With indie theater project ‘Danny and the Deep Blue Sea,’ the Pittsburgh actor steps into the role of producer

By SHARON EBERSON

Pittsburghers know Michael Patrick Trimm as an onstage performer, so when he reached out to say he had joined the parade of local theater artists entering the producing ranks, accompanied by a model format and a mission statement, I was eager to chat. 

Trimm is coproducing and will star opposite Shannon Donovan in John Patrick Shanley’s 1983 play Danny and the Deep Blue Sea, directed by Kelly Trumbell. His producing partners in Artists Collective are his fiance, Clarise Fearn, his mother, Patricia Prozzi, and Becca Smith, each associated with the arts, education and business in different ways.

I asked if we could talk first about the wave of independent artists creating their own pathways to productions, before we would get into Trimm’s obsession (my word) with plays set in bars — his recent past includes roles in King James for City Theatre (also a two-hander) and the solo tour de force The Smuggler for Pittsburgh International Classic Theatre, both featuring saloon sets. 

Independent productions are a regular occurence these days— just the day before our conversation, I had heard from Michael McKelvey, who is going to direct Assassins next month with the new Rogue Artists Theatre of Pittsburgh, and Doctuh Mistuh Productions. 

Danny and the Deep Blue Sea will be staged at the Rauh Studio Theatre in the Cathedral of Learning, recently the site of Jeremy Seghers’ Hamlet: The Bad Quarto. Other recent indie theater projects have been directed and staged by Alex Manalo, working with playwright Michael Eichler, who has financed the productions.

Trimm was aware of those projects, but Danny and The Deep Blue Sea was informed by another Pittsburgh team. 

“We were actually quite inspired by the work that Ken [Bolden] and Ingrid [Sonnechsen] and Max Pavel did with Witch,” he said, of the play at Carnegie Stage last year. In 2018, the trio, with Dylan Marquis Meyers, began their collaboration with Orphans. Under the title Aftershock Theatre, they funded the project by raising $7,500 through an IndieGoGo campaign. 

For Danny and the Deep Blue Sea, the producers held a “hugely successful” live fundraiser, “topped off” with a GoFundMe campaign.

Here’s more about from our conversation.

onSTAGE PITTSBURGH: Tell me about the Artist Collective, and why you wanted to do this project this way.

TRIMM: I think part of the order of operations was that Danny was a vehicle for us. We really have been looking at the landscape over the last couple of years, and we really are loving what’s being done at a very, very small level, but sometimes that stuff doesn’t pay their artists. On the flip side, we’re applauding the moves that City Theatre’s making, but there’s a middle ground where we were seeing a world of independently produced professional theater, where the artists all get paid at least a decent wage, and can succeed in Pittsburgh in this new world. We really wanted to be part of the solution … and start to explore this as producers. And when we were looking for a play to really sink our teeth into as the model for this, Danny kept coming up and coming up.

oSP: Who is “we”?

TRIMM: There are four producers: It’s myself. It’s Clarice Fearn, who is my fiancé and also is the owner of Four Streets Art Salon on the North Side. It’s Pat Prozzi, who’s my mother. She’s been doing business for a long time, but she also is entering into playwriting. And then Becca Smith, a producer with the traveling Theater for Young Audiences for-profit company out of New York, who has been interested in getting into a more ‘adult artist for artists’ sake’ producing capacity. And so the four of us came together and said: Do we want to do something with this that is proof of concept maybe? Try some things out that maybe are a little riskier in terms of the overhead, but still with a focus on fiscal responsibility, with outreach to individual potential patrons, more so than just the tried and true theater patrons, and working in a model that was going to hopefully be not just for the love of the game, but people would get paid?

oSP: One of the reasons I am asking about independent producing is, I just heard from Michael McKelvey, that he’s doing Assassins, and you know what Jeremy and Alex are doing. From my perspective, it’s getting to be a lot, but a good problem to have. Plus, it’s interesting in terms of the ‘too big to fail’ guys who, well, we’ll have to wait and see what the theater landscape in Pittsburgh is going to be. So when you thought about this, did you think about yourself within the landscape of what’s happening in Pittsburgh theater?

TRIMM: There’s a primordial shift that’s kind of happening now, and I think there’s two options. You can sit back and wait for the powers that be or the people who maybe have a little more experience than you to try to come up with solutions, and then you can benefit. … Or you can say, ‘Look, I want to try stuff ,and see if we can be part of showing a model of a solution. So if this works, if [other independent projects] start to work, to us, it’s about proof of concept, that this can be part of the landscape … alongside the other ones that are there, and hopefully collect enough data to go, ‘See, we don’t have to rely on a CLO or a Pittsburgh Public to say, either we have theater here, or we don’t, at a professional level.” 

oSP: Why did you decide to go the GoFundMe route?

TRIMM: We raised in two different ways. We started off with a live fundraiser event that we did with friends and family, with business connections, with people that we reached out to, people we collaborated with in the past. That was in mid-April, and we raised a decent chunk of money. Our goal was always to raise 50% of our funds from donations, 50% from ticket sales. We surpassed that goal by a little bit in terms of the donations. … Then we had a GoFundMe that was able to bring in a decent amount more that kind of topped that off. … The goal ultimately was to have the initial surge, and people could feel ownership over the play. The live event was … able to really buoy us cash-wise, because, again, we didn’t want to ask people to do this for the love of the game. Our designers are getting paid. Kelly, our director, is getting paid, Shannon is getting paid. And I should say, again, we were inspired by what Max and Ingrid and Ken did with Witch, which was a similar model.

oSP: The summer used to be a down time in terms of local productions, a few here and there, but next week alone is crazy. 

TRIMM: We’re not just going to sit back as a community. And that’s what’s really inspired me, is this idea that as a community, we’re going to try to take the reins on this, and say, ‘Can we be part of the solution?,’ and not wait for anyone to tell us that we’re allowed to make professional theater here. A lot of us may not succeed in our endeavors, but we’re throwing stuff against the wall. We’re brainstorming. We’re collaborating. The cross-collaboration that we’ve seen on our show, not to mention what I’ve witnessed with [other shows], it really is inspiring, and I think it’s part of the future. It’s really why we wanted to do this.

oSP: So let’s get back to what started it all. You said Danny kept coming up, but whe?

TRIMM: So the play, to me, when it entered the scene in the ’80s, was almost a love letter to this generation that [Shanley] felt was being not just left behind, but completely given a short change on how rough around the edges they were, and it wasn’t their fault. It was a play about being forgotten. It was a play about being ill-equipped for the new world that they were entering into. It was a play about loneliness and self-imposed exile. And then, over the next however many years, it became a play about people being very angry, and it became a play about how much these two actors could emote onstage. And as far as I know, it’s gotten a little bit of a bad rap that way. We kept looking at it and saying, ‘There’s so much here that feels parallel from the ’80s to now.’ The loneliness epidemic is something that we wanted to talk about as theater-makers, that really has affected people in their 20s and 30s. The fact that we have an entire generation who are feeling left behind by shifts in AI and technology and whatnot, when they were promised, ‘Hey, if you just do this … you’ll make a good wage.’ Now they’re being left behind as well.

“Danny and the Deep Blue Sea” takes place in a dingy Bronx bar, where self-loathing day laborer Danny, whose violent tendencies have earned him the nickname “Beast,” meets troubled single mother Roberta. 

TRIMM: [The play highlights] the fact that people aren’t able to connect the way they used to, the way that romantic connection is becoming harder and harder. For me, it was men specifically — but that’s not to say that [the character] Roberta doesn’t have similar thoughts. Men are just losing any sense of how to become a well-adjusted person without just lashing out. We went back and started looking at some of the reviews from the original that John Turturro did, started rereading the script without trying to put blinders on to some other productions. We were like, ‘This play can be a very intimate, very vulnerable look to basically adults who are still, for better or worse, children, and are lashing out at the world and at themselves, which just spoke a lot to I think the feeling that I’ve had, the feeling that a lot of young people I talk to have.

We were hoping we could refine some of what was originally incredibly relevant, rather than something that felt like it was just being done again because it was a vehicle for actors to emote a lot, which drives me nuts. I’ve seen a couple productions of this … and I got such a sense that the people represented by these two characters were getting short-changed. I think a lot of us felt that way, including Kelly. When we were pretty sure we were going to do Danny, we talked to her, and she just blew it open for us in terms of the way that she thought about it. It matched up with our thoughts that it wasn’t a play about just being angry, but about fear and about loneliness, and how you can find redemption potentially by connecting with another person.

oSP: I think in terms of the loneliness epidemic you spoke of, the isolation of the pandemic really makes that hit home for a lot of people.

TRIMM: A stunting happened. There’s a feeling of, how do we become the people we’re supposed to be, fully fledged humans, when we don’t have that connection? … For people my age, it continues to force us to wear blinders, like putting up this armor or finding these not productive ways to cope. It can be devastating, but the answer can be another person. As simple as that.

oSP: It’s why people like me take their laptops to coffee shops, to be around other people, or go to the theater, and share an experience, and start conversations. 

TRIMM: I think you see that in the angle we’re taking with it, the fact that we’re looking at these people’s humanity, and what they need from each other, and the potential for redemption. … The play, more so than most plays, sings when it’s not just read on the page. We’ve had people come throughout the rehearsal process — Cotter [Smith] has helped us, we’re using Active Analysis — and the reactions have been, ‘Wow, OK. We’ve got something here.’

oSP: I don’t want to say too much, but is there anything you’d like to add?

TRIMM: I think just generally speaking, it’s hopefully something that continues to surprise people, because it’s a play in three acts. And I think that the way Shanley writes it, it’s incredibly jarring in the first act and makes you think this play and these people are going to be this thing. And then, hopefully we’re doing a good job with this, but it unfolds like this Russian nesting doll, until where you end up with these two people is completely the antithesis to where you thought they were going, and who they were, and what maybe they could be, and that it takes your breath away a little bit. That’s what it has done for us.

TICKETS AND DETAILS

Danny and the Deep Blue Sea is at the Rauh Studio Theater, Cathedral of Learning, Basement, 4200 Fifth Ave., Oakland, July 9-12 and July 16-19, 2026. Tickets: https://dannyandthedeepbluesea.ludus.com/show_page.php?show_id=200536099 .

Categories: Arts and Ideas, Our Posts, Show Previews

Tags: Artist Collective, Danny and the Deep Blue Sea, Kelly Trumbell, Michael Patrick Trimm, Shannon Donovan