Nick Leshi – How did your play, Invitation to a Marriage, come about? This is the first time you’ve put it on its feet at all, right?
Roland Uruci – Yes. I’ve written several one-acts, and some scripts, and directed one-acts for a theater company that’s based in New York. It was called Phare Play Productions. I did that for two years. I was with a sketch comedy troupe before that and I wrote sketches. So it was a natural migration to writing more and more stuff. For a little while I was going for more of the serious stuff.
NL – The dramas.
RU – Yeah. I wanted to show that I wasn’t only “the funny guy.” Then I got stuck in all serious stuff! I said, “Oh my God, this is horrible.”
NL – It’s so funny how people get stereotyped.
RU – Yeah, you get typecast right away. I did a play with Luan Bexheti, Open Couple...It was a one line thing. And I sat (backstage waiting for my line) and thought a lot about it, and said, “Wouldn’t it be great if we did an Albanian play with Albanians, Albanians producing it.” Then I did The Resistible Rise of Fatlinda Paloka with Elza Zagreda.
NL – That was really a lot of fun.
RU – That was a lot of fun! So I was in that. And I thought, okay, great, but it’s not really about Albanians.
NL – I was thinking the same thing.
RU – It could be anybody.
NL – It was more about the Southerners. It could have been any outside culture.
RU – Any of the real Albanian stuff we sort of put in there.
NL – It seemed like there was a lot of improvisation.
RU – We tried to build the characters a little more...And I started writing. I already had this idea about an immigrant story in America about Albanians. What always struck me as odd is, when you’re an immigrant, who do you marry? That’s one of the biggest questions. Who do you marry? Do you meet the Albanian, do you not meet the Albanian? How do you commit? Are you still Albanian if you’re not marrying an Albanian? Are you super-Albanian if you do marry an Albanian? And how it’s always confusing. As an immigrant, what part of your time do you put in to be an American or an Albanian?...How do we show the immigrant story from two different perspectives? ...American and...Albanian-American.
NL – That’s why I find it so interesting what you and Elza are doing, because the Albanian culture for so long has been so isolationist, and I think it’s great that we’re finally broadening out without losing our identity.
RU – That was the trick with this.
NL – I think it takes your generation, you and Elza, and my generation, who see the best of both worlds. Our parents and the older generations might be a bit more protective.
RU – I don’t know if it’s protective. I don’t know if it’s elitist. It’s probably fear. It’s probably a reaction. How we all show we’re different. Whereas when you’re here for so long, you embrace the difference. I don’t think they embrace the difference. We’re just different, we’re just different. But there’s a lot of similarities too! And there are a lot of things that happen in our culture that can cross over easily into the American experience, which is great! And that’s what you have to do.
NL – You have the younger generation that abandons everything of their history and background because of that natural youthful rebellion.
RU – Right, they rebel, they say, “I don’t want to be in this, it’s backwards,” not realizing that some of it is cool. There are points in the play that I specifically did to show that some things are kind of interesting and not 100% bad. They just get sometimes morphed into things that are worse, but the core is good, it’s just that we have to understand the core. That was a big part of it. I just understand the two different sides. I’ve been to Albania Proper and I’m from Macedonia, and I have a lot of family from all over, and I always found it interesting the perception of what it is to be Albanian. Like when we go to Albania Proper, we’re not Albanians. You know, “You’re American, you’re Macedonian, you’re Kosovar, you’re everything but Albanian.” But we (Albanian-Americans) die to be Albanian. We have Albanian eagles around our necks, and they laugh at us! “Why would an Albanian wear that? We know that we’re Albanian! An Albanian knows he’s Albanian, he doesn’t have to wear that.” And that’s always how they think of us.
NL – That’s an interesting point.
RU – It’s such a different concept. And when they come here, (the young Albanians) want to be American. They want to forget Albania. I always tell people, part of this play is arguments and discussions I’ve had with people, it’s not based on any one person, it’s based on a multitude of people and their conversations and perceptions...that impacted me a great deal. What’s this concept? (Being) American (or) not American enough…
NL – (Or) not Albanian enough.
RU – It’s a very interesting way to see things. That’s why I’ve been trying to play with this, to really bring it out, to pull in American audiences. That was the big draw too to me. How many Americans can I get into this play? How many Americans can I get to come and see it and really like it? I didn’t push it through the (Albanian) community, I went through Facebook only, it wasn’t a big marketing push. I just wanted to see where it was going, make sure it was solid, but there were nights when I had half Americans in there and they loved it. And there’s a ton of Albanians who are married to Americans, and they liked it. And they brought their friends.
NL – It’s good to see both cultures. You see all these other cultures getting the American treatment, My Big Fat Greek Wedding, and so on. Different cultures that people don’t always think about.
RU – I’ll be honest, that’s another big reason I wrote it. In all honesty, is My Big Fat Greek Wedding a great story? No. It’s average at best. It’s very simple, two-sided, how a girl blooms...With this, I wanted to show the superficial part of how you choose a spouse, and also the love part...That’s a big crux of the story.
NL – When I’ve written some stuff and had staged readings, I’ve gotten some ideas from seeing different people do the roles. How about you when you’ve seen the actors read your words, did they bring new ideas to the material that you didn’t see before?
RU – They definitely brought stuff and it was nice to see. It was interesting because even the readings they brought some things, but I already had the voices sort of in my head. I had worked with some people in Fatlinda Paloka who I brought into this production. When I was writing it, I said, “This is perfect for you. I know, I’m writing this for you. Please do it. I know your voice.” It’s weird, as a writer, and you know because you’ve written stuff, I hear the voices in my head, I know what it sounds like, I know the inflections. I know exactly where it has to be in the pacing. Sometimes it’s hard to cast that. But luckily, there were some of these people who I was lucky to coax them and talk them into doing it. I wrote it almost in a rhythm. I tried to make dialogue very natural, where it just naturally comes out. There’s indignation, there’s subtext between spouses and family members. I wanted to show that friction. There’s two brothers that don’t get along, one’s the first brother, one’s the second brother, great common trait in any culture, you know. Who’s the favorite son? There are parents who got married for traditional reasons, some were forced into it. There are other parents who got married for convenience. I was playing on all those layers, and I tried to bring those out a little bit in a funny way where we’re not judging. I’m not making fun of the Albanian culture at all, that was never my intent. But you know, we can laugh at ourselves and that was one of the big things for me. We have to prove that in media we can’t always be the dirtbags. I’m tired of being the criminals.
NL – I’ve seen it with my Italian friends, almost every time they do a movie about Italian culture, it’s always the mob, and usually the ones making those movies are the Italians – Copolla, Scorsese.
RU – And then they complain! ...We glorify all these silly things.
NL – So what’s your background? How did you get into the arts?
RU – All by chance. I minored in theater at Hunter College, I was taking one acting class. I registered, I took the elevator up to take my first class. It was full of actors. I couldn’t stand their conversation. I dropped the class. Literally, I dropped the class that minute. I walked out.
NL – Were they pretentious?
RU – Yep. Pretentious and all divas. You know, I’m an average kid from Brooklyn. I speak a certain way, I understand that, I have a certain attitude, my sensibility’s different. I said, you know what, I just can’t be that. I got the minor, I did set construction, I even did...costume design. I like working with my hands. I like theater. You know what? I can do this. I grew up in a very oral house where there was a lot of verbal jabs. That’s how we grew up. Talking. We always made fun of each other. So it’s natural for me to live on that excitement of making fun and joking. I had a job at Broadway Video, Lorne Michael’s company, I was working in the production house and one of the guy’s there had a sketch comedy group...He said, “You want to be in my group?” I thought (he was joking). He said, “You can write!...Dude, I believe in you.” And he forced me to do it. I sat down with him and another friend I met through him. We wrote three 60-minute shows of sketches. We got ready, we auditioned people which was amazing.
NL – This was all theater?
RU – All theater. And so we started a sketch comedy group. Then we started doing runs – nine month runs, ten month runs. We got a lot of press. Sadly, originally the name was Ground Zero.
NL – That’s tough.
RU – We changed it after the attack, we changed it to Bathing with Toasters. We ran for about eight years, had a lot of press, had a lot of movement with us, a lot of excitement, but it just ran its course. We got as close as we could possibly get to doing it as a group.
NL – You probably learned a lot from it though.
RU – I did. My school was on the stage. I tell people, my education was the stage.
NL – That’s the best.
RU – It was an amazing process. It was amazing to be part of that.
NL – Technique is good. Learning the history of the craft is good. But you have to do it.
RU – Well, the weird thing is I did set construction and costume design. I had a history of it, a little bit. A different perspective, but I had a history of it. You know, a little more earthy, I would say. More about what you could bring to it. When you’re in set design and costume, it’s what you can bring, a hundred per cent...what you can build, what you can make out of it, how your imagination works out of a black space. And that was a natural fit for sketch comedy. There’s no costumes. People have to believe you have an I.V. in your arm if you’re holding a tube.
NL – That’s true.
RU – They gotta believe it. You have to be five different characters over sixty minutes. So all these different things you have to learn. That was a real pleasure. I got pretty close. As a group we were pursued by Comedy Central to do a series. We got pretty high up where the C.E.O. was meeting with us and everything, it just imploded, it took too long.
NL – You have to be at the right place at the right time.
RU – I started late, actually, I started when I was 30. I was a little older and they had other groups who were younger, you know, to move into that segment. But you know what? I did it. I got as far as I could with that and I’m happy with that. I did it with nothing. Then I started just acting and doing films. What I like to do is break up my time between film and theater.
NL – Which do you like better if you had to choose?
RU – I’ll tell you, I love theater because of the instant gratification.
NL – That’s a great thing to have. But film is so much more subtle and you really need to be a better actor sometimes to succeed in film.
RU – You do.
NL – It’s different. I keep telling everyone I know it’s different.
RU – It’s so different. The thing about film is, I’ve done a number of films, I’m in S.A.G. (the Screen Actors Guild), I’ve done films and some films online and independent films. I’ve gotten some good pieces out of it, but the nuance, the subtlety of film is attainable – there’s a hush in the room, it’s all about you, whereas theater, the subtlety is about them (the live audience) and if they can feel it you nailed it. It’s all about them, you brought them in. You’re not looking at them, it’s the emotion. If it’s there, you can draw them in. That to me is an amazing thing. It’s just two different ways of approaching the same end. But it is that subtlety like you said.
NL – I guess it’s also like you said the immediacy of having the audience there the whole time. In film, you’re so dependent on the director and the cinematographer.
RU – And all those retakes. Do it again, do it again! In theater, there is no do it again. Do it! We had a flub on stage, the joke got funnier because they messed it up. I wouldn’t keep that joke, but they committed, trying to work their way out of it, and by working their way out of it it got funnier...
NL – Do you have other stories in your mind that you’re working on?
RU – I do have a few. I really want to see where this one goes and that’s my place right now. I want to bring it back in September. I think it’s worthy to be seen more in all honesty.
NL – Same kind of venue, a small theater?
RU – I want to do a bigger venue. This, with word of mouth, we were selling out every night at 50 people.
NL – That’s great.
RU – Literally, I was turning people away every night. I would like to get a 100 person venue.
NL – Are you thinking of keeping it in Manhattan or are you looking for space in other areas of the city?
RU – In Manhattan I think. I’ve been approached about doing it in other communities, Albanian communities. I’m all for that. But again, the whole aim was not to make it Albanian only. So I’m a little wary of that. I don’t want to bank on that.
NL – Is there a lot of Albanian dialogue in there too or is it all English?
RU – All English.
NL – That’s going to draw the mainstream audience, which is what you want.
RU – Totally. I mean there are some Albanian words in there, but the way I crafted it, where I thought I needed it to be, I translated it, and there are points I don’t, you just assume what it is, and that’s it, move on. I tried to balance that out. It’s an 80-minute play.
NL – No intermission?
RU – With intermission, 90. Actually I wrote it for an intermission – there has to be a set change. The problem with some of these no-intermission plays is that the audience has to go to the bathroom, you know? So I said, you know what, this is going to have a bathroom break. But I’ll tell you, with this play, knowing how (sometimes audiences) don’t come back in a hurry, I would make a speech every time, “Listen, it’s a 10-minute intermission, that’s it. I lock the door!” I said, “I have a thick Albanian head, I will not open that door.” Every time I walked out at 8 minutes, there were people lined up the stairs. They said, “No, you said 10 minutes.” And they ran back up. That was amazing. No one left. That’s great.
NL – So when it comes back in September, are there going to be changes to it?
RU – A couple of changes I’ll keep that we got during rehearsal. Some lines, additions. The funny thing is, one of the actors had an old play, an old script, for rehearsal, he forgot his other one, so he had an old one, and a lot of his funny lines I had cut. He wanted to put them back in and said, “Hey, why don’t you keep them in? They’re funny.” I didn’t think they were funny the first time.
NL – It’s funny when other people hear it or see it, they notice something fresh.
RU – Yeah. They said, “This is hilarious, why wouldn’t you keep it?” I said, “I don’t know. I just thought it wouldn’t be funny.” There may be some cast changing. We also have to commit for two weeks. The schedule and other things have to be figured out. I have to think of the show more so than the personal things. The show is important. I do want to get it out there.
NL – So you’re directing it again the second time around?
RU – I think I did a bang up job. Not to be vain about it, but I think I understood it more so than other people would. There are nuances that I understand.
NL – That’s good. I hope it works out.
RU – ...I’ve been here and I’ve always had to toggle that line. I didn’t grow up with a lot. We grew up in a very American community. I didn’t know any Albanians growing up besides distant relatives at best. We had three or four families we visited, and that was it. We didn’t grow up with anybody. To me, it was always the toggling. What’s funny? What’s not funny? What do you tell? What do you not tell? It’s a process, but I think I understand it. I think I have a good background in sketch comedy. It enabled me to do the timing of the little things, the little tweaks that worked. And a lot of it came through. A lot of it really showed through.
NL – You’re like an inspiration. One of the scripts I’m working on is about these Albanian-American brothers growing up. I said, “Okay, if I’m doing it, do I have to add all these Albanian elements for the older generation?” It’s a challenge, but it’s good. It’s a personal story. There’s a lot of autobiographical stuff in there. But then you reach a point when you say, “Look, I’m telling a story for myself, and if an audience connects with it, great.” But at the same time, I have to make it accessible for an audience too.
RU – Perfect, that’s exactly what I was trying to do.
NL – You hope it will open some eyes.
RU – I definitely hope so. I was watching the show a couple of times. I didn’t watch the first night because I was shaking because I was so nervous. I literally just sat out in the hall and just heard the cues. I was like, “Oh my God.” Because I was just so nervous, you know? It’s your baby.
NL – It is your baby.
RU – It’s my baby, it’s my work, it’s my directing. It’s so many ways to say “I hate you.” You know? It’s not just one thing. It’s so many ways to say, “I hate you.” And people just loved it, and then when I did eventually watch it, did I just watch the actors? No. The actors have their job. Whatever they have to do, they have to do. I was watching the audience.
NL – To see their reaction, to see what they connected with?
RU – To see their reaction. I wrote the first act as a split stage. In the script, they use the same space percentage-wise. There’s like a gray area. So they come from one door, one family, the other door is the other family. And they constantly go like this, back and forth. It keeps the pacing going, because everything is happening in real time. The kids are being told that they’re engaged to be married at the exact same time. So you’re seeing all this happen. And I saw people’s heads turn left, right. They were following it so specifically. I was like, “That’s amazing that I got them to do this.” That’s a challenge to get the audience to really pay attention. I was very proud of it in the end. Prouder than I’ve been in a lot of stuff I’ve written.
NL – I hope I get to see it in September.
RU – I hope so too.
NL – Do you have a Web site for it?
RU – I’m going to start building it now. I had no idea what to expect. I was so nervous, the first effort, you know, what’s going to happen with this stuff? Maybe people would have hated it. Maybe people were embarrassed. You never know.
NL – You never know.
RU – It’s adult humor, but it’s not traditional Albanian humor, which is what I wanted to stay away from too. That’s a big peeve of mine, that Eastern Bloc humor that’s boring. I never get the jokes. I’ve watched it, I just don’t get why it’s funny. People tell me it’s funny. I don’t get it. It’s bad acting, it’s bad timing. I don’t know why it’s funny. I get lambasted about that all the time. But I think if we keep building the rapport like this, this is what’s important...
NL – That’s what it’s all about. You lay the groundwork. You got your message out there. Now people either accept it or bring their own thing to it.
RU – There’s nothing better...This is the one story I have. I hope there’s more stories out there.
NL – When I saw that play you were in with Elza, The Resistible Rise of Fatlinda Paloka, good show, I enjoyed it, a lot of the cast was good, but you really stood out. From the Narrator to when you became another character in the story, I thought it was really good. “This guy’s got acting chops and he’s an intelligent performer.” Your instincts, your stage instincts, came through.
RU – Thank you so much. It was a fun project to do. I just wanted to do more. The other guy in the show, Bujan Rugova, the Post Office guy, he had a very small part in this. Lumi Subasic, she’s a very new actor, the pregnant girl, that was her first effort doing anything. In this I gave her a nice meaty role. Because of that play also, I made this a true ensemble, no small parts. Everybody had good lines.
NL – That’s one of my pet peeves as an actor with a script, when you read a script and you know they only put this part in there because they needed something, they needed somebody to bring something or take something off stage, it’s not a good role.
RU – I don’t do that. I’ve never done that. You have to make sure that they’re there for a reason. It has to move the story along, not as furniture or to hand you something...If they’re not important to the scene, why are they there? You know, as a sketch performer, you always learn how to write like that. If you have three people, you wrote three people. If you have four people, you wrote scenes for four people. You only need four people in this scene. And that’s how you balanced it out...That’s part of my skillset I think. There was definitely a goal when I wrote this. I wanted a 90-minute play. I wanted a play that women would feel comfortable seeing, and bringing their boyfriends. I wanted to feel the moment in the end, because we’ve invested 80 minutes in these characters. Actually, some people, some Albanians, said, “No, make it funnier.” No. The ending could be funny, but it has to be sweet. It has to be sweet. There’s no funny movie in this world that doesn’t have a feel-good moment in the end. Animal House has a feel-good moment in the end!
NL – You want people to walk out with a smile on their face.
RU – You want them to walk out smiling and caring. You invested this much time in those characters. So those were all milestones that I really wanted to hit. I think when you do that, it works.
NL – And is this the first full-length play you’ve written? Was that difficult, coming up with all those beats?
RU – This came out of my head like wildfire. I wrote it in two weeks. I wrote the rewrites in another two or three weeks. It just made sense. You know, I don’t know if I can do it again...But when it came out, even to this day when I watched it, I was laughing.
NL – That means it worked.
RU – I told the cast when we were about to go up, I said, “Listen, there’s an old saying, during rehearsals it’s the director’s play, when it goes up it’s your play. You guys now own this. You have to understand something, do yourself proud, and understand where I am – I wrote it, I paved the way, I became a director, and now, I’m not the director, I’m a spectator. So appreciate me as the audience. I love it as the spectator. I’m done directing. You guys know what this is. But I love this, so treat yourself right. Do right by yourself.” That was one of my speeches to them. I do a lot of speeches!...I was stunned honestly that it came together. It was almost a theater in the round space so there were two sides to the stage, and even though you weren’t able to see everyone’s faces at times I told the actors about the intent. Independent plays and films are dialogue heavy. They’re all about dialogue. It’s not about the action, it’s not about the money, because we have no money. We have dialogue. Words we got. Money, not so much! That’s always the way I look at it. Make it make sense verbally then people can grab on to it. Do a line that is profound. It doesn’t matter, even if it’s hyperbole. In theater it’s okay. In independent film it’s okay to be that person. It’s totally okay, because we all wish we could say those words at that right moment. So I tried to put a little bit of heart into it.
NL – Did your family come see it?
RU – My cousins did, not my parents. I was actually scared of my parents coming to see it, because there’s some sexual notes in there, things like that, they might be uncomfortable with it, oh God! My cousins though, I had a whole clan, like fourteen people came, and they loved it. This is what we’re about.
NL – Was it a different reaction from the Albanians than from the Americans or did you feel they were both laughing at the same stuff?
RU – Yeah, yeah, that was the interesting thing. They were all making comments about the same things.
NL – That means it was all universal.
RU – And that was the goal! That was the goal. You didn’t have to cross ethnic lines. One person, an Albanian, said, “Why don’t we do a play for Albanians in the Albanian language?” I said, “Because I live in America.” I said, “If I live in Albania I’d write one in Albanian. But I live here.” It’s our story, we own it, it’s my gift to my people, we own it culturally, and that’s great. It’s like My Big Fat Greek Wedding is a Greek play. No one else can do it, it’s a Greek play. But this should be our play. This should be our story. And it can be played anywhere, it doesn’t matter. But it should be our story. We should own something that’s ours. And that is art, when you think about it, really, you want to own something, for your people, for your house, for your family. You want to own it. It has to be for these people. I think we’ve been missing that as actors here, as performers...I have natural instincts to see things and to look at it. Also because I’m an immigrant I see things a little differently. I can see things from multiple perspectives. I think that’s a skill we don’t use here as much.
NL – It’s like you’re bringing both worlds together.
RU – Right, right. I grew up in a very Jewish neighborhood. I grew up as an American-Albanian, I grew up as an immigrant. My parents moved a bit depending on jobs. I knew all kinds of people, I knew all kinds of ethnicities growing up, and we were always free spirits. I learned about different kinds of people. We didn’t care. As long as they were good people, we didn’t care. That’s how my parents raised us. So I think bringing that is different. We didn’t come with a lot of the stereotypes. At one point of the play, one of the themes is “besa,” honor for Albanians, a couple of Albanians who were right off the boat said it’s not important to Albanians. And one (other) Albanian stepped in and said, “No, it’s not important to you, because you lost it.” Because in the peripheral, where other Albanians are, it’s very important. It’s mythic. It became a myth. For those who lost it, from Albania Proper, they didn’t have it any more. But where you guys are – Macedonia, Montenegro, Kosova, even the Greek Albanians – it’s so mythic that it took a life of its own. And especially the immigrants who left from Yugoslavia and came to the U.S., not only were denied being Albanian there but over here had to become American, so they were denied twice of being who you want to be. That’s a big struggle, a big way to think. But that’s part of the story, showing what the struggle is, what are we bringing to the table, what’s our history, what kind of baggage do we have. I tried to make it real, I tried to make it sincere.
NL – It’s all the best parts of storytelling.
RU – Yeah, it’s all about bringing it across and helping people really connect to it. And I’ve seen a lot of people connect to it. I was really shocked. Fadil Berisha came, he loved it...It made me super happy. I gave myself a big high-five that night!
NL – That’s great. You did it. That’s great. When I heard you were writing and producing something I was thrilled.
RU – It’s hard, but I did it.
NL – You have to find a way to do it.
RU – That’s what it was. Literally throwing everything I had into it...It’s all about giving. It’s all about opening up and showing something from me. I think it’s really brought it out there. I really do. I wish you’d come see it. I hope you definitely come see it...
NL – I promise to catch it (when it runs again). It’s on my “must see” list now.
RU – Definitely. You’ll like it. There’s some stuff in there you won’t suspect. Like I always tell people, the part about being Albanian that I love is that I always get to meet these kinds of people, and that’s good for me. A lot of people say, “Oh, Albanians are this and that.” I say, “No, you’re stuck with who you think you’re stuck with. There are some people like that in every group. And you have to be selective. You have to surround yourself with people who shine you and you shine them.” That’s what this thing’s about...
NL – So if there’s one message you want your audience to take away after seeing your play, what do you want it to be? What’s the one thing?
RU – The immigrant process is universal. Sometimes you have to settle for just enough. That’s the theme in the end. Just enough is kind of awesome. We don’t have to have these high hopes. You have to work through stuff. Just enough is good.
NL – Just enough. That’s great.
RU – That’s the theme in the play, for me at least. Just enough is okay, because things get shattered, things break down, our images and ideas of who we are get totally broken apart, and that’s how it is though. We never know who we’re talking to in reality, it’s what they say they are, but a lot of times they’re not that strong inside, and that’s what comes out. I tried to do it in a funny way to make people laugh at it and make it a little endearing. People cared, I think people genuinely cared about these characters.
NL – That’s important. You made them real.
RU – Definitely real. Definitely real.
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