Building Character: Patti Murin and Josh Segarra

By MARK BLANKENSHIP

Welcome to Building Character, TDF Stages’ ongoing series about actors and how they create their roles

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But there’s heart beneath the humor. Lysistrata Jones (Patti Murin) convinces her fellow cheerleaders to stop sleeping with their basketball-team boyfriends until they finally win a game, which drives the boys crazy.  That’s a breezy premise, but eventually, the characters realize their attitudes affect more than a basketball season.  By accepting failure on the court or by forcing everyone to do what they say, these kids are short-circuiting their entire lives.

The show never gets “serious,” but these ideas give it a little substance, a little humanity. They also give the actors an enormous challenge. How do they balance the rapid-fire comedy with the gentler moments?

Partly, they trust Beane, who’s known for smartly comic shows like Xanadu and The Little Dog Laughed.

At first, this idea startled Josh Segarra, who plays Lyssie’s boyfriend Mick. “I want everything to be realistic and heartfelt and come out of my stomach,” he says. “It took Doug to say, ‘Josh, I get it. But stop doing that. Sometimes, you just have to say the words.’ And he’s right. If you’re not hitting his exact words and punctuation, it won’t land.”

They’ve discovered that to make the tender moments click, they have to play them small. Murin says, “It’s so easy when you get in a bigger space to say, ‘I’ll just gesture bigger, and I’ll talk louder, and I’ll make bigger faces!’ Especially for us. We really like to make faces in this show. But instead of falling to that, it helps to remember just to look at each other and play the scene and sing the song. To stay truthful. If you stay truthful, you can reach anybody.”

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Lysistrata Jones is in previews. It officially opens on December 14

Mark Blankenship is TDF’s online content editor