The director talks about noir, keeping it human, and the duality of phone booths.
Director James Dean Palmer loves reading scripts – but that doesn’t mean he ends up directing all of them. When the founding artistic director of Chicago’s experimental theater group Red Tape Theatre met Drew Pisarra in April 2022 at a poetry marathon at the Whitney Biennial, Pisarra was reading from his collection Periodic Boyfriends. Pisarra mentioned that he was also a playwright, and Palmer, who now directs (Long Wharf, Waterwell) and teaches (Fordham University, NYU Tisch) in the New York City area, asked to read some of his scripts. After he did, the director recalls, he was “just gob-smacked” and knew he wanted to work with Pisarra. He was particularly struck by Click, a three-hander set in several phone booths in what may or may not be a seamy 20th-century Alphabet City. In the play, Del (Mohammad Saleem) is trying to enlist the help of his girlfriend, Clare (Shuga Ohashi) in a street transaction that seems increasingly shady. And once the mysterious Oona (Saman Peyman) gets on the line, it’s clear that what’s going down is far more dangerous than any of them had bargained for. Fast forward to the present, and after a reading in early June at Atelier86, Palmer’s now directing Click, which is set to start performances at the Tank shortly, and shared some thoughts about the project with On and Off Broadway.
Tell me about what interested you about Drew’s work.
I’m a huge fan of playwrights like Conor McPherson, Annie Baker, Sam Hunter, and Will Arbery – playwrights in whom still waters run deep. Because Drew is a poet, he understands how less can be more. He creates these really muscular worlds, but there’s such a tenderness and sensitivity. And as I was reading Click, the first thing I thought was God, actors would kill to play these roles because Drew isn’t overbearing and telling them how to perform their roles.
The characters feel very recognizable, but also unique.
In the play, Drew draws on archetype as opposed to cliche, and in focusing on the archetype. he opens the stories up to myriad interpretations. When the play was read at The Drawing Board, there was a robust conversation, a multitude of interpretations. It’s a delicate thing that he does because I love pulp as much as the next person, but it’s become sort of commodified. Drew’s plays feel pulpy, but they transcend that. Click in particular is about how do you find your strength in a world full of sharks, people who are constantly out to eat and eat, out for themselves? It’s a world where kindness is dangerous.
Drew drops you into this play, and immediately, you see the stakes are so high. These characters, Del and Clare, are in so far over their heads, and they’re just trying to stay cool. They’re just trying to get through it. And that’s something everyone can relate to. This has happened so many times in my life where I’ve gotten myself in over my head, and by the grace of God, someone unexpected has done me a great kindness (like Blanche DuBois, I’ve always relied on the kindness of strangers).
Poor Clare can’t even see the situation that she’s in. She’s in love, just trying to protect the man that she loves, and she thinks that he loves her as much as she loves him.
Above, James Dean Palmer; at top, James Dean Palmer. Both photos by Clara Zwirble.
But the audience starts doubting that pretty quickly.
I do think Del has a heart. I don’t think he’s a monster. But this is why the play is so important – and why we watch shows like Succession, right? We live in a very polarized moment. People are on edge. It’s easy to compartmentalize and look at groups of people as monolithic. But at any point, a person is capable of doing good things or bad things. We make a choice, and a lot of that is informed by the circumstances we grew up in. And the world of this play is a world in which if you want to survive, you’ve got to be an anglerfish, you have to lure small prey in and eat them.
So Drew uses an archetype, but he builds on it. There could be a version of Del that’s dumb or mean-spirited. But Drew has given Del so much heart. He’s a real human in a complicated situation. So it’s very specific and unique, but it is drawing on that archetype.
And I really love the journey with Clare. She could have just been an archetypical ingenue, but Drew gives her so much power – and that turn at the end!
The play’s got echoes of Jean-Luc Godard’s new wave classic Breathless. How does that affect your understanding of it?
Definitely in the central relationship between Jean Seberg and Jean-Paul Belmondo. You know, film noir is notorious for having unlikable protagonists. I just watched Nightcrawler the other night, and I couldn’t stop watching because those characters are also just trying to survive in a terrible way. And Del is just like that: Drew grew that character from Belmondo’s. I grew up watching Humphrey Bogart and his gangster movies, and those were such an important part of that character’s identity.
The Jean Seberg character is this amazing human being with an incredible life and you’re like, Why is she with him? But as Paula Abdul said, “opposites attract.” So I think the central relationship between Clare and Del parallels those two.
I also think the works are alike in the way that French New Wave often focused on people of no consequence. You know, Shakespeare talked about kings, and French New Wave talked about us.
Click rehearsal. Photo by Clara Zwirble.
Perhaps that’s part of why Drew made the choice to set the play in three phone booths.
Look, I have not stopped talking about these phones! What magical things they are, right? I’m old enough to remember using pay phone booths. You walk into them, you shut the door. And you feel for a moment like it’s private. Because, at least in my day, the phone booths went all the way down to the ground and the booth actually sealed. It smelled, it seemed like your phone was always a little sticky, and there was gum and all kinds of graffiti and little pornography stickers all over. But it felt private. So you could have this private conversation. And my God, you know how many desperate life-changing phone calls have happened in a phone booth? I love you, I want to come home.
But phone booths are transparent. Your body is on full display, especially at night, when the phone booths are lit up and everything else is a little darker. I’ve had such a great time interrogating these spaces, because of that wonderful confluence of private and public space. They’re so cool. And I should say our designers have done an incredible job.
Then it becomes not a play about just talking, but it also becomes about bodies. Yes, I can be having a conversation with you. But I can also be tap dancing, I can be eating dinner or painting. Our bodies can be private. So someone could be professing their love to someone else over the phone, but their body could be completely disinterested, filing their nails, flipping through their phone. So, in Click, you have three people deep in a personal conversation, but they can’t read each other’s bodies. I thought it was brilliant, how Drew did this, I was so excited about that.
Also, the phone booths work dramaturgically because the play’s not set in a time or a place. It kind of feels like now, but because the characters are in phone booths, it also feels like New York or the ‘70s, ‘80s, or ‘90s, which was a little grittier, more rough hewn. We didn’t want to really do a period piece – ‘70s, New York – but we did want to evoke a world like that, when you really needed to be a survivalist. You had to hustle. And just putting in those phone booths did that.
Last but far from least: Tell me about the casting process.
Drew and I had a lot of conversations about who these characters were. We were both interested in personalities and dynamic rather than type, and two of the actors in the show,Saman and Mohammad, are former students of mine, one from Fordham, and one from NYU. I’ve worked with them before, and I knew not only were they hungry for this kind of work, but they were also really, really skilled at it. And the third actor, Shuga, was someone we discovered through the audition process. She came in with an audition piece that knocked our socks off. But all casting for me is about the chemistry in the room, and we have chemistry and skill. The rehearsals have been a green light. It’s just a joy to be in a room with these three. Honestly, if I weren’t directing the show, I would be so excited just to see it.
Click is in performance Aug. 30 through Sept. 8 at The Tank, 512 W. 36th St.
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