This week, justArts spoke with Carly Chernomorets and Ben Astrachan, director and assistant director of the Brandeis Players production “Dog Sees God.” 

justArts: How did you come across the opportunity to direct the show?

Carly Chernomorets: I think that Brandeis is starting to do a really good job of expanding its horizons and talking about underrepresented issues in the community, and I think that the show “Dog Sees God” kind of continues that trend, because we don’t see a ton of narrative of bullying or violence in response to bullying, especially at the college level. 

I think it’s something that’s talked about a lot with younger people, but then they like to pretend that it just doesn’t exist after that. And so we thought it could be beneficial for everyone to be exposed to this narrative that touches on all those topics.

JA: What has been your favorite part of directing the show? 

CC:  I think my favorite part of directing the show has been the amazing camaraderie that has developed within the cast. I feel so privileged to have worked with every single one of those immensely talented people. I was really flattered when they all agreed to be in the play in the first place. The collective brilliance of the cast has just made this experience so worthwhile. 

Ben Astrachan: I think, going off the camaraderie idea, it was one of the safest spaces I’ve felt [at] Brandeis, just because we always kept the lines of communication open and always had conversations about the play and about our lives and how they connected to the play. It was just a very nice community feeling. 

JA: What’s been the biggest challenge in directing the show?

CC: As Ben said, we placed a really high [importance] on creating a safe space with the content that we were working with. It’s been a challenge, but a really necessary challenge, to constantly be checking [on] ourselves and making sure that we’re creating a safe space for everyone. 

BA: And also, [considering] the fact that we lost someone in our Brandeis community a week before the show went up, a big challenge for us was how the show now had to change in such a drastic way, we were able to figure that out, and it was hard coming to some of the last minute decisions of how we were going to put the play up and how we were going to make it work to really call for good conversation throughout the whole Brandeis community instead of making people feel sad, or worse, about what is happening.

CC: Creating a safe space ultimately ended up extending from just the casting crew to the entire Brandeis community. So it became a question of, Is this a constructive choice, or is this a choice that will hurt more people than it will help? And we ultimately decided that, for people who felt ready to see it, it could be [constructive].

 —Lizzie Grossman