Vreeke was the director of “A Bright New Boise,” a play featured at D.C.’s Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company that has received six Helen Hayes nominations, including outstanding director.
This is your fifth outstanding-director nomination. How does it feel?
It’s excellent. … It’s always a really great surprise and it feels terrific when you get nominated.
What are we supposed to learn from this play?
To boil it down to a kind of single sentence, I think it’s that you have to be careful to recognize that belief systems can really get in the way of a fulfilled life.
Tell us more.
Well, the character that Michael Russotto portrayed is a man who in theater culture — which I don’t want to make any assumptions, but you know generally leans left — it’s a character I think more often than not is put up for ridicule because he’s an extreme evangelical fundamentalist. … In this case, Michael was able to achieve through [the playwright] writing a hugely sympathetic man who you just feel so strongly for who’s trapped in a belief system that can only make his life worse. … It creates a kind of understanding in all of us that in a way we are all kind of victims of belief systems that we were raised with and that we hold on to.
How did you make the setting — the break room and parking lot of a Hobby Lobby — come to life as director?
You can imagine what those rooms look like: very sterile, folding chairs, folding tables, maybe some lockers for employees, stuff on the counter, maybe with coffee and a vending machine. … Then you look at the script and say, “Oh we need a little area to represent a parking lot.” … So [the set designer] created these beautifully sculptured parking lot light poles that went all the way up Woolly’s two and a half stories.
– Courtney Zott
