Sepesy and Garrigan detail Ms. Adventures

It isn’t often that a local actor gets to premiere a new one-woman show, but it’s even rarer for one to be tailor-made for her talents by a writer who knows her well. When the actor is Alison Garrigan [Frankenfurter, Rocky Horror Show, CPT, lead singer of The Deadward Goreys] and the writer is the award-winning Michael Sepesy, the recommendation is "run, don’t walk". That comic and dramatic evening of monologues, Ms. Adventures, was a hit in the 2007 Big [Box] series and this year CPT has brought it back for a late-night run. Cool Cleveland contributor Linda Eisenstein talked with them and recorded this rollicking conversation.

Cool Cleveland: What made you decide to write a show for Ali?

Michael Sepesy: It was after I came back from New York in 2003, where I'd performed my show Loserville at the NYC International Fringe Festival. I realized that I liked writing one-person shows but didn’t particularly enjoy performing them. I'd written a few monologues for women, and I immediately thought of Ali. I’d seen her in a lot of shows but nothing that featured all her skills. She is a very plastic performer, but she had been getting typed in a narrow range of roles. As you know, it's often a problem with roles for women –- so many don't allow them a whole lot of range. I watch movies and think, "There’s that character again – the one-dimensional love interest who listens to the hero."

Alison Garrigan: I'm thrilled because I so often get typed as "strong leading lady" or "musical theater person". People don't realize that I'm a comedienne, for example. I like being a chameleon. I've got this unique physicality – I'm almost 6’, angular - with a forceful personality. Michael's work lets me become someone I’m not. And he really hits the woman’s voice – it’s easy to learn the lines because they feel so real.

MS: Plus she gets to scare small children. (They laugh.) When she did the "wolf" monologue this year at Pandemonium, it really spooked one of the actors’ kids.

AG: (with backwoods accent) "Big Momma would be proud." That one’s right from the Appalachian witch woman tradition. It’s funny, we discovered working on the show that Michael had written a bunch of pieces that related to my background.

MS: That one is about how people use the word "bitch" to put women in their place, a monologue about reclaiming it.

AG: And of course, I have an Appalachian background –

MS: Which I didn’t even know –

AG: Then Victoria, about the working class woman who’s selling her guitar because of how she's settled for less in her life – that one hit really close to the bone.

MS: It should, I wrote that with your voice in mind.

AG: God, I LIVED through that one. And there's the Indian one, about Buffalo Bill – I’m part Indian. Really, it was scary, how Michael hit on so many things. We actually had to cut one that was so close to home, it freaked me every time I had to do it.

MS: Yeah, that one depressed both of us too much. Now there's only the one piece dating from "Mike’s Horrible Existential Depression".

AG: Yes, and it’s hysterically funny. The one with the birthday cake...

Cool Cleveland: I LOVE that piece, it’s so twisted --

AG: No one has a twisted sense of humor quite like Michael's.

Cool Cleveland: Trust me, I know. This is the guy who can write Strip Joint of the Damned, about android snuff hookers, and make it both sympathetic and feminist. Come to think of it, you two both share a certain gothic sensibility, Ali with her Goth band --

AG: The Deadward Goreys -- it's a goth-punk cover band, yes.

Cool Cleveland: And Mike, you have any number of gothic plays.

MS: I always wanted to figure out how to put horror on stage. Then I figured out that most artistic directors don't really WANT to put horror on stage. There's actually only the one gothic piece in Ms. Adventures, the wolf one -- many more of them are comic.

Cool Cleveland: This may be your busiest year coming up, with two new "gothic trailer park plays". You just had your MFA thesis production at Cleveland State with The Douglas Tree, while CPT is planning to produce The Alice Seed next season.

MS: I hope Ali can do it again – she was in the reading at the Cleveland Play House Fusion Fest last year.

Cool Cleveland: Ali, you’re always busy, between your acting and all your costuming work –

AG: My husband likes to tell this story. He finds me sitting on the couch crying, "Waah, I can’t find my date book and I don’t know what theater I’m supposed to be at today!"

Cool Cleveland: You're, like, the hardest working woman in show business.

AG: And I still barely pay my bills! Oh, don’t even get me started about artists’ lives...

MS: Don’t look at me, I still live with my parents. In fact, I once thought about starting the ezine Uncool Cleveland for the rest of us, guys who live at home and have no night life.

Cool Cleveland: Well, you're going to have one over the next couple of weeks -- your show is at 10PM.

AG: And it's a huge load of fun. I mean, it has a monkey with a remote control and an attack Barbie, for heaven's sake!

[Ms. Adventures at Cleveland Public Theatre 3/27–4/12 @ 10PM. http://www.cptonline.org/theater-show.php?id=18]

From Cool Cleveland contributor Linda Eisenstein lindaATcoolcleveland.com
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