Laughing Through the Pain

Playwright, screenwriter, and film/television director Leslye Headland and theatre director Trip Cullman were strangers when they were first paired in 2010 for the NYC premiere of Leslye’s play Bachelorette. Now, 13 years and four major collaborations later, their working relationship has blossomed into an artistic marriage where Trip is Leslye’s self-proclaimed “theatre husband.”

Berkeley Rep staff sat down with the power duo to find out what makes their partnership work and discuss the inspiration and approach behind bringing this dark comedy to the stage and the importance of the great American family drama.

Below are highlights from the conversation:

LESLYE ON THE PLAY’S INSPIRATION

The inspiration is my family. I love them very much, and I wrote the play to work out a lot of the things that we didn’t ever get a chance to talk about. I just felt like there were so many things I wanted to say in the moment, but I didn’t know how to. And so, I wrote them many years later.

My family was a very musical family. All my siblings and I would play instruments and sing together. I liked the idea of a family drama that was orchestrated and that the dialogue would become like a piece of music that had to be conducted in a way that felt chaotic but was very planned in its execution. So, it’s a difficult play to do, but I think when it’s done right, you get a sense of really being a fly on the wall of what a family gathering is like.

LESLYE ON WORKING WITH TRIP

When I was first asked who my dream director would be back in 2010 for my production of Bachelorette, I said Trip Cullman because I really admired his work, and I felt like we would make a good match, and I was right. I think our sensibilities are just so similar. I write plays where everything starts out put together and then slowly the entire thing falls apart, whether it’s a hotel being trashed, or an office space being broken down by a tap dance. Trip is great at staging controlled chaos, so our strengths complement each other.

TRIP AND LESLYE ON THE PLAY’S TONE

TC: I think about this play as a kind of transgressive iteration of the great American family drama. Like, if you look at Long Day’s Journey into Night, Death of a Salesman, August: Osage County, or A Raisin in the Sun, this play is the 2023 version of that tradition.

LH: It’s also a bit of a send up of those plays. There’s a lot of tropes that we dismantle either because everything descends into chaos or because the characters are left of center. No one is really fighting for this family in the same way you see in those other plays.

TC: The characters are put into a cycle of emotions that range from ecstasy to utter despair, and the play requires the audience to go through a kind of emotional crucible. It is wildly funny, upsetting, tender, and moving. I’m thinking that audiences will have barely recovered from their own Christmas experiences with their family and might see a lot of their own dynamics being played out.

LESLYE AND TRIP ON THE PLAY’S COMEDY

LH: My experience over and over has been that with all my work no matter how serious I try to be, everyone always ends up laughing. So, I do think that I would characterize Cult of Love as a comedy. I would say it’s a comedy about dark subject matter.

TC: The comedy in Leslye’s work doesn’t come from zingers and one-liners, ever. The comedy is my favorite kind of comedy, which is that it comes from pain. It’s situational and characterological. So much of what is funny in the play is about the dynamics between the characters and inside of the family; there is very little filter.

LESLYE ON RELIGION AND QUEERNESS

In Cult of Love, I really wanted to take a look at the double meaning of pride. One, as a gay woman, how I’ve been able to find my own sense of pride being raised within a religious family and how you have to sort of stand up for yourself with the people that were put in charge of loving you. Two, the working definition that I used for the play was that if you’re suffering from the sin of pride, it’s because you think that you’re right. And I think everyone in the play thinks they’re right, and that’s sort of the problem. They can’t see past their own experiences within the family.

I feel conflicted having been raised in a Christian home, specifically Catholic, and then when I was older, nondenominational Christianity. The type of environment that I grew up in and the type of events that I took part in, whether it was youth group or Young Life retreats, a lot of it is buffered with the word “love.” God loves you; Jesus loves you; we love you, but then there’s this underlying weirdness of not accepting people. It’s like, we love you, but we don’t accept you. We love you, but we don’t want to talk about the truth of a situation or things that might be a little bit more complicated.

The tenet of Christianity that I believe in and still hold dear in my heart and was important for me to express in the play is that I know there is love there, and I know that people are doing the best they can, but as with all my plays, sometimes people’s best isn’t that great.

LESYLE ON WRITING FOR STAGE VS SCREEN

I heard this quote once that in a play the audience is wondering what’s happening now, and in a film, they’re wondering what’s happening next. When the audience is physically in the theatre, they’re so immersed in the present moment. Whereas in television and film, the audience can get ahead of the action in a weird way, even if it’s by a millisecond. They register things in a safe cocoon place where they digest it very quickly, and therefore it takes more to shock them or get them to laugh. They don’t have their peers to rely on in terms of how to react to something. You can inflict more daring or defiant moments on a theatre audience. They really don’t have the ability to disconnect from what’s happening. I also think that the musical moments in this show would be almost impossible to recreate in film and television. You could do it, of course, but there’s nothing like live music. You are affected by it so much more viscerally than, you know, watching it on your phone.