“Tell me,” she said. “What is a nation?”
On a late-summer afternoon in the bowels of the Baruch Performing Arts Center, on the edge of Manhattan’s Flatiron district, the queen posed that question again and again. It was a rehearsal of a new play, Barbara Hammond’s “Terra Firma,” and Andrus Nichols was playing the queen.
Best known as a founder of the theater troupe Bedlam, which she helped make into a critical darling, Nichols is now the artistic director of the Coop, a new company that she formed with a group who includes Kate Hamill, another Bedlam alumna, as resident playwright.
Like the queen in “Terra Firma,” the Coop’s inaugural production, Nichols has been thinking a lot about the beliefs she holds dear and the kind of society that she wants to nurture.
For fans of her and Hamill, who played two of the Dashwood sisters in Hamill’s breakthrough Jane Austen adaptation, “Sense & Sensibility” — a long-legged downtown hit for Bedlam — the emergence of the Coop is exciting news.
The joy is tempered, though, if you’d been hoping to see them team up again with Eric Tucker, the artistic director of Bedlam, who founded that company with Nichols.
It has been a while, she said, since she has been in touch with Tucker, a much-multitasking actor-director whose pared-back aesthetic has become synonymous with Bedlam.
“We haven’t really spoken since the split, which is —” She paused a moment. “Which is OK with me. That was last year.”
On a September morning before rehearsal of “Terra Firma,” she and Hamill were sitting side by side in a corner booth of a Greenwich Village hotel cafe, each with a bowl of yogurt. The two are so close that they finish each other’s sentences.
“You can be so rigorous in the work,” Hamill was saying, “if the rehearsal room is —“
“Generous,” Nichols supplied.
“Generous,” Hamill agreed.
This, they said, is the kind of warm, fun, respectful atmosphere that they want to create with the Coop, which counts among its dozens of artist members many Bedlam veterans. (Working with one company does not preclude working with the other.) Actor Jason O’Connell, Hamill’s fiancé, is on the Coop’s artistic advisory board. Tom O’Keefe, who was in the original cast of Bedlam’s “Saint Joan,” is in “Terra Firma,” which is now in previews and opens Oct. 10 at Baruch.
Directed by Shana Cooper, the play is set in a micronation so tiny you could count its population on one hand, and so precarious that its so-called terra firma is actually an old naval defense platform surrounded by ocean. Grappling as it does with questions of sovereignty and social cohesion, it’s a philosophical fit for the fledgling Coop, which intends to be both a roost for its members to return to and a kind of artistic co-op. (Feel free, its founders said, to pronounce the name either way.)
Nichols and Hamill, friends since they met in an acting class about a dozen years ago, used to be roommates on the Lower East Side. It was in their kitchen, pre-Bedlam, that Hamill wrote “Sense & Sensibility.”
“I bet Andrus $100,” she said, “that I could write a feminist adaptation of a Jane Austen classic, because I was so frustrated that everything was through the male gaze, constantly.” (Her wearing a #TIMESUP T-shirt to pose for the portrait with this article is in keeping with her feminist outlook, though she said she wanted “to let the shirt speak for itself.”)
Nichols met Tucker in 2009, in a monthlong acting intensive at Shakespeare & Company in Massachusetts. Success greeted Bedlam from the time it arrived on the New York theater scene in 2012 with George Bernard Shaw’s “Saint Joan,” lauded for Tucker’s shoestring staging and Nichols’ powerhouse performance in the title role. But the company’s oxygenated alchemy reached a new level in 2014 with the premiere of “Sense & Sensibility,” directed by Tucker, who acted in it alongside Hamill and Nichols.
Hamill, whose new play “The Piper” is in development at the Coop, recently landed, for the third year in a row, on American Theater magazine’s list of the season’s most-produced playwrights. She now has a considerable body of work. But that frolicking “Sense,” which has remained in Bedlam’s repertoire, was her first production — a hit then and in 2016, when it came back for a 10-month encore off-Broadway.
It was during that second run, when Bedlam at last hired a managing director, that Nichols quietly stepped down from her position as Bedlam’s producing director, for which she had earned a part-time salary, while Tucker earned a full-time salary as artistic director. The company’s slender budget hovers around $1 million.
Asked whether the disparity in compensation had been a warning sign, she acknowledged that “there was an imbalance” in their partnership. Still, after she acted in her last Bedlam shows in February 2017 (her choice; Tucker asked her a couple of times after that to reprise roles out of town, and she declined), she remained on the board of the company for another year or so.
“It was my child,” she said. “I built it.”
And when she left, there was so little drama to it — no angry fight, nothing like that — that Tucker didn’t realize the break was for good.
Over the phone from Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he is appearing in Bedlam’s off-Broadway-bound production of “The Crucible,” he said he thought that Nichols (who was still with the company when she joined the touring production of Ivo van Hove’s “A View From the Bridge” in 2016) stepped back from Bedlam to concentrate on building her acting career.
Not so, Nichols said.
In that fundamental misreading of events there is a poignancy: two people with a shared taste who clicked artistically but didn’t know each other well when, at Tucker’s urging, they started a company together. He said that Nichols came to feel like a sister to him and that it made sense, given how close she and Hamill are, that they would start their own troupe.
The Coop’s written vision statement, which outlines its commitment to “a culture of collaboration, experimentation and trust,” makes one eye-catching exception to its belief in radical inclusion — an exception that allows the rule.
“There are no auteurs here,” it says. “Everyone speaks with authority.”
And when Tucker mentions that he has always thought of Bedlam as “a place to have a little laboratory and be able to do my process” in tandem with an ensemble, while Nichols speaks of the Coop as the kind of artistic home and community that she thought she was building with Bedlam, you get the sense that they may have been operating under conflicting assumptions all along.
Bedlam “wasn’t my home,” she said. “That wasn’t what it ended up being.”
“So,” she added, a swell of optimism in her voice. “Let’s try again.”
This article originally appeared in
.