Arts and Entertainment | Theater

Spectator previews NOMADS’s “The Linguistic Features of AAVE”: Russian Doll, hot buttons, and Medusa

By Beatrice Shlansky / Staff Photographer

“If they feel uncomfortable, good,” director Hatchett, BC '22, said. “If they feel seen and appreciated, good. Any feeling that somebody walks away with, in my opinion, is better than not feeling anything at all. Because to not feel anything means that I haven’t done my job, the actors haven’t done their job, and tech hasn’t done its job.”

By Sarah Robertson • November 7, 2019 at 6:22 AM

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Photo by Beatrice Shlansky / Staff Photographer

“I’ve, one, never directed a full piece by myself, and, two, only [read] stuff by people that I've never met, or who are dead, or can’t tell me what they think about what’s going on,” Hatchett said. “It’s really interesting to see text as like a living, breathing thing, that is still working—rather than, well, ‘that’s on the page,’ and you can take out whatever you want or put in whatever you want because no one’s going to tell you no. But I’ve actually really enjoyed getting to work with somebody else and see their vision and try to do my best to also honor that.”

Photo by Sarah-Jayne Austin / Columbia Daily Spectator

"Actually watching people do it out loud for the first time I was ecstatic; I was also incredibly weirded out,” playwright Kemp, CC '22, said. “I was like, ‘This has never happened in any way outside of me reading it to myself, or me reading it to my dad, or my dad reading it to my mom’; like this has never happened in a context of people who don’t know me personally.”

Photo by Sarah-Jayne Austin / Columbia Daily Spectator

“With the auditioning of actors, that was also super odd, because obviously I am a person who doesn’t think too highly of my own art, so everyone who showed up, I was like, ‘Thank you for coming: Would you like a role?’” Kemp, pictured with the drill, said. “And my director was like, ‘You can’t do that; we don't have enough roles for that.’ And I was like, ‘But I really want to.’ So like, seeing so many people show up and saying, ‘Yes, I would like to be a part of this show,’ was weird but also very nice.”

Photo by Beatrice Shlansky / Staff Photographer

“I was writing a couple of pages a day, and then going back and destroying them, and then doing a couple more pages, then going back and destroying them,” Kemp said. “But a lot of my writing style is very conversational, which depends on having conversations that resemble the conversations of the script, so a lot of it was written after just having conversations with my partner about places where we’ve been, and like what we’ve been doing, and just throwing them in and seeing what stuck.”