The Geek Theater Interview: Pete Boisvert, Director
By Teresa Jusino
Two years ago, I interviewed director Pete Boisvert and playwright James Comtois about their theater company, Nosedive Productions. Today, Nosedive’s 10-year history is littered with all manner of comic book, fantasy, and horror stories. Comtois’ latest play, The Little One, opens TONIGHT, and hopes to take the vampire myth into some exciting new directions. I recently had the chance to talk with Pete, who is directing The Little One, about how far Nosedive Productions has come in ten years and how this show, which is the company’s largest endeavor to date, will propel Nosedive into the next ten years.
TERESA JUSINO: How is Nosedive doing ten years in? What are the accomplishments of which you’re proudest?
PETE BOISVERT: We started having a lot of success around 2006-2007, about 6 years after we started. I think Nervous Boy was a turning point for us. I think that really expanded our audience. The show came together very well, and it really broke us to a larger group of people. And that roughly coincided with us starting the Blood Brothers series. I feel like since that time, we’ve moved explicitly genre theater. Whereas a lot of the plays in the first 5 years tended to be a lot of things set in apartments and bars, a lot of young 20-somethings as characters, scenarios that were close to what [we] were actually living. We’ve really focused our style a lot since Nervous Boy.
We’ve talked at various points about re-mounting shows. And it’s interesting thinking about the earlier shows because our audience base for the first part of that decade is a very different group of people than the people who see our shows now. I get the impression that a lot of our current audience never got to see some of the early shows.
TJ: It looks like you guys are taking it to the next level at this point and broadening that audience even further…
PB: That’s something about this particular production [The Little One]. We’re in a larger theater than we ever have been in the past. I mean, the Kraine Theater is a 99 seater which is up from about 50-60 usually. We’re hiring a PR person for the first time. Usually James does that, but we’re bringing Emily Owens in to work on that. We’re getting a really strong design team in place, which is not… (laughs) In the past, some shows have had good design teams, some shows we haven’t had a lot of designers brought on, it’s more of just us doing it ourselves. So it does feel like there’s more of a step-up on this show. It’s a larger budget production than usual, we’re taking a little bit of a gamble with that. Hopefully it will pay off in attendance and what have you. But it does feel like a slightly larger endeavor than it has in the past.
TJ: Tell me about The Little One.
PB: It’s about a young human who’s turned into a vampire. Her mentor dies shortly after she’s turned, and she’s basically raised by another vampire, by a friend of her sire’s, which gives her a number of disadvantages. Biologically she would have a deeper connection with her sire, and she’s sort of cast off into the world.
Thematically, one of the things that is important to James, one of the big drivers of him writing this show, is that you watch these vampire stories and it’s always the same thing. It’s always that there’s this human character that can be a stand-in for the audience; that is usually involved in a romantic relationship with the vampires, or at least can step into that world. There’s always a lot of bleed back and forth between the worlds. I think that one of the biggest ideas in this show is just that a vampire’s sense of time wouldn’t allow that to happen. Their minds think in a different way. Just in terms of the scope they can comprehend. So that the vampires and humans are really different species. There’s no common basis for them to communicate on. Even if they could have the conversation, their experiences make them completely alien to each other, to the point where they can’t even understand one another. James has done a very nice job creating a sort of fully-realized detailed world for the vampires. If the humans in the play are either food or hunters, then it’s sort of incumbent that the vampire half gets a lot more detail, that we get a lot more subtle nuances of personality. There’s lots of fun little details of how this particular world of vampires works. Every time you have a vampire story, you’ve got to go through a little bit of “OK, so what rules are we playing by this time?” No one ever uses all of them in any given situation. I think it’s coming together nicely!
TJ: What are your genre inspirations, both for this show, and for your shows in general?
PB: I’ve always had a lot of interest in the use of horror for the stage. There’s something about being locked in the room, which you don’t get in film or television, this scene is actually playing out a seat in front of you, and if you need to leave that room you need to get up and actually walk out of it. That becomes part of the evening as well. So there’s a real feeling of being trapped in the theater, I think, that I’ve always enjoyed playing with in terms of horror theater.
TJ: Is there anything for The Little One that shaped what you were going for visually or in tone?
If you’re working in vampires, you’re gonna be carrying some of the visual baggage of the genre. You’re going to deal with goth in some way. I don’t think we’re going to have a full-on goth look to the show, but there are going to be hat-tips in that direction, just because that’s the language of how we look at vampires.
I was impessed to discover that Pete and James had actually kept my interview of two years ago in mind, and Pete closed the interview with this thought:
PB: One of your questions [from the last Pink Raygun interview we did] is definitely sort of in our minds right now. You’d asked about having female protagonists in the future, and we actually have two on this show. About 75% of this show is Becky Byers and Becky Comtois. The vast majority of the play is on them. It’s a 7-person ensemble that’s backing them, but there are whole scenes that go by that are really just the two of them…and, you know, some guy that gets thrown in to get eaten. And a lot of people get thrown in to get eaten.
The Little One opens TONIGHT at the Kraine Theater in New York City. For dates, showtimes and tickets, visit the Nosedive Productions website.
Teresa Jusino was born on the same day that Skylab fell. Coincidence? She doesn’t think so. She is a contributor to Tor.com, a website that covers sci-fi, fantasy, “…and related subjects.” Her work has also been seen on PopMatters.com, on the sadly-defunct literary site CentralBooking.com, edited by Kevin Smokler, and in the Elmont Life community newspaper. She is currently writing a web series for Pareidolia Films called The Pack, which is set to debut Fall 2010! Get Twitterpated with Teresa, Follow The Pack, or visit her at The Teresa Jusino Experience.
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TERESA JUSINO was born on the same day that Skylab fell. Coincidence? She doesn't think so. As a writer, her work has appeared in Elmont Life newspaper, and on the sadly defunct website, CentralBooking.com. She is a founding member and editor of The Revolving Door Commune Blog, is currently at work on a collection of short stories, and is writing a web series for Pareidolia Films called The Pack, which is set to debut this fall! As a geek, Teresa loves all Star Trek, Lost, Fringe, comics, and anything Joss Whedon, Brian K. Vaughan, and Neil Gaiman ever touched. She is also an aspiring fangbanger. 
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[...] you can read HERE, and I interviewed director, Pete Boisvert, for Pink Raygun, which you can read HERE. It looks like a great play – I’m seeing it this week, and there’ll be a review [...]