Interview: Stephanie Weisman & Maggie Wilson of MARSHSTREAM INTERNATIONAL SOLO FEST at The Marsh Bring a World of Solo Performances to Your Home Screen

On October 7-11, an astounding array of 56 performers from Scotland, Canada, Russia, and across the United States will (virtually) are coming together to take part in The Marsh's MarshStream International Solo Fest. Acclaimed as the San Francisco Bay Area's "breeding ground for new performance," The Marsh is thrilled to present a wide-ranging festival line-up that includes an internationally renowned Russian stand-up comedian, musicals, a traditional Indian dance piece, clowning, and much more. As added enticement, with the Vice Presidential Debate happening right before the festival kicks off, the October 7th opening will also include a post-debate discussion with The Marsh's astute comedian/performers Don Reed and Maureen Langan weighing in about the debate. Further details can be found at www.themarsh.org.

I caught up recently with The Marsh's Artistic Executive Director/Founder Stephanie Weisman, calling in from the Trinity Alps where she's been sheltering away from the Bay Area, and Festival Director Maggie Wilson from her home base in Brooklyn, New York. In conversation, Weisman is naturally ebullient and apt to go off on tangents, whereas Wilson is more direct and understated. Both women are easily engaging and a total delight to talk to. The conversations have been combined below and edited for length and clarity.

Producing an international festival right now is a pretty creative solution to working within current constraints imposed by Covid. I mean, if we can't all be in the same room anyhow, why not think big and go international? What was your process for coming up with the idea for the festival?

Weisman: I've wanted to have a festival for at least a decade. We're kind of the premiere place for solo performance, and everybody else has these great festivals, so why don't we, right? [laughs] But we're doing over 600 shows a year in 2 theaters and you have to raise funds for it and all that stuff, so it just always got put off to the side. When Covid happened, one of the first Monday Night MarshStreams that we did, this guy Colin MacLeod was on. He was playing the Celtic fiddle and telling a story, just a comical, short piece. When he was done, I did a little Q&A with him, like "So Colin, you live here?" and he was like "No, I'm in Scotland." And I said, "Omigod, how did you even find out about The Marsh?" He said, "I have a friend in San Diego and he told me the best place to develop work in the country is at The Marsh." [laughs] After hearing that he was in Scotland and he sounded as good as I sound [calling in locally], I was like "Oh my goodness, we can do it anywhere!" [laughs] So then I'm thinking about our MarshStream platform and how it really is bigger than the Bay Area at this point. So we can do the festival now, and it can be international.

We've been lucky to get a really wonderful funder in the Zitrin Foundation who allowed us to hire Maggie, for instance. She used to be our Marketing Director, and I really needed someone [to take this on]. She was the perfect person. And Zoom is supporting us as well, so that we can have a thousand people. That was a great gift, that we could do that and they are working with us on it.

Maggie, how did you come on board as Festival Director?

Wilson: I work at an Off-Broadway theater here in New York called Transport Group and also at the Chautauqua Theater Company. I've stayed in touch with Stephanie through the years and she's come into town a few times and we've met up. When everything with Covid was going on, she asked how I was doing, and I was like "Well, I'm kind of looking for work, I suppose?" I'm normally in Chautauqua every summer, there's a 9-week assembly so for the last two summers I was there in person, I relocated and lived there for 3 months. She was asking me if I was going to be in Chautauqua this summer, and I was like "You know, who can make plans these days? But it doesn't really look like I will be." Then she mentioned this wonderful and wacky idea to put together this international festival. When we first started talking about it, she and I didn't really know what it would look like. How many people is it, will anyone want to do this, are artists in the right mindset? And then it became very clear because we had a lot of interest.

How did you go about soliciting entries and determining the lineup for the festival?

Wilson: We did a broad press release and just kind of pushed out [the message] "Apply, apply!" I reached out to Canadian fringe festivals, and an international festival in Singapore, I posted it on London Playwrights Blog, a bunch of playwright blogs within the US, just like tons and tons of places. We received over a hundred shows. The thing that's really beautiful about Stephanie's artistic leadership is that she was never like "We have 6 slots." or "We have 10 slots." She was always like "Let's see what we can do. Let's take in all of the submissions and then see how many of these shows we can put on." We had people submit the full script and also an optional sizzle reel. We were blown away by the submissions, and in such a range. There's 56 total performances and about 54 of them are performed by the writer so it was important for us to see how would they perform over Zoom.

It's been very fast. When we were talking about this originally, Stephanie was like "Well, when should we do it?" and I was like, and we totally agreed on this, "You know, I think the art that people will be creating and want to tell before the election will be different than what they'll want to tell after the election." Like who knows what art people will create November 4th? So that meant we're putting this together pretty quickly.

In some ways, I imagine producing a virtual festival has its advantages - no worries about travel arrangements & visa issues for the artists, no need to frantically reset the stage and usher audiences in & out of the space between shows, etc. But I would also imagine it presents some new difficulties. What's been the most challenging part of putting this whole thing together?

Wilson: I think the most challenging thing is that the payoff is different. Stephanie's emphasis is always on the artists, and the artists networking with each other, so we've been trying to think how can we still create that feel of a festival, with us all being in 56 different locations? And then the audience is in, you know, a thousand different locations. I haven't been to a ton of festivals, but I have been to the Edinburgh Festival and there's something just so beautiful about people interacting with each other. So I think the hardest thing was like when do we get to like be together in a room? Last weekend, we had this networking event [for the performers] and it was absolutely amazing, just having all of these people look at each other, making all these connections. The Chat would just go off, like "Omigod, I can't wait to see your show! Wait - You're in Scotland?!" or "I'm in Russia."

A festival on this scale can be kind of intimidating for audience members. I mean, with 56 shows to choose from, where do you even begin? Do you have any strategies to recommend for navigating through the wealth of options?

Weisman: You can look at the descriptions, see what interests you, what kind of subjects. And we've got these incredible videos from the networking event. I had a lot of tribulations about that event, like "Is anyone gonna show up?" We have 56 different performers, and about 51 of them showed up. Like all this digital stuff, people have time, they didn't have to go anywhere, they just streamed in. What an amazing experience! One of the things we did was have all the performers introduce themselves - "Tell us your name, what the name of your show is, where you're from, and then one line from your performance so we can record it."

We've made five separate trailers of all the performers so you can actually see who each of these people are and get a sense of "Who is this person?" We're also gonna have a Q&A with each piece, and that's what's so nice about this digital thing. Being able to talk about it with the performer, who's normally the playwright, really just adds to the experience as well as the digital community feel of it.

Wilson: I think it's also [good to just] try things out. That's kind of the beauty of these virtual offerings. Not like I would necessarily recommend this, but you could go to something for 30 minutes, and then you could jump into another show. There's a little bit more freedom, I think, instead of being like "We're locked here for the whole run." There's a little more of a freedom to choose. Also I think the Shorts categories are exciting, how we've curated some of those. There's just such a range of snippets, of windows into people's lives.

I've been to various Fringe Festivals, and as an audience member, there's always a bit of a frenzy about it. I often wonder, "Did I pick the best show? Maybe I should have gone to the other venue." But if it's online, I really can catch all the shows if I want to.

Wilson: Yeah. If you can't afford to pay, you can access everything live for free. But if you purchase our Festival Pass which is like $25, then you can watch shows up to a week after the festival.

You've seen hundreds, possibly thousands, of solo shows. It's not as simple an artform as it might seem, and can be very tricky to do well. What do you think goes into making a successful solo show? As an audience member, what do you want to see?

Weisman: The Marsh is a place that you're really close to the performer and it's the same on the MarshStream platform. So I want to see that direct relationship with the performer. It's about the intimate setting of you and the performer, and that they've done their work, that they've developed the show artistically and technically. You can tell a well-developed show, it's got a throughline, it leads you someplace. For me, [it's about] the humor, the deep emotionality. It's often the performer's story, not always, but it then allows you to have the relationship to whatever the central issue is for the performance. Like Don Reed and the incredible stories he tells about his life in Oakland. It gives you a landscape and a picture and a way of understanding the time, what it was like to be in his shoes as a Black man, with a father who was a pimp, what that life is. What you're looking for is that engagement to that story that happens to be someone's particular story but has so much relevance to you - maybe to you personally, or to understanding that issue in a way that works a lot better than going to a lecture.

At the Berkeley Humane Society, they have this thing called "Best in Show." They have this competition and pick 3 stories, and I've been coaching it for past 2 years. Last year I talked to one of the 3 storytellers, and it turned out he was the head of the Oakland school district. We're talking about story, and he says, "You know, I have gone to a million retreats and workshops on this and that, and all this stuff about diversity trainings and those kinds of things. The thing that works is hearing somebody's story. It works so much better than all those trainings because you can feel it, you can open your heart to it." It shouldn't feel like a lecture or something being drummed into you. You are experiencing it.

Wilson: I love solo shows where I go on a ride with the performer, where something unexpected happens and where I learn something new. I also think it's important as an audience member to know "Who am I to you as a solo performer?" Like, am I an audience member or am I your best friend and you're telling me a secret? Or am I your conscience? Or am I a mirror? We have one piece, a drag queen taking off their makeup, and they're talking to themselves in a mirror, and so like the Zoom box becomes a mirror.

There's all types of solo performers in this festival. A 79-year-old I think may be our oldest one, and then there's a 16-year-old, so there's people that will just approach the artform differently. The genre of solo performance, for us, how we're defining it, is very broad, it's really like one person sharing their art. We have a movement piece, we have music pieces, we have comedy. And I think that in a way solo performance also translates better to a Zoom performance than sometimes an ensemble piece can.

Are there any pitfalls a solo performer should really make sure to avoid?

Weisman: Well, yeah, narcissism! [laughs] I want to hear something that's meaningful. If I just hear something that's not been thought about in social context and how it relates to others, that's the pitfall. The work of the solo performer is to deepen it, and also to balance it. You don't want to go deep into somebody's problem and just get stuck with it, you know? Like get me out of here, I need some balance here! In the beginning, a lot of our early solo performers were standup comics that transformed to solo performers, people like Josh Kornbluth or Marga Gomez, for instance, who's in the festival. They are so great with how do you connect with your audience. As a standup comic, that's what it's all about and then you take those skills and you turn that into a deep story and it's like nirvana. Certainly there's nirvana shows that aren't [performed by] standups, but that's a good training ground.

Stephanie, the last time I spoke with you back in April soon after the start of the Covid shutdown, you said one of the things you were already missing most was going into the office each day and interacting with colleagues face-to-face. Has that changed at all for you?

Weisman: I am so in touch with my staff right now that I probably talk with them more than I used to. There's a little issue of Zoom fatigue, but you find out it's not so bad to Zoom with people. I still miss going into the office, still miss hanging out with whoever happens to be coming by, the performers, the program directors, staff, the board, all those people. You don't bump into people really anymore, and I do a lot of bump-in work, you know? Like, OK time to take care of it now with this person in my office.

And I think there's a bit of a sameness that happens in my day, that sometimes gets you a little [down] you know? Everything's pretty much the same because there's no place to go. It's like you take your walk, you sit down at your desk, you have your Zooms, you do whatever you do, you read a book at night. I mean, obviously I still missing going into the office but it's that sameness of the days.

Maggie, I think you're the only person I've ever spoken with who is both a playwright and a marketing manager. That's quite a disparate skill set you must have! Do you see them as totally different things?

Wilson: I actually don't. I see them as similar because I feel like I'm a storyteller, and I'm telling stories in both ways. Like if I'm writing a press release it's a bit of a drier story, but I'm still telling a story. I think it also helps me as a playwright to understand that there were a lot of shows for this festival that were good, but weren't accepted right now. That doesn't mean that playwright is a bad writer, doesn't mean they shouldn't continue to create art; it just means that it didn't work for us this time. As a playwright that helps me because I submit to so many things, and sometimes they work out and sometimes they don't. It's important to remember that person that read the script might just not have liked that script when they read it. Maybe in two years when they read it [again], they'll like it.

I assume that's the kind of thing that as a playwright you sort of know is true, but if you haven't actually been on the other side of that interaction, you don't really believe it.

You don't believe it, you just don't.

It also gets a little murky(?) on how I separate the two. But I do like it.

What do you mean by murky?

Like the artistic director that I work for here in New York, I haven't sent him a script of mine. I think maybe somebody else [in my situation] would, but I've like boxed myself into a role with him. I think we might come to a point where I do share my work with him in that way.

I can understand your hesitation. If I went to see a play and found out it was written by the company's marketing manager, that might give me pause, like are they producing that person's work just out of a sense of personal obligation?

I was at The Marsh I guess for almost two and a half years, but I didn't enter a show into Monday Night Marsh until my last week there. Stephanie came to the show and she was like "Why weren't you doing this the last two-and-a-half years?!" So maybe I also am hurting my creative career by my own qualms. Yeah, that's unclear... We're working on it in therapy. [laughs]

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