There’s more to this duo than ‘Moe and Jerryweather’
Putting together a webcast series is not as immediate as one would think. Nor, Adam Langdon says, are they necessarily produced the slapdash, do-ityourself manner that pop culture would have one believe.
Langdon is one half of the team that appears in and masterminds “Moe and Jerryweather,” a series he and David Cowenswet began when they were classmates at Juilliard and that built audience during its first season on YouTube and second skein on Vimeo.
Right now, “Moe and Jerryweather,” which is modeled after a British series that featured Hugh Laurie and Stephen Fry in the ‘90s, is in a sort of a hiatus. Both Langdon and Corenswet has their acting ambitions come true in a big way, Corenswet plays a major role on YSA’s “The Tap,” about a secret fraternity at a Ivy League school and produced by Rob Reinert with major participation from “Boardwalk Empire” director Simon Cellan Jones. Langdon in on tour in one of current theater’s meatiest roles for a young actor, Christopher, the sensitive, determined youth in “The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Times,” which arrives tomorrow for a run through Sunday at Philadelphia’s Academy of Music.
Langdon, who turned his childhood attention from zoos to performing when his family moved from Brooklyn to Essex Junction, Vt., is obviously a guy who likes to express himself and keep busy. That included visiting zoos while he travels with “Curious Incident,” the 2015 Tony-winner for Best Play. Philadelphia’s famous zoo is certainly on his agenda.
His activity shows in the way he constantly pursued being an actor once the stage attracted his attention and is the way he wrote material for himself and created a character to play of a web program while waiting for a part like Christopher to come along, which no one could predict it would.
Langdon says his role is “Curious Incident” is as physical as it is emotional. It requires a tour de force from an actor, as Christopher is not a typical teenager. He is gifted intellectually while being prickly about some things, just people touching him. He also takes much that people say literally. When he is accused of killing a neighbor’s dog, he takes it upon himself to find out how the dog actually died, a mystery that leads Christopher on a journey that takes him from his safe have in Bristol, an industrial town just west of Bath in England, to the bustle of London via British Rail and the London Underground.
Christopher has often been called autistic, but Langdon, speaking by telephone from Charlotte, “Curious’s” venue as the time, says that word never appears in either Mark Haddon’s book or Simon Stephens’s script.
“We don’t diagnose Christopher,” Langdon says. “In fact, we stay away from it. I play what’s going on in his life. He is incredibly intelligent and intent upon getting to the truth about matters and correcting what he regards as an injustice towards him.
“It’s a wonderful part. I love playing Christopher. I don’t think there’s another role like it in general, let alone for a young actor. Playing it is exhilarating. I should be tired after each performance, but I tend to be energized. This part and this play are so insane and crazy in exciting ways. It’s so physical and emotional. I have a lot of experience, and I don’t think there’s any way an actor can totally prepare himself for this role.”
Langdon has been training as actor for most of his life. He was born in Brooklyn and lived near the Prospect Park Zoo, which was his favorite place. His parents took him to the Bronx Zoo, the Central Park Zoo, and other places he could see animals. Langdon had little doubt he would have a career that involved animals, if not a zoologist then a veterinarian.
Then, he was age 11, his family moved to Vermont, where there were no zoos. Vermont had community theaters, and Langdon performed in them. He says he was in every musical at his high school and found being on stage exhilarating. Counselors in Vermont advised him to expand his choices beyond major university theater programs, but Langdon knew what he wanted and got it when he was accepted to Juilliard.
There he performed while studying. He became interested in all aspects of theater, including writing and technical skills. He says he usually played young men who had confrontations with authority figures. He also made friends.
One was David Corenswet. They found they shared a comic sensibility and admired some of the same comics, such as Laurie and Fry and their ‘90s sketches. They began putting together bit and developed characters for a web series.
At the time they were playing characters named Joe and Merryweather in a Tom Stoppard play, “Hapgood.” They exchanged the first letters of the characters’ names to create their personae, Moe and Jerryweather, roommates and friends who explore unusual topics, using by taking the figurative literally or wondering about something arcane, like why pineapples are fruits. Corenswet’s Jerryweather is the person on top of it all, the one who gets breaks, knows exactly what to do on most occasions, and thinks deeply about contemporary topics. Moe, played by Langdon, is a slacker who, in the show’s opening, eats a sandwich while halfheartedly doing sit-ups Jerryweather is executing with perfect form and serious commitment.
“Ideas originate with us, and once people see the show, especially friends from Juilliard or the theater, our first audience, they suggest bits or situations. Sketches are not improvised. They are written.
“Of course, you want everything to look as if you just thought of it, but that takes a lot of production. It was more than a year after David and I shot the first ‘Moe and Jeeryweather’ and we placed the first episode on YouTube.
“That was because we wanted professional production values. David is into the technical end of theater. He has his own photography and editing equipment as well as lighting and sound gadgets and an interest in music. We used his equipment to shoot the first shows, augmenting it with rentals. Our budget was $5,500 which doesn’t sound like much, but it is different from what many people think, that web programs are just thrown together.
“David and I looked at every aspect. We honed the scripts. We thought about lighting and editing and music. David did most of the editing. There is more care than people imagine that goes into a web series. We worked hard to get everything right and improve what we were doing. The hope is one day we’ll have an $11,000 budget and can rent more equipment. We have actors who want to work with us. Right now, David is busy with a television series, and I am on the road in ‘Curious.’
“These are not complaints. We’re both thrilled and want to go back to ‘Moe and Jerryweather’ when time allows. Making a good web program, especially with sketches of varying lengths, some just an answer to a single comment, takes care that goes beyond the writing and acting. We are proud we put in that time and created something that looks polished.”
Langdon continues to write, a pastime he says always occupied him and enjoys seeing the country and its zoos.