Live and Loving It
Making his way through the smelly greasepaint and the roaring crowds, David Bailey talks to Amy Matheny, producer and star of Chicago’s successful stage play Xena Live!
Official Xena Magazine: Issue 07
While New York's Broadway may be internationally famous for being the theatrical centre of the US, it's Chicago where the real cutting-edge stuff can be found. Literally so, in this case, as Xena's first sword-swirling tread of the boards recently came to an end at Chicago's About Face Theatre.
A co-production between About Face and greasy joan (that's another theatre company, not an unfortunately oily woman), Xena Live! is produced by Amy Matheny, who also bagged herself the role of Xena's sidekick Gabrielle in the stage play.
“Greasy joan was a company that was started by six friends and myself about five years ago,” Matheny explains. “Basically, we were all people who had been trained in classical theatre and we came to Chicago and all kind of found one another, and really wanted to do work that wasn’t being done here. Chicago’s very much known for very American blue-collar, male theatre, like Steppenwolf [the company where Frasier’s Kelsey Grammer made his name] or plays by David Mamet. And we wanted to do something different: very obscure classics, literary adaptations. Xena Live! has been the biggest departure in terms of fitting our mission statement.”
You don’t say. While many of us would consider Xena: Warrior Princess to be an ‘obscure classic’, and even ‘literary’ at times, surely this play is the kind of thing at which high-brow critics are going to look down their snooty noses? Definitely not, Matheny is happy to proclaim, pointing out an important Chicago theatre tradition into which Xena Live! slips quite comfortably.
“Besides doing very urban plays in this town,” she says, “the other big thing is late night theatre and improvisation. Most of the great [US] comedians come out of Chicago. So we thought we would do some sort of spoof, but we wouldn’t call her Xena and we wouldn't call the show Xena — it might be called Xenia, who knows?”
That was the intention, but people began to suggest to Matheny that maybe she could do something more with the production. “I never thought about going to anyone and getting the show approved,” she claims, “but then I brought some people into the show who said, ‘Well, why don’t you just try to touch base with somebody at the television show?’ [We ended up talking to] George Strayton, the [then] Director of Marketing at Renaissance Pictures.
“So I started emailing and speaking on the phone with George, because he oversaw the licensing of the show. He started trying to help me. I sent him a pack of information on who the playwright was, and who the actors and directors were, and about the two companies who were producing the show - greasy joan and About Face. He said, ‘This all looks really great, and I’ve talked to Rob Tapert about it. We just need to find out how you go about doing this.’”
The search for the ‘official’ tag for the show followed a very tortuous route. An examination of the contract between Renaissance, Universal (who distribute the show) and Studios USA (who oversee its broadcast in the US) finally revealed that neither Universal nor Studios USA held the rights for a theatrical production of Xena. Matheny returned to Renaissance with this news, and they checked their papers and “discovered that it was Rob Tapert and John Schulian [the creators of Xena] who had the theatrical rights. No one had ever asked them before, so they had no clue!” With Rob Tapert firmly behind the project, the first official Xena stage play went into production.
While it is usual for licensing departments to have a heavy hand in official products, Renaissance gave greasy joan a free reign during development. “The only thing they could really compare us to was the Xena comic books,” explains Matheny. “And they said, ‘We like the comic books because they can do things we can't do on television.’ And I thought it was really amazing that they thought that nothing was too precious. They really wanted the world of the show to expand.”
And expand it did. Xena Live! is a highly unusual play, as it closely apes the format and feel of an episode of a television show. “It’s about an hour and 15 minutes, with no interval,” Matheny reveals. “It was really important to me to ask the playwright and the director to structure the show like a television show. So, first you have [the teaser] and then you have the opening credits - which we have recreated live on stage. And then you have commercial breaks: the first time Callisto enters, we break for commercials. The actors do live commercials on stage for some of our sponsors. It has a real feeling of a television show, of what Xena is.”
This goes for the story of the play, too. “The story takes place in a place called the Ravens Wood,” Matheny begins. “We have an area of Chicago called Ravenswood, so it has a lot of local implications. There's an evil sorceress who is trying to tear down the woods to create a theme park for herself, and this is also a very [pertinent] theme. We had a problem here in Chicago that the Asian longhorn beetles that had come over here were chewing down and infesting all the trees in Ravenswood. They also found these beetles in Central Park in New York, and they're voracious and there's nothing you can do about them, you just have to cut down your trees.
“The playwright gave us an idea of how these beetles were unleashed in our version of Xena: this evil sorceress unleashes the beetles into the woods to chew them down. Xena knows this is going to happen and enters the woods. The sorceress casts a spell on her that splits Xena into two halves: one is Xena the lover and the other, Xena the warrior. Xena the warrior is walking around picking fights - she's very hostile - and Xena the lover is the antithesis of that and is very much into her unspoken feelings about Gabrielle. She’s very much a flower-picker, even though she does fight when she needs to - but she’s a little off her game. All is resolved in the end, and there’s a moral!”
These “unspoken feelings” are a source of much discussion among fans of Xena, and that's something Matheny was acutely aware of during the production of the play. “There are a few huge debates from various fans of what they think,” she says, “but we don’t really try to answer those. I think we just try to present all of them, so fans of the show know we’re hip to them. There are a lot of moments where you think that Xena and Gabrielle are going to kiss, but then something happens to interrupt them. The way we’ve disguised the whole thing - so we don't have to make a decision as to what the reality is - is that Xena’s under a spell. Gabrielle doesn't quite know what to make of it, but she thinks that this is her Xena - at least for part of the play.
“We do a similar thing with Joxer,” Matheny continues. “People either love him or hate him, and I figured we needed to present him in the best way we could and let the audience members make their own decision. We have a very talented man playing Joxer [Brad Harbaugh]. He bears an uncanny resemblance to Ted Raimi and he's just a phenomenal comedian.” Speaking of the casting, what is it like for a self-confessed Xena fan like Matheny to end up playing the role of Gabrielle? “It's awfully fun,” she enthuses. “I used to have a lot of people say, ‘Well, you look like her, and you’re Southern - you could do that!’ It is a bit of a dream come true. It’s really so much fun to be in a show that I’m a fan of and I’ve enjoyed, but also one that makes so many people so happy. It’s been so long since I was in a show where people are clapping and whooping and hollering. People were doing Xena’s war cry in the audience! And then there were people who have never seen an episode of Xena on television in their lives who are having so much fun. In that way, it definitely makes it a dream come true - everybody’s there having a really good time, and that was the intention.”
As a fan, Matheny was keen to use some of the more popular characters from the television show in the play. “I was able to say to the playwright, ‘These are the characters I would like to see in it, use some of them.’ And she used all of them, and came up with a couple of her own. The sorceress is our own creation; Xena fans don’t know that character. It’s a man in drag [Scott Duff], and she’s bigger than life - it’s very camp!”
So if Matheny likes it, and the audiences like it, what do those snooty-nosed critics think of it? “We were really nervous about our press coming to see it,” Matheny recalls. “Will the guy from The Chicago Tribune, who has never seen Xena, like it? That was really important, [because the reviews would bring] people in. While we were working on the script, we were asking ourselves, ‘What’s OK to be an inside reference that you won’t get if you don’t watch the show? And how much stuff do we have to explain?’”
Thankfully, the meticulous attitude towards the non-fan members of the audience paid off. “The reviews came out and they were just great,” Matheny says. “Across the board, the reviewers just loved it. Most people were very impressed with the quality of the show. It’s a beautiful show to watch: a very extravagant sound, set and light design, and there are handmade leather costumes. [It's unusual] for a late night show, which in Chicago is usually people in jeans and a T-shirt. They really loved the characters and the energy, and they thought it was just hysterical.”
But it’s not the response of the press that is most important to Matheny. “Even though I’m pleased with the good reviews,” she says, “the fans have been so happy. I haven’t had one fan say one negative thing. I get emails all the time, and I try to answer all of them. The other day a woman came up to me who has seen the show four times. We have people coming and bringing people from their office. We had a whole segment of the Chicago Police Department there the other night - one of them was a fan of the television show and had brought a lot other colleagues with her. It’s been a very mixed audience: young and old, gay and straight, male and female. It really has been so diverse, and it’s got more and more diverse as we’ve gone along.”
This diversity doesn’t quite stretch to one sector of the television show’s audience. “It’s not really suitable for children in some regards,” Matheny says. “But I don’t think it’s worse than a lot of [prime-time] television shown here in the States. There’s nothing that really wouldn’t be suitable for children, but we said that it wasn’t because of certain aspects of it.
“Mostly it's because of the gay content,” she clarifies, “and that’s kind of a sad reason to not let kids come and see the show. But parents have made their own decisions, and we’ve had kids there as young as nine or 10. We had a mom who drove her 13-year-old daughter across four states for 12 hours - it was her Christmas present! The daughter loved it and her mom loved it. Her mom compared it to driving to see the Beatles when she was a young girl. I said, I hardly think any of us is going to be Paul McCartney!’”
There was thought behind the gay content of the play beyond the tip-of-the-hat to the subtext of the television show. “About Face is a gay and lesbian theatre company,” Matheny explains, “and I went to them basically just to rent their space. They are in a section of town that has a big nightlife, and I knew that Xena had a big gay and lesbian following and also that the gay community would really get behind a campy, fun, boisterous show.
“We’re lucky in that the theatre company gets public funding and everyone knows that they’re a gay company,” Matheny continues, “and that’s seen as an asset. In that way, we're very fortunate. And Chicago has a very large, thriving gay community, and a lot of resources for gays and lesbians. At least a third of our audience is from that community. I thought there would be more women than men, but it’s been equal. In fact, there have been more men sometimes.”
Well, what do you expect? You put a man in drag on stage, camping it up as an evil sorceress, and gay men are going to stampede to the theatre. Agreeing, Matheny also points out another audience magnet: “We do have some gorgeous men and women in the show, so there’s enough eye candy for everyone. And most people are pretty scantily clad!”
At the time of writing, Xena Live! is just a couple of short weeks away from its last night.
Once this interview is published, the show will be over (unless there's another extension of its run). What then for the play? A move to another theatre in another city? Matheny doesn't think such a thing is likely to happen any time soon. “Probably the only way that would happen quickly," she say, “is if somebody else walked in who had tons of money, and just plopped it down and said, ‘I'm going to do this.’
“This one is called Xena Live! Episode 1 - Double Your Pleasure. My intention was always to have more episodes, utilising the same actors, and to be able to do more than one episode in a weekend. So if you (took a special trip from England, for example, you could see a few episodes. I always thought that would be a fun concept. But that’s a hard concept to sell to [theatre executives] in California - or New York, especially.
“We obviously get so many emails from people saying ‘Bring it to Boston!’, 'Bring it to New York!’, but I have no idea whether we will at this point. It's a very expensive show to produce, and even though we’re having good numbers, I really am not able to pay everybody what I want to pay them. We have 30 people every night that make the show happen, and that’s a lot for a company our size. To take it on tour would be extremely expensive. If I did take it to New York, where do you find somebody with enough money to pick this thing up and bring a cast and a crew of 25 to 30 people?”
But Matheny is more than content with Xena Live! in Chicago. "Right now, I have been enjoying this run. I'd love there to be another episode here first. I would really like to do a very dark episode which still has some comedy in it but is just a little darker and grittier. I think it would compliment the piece we have now. And then I would love to take both episodes to another city.”
The world waits with bated breath...
SIDEBAR: Season of Concern
After every performance of Xena Live! a collection is taken for the Chicago-based charity Season of Concern, who raise money for the fight against AIDS. “They're basically a direct-care support organisation,” Matheny explains, “so most of their money goes into food, care and medicine for [people living with AIDS in] the Mid West of the US.
“That's been really important, because Alexandra Billings, the woman who plays Xena the warrior, has been living with AIDS for 15 years. It's a cause that we feel very passionately about, and she's one of my dearest friends. She's a very powerful witness. People have watched her do this show, where she's so physical and beautiful and ferocious, and when they discover in our speech after the show that she's been battling the disease for so long, we get a very emotional response from most people.”