Interview: Seth Barrish Chats about THE PAVILION, The Barrow Group and So Much More

Craig Wright's amazing play THE PAVILLION is currently being performed as part of The Barrow's Group 2015/16 season. BroadwayWorld sat down with Artistic Director and one of the stars of The Pavilion, Seth Barrish, to talk about his work with such a eloquent play, The Barrow Group and the release of his new book An Actor's Companion: Tools for the Working Actor.

Check out the BroadwayWorld interview below!

In THE PAVILION you get to play multiple characters as The Narrator, can you talk about switching between characters?

Well, it has been a blast. I suppose what I key in on are physical attributes and vocal attributes, changing the voice and dialect as well as what I do with my body. The rest of it, I sort of let the play and whatever is happening in the moment carry me through. It has been just a blast. It's so much fun.

Do you have you specific character you like playing every night or does it vary night to night?

It varies. I mean I enjoy them all. I love the writing so much. I find that the material both feeds me and also cracks me up. He's a really funny writer.

Going off of the writing, Craig Wright is so beautifully written and The Pavilion is built upon his eloquent writing. How is it playing with the language?

That element has been, and I expect will continue to be, incredible. I think the writing in this play is extraordinary and the guy just has a way with words.

So, you've had multiple roles in TV and in theatre, how does your role in The Pavilion compare to other roles you've held in the past?

I can tell you that this is one of my favorite roles over the years for a number of factors. One is my love for the play and the other is my love and trust for the entire ensemble that is working on this project. Not just the actors, but the directors and the designers. It has just been a very cohesive team effort from the beginning. And we all have a history working together and I think we just love what each other does so much. It just makes it a joy, so this has definitely been one of my favorite things over the years.

How is it working with Dusty Brown and Julie Voshell on a play that only really features the three of you?

It's great. For the same reasons I just articulated, we work in a very similar way. We have a very easy going, loose process. Loose in the sense that every time we do it, we do things differently by design. We are actually interested in that. We're always 100% loyal to the text, so we don't adlib or anything like that. That said, night to night, I could not give you one line reading of how anything is going to come out. It's very different.

So, not only are you starring in The Pavilion but you are also one of the artistic directors of THE BARROW GROUP, could you talk a little bit about The Barrow Group and your work with them?

We founded The Barrow Group in 1986 and the back then the company was a resident company of artists. We started with nine, mostly actors, and then grew up to about 20 folks that were a mixture of actors, designers, directors and writers. Then in the mid-90's we had an extended community that just grew and grew and started to represented at first hundreds of other artists and now literally thousands of other artists. At that point we shifted from revolving around the resident company model and instead just involved the community as a whole and in everything that we were doing. The one common thread that has been there from the get go and remains at the core of what we do is an aesthetic. We are really interested in making theater as spontaneous and alive as possible. I suppose the theory is that, that is the one thing that humans bring to the table, the writers do what they do and I guess we feel when the writing meets life you get something that can only happen in a live experience.

So, everything that we do revolved around that. We started a school around 1989 or so and that was the extension of what we were doing aesthetically so, there were are sharing techniques that are designed to make things more spontaneous and more real. That also began as a place for classes for actors and then has now branched into so many other disciplines in the performing arts over the years. It's a huge part of what we are doing and allows us to keep this community of artists in touch with what we are trying to do aesthetically. Spread it out in the world.

What drew you guys to The Pavilion? And to make this a major part of your 2015/16 season?

We did an in-house reading of it, which we often do in order to find material and it just slayed us. We were all sobbing and so we did a couple more in-house readings of it and it was continuously moving us deeply so that was the primary factor. Also, it just so happened to match the attributes that our facility has. So, our facility was well set up for a story theater, simple format so that was nice, but quite secondary. Really we just loved the play right off the bat and also stylistically it bounces back and forth from things that are very sort of heightened language to language that is incredibly naturalistic and that also is a good fit because we are very much interested in honoring text but also we get into our wheelhouse when dialogue is written in a way that people really talk and Craig is so good at that.

Do you find yourself discovering more and more about the text each performance?

Every night! Absolutely. Every rehearsal, every performance. To me, the mark of a great play is you can hear it again and again and again and each time you get something new out of it and that's the way it has been with this play. I feel like that will go on and on. It's really a deep play.

And how has the audience response been to it?

It has been fantastic. People are clearly having a great time, a ton of laughs and all that, but we are having the experiences where some people are getting moved in a very deep level, which is exactly how we felt when we read the play. It was doing that with us. So, we hope that just continues throughout the course of the run for sure.

I also hear you have a book launch soon! Can you talk about that?

Yeah, I have a book launch on June 23rd. There's a book launch for my book, AN ACTOR'S COMPANION: TOOLS FOR THE WORKING ACTOR. TCG is the publisher and the tools that I mentioned before that we use and continue to share in the school environment, a lot of those tools are articulated in that book. It just got released and the official launch is on the 23rd at 7pm, but it's already out on Amazon.

How was it writing the book?

I wrote an initial version of this book 15 years ago and this is sort of a tweak and re-write of it. It was something that I wrote the first draft when I was on a job, on the road and had a lot of time to kill and thought, 'I've been talking about this stuff for a long time, I should write this down.' And very quickly I banged out a draft and the rest of the time was spent with re-writes and just floating by a lot of artists that I've worked with over the years to make sure I can get the language down and make sure the ideas were as clear as possible.

The format of the book is unusual in that all of these things are written... every tool or tip or adjustment are written in very short form. So, each chapter is, with a few exceptions, less than a page long. It was designed for quick assimilation, so you can read it and get it, and also quick application, so you are on the job and you are going, 'I'm having a little difficulty,' and you can literally flip through the book and find the solution. I also did a thing at the end of the book where I consolidated the whole book, each of these page long chapters, down into like 2 sentence chapters so that it's a quick reference sheet. That all came from me having a very short attention span and I always found reading about acting kind of excruciating. My brain just doesn't work that way and then I came across a book called About Acting, which is out of print now by a British Actor named Peter Barkworth and the contents of it was different than what I'm writing about, but the format was similar in that he did have a bunch of short chapters and I read it and just inhaled it. I loved the format so much that I borrowed it and altered it a bit and ended up with this book. I'm excited about it.

Seth Barrish is currently starring in The Pavilion and is one of the artistic directors of The Barrow Group. He has been seen in multiple performances in theater and is known for his work on TV in Veep and Damages.

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