Transcript: On the Edge of Our Seats

Season 1, Episode 1 was recorded at Boston Arts Academy on January 21, 2026. You can listen to this episode on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. Subscribe to get our next episode when it's released.

Lisa Thalhamer
From the podcasting studios at Boston Arts Academy. This is Scene in Boston. I'm Lisa Talhammer.

Laura Amico
I'm Laura Amico. Scene in Boston is a podcast about greater Boston's incredible theater world. Lisa and I are your hosts. Thanks for being with us for our premiere episode.

Lisa Thalhamer
We're really excited to start building this community. We want Scene in Boston to be a place where new theater fans are born and current theater fans find a way to share the shows they're excited about.

Laura Amico
Normally, one of us will be in conversation with someone involved in bringing to life one of the shows playing in Boston,

Lisa Thalhamer
and we have that first interview today. We're really excited. We'll get to that in a few minutes. But Laura, we've seen two shows together since we last recorded. Since we saw Girl Crime first, let's start with that.

Laura Amico
Yeah, Lisa, it was really fun to see this show together because it was about two women with a podcast, which felt kind of crazy, except instead of talking about theater, they were true crime podcasters.

Lisa Thalhamer
Yeah, they reminded me of the type of podcast we saw a lot of about 10 years ago, where there's, frankly, a gruesome story of the week, but told with this like girl boss energy of the time. The podcast in the show is called Cutie Girl Crime and in the context of the play this podcast is satirical, just so over the top, but within the world that these characters occupy, they take their show seriously in a way.

Laura Amico
They do. And what I thought was interesting about Girl Crime was that it takes on our obsession with true crime and influencer culture, from calling grown women to girls, as you mentioned in the title of their podcast, to packaging trauma alongside lip gloss and weight loss ads, it asks whether we're listening to these stories or, I thought consuming them.

Lisa Thalhamer
Yeah. Podcast host Jackie and Chrissa say they are empowering women with their safety gear and slogans, but the show keeps asking whether by focusing on the most gruesome parts of these stories, they're actually shrinking these women down to their victimhood instead of their full lives.

Laura Amico
Yeah, this is particularly interesting for me, because I'm a former crime reporter. I spent seven years covering homicides, and so seeing how this play took on those types of stories and audience and responsibility for trauma based storytelling was really significant, and I thought there was a lot to take away from that, but still, despite that seriousness, it made me laugh, it made me gasp, and there were parts that felt honestly kind of frightening.

Lisa Thalhamer
Yes, I am so glad we saw this one together, because there was a point where I just kind of like, shoved at you with my elbow. I needed to know that someone I knew was sitting next to me. It was just it was just so intense

Laura Amico
the end of Act One oof,

Lisa Thalhamer
and it was probably even more intense because of the venue. We were in a small black box theater at BCA plaza with probably fewer than 100 people. Everything felt so close,

Laura Amico
so close. And also we commented after the show, you and I that the acting was incredible, the whole cast, but you and I both commented after the show about Avery Oulette playing Sarah the producer. Her physical performance of trauma and anxiety was incredibly moving. But we also saw that later on with Josephine Moshiri Elwood with Job, but we'll get to that in a moment.

Lisa Thalhamer
This was the world premiere workshop of Girl Crime and unfortunately, a really limited run, just two shows over one weekend. But I hope we see more of this show in the future. I think the playwright Kendall Reynolds, has a lot of really interesting ideas.

Laura Amico
Yeah, later this season, I'm hoping to do an episode on the play, Weighting the Weight that's a community built theater work from the Open Theater Project, and it's a very different play about violence. It's first person stories giving voice to mothers whose children have died in gun crimes. Open Theater Project's website promises that the play is, quote, a model for how communities can resist despair and rebuild through love. So I'm really looking forward to seeing that, especially after seeing Girl Crime.

Lisa Thalhamer
The other show we just saw is called Job, and that's what the rest of this episode is about.

Laura Amico
But before we get there, I just wanted to say one thing, and that's at the end of our first episode last week, we teased a discussion about Wonder at A.R.T. and the creativity of adaptations. We'll get to that episode a little later in the season, but today we're exploring how trauma moves through our online lives as content, as labor and as identity. So Cirl Crime looks at it through media and branding Job through someone who makes that role her whole sense of self.

Lisa Thalhamer
Frankly, it's been a really intense few weeks of theater for us.

Laura Amico
We need something lighter after all this. But before we do that, at the end of Job, do you remember I turned to you and I said, I've never seen anything like that. It's been intense, but it's been fantastic. Job, I thought was utterly and completely captivating. I'm really excited to hear from the actors who brought this story to life.

Lisa Thalhamer
Job follows a young content moderator who defines herself as a guardian of the internet, turning the worst content into a mission and an identity as her sense of purpose collides with her own unprocessed pain, the play asks what it costs to treat trauma as something to be managed rather than healed. Job opened January 16 and runs through February 7 at speakeasy stage. The play's two actors, Josephine Moshiri Elwood and Dennis Trainor Jr, are with us today. Josephine and Dennis. Thank you for being here.

Josephine Moshiri Elwood
Thank you.

Dennis Trainor Jr.
Thanks for having us. It's great to be here.

Lisa Thalhamer
Yeah, it's um, you both play fairly intense characters, so it's sort of funny to see you in this environment where you're just yourselves. I'm curious like how the show premiered in New York back in 2000 in 2023 excuse me, and had a really successful Broadway run, and now here we are doing this in Boston. What's it been like bringing this show to Boston audiences?

Dennis Trainor Jr.
Yeah, I think one of the thrilling things about bringing it to Boston audiences is you can feel right from even the first table read, when there are different age groups in the room, and then through the first couple of previews and opening weekend, where you can feel the different age groups in the room and how they pull for different plot twists and different characters within the story. So one of the things about Job, one of the many things about Job that's fun and exciting is this kind of generational moral argument about how much of our lives we should be spending as citizens of the internet. So you can really feel that dynamic push and pull in the audience and in such an intimate space like the Robert studio at Speakeasy, it's, I mean, where they're really right on top of you. Please open your wrappers before the show starts. It's really exciting.

Josephine Moshiri Elwood
Yeah, I did not see the production in New York, but my husband did, and that's how I learned about the play. And he says that there is such a palpable difference between the audiences in New York and the audiences here, the audiences here, I think, engage with the shows in a different way, and there's so much more room for laughter, even throughout all the discomfort and the tension. And that's something that I really what's one of the many things I love about Boston audiences. I think we are so comfortable with discomfort in Boston, you know, we're all very hardy people and and so finding room, even in the midst room for laughter, in the midst of, you know, some dark material is is something we're comfortable with.

Lisa Thalhamer
Yeah. So we gave, within the context of this podcast, a little bit of a summary of the show, and Dennis, you talked about the generational conflict, but like, in the mind, in your guys' minds, as you've dug into this show for the course of, what, a couple weeks, months now, like, what is this play about?

Josephine Moshiri Elwood
I do think generational differences are at the heart of the show. I mean, a lot of it's about technology and a lot of the lens we've been discussing this through the lens is the lens of technology and our relationship with technology. But there is a big generational divide between the people who were born before technology was integral to our lives and those who were born after that point. And so I think it's very natural to, you know, interrogate these questions about how we live with technology in our life, you know, right in our pockets every day, through, you know, through a discussion about the generational differences. And there's a lot of tension between the two. There's a lot of differences, and a lot of, you know, head butting, and that's illustrated really well with these two very different characters.

Dennis Trainor Jr.
It does feel like the playwright... It's funny to read one of the first things you read in the as you open the script says in the playwrights notes, this is a period play, and it takes place in January of 2020 a moment before we went into this kind of covid world. So it's very of the moment, but it also speaks to another Trumpian moment that isn't as escalated as the Trumpian moment that we're living in right now. But it also speaks to this. It's one of those places that speaks to this particular moment in a way that different people can find a different avenue in defining how much, how much value there is to having the entire world at your fingertips or in your back pocket every moment of every day. And what that level of connection? What is the what is the cost versus the benefit of what that level of connection provides? And different people leave the audience feeling different things about that, I'm sure.

Lisa Thalhamer
Yeah, yeah. Josephine, I want to talk to you about your character, Jane. Okay, so Jane is deeply vulnerable and at times genuinely frightening. How did you navigate that balance and performance without tipping her either into villain or victim like you ride this weirdly thin line?

Josephine Moshiri Elwood
Yeah, I these are my favorite kinds of characters to play. I think from the outside She, at least initially, might not seem very sympathetic. People might view her as, yeah, maybe a little crazy, a little on the edge, but with any person, people that we know, you might see one thing on the outside, but there's a reason why they are that way. So this is why those are my favorite kinds of characters to play, because there always is so much more living beneath the surface for any human. I mean, our director, Marianna, is brilliant, and Marianna Basham, she's amazing, and she has helped me quite a bit. But just understanding why she is the way she is. Some of that is through, you know, I have not had a very similar life to Jane, but I can sympathize and empathize in different ways. And, you know, remember different moments in my life that maybe don't parallel, but you could understand how one thing could lead to the other but I just, I love being a mess on stage. It's just such a fun place to live. It's a very safe space to be a mess, you know? So it's a it's a lot of fun.

Lisa Thalhamer
yeah, I've got to ask you both about about the the moment the show ends, the curtain call, like you both were so clearly, you both seemed incredibly emotional. We saw this on a Saturday night. It was one of the earlier performances. Like, what is that? Can you tell us anything about, like, what that moment's like? Are are you aware of what that moment's like? Are you somewhere else?

Dennis Trainor Jr.
I think if we do it well, that it is 75 or 80 minutes of lights up and then the two of us on stage carrying the tension of this play. So, I mean, we're actors, and we're pretending we're okay, don't worry, but we still do carry that, that tension. And when the lights go down on that curtain call. It's nice to release some of that tension and find your way back in another version of the real world that's not the given circumstances of the real time tense drama that plays out. So it's a common question that I get from a lot of audience members. The truth is, for me, I'm 100. I'm fine. It's tense, but it's thrilling. I love, I love going to work. We're going to do a show in a couple of hours, and I can't wait.

Josephine Moshiri Elwood
Yeah, yeah. It's it definitely the tension for me still lives in my body a little while through that curtain call, and a little bit afterwards, it's when I get in my dressing room. I have some breathing exercises I do to fully release it, but there is just a huge sense of relief once the lights go out. And, like Dennis said, Yeah, we're totally fine, you know, we are. We're able to do this in a really sustainable way. That's, you know, really important that we do it in a healthy way. But, yeah, it's, it's, uh, the adrenaline is pumping even throughout those look at those vows.

Lisa Thalhamer
Yeah, Dennis, let's talk about Lloyd. The relationship between Jane and Lloyd in this show is just constantly shifting, power moving back and forth between the two of them. Was there part of the rehearsal process where, like, that dynamic started to shift into place? Does it? Does it vary on the night? How's What's that power shuffle in the show like for you guys?

Dennis Trainor Jr.
Yeah, I mean, without giving away some spoilers in the show, this is a therapy session unlike Lloyd has ever engaged with before. He has confidence that maybe tips over into a little bit of hubris, so that even though that he's facing again a singularly, uniquely challenging moment, in terms of what this therapy session is that ratchets up the tension quite a bit that he actually feels like there's some part of him that's challenged and embraces that, that moment. So for Lloyd, it's one of the metaphors that I've been talking about. And this is a generational thing too, for people out there over a certain age who may remember the board game operation, a wacky doctors game where you had to take a little needle and put and pull out something without sending off a little buzzer. To me, that's what it feels like dealing with my co star over here, playing Jane. That I have to be, I have to very carefully navigate her to a place that's going to be safe and productive for both of us without send setting her off. So that challenge is is a challenge in rehearsal, and we play and we experiment, and again, through the guidance of our outstanding director. Dermara and abosham, you find where the guardrails are and when you're stepping outside of those and when you have to come back in. And then you find what feels like the pocket of the play. And within that pocket there's a lot of room for play and night to night variation, but this play, more than others than I've been in the past, feels like that pocket is a tight one, a narrow one.

Lisa Thalhamer
Yeah, so we've talked about it's a smaller space, it's a great stage, but a smaller, more intimate space, right? And then at one point, Jane comes off the stage and into the aisles of the audience, and it was a little I remember feeling really overwhelmed, and I was near the aisle, and I was like, Oh no, is she coming for us? Like, what's happening here? The man was the man, like, sitting further down our aisle was, like, visibly cringing and hunched so, like, how you've talked a little bit about feeling the audience reaction and that you'd like them to deal with their rappers early talk to me about like, feeling the audience in that space.

Josephine Moshiri Elwood
Oh, it's great. That's one of the reasons I love performing in this space in the Roberts but you can really feel the moments when the audience is really with you or with your character, and you can feel when they're not. And I particularly love the moments like, there's a moment early on when I can tell everyone is siding with Lloyd and not with Jane, and they think she's just off her rocker. And I know as the actor, I'm like, Oh, just you wait. Just you wait. And it's so Oh, it's so satisfying when you know, there is a bit of a shift, and you feel them right back there with you. Um, there's nothing like it, you know, yes, TV and film actors get paid a lot more than than theater actors do in any any industry, even on Broadway. But gosh, there's nothing that beats having the audience right there with you and along for the ride.

Dennis Trainor Jr.
Yeah, one of my favorite moments in any play that I've been in in a long time, it comes towards the end of the play, where, again, I'm not trying to tease your listeners, but there's, there's a great, I don't want to spoil anything, and and as Josephine was just talking about, when Jane's character begins to turn the tide, where she crosses downstage of me, which means that I get to both look at her character, navigate something, and see her silhouette in the lights, and I can see several rows of the audience, kind of leaning in and starting to put the puzzle pieces of this mystery and thriller together. And luckily, I just have it's a moment to play where I just have to throw through a few questions at Josephine, and she has mountains and mountains of text. So I can enjoy both the actual moment of the play and the meta theatrical moment of everyone in the room together. So so I have a visual and a kinesthetic response to that which is quite great about that particular intimate space and and how it intersects with what we're doing on stage.

Lisa Thalhamer
So The Moderate is opening at Central Square Theater early in February, and it also centers on someone who sits between the internet and the rest of us deciding what the world gets to see. It strikes me that these two stories are landing in Boston at the same moment. Why do you think the idea of carrying and filtering other people's pain, you know, feels so compelling right now?

Josephine Moshiri Elwood
That's a great question. I know. Speaking from my own experience, I think I have seen the most horrific things on the internet that I have ever seen in the last few years. I think we as a side as society are starting to talk about how much we can handle. I Josephine, believe that it's really important to be a witness and to know what's going on in the world, and at the same time knowing how much I can take help in a healthy way. So I think, you know, it's a very politically fraught time. There's a lot of violence all over the world, a lot of violence in our country, and we're really grappling with how to how to be citizens, how to be witnesses, how how to be in solidarity. Um, while we are we're not just reading it in the newspaper. We're seeing it on our screens. And we're seeing it on our screens all throughout the day. Whenever you put you know whenever you pull I know whenever I open up Instagram, it's something new and horrifying. It feels very present.

Dennis Trainor Jr.
Yeah. I think one reason why it could why those particular plays might land right now and resonate with audiences, is that we again, we have access to so many things if we want to keep our eyes open to atrocities in the world and things going on from Gaza to Minneapolis. Right now, you feel like you're connected and you have access to this incredible information, but at the same time, you also make feel impotent in terms of having any effect on the things that you're seeing on the internet. So again, that's that double edged negotiation that you have with the entire world being at your fingertips. You have access to that kind of information. And then now, with AI, you have to source through and decide, you know is what you're looking at actually, actually a real thing in the real world. So, and it's and it's moving, it's all moving much too quickly, I think for a lot of us, so great that theater and theater, which is not actually a medium that usually responds very quickly to these type of events, it's so it's exciting that Boston has several productions that are speaking to that right now.

Lisa Thalhamer
What do you hope people take with them after the show ends and they leave the theater?

Josephine Moshiri Elwood
We were talking about this earlier. It's hard to have any just one thing that I hope people take from this. I hope, I hope we are all asking questions of ourselves about how, how we are interacting with our phones and and beyond that, what we're doing when we are seeing these things on our phones, how to be a responsible citizen of the world, given the rise of AI, how, how we ethically interact with technology And and ethically repost and asking, all, you know, asking all the right questions about, you know, who to trust, and why is this story out there, and who benefits from this, all, all of those things. Yeah, I hope that's something we're all thinking about no matter, you know, after this play, but also just in general right now.

Dennis Trainor Jr.
I think Josephine, that's really, that's, that's, that's smart, that's smart. That's a lot of reasons. And the different things people take from the play, I think, also, too, that one reason I go to the theater, and I bet that people go to the theater for, is, is they get to see two people inside some given circumstances that are that heighten, you know, a life or death situation, so that they get to, I think that audience are getting to see people be more physically, mentally, present in the present moment than they are in their day to day lives. And that even even in a tense experience, and a tense experience like this show provides, I think, can be thrilling and exhilarating, so that I think they go for all those great reasons about why it drills down into the themes that are important to our society right now, but they also go through a little bit of a thrill.

Lisa Thalhamer
There's a real magic to being in a space and your phone is prohibited and the lights are down and you and this is only going to happen once. This is like, yes, you perform night after night after night, but not no show is going to be exactly the same as the other. And you know, time is a deeply limited resource, and we're catching this and you're there for this moment. So I'd like to ask you both, what are you guys looking forward you two looking forward to in Boston theater in the next couple months.

Josephine Moshiri Elwood
Well, I'm very excited for Speakeasies next show The Antiquities. It also asks some questions about technology and our future with with technology, with or without technology. I'm very excited to see it. I think it's going to be stunning. I'm also excited to see Actor Shakespeare Project's Gem of the Ocean by August Wilson. They have been doing a lot of August Wilson plays over the last couple of years, and they're always beautifully done. So I'm very excited to see this one.

Dennis Trainor Jr.
Yeah, and you brought up Ken Urban, who's a local playwright doing The Moderate at Central Square, and I think that that extends a little bit beyond our run, so we'll be able to see the end of that. So I'm looking forward to that. So I'm looking forward to that myself.

Lisa Thalhamer
Dennis Josephine, thank you so much for being here. We really appreciate it.

Josephine Moshiri Elwood
Thank you. Thanks for having us.

Dennis Trainor Jr.
Thank you. This was great.

Laura Amico
I'm curious now about how The Moderate shifts this conversation to whether the toll of that work leaves any room for connection. Job left us, well, it left me really uncertain that tension of jade as martyr to the pain was deeply unsettling. I don't know about you, Lisa, but I think this will be really interesting to see.

Lisa Thalhamer
So tickets for Job are available at speakeasy stage.com and you can find that link in our show notes, and you can

Laura Amico
Catch The Moderate at Central Square theater. February 5 through March 1. Tickets are at Central Square theater.org,

Lisa Thalhamer
The next performance on our shared theater calendar is Penelope, one of the many stories rooted in classic Greek stories that are being staged in Boston over the next few months.

Laura Amico
But there's also lots more happening on Boston stages. A.R.T. has an extended Wonder (Hooray!) through February 15. As you heard, we both thought this was a show you should make time for.

Lisa Thalhamer
Also, there's the 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee at Boston Center of the Arts through February 1. I saw this show off Broadway at the end of last year, and it's so funny and creative. You if you if you haven't, you have to experience their version of audience participation.

Laura Amico
I'd love to see that. You can find the full listings on our calendar. It's on our website seen in boston.org That's also where you'll find show notes with links to everything we've talked about today.

Lisa Thalhamer
We'll also share the link on our Instagram and Facebook page. Find them both under scene in Boston. Pod, as always, that's seen with A, C, S, C, E, N, E,

Laura Amico
and you can email us at scene in Boston pod@gmail.com

Lisa Thalhamer
thanks for listening, and we'll talk to you again in a few weeks.

Laura Amico
Bye.

Laura Amico
Scene in Boston is produced and hosted by me, Laura Amico and Lisa tauhammer.

Lisa Thalhamer
The audio production students at Boston Arts Academy recorded mixed and edited mixed and edited this episode.

Laura Amico
They are Michael Finley, Alexander Storm, Avant Moro Flack, Booda Kay, Charlotte GS, Sebastian Antunez, and Manovah Exavier. Charlotte GS composed our podcast music.

Lisa Thalhamer
Thank you to Joshua Jackson and Boston Arts Academy for additional support.