Video: Norbert Leo Butz & Francesca Faridany Explain What VLADIMIR Is All About
Oct 1, 2024
Up next at Manhattan Theatre Club is the world premiere of Vladimir, written by Erika Sheffer and directed by Tony Award winner Daniel Sullivan. In this video, watch as the cast and creative team chat more about what the play is all about!
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Hello, I'm Richard Ridge for Broadway World
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Two-time Tony Award winner, Norbert Leo Butts, is returning to the New York stage
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in Manhattan Theatre Club's world premiere of Erica Schaeffer's play, Vladimir, directed by Daniel Sullivan
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It begins performances on September 25th. We dropped by the rehearsal room to meet the company
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I'm just so inspired by everybody and by the work in Erica Schaeffer has written a really good play
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And it's a really timely play. and Dan Sullivan is so good at what he does
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and we worked together years ago it's been years since I've been in a room with him apart from doing a workshop of this play
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a year ago and I mean just meeting all of these wonderful actors
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for the first time it's a thrilling thing and we've only been in the room for five six days
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and it feels like months on the one hand but it also is very new
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and we're learning all of these things and getting to know each other and it's just it's so exciting
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I love it. I play a job journalist called Raya, and she's an independent journalist in Putin's Russia. But this is
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20 years ago, so it's the beginning of his rise. And everyone still thinks there's hope for
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democracy, perhaps, and there's hope for freedom of speech, and there's hope for protest. But
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they're beginning to figure out that that's not true. And so she continues to speak out, and she
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continues to find the voices of people who are voiceless and tell their stories
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And she continues to oppose the regime. And she's so courageous and so relentless in that pursuit
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And that is kind of all It utterly or so it was a no for me I haven done a play in a while now And I was looking for something to come back and do And this play really really spoke to me
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We did a reading of it about a year ago, and I fell in love with it
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I fell in love with Erica Schaeffer's writing. I loved her play, Russian Transport
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She's excellent at dialogue. She's fantastic at political debate. And I always wanted to work with Dan Sullivan
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He was a bucket list director for me, and so I'm thrilled to be in the room with him
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I play a character named Kostia, and he is best friends with the central character
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played by Francesca Ferradani, who's based on a real woman, a real journalist
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who is persecuted under the Putin regime. And we play best friends
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old dear friends. I'm her editor, she's my writer, and in the course of the play
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their friendship is really tested because of the political environment. I think the play is about how the political is always personal
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Political, especially authoritarian governments, present real challenges for families, for friends, for intimate relationships
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especially when you fall on different sides of these binary political arguments
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So it's a fantastic part. He's a guy who goes through a real disillusionment
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and has to wrestle with his life's work. I play Yvgeny. Yvgeny is an accountant who comes across some irregularities
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in government tax refunds and overcomes his initial sense of sort of reticence and self to sort of speak out and become a whistleblower in effect And he has this extraordinary sense of courage and of duty to his country and to his community
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And that is something that I don't always share, and I really, really admire this man
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And it's an honor to play him. The whole thing is really thrilling
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This is a home for me. This is my third show here. I started out like you did
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in city center, and then did the assembled parties on Broadway, and now I'm here with this
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And then with this amazing cast, I worked with Dan on dinner with friends. Eric, I didn't know, but I'm just a complete fan of her play
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And then everybody in the show, I'm just crazy about. So it is exciting
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It's an exciting moment. I'm really happy. It's one of those shows where I feel like everybody in the show is better than me
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So it makes me bring my A-game even more. so I love that challenge
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You know, everybody's so good. And I just, you know, I want to honor that by bringing Maya game as well
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Rehearsal has been kind of like a dream come true in a way
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I worked with Daniels and understudy and Little Foxes seven years ago
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And now to be in a rehearsal room with him seven years later is mind blowing to me
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And I'm kind of just trying to soak it up as much as I can
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I'm with all of these incredible, talented, wonderful people. so it feels like I'm going to camp every day
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It's amazing. Being in the room with Dan Sullivan. I mean, it's incredible
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It's funny because he's like, he's so quiet and then he speaks and you're like, oh
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And it doesn't mean that like everything he says just like means more
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Like if he like at the end of one day he was like you know I feeling really good about this And we were all like oh my God Like it going really well guys Yeah it really it yeah it really amazing
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What unlocked the play for you to write? I think when I dove into the research about Vladimir Putin and his rise to power
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I sort of realized like he was the least interesting person I was reading about
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And it was sort of everybody else around him, the activists, the journalists, the everyday people
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and their response to it that I found myself really fixated on
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And so that's where my curiosity was, and that's sort of where I, the path I followed
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This play is about a subject that I have found fascinating, which is it's about an entire country sort of caving to Vladimir Putin and why
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What is there about this man that has kept his... All of the people in Russia, though there are many people who are working secretly against
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Putin, but the country as a whole, it feels, to me at least, and I think you see the sense of it
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in this play, have backed away from fighting against this sort of onslaught of Vladimir Putin
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And this play sort of examines why that is
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