TDF Stages

As his first major Off-Broadway show opens, the freshly minted Obie winner is staying true to his indie theatre roots

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In-demand director Jack Serio usually starts a project by asking, "Just how little do we need to tell this play? What's the most essential version?" He has taken this approach with a series of acclaimed hyper-intimate productions in NYC, including On Set with Theda Bara, The Animal Kingdom and a haunting Uncle Vanya staged in a Manhattan loft for just 40 people a night. This spring, Serio is applying that same less-is-best philosophy to two world-premiere dramas: Samuel D. Hunter's Grangeville currently at Signature Theatre about a pair of estranged half-brothers who reconnect over their ailing mother, and Ken Urban's Danger and Opportunity at East Village Basement centering on a married gay couple whose relationship shifts when a female ex pops up. The stories are distinct, but they share themes of memory, reconnection and what Serio calls "the danger of certainty," along with a director committed to stripping away inessential material to tap into the soul of each play.

Serio has been rehearsing Grangeville for almost two months and he's directing in a much larger venue than he's used to: The theatre has almost 200 seats. Meanwhile, he's been working on Danger and Opportunity, which runs March 27 to April 17, for two years and is staging it in a cozy new venue that's a natural fit for his radically intimate aesthetic, which earned him an Obie Award earlier this month.

On a recent day off from Grangeville, he workshopped the latest draft of Danger and Opportunity with the three-person cast: Ryan Spahn, Juan Castano and Serio's frequent collaborator Julia Chan. Because the characters express deeply personal hopes and fears, playwright Ken Urban appreciates Serio's ability to make sure everyone feel secure. "The actors have to feel safe in exploring those vulnerable spaces," says Urban. "Jack does an amazing job letting them open up and find that intensity."

Serio likes how Danger and Opportunity challenges its characters' self-perceptions. Spahn and Castano play Christian and Ryan, a couple straddling both sides of 40. Serio says both men "feel certain about their sexuality" until Christian's high school girlfriend Margaret (Chan) reenters their lives. "Gay people sometimes have to fight very hard to have their existence acknowledged," Serio explains. "What does it mean for someone who fought to be gay to begin sleeping with a woman? Is that regressive or is that a kind of queer expansiveness?"

Serio admits Grangeville has been a fresh experience for him, between the new collaborators and the larger venue. But it's a challenge he actively sought out. "I would direct an e-mail that Sam wrote," he jokes. Serio became a fan in 2014 when he saw Hunter's play The Whale at Boston's SpeakEasy Stage. Later that year, in his first semester at NYU's Playwrights Horizons Theater School, Serio sat in on a tech rehearsal of Pocatello when the company put out a call for a student to be on book with changes. Still, he didn't know Hunter personally.

When Signature Theatre announced Grangeville last spring without a director attached, Serio seized the opportunity. "The short version is that I hunted him down and begged him to let me direct this," Serio says. Even just reading the synopsis, he felt a connection to the material. Serio has two young half-brothers, and the description of the show as "the stories we tell to make sense of our suffering and the complexity of forgiveness" resonated with him.

"Those themes were things that I was already exploring in my own work," Serio says. "Forgiveness is something I've come back to again and again." The blurb also hinted at the play's interest in moral grey areas. Serio has long been drawn to stories that focus on "messy, complicated people where the line between right and wrong isn't always clearly delineated."

After talking with Serio and watching some of his work, Hunter knew he had found his Grangeville director. "I saw two of Jack's shows before we started working together," Hunter says, "and I was really impressed with his ability to accomplish so much with so little—which is really in the spirit of the plays I've been writing." They also share an interest in "eschewing binary thinking and facile moral statements."

Grangeville was originally set to star Brendan Fraser, who won an Oscar for his performance in the film version of Hunter's play The Whale. Fraser's sudden departure posed a potential setback, but Hunter and Serio managed the last-minute change with remarkable agility. Veteran stage and screen actor Paul Sparks (Boardwalk Empire, House of Cards, Bug) now plays Jerry, who reaches out to his younger half-brother Arnold (Brian J. Smith) when their mother's health takes a turn for the worse. Sparks was cast the day before rehearsals began; as the actor quickly got a handle on the material, he made the play stronger. "Paul would paraphrase a line accidentally, and Sam and I would go, 'That's better that way,'" Serio says. "We really started to tailor things to Paul, who is so naturally funny and charismatic, which that part really needs."

As many of Off-Broadway's institutional nonprofits have leaned into commercial enhancement in recent years, minimalism has become rarer. Serio's restrained approach is unusual for a show at Signature, but it serves Grangeville well. Much of the play takes place over phone calls: Jerry still lives in Grangeville, Idaho, but his brother Arnold lives in the Netherlands with his husband. Serio says cutting props like phones and computers was "the first decision I made."

In rehearsal, Serio simplified the staging even further. Originally, during their initial phone call, Sparks and Smith stood downstage and faced the audience under bright lights. When that felt stale, Serio says, "I sent them out of the room. They went to opposite ends of the Signature and called each other, and Sam and I conferenced in. We just sat in the rehearsal room and listened, and it was much more compelling to not have access to either of them."

After that, he restaged that opening scene in blackness, with two disembodied voices reaching out from opposite sides of the theatre. Serio says darkness "does something to the quality of listening" and keeps the audience from jumping to conclusions about either character.

Serio realizes simplicity has risks—most notably, boredom. "If we don't pull it off, it's just two guys sitting there," he says, which is why he made sure the show's design enhances his minimalism. Sound designer Christopher Darbassie filters the performers' voices to mimic the quality of phone calls and video chats, and a deceptively simple set by the design collective dots absorbs every hint of light into its shadows. Their contributions helped Serio evoke a sense of intimacy in a traditional theatre space.

Serio says both plays share an interest in how "certainties sometimes make us feel good but are very rarely emotionally helpful." In Danger and Opportunity, the characters reckon with their presumptions about sexuality and the lives they can make. In Grangeville, the brothers begin to chip away at their fixed interpretations of their shared childhood. "By the end," says Serio, "they move an inch toward forgiveness. It's so hard just to move that inch, and that's my experience of the world as well."

These plays also deal with the onset of middle age and how we process our adolescence as adults. Serio is 28, but his work often focuses on older characters. He says that's not an accident: He values the wisdom of experienced artists. At NYU, the choreographer Dan Safer advised him to "always be the dumbest person in the room." That mantra inspired him to seek out mature collaborators, including Austin Pendleton, David Greenspan and David Cromer.

That said, Serio believes audiences of all ages will see aspects of themselves in these plays, but he does have a unique interest in older characters. "I think I'm always trying to get people to take me seriously," he admits. As a high school student in Boston, he ran a small theatre company and directed his peers in "more adult" plays like God of Carnage, Yasmina Reza's black comedy about a childish feud between parents. Serio says he wanted to "convince people that I had something to say," and it worked—his Boston Teen Acting Troupe was written up by The New York Times.

"I don't think of Jack as young, to be honest," says Urban. "He has an old soul and that also makes him a good collaborator."

Hunter agrees: "His work on Grangeville is truly exceptional, and I feel very proud that I've been able to give him his first major Off-Broadway show."

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