Cassie Beck Audio

Cassie Beck: The Humans is an American story about an average, blue-collar family trying to have a great Thanksgiving and everybody’s just trying to get through the meal. excerpt from The Humans RICHARD: I’ve been better for years, it’s why I’m comfortable talking about it... ERIK: You take medicine for that? BRIGID: Dad, that’s rude/ to ask RICHARD: It’s okay. ERIK: Sorry, hey, sorry, just...in our family we don’t, uh, we don’t have that kinda depression. AIMEE: Yeah, no we just have a lot of stoic sadness. Adam Kampe: Actress Cassie Beck currently stars in the role of Aimee Blake in the Tony Award-winning drama, The Humans, by Stephen Karam. Her character serves as the de facto Blake family referee, keeping the peace and injecting humor where and when necessary. Curiously, dramatic acting wasn’t her first love.  Music bridge Cassie Beck: I started off as a dancer. I always wanted to dance so when I was little I did Irish step dancing actually competitively for years and years and years and that was a big part of my life so that’s the performance bug, not necessarily the acting bug. And if you’ve seen “The Humans” you will see a little jig in there and that comes from my sneaky playwright, Stephen Karam, knowing that I did Irish dance as a girl so he found a way for me to get it in the show. Never tell a playwright your past because it’ll end up in writing or you will be performing it at some point but that’s how it started, and then when I was eight my mom took me to see a production of “The Music Man” and that’s when I really remember thinking I want to do that.  My dad was in the military so we moved around all over the country and I ended up in Mississippi in a tiny two-stoplight town. The year I started they started the drama club; it was the first year that they offered that program so I was kind of in it from the beginning. The first play that the school ever performed I was in and it was also part of the competitive circuit so we traveled around the South and competed with this one-act play and made it all the way to nationals to D.C. and performed it there and that was it; it was over for me. I fell in love with it. Music bridge I knew I always wanted to be a performer of some kind; I just didn’t know necessarily that it was going to be acting and even through college I thought I wanted to do musicals. I wanted to go to Florida State ‘cause I wanted to study musical theater but I-- because of my dance background and because of the acting I thought musical theater would be the natural thing for me, but then I auditioned for a scholarship at the University of Memphis and I’m so thankful I did because actually it was the perfect fit for me. I’m a late bloomer. I came at it a little late so even though it was high school and that sounds pretty young...man, the 18 and 20-year-olds who come to New York and they go to Tisch and they know at 16, 17, 18, they’re doing summer camps, they know all the Shakespeare plays, they’re coming in, that’s true in the South, too. When I started as a freshman in college I just didn’t have the vocabulary. I hadn’t read all the plays, I hadn’t done all that work, so I was really behind and the BFA at the University of Memphis was amazing ‘cause they really caught me up quickly and I felt like I got a real classical kind of study curriculum, a lot of Chekov, some Greek plays, and they weren’t shying away from the gritty contemporary plays that were coming out of New York. We were the first college to do “Angels in America.” That really set my path for what I ended up doing, and then when I moved to San Francisco really just on a whim, I just wanted to make it back to the West Coast, it turns that that city is a real hotbed for new works. So I started by joining an ensemble theater company out there called Crowded Fire and it was all a lot of local playwrights, New York playwrights coming in and writing new work and so I sort of got trained on that just by happenstance. I learned the skills of being in a new play environment and working with a playwright. And that’s really the way my career has shaped since then. Transition to role in The Humans The Humans is, it’s one of the best plays I’d ever read straight off the page, and also I turned to my husband and said this play is gonna win the Pulitzer…off the first read. A couple years ago the Roundabout did a reading. Stephen Karam will have to correct me on this if this play was a commission for that theater company. I think it was and they were gathering some actors to hear the play out loud with playwright   Stephen Karam and a director and some of the producers at the Roundabout. And I had worked at the Roundabout before so they just like usual sent you the script, asked you if you were available and interested to come in and just read it around the table one morning with some other actors and the minute I read it I thought “Oh, please, God, just let me be a part of this.” After the reading we just stood in the lobby for 20 minutes just talking about from an acting point of view how deep and rich and amazing this play is. Plus, the technical challenge of the speed of it and the contemporary language. It’s just an amazing piece of writing. Right away, I recognized myself and I recognized this family. This is a family that crosses the line and somebody’s feelings get hurt but you don’t address it, you just keep going, and some of the comedy comes out of that I think, the recognition of people who really love each other but there’s a kind of casual cruelty inside of their relationships and that’s just good stuff. ERIK you put faith in, in juice-cleansing or/ yoga but you won’t try church – BRIGID I did one juice cleanse...one... ERIK -- you eat chard to feel your best but you still -- you said half your friends are in therapy,/ you said that so I’m askin’-- DEIRDRE My mouth is shut... BRIGID That’s because -- yeah, I was trying to get you to pay for mine -- I still can’t afford it – ERIK Well save some of the money you spend on organic juice and pay for it yourself – BRIGID Don’t criticize me for caring about my mental health – AIMEE Okay... ERIK Well what about -- Rich’s mom is a therapist -- why don’t you get it from her? – DEIRDRE Erik... BRIGID Yeah, Dad, I’ll get therapy from my motherin-law, that’s an awesome idea. Small beat. DEIRDRE She’s not your mother-in-law unless you get married – Stephen Karam has an intro to the play that’s some of his research that he did and one of the things he wanted to explore in the play is basement fears, what he calls basement fears. I’ve heard him say it several times now. And I think because he’s investigating that it really does allow the actor to show up because everybody has sort of different basement fears that resonate with them. You know, fear of loss of a loved one, fear of poverty, fear of illness. There’s some pretty common human anxieties and fears and we are living in a post 9/11 world. And I think he just drew those fears so precisely and specifically but at the same time so much of ourselves…we have to show up. We have to bring our own stories to the table. Sometimes you do plays where the challenge is communicating the political message through the writing, through the relationships and the characters, and I feel like with this play the challenges live in the relationships between the characters. So we don’t have any kind of political commentary on our back, any sense of period or time and place; it’s really in the now, right now, how you are relating to your mother, how you are relating to your sister, how you are relating to your ex-lover, how you are relating to your father in every second. And so it’s an amazing exercise in being present and that is thrilling from an acting point of view. This Tornado Loves You – Neko Case THE END. Adam Kampe: That was actor, Cassie Beck, on how she fell in love with the craft of acting and her role in the 2016 Tony Award-winning best drama, The Humans. Special thanks to Matthew Troillett (TRAW-let) with the PR agency, DKC/O&M, and the Roundabout Theater. The play recently moved the Helen Hayes to the Schoenfeld theater on Broadway. Catch it if you can. You will not be disappointed. For the National Endowment for the Arts, I’m Adam Kampe. Music Credits: Excerpt of “The Champaign Jig Goes to Columbia / Pat and Al’s  by NEA Heritage Fellow Liz Carroll from her album, Lost in the Loop, used courtest of Alliance Records and by permission of Liz Carroll. Excerpt of “Throughout the City” by David Szesztay Excerpt of “This Tornado Loves You” (instrumental) by Neko Case from Middle Cyclone, used courtesy of Anti- Excerpts of the following found on WFMU’s Free Music Archive used courtesy of Creative Commons: “Something in the Distance” by Scott Holmes. “Cotton” by Podington Bear from Solo Instruments.