16 Minutes with Adam Standley

Posted on February 25, 2013

by Cassandra Bell

ARTISTS

Photographing the Artists of the Satori Group 1 of 15

Guest Blogger Cassandra Bell

Photography and Q&A by LaRae Lobdell

Recently, LaRae had the honor of spending some time with Adam Standley, the man behind “Wynn” of the upcoming Satori project, reWilding. What is reWilding you ask? Satori describes it to us perfectly: “There is a place between civilization and wilderness, where a people have set down roots, and use of the past tense has been outlawed. It is a society of the foreign and forgotten, the lost and the seeking, where guitars play stories people don’t speak about. Tonight, someone new arrives.”

To celebrate and get ready for this exciting story, LaRae thought it’d be great to get to know the man behind the character in a brief Q&A style interview! Check it out below his fabulous photos!

Get to Know Adam Standley!

PS: What made you want to do theatre?
AS: Well I guess we all had/have a number of reasons. There’s the whole high school moment of “oh, there’s girls in the theatre hall!” Then there’s the discoveries that occur as the result of some of the deeper work actors do, discoveries about yourself, and you want to demand that level of personal rigor, so you keep at it, and try to share it onstage.

One time my friend and peer Alex Matthews sent an email that included the question ” I mean, why do we even do this?” I immediately took this to the deepest of all possible meanings, answering something like “I think ultimately I’m a weird person, people always are a little bit confused by me, even when they know what I’m talking about. I’m uncommon in all the common ways. I think I stand onstage and embody the strange bird that is humanity, the weirdos, the unsung and the over-privledged, even the really familiar, all of them, I perform as many of them as I can to, in my way, stand tall for diversity. See! These people, ya know, blink and swallow, normal stuff, please don’t think they don’t count. I do theatre to promote diversity!” Alex quickly replied that I had taken his question well out of context, and that, yeah, I’m sure we all have our reasons for doing theatre. Again, I’m a little uncommon, the theatre suits me well I think.

PS: What kind of people do you surround yourself with?
AS: Kind people. Mean people suck. I was doing a archtypes game once with these cards and I became hugely fascinated with the Shapeshifter archetype. Isn’t “shapeshifter archetype” oxymoronic is some way? Yet I know exactly the impulse to which the card speaks. I’m not sure if that makes me “weak spirited” or lacking integrity, or whatever, but I often feel fulling indulging sides of myself when certain people are around. And with a certain knowledge of this psychological empathy, I find myself drawn to people who are honest, don’t take themselves to seriously, work hard and obsess over quality, have ambition.

I also got this girl, a main thang let’s call it, I’m around her pretty often. And Bogie our dog.

PS: What is your favorite restaurant pick in Seattle and the best dish on the menu?
AS: The mexican food truck at Graham and Rainier. All of it. Get there.