SL: You two are long-time collaborators. Can you tell me about how your creative relationship started and developed?
RI: In my first year, I applied to direct The Effect at TNC and I got it. It was a romance between a boy and a girl. And I saw Elise audition—we had her audition for the main female part. And she was so good. [To Elise]: this is almost inappropriate, but I thought you were so sexy. And the thing about Elise as an actor is she’s just there in the moment, when it’s happening. And I think a lot of actors don’t quite let that happen to them. So we did a lot of chemistry auditions. And we eventually decided that Elise was going to play the main male role. And that was awesome. That just changed the whole dynamic of the play. And then—I mean I wouldn’t describe us as becoming really good friends after that-
EH: No, but I always did have a friend crush. I just admired you so much. You were immediately the best director I’d ever worked with. The process was so smooth, at least from an actor’s point of view, in The Effect. We got to cancel a dress rehearsal because we didn’t need it. I felt so comfortable, so engaged and inspired and it was just—I was really in awe of you.
RI: It was a great time. And then with Honeytrap, I reached out to you.
EH: Yeah, I saw it was happening and we were talking about it and I was like, “Oh my God, I’m really busy with Cutlass, but I can help with finding a space, or backstage stuff, or whatever.”
RI: And then I was like, “what if you auditioned?”
EH: And I was like, “uh-oh!”
RI: We had some amazing auditions. Honey was obviously my main priority. And in my previous plays, I really wasn’t fussed about gender intentional casting. But for Honey, I was like, I really need someone who is a woman to play this.
EH: I will say something I’ve really enjoyed in The Effect and Honeytrap is that I identify as kind of a genderqueer person. So I felt very validated in both those shows getting to step into a purely feminine character and a more masculine one. It’s been really fun for me that I’ve gotten to play both sides of my identity. It felt super authentic both ways.
RI: I mean, I think she comes out of a lot of different things. My school when I was in year 11 had a really big sex scandal. There’s a website in England called “Everyone’s Invited” and it’s a website where you can anonymously talk about your experiences with sexual harassment or sexual assault. And it came out when I was in year 11 and it was all my school. It was just terrible things that had happened to women at my school. And I think that those things had been happening, but it was a culture such that we didn’t understand how wrong those things were. And so that was a big inspiration because I went to a really posh private school in London and there were so many boys there that really did awful things and will go on to have very successful lives and careers and wives and children. And that really angered me.
But so I think honestly Sam, the male character, was really where the play was born in some ways. I tried to take that aspect of those men that I had known and blend it with men that I care about and love, because I don’t think that he’s an evil character. I think it’s that thing of trying to understand the people we really don’t understand at all. I think a lot of my writing, and even The Effect is trying to understand men. I think Misha was just a great person to play that role, because he is also someone who was trying to understand how to embrace that masculinity a lot. I think he struggled with it.
EH: I think it affected him. He’s very, very kind, really understanding of women. But of course, you’re still socialized as a man. So you do have a connection to that, even if that’s something you 100% resist and don’t want to be. So what was impressive about him is based on a sentence of your direction he could switch.
RI: There are these amazing political leaders rising in the left wing, someone like Zach Polanski in England, who’s an incredible person, and Mamdani, and I think we’re voting for these incredible people. But I think in the back of my mind, I had these wonderings of: these men who are going to maybe do great things for the world, are they still the same, disgusting politicians?
And then I guess the third part is Honey herself. I think as a woman, I’m sure all of us here at the table have a lot in common with Honey. I was kind of trying to understand; I’m not a vengeful person. There are things that have happened to me in my life that I wonder if I should be more angry. But then I think about responding to these situations, and how do you move past trauma? Is what Honey does a way of moving past her trauma or is the best way to forgive and forget and put stuff away in the past?
EH: That was what was so difficult for me about playing the character. I found that in my own life, when I’ve had negative experiences, how can you truly forgive the person? You hear all this stuff about how forgiving is how you move past a situation. But that’s hard when such terrible things happen. And you can never fully know the truth of what happened because you can’t be inside the other person’s brain. In my own life, I’ve had to balance that. You can find a way to ruin a person’s life, or you can try and just live your own life. I’ve leaned towards the latter for my own health but it’s interesting embodying a character doing the opposite.
RI: One quote that started off my journey is an Emma Copley Eisenberg quote: “Revenge is the place the fracturing mind goes when it’s trying to stay whole.” I think in some ways, Honey’s trying to look after herself. I don’t think everyone understands that, and I don’t even know if I understand her.
SL: The drive is very understandable to me. I know that feeling and Honeytrap felt like an invitation to feel it. I think we spend a lot of time as women resisting that part of ourselves and being told to not be angry and to let things go. One of the things that’s powerful about the play to me is that it gives the audience the chance to feel this rage and recognize it, which is so rare.
Speaking of female rage, the play engages with the rape-revenge film in a really interesting way. In the program, I Spit on Your Grave is cited as an inspiration for the costuming. How did that genre play into writing this play?
RI: My specialty of study and my fascination has always been horror films. I have written a lot about the rape-revenge genre, definitely I Spit on Your Grave. You don’t have Honeytrap without a movie like I Spit on Your Grave, no matter how problematic it is. I can’t separate my writing from that—my whole life is that. It definitely falls into the rape-revenge canon and genre. There’s a great quote from Chelsea G. Summers, who wrote A Certain Hunger. In an interview she was asked if she watched horror and she said, “I have never enjoyed stories that are animated by the bodies of dead women.” And I didn’t want to write a story like that. That happens enough in the real world. The idea that Honey would be able to pull off what she did is almost unbelievable. And that was something in my mind too—there are elements of fantasy to this story. When I was writing, I was like, I want you to have this moment at the end with your sister. It was important to me that she had that happy ending.
EH: And also that this story that does center around a man, it ends with her connection to her sister. It really is about the two women. [To Ruby:] I noticed when you talk about this play, you usually don’t mention him in the first sentence. You usually just say it’s a play about three women living in London.
RI: I think Susie is important to that aspect. I think she informs our understanding of these women a lot. And the way women will question other women. It’s not just men, it’s other women who will question each other and question themselves. That’s also something that Sof and I workshopped a lot. That wasn’t their intention when they first started playing the character. Sof was like, “Okay, I’ve decided that Susie actually doesn’t believe Honey.” I think that was a decision that really worked.
EH: Back to the idea of catharsis, I had a personal connection with the play because one of my moms is a social worker for women who have been sexually assaulted. I drew a lot from that experience. She would come home and her day would be filled, and maybe one of her clients took their life because they couldn’t handle it anymore. Or she went to court and no justice was served. And just hearing these horrifying stories for hours every single day. That’s her life. So, I’ve always had an acute awareness of how common this is because she has forty regulars in our small town and she’s just one social worker. And these things are covered up, or knocked aside, and evidence is lost. So I think that’s why this play was so important for me. A story of getting revenge. But it is complicated because so few women get revenge. And when you’re making a piece of media, people can see it as representative of what is actually happening in the world.
SL: I would also like to hear you talk about the role of humor in the play.
RI: I thought more people would laugh.
SL: I laughed! I cried a lot but I laughed.
RI: I think maybe if it was an English audience they would have laughed more.
EH: Your dad laughed!
RI: That was an act of charity. But I love my parents, everything I’ve ever put on they come and sit in the front row. And they laugh unprompted. I think we did think it was going to be funnier than it was. But I think humor is something we needed, especially in rehearsals. Misha and Evie were so jolly and funny. We needed them.
EH: Shoutout to Dana for being the best intimacy director. They were so good. They had us do a double high five when we were checking in and checking out. At first I was like, “that’s so dorky!” But once we did it, I was like, “this is so necessary.” Misha and I had to do some crazy shit. Having a man on top of you is threatening. But it felt totally fine and comfortable because we did this little goofy check-in and it was fine.
SL: Elise, something I’ve seen consistently throughout your acting is that it is very embodied, very physically intense. I was wondering what it felt like in your body to be this character. You do a lot of shaking and crying in this play.
EH: I had to do a lot of work to get into this headspace.
RI [to Elise]: I think you were struggling quite a lot physically.
EH: I think it didn’t affect me that much until the couple days when we were running it so many times. The few days around the show it really did take a lot out of me, but in a way where I felt I was doing it justice. I was being as healthy as I could while doing justice to this character.
RI: I think that’s a good balance.
EH: A little trick I started for the show is that I make a little sensory bag for each character I play. For Honey it was perfume, an old cigarette, a breath mint—just anything she would have. Wearing the perfume and smelling it before I went on stage put me into her body. Or rather it invited her into mine. That’s how I think of characters—I have my body, but for this moment, I can invite someone else into it.
SL: What was the perfume?
EH: A Jean-Paul Gaultier tester.
RI: I think you’re not doing yourself justice. It’s a hard person to play and you did it anyway.
EH: I think I’ll always do it anyway. I think her mental state was much more complicated and harder for me than shaking and crying. Because as somebody who has struggled with my mental health that is not foreign to me. I can get to that place, and it is kind of cathartic because I’m doing it through somebody else. But understanding her morals and the revenge fantasy—all that was much harder for me.
RI: I feel like maybe you were less worried about this, but I was also worried that people would watch this play and think it was a fable about women lying.
EH: Exactly
RI: I think that affected both of us and that must have put a lot of pressure on you.
EH: It was the most important thing to me: how can I play this in a way where the audience empathizes and relates to her, and doesn’t think she’s a liar? I made the story of what happened to her as a teenager down to every detail. I had that as a vision in my head. And so that helped me. And what’s so funny is people would come up to me like, “that’s so crazy you were in your underwear!” That was the easiest part. Everybody has a body. It’s the mental stuff that is so much harder.
SL: The venue for the performance was a really unique, intimate space. How did that change the play?
RI: I picked that space because I knew I wanted to do something in the round. I wanted it to feel like we were in the room. The music was also so important to me. I liked the fact that there were four huge speakers. And that they would have so much room to act. I think it was more intense [for the actors] because you’re fully surrounded.
SL: Is there a future for Honeytrap?
RI: Honeytrap is definitely not dead. There’s definitely different stuff I’d want to do with the script.
SL: You guys have another collaboration coming up with Elise’s musical Cutlass. Can you tell me a bit about it?
EH: My short pitch is: lesbian pirate musical. It’s a retelling of the career and love affair between Anne Bonnie and Mary Reed, two real female pirates from the golden age of piracy. Very few of the sources in my research acknowledge the possibility they were queer. And it’s like, why not take it in a direction that is real and is about their humanity? So, on January 15 and 16, there will be a workshop at Tuesday Night Cafe Theatre with ten pieces for violin, cello and piano, and four scenes.
Tickets for Cutlass are available at https://www.eventbrite.ca/e/cutlass-musical-workshop-tickets-1975245038081?aff=oddtdtcreator.
