Artist Profile by Kymm Zuckert

This year has been the year of Gay Slave Handbook, we worked on it from February nearly to September, and nothing else has defined this year as much as this show for all of us lucky enough to be involved in it.

After doing the one-act twice, as part of Spring Shorts and for the Samuel French Festival, Blake Bradford, (playwright and acting the role of Sebastian), decided to make it a full-length and take it to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. Instead of taking the piece and stretching it out, Blake decided to keep the original one-act as is, and add a first act showing the same three characters eight years earlier, in high school, and a third act eight years later, in their thirties.

All the same people were involved from the March production, Matt Klan as Jimmy, Christine Vinh as Giulia, Blake as Sebastian, and me directing.

First, Blake wrote the first act, and everyone had to remember what it was like being sixteen and eighteen, ("I don't know if I can pull this off!" "That's the audience's job, willing suspension of disbelief!"), then we put back in some of the cuts to the second act that we had done for the French, as there is a thirty-five minute time limit, and finally, we added in the third act.

After having to learn all of those second act monologues, Blake gave all of the first act monologues to Matt and Christine's characters, but he ended up having to do one in the third act himself for plot purposes - he's the lead, it's the end of the show, the storylines are being wrapped up, Sebastian needed a monologue.

There were also fight scenes between Sebastian and Jimmy, one per act, which were terrific. Matt Klan is a fight choreographer and director and I captain with him, so three fight scenes with three different emotions and circumstances to them were really interesting and fun to do. Also, Matt is always teaching other people fight moves, he could make it a lot more intricate in choreographing it for himself! The fight in Act I is fun, a game between the boys; in Act II it's an explosion of rage, an attack; and Act III is a battle for their lives and souls. A fight choreographer could ask for nothing better.

So, off we went to Edinburgh! I had found us a flat to rent in Leith, Blake and Christine went on one flight and me on another, Matt joining us a couple of days later. The flat turned out to be perfect (except for the shower, which had only two settings, freeze and scald), big and comfortable. It kind of couldn't have been farther away from the venue where we were performing, but since Edinburgh and the surrounding suburbs are really tiny, "couldn't be farther away" meant two and a half miles, easily walkable.

The way it works in Edinburgh is that everything that can be turned into a venue is turned into a venue by golly, and rents out two hour (or hour and a half) slots, so from 10a until midnight, you can have seven or eight or nine different shows from different companies. We had the 10p slot at Rocket Venues, the last one of the night, which meant that there was another show in before us from until 10p and we should have started the show at 10.10p but we accidentally thought that we should start at 10p. However, the show before us canceled almost more times than it performed, so it ended up not being an issue.

Blake and Christine and I arrived on Thursday, Matt arrived on Saturday, and we teched Sunday morning and opened Sunday night. We had brought some props with us, like all of my pill bottles and the video camera, but we needed a bunch of other, little things - sticks to fight with (you know what you have when you break the sweepy bit off of a broom handle? A fighting stick), soda for the four hundred drinks in the show (mostly drunk by Christine, and since the cups needed to be drained before they were thrown in Act II, she did a yeoman's job making certain every cup was empty no matter who was supposed to be drinking it), and a wine cooler for Act I, among other things. Do you know what nobody in Scotland has ever heard of? Wine coolers. Have you ever tried to explain the concept of a wine cooler? "It's kind of like soda, but it's alcoholic. It's in bright colours, kind of for kids? But not. Because it's alcoholic." Yeah, I sounded about that stupid, and I ended up getting this sort of cloudy vodka stuff. Clearly not American, but it's not as though we were going to be performing for an American audience.

For our tech I took my three hundred light cues and four hundred sound cues up to the booth at the venue, and we ran though the show, figuring out how to fit out show into a differently-shaped space than it had performed or rehearsed in before. We gave up on the idea of having a sofa, since we had one square metre on the third floor in which to store all of our props and furniture and we would have had to buy one at a charity shop and you know what makes a perfectly good sofa? Three chairs. Three chairs that were already in the venue, didn't have to be purchased or stored in our metre, just pulled out of the front row. We just had to figure how to have a fight scene on that sofa without breaking the actors' backs or have the "sofa" fly into three pieces before the audience's eyes. Fight next to the sofa, got it.

After the tech, we went out to try and get an audience for the show that night. Because that's one of the things that you have to do at the Festival, and that's get out there and Sell! Your! Show! You don't have relatives and friends to come see you, it's all people with a million different show choices, you have to convince them that Gay Slave Handbook is their best choice to spend £8 on (£6 concessions). So we passed out fliers and the boys did the Act III fight about five times on the cobblestones of the Royal Mile, which was very impressive, if somewhat crippling, but those actors will do anything for their art. Even look really super-cool fighting in the middle of the street while Christine and I handed out flyers yelling, "Gay Slave Handbook! Where the gays bash each other!" I think Matt came up with that one.

And do you know what? We ended up having an audience for opening night! And every night, we never had to cancel a performance as many shows end up needing to, there was always a house, people really seemed to like the show, there were a couple of nights when they really could have taken a second curtain call, as the audience just wouldn't stop clapping, and once Christine and Matt got stopped on the street by someone who had been in the audience the night before. We also ended up seeing a lot of great shows, and we all had thighs like rock by the end, what with the seven miles we were walking every day.

On Monday 27 August, the final night of the Festival, we fittingly performed our final show of Gay Slave Handbook, which may have also been the final performance forever in our venue, which might be decommissioned as a theatre. The journey that had begun six months before from one-act to full-length, from New York to Scotland, from eighteen to thirty-four was finally over, and we took our props and costumes out of our metre and walked that two and a half miles back to Leith for the last time as fireworks burst in the sky.

-Kymm Zuckert
director of Gay Slave Handbook
Phare Play Productions

About Ms. Zuckert: A graduate of Interlochen Arts Academy, Circle-in-the-Square Theatre School and New York University, Kymm Zuckert has been working in the theatre for forty years. The daughter of well-known actors Bill Zuckert and Gladys Holland, she started performing at the age of three in such plays as The Little Clown That Forgot How to Laugh and a French-language version of Sleeping Beauty as well as appearing in television shows like Sanford and Son, Baa Baa Black Sheep, and Days of Our Lives. As an adult, Ms. Zuckert has been a performer and director with theatre companies such as Love Creek Productions, Foolish Mortals and Phare Play Productions, performing as Josie in Moon for the Misbegotten, April in The Hot L Baltimore, Bottom in an all-female version of A Midsummer Night's Dream with Ms. Vinh and directed by Mr. Bradford, and Marie in Maiden's Progeny (Off-Broadway), as well as appearing at the Fringe twice before, in Sleep With Me and Pamme's Play. She has been a director for the past fifteen years, on such shows as Orpheus Descending, A Doll's House, Closer, and Shirley Valentine, and has worked with Phare Play on Snake in Fridge, Dark of the Moon and The Cherry Orchard.

Cast Sebastian: Blake Bradford Giulia: Christine Vinh Jimmy: Matt Klan