The Stars of 'Chester Bailey' Discuss Their Journey With This Taut New Play

Chester Bailey, Joe Dougherty's two-character play now on stage at New York's Irish Repertory Theatre, has garnered a lot of attention and a lot of praise. It is a taut psychological drama, starring real-life father and son Reed Birney and Ephraim Birney who are giving gripping performances as Doctor Philip Cotton and Chester, his pajama-clad patient from Brooklyn. The Birneys talked to Newsweek about their experience acting in Chester Bailey and the journey they took with it to Irish Rep.

Their connection to the play actually goes back several years. Ephraim was cast first. Reed came on later. Reed told Newsweek, "I was in a reading of it as the Irish Rep. I think January 2015, with [director Ron Lagomarsino]. Then I got a gig so I had to drop out at the last minute.

"Ron went out to San Francisco [American Conservatory Theater (ACT)], I think in 2016, and did a production of it with David Straithairn there as Dr. Cotton at the ACT small theater." After that, Reed rejoined the play and starred with Ephraim in productions at the Contemporary American Theatre Festival in West Virginia and at Barrington Stage Company in Pittsfield, Massachusetts.

The play has evolved a little since that 2015 reading. Ephraim said, "Even back then, it was relatively similar to what we do: the same shape, a lot of the same dialogue."

Reed pointed out, "Except it started very differently. I think that first moment where I come in, and I say, 'I'm Dr. Cotton.' That's new."

There are a few changes that have come for this production. Reed told Newsweek, "Our production has some new dialogue." He asked Ephraim, "Did we get new lines in Barrington last year? I don't think we did. Did we?"

Ephraim answered, "Maybe a few."

A lot of Chester Bailey, especially early on, is exposition that is spoken directly to the audience.

"Yeah," Reed said. "the first 14 pages of the play."

'Scariest Part of Doing the Show'

When asked if that is tough for an actor, Reed says: "It's the scariest part of doing the show: the first half hour, starting up that way and knowing that we don't even talk to one another within a half hour. So there's nothing we can do if one of us skips a line or misses a line. The train is off the rails. Luckily, we haven't had any derailments while performing. But, you know, in rehearsal, certainly I would jump pages and pages ahead. Suddenly, the play's half over."

And then it's a 45-minute play.

Reed laughed and said, "Some people really liked that, yeah: a good quick evening in the theater."

When asked if during the long stretches of exposition are there triggers, lines in the speech to feed you the next line or does the other actor just stops talking, so it becomes like; 'Your line. Go for it," Reed said, "I think it's a little bit of both. I mean, I hear [Ephraim] say something and I think: Oh, that's going to lead me into the next thing."

In performance, things have gone well, Reed said, but that was not always the case. "When we'd stop and start in rehearsals, and they'd say, 'Start at this line, for Ephraim,' I will have no idea what my next line will be. That's when everything gets tricky."

Ephraim told Newsweek that, "You do see there are a lot of kind of smart little hints that Joe has given the actor in one line will be off the other. Like when we both meet our respective women at the same time in the story. There's that, and even on a smaller scale, an example that pops into my head is when I'm in Penn Station for the first time, and I see the girl with the red hair in the newsstand, Dad has a line that finishes where he says, 'I don't like being in Penn Station while blah, blah, blah, blah. It's like you're in a big Victorian birdcage.' That's how his line ends, and my line starts with. 'There was a print of a bird on the front of her blouse.' So, there's a fun little connector there that [Dougherty's] thrown in that makes it a little easier."

Built-In Backstory

Usually actors create a backstory for their characters. That really wasn't the case in Chester Bailey.

Reed told Newsweek, "Oftentimes, when you start, you spend three or four days doing table work, where you read the play, you discuss the play, and you do a lot of inventing backstory. I don't think we ever really did any table work, which with a play like this is all right: A lot of it is already in there because we have those 30 minutes exposition in the beginning."

It has been noted that there are a lot of familial echoes to other plays: The pipe dreams and illusions of The Iceman Cometh and Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and even The Glass Menagerie. Not that it's in any way derivative, but a lot of those plays touch on something deep in the American psyche: the coping mechanisms that desperate people come up with.

"Well," Reed said, "you know, it's obviously a story that's important: how we have to deal with our dreams and our hopes."

A Surprising Genesis

The genesis of Chester Bailey was a bit surprising to Reed. "We said to [Joe Dougherty] early on, 'Where did this story come from?' Because it seems so full. He said he had no real memory of writing it, and he said he remembered sitting in his backyard in California, sitting down, and then kind of remembered it being done, but it's so full of period detail. And I love Chester's vernacular, you know, 'tumbled to what's really going on' and 'monkey out.' All that stuff. But the inspiration came when his wife handed him a tiny little newspaper clipping about a woman who suffered catastrophic injuries—currently: It was a modern story—and the last line was, 'She is in denial about what's happened to her.' and that's what kicked him off."

Ironically, this is very similar to what happened with Peter Schaffer, which led him to write Equus. Sometimes, the less one knows, the freer the imagination is to run with a story. Dougherty went in a little different direction with Chester Bailey.

For Reed's character, the turning point in Chester Bailey comes when Chester lets it slip that he knows he is blind. At that point Dr. Cotton's job changes, at least in his own mind. "We have our tussle, and I see him walking as a blind person. And he lets me have it and says, 'What difference does it make if you know why?' and I think that resonates hugely with me. I realize, in that moment: Why am I working so hard to bring him back to the world? What does the world have for him? His parents are gone. He doesn't have anything. And so it's actually cruel and harmful [to strip him of his illusions]."

Compounding the situation is that Cotton is tasked with making the problem of Chester and his situation go away. Not solving the problem, just making it go away. Keeping up appearances is key.

Reed agreed, "There's no getting out of the hospital. Why not let him be as happy as he can be in the hospital. And if he thinks [Chester's imaginary girlfriend] Alice is going to come and visit, then great.

"I think in that moment I made a lifelong commitment to taking care of him. I say in that final scene only the three of us [Cotton, Chester and Alice] are going to know."

The haunting question for Reed and Cotton, of course, is: What happens to Alice if and when Cotton leaves the institution?

When the Play Is Over

In stressful and demanding roles like Cotton and Chester, actors can often take their work home with them. Some even live their parts 24/7. When asked if this is the case with them, Reed said, "I think because we've been doing it for so long, for so many years. Various productions. That we found a way to compartmentalize it nicely. We have our fun and goofy relationship that we are happy to go right back to when the play is over."

Ephraim is even more succinct: "When I take off my pajamas, I lose my [Brooklyn] accent."

Chester Bailey has been extended and is now playing at the Irish Repertory Theatre 132 West 22nd Street in New York, through November 20.