The Realistic Joneses at the Laguna Playhouse: A conversation with Joe Spano
By MARRIE STONE
Will Eno’s 2014 Broadway hit The Realistic Joneses opens this week at the Laguna Playhouse. It’s a script that defies easy descriptions. Two couples share the same last name and same neighborhood. Described as “spare, suggestive, slyly hilarious and strangely maddening, this profound play explores what is said, what is unsaid and the role that denial plays in helping us navigate life’s chaos.”
Directed by Judy Hegarty-Lovett and starring Faline England, Sorcha Fox, Conor Lovett and Joe Spano, the show will run through May 14.
I caught up with Joe Spano, who plays Bob Jones, to hear his perspectives on the play. Spano is an Emmy Award-winning actor heading into his 21st season as Tobias Fornell on the CBS television series NCIS. He starred for seven years as Lt. Henry Goldblume on Hill Street Blues.
Spano’s television and theater credits are extensive and span several decades. He appeared in the Laguna Playhouse’s production of Heisenberg in 2019 as Simon Stephens (also starring Faline England). And, most recently, he acted in The Gin Game with JoBeth Williams.
Our conversation has been edited for brevity and clarity.
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Photos by Veronica Slavin
(L-R) Faline England, Joe Spano, Conor Lovett and Sorcha Fox star in “The Realistic Joneses” by Will Eno, directed by Judy Hegarty-Lovett, now playing at the Laguna Playhouse
Stu News: Tell us about The Realistic Joneses from your perspective.
Joe Spano: I wrote this little thing about it because it’s hard to explain:
It’s a tragic comedy about two married couples who meet in a somewhat odd and yet extremely domestic circumstance and their attempts to make sense of each other. It’s about love and mortality, about connection and disarray. It’s about quantum physics and cleaning the refrigerator. And it mostly asks the question, “How can we do our best – or live with failing to do it – in a world that we are totally incapable of truly understanding?”
I know it doesn’t tell you much, but it tells you everything. It’s a mystery and we work it out every night in conjunction with the audience.
It really needs an audience and it needs the performers to recognize that there is an audience there.
SN: So it’s interactive?
JS: Not in any sort of overt way. We let the audience know we’re listening to them, but they don’t really participate. At the same time, they do participate because they hear and understand things. This is true of any play. An actor is understanding what the audience is understanding, or at least how they’re reacting. If the actors aren’t listening to how the audience is reacting, they’re not doing a good job.
Judy, our director, always points out that we are there, the audience is there, we’re not hiding anything from them and we’re listening to how they are taking it in and what sense they are making of it.
SN: It sounds like a production that highlights the importance of live theater, which we all came to appreciate when we didn’t have it during the pandemic shutdowns.
JS: That’s a good point. I haven’t thought about that. You probably couldn’t do it [without a live audience]. Well, you could do it, but it wouldn’t make any sense.
SN: So this cast has been together for three productions of this play?
JS: That’s right. We rehearsed this in France because that’s where Judy and Conor live. I’ve just loved their work, particularly with Beckett, for decades. Then we did it at the Dublin Theatre Festival, where Judy won Best Director. Then we brought it to the Rubicon in Ventura, and now we’re doing it here. It’s actually produced by Rubicon at the Laguna Playhouse.
SN: The Realistic Joneses was written in 2014. Normally, nine years wouldn’t make a big difference. But the last nine years have been extraordinary. How has the play held up?
JS: I think it’s even more apropos and poignant today. It’s a question of four people trying to touch each other, to make connection, to understand or at least to not…I was going to say hurt each other, but that’s not it. Except emotionally. That always happens.
I think the difficulty of really connecting with other people is dealing with one’s own intelligence, one’s picture of the world, one’s appetites. How do you keep yourself alive without harming other people? Or even know that you’re harming other people? We don’t know unless we’re really paying attention and knowing that’s a possibility. Not only a possibility. I would say a probability.
SN: Is that what drew you to the role?
JS: There are a number of things I was drawn to. I had to grow into the play and the play had to grow into me. I so admire Judy and Conor and Faline (who I did Heisenberg with here at the Laguna Playhouse a few years ago). I just love working with them. And I am in awe of Judy and Conor’s ability with Beckett, who is hard to handle.
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SN: Yes. Tell us about that.
JS: Here’s a story for you. I was doing Beckett’s Waiting for Godot at the Rubicon in Ventura. One afternoon, one of our actors didn’t show up for a matinee. Conor was doing a Beckett workshop in conjunction with the play on stage. He arrived 15 minutes before the play to teach this workshop. He was pulling up to park and the stage manager went out, yanked open his car door, and said, “You’re coming with me. We’ll park your car.”
[Conor] played the role of Lucky that afternoon. Lucky is a part who has no lines except for this extraordinarily long and incoherent monologue right in the middle. Conor had been doing that part with this acclaimed production from the Gate Theatre in Dublin. He had done it again in Japan. And he uses it as a warmup. He does it every day to keep himself fresh.
So, we went on stage not knowing what was going to happen. Conor knew it word-by-word. He even knew how to drool on cue. It was so beautiful. That kind of beautiful skill and dedication of knowing a piece and being able to do it anywhere with anyone. It really meant a lot to me. It’s something I’ve never seen before and made me conscious of how wonderful artists can be.
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Conor Lovett, a renowned Beckett actor, on far-right stage as (L-R) Faline England, Joe Spano and Sorcha Fox look on
SN: That’s an amazing story. I love that. Are there any changes in how this production is done, in contrast to the Dublin and Ventura shows?
JS: Judy is very excited about not so much changing things up but going deeper into the play and making it say more from what we’ve learned in conjunction with the audiences.
SN: Are there any adaptations required based on the layout of the Playhouse itself?
JS: That’s an astute observation. This theater is totally different than either the Rubicon in Ventura or the Smock [Alley] Theatre in Dublin. Smock was much smaller and rough-hewn. The Playhouse here is beautiful. It’s a larger space and has different echoes [and a sophisticated sound system for the hearing impaired]. We’re playing to the [hearing impaired] audience as if there wasn’t any magnification or “sweetening.”
Also, this stage is bigger, so there’s more room around us. We have the freedom to be a little bit larger than we are in the other theaters and that’s really exciting. It’s wonderful to somewhat respond to the space itself. I’m sure audiences might not know what’s going on in terms of technical stuff, but they’re going to have a much richer and more immediate experience.
SN: Is there anything else interesting done with set, sound or lighting design?
JS: This will be four actors on two round discs. Whatever we have is what we do in conjunction with the audience. There are no tricks except an extremely beautiful and evocative sound. This sound that greets you – mainly between the scenes – is really gorgeous. And the lighting is beautiful and varied.
Having four actors on two discs, there’s this gorgeous thing about that [simplicity]. At its essence, theater is just people on stage performing for people in the audience. That human connection is why I got into this. Being on stage live is what I first did and it’s what caught me.
SN: It sounds like theater has your heart. Do you enjoy it more than screen acting?
JS: In terms of performance, yeah. It’s really something. It’s almost…I don’t want to scare anybody – there’s nothing about the play that’s spiritual – but [theater] is almost spiritual for me. It’s scary when you’re fragile. You can mess up. Things can go wrong. Audiences can respond differently. That’s life. That not knowing is something that’s really special.
Whereas in film or television, we’re giving raw material to the editors and directors and producers. They make the experience for the audience out of what we give them.
SN: What do you hope audiences take away from this?
JS: I’m hoping people get something for themselves about their own lives. Not that anything is going to be solved, but at least knowing that we are as confused as they are.
SN: That’s one of the beautiful things about art. It raises more questions than answers, but at least you feel like you’re in the company of everybody asking the same questions. It allows us to feel less alone.
JS: I think that’s right. If we can open ourselves up for a little while and share and experience something together.
I’m older than anybody else in the play, so that’s always going to be part of what I’m doing. But it’s these two older couples contemplating their own mortality. It has to do with fragility. The men have this particular disease. Actually, it’s fictional, but in the play it’s real. They’re both dealing with how that strikes them, how they deal with it. The women, of course, have to deal with it as well because the men don’t deal with it very well. I don’t know if that’s [universal], but I have this hunch that women deal with it better. That’s a big part and that progresses over the course of the show.
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Faline England and Joe Spano appeared at the Laguna Playhouse together in 2019 for “Heisenberg”
SN: Anything else audiences should know?
JS: There’s no intermission, so we get to play all the way through. That’s really fun. I hope everybody goes along with that. They have so far.
The Realistic Joneses plays through Sunday, May 14. For tickets and additional information, visit the Laguna Playhouse website by clicking here.