Dagmar Stansova is an award winning writer and critically acclaimed actor, has performed in leading roles off-Broadway, at LaMama and The Public Theatre and in Los Angeles at the Odyssey and West Coast Ensemble. Her television credits include “One Life to Live” and HBO’s “The Image” with Albert Finney.
She starred in the independent films “Dirty Money” and “Tick Tick Tick” which premiered at Sundance. Other film credits include Coppola’s “Dracula” and “Waist Deep”. She’s written an award winning screenplay about the Velvet Revolution of 1989 which earned her a Writers Guild of America membership.With her mother, father and sister she escaped from communist Czechoslovakia, lived in Israel, Greece, Italy and Germany, learned to dance in Harlem and Haiti, got her BA in Latin American, Portuguese and Brazilian Studies from Brown University, completed her pre-med requirement at Purchase, State University of N.Y. and to the shock of family and friends pursued a career in the Theatre Arts. She studied acting with the formidable Kim Stanley. For twenty years she avoided writing about this complex issue of how traumas are passed from one generation to the next until she met her director and dramaturg Debra De Liso who “put her hands under her art” and Loose Underwear was born.
Tell us about your background and how it shows up in your play Loose Underwear.
I am a daughter of a holocaust survivor. You wouldn’t think there’s much comedy in that. And there isn’t. But it is a rich terrain for the absurdity, the unfixability, the unknownness, the sublime dysfunctionality of life. Loose Underwear is a dramatic work that happens to be funny. It’s about how the daughter of a “New Age” Holocaust survivor - that in itself is funny - is compelled to cha-cha away, yes dance away, the wounds of her ancestors and through the celebratory delight of her loose underwear she finds an unexpected way to lift the weight of ancestral traumas. I have been obsessed with the idea of how what one generation neglects or covers up, haunts the next. My mother’s generation didn’t have the luxury of dealing with their post war traumas. As is often the case with children of Holocaust survivors, I took on the weight of my mother’s experience, hoping to unburden her load. I so identified with her trauma that I lived my life as if it was me who survived the Holocaust. There’s all these plays about “The sins of the fathers shall be visited upon the sons” well, my play is about “The shocks of the mothers shall be visited upon the daughters”.
Where did you begin the show and what was the effect on the audience? Explain in detail.
When I performed an excerpt from my show at the Atwater Playhouse I was so happy that people were laughing
and crying. It was very important to me that I deliver this heavy subject matter with a light touch. I got to see how strongly it affected people of all ages but especially women. It is a mother daughter story after all. The mother daughter relationship is a tenuous one, a challenging one for most of the women I talk to. It’s the strongest bond and the most potentially explosive one. I’ve put the mother daughter bond into the context of the Holocaust and what’s ironic is that my mother, the “hidden child” Holocaust survivor, is the comic relief. The holocaust is a heavy matter and I believe you can’t throw it at people without giving them a place to release the tension, a place to rest, a place to remember that laughter lurks in the darkest of situations.
In real life, it was my father who was the comic relief. He was not Jewish but he was my mother’s greatest champion. He was an equal opportunity humorist. He would make the same irreverent jokes whether in the company of the guy who collected our garbage or the Pope. This humor got him in a lot of trouble with the Communists and if we would not have escaped from Czechoslovakia he would have ended up in a labor camp in Siberia. But even if that would have happened I have no doubt that my father would have kept his humor.
I think what’s funny about my show is that I don’t try to cover or pretty up the absurdity and paradox of real life. I don’t want to give away the climax of the show so I’m going to shut up. Come and enjoy. It’s funny in the way that real life is funny when you find yourself in moments where everything is contradicting itself and all you can do is laugh, the only way out or in is to loosen your underwear. It’s the celebratory spirit of loose underwear that kept me sane, that kept the spirit of celebration alive in me. And for this I thank my father and my grandma. My father for introducing the concept to me as a little girl when he said that the key to happiness is “Loose balls, like blowing in the wind!” It was clear to me that I didn’t have any balls to make loose so I translated his masculine concept into a feminine one. I asked my grandma to sew me some underwear. “Make it loose grandma! Make it loose!” And she did.
Loose underwear blowing in the wind is a symbol of freedom, of an open mind, of a celebratory stance even when faced with trying to exorcise the homeless ghosts of World War II. In my later years, which is now, I took that even a step further. Women’s lib had nothing on me. They took off their bras. Well, I took off my underwear. I went from Loose Underwear to No Underwear. So my loose underwear raised on an invisible stick, blowing in the wind like a flag of surrender, became my approach to life, to art, to death, to the whole shebang we call existence.
On my father’s side I come from a lineage of drummers. they were village announcers, like a walking newspaper. So technically you could say I come from a line of journalists, or newspaper men. It wasn’t about the facts of the story it was about how that story could serve the people listening to it. If it was bad news there would always have to be a joke inserted. Jokes and humor and parodies were considered a digestive aid for bad news.
What excites you most about your story?
Is it appropriate for all ages?
What I love about my story is that it takes you into some unusual terrains. From communist Czechoslovakia, to Harlem, from exorcisms to orgasms, from peeing rituals to poetic soliloquies. All within a framework of strong contrast between dark tragedy and absurd comedy. We can’t talk about the Holocaust and the Jewish experience without getting real about it and yet I think ultimately the play is uplifting and I hope it gives the audience chills like it gives me at rehearsal.
It’s great for teens because they’re hormones are waking up and popping and this show is all about addressing the authentic feelings we have inside of us. If I had a daughter, this is the kind of play I would want her to see. Even though it’s a very specific story, I feel it’s universal. We all search for freedom. We all search for happiness. We all have parents that we love or hate but eventually need to separate from. What are we here for? Except to enjoy life? And you can’t enjoy life when you are weighed down and loaded with family baggage. But this isn’t about throwing things away. What excites me about this story is that it is a story of separation, a story of divorcing your parent but at the same time it’s a story of marrying your own humanity. Hopefully this play will encourage people to choose loose underwear instead of tight ones.
What do you hope will happen as a result of the Fringe exposure?
My vision for the show is that I get to do it off-Broadway on my old stomping grounds in New York City. I’m also a screenwriter and would love to turn it into a film. And of course I would love to have full houses for each performance.
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Loose Underwear plays at The New American Theatre
Saturday June 8, 2019 - 3:30 pm
Thursday June 13, 2019 - 9:00 pm
Sunday June 16, 2019 - 6:30 pm
Sunday June 23, 2019 - 7:30 pm
Saturday June 29, 2019 - 5:00 pm
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