Q&A: EDINBURGH 2024: Sydney Green on THE GOSPEL OF JOAN (CRAWFORD)

BWW caught up with Sydney Green about bringing The Gospel of Joan (Crawford) to the 2024 Edinburgh Festival Fringe.

How did you first get involved in the world of theatre?

I've been intrigued by theatre since I can remember and almost always involved in some way or another. I got pulled onstage during the Broadway revival of Hair when I was seven. I was a cheerleader in High School Musical: The Musical when I was around the same age. I saw plenty of age-appropriate and (certainly in the case of Hair) not age-appropriate theatre and I was always enthralled by the grandeur of it. Truthfully, to this day, I love big musicals with sprawling orchestras and palatial sets. But, that was never what I wrote nor really what I wanted to write. I started with poetry when I was in the fourth grade (eight years old) thanks to a very kind teacher, and then novellas and eventually novels. I didn't write my first play until I was around fourteen and it was the product of a “minor” obsession with the War of the Roses, specifically with Anne Neville. I found her too often in books voiceless in her own story, so I wrote hers. For me, theatre has been a space to uplift the voices of women that history has shirked and find the stories, fictional or otherwise, that have been waiting to be told.

Can you tell us a bit about your show, The Gospel of Joan (Crawford)?

Of course! The Gospel of Joan (Crawford) is the story of five women, ripped from different points in history, who all tried to achieve immortal fame. However, through one horrible happenstance or the other, often rooted in sexism or homophobia, they ended up sinful, dead and forgotten. As a result, they find themselves in Hell - except they are not alone in the fires of eternity. They all awake at a poker table, under the direction of the one and only Joan Crawford - now a glorious drag queen (portrayed by Mikey Bogardus), ready for her next starring role. With the threat of Joan’s magical cane and a chance at Heaven on the line, the five women must find themselves again struggling against a system bigger than themselves, except this time they aren’t going to let it own them. Or, rather, that's what most of them believe. For one of the women in particular, Therese (portrayed by C. Breene Halaby), a 1960s figure skater, it might be more arduous to separate herself from the misfortunes she has endured - and, when everything she has ever wanted is dangled in front of her, alongside all her failures, maybe she does not want to be better. Maybe she just wants to be herself, whoever that is. This is a play about reclaiming your past and rewriting your future. Because it doesn't matter if you're dead; you're here - and “this is gonna be the time.”    

What was the creative process like for The Gospel of Joan (Crawford)?

The Gospel of Joan (Crawford) started as a developmental reading at New York University as part of the Broke People Play Festival. We started with an early draft, and the director Sofi Lopez Arredondo, the assistant director Ahreumbi Rew, and the cast and I all discussed what direction the play should take. The final product was an amalgamation of all of our insights and opinions, culminating in a piece that was both collaborative and, honestly, not exactly my original vision for it - but, as any good playwright will tell you, better for it. Theatre is not a one-person venture. At the very least, it is two, performer and audience, and The Gospel of Joan (Crawford) has proved the definition of that. After we wrapped the original festival, Sofi approached me about taking the show to the Tank for their annual PrideFest, and later about taking it to Fringe. Yet, even as we did another round of cuts for this summer, Sofi and I sat with cast and crew members in a collaborative space, deciding together. Throughout everything, this play is defined by the pieces of us all that we have poured into it together.   

Can you tell us about the theatrical group you’re a part of, teatrito, and its impact on The Gospel of Joan (Crawford)?

So teatrito (which means “little theatre” in Spanish) is a Mexican-led emerging theatre collective based in New York City, specifically focused on new work development by young theatre artists. It is run by its founders Sofi Lopez Arredondo, our director, and Reyna Carrillo, our producer. Reyna and Sofi have really forefronted care and consent as core working tenets of teatrito’s process, and spotlighting queer and POC artists through projects that are joyful, collaborative and fresh. As I mentioned with the creative process, The Gospel of Joan (Crawford) is the sum of all the people who have brought it to life, and that absolutely includes the members of teatrito. Sofi was the first person to believe in this project and I don't know where we would be without their impact. Probably still 150+ much darker pages sans the drag queen and the Lady Gaga references.  

How do you balance comedy and darker themes like the sins of the characters within the show?

I think a lot of it is allowing the characters (and the actors) to embrace how simply absurd sexism and the confines of the past truly were. Characters like Manke (portrayed by Heather Lynn Wong), the German opera singer from the 1900s, endured absolutely wretched things in her lifetime, but Hell is a second chance for her - and the rest of the women - to be who they could not in life, whether that means opening oneself up to new sexual possibilities or a new understanding of one's legacy. The humour of this show comes from expanding one’s expectations of who these people are as well as the central absurdity of having to play this poker game to win something you never asked for and reclaiming choice in a world that has determined you have none. Often the piece is inherently so depressing that it has to push itself to be funny - or else it's just plain sad. The Gospel of Joan (Crawford) is a show of breaking from expectation and carving out a new future, so, while these women are inundated with the horrors that they have endured, it does not limit their possibility for levity, even if it has its darker edge. Actually, the sharp departure from the calamity of their lives from the chaotic and unusual natures of their afterlives is exactly the root of the play’s humour. When you put a wacky British choreographer, an avante-garde French filmmaker and her actress lover, a devout German opera singer,  a shallow figure skater and THE Joan Crawford in a room and make them all a little queer and a lot wanting, it doesn't truly matter how many horrible things they lived through - comedy is the product of friction. As Joan herself says in the show, “I never was much fond of comedic roles, but I have always loved getting into character.” And this is a play chock full of them.

What is it like bringing The Gospel of Joan (Crawford) to the Edinburgh Fringe from New York?

Honestly, it has been a wild and beautiful process. For one thing, it has been a series of “yes”es. In a theatre world in which we are so often told no, in which our work is not given a stage or any space at all, being surrounded by people who truly care about this show and want to take it as far as it can go is everything. I want to thank everyone in this process who has poured themselves into this piece so deeply. Without them, The Gospel of Joan (Crawford) is just another document sitting in my Pages or some theatre’s unread email folder. We have definitely had our struggling moments that have paved the way for our great team to step up–fundraising has been particularly difficult. We currently have a GoFundMe up, though it has proved hard to draw in people for that. In contrast, people have seemed to really resonate with the idea of our chaotic queer afterlife play in the general sense. We are expecting a whole new wave of young LGBTQ+ people to find and hopefully find a weird sort of comfort in our baby. But I think the funniest thing about bringing this work to Scotland is we questioned what to do about Lin’s (portrayed by Niray Almonte), the British choreographer, accent. Would actual British people think it was horrible? Well, yes, but they were going to anyway. So, in the true Camp nature of the show, we decided to dile the outrageous factor up to ten. All the British people coming can tell myself and Niray how that is not how they sound, or tweet about it. We'd love the cheeky shoutout. 

What do you hope audiences take away from The Gospel of Joan (Crawford)?

“I wonder who you would have been without him” is probably one of my favourite lines from the play and likely the closest the work gets to a takeaway. In a threatening, complicated, rarely-ever kind world, this is a piece about death - about how/why we die and how we live after we die. Because even “the end” is not the end. Your story could have ended a century ago, like it did for the filmmaker killed in the 1920s, Héloïse (portrayed by Susana Gómez), and yet you are making history even now. Sure, the battles never stop, but neither do we, even as we decay and get forgotten. But, contrary to what some of the characters might (at first) believe, maybe we deserve to be remembered. Specifically, maybe we deserve to be remembered for who we are – as women, as queer people, as people trying to be someone - rather than the monsters or stereotypes anyone believes us.

How would you describe The Gospel of Joan (Crawford) in one word?

Autonomy.

The Gospel of Joan (Crawford) runs from 12 to 17 August at theSpace @ Venue45 at the 2024 Edinburgh Festival Fringe.

Photo Credit: Katie Woo

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