Growing up in today’s society is already difficult. There’s no guidebook to being an adult. I’m 32 and still find myself looking for the more “adult” adult in the room for help. However, transitioning from being a child into adulthood must have been even scarier during the height of the global pandemic a few years back. During that period, Simon Henriques and Skylar Fox wrote The Grown-Ups, which The Ringwald is opening up their 2024-2025 season with!
The show opened this past weekend and runs through November 4, and just before its debut, we were able to sit down with the director of this production of The Grown-Ups, Jennifer Goff! In this exclusive interview, Goff discusses what drew her to wanting to direct this story, which themes stick out to her the most, and the challenges of transitioning an outdoor show to a black box theater. Enjoy!
[Note: The highlighted excerpts below of this interview have been lightly edited for clarity. Warning for mild spoilers from The Grown-Ups. You can watch/listen to the full interview above, find it in most places where podcasts are available, or read on.]
Timestamps for this interview:
- 00:00 – Intro
- 00:34 – How is the rehearsal process going for The Grown-Ups?
- 01:05 – What is The Grown-Ups about?
- 02:08 – What drew you to this story? What makes it unique?
- 05:41 – The show is closing just before the 2024 election, why was this the right time to tell this story?
- 06:16 – Challenges of bringing this play and story to life on stage?
- 08:49 – As the director, what’s your process bringing your ideas to the stage?
- 11:40 – What themes in The Grown-Ups resonate with you the most?
- 12:30 – Outdoor vs indoor shows
- 14:02 – What do you want audiences to walk away with from The Grown-Ups?
- 14:35 – Outro
Highlights from the interview with Jennifer Goff, director of The Grown-Ups
Brian Kitson: I was wondering if you could give us your take on what The Grown-Ups is?
Jennifer Goff: Sure. So, The Grown-Ups is a story of a group of senior counselors at a summer camp. Most of them have been coming here since they were wee itty-bitties, and now they are the counselors. It’s following them as the world outside of camp starts to become something they don’t know how to deal with, and starts to encroach on the world of the camp.
BK: that sounds really exciting, and it almost felt like it from the sound of it, at least from the press release, like it touches the genre of horror in a way of like a realistic horror. Because again, I don’t want to give too much away, but like, do you feel like it plays with that a little bit?
Jennifer Goff: I think that there’s definitely tension that we expect from a world of that, but I would say it’s a much more realistic human kind of fear that it’s playing with, than anything supernatural.
BK: What drew you to the story, and what do you think makes it so unique?
Jennifer Goff: Well, I read this play a couple of years ago and first of all, just the genesis of the play is really unique. It was written during COVID by a group of folks who were bummed that they weren’t able to be making any theater. And so they wrote it and performed it in their backyard with friends. And so it was intended to be done outdoors. It was intended to be intimate.
But then just reading it, I was so taken with what the play has to say about extremism and about othering in society. The fact that it takes, it uses these young adults, these characters are all in their early to mid-20s. And that it looks at them and kind of asks, when the grown-ups around you fail you, what does it mean to suddenly have to step into being a grown-up? And it’s a really powerful. I teach at a college level and I work with 20-year-olds all the time, and it really spoke to me.
BK: What has been the most challenging part of bringing this story to life on stage?
Jennifer Goff: Well, it is… we’re staging it in the round, so there’s going to be an audience entirely surrounding the actors, and they’re gonna very much feel like they’re a part of this world, I hope? And so trying to create a space in which these actors can be sort of separate and tell the story and be who they are, but also make sure that they’re going to invite the audience into this intimate space in a way that is more intimate than most theater experiences. I think it has been a really interesting part of this process and an interesting challenge, and one that we won’t really know is successful or not until we get a whole bunch of people in the room. So it’s exciting.
BK: What themes of the show do you feel like resonate the most with you as the director?
Jennifer Goff: Definitely for me, the word that keeps coming back to me as I think about this play, is the word responsibility. Because these characters are all wrestling with what it means to be responsible and to be not just responsible but responsible for someone other than themselves. And I think that’s really meaningful to me personally, and it’s really meaningful to me on a sort of larger scale because I think we have a tendency in society today to be very sort of insular and cut off, and to forget that society is actually a whole bunch of people who are responsible to each other. And so I find that really, really meaningful.
BK: Final question for you is what are you hoping audiences walk away from with the show?
Jennifer Goff: This is a play that could come across feeling pretty bleak. But I think that we’ve specifically tried to approach it leaving with a ray of hope. And, you know, we put the hope in the hands of the characters and then by extension in the hands of the audience. So I really hope that they walk away with a sense of responsibility for carrying that hope forward.
Don’t miss The Grown-Ups at The Ringwald Theatre!
If you’re in the Ferndale area, get your tickets now for The Grown-Ups, which runs through November 4th! Have you seen any local theatre recently? Let us know on social media @MyCosmicCircus or @BoxSeatBabes!
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