INTERVIEW WITH ACTOR ETHAN DUBIN


Education Dramaturg Ted Sod spoke with actor Ethan Dubin about his role as Bobbie in Bobbie Clearly.


Ted Sod: Tell us about yourself: Where were you born and educated? When and why did you decide to be an actor? Did you have any teachers who had a profound influence on you?


Ethan Dubin: I was born and raised in Pasadena, California, a suburb in Los Angeles County. I didn’t know I wanted to be an actor from day one; it took some time. But I was always performing in some way or another. I was bad at sports (like, no-one-goes-to-lunch-until-Ethan-hits- a-baseball-during-gym, bad-at-sports) and compensated with a class clown mentality. My high school and my family were really focused on academic achievement, but I was lucky to have two phenomenal acting teachers, Tina and Cynthia, who consistently made the best high school theatre around (yeah, that’s right). They nurtured my curiosity, and they also recognized the weirdo in me. One taught me Viewpoints and Suzuki when I was sixteen, and the other sent me to go see a Robert Wilson musical my junior year, which she knew would explode my brain. It did. Theatre always gave me a place to escape to, so I guess in hindsight it makes sense that I wanted to go to school someplace where I didn’t know anyone at all. For me that was the frigid Midwest and Chicago. It didn’t take long at school to figure out that I wanted to do something in the theatre. When I graduated, I still hadn’t quite figured out what. I thought I’d start telling people I was an actor just to see how it fit. And it’s still fitting.


TS: Why did you choose to play the role of Bobbie in Bobbie Clearly? What do you find most challenging about playing this role? Does the role have personal resonance for you? If so, how?


ED: I am humbled at the opportunity to play a character as complex, beautiful, and challenging as Bobbie. I have always been attracted to playing outsiders, weirdos, people who desperately want to fit in and to be liked. I relate to them. In their efforts to try to be liked, these characters often have to be incredibly courageous, especially when their actions may be clumsy, misguided, or downright painful to witness. I’ve never played an outsider as polarizing as Bobbie. I immediately connected to how raw and vulnerable he is, and how pure his hopes are to make amends with the people of his hometown. With this horrific crime behind him, he wants so badly to do the right thing, to prove that he’s worthy of forgiveness. At best, he is the elephant in the room, and far more often he’s the target of wild and justified hatred. It’s an amazing challenge to try to imagine what that would be like—for me, and for our audiences. I found a statistic that in 2016 there were an average of five gun-related homicides of children or teens every day. I didn’t grow up in a town like the Milton, NE we see in Alex’s play. But the story of Bobbie Clearly is all too familiar and recognizable to me growing up and living in this country.


TS: In your opinion, what is the play Bobbie Clearly about?


ED: For me, this play is about the act of forgiveness and how we get along as a community in the wake of a tragedy. Far too many small American cities and families have had to grapple with a tragedy like we see in the play. How do you move on? How do you learn to feel safe again? How do you punish the criminal, and does he deserve a place back in the society he harmed? If so, would you help him? I can


12 ROUNDABOUT THEATRE COMPANY Ethan Dubin


remember several mass shootings in recent history where the families of the victims have announced their forgiveness of the murderer hardly a day after they lost their loved ones. And I’ve wondered what this really means, what this really feels like. Could I forgive someone like that for a crime so heinous? Or even if I thought I could, what would it be like to have that forgiveness tested if and when I saw him face to face? There are so many painful complexities in how a traumatized community tries to coexist and move on. Some people feel their very identity has been changed forever and want to spend their lives memorializing the victim, while others want to get as far away from the memory as possible. One of the things I love about Alex’s play is how honestly he portrays this, and how funny and awkward it can be along the way.


TS: What is your process as an actor? What is the first thing you do? How do you research a role like Bobbie?


ED: With a few weeks to go before rehearsals, I’m gathering research and mining details from the script. Through books, movies, clips, what have you, I’m trying to spend time with people who may have similar circumstances to Bobbie or resemble some part of his life. That could be anything from a man serving a life sentence in prison for a murder he committed as a minor, to just what it’s like for a bunch of high school kids in Nebraska to pile onto a bus to go detassel corn and make some ice cream money. I want to get a sense of the textures and rhythms in the text. And I also want to figure out what facts I know from the script, and what questions I’m going to have in the rehearsal room. Especially with a play like this, I start with a timeline, trying to organize everything I know for sure about Bobbie so I can start to draw a narrative for


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