other and- -yes, it's been really, really special.

Actually, me and Paapa were talking about how right now it feels really super scary to do the play because it feels so different than it did before and the shows are different every single night. It has this element of not knowing what's going to happen, which is a mirror to everything that we live in our lives.

Kousha Navidar: Can you go into that a little bit? I think that's really interesting because you're talking about maybe somebody says something different to you. Is that what you mean when you say the performances might be different day by day? What's the scary part there?

Taylor Russell: I guess the scary part is that there's so many things that add to the palpability of the plane, of the piece any given day. Maybe it's very like woo-woo to say being in New York really informs how different it is, but it does. The energy of the people here are different than they're in London. Of course, we receive things. Humor is very different from being in the UK than being in America. It feels like things that maybe we could count on in a different country or we would expect to be the things that people take away aren't necessarily the ones that are people resonate with here or connect to here because perspectives change so vastly obviously from continent to continent and with person to person.

Because of that, the reflections of that feel new to what we've experienced prior, I think, which makes it, yes, kind of unknown and a little frightening maybe at times in a good way just because you can't predict it. I think the last thing you want if you're doing work in this way is predictability. I think even if it feels painful, you want newness and you want to not know and live in that suspense. It's amazing to be able to have it be reinvented in this way. It feels the opposite of like, "Oh, we're doing this again and again and again." It feels like, "Oh wow, I have no idea how tonight's going to go," and that’s some--

Kousha Navidar: Very dynamic.

Taylor Russell: Yes. Very dynamic.

Kousha Navidar: You're listening to All Of It. I'm Kousha Navidar and we're talking about the play, The Effect with two of its lead actors, Taylor Russell and Paapa Essiedu. I want to talk before we go to break about falling in love. You two have such great chemistry on stage, and there's these scenes where you are flirting and falling in love, and I could sense the whole audience responding to your chemistry. Let's hear a moment from the play. This is a scene from the early flirtation. This is The effect.

Tristan: Is it good? Was it Rampton? Should I go? I'mma to travel straight after. This is just for extra cash.

Connie: Ah, cool.

Tristan: Yes. Isn't it the holidays? You didn't want to go back?

Connie: No. Plus my man is here, so--

[laughter]

Tristan: And what, your man don't mind you doing this?

Connie: Mine, no, I-- No, I do what I like.

Tristan: Yes, sure, sure, sure, sure. Of course, you do. Like Beyoncé like, "No, like, I got a man, but I don't need a man. Who needs a man? But I got a man just in case. And that's my man, so please don't touch my man." [laughs]

Connie: Can you please just not attack Beyoncé?

[laughter]

Kousha Navidar: I love hearing the audience laugh with you at each little beat. Paapa, what was the rehearsal process like for getting that chemistry down and for getting comfortable with each other?

Paapa Essiedu: Yes, the rehearsal process was-- It was actually remarkably free and remarkably easy to be honest. I've done a fair few plays and I usually have some sort of nervous breakdown about three weeks or 50% through rehearsal process. It's pretty consistent and reliable that that's going to happen. But there was something about the ease, the freedom, the availability, and the space with which we were all afforded in this rehearsal process, which I think really fed into mine and Taylor's relationship.

It obviously goes without saying that Taylor's just a remarkable actor and has remarkable, courage, bravery, vulnerability, spontaneity, and creativity, which in a rehearsal room is like gold dust. I was just very fortunate to be able to have someone who was so remarkable to play with.

Yes, in terms of the organicness of that relationship, our director, Jamie Lloyd, he's a great believer in not flogging a dead horse. Not flogging a dead horse, but flogging any sort of horse. He's very much like the blocking is very free and is never set, and the ideas are very free and they're never set. A scene could be rehearsed one way and then a completely oppositional way. He will genuinely believe in the virtues of both, but he'll never say one is better than the other.

That gave us a whole playground worth of potentials and possibilities to explore, which I think allowed me and Taylor to just sit in something that felt very real and very active and dangerous. It didn't feel like it was doing it by numbers.

Kousha Navidar: Absolutely. I'm so happy that you brought up the freeness and the blocking because those are all things that we'd love to get to, but we have to go to a break right now, so we'll come back very quickly. I'm talking to Taylor Russell and Paapa Essiedu. The Effect runs at The Shed through March 31st. We're going to come back, talk about a lot more of it right after this.

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Kousha Navidar: This is All Of It. I'm Kousha Navidar in for Alison Stewart, and we are talking about the play, The Effect, which runs at The Shed through March 31st. I'm joined by two of its actors, Taylor Russell and Paapa Essiedu. Before we went to break, we were talking about the staging and the blocking. I'd love to get into that. Taylor, Jamie Lloyd is known for these spare stagings, no real props or sets. The stage is basically empty except for two chairs and a bucket with a brain inside. If you go see the play, that'll all be explained. Taylor, why do you think that starkness works for this play?

Taylor Russell: Feels hard to talk about Jamie's vision without him saying it in his words, which is much more eloquent than mine. Why it works for this play in particular, in our rehearsal process, there were a lot of versions where we did it with props and we tried. I think what's important to note, which isn't your question directly, but to the style of what Jamie does, is that if we don't go in with, “It's going to be this thing and it has to be no props, and it has to be this because this is the way I do things.”

It's an evolution and it feels like if we don't need it, because it feels stronger. The words feel stronger, the way that you can communicate what you get just by seeing a device or an item, if you can communicate that with your body and still feel what you would get from seeing the thing that you're talking about. If that matches up, then it might end up being more distracting and actually more freeing to not that piece there.

I think in this particular play, with the fact that it's different every single night and having the freedom that comes with not having to hold things and just have your body, which is also very scary too because you can't really rely on anything else to carry you like you do with being able to fiddle with a phone maybe or-- I mean, we both have bracelets in the play, the bands that we go in for the trial.

But I think I haven't heard yet that it’s distract-- or it's strange or it feels like you couldn't sink into the story because the prop pieces that we were talking about weren't there. Which is really interesting because I think in a lot of ways, it can be perhaps limiting, not always, but certainly maybe in our case, it feels like it gives more and lends more to the play than it takes away, which-- yes.

Kousha Navidar: Yes. When you're talking about that freedom, it reminds me of one specific part of the play. There's, in the middle of the show, you two managed to pull off a sequence that almost feels like a movie montage. There's little glimpses into this night that Connie and Tristan are spending together with little scenes coming quickly and then fading to black and then coming back up. Let's actually hear a little bit of it. Here's a clip from that sequence.

Tristan: What are you thinking?

Connie: Stop, stop, please, don’t tickle me. [laughs]

Tristan: No, no, no. What are you thinking? What are you thinking, huh?

Connie: Stop it.

Tristan: No, no, no, just tell me, what you’re thinking. [laughs]

Connie: What are you hitting yourself for? [laughs] What are you hitting yourself for? What are you hitting yourself for? What are you hitting yourself for?

Tristan: No, no, no, no, I want you to hit me.

Connie: Why?

Tristan: Because then I can show you how much I don't mind.

Connie: Oh my God. Oh my God. Oh my God.

Tristan: Are you mad?

Connie: I'm sorry, but, no, you told me to hit you.

Tristan: Are you mad?

Connie: I'm trying to be honest.

Tristan: Why do you have to try?

Connie: Because it's not my default setting, Tris, [neighs]. It’s not anyone’s. [laughs]

Tristan: It's mine.

Kousha Navidar: Paapa, what was the key to nailing this kind of sequence on stage when it comes in and out so quickly? You talk about the freedom on one hand, but also you were hitting your marks every single time with this one. How do you prepare for that? How do you execute it effectively?

Paapa Essiedu: Yes, I suppose it's one of-- Taylor talks about it being kind of scary doing this play and I think this is one of the scariest moments because it's-- Without getting into plot spoilers or whatever, it's like probably the most intimate, most free, most shared moment that they have in the play and is completely crucial to nail that bit for the second half of the play to really make sense or to be justified. There's a lot of pressure, but I don't think we ever felt it. Again, obviously, because we call those bits vignettes, they’re little like snapshots, which feel like they talk about-- they feel like they represent many years of a relationship, but really, it's just one night.

There's maybe five or six vignettes in the play but in terms of what we created, there were probably initially 20 or 25 different ones. Those are just the six that made it into the final cut. For us, it was about trying not to lean too hard into the sentimentality or into forcing their love upon an audience or upon each other and finding something that felt true to those 3:00 AM moments where you're with someone, and it's exciting, and you feel both like a child and both like an adult at the same time. It's just very, very, very intimate.

Kousha Navidar: Both like a child and an adult at the same time without that sentimentality. I think that is a really great way of describing it. I thought you both would be interested, we just got this tweet coming through from one of our listeners. They wrote, “I just saw The Effect on Saturday. It was excellent and thought-provoking. I didn't realize it was Paapa Essiedu in the play until afterwards. Loved him in I Will Destroy You but he was so damn good. The levels in that play, wow, like you were talking about, many levels that are working through there.”

Paapa, I just want a quick question for you as well. There's a little dance sequence in the middle of this show. It's hilarious and charming. I didn't realize you could dance. Are you a dancer?

Paapa Essiedu: In my mind, I am but [unintelligible 00:23:51] people that don't think I am.

Kousha Navidar: Taylor, do you think Paapa's a dancer at heart and both mind?

Taylor Russell: Hell, yes. Yes, of course, he is. Yes. He can move. He can move. You see it on stage.

Kousha Navidar: You do see it on stage. We all saw it on stage. Very good, one of the highlights for me personally. Talking about all of the cast, Taylor, it's a cast of entirely Black actors in a play about mental health. That's an area of healthcare that is certainly not immune to racism and implicit bias. At one point, Dr. Lorna, who's another character on stage has a sentence about how difficult it is just for her to get up in the morning, not because of her depression, but because she's a working class Black woman. Taylor, how do you think race adds another dimension to the story?

Taylor Russell: Well, originally, in the first iteration of the play, it was not a Black cast. It was a white cast. To my knowledge, Jamie wasn't like, “We need it to only be Black actors, and this is why, and we're doing something to talk specifically about that with a cast of Black actors.” I think it was one of those things where it's like these are the people that he was drawn to and it happened to be all of us. Because of all of our different backgrounds and with our ethnicities, it informs the play in a way that's different than the first iteration of it, but also what I love about it is it is about Black people, because Black people are in it, but it isn't focused specifically on that.

It's bigger than that in a lot of ways in that it feels like it's about something universal. Through our specific lenses in our different characters, it gets rich in the way that it does, and complex in the way that it does, and has different implications than it would if it was somebody who wasn't Black. Which I think is why this version is really poignant and special and interesting and affecting maybe in the way that we're doing it this time around. I think more than anything, it's exciting to see a lot of young people come to the theatre and to look out every night after we finish the play, and it be a lot of mixed people in the audience and a lot of Black people in the audience, and to hear reflections back on what they feel about it, watching it being a person that can resonate with seeing somebody that looks like them in a piece about mental health. I think that that's been incredible. I'm definitely not the one who's best to speak to this. I feel like Paapa's probably much better or Kobna or Michelle.

Kousha Navidar: One thing that you brought up that I think is so vital is this idea of universality and this idea of so many different types of people coming to the theatre and taking something from it. In the 30 seconds or so that we have left, I'm going to ask this to both of you first you Taylor. What do you hope audiences leave the theatre thinking or talking about in about 30 seconds?

Taylor Russell: I want to hear what Paapa has to say too, but for me, it's pretty simple in just that I hope people feel more connected to their friends and family and loved ones and themselves and feel like they've learned something hopefully.

Kousha Navidar: And Paapa?

Paapa Essiedu: Similarly, I think it's a play about relationships, both with other people and with yourself. I think, particularly the Dr. Lorna character, looking at her journey that she goes in terms of her self-love, self-acceptance, et cetera, I think is really powerful and moving. I hope audiences have the same journey.

Kousha Navidar: I was talking to Taylor Russell and Paapa Essiedu about The Effect, it runs at The Shed through March 31st. Thank you both so much.

Taylor Russell: Thank you.

Paapa Essiedu: Thank you. Thanks for having us.