Barrett Foa: Playing Around in The Drunken City

About the author:
Barrett Foa modestly calls himself “Mr. Quirky Broadway Musical,” but the sunny strawberry blond actor has created a varied career since graduating from the University of Michigan's famed musical theater program. This native New Yorker and alum of the posh Dalton School has mixed it up since playing Jesus in a 2000 off-Broadway production of Godspell that also featured Shoshana Bean, Leslie Kritzer, Capathia Jenkins and more. The “quirky” label applies to Foa's long runs in Avenue Q and The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee, but he has also been featured in productions of Much Ado About Nothing, Camelot, and Charles Busch's The Lady in Question OK, that's quirky. Currently, Foa is part of a talented young ensemble in Adam Bock's new comedy The Drunken City at Playwrights Horizons. As a suburban dentist who serves at the play's voice of reason, Foa referees the rowdy goings-on when two groups of inebriated friends meet outside a bar in the city—and end up questioning every aspect of their lives. Broadway.com asked Foa to describe the development of the newest work by an in-demand young playwright.

My talent-crush began on a warm Wednesday afternoon in the autumn of 2006.

It was intermission of a not-so-great comedy and I was standing outside the theater getting some much needed fresh air. That's when I met him. Adam Bock. He looked to me like the guy from the Doonesbury comic strips. “Wait, you're Barrett Foa?” he said. “You're about to get a call from Playwrights Horizons to be in a workshop of a new play I wrote called The Drunken City.”

I figured he had the wrong Barrett Foa.

I had just come off a two-and-a-half-year stint at that dirty puppet show, Avenue Q, and was just starting my fifth month playing an 11-year-old space cadet in The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee. I was Mr. Quirky Broadway Musical. Suddenly a fancy pants not-for-profit theater like Playwrights Horizons wants me to be on the ground floor of a new six-character straight play by red-hot playwright, Adam Bock? Um, OK. Hi.

He asked me my sign. Blink. Blink.

I picked up the script and kinda skimmed it on the subway. Uh oh. It seemed so stylized. The page was riddled with huhs, whats, ohs and mumbles. No one seemed to be saying anything. What's more, the characters seemed kind of annoying: Three B&T girls squealing about their engagement rings, two inebriated guys stumbling around debating who had more to drink. One of them me seemed to be tap dancing for no particular reason. My talent-crush was waning. What was this thing?

Well, we got to the first read-through, and when I heard the script out loud, I soon realized what this was. This was genius. This was not stylized, this was naturalistic. This was how people talk. This was funny not because we were spouting clever Neil Simon-esque one-liners, but because the situations these six characters found themselves in were so preposterously real and outlandishly relatable that it made us all go “Oh, I do that!” and burst out laughing. This was touching because we expect so little from these potentially shallow, inarticulate, drunk characters, that when we realize that their emotions and relationships run deep, it rocks us so hard that we're suddenly crying. Waning? My talent-crush was full-on confirmed. Smirk.

Needless to say, Playwrights Horizons also saw meaning behind Adam's deceptively light play, and our one week workshop six scripts on music stands was to be realized as a full production complete with a crazy tilting set come March/April 2008. Now all I had to do was wait a year and a half to see this amazingness realized! I finished out Spelling Bee, I hit high notes and played love scenes as Frederic in Pirates! at Paper Mill, I even got to be in a Charles Busch play with Charles Busch out in Sag Harbor. But all I could think about was getting to create and originate Eddie, the tap dancing dentist, in The Drunken City.

February 2008 finally rolled around, and it was time for rehearsals. The cast of six was brilliance personified, helmed by our fearless leader, Trip Cullman. Trip trusted us and we trusted him. It was one of the most natural and stress-free rehearsal processes I've had the pleasure of working on.

Adam, too, was present at every rehearsal and offered invaluable insight on the meaning behind each “well” and “OK.” He is, hands down, the most brilliant observer of real human behavior I've ever worked with. He not only understands what we humans do and why, but he can articulate it and write that behavior down as words in a script. Without giving a line reading, Adam would break down an “oh” and deconstruct a “huh” so that every word of that script was thought out, justified and specific. And because Adam likes to repeat words and sounds, his ear will notice the tiniest extra syllable throwing off the rhythm of a certain section, and cut it without pride or hesitation. Sigh.

But perhaps what I like best about Adam's writing is that he is the king of the Switcheroo. We are taught as actors to connect the dots—to make sure that the audience knows how our characters get from one thought to another. But as humans we don't convey our trains of thought least of all when we're hammered!. Ideas tend to be random and staccato. Adam helped us to find the “pops” and the “switches” in his language and the avoid “glides” between sections. Blush.

Similarly, any good conservatory or masters program teaches its students to differentiate a repeated word or phrase each time it is spoken. Adam encouraged us to throw all that out and speak our repeated words with the exact same intonation. We came to find that this translates loosely into comic gold. Swoon.

I could go on forever about all of Adam's amazingly quirky artistry to say nothing of the cast and all the creatives, but here's the point: Adam Bock is a genius and a weirdo, and everyone who encounters him and his work develops a hard-core talent crush. Come see our play, The Drunken City. It is funny and fun and silly and sad and new and deceptive and amazing. Come and get a talent-crush on a new playwright, but you'll have to get in line.

Oh, and…P.S. Adam, I'm a Virgo!