What’s your name?
Julia Stone.
Who are you playing?
Jean Fordham.
What town are you from?
East Hampton.
Is this your first time at Home Wall?
Yes. I like it here. When I came to audition, everyone was really nice. It didn’t seem super cliquey. When I go to other places, sometimes I feel like an outcast. But I felt very welcome here. I do know some people who I’m in the show with from prior experiences.
How did you get into theater, and what is your background in theater?
My parents put me on stage. I started with dance like most little girls did. When I was about five, my parents just started making me audition for things. I’ve always been very outgoing and charismatic, so I just kind of stuck with it. I do a lot of musicals. I just graduated high school. So I just kind of got out of all the high school theater stuff, but that was still a great experience. I did Sandy in Grease. Morticia Addams in The Addams Family.
Describe your character.
She is fourteen, but she looks older than she is. She is a pot smoker. I kind of describe her as a victim of the circumstances. She’s young, she’s growing up, and she’s kind of just been thrown into this ruckus of a household and a family. I don’t think she’s a bad person.
If you could give your character advice, what would it be?
Because she’s growing up, I tell her you’re not messing up, you’re growing up.
Why do you think this show got a Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 2008?
It’s a show a lot of people can relate to. There’s so much conflict. There’s a lot of things that are very common in troubled households. Everyone can see either themselves or someone they know.
Do you have a favorite book?
Oh, I love Lord of the Flies.
Do you have a favorite poem?
I do love poetry in general, but I don’t remember what it’s called. It’s about a woman relating her experience with an older man to little red riding hood and the big bad wolf.
What’s a fun fact about yourself?
I can pop my hip out of place.
Is there anything else that you would like to say? Any other ventures? Any shout outs you’d like to make?
Well, I’d like to give a shout out to my parents, obviously. My mother and my father, I love them very dearly, and they do everything for me, and I probably wouldn’t be doing this without their support.
Appended: Little Red Cap by Carol Ann Duffy
At childhood’s end, the houses petered out
Into playing fields, the factory, allotments
Kept, like mistresses, by kneeling married men
The silent railway line, the hermit’s caravan
Till you came at last to the edge of the woods
It was there that I first clapped eyes on the wolf
He stood in a clearing, reading his verse out loud
In his wolfy drawl, a paperback in his hairy paw
Red wine staining his bearded jaw. What big ears
He had! What big eyes he had! What teeth!
In the interval, I made quite sure he spotted me
Sweet sixteen, never been, babe, waif, and bought me a drink
My first. You might ask why. Here’s why. Poetry
The wolf, I knew, would lead me deep into the woods
Away from home, to a dark tangled thorny place
Lit by the eyes of owls. I crawled in his wake
My stockings ripped to shreds, scraps of red from my blazer
Snagged on twig and branch, murder clues. I lost both shoes
But got there, wolf’s lair, better beware. Lesson one that night
Breath of the wolf in my ear, was the love poem
I clung till dawn to his thrashing fur, for
What little girl doesn’t dearly love a wolf?
Then I slid from between his heavy matted paws
And went in search of a living bird – white dove –
Which flew, straight, from my hands to his open mouth
One bite, dead. How nice, breakfast in bed, he said
Licking his chops. As soon as he slept, I crept to the back
Of the lair, where a whole wall was crimson, gold, aglow with books
Words, words were truly alive on the tongue, in the head
Warm, beating, frantic, winged; music and blood
But then I was young – and it took ten years
In the woods to tell that a mushroom
Stoppers the mouth of a buried corpse, that birds
Are the uttered thought of trees, that a greying wolf
Howls the same old song at the moon, year in, year out
Season after season, same rhyme, same reason. I took an axe
To a willow to see how it wept. I took an axe to a salmon
To see how it leapt. I took an axe to the wolf
As he slept, one chop, scrotum to throat, and saw
The glistening, virgin white of my grandmother’s bones
I filled his old belly with stones. I stitched him up
Out of the forest I come with my flowers, singing, all alone