greenroom Series No.1 / "Spring Awakenings" by Lazy Susan Theatre Co.

Lederer, Bryce. 2025

“So I saw that you met Nardwuar last year.”

Bryce: I did! Yeah, it was awesome. It was so sweet.

“If he was conducting an interview with you, what do you think he would ask you about this show?”

Bryce: Oh, man. I mean, he would definitely know that I've been in it before. He would definitely know that, like, I have, like, memorabilia of the musical. He would know that, had a CD of the Broadway cast recording in my car that got stolen, and then I bought it again, and then I lost it, and then I bought a third copy. He'd do some research into my connection towards the source material itself.

“You're multi-hyphenate. You're a director, artistic administrator, & actor, of course. As a theater-maker of Chicago, what does it mean to you to work with Lazy Susan on this play? This is a familiar play for you, obviously, but do you feel that this is a challenging project for you creatively, even though you've done it before?”

Bryce: Really challenging, actually. I mean, it means a lot to do this. I don't get that many chances to act anymore, because I just have my hands in so many different fields in theater now. And it used to just be all I did. When I was growing up, I was part of this theater where I was doing like three shows at a time. I was always grinding. And that's very high school, you know? But, then you go to college and over time, your involvement and the amount of projects you're doing at one time… It just diminishes and then I start branching out to other things.

So I’m at this point where I'm acting like, once a year. Every single time I get a chance to act, it's almost more meaningful. And I'm very, very grateful that they trusted me with this role and this opportunity, just because I only get one chance a year to do this, and there aren't many roles that are juicier and have more text to sink your teeth into than this.

And on a personal note, as someone that runs their own theater company, I just know how difficult it is and how time-consuming it is, how much work it takes to put on theater. I just think it's so cool to do. Like, it's like the craziest thing that someone can choose to do is start their own theater company. So I just think it's so cool to be part of their own journey with their theater company. I'm honored to be a part of it, honored they trusted me with it.

Grima, Isabelle. 2025

“So, without spoiling too much, I was wondering what songs or albums do you think of while you're performing this show?”

Isa: So, Wendela is 14. I'm 24. So I really try to think of things that I listened to when I was 14. So probably like Taylor Swift and One Direction.

“I actually was going to ask what Taylor Swift album do you think is most close to this? But I didn't know how connected you were.”

Isa: They're not necessarily songs that I would associate with the show, but for me, I'm like, okay, 14 year old girl? That feels right. And then, yeah, if I had to pick a Taylor Swift album, though, I would say “folklore” / “evermore”. Hannah [Loessberg] and I talked about that too, and we both said “folkmore”.

“Do you have a favorite from those?”

Isa: Let me think. I love “hoax”. “exile” with Bon Iver.

“I did see that there's themes in this play of sexuality, self-esteem, flowering of girlhood, and I saw on your website that you’re a model. How has the duality of womanhood and girlhood affected your creative inspirations and process in general, not even just with this show?”

Isa: That's a good question. It's been very interesting. I grew up going to a private Catholic school, so my experience was pressured to not have any kind of sexuality. And so once I got to like high school and college, I really kind of found my own way and wanted to portray my own sexuality and be proud of it and confident in it.

Doing things like modeling or theater too, I've done plays before with very sexual characters, and I think it's so important to be able to do those and be proud and confident of it, and make it like an intentional choice of like, yes, I'm being sexual and I know I am being sexual, and that's okay. It's not a bad thing.

Especially with my modeling, though, it's helped more being able to do these different shoots with so many amazing photographers and just having safe places to do that, and knowing that I've worked with great photographers where I felt comfortable and just having control over it has made the world of a difference.

Griffith, Jake. 2025

“You're a playwright! Whether it's drawn from your personal experience with that Second City show you did, or in the form of sold-out staged readings. Had you heard of this playwright, Wedekind, before this production? What have you learned from him as a playwright during this show?”

Jake: I knew a little bit of the musical. I did not know the storyline, truly at all, until we got to after the initial audition, and we got the full script. I ended up reading the entire script before callbacks and I was like, “This is way darker than I realized it was when I was a kid listening to the musical.”

What I learn from him, I think leans into a lot of stories happening at once, and the very end isn't like a nice little note. It's hard to tell, some of it's also been very adapted for [our] show, but the weirdness of the masked man at the end is very interesting. It's very strange, but it's a weird way to end the show, that I feel like you can take stuff from. It doesn't have to be like a nice tie-up. It's weirdly dissonant, that it's just a strange character you've never met, who doesn't making Melchior not commit su*cide. It's the only thing you know. That's it. Which is very interesting and weird, but I like it. I think of older plays being so formulaic, not in the way that they're boring, but the way that that's how we get our formulas for writing now. When something's really strange and has stayed that way, that's so interesting.

“Okay, I have to ask. I know you spent some time in New York a few years ago. Do you agree that Chicago is better than New York? There is a correct answer, but no pressure.”

Jake: That's hard, because I'm going back to New York in Fall for grad school. Very excited. One of my close friends from New York just came and visited, and I was talking about “Spring Awakenings”. He was jealous, he's like, “New York, everything has to be new. It has to be like a new play. It has to be the premiere of something.” Everybody who's young and making theater… it has to be new work and all these writers are working on stuff. It's a lot of pressure. You can’t do that like, “Hey, I read this play. I loved it. Let me just do it.” It's different, the culture of that theater scene. Here in Chicago, I’ve been able to consistently be a part of artistic projects since I moved here two years ago. I've been able to do the things that I really enjoyed doing all the time, I'm not having to scramble and maybe get to do it for a second.

Tinlin, Nealie, & Loessberg, Hannah. 2025

“I have to say, of course, congratulations on another Lazy Susan production. What was it like choosing this play for the season?”

Hannah: Oh, wow. You know, it came at a time when we were like, what to do next, what to do next in our budget? Because, you know, at this point, we haven't acquired rights for any of the shows. We've either devised, or done new works. So, this is a really old play.

Nealie: We always kind of had it in our back pocket. Hannah was always like, “I want to do ‘Spring Awakenings’.” We never knew when. And then things happen.

Hannah: I was like, let's do it. It's a little dark. It's a little dark for Lazy Susan.

Nealie: But it also was on brand at the same time. It just kind of

happened.

“This play has been censored throughout time and the world. It seems very topical in the current time of fascism. Arts and expression are more and more suppressed, so how

important is it for plays like this to continue to be supported?”

Nealie: Well, this is why theater and art itself is so important, because a lot of the times I feel like those are the people who are targeted first, because people see themselves on stage. We share stories on stage that are important to tell, and give information that's important to tell. And storytelling has been done since the beginning.

Hannah: It's always been political.

Nealie: And the theater has always been a political thing. No matter whether you're doing a comedy or tragedy or something in between. So I think it's nowadays more important than ever.

Hannah: Especially with the whole idea of education in general…

Nealie: A really big fiend.

Hannah: And I think that censoring different forms of education in schools these days, whether it be for stuff that happened in the United States and actually how it did happen and glazing over it.

Nealie: Also sex education.

Hannah: Sex education, big one. We went to Catholic school…

“A theme, apparently.”

Hannah: It is.

Nealie: It's a theme all over the place.

Hannah: So I was taught abstinence.

Nealie: I've just been taught abstinence and I feel like I didn't really find the truth of the tale until I was older and I had friends that had gone to public school. It's so varying across the board and then that's how, you know, situations happen.

Hannah: I remember in school, different kids would use that information to, target other kids. We all had book numbers in school, and mine was like 69, and this was in seventh grade. Everyone was making fun of me and I had no idea why. I was like, what do you mean? And someone had to explain it to me, and it's not that that’s something should be explained explicitly, but I just had no idea. Clearly there's characters in the play who know more, and characters who know less about sex and sex education. The girls are definitely in the dark in the play.

Nealie: When and when don't you share the information, when is the right age to share information with people to have them get a sense of the world and what they're walking into. Yeah. I think the play kind of tries to explain that.

Hannah: We have an administration that wants to censor a lot of things.

Nealie: The arts are usually the first to go. We are not going to let that happen.

Hannah: We always have a fascination together with banned books. This was a banned play for a long time, so –

Nealie: Yeah, and that means –

Hannah: It means it's good.

Nealie: There's something about it that's important rubbing people the wrong way, but –

Hannah: Maybe we are starting a conversation.