Ahoy, outcasts and underdogs!

This past Saturday was official opening night of SHIP, and reviews are already praising the production, Douglas Williams’ script, and especially its unique characters. David Fox of Reclining Standards describes the trio of Nell, Caitlin, and Jeremiah as “a group of outliers in search of something to anchor a life that otherwise doesn’t feel destined for achievement” and says “The last time I remember being so taken with a playwright’s voice for contemporary speech was in Kenneth Lonergan’s This Is Our Youth, now almost 25 years old.”

Annie Fang, Alison Ormsby, and Michael Stahler, the trio of recent college graduates (thanks to SHIP being an Azuka New Professionals production) that bring those outliers to life, sat down to talk about their characters at top of show, and what makes them such Azuka-style underdogs. You can find the video below, as well as a transcript. (Plus — wondering about that artwork in the background? It’s by the wonderful @scraps_collection on Instagram!)

SHIP runs through March 15; you can make your Pay What You Decide reservation by clicking right here!

Below is a transcript of the above video, which has been edited and pared down for clarity from the original footage.

ANNIE: “Hello, my name is Annie Fang and I’m playing Nell.”

ALISON: “My name is Alison Ormsby, I play Caitlin.”

MICHAEL: “Hi, my name is Michael Stahler, and I play Jeremiah in SHIP.”

ANNIE: “Nell…is a bit of a wild card. She’s just gotten out of rehab; she’s just kind of dealing with being back in her hometown. It’s a pretty small town, so things are kind of slow. She’s just waiting for her next big thing, she knows she’s destined for the bigger and the better.”

ALISON: “Top of the show, Caitlin is sort of in this place where she’s playing the role of caretaker, and taking care of her and Nell’s mother; her and Nell are sisters. And Caitlin is a librarian and has been traveling back and forth to take care of their mother.”

MICHAEL: “Jeremiah Cukor is a…a young man who attempted to grow his nails the longest in the world, and failed. This is sort of a character who is too weird for normal people, and too normal for the weird people? He’s just lost his nails in a terrible car accident, and is trying to live a normal life.”

ANNIE: “Nell is definitely an underdog. She has, like, a pretty wild past? And I think there are a lot of people who don’t expect her to necessarily succeed in a conventional way. She’s got a lot of stuff going on in her brain, she’s struggling with sobriety. She’s just kind of on a different wavelength, she marches to the beat of her own drum, and I think for a lot of people who are fully acclimated to normal society, that can be a little risky, or tenuous. And I think she’s always sort of on the precipice of something, that people don’t necessarily give her a lot of faith.”

ALISON: “Caitlin is totally underdog territory, in that she’s working constantly behind the scenes and not getting a lot of credit for all of the hard work that she’s doing. So it feels really important to give her justice by giving her a voice.”

MICHAEL: “Jeremiah fits in as an underdog — because of his incredibly long fingernails, he was sort of robbed of a normal childhood. He was not able to do things for himself, around the house, he was not able to drive himself, text people, and so he was also isolated from a lot of his peers. I think he’s also a bit of an outcast, because he's now starting to reacclimate to society, and develop the skills to live in this hectic world — which is something that I personally, as someone with Asperger’s, can relate to.

I’ve never seen someone write young people like Douglas Williams writes young people. I mean, because he writes them as people!'“

ANNIE: “The writing brings so much life out of all these characters.”

ALISON: “I know for myself I’ve seen a lot of reflections from my own personal life via these characters, and I’m sure that it will touch many people who have experienced the same, or know someone who’s going through, a troubling time.”

ANNIE: “The script is so good, I think we have an awesome team working on it, I love working with the cast already. There’s already so much chemistry in the room.

I don’t think people will be afraid to laugh? But I hope they laugh a lot. Like, it just…it really brightens it up! I love it.”