ART & CULTURE
O n St age | By Karen Greco
Showstopper Artistic director Tony Estrella on The Gamm’s provocative new season There’s an alchemy to putting together a theater season and Tony Estrella, artistic director of The Gamm Theatre, is well attuned to that magic. “I think of seasons like a record album, where the songs are sequenced for a reason,” he says. “I want that same connection for the season, where the plays speak to each other. I want resonance for the subscriber, for us all to be in this collective headspace.” In the spacious Gamm lobby, it’s incredible to think that this established and thriving Warwick theater has its roots on the fringe. A group of artists who grew out of Trinity Rep founded Alias Stage, the precursor to The Gamm, which was structured as an intense artist collective. Bold and adventurous, they leaned into the intimacy between actor and audience. It was a production of Antony and Cleopatra in a garage on Elbow Street that put the fledgling company on the map. Fittingly, their season opener, Rajiv Joseph’s Describe the Night – which bundles 90
years of Russian history in one play – feels as audacious as doing Shakespeare in a car port. Estrella explains that the play was a last-minute addition to the season, one he didn’t think about until Russia invaded Ukraine. “It rang a bell in my head about this great play.” Estrella leans forward, his whole body kinetic as he describes the play. “It’s dealing with these characters like [Isaac] Babel and Putin, but what it’s really about is how we manufacture truth, politically, and the play posits a kind of conspiracy theory that is very attractive, but factually, as far as we know, untrue. So how do we draw the line between fiction and reality? It’s increasingly hard, right? What theater can do, what art can do, is help contextualize this.” The second play in their season, Lynn Nottage’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Sweat, was the pre-pandemic play that got away. A topical look at America’s economic decline through the lens of a community of blue-collar factory workers whose lives are ripped apart by
layoffs, it felt apropos for the birthplace of the Industrial Revolution. But The Gamm’s original request was declined, with the rights going to Trinity Rep. However, that production was curtailed by the pandemic. When it came time for The Gamm to plot out this year’s season, Estrella saw the rights to the play were back on the table, so he folded it into the season. “[Trinity Rep] has precedent, as they should; the playwright needs to get the biggest audience possible,” says Estrella. “But we’re fighting from this smaller theater perspective.” This means Estrella keeps his eye on original work from more farflung locales, particularly Great Britain. “Every morning, the first thing I do is read The Guardian theater section,” he says with a laugh. The second half of the season has that anglophile bent. Estrella considers The Faith Healer, by the Northern Irish dramatist Brian Friel, a sort of seasonal shift, moving from the topicality of Russia and fading factory
Photo by Peter Goldberg
Artistic director Tony Estrella in The Gamm’s 2021 production of It’s A Wonderful Life: A Live Radio Play, which returns for the holidays for their 2022/23 season
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ProvidenceOnline.com • August 2022
