In this episode, Christopher Christensen met with Samuel Buggeln to discuss his upcoming production of 'I Want a Country' written by Andreas Flourakis. In their conversation, they explored his role as visiting lecturer and director at the Schwartz Center for the Performing Arts and his role as artistic and executive director at the Cherry Arts located in downtown Ithaca. He offered insight into his ongoing work as director of the production, his collaboration with students and faculty at Cornell, and examined the core question presented by the play: when does a nation stop being a home?
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Transcript
00:00 Music.
Chris Christensen 00:11
Hello and welcome to episode 70 of the PMA podcast. In this episode, I met with Samuel Buggeln to discuss his upcoming production of "I Want a Country", written by Andreas Flourakis. In our conversation, we explored his role as Artistic and Executive Director at the Cherry Arts space located in downtown Ithaca, and his role as visiting lecturer and director here at the Schwartz Center for the Performing Arts. He offered some insight into the ongoing work as director of this production, his collaboration with students and faculty here at Cornell and to examine the core question presented by the play: when does a nation stop being a home? Sam, welcome to the PMA podcast.
Samuel Buggeln 00:53
Thank you so much. I'm pleased to be here.
Chris Christensen 00:56
Yeah, fantastic. And how's the day going?
Samuel Buggeln 00:58
Oh, just fine. Thank you.
Chris Christensen 01:00
Okay. Any any excitement for today, or just standard run of the mill?
Samuel Buggeln 01:05
Yeah, this morning, I run this arts organization called the Cherry Arts we're downtown, we started out mainly doing theater and performance, but now we have an art gallery as well, and one of our first big gallery exhibition of the season opens tomorrow. So I spent the morning in the quite pleasurable little task of breaking off little tiny pieces of stickum gum and putting them on the backs of labels to stick on the wall by the artwork.
Chris Christensen 01:31
Okay-
Samuel Buggeln 01:31
Not too close, but not too far.
Chris Christensen 01:33
All right, let's talk a little bit about that. So what what's your your connection with the Cherry?
Samuel Buggeln 01:40
Well, I'm a co-founder of the company, and it's Artistic and Executive Director.
Chris Christensen 01:46
Okay, and tell us a little bit more about the the art gallery. When, when did this idea come to fruition?
Samuel Buggeln 01:53
Sure, the Art Gallery started up. Maybe it's been fully running maybe three, three and a half years. And it is, it sort of fell into our lap as a as an expansion of our mission, which was really exciting we had been, as I said, we started as a company focused on performance. We built the Cherry Arts Space, which is a performance space flexible down on Cherry Street in the West End. And then, I mean, it felt like we'd been at it for a long time, but now looking back, it was quite soon after the art space opened that this developer named Vecino, this Vecino group were planning to build a building that they plan to call the art house, which is what it's called, just across the parking lot from the cherry art space. And they wanted it to be, it's an affordable housing building with supportive housing for young people who had been unhoused or housing insecure. And they wanted to have an arts sort of focus, so they had a sort of big it was called a charrette, a sort of gathering of stakeholders, arts people in the community that happened to be at the Cherry Arts space, since we were right there, to talk about what was needed. And what emerged from that conversation was that there, we need a community art gallery in town and a rehearsal space. And so they built that in to the building. And you know, I was chatting with the guy, Rick, who runs Vecino, the developer, after the this meeting, and said, So, how does this work then? And he said, Oh, well gosh. Now we have to find an arts nonprofit to run these spaces. And I was like, Oh, tell me. Tell me something about that. So, yeah, so sure enough, now we've been running the spaces for several years, and it's really great because we, you know, we had always, though I'm a theater director, we had always framed the company, the Cherry Arts, as a multi disciplinary company, and it was really, it's a it's a very funny thing to have put that out in the universe and suddenly, like, there's an art gallery and an offer to to program it. So, yeah, so now we run three spaces, and visual art, performing arts, and all sorts of other things.
Chris Christensen 04:20
Nice. What's the exhibit that's open? You said it's tomorrow, that it's opening?
Samuel Buggeln 04:23
It's opening tomorrow-
Chris Christensen 04:24
Okay.
Samuel Buggeln 04:25
-Friday, and if I was that would be October 3, I guess,
Chris Christensen 04:29
Astonishingly, so, yes.
Samuel Buggeln 04:33
The, and- I'm very excited about it. Actually, it's our big, sort of full exhibition of the season, and we're collaborating. We love to collaborate with a local curator and art maker named Kaleb Hunkele. Kaleb runs a company called the Ithaca Print Commons. He's a printmaker as well as a painter, but he really has, he has a couple of very specialized art print making machines, and so he's running the Ithaca Print Commons for a while, in a variety of different locations. But he's been curating this annual, just about annual, fall exhibition called Open Season for well over a decade. So this is open season nine, because they don't happen every year. And, yeah, it's Invitational. He has his, really, his finger on the pulse of all sorts of people making all sorts of exciting work in and around this part of the world. And so he curated it. This is the first time Open Season is happening at the cherry Gallery, and it looks great there. It's terrific work, and it's very exciting.
Chris Christensen 05:39
And how long does it run till?
Samuel Buggeln 05:40
It runs basically all the month of October.
Chris Christensen 05:43
Okay.
Samuel Buggeln 05:43
So four weekends.
Chris Christensen 05:45
Yeah, by the time we get this podcast out there, I think there'll still be some time there for-
Samuel Buggeln 05:50
Alright.
Chris Christensen 05:50
-people here to stop down and pay you a visit. So what brings you, what brought you to the Schwartz center?
Samuel Buggeln 05:57
Well-
Chris Christensen 05:58
Go ahead. Yes.
Samuel Buggeln 06:00
You can say-
Chris Christensen 06:01
Well, I was going to say, we have, "I want a country," which is why you're here. But something must have drawn you to this space initially. Samuel Buggeln 06:08 Well, I am married to Professor Nick Salvato.
Chris Christensen 06:12
Yeah.
Samuel Buggeln 06:13
And so that was the, that's how I first found my way to the Schwartz Center, when he got this job. And you know, that was that's many years ago now. And the way the Schwartz does theater programming has evolved a number of times over the years. And yeah, and sure enough, a few but I had never had cause to direct a full production here on the students, and so when the folks here reached out to me earlier in the year, I thought that sounded like a great time.
Chris Christensen 06:46
Okay.
Samuel Buggeln 06:47
Yeah.
Chris Christensen 06:48
Go ahead.
Samuel Buggeln 06:48
Oh, I used to for years when I was a New York City-based sort of freelance professional theater director, I would direct on the NYU Tisch BFA students, and that was a kind of annual gig for just about a decade that I really enjoyed and but it's been years and years and years since I directed students, and it's just it's such a pleasure. You always, as the true stereotype goes, you always learn as much from the students as the students do from the instructor.
Chris Christensen 07:21
Well, I'm glad that opportunity made itself available to you.
Samuel Buggeln 07:24
Yeah, me too.
Chris Christensen 07:25
You want to talk a little bit about the play itself? I tried to find as much information as possible, and I found that it's actually rather challenging to-
Samuel Buggeln 07:35
Oh interesting.
Chris Christensen 07:36
I mean, I could find some nice synopses, brief synopses, but nothing too deep. So, and of course, you don't want to give away too much for those who don't know too much about it, but yeah, whatever you feel like you want to share.
Samuel Buggeln 07:48
Sure. No, I can. I can absolutely share. So one of the reasons you might not have heard or seen so much about it is that it has been very much produced over the past, sort of, I guess, dozen years since it was written, but it's an international play, and that's what we focus on at the Cherry Arts in our theater program, and we do lots of English-language premieres of important new international writing in translation. And it's, it's really been a very fruitful and exciting niche for us. And so, you know, in that line of work, you inevitably come across plays that are terrific and very exciting, but are not for one reason or another, a play that we can produce. And this play, I want a country, is written by a Greek writer named Andreas Flourakis, as I, see, he wrote about a dozen years ago in the aftermath of the Greek financial crisis and a social crisis. And so he it has been produced, really, all over the world, really over 25 productions since then, in all sorts of languages and all sorts of countries. And the fascinating thing about the play is that Andreas tends to write in what's called Open texts. So it's very unusual way to write a play in that none of the lines are assigned. So if you look at the page, you're used to looking at a, you know, a script, almost no matter how experimental, you're going to see the names of characters and a colon, and after that, you're gonna see the line that the person says. In this case, you just see a line, a line, a line, a line, a line. And it's up to the director and the creative team and the cast to figure out who says what. And so it's a very that, and, you know, I'm it, this kind of writing does happen. It's definitely a thing. There are, you know, famous playwrights who write this way, in English and and a lot of people, sort of around the world. It's a it's a form, but it's one that happens very little here in the US and so. And in fact, as much as I had have a background like this is, you know, international semi-experimental plays, is, is literally what I've been directing now for the last decade, almost exclusively, it was the first time. This is the first time I'm working on an open text, and it's been really exciting.
Chris Christensen 10:25
That's what I was gonna ask next, yeah.
Samuel Buggeln 10:28
Yeah it's, um, it's the first time. And, you know, and so it was, it's a, it's really exciting kind of project to sit down with students on because, well, as I said, you want it to be a learning experience for everybody, and so we're all really discovering together, not only what the play means and says to us when we say it, but also, how are we going to discover that? What is the process going to be of discovering that? I have a feeling it's a little like a, like a Rorschach test, but we won't know, like the audience will then watch it and say, Oh, clearly the this play made this creative team think this, this, this and this, but we don't know that as we're making it, we're just sort of, like, making sense of it in real time. And it will be really, I don't want to say a surprise, like, we're obviously like, you know, making discussion. I will say that I think it's certain that the audience will see things that we've done that we were unaware that we were doing.
Chris Christensen 11:46
Okay.
Samuel Buggeln 11:46
Which is kind of neat.
Chris Christensen 11:48
So it's your first time doing open text. Is there something about this particular play that drew you to it?
Samuel Buggeln 11:54
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, so as I said, Andreas wrote it in the aftermath of the Greek financial crisis as a response to the fact that a lot of people were leaving Greece in search of better opportunities. The people who were staying were trying to figure out what the country could be going forward if it was still the country that they had grown up in, and was there a chance for it to become a better country, or what? And and so he was really wrestling with these ideas of, I don't wanna say nationalism, but what were the ideas of, like, what is a country and what makes one and what makes people attached to one, and when do people have to leave? And then, what is their status? What is, what's a person's relationship to state when you no longer have one, or you no longer live in the place that you grew up? And so this is a time. I mean, there are two things. There's, of course, a massive phenomenon of global migration that never really stops, but it has been, particularly has felt very intense and fraught, both in terms of the American borders and in, of course, Europe and the Middle East, for a long time now, but also the amount of upheaval in our own American politics, our own, US politics in the past year has been so intense that it, I think, has left a lot of people feeling like, what is this country now? You know, and so, so it is so these questions that he poses in these very open ended form seemed really, really powerful right now.
Chris Christensen 13:49
Okay, are there ways that you've adapted this to sort of be more specific to perhaps Cornell or the Ithaca area in a way, or just kept it as it was?
Samuel Buggeln 14:01
Not really there are, there are definitely, like, lines, you know, it's a kind of text that comes out of a tradition where it's probably okay to adapt a little bit this. There are different, lots of different theater traditions in terms of, how do we think about the malleability of the text? And this is from a tradition that's probably okay with it. That said the lines that really seem to place the play in Greece, we left as as is, and we just performed them as if you know these were Greek people speaking in the aftermath of the financial crisis, I think that there's but those are actually a minority, like most of the play is really lives in the abstract, more abstract space of trying to hammer out, trying to wrestle through these problems and questions. You know, that I described earlier. And so so that stuff didn't really need adapting at all. You know what I mean? You, you just sort of dig into it and and I am, and I believe that they're going to land very powerfully here. And the stuff that and the stuff that sets us in Greece, is sort of helpful reminder of internationalness. So you know of the fact that these questions get asked everywhere, in different versions, and I think so that, I think that's a, like, nice, sort of reminder of where the text did come from.
Chris Christensen 15:39
Okay, how many people involved in the cast?
Samuel Buggeln 15:43
Eleven.
Chris Christensen 15:44
Eleven, okay.
Samuel Buggeln 15:45
Yeah.
Chris Christensen 15:45
All students?
Samuel Buggeln 15:46
All students. Oh, you know what? One, one staff member, yeah, you know, interestingly enough, that's the course. The play is a course. And and anyone, and I didn't realize this, but any, any student, faculty member or staff member is welcome to audition, and, you know, enroll in the course. You know, just as anybody, any staff member can enroll in Cornell courses if they, if they want to and qualify, and one wonderful actor auditioned, and they're, and they're great.
Chris Christensen 16:29
Okay, fantastic-
Samuel Buggeln 16:29
But we have a great-
Chris Christensen 16:30
-somebody from the Schwartz center or outside of-
Samuel Buggeln 16:33
No, no outside of, actually I forget what, what office they work In, one of those Dean offices.
Chris Christensen 16:40
Okay, oh that's great.
Chris Christensen 16:42
Okay.
Samuel Buggeln 16:42
And, and we have a great range of students. We have graduate students and undergrads, some like hardcore performing and media arts types and but then a surprising number of people who are attracted to the internationalness of the text, and it's a very diverse cast people from all different parts of the world. So it's a really, it's really kind of wonderful cross-section of Cornell's community, which is so international. And I think that that is a was a really unexpected of an exciting benefit to choosing this text that sort of shook a lot of people out of the tree.
Samuel Buggeln 16:47
Who are just really interested in the- yeah, the topic.
Chris Christensen 17:29
Okay, what has that collective experience looked like for you and for the students and for the staff member and just the cast in general, as you, as you work through this process, because the play opens very soon-
Samuel Buggeln 17:43
Yes, yeah, within a few weeks. And it's, I will say, it's a very intense process, because, you know, it's a, it is, as I said, a course. And there are, you know, state guidelines for how many hours of instruction-
Chris Christensen 18:00
Right.
Samuel Buggeln 18:01
-have to happen in a course. And so we're and of course, you know, we need to not be under-rehearsed. The play needs to come together. And so we're rehearsing four hours a night, five nights a week. And it's so it's a very intense-
Chris Christensen 18:15
Yeah.
Samuel Buggeln 18:16
-it's very intense process. Working with Danielle Russo, who is also a faculty member here. She's an amazing choreographer, and so she's doing movement work. The another thing that the text does is we have the scenes, and then it will just the dialogue stops, and it just says the word action, and then the dialogue picks up again. So you we have, like, a series of, again, opportunities to create something that's movement-based and and so Danielle is leading the charge on those, although it's very mixed up. I mean, she's also doing movement within some of the dialogue scenes, and I'm also doing movement in some of the action scenes. It's very, it's a, it's a real collaboration. But yeah, we're, it's a it's, it's a lot of hours in a very condensed in a very condensed period. So it's very exciting. It's very intense. And I mean really, we start just sitting at the table, going around and reading the scenes and starting to still out, what are the ideas? Are characters emerging? You know, is someone attracted to being the person who voices this set of ideas? Or, you know, where are the conflicts emerging? And how do we and how do we best embody those in the voices who are here, and then how do we how do we embody that on the stage? Chris Christensen 19:45 Okay, so you mentioned about the movement. Can you expand on that a little bit? What does the movement look like that Danielle's choreographing? Samuel Buggeln 19:54 Well, it's very it's a great question, because I didn't know Danielle. I mean, I had seen some of Danielle's work, but it's very different to see someone's choreography. And I was very, you know, excited about about working with her, but it's a very different task to create movement, to choreograph for dancers, versus to create movement in a play for actors. And so that's been an exciting stretch and new sort of vocabularies for Danielle. I think what we're doing is creating storytelling moments that are evocative but not literal, you know, and so I sort of had the opportunity to watch Danielle take a series of rehearsals to build out several segments. Some, again, like that will happen in between dialogue scenes, some that happened during, you know, as people talk. And so I got a sense of her vocabulary, which is very vivid and very evocative, but not like miming. Not like miming, real tasks. And in fact, that's something that we have to keep, like, pulling the actors back from, no, we're not going to, like, actually mime writing a letter and sending out to someone. We're going, you know, like we're creating sort of tasks in the body. Maybe a way to think about is tasks in the body that create a similar energy or a certain amount of labor to a kind of storytelling we want to do, but, but that way we keep it open and we keep we're not telling like individual stories, but sort of like giving information that the audience can map their stories onto, in some ways.
Chris Christensen 21:40
Okay, this is taking place in the Flex Theater.
Chris Christensen 21:44
Did you decide that? Did you decide upon that space for yourself, or is it just the space that happened to be?
Samuel Buggeln 21:44
Yes.
Samuel Buggeln 21:49
It was the space that it was the space that had been chosen for the project, and it was, and it's terrific. It's very exciting that it was because we're able to, we're able to have the audience on two sides of the stage, so that it's a kind of, it's the set is beautiful. It was designed by Sarah Bernstein, who is the, who's actually the costume design professor here, but is, like everybody here, able to do many things, and has designed a beautiful set for this so, and it sort of takes a form of a of a kind of modernist island with a dock protruding that goes way out, and that's what the audience is on two sides of. But the docks has, in this kind of, like artful way broken and so it's a sort of like abstract, but very beautiful, again, very evocative space that seems to that something seems to be wrong with and so that's just, that's just where all of this plays out, and the audience. The nice thing about having audience on two sides is that everyone's close to the action. And it keeps us you feel very involved. You feel very, very encircling the action.
Chris Christensen 23:10
Okay. And those who attend these performances will be sitting in the new risers, which were just installed over the summer. So that's-
Samuel Buggeln 23:18
Yes.
Chris Christensen 23:19
-that's brand new as well.
Samuel Buggeln 23:20
Totally. I understand the risers retract and, automatically, which is, it's been great for us actually, because we could, like, back the risers. We could retract the risers and then have our work table on one side of the room and the and the set where the show will be performed on the other side of the room. We're just about ready to abandon the work table, and I presume the risers will then expand to fill their space.
Chris Christensen 23:46
Yeah, it's really quite amazing.
Samuel Buggeln 23:48
Yeah.
Chris Christensen 23:48
And it's a good thing that we still have other portions of it that were retained for the other side to kind of balance things out on either side of the stage, right?
Samuel Buggeln 23:49
That's right.
Chris Christensen 23:56
Are there challenges that you have encountered as you're working through the process that have yet to be resolved, or ones that have been that-
Samuel Buggeln 24:09
Gosh, I mean, I do think the, I mean, the the fact, I wouldn't say challenges, but the fact of the open text was more different than I expected it to be, I think, you know, not to get too deep into it, but there's a but there's- in the English language, theater is we think of as a very text-based theater. It's very playwright-centric. The playwright writes a play. This goes back to Shakespeare. The playwright writes a play, and then a director looks at the play, and the playwright has basically given the director instructions on what, directors would dispute this, but compared to how it's done in other parts of the world, this is true, like the the play basically tells you what to do with it. You know? It's a generalization, but they're in in much of other parts of the world, certainly Europe, Latin America, it's more like what gets called the director-centric theater, the Regietheater the Germans call it because they sort of lead that charge, where the director is almost is the author of the work, and they may or may not work with a playwright, and if the and often if they do work with a playwright, the playwright feels like I generate loose text, and the director will work with a dramaturg and shape it. So it's a very, very, very different approach. And now I'm a direct- I'm, you know, I'm a North American director. I direct plays, but plays that come from the world of the Regietheater, of the director-focused theater tend to be looser or more challenging, in the sense that they don't tell the director and the creative team how they want to be staged, because they're accustomed to a director who's going to make those decisions anyway, probably in unexpected ways. So all this to say, I'm accustomed to plays that don't solve all the problems for you as a director and and and create a lot of possibility for, you know, for creativity, for expressiveness in that way, but a play that actually assigns no lines has no stage directions, there are a few stage directions that are mysterious and and really leaves everything wide open. I've been surprised by how different that process is, how much you know time and real searching work it takes to create scenes and it's and it's and it is amazing. The scenes are the scenes are in there. You know, we it takes a lot of unpacking and uncovering, and then suddenly this series of short lines becomes a really vivid, dynamic scene. And what's really amazing is that given a different group of creators, a different group of actors, a different director in a different country, presumably, that might unpack to a totally different, vivid scene. And so it's been, it's been very exciting and more more different than I expected it to be. I'm excited, by the way, because Andreas is coming to Ithaca to see it.
Chris Christensen 27:40
Oh, that's fantastic.
Samuel Buggeln 27:41
Which is super fantastic. He's someone I've known for a long time, and he he was going to be in New York City anyway, but he shifted his New York City date so that he and his wife could come up.
Chris Christensen 27:53
Oh, that's great.
Samuel Buggeln 27:54
Yeah.
Chris Christensen 27:55
For opening night, or don't know?
Samuel Buggeln 27:57
Again, I am not even positive whether he's coming the first weekend or second weekend.
Chris Christensen 28:03
Okay, gotchu.
Samuel Buggeln 28:03
I spend all my time in rehearsal.
Chris Christensen 28:08
You're kind of going back and forth between cherry and here right now.
Samuel Buggeln 28:11
Yes.
Chris Christensen 28:12
Juggling both those things. You've got a lot of dates in your head.
Samuel Buggeln 28:14
Yeah.
Chris Christensen 28:15
Yeah. I'm curious. Do you foresee the way in which this is influencing the work that you do as a director? Do you foresee that having some influence later on, as well how that will be integrated into your work? Or too soon, too soon to say?
Samuel Buggeln 28:29
I guess, I mean, you know, every play, every play, has discoveries that influence your trajectory, and this one is no exception.
Chris Christensen 28:38
Okay, you mentioned Sarah earlier-
Samuel Buggeln 28:40
Yeah.
Chris Christensen 28:40
As the costume designer, she's, she's, she has done the scenic design, but she's also working on the costumes as well for this, along with Lisa Boquist and I'm assuming students as well. You want to talk a little bit about what the costume design looks like for the play?
Samuel Buggeln 28:55
Sure, it's, I mean, it's a very again, it's a like the set, I would say the costumes. It's a it's a tricky balance to walk, because we, we don't want it to feel too much like this is set in Greece, in the, you know, in the aughts. We don't want it to feel too much like it's set in North America today. And so, yeah, it's a sort of like, it's definitely in the present. We talked about, we talked about the tendency of plays like this that are kind of abstracted, that can where the design can want to go to the past. Like there are photos of other productions where people are carrying, like, old leather suitcases with straps around them, kind of thing. And it's like, this is not set in the 1930s like but I don't know what that sort of magnetic pull is. So it's very much set in the present, and the people are who they are, and we're trying to, like, land in the reality of people who are in a circumstance of migration or immigration or reinvention of a country right now.
Chris Christensen 30:11
Okay, how about sound sound design?
Samuel Buggeln 30:15
Oh, great. Well, we're working with Warren Cross on that. He's such a tremendous designer and a great spirit. And, yeah, we're mixing up, mixing up, you know, some of the action segments want to, I really wanted to be like, almost dance numbers like, just like the pleasure of finding a song that really, that really advances the themes of the play, and just like dancing to the music, you know what I mean? Because I think that's a great pleasure of theater making, and I think it would be silly to not do it when you have the opportunity.
Chris Christensen 30:59
Okay.
Samuel Buggeln 31:00
And so some of the action scenes are like that. And so Warren's been working with us on finding versions of the songs that are not, you know, that we that we're able to use and not be in violation of copyright.
Chris Christensen 31:13
Yeah.
Samuel Buggeln 31:13
And and in the key that everyone can sing them in.
Samuel Buggeln 31:20
It's not, not in a like, not in a kind of like, beautifully miked musical theater, way more like in a round the campfire group of friends belting out a song kind of way.
Chris Christensen 31:21
Oh, nice.
Chris Christensen 31:21
So the cast is singing as well?
Samuel Buggeln 31:21
The cast is singing, the cast is belting out.
Chris Christensen 31:21
Okay.
Samuel Buggeln 31:31
Yeah, yeah, totally. It's a great, it's a great energy.
Chris Christensen 31:34
Oh, I like that.
Samuel Buggeln 31:35
Yeah.
Chris Christensen 31:35
What do you hope that audiences take away when they step out of the theater after viewing this?
Samuel Buggeln 31:42
Yeah, well, I hope, I hope it will have given people, I hope it will have been thought-provoking in terms of, yeah, provoking a lot of thinking about what it is that, may you know, I just read, just read something on Tiktok. I think, I think the word, the term that was used by this, like ethicist I follow on Tiktok is effective fictions. And she just sort of like dropped the term on the way to making another point, but she said, you know, we have, as human beings, this superpower, she said, of which is the effective fiction, like nations and like money for two the two big examples like these are not the real. But they're very, very powerful fictions that everybody, everybody buys into, and everybody treats as being very important and very real, and therefore they become very important and very real. And and so it was interesting to to to be reminded of that by this random Tiktok that that countries aren't real. You know, countries are effective fictions, but they're very, very powerfully felt and, and, and to think about what, what it is when you stop recognizing the country that you think of as your country, what it is when you are forced to leave for that reason or other reasons, what it is you know, to ask to become part of a country that's quote, "not your country," like these are all the big questions that are underlying a lot of our current, I think crises and realities and and so I think it's an opportunity to really engage those questions and in a way that's still very entertaining and compelling and fast-moving. In the way that good theater is. So so I would say that's what I would hope for.
Chris Christensen 34:04
Okay, yeah, I think that that's a concept or idea that a lot of people would struggle with, is the idea of the fiction of a country.
Samuel Buggeln 34:14
Yeah.
Chris Christensen 34:15
And-
Samuel Buggeln 34:16
I mean, if you look at the, you know, if you look at the picture of the Earth from space.
Chris Christensen 34:22
No lines. There are no lines. Yep, yeah.
Samuel Buggeln 34:26
Yeah, that reminds me of a when I'm I grew up in Canada, and in the 80's of my youth, Jane Siberry was one of my, like, favorite pop stars, and she had a song called No Borders Here, and I should think about seeing if there's a place for it in the show, or at least in rehearsal.
Chris Christensen 34:51
Is there any place in the meantime, while people are waiting for the play to open and they hear this podcast, do you have any social media presence or any place where different bits of the rehearsal process are beginning to appear?
Samuel Buggeln 35:03
Gosh. I mean, I think the, I think the the PMA website will probably have links to that stuff. You know, part of the pleasure of doing a project here, I usually, when I'm directing shows at the Cherry I would have all of those answers handy because I'm also supervising the staff that makes them happen. But here I'm just delighted and impressed by all of the wonderful work that happens on those fronts and but I don't, I don't oversee them myself,
Chris Christensen 35:37
Okay. Easy enough.
Samuel Buggeln 35:39
Yeah, but I would also say, I would also invite people to check out what's happening at the Cherry Arts, if they're, you know, right down the hill, there's open season nine and and also another international play called The Weight of Ants, which is from Quebec, that is playing at just about the same time that I want a country is playing so audiences, Ithaca audience will be able to get their fill of international theater writing in one weekend.
Chris Christensen 36:11
All right, fantastic. Is there anything I did not ask you today that you wanted to talk about.
Samuel Buggeln 36:12
I don't think so.
Chris Christensen 36:12
I always like to make sure I check in with the guests, because it could be something you wanted to-
Samuel Buggeln 36:20
No, it's been a great conversation. Very Yeah, I think we hit all the hit, all the marks.
Chris Christensen 36:27
All right, fantastic. Well, Sam, thanks for being on the podcast.
Samuel Buggeln 36:30
Thank you, Chris.
Chris Christensen 36:31
Indeed.
