Images: Dan Froot & Company (all photos by Bailey Holiver)
Arms and the Man
Dan Froot on Turning Friction into True Fiction
By Ursula Youd
Dan Froot & Company (photo by Bailey Holiver)
This article is part of the Stage Raw/Unusual Suspects Youth Journalism Fellowship
Recently, devisor-actor Dan Froot’s performance, Arms Around America, was staged at UCLA’s Nimoy Theater.
In his 75-minute show, Froot has a distinct way of conducting a performance and creating new perspectives for the audience. Just through watching the performance, I was able to learn about Froot and his dedication to documentary storytelling even before I spoke with him.
Arms Around America is a distinct compilation of six true stories that depict gun usage in America. He conducted 10 hour-long interviews to compile the performance. (It was originally produced as a radio play.)
Dan Froot & Company creates theater pieces, podcasts, and community gatherings that foster dialogue around pressing social questions.
Dan Froot (photo by Bailey Holiver)
Stage Raw: What sparked this play or this performance?
Dan Froot: What sparked it was that in our previous production, which was called PANG, the process was similar. We would do book-length oral histories of families around the country, but these were families that were living with food insecurity. And in each case, it became evident that food insecurity was really entangled in other sets of circumstances for each family. So, for instance, for the family in Los Angeles, it was housing insecurity. For a family in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, it was immigration bias. And in Miami, it was gun violence and food insecurity. And we were performing PANG in Miami in early 2018. And we were experimenting with the kitchen table, which was part of Arms Around America as well. And we felt like we were coming to a kind of format with the kitchen table that was both performance and community forum, and we were really excited about that. And so we were wondering, you know, what? What might be next? We had been doing work with people living with food insecurity for a long time at that point and we were just looking for what might be the next sort of topic we would take on. And as we were closing the show in Miami, 40 miles up the road, 37 people were shot at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland. And so we turned to each other and said, “Okay, this is it.” And so that was the initial spark that did it for us, as well as having done that play that looked at the intersection of gun violence and food insecurity.
The first thing you need to do when you’re listening to people on this topic is to find your common ground, your highest common ground.
SR: What made you want to incorporate sound effects into the play along with a live band?
DF: Yeah. Well, first and foremost, it’s really fun. I like doing that. I have a background as a musician, a jazz saxophonist and composer. So I’m always looking, even as a writer, I’m looking for what’s the rhythm, what’s the tonal profile here, you know, what’s the tempo? I’m thinking of it musically. And I really wanted to treat all parts of the production as a score with the sound effects and the actors doing their dialog. So my doing sound effects is just a small part of that. But I got to participate in some way. And I also think that one of the things I love about this form of radio theater and doing live sound effects, in particular, is that what you see and what you hear are different. There’s a gap between what you see and what you hear, and that gap has to be filled by the audience’s imagination. So if you’re doing your job, then the audience has to do their job, because otherwise they won’t be able to put it together. So they have to actively understand. Try to imagine that when I’m working with a socket wrench and the dialog is about manipulating a revolver, that the sound that they’re hearing from the socket wrench is the spinning barrel of the revolver and the clicking of the of the hammer and all of that kind of thing. So it allows the audience to do that work themselves and to be in an empathic relationship to what we’re doing.
SR How was it going through this process of performing and writing Arms Around America? Did you change your views or values or did the experience just make you think differently?
DF: I’m very much afraid of guns myself. And in part of the research for this work, I learned to shoot. And I liked it so much that I hate it. It’s so much power in your hand that it’s overwhelming to me. So that’s one thing, but I have come to understand that guns are not just something that shoots for a lot of people. For a lot of people, it’s their family heirlooms.
SR: How do you stay focused? And I mean, you work with such heavy topics and I just want to know, how do you keep going?
Dan Froot & Company (Photo by Bailey Holiver)
DF: [The company], we really are like a family, very much in the rehearsal studio. And that carries on to the stage. And I’m really glad that that’s legible. We love each other, and we love being with each other. And we get mad at each other, and we work it out. We are a family, you know, in a lot of ways, a chosen family. That is really what keeps me going. They’re incredible, incredible people.
I’ve had a lot of really great collaborators and situations. It’s ecstatic for me. So even when I’m having a really hard timetrying to integrate the feedback from the previous rehearsal into the next draft of the script, I’m looking forward to the next rehearsal. And my friends in the company keep me accountable. You know, if I don’t have anything new for them, they’re going to ask me why. And if I haven’t sort of tried to approach the kinds of critical feedback that were given last time, they’re going to ask me why. So I want to do this for all of us. Yeah. Enough said.
