Jersey Arts Podcast · ArtPride New Jersey

Theresa Rebeck, Marisa Smith, and NJ Rep's Theatrical Sandbox by the Jersey Shore

·28 min·1 clip

Marisa Smith says Samantha Inside Out follows a high school teacher who changes her life in one evening.

1. Jersey Arts Podcast centers on Teresa Rebeck and Marisa Smith discussing Samantha Inside Out at New Jersey Repertory Company in Long Branch. 2. Maddie Orton hosts the conversation, Teresa Rebeck directs the production, and Marisa Smith wrote the play and co-founded Smith and Krause Publishers. 3. The episode asks what Samantha Inside Out is for: a one-woman play about a woman who reconsiders her life "dead on" during one evening. 4. Smith says Samantha is a high school teacher, a mother, and a wife whose children have "flown the nest" and whose life has changed. 5. Smith describes the script as coming from "life," watching women, book group conversations, and observations about men, children, work, and getting older. 6. She says much of her writing begins with "some essential anger," even though she does not seem angry to other people. 7. Rebeck and Smith talk about Samantha's crisis as a moment when perspective and self-awareness force a character to stop lying to herself. 8. Smith says the play is not her own life, even though it contains autobiographical elements drawn from "an amalgam of many women's lives." 9. The two writers discuss how writers reuse real conversations, including a story about Smith using her son's arrest for smoking pot in Central Park in a piece of writing. 10. Rebeck says the play is set around a holiday party at a college professor's house, which matches Smith's interest in academic and domestic settings. 11. Rebeck says the academic party setting feels familiar because she has been in college-professor houses and remembers the relief of hiding upstairs while the party happens below. 12. Smith says the piece began as a 10-minute play called Dino Woman before Rebeck encouraged her to expand it into a full-length script. 13. Rebeck says the short version showed Smith's wit, anger, darkness, and light, and that the longer form fit the material. 14. Smith says writing the full-length monologue required her to "winnow" an overblown draft and find "the engine" that keeps the play moving. 15. Rebeck explains that she began directing after Gregory Boyd at the Alley Theatre hired her to direct All My Sons. 16. She says she admired Arthur Miller's All My Sons as "the great American play" and calls her move into directing both fulfilling and useful. 17. Rebeck says working at NJ Rep feels protected and serious, and she points to the set design, the proximity of rehearsal to housing, and the focus on the play. 18. The tone is conversational and collegial, with Smith and Rebeck finishing each other's thoughts and trading professional stories. 19. People interested in contemporary theater, women writers, and New Jersey arts would likely enjoy this episode. 20. Listeners looking for true-crime, politics, or hard-news coverage probably should skip it.

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