Orange County Register

The Geffen Playhouse has landed the local premiere of a hot new script, Bill Cain’s “Equivocation.” The period drama, which uses the 1605 Gunpowder Plot as the springboard for a fascinating suppositional tale of intrigue and political skullduggery, was a talker in its world-premiere production at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival earlier this year. (At left is a still from the Geffen production with Patrick J. Adams and Connor Trinneer.)

A bit of background: The Gunpowder Plot.

For the Geffen Playhouse production, director David Esbjornson has chosen to present the story in modern dress, and the actors speak without English accents.

Recently I talked with four of the actors in the Geffen production – Harry Groener, Connor Trinneer, Patrick J. Adams and Brian Henderson, who share dozens of roles – about the challenges, pleasures and undeniable contemporary resonance of “Equivocation.”

The Orange County Register: You’re all playing multiple roles. Are there a lot of quick changes of costume?

Groener: I’m not sure that you’re going to get exhausted watching us. Hopefully you’ll get caught up in the story. Our hope is that that’s the fun of it – the storytelling is the primary focus.

Register: Does the multiple role-playing serve another purpose?

Patrick J. Adams: If you read Bill’s other plays, there’s a theatricality to them which is unique, I think. All of a sudden you can have a stage full of people who were until that moment sitting in a lecture hall now leaping forward two years in time and in a completely different location – with just a change of lighting. Bill writes plays in which time is not a linear thing, so the actors are used in the service of that idea. Sometimes that means switching roles very quickly.

Register: Some of the roles are recognizably Shakespearean?

Brian Henderson: Yes. There are several plays within the play – I can’t remember how many, quite a few – and some of them are excerpts from “Macbeth,” “Lear” and other Shakespearean tragedies. There’s also a piece from “Henry VI.” Shakespeare is also a character in this play.

Register: What does the title refer to?

Henderson: It’s about telling the truth and yet managing not to incriminate yourself, which is what certain people had to do when they were being interrogated by the government about their allegiances and other things.

Register: I’ve read that the themes seem very relevant. How so?

Groener: It’s about weapons of mass destruction, and about twisting the truth and having one side control the reality of the situation, which all seems very familiar, I think, to a 21st-century American audience.

Connor Trinneer: But it’s not right on the nose. You don’t go, “Oh, I know why he’s doing this right now!” In Ashland they did a very classical interpretation of the play. You don’t have to make the parallels obvious to get the points across.

Register: Why aren’t you using British accents, since this story happened in the heart of London and all the characters are British?

Groener: I’ve been doing som reading on (historical) accents and they think that British accents at this time (the beginning of the 1600s) sounded pretty much like Americans sound now, or not far from it. Closer to what we sound like than what the English sound like now.

Henderson: Also, it’s not that important to the story. If people start asking themselves why we’re not speaking in dialect then we’re not doing our jobs.

Register: Did you talk about making the contemporary parallels explicit with the director?

Trinneer: We had lots of conversations about everything. Rehearsing this play meant starting every day with a great conversation abut how it relates. I remember us talking about (the WMD/Iraq debate) and how it resembles the Gunpowder Plot in some ways.

Henderson: The idea of the government trying to control the information that people get seems like a pretty resonant theme to me.

Groener: And the idea that you can reshape history in the retelling of it. What’s that old saying? “Whoever owns the narrative owns history.” That’s what’s going on in the play. And I think we’re seeing some of that now in this country – people fighting really hard to control the stories that unfolded over the last eight years.

Adams: Also, this play has a lot to do with religion, which is worth noting, and the persecution of people because of their religious beliefs. It’s about Protestants vs. Catholics at a time when faith was such a divisive issue and wars were fought over it. So the connection to our time is pretty obvious.

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