We had the good fortune of connecting with Sara Fellini and we’ve shared our conversation below.

Hi Sara, we’d love to hear about how you approach risk and risk-taking
Obviously it’s very important to take risks, and that itself can be a huge block to a lot of people, because they don’t even really recognize that they’re just playing it safe, they rephrase it as being smart or savvy, when really they’re just being pointless and meaningless. It’s true that sometimes you can take a risk without fully understanding the potential drawbacks, but more likely, you’ve thought long and hard about your choices and you mostly accept the potential consequences (if you don’t, then you’re not really a risk-taker, I guess you’re just some kind of obnoxious hurricane). But it’s surprising how many people will take on such a risky venture as theater – an expensive, impermanent, unpopular art form and STILL be too afraid to be real about it, and instead create pretentious, cowardly work, and give theater a reputation of being self-important and pretentious because people are so afraid of doing something entertaining that they’ll get so esoteric they’re barely understandable. Theater! An art form of all the art forms that should be for the proletariat, it has all the immediacy and person-to-person skin contact that every dangerous thing on earth has, and we just completely neuter it – usually in some kind of weak attempt at copying film, with tech and lights and quick scene cuts and acting from our waist up too afraid to “overdo it” or be “too much”, not even recognizing the very specific benefits that theater offers that film never can, the very elements that all of us are so desperate for in modern life – immediacy, impermanence, eye-contact, skin contact, in-person community, too much. But I think what’s even more important to think about than risk-taking is recognizing, what is a risk. Your brain will do backflips to convince you that something safe and boring is risky, so that you never actually take a risk. Example, female nudity – no one in the New York or LA theater scene is uncomfortable with female nudity. Nude women are like chairs, we are nothing. It’s titillating, yes, in the way that a leg lamp or a shot glass with breasts is titilating, and perhaps it’s a bit nerve-wracking for the performer, but it’s not risky. Realistic rape scenes are not risky, and in fact they perpetuate the same culture that they claim to be wagging a finger at. From the outside, rape just looks like rough sex. So depicting rape is depicting rough sex. Describing rape scenes are just describing a porn scene.
I know that, and we know that, in spit&vigor, and we really consciously digest these things. We rarely use female nudity, and if we do it’s in some terrifying powerful way – we only ever featured it in a very recent production and it was in a scene of Elizabeth Bathory rising from a bathtub full of blood to bite a servant girl to death. We do feature male nudity because many people are very uncomfortable with it, and we would like to explore that. Audiences really, really hate a naked man onstage, particularly when he’s naked for consumption – not attacking or aggressive, just naked and enjoying being naked. Like a muse. The population at large have not digested enough of those subtle nuances of gender, and it’s palpable with a live audience. We had a character who lived in the 1800s and was a photographer who enjoyed taking his own nude photographs, so the actor would undress fully, and then take a self-portrait with an old daguerrotype camera, where the subject has to stay perfectly still for a few minutes. There were some audiences that couldn’t stop laughing, and some audiences who truly, truly hated it and their silence was…. palpable.
We also do address rape frequently, but we focus on what a rape feels like, not what it looks like. One of our first plays featured a young priest, a survivor of childhood molestation, being attacked by a demon Jacques Brel as he sang a jaunty version of “valse a mille temps”, a kind of carousel tune that gets faster and faster as it goes on. (Jacques Brel was a Belgian singer in the 1960s, and in the play he was a symbol of the priest’s abuser, who was a cantor in his old church). Brel forces the priest to waltz with him and it devolves into him choking the man on the alter, as the priest involuntarily orgasms. Not comfortable, not safe. Some people hated it a lot, and that’s fair, but the boon of taking a proper risk is that there are other people who have been waiting to hear exactly what you said, and who are both grateful and inspired. And those moments are really what art is about, and if you never have the bravery to touch upon those moments, and risk that palpable, tangible silence, then the hard truth is that you aren’t a true artist, and I truly believe that while you might be pleasantly content in life, you won’t ever be truly deeply satisfied in your art.

Alright, so let’s move onto what keeps you busy professionally?
I’m the Artistic Director and co-founder of a small but somewhat acclaimed theater company, spit&vigor theatre company.

Foremost, I’m a playwright and designer – costumes, props, sets. I’m also a performer. I’ve been working in theater since I was a kid in community theater, but I’ve been working professionally for over ten years as a performer and skilled artisan, and almost ten years as a playwright. The first professional play I performed in was an entire monodrama by Sylvia Milo called The Other Mozart. I was working backstage as a volunteer, and they promoted me to sound captain because I had some experience in high school working with sound – a very ancient and basic soundboard that gave me a very hands-on approach to tech. While I was running the cues for The Other Mozart, I memorized the entire play, along with all of the very carefully choreographed movements and staging, and when they were looking for understudies I told them I could perform the entire play without a single rehearsal. So the production team got a rehearsal room, and I stumbled a bit on the first few lines, but then went on to perform the rest of the entire play perfectly. I became an alternate performer, and toured the piece in New Orleans, Texas, upstate New York, and NYC.

The first play I wrote was called “wrenching and visually eloquent” by The New York Times. I wrote to every single theater reviewer at the New York Times every few days for two months in order to get them to come out. Personal emails, addressing the work they usually tend to like and why they might like this play. That was while I was playing one of the major roles and designing the props. And honestly, it’s gone on like that for about ten years. That level of work and dedication. But I genuinely don’t mind it, I appreciate every moment that I’m working and I’m incredibly grateful for the opportunities I’ve been given, and even moreso for the ones I pushed for and created myself.

I knew that I had no education, and I was a waitress, and I needed to work extra hard to impress. It’s not easy, life is not easy for anyone, even people with a lot of benefits in the world, and you have to be that much more dedicated if you don’t have any connections or education or money to look good or have nice headshots, or hair, or clothing. You have to be a little bit crazed, but I think I have something very particular to offer, as a performer and writer and designer, so it’s my passion.

When I perform, strangers speak to me afterwards about very, very small and subtle choices that I make. When I performed The Other Mozart, a man noticed that I never touched my face in the entire show, except for two times – when I do an impression of my mother worrying over me when I’m sick as a child, and at the end of the play, when I describe the early death of my daughter – “She played {the harpsichord} with such lightness”. It stuck with me because I knew that man had just lost someone very close to him, and his connection with those parts felt very deep. I tend to get very intimate feedback from people, which I hope is because I am connecting deeply with them. When I perform, I try to make every single word count. I work very hard to have the piece memorized to a level where I can say it in my sleep, no matter how long the speeches or how many pages, so that I am totally free onstage and I can almost witness myself perform. I can make fresh choices every night that are totally in line with the direction, but still different every single performance. I also have a memory issue that makes it so I physically need to memorize text until it’s a muscle memory otherwise I will get caught up – but even that has been a benefit, because it forces me to work much harder to get the same result as other actors, so I’m that much more familiar with the text.

When I started writing, I noticed that when I wrote a particular character, or scene, I would always have to go three steps further in description than I thought I did, in order to break through the automatic assumptions of people reading it, as they would tap into tropes, or stereotypes, and I would have to re-explain what I was getting at. Many people struggle to digest writing or art without making assumptions, just taking it as it is. It almost seems like a fear of the moment, or a fear of reality. I didn’t realize most people thought that way, but it explained so many confusing human interactions I’d had up to that point. It made me realize that what I’m writing could hopefully be innovative, and my way of thinking is just slightly irregular enough, or refreshingly straightforward enough, to be extremely worthwhile in writing and creating.

I think that there is a perfect level of vulnerability and grandeur and dignity that very few artists reach in this world, that is reserved for truly singular artists like Shakespeare, the kind that is sometimes not appreciated in its time because its ferocity and vulnerability are deeply terrifying on a primal level to consumers of the art, like Caravaggio or Van Gogh or possibly Vivian Meier or Emily Dickensen who may have intuited their art would be intimidating, and I aim for that, in everything that I do. To go beyond myself, as a benefit to art and consumers of art, now and in the future.

Let’s say your best friend was visiting the area and you wanted to show them the best time ever. Where would you take them? Give us a little itinerary – say it was a week long trip, where would you eat, drink, visit, hang out, etc.
I live in New York City, so I hope that’s what you’re asking about. I’ve only been to LA once, on a road trip to take my friend to college, and I liked In and Out Burger, and that I could smell greenery in the winter. And that the buildings had outdoor hallways. The rest of it kind of feels like a dream. I wish I’d seen the Hollywood Cemetery.

Honestly I’m not that good at showing people around…

I usually take people to Caffe Reggio on MacDougal Street in the West Village. It’s a classic old fashioned cafe, on a street that has a kind of New Orleans vibe because it’s old New York. It’s painted the two ugliest colors on the planet in thick, thick paint – a kind of radioactive Kelly green and an extremely depressing dark, mud brown. The tables and chairs are mismatched old church pews and really ornate old wooden chaises and some kind of marble-top tables or really old ornately carved, like mahogany. It feels like the kind of amazing antique stuff that street punks would have collected over six decades – but the owner is an incredible, kind of, pinky-ring Italian who has a floor-length fur coat in the winter and pinstripe double-breasted suits. They still have cappuccinos with actual foam on top, there’s no latte art, all the food is basic and really good, and they serve ricotta cheesecake. The service. Is. Terrible. You can sit for thirty minutes and a waiter won’t even look at you. But that’s a boon. You can sit and chat forever, and no one on earth cares at all.

If this were years ago, I would take them to 169 Bar which is this neon, eclectic, fun place, like if Pee Wee Herman had a bar – but it’s a bit too exciting for me now. I had a dream once that I was serving a perfect orange creamsicle drink, in a round glass that looked like an orange, with a red and white straw sticking out of it so that it looked like the orange on containers of orange juice, to Gomez Addams at 169 Bar. And then he was murdered!

Maybe The Back Room? A speakeasy in the back of an old toy store? But I think I just like the big antique couches, there’s nothing too special about it. I really just like places you can sit and talk.

If it was the summer, I would get a car so we could drive out to the end of Long Island, because if you find a really dark spot out there, they have these white fireflies that surround you with this very interesting light pattern, kind of almost like a vertical dotted line. The ones in the city slowly blink yellow, but the ones out near the ocean fall, blinking quickly, and they’re extremely beautiful. It’s also very dark out there – which is very unique to me but if someone was visiting from out of state that might not be so unique to them. But we could visit Sweet Hollow Road on the way there, which is a haunted road with a cemetery from maybe the 1600s on it. And we can try to find The Duck, which is a big wooden duck, and I can never remember exactly where it is so maybe we could get a little lost. It used to be for selling duck eggs, and now it’s just. a gift shop. But if you get there at night, a ton of deer just stand around it.

I would definitely take them to the Met to see my favorite statue, a Greek statue of Gaius Trebonious, which is a very bad statue. Like, totally wonky, his face is a very dumb-guy face, and his body is very disproportionate – if you go around his back, his buttcrack is like a full two inches wide the whole way. The Greeks had a superstition of burying statues that were struck by lightening, and that one was struck by lightening. So the unfortunate thing is that this is one of very few bronze statues that survived Romans melting the bronze down for weaponry. And it’s just, awful. Just an awful statue. But I’d also look at the veiled dancer, which is this very very tiny gorgeous statue of a veiled dancer that is so unbelievably modern. And we could look at some of the enormous totems and the large wooden boat in the Michael C Rockefeller wing – things that really honestly scare me for being so huge and having so much feeling imbued into the wood – and I could regale my visitor with the tale of the mysterious disappearance of Michael C Rockefeller.

Speaking of large things that scare me, we could also stop at the Natural History Museum and look at the huge whale hanging from the ceiling of the Oceanic wing. I used to be a caterer at the Natural History Museum, and the amount of very rich very drunk ladies that I had to shoo away from the elephants that Teddy Roosevelt shot and had stuffed was really disheartening, because they were always very mean. I cried in the bathroom almost every shift. But that has nothing to do with the giant squid that’s eternally attacking a giant shark in the corner, so we could look at that. There’s no glass on that exhibit! You could fall right in. There are also scuba diver mannequins among the fish, which feels kind of funny. The last time I was there, their gear seemed very old fashioned.

In conclusion, you should probably choose someone else as your tour guide.

Who else deserves some credit and recognition?
I’d like to shout out Michael Sgouros and Brenda Bell, owners of The Players Theatre in New York City – and the rest of the staff, especially Courtney Hansen. They run one of the last bastions of old New York theaters – a true pirate ship, run with grit, and sweat, and personal attention from the owner/operators. It’s on historic MacDougal Street in the West village, on a wild street, connected to Cafe Wha?, and right next to the Comedy Cellar.
If a light is out in the theater, Michael is on a ladder changing it. If you need help getting tickets sold, Brenda is on it.
They give opportunities to small theater companies that don’t exist anymore now that the rents are so absurdly high and you need three grants to rent out one weekend in a main stage. They take risks on new plays and musicals, help small producers get their production off the ground, and give whatever guidance is wanted – but let you alone if you want to make your own mistakes.
It’s a huge opportunity for artists, having a place where you can sink or swim, produce and develop very exciting material – and I know without them, we wouldn’t be anywhere near where we are now. They took risks on my early plays, giving me off-broadway runs, and when they were turning their rehearsal studios into longterm rentals, they gave us an opportunity to move on from a kind of greedy corporate landlord in Gowanus to a space in New York City, inside an existing theater.
I think they’re amazing people, and the gift they give to the city is incredibly rare.

Website: www.sarafellini.com

Instagram: instagram.com/spitnvigortheatrecompany

Facebook: facebook.com/spitnvigor

Other: www.spitnvigor.com

Image Credits
Giancarlo Osaben, Yvonne Allaway

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