In Dido of Idaho, playwright Abby Rosebrock challenges her main character, Nora, and audiences to change the stories we tell ourselves, by framing Nora’s tale in a story many of us know so well: the Myth of Dido & Aeneas (wherein the Queen of Carthage falls desperately and tragically in love with the Trojan hero Aeneas).
Abby is a Brooklyn-based writer and actress from South Carolina. Her work has been commissioned, developed and produced throughout New York City and across the country. Other full-length works include Wilma, Blue Ridge, Singles in Agriculture, Monks Corner and Ruby the Freak in the Woods. Abigail Deser directs the West Coast premiere of Dido of Idaho, produced by The Echo Theater Company. Dido of Idaho is a dark comedy about “the lengths to which a woman might go for the love of a good man.”
I wrote to Abby about the production to learn more about her process, the inspiration of the Grecian story of Dido and Aeneas, and balancing the weight of economic inequities with humor and grief.
Carolina Xique: What inspired you to write this piece and how has it grown since its inception?
Abby Rosebrock
Abby Rosebrock: Recently, I read a piece on the filmmaker Catherine Breillat that said she’s exploring the way heterosexuality deranges women. I was like “Damn, well said.”
That’s kind of exactly what I was trying to do with Dido of Idaho, though in a completely different mode, when I wrote it. But there were a million other motives and inspirations. I’d had a long-standing desire to work with the Dido myth, which had been haunting me since I first came across [Henry] Purcell’s music in high school and Virgil’s poem in college.
Recurring dreams I was having about my mother found their way into the play, too. And another impetus was the desire to write some wild female leads that were funnier than I’d seen before. As far as the piece’s growth, I think the story has gotten sharper over the years. Seeing it come to life in different regions and contexts has helped me zero in on what’s essential in the story and prune away the rest.
Alana Deitze and Joby Earle – Photo by Makela Yepez Photography
Carolina: You say that you wanted to “write about a woman who feels hopeless of ever being loved, and to imagine a way out of that for her.” How have the references to the elements of the story of Dido & Aeneas brought this piece to life?
Abby: I love the portrayals of Dido in both Purcell and Virgil. They’re gorgeously crafted and I think largely very empathetic. Of course, in those versions, Dido is destroyed, and I wanted to write a story about a woman who survives. But those works very much inform the play; Purcell’s music and narrative elements from Virgil are woven into the script. The myth has literally determined the course of Nora’s life, insofar as she’s a musicologist who studies the opera for her livelihood.
She’s also living out a narrative of abandonment and annihilation in her romantic relationship. So it’s a play about how painful it is to be trapped inside of a compelling but ultimately destructive story about oneself. I think everyone struggles with that at some point or another. How do you break out of some terrible intoxicating pattern and start creating a life you love?
Nicole DuPort and Alana Dietze – Photo by Makela Yepez Photography
Carolina: What has the rehearsal process been like and how have your thoughts about the play evolved?
Abby: It started with a Zoom reading that was instrumental in helping me evolve the script. I feel I have a more objective relationship to the story and characters than I’ve ever had. And I’ve loved being in conversation with this team across the time zones.
Carolina: How has it been, balancing the hilarity and the weight of the themes you’re dealing with?
Abby: It was a doozy to write. I’d be confronting memories that brought up deep grief, and then I’d try to crack myself up with jokes to snap out of it. So the script has this quality of vacillating between darkness and delight. Hopefully that makes for a fun and rewarding creative process, even though it demands a lot from everyone.
Carolina: And why this play today, right now?
Julie Dretzin and Elissa Middleton – Photo by Makela Yepez Photography
Abby: There’s an economic context to the play that often escapes notice but that shapes everyone’s actions. The only person in the play with a stable income is Michael, a tenured professor at a university. His wife and his lover are both pathologically attached to him because they see him as a source of security—not just emotional but material security. Nora’s brilliant and has a job but her life is especially precarious; Michael’s wife, Crystal, a teacher who desperately wants a kid, wouldn’t have the funds to raise children on her own. And her mother is ill, so medical bills loom over the story. These characters long for a partner to the point of self-destruction because the future for a broke single woman in America is so bleak.
If there’s one timely argument I hope people take away, it’s that economic inequality brings out everyone’s worst instincts and creates immense suffering. Nora triumphs insofar as she becomes a person who can see this economy for what it is and stand for something different.
“Dido of Idaho” plays Fridays and Saturdays at 8 p.m.; Sundays at 4 p.m.; and Mondays at 8 p.m. through August 26 at Atwater Village Theatre, located at 3269 Casitas Ave in Los Angeles, CA 90039.. All Monday night performances are pay-what-you-want. For more information and to purchase tickets, call (747) 350-8066 or go to www.EchoTheaterCompany.com.
Know a female or FPI-friendly theater, company or artist? Contact us at [email protected] & check out The FPI Files for more stories.
You’re driving to Los Angeles on the 101 North Freeway. For most tourists and incoming residents, this drive is the dream: seeing the famous buildings of the LA skyline, zipping under the 10 Freeway overpass, and seeing the light opening up to the concrete jungle of Downtown. With its often-sunny afternoons and the undeniable scent of affluence (or is it the smog?), an updated Carrie Bradshaw could happily look forward to a very West Coast version of Sex and the City.
Except, when you exit in Arcadia, or drive down Glendale Boulevard, or pass through Echo Park, the same disturbing scene of tent cities overwhelms sidewalks and underpasses. In the safe confines of your car, you can’t help but notice how the homelessness crisis has become synonymous with the city itself. And it feels like there’s nothing any policeman or city official is doing to stop it. So you ask yourself, What can I do?
This is the same question Clare of Assisi asks herself in Echo Theater Company’s production of Poor Clare. We see her journey from being a well-known socialite, to asking a man named Francis about how she can change her ways to be of service to the poor. LAFPI sat down with director Alana Dietze (Dry Land and The Wolves at the Echo), and playwright Chiara Atik (Bump, Women and HBO’s “Girls”) to talk about the inspiration for Poor Clare and how it relates to living in Los Angeles, today.
LAFPI: What did you think when you read Poor Clare and what inspired you to direct it, Alana?
Alana Dietze
Alana Dietze: I thought it was extraordinarily funny; that was my very first impression of it. It made me cry, laughing. I was also profoundly moved by the ending, which I don’t want to say too much about. Echo always has a post-reading conversation about material, so as we were talking amongst ourselves, I found myself getting very passionate about it. So that was my first clue that maybe I wanted to direct it.
It’s an allegory for homelessness and wealth inequality in modern day using the framework of the lives of Clare of Assisi and Francis of Assisi and I thought it was such a smart way of looking at this huge problem that we have all over the world – but especially in Los Angeles – that keeps growing and feels so out of control. I thought this play profoundly captured a lot of the feelings that I’ve had about it: the anxieties, fears, shame, feeling like I want to help more, but not being able to help. I thought that was a really valuable thing to put onstage.
LAFPI:Why Los Angeles? Why now? Being that it’s set in Italy in medieval times, the story couldn’t be further away from LA, present day.
Chiara Atik: That’s funny. I was about to say that when I wrote the first draft and started sending it out, I included two pictures to set tone, and one is of, um…
Chiara Atik
Alana: Skid Row.
Chiara: Yeah. One is of Skid Row in Los Angeles, and the other is a Renaissance portrait. I live in New York and was living there at the time [of writing the piece], but I had been spending a lot of time out here and homelessness made a very big impression on me. More so than it does in New York because homelessness in New York is ingrained in the fabric of the city; it doesn’t feel like something new, it feels like something that’s always been there. You just go about your commute and you have to put on blinders, to a certain extent, to not have your heart break at every single moment of every day.
But I’ve come to LA periodically for years and I sort of started to notice it in a way that I hadn’t. I started reading up about this problem that seems to be growing bigger and bigger. It made an impression on me: to be on the freeway and to see every overpass and underpass be covered with tents. It’s that juxtaposition of being hermetically sealed in your car while driving past all of these tent cities. So I think, in that sense, LA’s current situation of how people are grappling with it gave me an inspiration in the play. Also, you get the sense that it’s a growing problem that the characters of the play are dealing with.
LAFPI:And that’s very LA.
Alana: Yes!
Chiara: Another thing that I think is interesting in terms of New York versus LA: in New York, because you’re always walking around or on the subway, the different populations and economic levels actually have to deal with each other and interact. You’re sitting on the subway and people come up to you and you have to make the decision, “Okay, am I going to give a dollar or pretend not to see this person”; you can’t quite escape it. But in LA, because of the car culture, there’s an extra distance. It’s something that you see and clock, but don’t have to contend with person-to-person.
Alana: Also, there’s the way that the city seems to be dealing with the problem. I mean, “dealing with the problem,” in quotes, because it doesn’t really seem like they are. I’m not a political expert, I don’t know everything about this issue, but I lived in Echo Park for a really long time, and that was an area specifically where, as the homelessness crisis grew, huge new tent cities would pop up. I would turn a corner and there would be a whole slew of tents that weren’t there the week before. And then a week later, they’d all be gone. It felt to me like the cops were coming through and just moving people along which does nothing to ultimately solve the problem or help anyone. I guess they think they’re helping the residents? But even then, people are just going to come back. There’s nowhere for anyone to go.
LAFPI:Moving people along as a solution – it’s that class difference, right? They’re placing importance on people who are paying to stay there, instead of those who don’t live anywhere, and telling them to take their problems somewhere else.
Alana: And the problem is, where would they go?
Jordan Hull, Kari Lee Cartwright and Martica De Cardenas – Photo by Cooper Bates
LAFPI:Following up on that, Chiara, how did you come up with the concept for Poor Clare?
Chiara: I always knew the story of St. Clare. I found myself in recent years having so many conversations with people where we’d sort of bemoan the state of the world: “Isn’t horrible about the refugee crisis, isn’t it horrible about homelessness,” and this or that. But then I would go home, turn on the TV, and forget about these things. And the ability to worry and empathize but then go home and turn that off and forget about it is such a privilege. I was thinking about the fact that I feel bad about this stuff, but I’m not, like, quitting my job and quitting my life to go out and help.
The story of St. Clare, the real girl, who really did completely change her entire life, is such a radical story. It’s certainly not something that I’m capable of – that most people aren’t capable of – but I was interested in exploring the idea of somebody who really goes so far. And I’m not suggesting that as a solution or saying it’s what we should all be doing. I think that’s why Clare is a saint and most people aren’t. But it’s that journey of someone becoming so radicalized to do something, to take action in whatever way they can… I really underestimated how many people didn’t know of her.
Alana: I didn’t know who she was when I read the play. I knew that there was a St. Francis, but I didn’t really know anything about him.
LAFPI:So with this play, what do you hope that audiences learn about St. Clare of Assisi?
Chiara: That she existed. I think her story is cool and relatable. And what we know about her historically is interesting. She was 18, super rich, had a great life, and gave all of that up to take vows of poverty to try to do good in the world. I think that’s a crazy impressive story. That’s like a Kardashian doing that or something. And this is 800 years ago. A girl, definitely braver than I am right now, did that. I hope people will be interested in her story, her conviction, her action at such a young age. She was just a teenager. It’s like if Khloe was, like, “Alright, I’m giving all of this up!”
Jordan Hull and Ann Noble – Photo by Cooper Bates
LAFPI: I still feel like if Khloe did that, for the most part, people wouldn’t initially believe her. Compared to men, I think someone like a Kardashian might be treated differently.
Chiara: I think it’s hard for women, especially young women, to be taken seriously when they decide to do something intensely. If you watch the play, Francis raises his eyebrows, but there’s less at stake for him to go find a religious order. But for her – for a girl to do what he’s doing – the stakes are a lot higher.
LAFPI:Are there any other ways differences in sex and gender function specifically in the play? I noticed in the cast that there are 2 men and the rest are women.
Alana: That was something else that I really love about the play. I wouldn’t say that it’s primarily about gender, but like Chiara said, there are different stakes for Clare than Francis as she goes on this journey, and there are really interesting moments where Francis lets her know that things will be different for her. And those moments help drive her conviction to commit to her beliefs. She has to be more convicted than he is, because it’s harder for her to do what she does.
LAFPI:How much of the play is fact? How much is fiction?
Alana: This comes back to the earlier question of why Los Angeles. The language is all modern day, and it feels like the language of Angelenos. That’s part of what attracted me to it, because I thought, “Oh, these people talk like me.” So in that respect, it’s totally fictional. I don’t know how much really is fact?
Chiara: Definitely little bits from St. Francis’s life trajectory. We knew that Clare and St. Francis knew each other and she really was inspired by him to do this thing. But we, of course, have no idea what their conversations were like or the nature of their relationship, so all of that is fiction.
Jordan Hull and Michael Sturgis – Photo by Cooper Bates
LAFPI:What questions would you like audiences to be asking by the end of this play? Are there questions women should be asking?
Alana: It feels to me like it’s about highlighting and focusing in on this push-and-pull, this question about what do we do to help? Can we help? Is there such a thing as help? What do you do when you become aware of your own privilege? I feel this juxtaposition of a desire to be moral, to be good, to help other people, to do something worthwhile and meaningful… in contrast with the fact that what Clare does may or may not help anyone. But it’s the thing she must do. To me that’s what’s most interesting and relatable about the play. I hope that the play will help people think about that question for themselves and maybe make a choice.
Chiara: In terms of women specifically, Clare, throughout the play, drastically alters her appearance and goes from caring very much about how she looks to forsaking that along with her wealth and status. That’s something I admire in her character. I almost can’t imagine caring about something so much that I would be, like, “Fuck what I look like.”
LAFPI:And now we live in this world where everything is appearance-based, whether online or in-person. Doing what Clare did is like someone completely going off the radar. Which you don’t see a lot of anymore.
Chiara: Yeah, and I’m not saying that it’s necessary to do in the modern world. But on the other hand, you see her judged for what she looks like throughout the play. It’s interesting to see what it means to her to, like you said, go off the radar: “I’m not giving you this anymore. I’m not presenting like this anymore.”
LAFPI: Which leaves us with the question of whether anyone has a solution for the seemingly-uncontrollable homelessness crisis right now.
Chiara: The play definitely doesn’t.
LAFPI: But it’s good to have the wheels turning!
This interview was conducted in March, 2020 before Poor Clare’s original opening, with dates modified in this version.
“Poor Clare” at Echo Theater Company runs through November 29th. Ticket and information at echotheatercompany.com.
Know a female or FPI-friendly theater, company or artist? Contact us at [email protected] & check out The FPI Files for more stories.
Los Angeles Female Playwrights Initiative is a sponsored project of Fractured Atlas, a non‐profit arts service organization. Contributions for the charitable purposes of LAFPI must be made payable to “Fractured Atlas” only and are tax‐deductible to the extent permitted by law.
