Plays / Chronology / Orange Lemon Egg Canary / More About the Play The following articles appeared in Actors Theatre's subscriber newsletter prior to the 2003 Humana Festival ORANGE LEMON EGG CANARY Everybody loves Magic. Everybody loves to be fooled. Everybody loves to be tricked. Everybody loves to be caught with their pants down. Everybody loves to be cheated and misled. Everybody loves it when someone lies to them. Especially when they watch that certain someone very closely and they’re trying to catch him in his lie, but he’s quick with the sleight of hand, too quick; and a girl is left feeling both stupid and angry, and third of all, empty. People love that. — Henrietta in Orange Lemon Egg Canary As playwright Rinne Groff points out, references to magic are a familiar part of our everyday language. “Something is magical, or he’s a trickster—we’re pretty conversant in those metaphors of magic,” she observes. This is particularly true when talking about that most magical (and perhaps most ephemeral) of subjects: love. But while allusions to magic may be commonplace, real magic—stunning sleights of hand, breathtaking illusions—remains as exotic and intriguing as ever. In her sassy new play, Groff combines both, making the magic literal by bringing it to life on the stage, and transforming the conversation about love, and illusion, in the process. The story of Orange Lemon Egg Canary, whose title is based on a well-known magic trick, centers around Trilby and Great. Trilby is fascinated by magic, but has a lot to learn, and is determined that Great be the one to teach it to her. Great has inherited his “skills” from his grandfather, a master magician whose act included everything from card tricks to a stunning spectacle known as the Hypnotic Balance: an illusion which involves a lovely assistant balanced delicately atop an enormous spike. We learn of the elder Great’s legacy through Henrietta, the self-same lovely assistant who lived—and died—balanced on the point of that spike. Henrietta moves through the action like a ghost, narrating, observing, and ultimately influencing the trajectory of the present-day love story between Trilby and Great. The play began as something of a challenge for Groff. “I was hanging out with a bunch of actors,” she explains, “and one of them was this guy who would always do magic tricks at bars while we were hanging out. I didn’t really think much of it, but then I got to know him better, and it turns out that in addition to being an actor, he is also a magician. He started talking about the interaction between magic and theatre, and how it’s never really been done—there have been attempts to combine the two, but none of them were really satisfying to magicians. So I started to think, okay, I’m going to write the play that successfully unites these things.” That actor/magician is Steve Cuiffo, and he has continued to work closely with Groff in developing the role of magic in the play. And that magic, which is woven seamlessly through the action of the play, consists of everything from card tricks to large-scale illusions—including the violent but beautiful Hypnotic Balance. While magic may be an essential part of this world, this is also very much a love story, with a contemporary urban twist. Set in a place that closely resembles New York’s East Village, the play is populated with sexy young hipsters struggling to make a name for themselves. “It’s like an episode of Friends where there are also ghosts walking through and women on spikes,” Groff jokingly explains. Smart, funny and wildly theatrical, the play pokes fun at love, sex and romance through clever banter, sudden plot twists and surprising betrayals. But while Trilby and Great’s growing relationship may be portrayed with a light touch and a wry wit, this magical tale also has a darker side. As one character observes, if the pain is deep enough, even trick knives can cause real wounds. “That was a big impulse at the beginning of the play,” Groff says of the violence at the center of many of the play’s most spectacular illusions. This impulse was inspired by her reading and research into the world of magic: “In one book I read, Magic and Showmanship by Henning Nelms, I remember a phrase that jumped out at me: ‘the assistant, a.k.a. the victim.’ I just thought, wow, in what other context would you hear a person referred to in the same breath as an assistant and a victim, as if those were so obviously synonymous? And clearly, that’s a huge part of the magic tradition—women being sawed in half, portions of women’s bodies being removed. And it always seems to operate in that gendered way.” This interest in examining the representation of women in the world of magic led Groff to reevaluate the role of the assistant. “You go to a magic show to see a magician. He’s the famous guy,” she explains. “It’s not a magician and his helper magician. It’s a magician and his assistant. You don’t go to see the assistants, and they don’t get much credit. But I wanted to say, wake up. If it wasn’t for them, this whole thing would fall like a house of cards. There are these uncredited people who really make this stuff work. She doesn’t get any of the glory. But without her, no magician would be Great.” — Tanya Palmer RINNE GROFF Her work with that company enabled her to realize how much she liked writing: “I found that I really enjoyed that process of being a creator, in terms of establishing what was going to be onstage.” She had written both plays and fiction as an undergraduate in the theatre program at Yale, but it was through Elevator Repair Service that she really began to flex her creative muscles. “In a pretty fundamental way, the beginning of my career as a theatre writer was with ERS,” she says. A pivotal moment came when she performed her own solo material. “I had never had any kind of stage fright in my entire life,” she confirms. But the night she was to perform her own piece, she admits that she “was absolutely petrified.” The experience made it clear for Groff: “There was something about how deeply terrifying it was for me that made me feel that there was something really important there.” This was the beginning of her transition away from acting and toward writing. While the experience was unnerving, “It was also thrilling,” she remembers. “And it was then that I decided I needed to explore this a little bit more.” Her explorations have been fruitful; recent plays include The Five Hysterical Girls Theorem, produced by Target Margin Theatre in 2000; Inky, a co-production by Clubbed Thumb and Salt Theatre in 2000; and Jimmy Carter Was a Democrat, which premiered recently at Performance Space 122 (P.S. 122), in addition to the ten shows she’s helped create with Elevator Repair Service in the eleven years since its inception. Her identity as a theatre-maker remains invested in both performing and writing. She enjoys the collaborative process of working with Elevator Repair Service as much as she enjoys writing alone. “I love juxtaposing those two different ways of writing theatrical material. One is sitting at your computer, by yourself—it’s lonely, but you have total control over the creative process. And the other is being in a room with a group of people, writing by doing. It’s a lot less responsibility, and never lonely, but it’s in so many ways much more difficult.” It’s a good mix for Groff. “I really like both these ways of creating material,” she says. “They feed each other very nicely.” Groff counts her adopted hometown, New York City, as a major influence in her artistic life. Although she was born in New York, Groff grew up in the area around Tampa, Florida, which, similarly, “has an influence on my work in a certain way,” she says. “Florida’s such a strange state. It’s part of the south, but not really.” But New York has become her home, mainly because of her involvement with the artistic community there. She mentions P.S. 122 as a perfect example of what living in New York means to her: “It’s a place that I had a relationship with as a performer, and as I moved into writing, it was a space that was totally open and accessible to me, and nurturing. That’s part of what makes this place my home.” — Claire Cox