Interview w Rachel Crowl
Who do you play in A Simple Herstory, and how did you become involved in the project?
I played Susan B. Anthony which was fascinating for me because I knew something about her. I didn't particularly know about Victoria Woodhull, but I did know that Susan B. Anthony was kind of a douchebag. My wife is a professor of gender studies, so she gives me very quick rundowns on this stuff. I also really enjoyed the sort of slightly subversive nature of having a trans woman play Susan B. Anthony.
Donya Washington [who directed] is with the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, and I had just spent two seasons there, which is why she thought of me for Susan B. Anthony. I'm very grateful, because it was a lot of fun. And it was easy, it was really just like two scenes! Every once in a while you run across writing where the character just leaps off the page at you, and you are like, Oh, I totally know. I know, I know. Okay. I get this, I get all of this. Okay. Oh, she's -- yeah. Okay.
But it was also that, as written, she’s a much more complicated character than that. It doesn't shy away from how abrasive a personality she was. Her loose ethical stance on things. But she was also allowed to be a hurt human being, you know, the consequences of jealousy, of envy, of rage, and how that affects the person. I think my favorite part was just the writing where Susan B. Anthony called out the podcaster for paying attention to the stuff that you think is easy. And it wasn't, none of this was easy. It doesn't matter how noble you are in trying to unearth these facts. If you're not willing to confront how not-fucking-easy any of that was, well, then you're just cherry picking history.
And I loved that. I loved the idea of a character from the past upbraiding someone in the now having a too-facile-sort-of-examination of what is a much more complicated thing. One of the interesting things about the piece is how much it brings out that it’s super important to know the context of the time in which people live, what the accepted norms were, and what was breaking norms. And what was all the unconscious horse-shit baggage that they still were carrying that we now look at and we go, Jesus, how uptight.
Totally. And yet it was still so hard for us to get a female vice president.
Oh yeah! Right. It's still an ongoing thing. But you know, the conversation has radically shifted. The pandemic is in very many ways, like a great sociological reset, right? We as Americans tend to live this fast-paced, rock-skipping-across-the-lake kind of existence, you know? But the pandemic made us sort of swim and dive deep. In some ways, people are smarter than they've ever been, and they're also dumber than they've ever been. It's mind-boggling if I think too much about the amount of willful stupidity I see in politics. And so for this project it's nice to go back to the 1850s, 1860s, 1870s and go, "Oh, well it was just a completely different time." And it's useful to look at the context of it and realize that our time is very different from theirs. It has roots back then, but progress has been made. It's not all bad news. The whole LGBTQ movement has taken on a life of its own, and has really made huge strides. We have this whole emerging, non-binary subset of people who are radically telling people that gender isn't nearly as important as you think it is, or at least it isn't to me. In the context of this podcast, it’s interesting that we're talking about women bending their gender roles in a time when society was even more constricted.
And now the conversation has gotten even more interesting and more complex and, and has made room for more people, more humans to be included on terms of who influences the culture, moves the culture forward. I am seeing this very slow, but inexorable rise of all of these minority groups starting to grab the table and say, I've got a chair now. It's like Hollywood is finally starting to come to terms with the fact that people want to watch a bunch of different stuff, and you're getting a chance to hear more voices.
I always think it's funny: I look at younger people now and I go, I wish I could sit you down in front of a television in 1978, right? Three channels, four, if you figure out where the PBS was, and then maybe you'd get like some public access, crazy horse-shit that the cool kids would watch, but basically you got no choice. So the movies at that time served the purpose of telling bigger stories.
Now, it's completely flipped. Now movies tell stories about explosions and spandex, and streaming tells actual stories. And now with podcasts blowing up, it's like the radio play finally is having a new life. Call it a scripted podcast. Right. Great. Awesome. Everything comes around eventually. If it was fundamentally a good storytelling device, it never dies.
And the advantage of podcasts is that it makes people actually think in their own minds, and make the images for themselves, you know, in the same way that reading does. When I did my epic 15-hour drive from Wisconsin to Baltimore, I listened to the new Marvel scripted podcast, and it was amazing. I could populate all the worlds with my own brain, it made the miles fly by. I was really into it. I even got feels somewhere in, like, Pittsburgh.
Can you contextualize your work a little for people who are meeting you for the first time on this page? Talk to me about your work and your journey.
I started off, off-Broadway in the nineties. I did like an old-fashioned apprenticeship at a theater in the Adirondacks, way upstate New York. And I was there for like five years, and I did every job under the sun, and I didn't go to school for acting, but I learned by being on stage with people who were better than I was. And then I moved to New York City and I got a job immediately at The John Cocteau Repertory, and I was there for five years.
Wait, did we work together?
[At this point Rachel and I realize that we did a show together in 1999 at the Jean Cocteau Rep.]
Okay. Mind blown.
Mine too. Wow. Right.
So I was there until new leadership came in, and a bunch of us just left. The New York Times did a big story about us because we went and formed our own theater group [Phoenix], which is still running. And I did that for a couple more years, but I was already starting to transition. It was, you know, the mid-aughts, which was a completely different time than now for a trans actor. And so I just retired. My wife got a job at a liberal arts university teaching and I followed her to Wisconsin. I was there for like 12 years. And out of the blue, I auditioned for a lead in an indie film, and I got it. And five weeks later I was in San Diego, and they were saying action. And I was like, I guess I'm an actor again. Then shortly after that I did a horror movie with Crispin Glover. I got to play a serial killer, which is fucking hysterical, and really fun. And then I got an offer to come up to the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, which was kind of a dream come true. And I had two amazing years there. And then just before the pandemic, I had landed a lead in another indie film. And so I left OSF and moved down to LA to get ready and then the pandemic hit.
And then I went back to Wisconsin and did a bunch of Zoom, like everyone else.
Okay. Thank you for that context. That was good. I'm still getting over the fact that we worked together 25 years ago. But next question: since we're talking about ghost stories on this podcast, if you were going to be haunted by a historical figure, who would it be?
Ben Franklin.
Oh, talk to me, why?
Uh, because he was kind of dirty. He was definitely not super upstanding. There's like a natural amount of snark. I think he would totally call me on my bullshit, but I think he'd also be like, Whoa, that was a fully creative way to come up and solve that problem. Like, he just would be like a really good life coach for somebody who's already snarky and always pushing back against being too cynical.
Interesting! All right. Good answer. Okay, next question: If we're at an inflection point in our culture, and I think we are, what are some practical ways that you would like to see our field shift to be more inclusive, more balanced, to reflect what's happening in the world right now?
Well, I mean, there are some obvious issues we need to address. When we're looking for new people to fill roles, any role, we need to make sure that that we're casting an actual wide net. You always want to hire the best person for the job, but I think we need to redefine what best person for the job means. And that's going to take a lot of work and not be really easy, you know, because there is still that impulse to be like, No, but I just want the most talented people who are right for my project, you know what I mean? And that naturally leads to certain kinds of blinders to other things.
And also I think to have more genuine outreach to people at younger ages, so we get kids from different backgrounds. Exposure. I don't know that every kid really has the same opportunity to be a theater nerd. We need to make it easier for everybody who wants to be a theater geek to be a theater geek in high school, you know, and then that trickles up to college.
What does that look like?
I think it's a more constant and overt attempt to actually spend money on the arts, to actually fund them, make them as important as other things. If the pandemic has shown us anything, it has proven how much we depend on entertainment and stories to get us through our day. And you know, I'm very hopeful that things are changing.
I also think about paying it forward. Every chance I get, like if I had to pass on a role ’cause I just couldn't do it, I think about the actors who I would want to replace me. We need to be more proactive for each other, I literally just connected some friends to a casting director at CBS that I had made a connection with, and I just sort of wrote her and I said, You know, these people are awesome. I have no time for how secretive we are as an industry and how we withhold opportunity, as if it must be kept a secret. That's horse-shit. Help people and they'll help you back.
You’re describing the actor network, right? That the power should not be all casting directors bestowing an opportunity on somebody, but that we can actually recommend people amongst ourselves and sort of have our own version of power.
Yeah, I'm a recipient of this, like even A Simple Herstory turned into a really amazing opportunity that's coming down the road that I can't talk about, but an amazing opportunity. And all because Donya [Washington] remembered me and thought it'd be awesome to cast me as Susan B. Anthony. You know, one thing leads to another. And so I always tell everybody, every chance you get to act, whether it's an audition or a callback -- which I'm doing in like a half an hour -- and I'm just trying to not be nervous about it -- it's a chance to do your favorite thing in the whole wide world, whether it's just a self-tape for three minutes, you're doing your favorite thing in the whole wide world. And so treat it that way.
I remember landing in LA for that film. And I was like, Wow, I've never been on a movie set before. I've never done that! I haven’t been active in 12 years and I'm going over LA. And I grew up in LA. So it was really cool to see the city again. And I remember thinking to myself, Well, you should just be the very best version of yourself you can be the entire time you're here, because that's the one who is more than willing to ask dumb questions, because she's curious and doesn't mind looking like a moron. You know what I mean?
Totally beautiful. OK. Last question. What can you plug? Not the thing that's coming down the pike that you can't talk about. But what's coming up?
So currently, I have The Swindlers by Noah Diaz, at Baltimore Center Stage, we start previews early September. It’s sort of a farce/memory play. The writing is exquisite, and there are moments of sheer who's on first sort of verbal shenanigans, which I love.
And in the spring of 2022, a reprise of our show from OSF [Between Two Knees] that currently is bringing the entire cast, crew and designers over to Yale. We’re going to be the third show in their truncated season next year. We’re going to offend so many white people. I cannot wait.
I played Susan B. Anthony which was fascinating for me because I knew something about her. I didn't particularly know about Victoria Woodhull, but I did know that Susan B. Anthony was kind of a douchebag. My wife is a professor of gender studies, so she gives me very quick rundowns on this stuff. I also really enjoyed the sort of slightly subversive nature of having a trans woman play Susan B. Anthony.
Donya Washington [who directed] is with the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, and I had just spent two seasons there, which is why she thought of me for Susan B. Anthony. I'm very grateful, because it was a lot of fun. And it was easy, it was really just like two scenes! Every once in a while you run across writing where the character just leaps off the page at you, and you are like, Oh, I totally know. I know, I know. Okay. I get this, I get all of this. Okay. Oh, she's -- yeah. Okay.
But it was also that, as written, she’s a much more complicated character than that. It doesn't shy away from how abrasive a personality she was. Her loose ethical stance on things. But she was also allowed to be a hurt human being, you know, the consequences of jealousy, of envy, of rage, and how that affects the person. I think my favorite part was just the writing where Susan B. Anthony called out the podcaster for paying attention to the stuff that you think is easy. And it wasn't, none of this was easy. It doesn't matter how noble you are in trying to unearth these facts. If you're not willing to confront how not-fucking-easy any of that was, well, then you're just cherry picking history.
And I loved that. I loved the idea of a character from the past upbraiding someone in the now having a too-facile-sort-of-examination of what is a much more complicated thing. One of the interesting things about the piece is how much it brings out that it’s super important to know the context of the time in which people live, what the accepted norms were, and what was breaking norms. And what was all the unconscious horse-shit baggage that they still were carrying that we now look at and we go, Jesus, how uptight.
Totally. And yet it was still so hard for us to get a female vice president.
Oh yeah! Right. It's still an ongoing thing. But you know, the conversation has radically shifted. The pandemic is in very many ways, like a great sociological reset, right? We as Americans tend to live this fast-paced, rock-skipping-across-the-lake kind of existence, you know? But the pandemic made us sort of swim and dive deep. In some ways, people are smarter than they've ever been, and they're also dumber than they've ever been. It's mind-boggling if I think too much about the amount of willful stupidity I see in politics. And so for this project it's nice to go back to the 1850s, 1860s, 1870s and go, "Oh, well it was just a completely different time." And it's useful to look at the context of it and realize that our time is very different from theirs. It has roots back then, but progress has been made. It's not all bad news. The whole LGBTQ movement has taken on a life of its own, and has really made huge strides. We have this whole emerging, non-binary subset of people who are radically telling people that gender isn't nearly as important as you think it is, or at least it isn't to me. In the context of this podcast, it’s interesting that we're talking about women bending their gender roles in a time when society was even more constricted.
And now the conversation has gotten even more interesting and more complex and, and has made room for more people, more humans to be included on terms of who influences the culture, moves the culture forward. I am seeing this very slow, but inexorable rise of all of these minority groups starting to grab the table and say, I've got a chair now. It's like Hollywood is finally starting to come to terms with the fact that people want to watch a bunch of different stuff, and you're getting a chance to hear more voices.
I always think it's funny: I look at younger people now and I go, I wish I could sit you down in front of a television in 1978, right? Three channels, four, if you figure out where the PBS was, and then maybe you'd get like some public access, crazy horse-shit that the cool kids would watch, but basically you got no choice. So the movies at that time served the purpose of telling bigger stories.
Now, it's completely flipped. Now movies tell stories about explosions and spandex, and streaming tells actual stories. And now with podcasts blowing up, it's like the radio play finally is having a new life. Call it a scripted podcast. Right. Great. Awesome. Everything comes around eventually. If it was fundamentally a good storytelling device, it never dies.
And the advantage of podcasts is that it makes people actually think in their own minds, and make the images for themselves, you know, in the same way that reading does. When I did my epic 15-hour drive from Wisconsin to Baltimore, I listened to the new Marvel scripted podcast, and it was amazing. I could populate all the worlds with my own brain, it made the miles fly by. I was really into it. I even got feels somewhere in, like, Pittsburgh.
Can you contextualize your work a little for people who are meeting you for the first time on this page? Talk to me about your work and your journey.
I started off, off-Broadway in the nineties. I did like an old-fashioned apprenticeship at a theater in the Adirondacks, way upstate New York. And I was there for like five years, and I did every job under the sun, and I didn't go to school for acting, but I learned by being on stage with people who were better than I was. And then I moved to New York City and I got a job immediately at The John Cocteau Repertory, and I was there for five years.
Wait, did we work together?
[At this point Rachel and I realize that we did a show together in 1999 at the Jean Cocteau Rep.]
Okay. Mind blown.
Mine too. Wow. Right.
So I was there until new leadership came in, and a bunch of us just left. The New York Times did a big story about us because we went and formed our own theater group [Phoenix], which is still running. And I did that for a couple more years, but I was already starting to transition. It was, you know, the mid-aughts, which was a completely different time than now for a trans actor. And so I just retired. My wife got a job at a liberal arts university teaching and I followed her to Wisconsin. I was there for like 12 years. And out of the blue, I auditioned for a lead in an indie film, and I got it. And five weeks later I was in San Diego, and they were saying action. And I was like, I guess I'm an actor again. Then shortly after that I did a horror movie with Crispin Glover. I got to play a serial killer, which is fucking hysterical, and really fun. And then I got an offer to come up to the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, which was kind of a dream come true. And I had two amazing years there. And then just before the pandemic, I had landed a lead in another indie film. And so I left OSF and moved down to LA to get ready and then the pandemic hit.
And then I went back to Wisconsin and did a bunch of Zoom, like everyone else.
Okay. Thank you for that context. That was good. I'm still getting over the fact that we worked together 25 years ago. But next question: since we're talking about ghost stories on this podcast, if you were going to be haunted by a historical figure, who would it be?
Ben Franklin.
Oh, talk to me, why?
Uh, because he was kind of dirty. He was definitely not super upstanding. There's like a natural amount of snark. I think he would totally call me on my bullshit, but I think he'd also be like, Whoa, that was a fully creative way to come up and solve that problem. Like, he just would be like a really good life coach for somebody who's already snarky and always pushing back against being too cynical.
Interesting! All right. Good answer. Okay, next question: If we're at an inflection point in our culture, and I think we are, what are some practical ways that you would like to see our field shift to be more inclusive, more balanced, to reflect what's happening in the world right now?
Well, I mean, there are some obvious issues we need to address. When we're looking for new people to fill roles, any role, we need to make sure that that we're casting an actual wide net. You always want to hire the best person for the job, but I think we need to redefine what best person for the job means. And that's going to take a lot of work and not be really easy, you know, because there is still that impulse to be like, No, but I just want the most talented people who are right for my project, you know what I mean? And that naturally leads to certain kinds of blinders to other things.
And also I think to have more genuine outreach to people at younger ages, so we get kids from different backgrounds. Exposure. I don't know that every kid really has the same opportunity to be a theater nerd. We need to make it easier for everybody who wants to be a theater geek to be a theater geek in high school, you know, and then that trickles up to college.
What does that look like?
I think it's a more constant and overt attempt to actually spend money on the arts, to actually fund them, make them as important as other things. If the pandemic has shown us anything, it has proven how much we depend on entertainment and stories to get us through our day. And you know, I'm very hopeful that things are changing.
I also think about paying it forward. Every chance I get, like if I had to pass on a role ’cause I just couldn't do it, I think about the actors who I would want to replace me. We need to be more proactive for each other, I literally just connected some friends to a casting director at CBS that I had made a connection with, and I just sort of wrote her and I said, You know, these people are awesome. I have no time for how secretive we are as an industry and how we withhold opportunity, as if it must be kept a secret. That's horse-shit. Help people and they'll help you back.
You’re describing the actor network, right? That the power should not be all casting directors bestowing an opportunity on somebody, but that we can actually recommend people amongst ourselves and sort of have our own version of power.
Yeah, I'm a recipient of this, like even A Simple Herstory turned into a really amazing opportunity that's coming down the road that I can't talk about, but an amazing opportunity. And all because Donya [Washington] remembered me and thought it'd be awesome to cast me as Susan B. Anthony. You know, one thing leads to another. And so I always tell everybody, every chance you get to act, whether it's an audition or a callback -- which I'm doing in like a half an hour -- and I'm just trying to not be nervous about it -- it's a chance to do your favorite thing in the whole wide world, whether it's just a self-tape for three minutes, you're doing your favorite thing in the whole wide world. And so treat it that way.
I remember landing in LA for that film. And I was like, Wow, I've never been on a movie set before. I've never done that! I haven’t been active in 12 years and I'm going over LA. And I grew up in LA. So it was really cool to see the city again. And I remember thinking to myself, Well, you should just be the very best version of yourself you can be the entire time you're here, because that's the one who is more than willing to ask dumb questions, because she's curious and doesn't mind looking like a moron. You know what I mean?
Totally beautiful. OK. Last question. What can you plug? Not the thing that's coming down the pike that you can't talk about. But what's coming up?
So currently, I have The Swindlers by Noah Diaz, at Baltimore Center Stage, we start previews early September. It’s sort of a farce/memory play. The writing is exquisite, and there are moments of sheer who's on first sort of verbal shenanigans, which I love.
And in the spring of 2022, a reprise of our show from OSF [Between Two Knees] that currently is bringing the entire cast, crew and designers over to Yale. We’re going to be the third show in their truncated season next year. We’re going to offend so many white people. I cannot wait.
This interview was conducted by Kyra Miller, 2021.
* This interview has been edited for clarity and cohesion.
* This interview has been edited for clarity and cohesion.