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What's RELEVANCE All About? Jayne Houdyshell & Company Explain!
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Nov 3, 2022
MCC Theater (Robert LuPone, Bernard Telsey, William Cantler, Artistic Directors; Blake West, Executive Director) will soon present the third show of its 2017-18 season: the World Premiere of Relevance, written by J. Lee ('How to Get Away With Murder,' 'Looking') with direction by Tony Award nominee Liesl Tommy (Eclipsed).
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Hello, I'm Richard Ridge for Broadway World. MCC Theatre continues their season with the new play Relevance by J.C. Lee
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On to the direction of Liesl Tommy, it will begin previews on February 1st of the Lucille Lortel Theatre
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and we drop by the rehearsal room to meet the company, led by Tony Award winner Jane Houdichel
0:18
Talk about the role of this incredible woman you're going to play. She is an incredible woman. She's a woman who has been a leader in the women's movement since the 70s
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and she's a great writer and has had literary acclaim. She's also an academic and brilliant, brilliant professor
0:36
and she's kind of a star in that world of academia and literary world
0:42
And it all changes during the show for her, right? Well, yeah, she encounters a lot of things she didn't expect to encounter
0:49
in the context of a conference for women's literature. She meets a young woman who's up and coming in that world and very brilliant in her own right and has a lot of eye-openers for the character I play
1:08
Samaji Ukweli is a woman who has her own feminist thought, very different from Teresa's, Teresa Hanek, in the play
1:19
my question is just why why does the place have to be seated why can't we all just coexist
1:24
but um the way of the world is that one has to one has to be the it feminist one has to be the
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it girl the it man and so we have to figure out how this is going to work out because she's not
1:37
willing to back down and neither is Jane Hattyshell's character so we have to find out how this is all
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going to work out. I play David Green. I'm the agent for Jane Hattyshell's character, Teresa
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And I seen it all I been around it all And mostly I been around her a really long time so I the one I think who probably has the best sense of what coming
2:06
at any given moment in the play. I've seen this before. So I play Kelly Taylor, and she basically heads the conference
2:15
that we find Teresa and Samaji at, And it's during this first sort of interview and discussion that they're having between each other that this question of sort of defending yourself in the world and your ideas start to pop
2:34
It is about feminist intersectionality, which sounds like incredibly boring, but JC is a brilliant, dramatic writer
2:45
And it ends up being about the generational conflict between two really powerful, smart women who should be allies and aren't
2:55
And I think it really gets something very exciting going on in our society right now as we're seeing a generational change and we're seeing a new generation come along and speak for themselves in ways that an older generation, my generation, frankly, thought we were doing and maybe we weren't
3:14
I'm looking forward to experiencing the audience's response. I'm looking forward to the moments of discomfort, the moments of recognition, because the play really takes, I think, our audiences to task in some ways
3:29
It really is going to be provocative, and I think it's going to be hard for some people to wrap their heads around, and I think other people are going to feel like, ah, I understand
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I believe the theater is where you're supposed to have the most difficult conversations in a culture
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and this play takes head on some of the most difficult conversations we're having right now
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so I'm excited to provoke those conversations in the audience
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