A few weeks ago I spoke with Chad Kaydo about his wonderful play I’m Repeating Myself, now running at The Brick Theater through March 15th. Directed by Carsen Joenk and produced by The Brick, Rhonda, and The Omnivores, I’m Repeating Myself is a theatrical scrapbook of passing conversations, musings, and memories real and imagined. Kaydo performs as himself in the play, alongside a cast of five actors who play five different “Chads,” as well as a large assortment of other characters from Chad’s life and mind–family, friends, strangers. There’s a pleasurable freeness to the way the play flows and accumulates; reading it feels as easy and as cyclical and winding and wild as thinking itself. Kaydo has collected and assembled seemingly “small” moments into a simple, hilarious, devastating, finely-observed piece about family and the way we tell stories.
In the notes at the top of the script, Kaydo quotes Thornton Wilder and Grace Paley, two writers who excel at creating wry and subtle pathos. Our Town’s spare aesthetic and local-as-universal philosophy has many resonances in Kaydo’s play. Like Wilder’s masterpiece, I’m Repeating Myself uses elliptical and oblique storytelling to ask incisive questions about mortality and family. Kaydo knows that theatre is the perfect medium to reflect impermanence, and the specter of death is inside every breath of this play–but Kaydo has a light touch. He lets us listen and find the echoes and connections ourselves. And in the days after I read the script, I found myself hearing my own thoughts and (more importantly) my conversations with other people much more clearly.
The interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Kallan Dana: When did you start working on this play?
Chad Kaydo: In 2020 I was home in Ohio with my family for the summer. I started writing down conversations I was having, just as an exercise. I just wanted to capture the texture of this stupid argument I had with my sister or an interesting conversation with my mother. I typed these conversations up over a couple of days and saved them in a folder called “Ohio Sketches”.
Then about a year ago I was going to do something at Quick + Dirty, the project I run at The Brick with Theresa Buchheister, and I found these scenes. There was all this interesting stuff underneath them about mortality and family patterns. So I smushed those scenes together to be a ten-minute play. Then there was an open slot in the schedule at The Brick, and Theresa was like “what would you want to make?” And this play felt exciting and really made for The Brick in a lot of ways.
KD: Can you say a little bit about your relationship to The Brick and to Theresa?
CK: Theresa is just a badass. They were a guest in a class when I was doing my MFA at Hunter. I emailed them to ask to get coffee and I asked if I could come be the world’s oldest intern at The Brick. I told them that I was craving ways to meet other writers and directors who were in the same place career-wise. They were just like “let’s do it!” So Quick + Dirty came out of that. And when I was emailing people to invite I was like “what do I call myself?” and Theresa was like “how about playwright-in-residence”? I’ve had that title at The Brick since then.
KD: Why is this show so well-suited to The Brick space?
CK: This show was written for The Brick. I can’t go to The Brick without bumping into people I know—which I love. Theresa has made it such a community space. And there’s so much character to the space itself. We’re doing it in the round, we’re not doing it in the normal seating configuration. It’s not on some crazy expensive set, it’s super intimate—the audience will be close to the actors.
KD: Does the cast stay onstage and watch most of the action throughout the play, even for scenes they aren’t in?
CK: They’re pretty much all onstage the whole time. It has to move so fast, and we’re all present. We’re all part of the act of making these memories—of remembering and of reenacting these memories.
KD: I think something that Thornton Wilder does so well and that you also do so well is recognizing that people talk to each other in philosophical ways. It’s not anti-naturalistic to have characters musing about mortality!
CK: That’s what gets my playwright ear going—when I realize that someone has told me so much in a way that feels offhanded. Sometimes you’re having a conversation with someone and you think: oh my God, you don’t realize what you’ve just revealed to me. We confess things about our morality, our political beliefs, our deep wounds. We say things off the cuff and don’t realize what we’re saying—or maybe we do realize and are trying to express deep things without being like “I have pain!”
KD: How did you figure out the extensive doubling of the play?
CK: It’s changed a lot over time. Matthew Antoci has been in the play since the Quick + Dirty version, and their track has been pretty consistent. Some of the doubling is about looking at the order of the play and making sure that the Chad is changing from scene to scene. And then sometimes it’s about the presence that an actor has. It’s all on a chart—there’s a big excel document that has every scene. It’s fun because it’s very flexible and open but also crazy-making because you’re trying to keep track of who’s doing what.
KD: When and how did Carsen come on board as director?
CK: Theresa had been directing but then they decided to step down from The Brick and take some time away from New York, so we were thinking about who could come in to see the show through to production. Carsen came to mind—I loved her [show at Clubbed Thumb’s] Winterworks, and I kind of knew her, and thought she was so cool. So Carsen and Theresa kind of co-directed a reading of the play. That was a super fast process, but everything Carsen said to the actors and to me was right on. On the first day at the end of rehearsal she was like “can I suggest some cuts?” and I was like “YES!” I wanted someone who would get into the weeds of it with me. She asks really smart questions.
KD: We’re in an era of very talky plays. I really like talky plays, and I also really like action! It seems to me that your play is asking: what is action? Is storytelling about watching people talk or is it about watching people do things?
CK: For a long time I was embarrassed to write plot. I don’t want the audience to feel the machinations of plot, but I do need them to leave having had a full ride. That’s always the needle I’m trying to thread. Can this sneak up on you? Can you be hanging out and laughing for 85 minutes and then in the last 5 minutes you’re like “Oh my God–I’m moved by this thing!” I want you to feel like you’ve had a journey but that doesn’t necessarily need to be an Aristotelian climax—but I’m also not just showing you 90 minutes of life and then being like “see you later!” I find that really frustrating. There needs to be some kind of eruption of feeling.
KD: I interviewed Diana for Sex and the Abbey—I feel like I now have to interview all of The Omnivores! How did you come together as a collective?
CK: We all had dinner before our first class at Hunter because we were so excited to meet each other. At the end of that dinner we were talking about 13P. For me—I didn’t start playwriting at 25, and I didn’t feel like I could wait ten years to see if someone might want to produce my work. And will the theaters I dream of working at be around in the future? That’s sad and terrifying to think about, but it is the reality. Of the five of us in our cohort, four of us were…let’s just say not in our twenties. I think that we brought a different kind of life experience to things. Some of us had corporate job experience, so we knew how to manage projects and get stuff done. And we didn’t have the patience to wait for the traditional model to work or not work for us. And we love each other!
KD: Has the process of making the autobiographical memory play impacted how you look back on any of your own memories?
CK: I look back on those Ohio scenes that I recorded and I wouldn’t remember those conversations if I hadn’t written them down. Things can carry meaning if you record them.
KD: Is your family coming to see the play?
CK: My parents and my sister are coming! I’m so curious about what they’ll think. As a playwright I try to trick myself into thinking that no one will ever see what I write—that’s how I get things on the page. But now people are going to see this! In the end the play is a love letter to my family.
The Brick, RHONDA, & The Omnivores present
I’M REPEATING MYSELF
A new play by Chad Kaydo
Directed by Carsen Joenk
February 27-March 15, 2025
at The Brick Theater — 579 Metropolitan Ave
Tickets $25-100
The March 7 performance will be ASL interpreted.
With Matthew Antoci, Alma Cuervo*, Enette Fremont, Chad Kaydo, Frankie Placidi, & Jon Norman Schneider*
A strange summer provokes questions about family, mortality, porn algorithms, and whether or not you’re still single because you’re “too picky.” I’M REPEATING MYSELF wonders how we get over a lifetime of tiny wounds to take care of the people we love…and maybe ourselves too. Playwright Chad Kaydo joins a cast of actors playing his friends and family—as well as multiple versions of Chad himself—across boundaries of age, race, and gender, mixing queer irreverence with earnest, emotional immediacy.
“I’m Repeating Myself” runs now through March 15th at The Brick
Creative Team
Scenic Design: lucas a degirolamo
Costume Design: Kindall Almond
Lighting Design: Ebony Burton
Sound Design: Jordan Rose Bernstein
Associate Sound Designer: Lola Basiliere
Dramaturg: Christine Scarfuto
Production Stage Manager: Jared Six
Production Manager: Daniel Weissglass
Co-Producer: Theresa Buchheister
Associate Producer: Mark Toubman
Line Producer: Sarah Jones
Art: Rob Wilson
Produced by The Omnivores and RHONDA
*Equity Approved Showcase
I’M REPEATING MYSELF is produced by The Omnivores and RHONDA, powered by Producer Hub, and was developed at “Quick + Dirty” and the Omnivores Summer Reading Series at Brick Aux Studio, 2024.
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