I’m talking to Siena Foster-Soltis on a patio overlooking the lights of Los Angeles. The hillside home, in the ultra-luxe enclave of Bel-Air, is an apt location for Siena’s latest play, Over the Hill, an exploration of incongruities in class, age and desire disguised as a sex romp. And this is not the first site-specific Foster-Soltis production. She has staged other plays in hotel rooms, backyards and strip clubs. Not to mention actual theaters.
Over the past two years I’ve experienced four of Siena’s recent major plays. (Since she and I are good friends I’m just gonna call her Siena here.) These include her manic adaptation of my “cult” novel, Fear of Kathy Acker. In some ways, while completely fresh, Over the Hill is Siena’s most “narrative” creation: a plot-thick caper where laughs lure you into disquieting truths.
Over The Hill, Featuring Barry Del Sherman and Riley Quinn Scott
Here’s a snapshot of Siena’s ascent. She’s 25 years old. She studied Fine Arts at California Institute of the Arts and still paints. Productions have included The Acts of Afra (her CalArts thesis produced in a Downtown L.A. venue), Contrition Pageant (a wild ride at L.A.’s The Elysian), Fear of Kathy Acker (at Illusion Magic Lounge, a theatre in Santa Monica), Session (her writing/acting collab with poet and filmmaker Lily Lady which has played in Los Angeles, New York, Toronto and soon Europe), and now Over the Hill (at this hillside home). All in the past two years. There have also been one-acts and staged readings. These plays make you squirm– with both titillation and self-cringe. Siena has an avid fan base on both coasts.
(Over the Hill, co-directed by Siena and Frank Demma, plays again August 21 through 24 in Los Angeles, and Session opens again in New York starting August 29.)
Jack: What are the overriding themes in your plays?
Siena: I often write about money, age, class, power, performance and desire. I think these themes are present in all the works we’ve mentioned.
Jack: I see a clear division between Contagion Pageant and Fear of Kathy Acker on the one hand, and Session and Over The Hill on the other. The first two are wildly, extravagantly “experimental,” while Session and Over the Hill are more “traditional.” All are tightly woven, with hyper-fast cues. For example: Contrition Pageant, in my memory, is a colorful blur of psychosexual themes. Fear of Kathy Acker is jagged and veering, emotionally and experientially. Both plays incorporate lots of music, movement and even video, plus masks and skimpy costumes. Meanwhile, Session is essentially a two-person showpiece about sex-worker friends, and Over the Hill is an almost classical two-act “farce,” with broad antics, exaggerated characters, mistaken identity, etc. Like a darker Noises Off-type farce where schemes “go wrong.” Where did I go wrong in my generalizations?
Siena: Both Contrition Pageant and Fear of Kathy Acker are visually oriented. Both were adapted from outside sources. They are like massive collages of text and imagery. Session and Over the Hill are more character and plot-driven. You’re right in that the two sets of plays are almost like two different media.
Jack: What accounts for this shift in style?
Siena: The easy answer is that I am a product of my surroundings. For the earliest shows, I was primarily focused on visual arts. My co-creators were artists following a similar pedagogy. It all comes down to influence. Creating live theater can obviously be very different from a gallery installation. I ultimately just love trying new things and experimenting with a variety of media. There is also something to be said for following where the momentum takes you.
Jack: This year, the momentum took you from L.A. to New York, where you relocated. What’s the difference?
Siena: Being from Los Angeles, I have a great community out here, but at the same time, theater can feel like it exists in a vacuum. I’m not sure if that’s because of car-culture, or house-culture, or just how the city is structured in general. I really love getting to work in New York because there's so much going on all the time and everyone is down to travel wherever for whatever.
Jack: Let’s talk about your latest production. What do you think of my comparing Over the Hill to a classical farce?
Siena: Over the Hill is totally a farce. Somebody mentioned Moliere’s Tartuffe, and while that wasn’t a direct influence, I can see the comparison. It's ultimately a dark comedy that plays differently on different nights. On some nights it feels comical and like a satirical buddy comedy. On other nights it plays much more sinisterly.
Jack: Over the Hill is not about sex work (as Session is), yet it probes parallel power dynamics: Five people of different levels of privilege, wealth, age, and gender vie to gain the upper hand for what they desire: sex, comfort, a future, attractiveness, even basics such as secure housing. There are sadly funny back-stabbing antics among the two couples.
Siena: I wanted to write something about growing up in Los Angeles. While the experiences of the characters in Over The Hill aren’t all directly my experiences, I pulled a lot from my own life and the people in it. At the same time, I enjoy playing with the common “LA tropes” (i.e. a 30-something aspirational screenwriter with a young girlfriend, an overachieving sorority girl, an old man with a lavish house in the hills, etc). While these stereotypes are relatable and can be funny, I think the often unassuming dark side of these archetypes are deeply woven into both the play and real life. As you said, Over The Hill is not about sex work. While my characters may individually play with leveraging sex, youth, fantasy, etc, the intention behind doing so is not simply a transaction or a consensual exchange of desire, as it ideally would be for a worker and client. Over The Hill is about a scam, desperation, a personal inclination to better one’s own reality at the expense of others. It's about money and identity -- how young people approach these desires while encountering some pretty dark forces. None of the characters are sex workers. I can see how watching two young women (Anna Petrov, played by Lucy Parks Urbano and Eve Cohen, played by Riley Quinn Scott) in a mansion’s infinity pool alongside an older man (Leslie Roth, played by Barry Del Sherman) can elicit a comparison to sex work, in many ways Anna and Eve both use sexuality to attempt financial gain, but for me, these are two very separate dynamics.
Session, Featuring Siena Foster-Soltis and Lily Lady
Jack: Session, on the other hand, is about sex work. Overtly. In your face. In Los Angeles Review of Books, I wrote this is “deeply immersive theater…. You are eyeballs-to-boobies with two clever sex workers on an emotional thrill ride.” But again, you (with your co-writer/co-performer Lily Lady) foil expectations about that world. It’s much more celebratory than desperate.
Siena: Lily and I joke that Session is not as much about sex work as it is about friendship. It was important for both of us not to trot out the old “dead hooker” or “dumb John” tropes. When we started writing together, we both wanted to make a piece about authenticity and the complexities of navigating desire, even when that desire is transactional. The show lives and dies on the chemistry between our two characters. We both have so much fun getting to tour (we’ve been doing Session for over a year now). I think you can tell when a performer is having fun and enjoying themselves and loves their scene partner. It’s part of what makes the show feel really alive.
Jack: Session is also unique in that, for the first time in any of your major plays, you are acting, co-starring with Lily Lady. But it never feels like acting. To reference again my Los Angeles Review of Books review, the vibe between you and Lily Lady is “so real that the term ‘authentic’ rings hollow. Co-orbiting like electrons, they finish each other’s thoughts/lines in split-second riffing that feels unrehearsed. There is nothing “staged” about it.” How do you create that sense of spontaneous dialogue from a meticulously composed script?
Siena: We didn’t want to come off as capital A actors. I personally don’t consider myself an actor and was honestly nervous when I first started performing in this show. Our characters are on stage the entire time and we go from zero to 100 incredibly quickly (not to mention that all of our physicality is unstimulated). Our original director Frank Demma helped us both achieve a balance between naturalistic and presentational. At this point, having done Session for over a year now, Lily and I get to play with making new choices, trying new things, every night feels fresh and new. If you’re in New York at the end of August, Session is being produced by www.thekollection.org/ (the 29th and the 30th).
Jack: At the other end of the spectrum is your adaptation of Fear of Kathy Acker. Here you are employing someone else’s (my) source material. But very non-narrative material. Does that make it easier or harder to craft a play?
Fear of Kathy Acker, Featuring Magdalene Taylor and Avianna Glover
Siena: I got the privilege of working on it with you and getting to flesh out all my ideas in conjunction with your source text, which I think is a huge advantage and something I’m super grateful for. But in other ways, it’s harder. I inserted myself as a character into the play, and this freed me from falling into certain judgments on the “Jack” character. I didn’t want you to feel judged as I was adapting your book (just like an actor can’t judge their character, my self-insert was a way of subverting that). I could never have adapted it as a straight narrative, I wanted to mirror the book. But we connected certain threads in the book and amplified certain characters to give it shape. When it was finished I was ready to work with more narrative storytelling, which gave birth to Session and Over The Hill.
