Lauren Weedman is naturally funny. Her humor is not forced, it's not faked, and it's only sometimes rehearsed ... like for the world premiere of her new one-woman show, No...You Shutup, commissioned by Boise Contemporary Theater and directed by her boyfriend, Jeff Weatherford.
Taking time from extensive rewrites, Weedman spoke with Boise Weekly about living up to the success she garnered with BUST, how difficult yet freeing it is to write a one-woman show and why her writing comes from a deeply personal perspective.
In BUST, Weedman portrays more than a dozen different characters as she recounts time spent volunteering in the Southern California prison system and dealing with the self-imposed prison of living and working in Hollywood.
BUST has been successful—it's still running, in fact—but was wildly so in Boise. The response she received from Boise audiences was shocking.
"We were worried in the beginning that Boise was going to be so conservative that they wouldn't like me. We didn't know anything about [Boise]," Weedman said. "Could I say 'f***'? Plus, BUST had a lot of non-white characters. Would they feel uncomfortable because they're aware that they're in such a white area? There's a lot of guilt about that."
Weedman realized that what she brings to the stage is something Boise audiences may not be used to but something she's sure they want.
"[With BUST,] Boiseans were incredibly hungry to shake it up. They were much more willing to laugh at things that were harder to laugh at. People here seemed to want to go with it and laugh. They were so appreciative."
Boise offered Weedman a degree of support that she's still coming to terms with.
"I read a blog while I was here. It was definitely by an older, conservative gentleman, and he said, 'Boy, she drops a lot of f-bombs,' but he still said good stuff about the show. That was amazing to me."
What Boise audiences saw in BUST wasn't a world premiere. Weedman had already performed it, and even with concerns she'd be facing ultra-conservative audiences, she knew the material worked. While Shutup doesn't deal with such controversial subject matter, it's still risky for her because it's new. The kind of new that has Weedman scrapping most of her original ideas for the play and overhauling it just days before opening night and the kind of risky that has her trying to present less autobiographical, personal material than she usually does.
Weedman, adopted herself, said she wanted to deal with the topic of adopting a baby. Her strategy was to travel the country, talking to her gay friends who were struggling to form families, and then write a piece made up of little vignettes of that sojourn. By the time she was scheduled to come to Boise to begin work, she hadn't visited any of them. Because she couldn't rely on the words of others to guide the direction of her writing, she'd left herself little choice but to turn her literary eye inward.
"A new piece is always petrifying. And what I f***ing hate about solo theater and what I also love about it is that it's all my fault, no matter what happens," Weedman said.
She hadn't been feeling great about Shutup because she was still trying to make it a piece about other people's lives and was trying too hard to be hilarious. It wasn't working.
"Up until last night, I was resisting telling a personal story. I know Boise thinks I'm funny; I do comedy. So, the first draft of it, I wrote like a big comedy wack-a-doodle. I did a run-through yesterday and was like, 'This is so irritating.' And I'm not telling a story," she said. "I do have something I want to tell, but it's about having a baby, and that seems like such a cheesy subject. Having a baby? Why not? Everybody does it. So I had to go into the issues of why not to have a baby."
Like deciding if she wants to have a baby, writing a play about it was not something Weedman was 100 percent ready for. "I did what I always end up doing," she said. "I think I want to do something outside of me, think that's smarter or makes it more accessible or won't make me seem so self-obsessed. But the bottom line is, I am."
Boise audiences will probably be OK with that. We're a little obsessed with her, too.
No...You Shutup runs Nov. 22 through Dec. 13. Previews are Nov. 19-21. For times, tickets and more information, visit bctheater.org or call 208-331-9224. Boise Contemporary Theater, 854 Fulton St.
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