Hello my name is Lauren and I'm 17 years old. - Hi my name is Abed I am 17 years old
and we are both together part of The Old Vic Schools Club. - Today we are
interviewing Julia who's the Associate Director of The American Clock we're
going to interview her some questions about a play we have not yet seen.
So just briefly could you explain to us what The American Clock is about.
- It's such a good question because it's actually quite a massive epic piece of
theater but the short version is that it follows a family that is loosely based
on Arthur Miller's family, the Baum family, and it tracks their journey from
the stock market crash of 1929 through the Great Depression of the 1930s. While
also threading in stories of a country in spasm - so the entire United States
struggling with this massive economic collapse. - And if we were to discuss
design on The American Clock what particular elements would you say kind
of conducted a particular type of atmosphere or mood? - I loved the design
for the show I think it's amazing and our designer Chloe Lampard, I've been a
huge fan of hers for a long time, so I felt really starstruck the day that we
walked into the same room. What you'll see is these wood panels that move up
into skylights that are modeled on the Chicago Stock Exchange which has been
preserved in the Art Institute of Chicago and I'm actually from Chicago so
I've been in this space it's nothing like Wall Street as you'd imagine it today.
I don't know if you've seen the New York Stock Exchange or pictures of it
but there's like big screens and traders like shouting and making lots of gestures.
This is a much older version of that they're like big chalk blackboards
where people would scribble, they'd climb up wooden ladders and scribble in numbers.
So we've created that on on either side of the stage
and actually in the scene where we witness the Wall Street Crash, we have
rain so they've installed a water system
where rain falls on the skylights, and they're backlit, so you see that rain
falling and then it it drifts down the blackboards and wipes away the numbers
that are there. So, I think there's a lot of other things going on with the set
too but those two elements express how it's both representational in that you
get a sense of an actual place and quite expressionist in that really dramatic
water wiping away of the numbers. - There's a lot of music movement in the play, as
you talk about, how did you approach this kind of in rehearsal? - Yeah, endlessly at
great length. In the dance for example, we had a swing specialist who came and did
about, I would say, a full week of swing intensive with the actors. So that they
had this movement vocabulary really deeply ingrained before we did any
choreography, before we set what the actual dances would be. The other thing
that I think is unique about this process is the sound designer and the
composer were in the room every single day. Usually that's not possible, usually
they kind of work from afar and then they know their music gets sent in or
they'll visit once a week or something like that
but they were able to watch the play as it was forming and then compose based on
all the nuance that was emerging. - Yeah so you also spoke about kind of the roles
of Lee, Rose and Moe Baum being played by three sets of performers kind of what
was the thinking behind that? - So I guess to give context for that,
I can tell you guys a little bit about how this production came to be. Which was
that the Miller estate so Rebecca Miller, Arthur Miller's daughter, recently felt
like they wanted to have some new and really exciting productions of Arthur
Miller's plays and Rachel, the director, was someone that they were aware of
making work in New York. So they
approached her about this, as someone who could bring a kind of Broadway
sensibility to a play that hadn't been done very much. And her earliest
instincts about the show were to make it about our world as well and make it not
only about this one white Jewish family in the Great Depression but about all of
American history and all the waves of immigration and people struggling
through the American experience and I think that got Rachel thinking about you
know this experience of just dramatic economic struggle has been the
experience of many, many, many groups of people across the United States, across
the 20th century and what the play might need is an expansive scope. So we start
with the kind of white Jewish family, we move into a South Asian family and then
we end with a black family. - That's cool, we're all done then, thank you.