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From Baked Goods to Broadway Productions: Shoreline Trio Tackles One of the Hottest Plays of the Season

One of Jana Shea’s first memories of Greg Nobile is hearing him play with his friends.

While sitting in her yard, she heard him in the yard next door tell a group of kids to get in line, then “you kneel,” and “you stand,” and “no! Not like that!” He then explained to his friends, in detail, how to do jazz hands. Shea remembers saying to her husband, “It sounds like a kid next door is producing a musical.”

And, in fact, he was.

“It was Anything Goes,” says Nobile. He was playing at a friend’s house, and he remembers the playscape in the backyard was the ocean liner and a hose provided water effects for the Cole Porter musical.

Along with Carly Callahan, we are talking in Shea’s backyard on Seaview Avenue in Branford on an almost unbearably hot Saturday morning in late July, eating blueberry muffins and sipping seltzer, sitting around a picnic table perched in the shade on a ledge overlooking Long Island Sound.

On Tuesday, Sept. 10, the three of them, as lead producers with Branford-based Seaview Productions, will celebrate the first preview of Slave Play, one of Broadway’s most highly anticipated, and highly controversial, productions. Opening night is scheduled for Sunday, Oct. 6.

During its sold-out, off-Broadway run, the play was dubbed by The New York Times theater critic as “the single most daring thing I’ve seen in theater in a long time.” The off-Broadway run, also a Seaview Productions’ production, created a huge buzz, ardent fans, and feverish press coverage. It also generated an online “Shutdown Slave Play” petition, which gathered more than 5,400 signatures, started by a woman who called it “one of the most disrespectful displays of anti-Black sentiment disguised as art.”

Indeed, if Slave Play can be characterized as a deep dive into racism, sexuality, psychology, black feminist and queer theory, and the trauma left in the wake of this country’s shameful history of slavery and colonialism, it’s also fair to say that it will leave some playgoers giddy and leave others with nitrogen narcosis.

Needless to say, it’s no Anything Goes.

When Greg Gives You Blueberries...

Nobile’s Seaview Productions came out of the gates hard with its first project, A Gentleman’s Guide to Love and Murder, which won four Tony Awards, including best musical, in 2014. Since then the company has been involved in a wide array of theatrical projects, from frothy musical comedies like Escape to Margaritaville (“It will knock your flip-flops off! This is what escapism is all about!—Entertainment Weekly) to Sea Wall / A Life, which focuses on death (“the writing is excellent...but this is no show to see on a first date”—Variety).

Slave Play is one of the trio’s first efforts at leading a show on Broadway, putting them in the most direct control and management of the show and all of the day-to-day and decision-making responsibilities, from picking the script to, if and when all goes well, paying off the investors at the end of the run.

The producers are the chief executive officers of what is essentially a multi-million dollar start-up.

So, why pick this play, which is both amazing and intensely controversial, as one of their first forays into lead producing? And what, exactly, does a producer do, and how do they do it as a team? By way of an answer, Callahan invites me to talk with them that Saturday morning at Shea’s house.

Callahan gets there first, just as the sun is approaching high noon on the most dreadfully hot day of the summer. Balancing a plate of blueberry muffins with one hand and her huge bag on her other shoulder, without breaking a sweat, she leads the way into Shea’s backyard.

Callahan’s day started at 7 a.m., when she made her first of two phone calls to associate producers in New York City. During the second phone call, via speaker phone, she started mixing the muffin batter. Her daughters Cate, 13, and Caroline, 11, woke up during the second phone call, and helped by pouring the batter into the muffin cups. The girls also helped by critiquing their mom’s conversation after she got off the phone, and giving her tips for her next phone conversation.

Callahan can stay and talk with us for a bit. Then, later that day she has two performances of Mamma Mia! at the Ivoryton, where she’ll play one of the supporting principal roles. Her first performance will be at 2 p.m. and the second at 8 p.m. In between she’ll do Seaview Productions-related work from the dressing room.

Nobile loves working with Callahan because they talk about a project one day and the next morning, at 4 a.m., he gets a Google doc with the details from Callahan. They make a good team. He goes to bed around 3 or 4 a.m. and she gets up at 3 or 4 a.m.

“Operators are always standing by to take your call,” she says.

As Nobile reaches for a blueberry muffin and takes his first bite, Callahan uses a blueberry muffin analogy to explain her working relationship with Nobile. Nobile is the blueberry collector, she declares, making motions like she is collecting berries.

“I do. I am,” Nobile says between bites. “I am a blueberry collector.”

“He is truly brilliant at collecting blueberries,” Callahan says. “And then he drops them all on a big Carrara countertop [she drops the imaginary berries on the imaginary marble countertop] and we have this brilliant idea, baked goods. I go, ‘OK, let’s make muffins,’ and I go to Julia [Dunetz, an associate producer at Seaview]: ‘We need three cups of flour, and baking soda, and so on.’”

Right now, the blueberry collector is busy eating the blueberry muffin.

“Mmmmm, Carly,” he says.

‘I Wept’

Nobile admits that, when it comes to Slave Play, the blueberry bin sat on his desk for a bit. The script was first offered to him by someone who was at the time the playwright’s boyfriend.

“His boyfriend’s play? No way,” says Nobile.

He put it in a pile on his desk.

And then someone else who read it told Nobile, “You’ve got to read it.” And then an agent called. “You’ve got to read it.”

It moved up in the pile, but just a bit.

And then one morning he was at a random breakfast and a random woman asked, “Have you read Slave Play?” He finally read it.

“I wept,” Nobile says. He called the agent and said, somewhat sheepishly, “I’m sure this is taken, but...”

The agent told him it was still available.

Shea read it.

“This is crazy,” she said to Nobile.

“Yeah, we’re going to do it,” he responded.

Callahan wanted to help. Knowing she was already dreadfully busy she thought she could “dip her toe in.”

“Cute thought,” Nobile says.

Before she knew it, Callahan was all in.

“I couldn’t help it,” she says.

Beautiful and Terrifying

Even before the reviews came out, some of the New York Theater Workshop performances started to sell out shortly after the play had its world premiere in November 2018. Nobile, tracking an array of data points for his different productions, was puzzled, but pleased. That meant it was spreading by word of mouth, by people who told their friends they had to go so they could talk about it.

Then the phone calls started coming in.

People loved it.

People hated it.

Then the reviews hit.

All the tickets sold out and the run was extended.

And then people became interested in the playwright, Jeremy O. Harris. Variety. Vogue. Vanity Fair. Madonna was interested. Other actors and actresses weighed in, declaring themselves fans.

“The dialogue around this play was something we had not seen before,” says Nobile.

He adds that the conversations—even the most difficult, damning conversations—felt necessary and urgent.

When the New York Theater Workshop run ended, the safe bet for Nobile, Shea, and Callahan would have been to “pat ourselves on the back and say, ‘We did a nice job’ and move on,” Nobile says.

Or you could double down?

“Totally,” Nobile says. “There was something about Jeremy and the conversation around his work that felt vital given this cultural and social moment. We felt like we had a responsibility to go as far and as wide as we could. There was a stickiness to it that we could not ignore. We had to succumb to it in the most beautiful and terrifying way.”

Our conversation pauses for a moment as we let that sink in.

“Muffin break!” Callahan cries.

A Comedy of Sorts

The “notes on style” at the beginning of the Slave Play script describe it as a “comedy of sorts” and direct the actors to “not work to make the audience comfortable with what they are witnessing at all.” There is this description from the press packet: “The old south lives on at the MacGregor plantation in the breeze, in the cotton fields..and in the crack of the whip. It’s an antebellum fever-dream, where fear and desire entwine in the looming shadow of the master’s house.”

For those who choose to see the play, it’s best to approach it having encountered no spoilers.

It is provocative. It is explosive. It’s about as far away as you can get from the likes of Anything Goes and Mamma Mia! and Escape to Margaritaville.

The three producers have an affection and appreciation for those frothy, predictable happy endings that allow us to park our brain by the door and just enjoy. And it’s clear they live to create the conditions that allow playwrights like Harris, a recent Yale grad, the opportunity to have their say in spaces that will create large conversations.

“This play is being produced in a large, commercial space that is usually commanded by older, usually white, usually male, artists,” Nobile says. “Playwrights tend to come to this space after they’ve done something else.”

He adds that sometimes producers can get stuck on auto-pilot, producing one safe bet after another. That’s a risk he doesn’t want to take.

“It’s our responsibility to fight auto-pilot every day and imagine the possibility of doing more,” he says.

Shea, who used to work at the phone company and is now a force for the arts on the shoreline and beyond, and Callahan, who in addition to being an actress is also an artistic entrepreneur based in Madison, agree.

“We have a vision. And we are worried,” Shea says. “We are worried that Broadway is broken. And we are worried that Broadway is broken in a way that we don’t appreciate...We need to bring different kinds of shows if we want to attract more than rich, white, older housewives. My issue was, why are there no new plays? And that’s because there is so much to fear about new productions.”

All three of them say that, in many ways, this is the play they have been waiting for.

In an interview in Variety, the playwright, Harris, said in a statement: “During my very short time being a professional writer, the world I thought I’d inhabit was one at odds with a commercial theatrical landscape; so to see that this play, Slave Play, that interrogates the traumas Americans have inherited from the legacy of chattel slavery and colonization, has a place in the canon of work that has made its way to Broadway is both exhilarating and humbling.”

Sure, it’s also risky. But the Seaview Productions trio is unanimous in this, that producing Slave Play, and plays like it, is a risk worth taking.

“Nobody doesn’t have an opinion on it,” Nobile says of the play, eyeing another blueberry muffin. “And it’s not our goal to have everyone like it. It’s our goal to have a conversation.”

He adds that, with the Broadway openings of Sea Wall / A Life in August and then Slave Play in September, he’s happy to have Branford as a place where he can come home. He looks at the house next door to Shea’s, the home of his childhood friend, Ryan Bloomquist. When they were 5 or 6, Nobile and Bloomquist started up the Lemonade Gang to raise money for a friend who was suffering from a disease, and over the years helped raised more than $100,000 for that. And then, when they were about 10, they launched their off-off-off-off Broadway production in that backyard. And, just the night before the day we are talking, he and Bloomquist took the stage at the Owenego in Branford to help out with yet another hometown initiative. “What’s so crazy to me is that we are sitting at this table just feet away from where we did Anything Goes,” Nobile says. “I’m 27 now. It was not that long ago to this particular moment.”

He looks out towards the water, and then back towards the backyard.

“Aren’t we lucky.”

To find out more about Slave Play and to buy tickets, visit slaveplaybroadway.com. To find out more about Sea Wall / A Life visit seawallalife.com. For Carly Callahan’s blueberry muffin recipe, visit zip06.com and search on the headline for this story.

Editor's Note: This article was udpated on Thursday, Aug. 1 to clarify information about opening night.