For one final fright before this spooky season fades away, the Oviedo Mall’s Imagine Performing Arts Center is hosting characters more terrifying than any walking corpse, as the Ensemble Company presents Martin McDonagh’s Tony-winning thriller The Pillowman through Nov. 8. Jeremy Wood and Brenna Arden — the real-life married couple playing a pair of cops who may be more monstrous than the child-murderer they are chasing — recently sat down with me to chat about their latest killer roles, among other artistic challenges they’ve taken on together.
Arden and Wood were brought together by Orlando’s theater community, but they both came to it from very different directions. Arden, an Orlando native who attended Winter Springs high school, saw an Orlando Shakes production of Romeo and Juliet at Lake Eola, and remembers she was immediately smitten by “the lights, the sound, the stage combat, and just being outside.” She appeared in Valencia College’s The Crucible and Tiger Tail at Theater Downtown, then made a big impression in The Dark Side of Saturn, a play that she says “actually shifted my appreciation of darker material, and not [just] the happy-go-lucky.”
Wood was bit by the theater bug in kindergarten while playing the Three Bears’ porridge. He attended a Baptist school in Pennsylvania before ending up at Jerry Falwell’s Liberty University. (“I got accepted into Harvard, but my father wanted me to go to Bob Jones University, [where] I was promptly kicked out for about 15 different things that are not even against the rules at Liberty.”) There he met former Orlando actor Scott Browning in a production of The Crucible. Along with other Floridians from their writing group, they moved to Orlando after college in search of “Hollywood East” during the brief post-Blair Witch boom, and ended up studying at Yvonne Suhor’s Art’s Sake Acting Studio.
What finally brought Arden and Wood together was Phantasmagoria, the Victorian steampunk storytelling troupe started 17 years ago by John DiDonna, Kevin Becker and myself. Wood was featured in our Empty Spaces Theater Co.’s productions of Stephen Adly Guirgis’ Jesus Hopped the A-Train and The Last Days of Judas Iscariot, and joined the Phantasmagoria cast four years. Arden auditioned a few years later and says the two were partnered up because “we were the tallest people in the cast, and they were like, ‘Let’s just put the two of them together, it’s fine.’”
The pair left Phantasmagoria after year 11, and Arden began performing in a string of striking shows at Ensemble, including In The Next Room (The Vibrator Play), Hedda Gabler and Suddenly, Last Summer. Meanwhile, Wood was fed up with his retail job. He “made a big decision right when I turned 40. I said I have $400 in the bank, and night school for real estate is $396, and I did it,” receiving his real estate license in 2019. But when the lead dropped out of Wildfire Players’ Macbeth (a name neither will utter), Wood jumped back into acting on 21 days’ notice, playing the Scottish thane alongside Arden’s witch. “Fortunately, it’s a lot easier to memorize Shakespeare because of the cadence, because of the iambic,” he says.
Although they hadn’t performed together in several years, “It was so simple and easy, and we both were great,” says Arden. “We’ve each had past relationships where they did not like our acting with other people, [and] obviously those relationships didn’t work out,” explains Wood. “I will pick the craziest pieces. I really just want bold theater, and that involves a lot of physical stuff. And she was like, ‘Well, yeah, great. Me too.’” Wood insists, “We’ve never screamed or yelled at each other, but we certainly do in this play.”
Wood has wanted to perform in The Pillowman since reading the script and attempting unsuccessfully to secure the rights for Howler’s Theater, which he founded with Browning; instead, they produced an exceptional Behanding in Spokane, but he jokingly told producer Matthew MacDermid, “I will stab a man in the face to play Ariel” in Ensemble’s production. Fortunately, director Gabriel Garcia selected him as the brutal detective without any stabbings. He then tapped Arden — just as she was returning from a teaching scholarship in Stratford-upon-Avon — to play Ariel’s sociopathic “good cop” partner, Tupolski, when MacDermid (who was originally cast in the role) stepped aside. “She’s such a chilling character. She’s so evil, she’s so manipulative, and has to follow her status quo, says Arden. “I’ve never played anything like this, and I’m very humbled and grateful that I’m getting to play something like this.”
Both actors emphasize that, despite the dark material, Garcia’s direction illuminates the empathy and emotional depth. “He’s very great at finding the heart of material that is a lot of times impossible to find, and he connects it so beautifully with music [and] feeling,” praises Arden. “If one of us makes a big offer [or] choice that he didn’t see, he doesn’t say ‘stop,’” adds Wood. “Instead of stopping an energy, he has a wonderful way of redirecting an energy and making it work.”
The Pillowman reflects today’s horrifying facts, despite being over 20 years old: “You could be grabbed out of the mall today, dragged into a room in Alligator Alcatraz, in your own state, questioned, locked up, shot, and no one would have any idea,” says Wood. In the face of that, Arden says Ensemble offers a “home base” that “reminds me of Theater Downtown” for those seeking challenging, rarely produced scripts. “We need to get a new crowd in [the theater],” says Wood. “We have to do fresh, powerful stuff, and being part of that is deliriously exciting.”
The Pillowman: various times/dates through Nov. 8 at Imagine Performing Arts Center, 1220 Oviedo Mall Blvd., Oviedo, 407-986-0494, $20-$50.
