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QuickTake:
The play “Dog Mom” bounds onto the stage at Oregon Contemporary Theatre this weekend. We sat down with its author, Tate Hanyok: “It’s sort of an allegory for, 'Let's treat each other in life like a bunch of rescue dogs’ … Everybody's got a little bit of damage, and we all need some love."
For a person, a walk around the block is a walk around the block. A tree to look at here, a streetlight to wait at there.
For a dog, it’s a cavalcade of sights, sounds and — of course — smells.
That differential in everyday joy is part of what inspired Los Angeles-based writer and actress Tate Elizabeth Hanyok to pen the play “Dog Mom,” which opens at Oregon Contemporary Theatre in Eugene this weekend. The play is about a jaded New Yorker who takes in a scruffy, and often not the best-behaved, dog.
“With an animal, the stakes are so high, and their world is so simple, and food is so exciting, and these little joys in life can be exciting for us too,” she said. “It can kind of take the heavy burden of life off our shoulders when we look at it through the lens of our pets.”
Hanyok’s “Dog Mom” is in Eugene as part of the National New Play Network’s rolling world premiere program. The program, an initiative to connect playwrights writing original pieces with regional theaters to produce and mount the works, also brought last fall’s “Rocket Men” to OCT.
This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity. The final question of this interview contains a mild plot spoiler for “Dog Mom.”
Lookout Eugene-Springfield: Where did “Dog Mom” come from?
Tate Hanyok: Coming out of the pandemic, I was watching a theater company that I’m very close to lose a bunch of subscribers. Times have been fraught. There’s been a lot of political division, and I thought, “What is something that we can all unify on? The love of our pets.” The idea of getting people back into the theater through a shared love of their pets felt like a good way to contribute to the theater community that I love so much. The title is somewhat commercial, and maybe someone who’s not a subscriber or a normal theatergoer might go, “Well, I’m a dog mom,” or “I’ll bring my friends,” and then hopefully we can get them in seats, have them have this great shared experience, maybe they come back for another show.
Also, I was in between writing two dog-premise movies that did not go — production can be hard — but I had a dog horror movie, and then I had a dog rom-com. Those are both currently stalled out, and in between those, I just kept thinking, “What’s the dog thinking?” This was just a really fun way to take all those ideas, because, of course, in those other movies, the dogs don’t talk, but I could put all of the thoughts of our dogs into this. So I would say those two things kind of conjoined and became the impetus.
And it’s been a really wonderful experience, because it’s done exactly what I had hoped so far, which is getting people back to the theater, and the places that it has been have reported a lot of that shared unity that I was hoping for. I really wanted to have an audience come in as strangers, and then by the end they’re sharing stories of their pets. If they don’t have a pet, maybe they’re thinking of adopting a pet.
Are you now, or have you ever been, a dog owner?
I have been a dog mom. I am currently a possum foster mom, which is polarizing.
Tell me everything.
You genuinely want to know, OK. I am a champion for underdogs of all kinds, and I feel the possum has a bad rap. They are these terrifying, prehistoric-looking things with fur, but their nature’s defense is to either play dead or open their mouth with their 1,000 teeth that they don’t use and go, “Ah,” which looks scary to us, but really, it’s them being like, “Please don’t come any closer.” So, they have all these babies, and they don’t know what to do with them.
They come out of the pouch, they ride on mom’s back, and then this is currently baby possum season, where they just start falling off mom’s back the bigger they get, because not all of them will fit. The bigger they grow, and they’re very helpless creatures, but they’re here to clean up our trash. They’re like little dustbusters, you know, eating all the dead fruit and the bugs, and they’re just really good waste control. But you see one in the corner of your garage, and it’s like, “Oh God, get it out,” but it’s just like, “I’m just looking for something to chew on.”
When anyone finds a baby possum, if they’re not still nursing age, because at that point they need to go to like a wildlife conservation, because they can bottle-feed them — they’re very, very delicate creatures — but if they’re old enough, I’m like, “Bring them to me,” and I’ll pair them with the other little guys running around. There’s a friend who was on a studio job, and they were closing the set, and it was like they found this baby possum amongst all the grip equipment, the lighting, and the wires, all that. They know they’re shutting the show down for the summer, so there’s going to be no trash for this little thing to feed off of.
So she’s like, “Tate, can I bring it to you?” I said, “Yes, please.” So she brings this little dirty Hollywood opossum, and I put him in a cage outside, and every night I have a couple little guys who had lost their mom who would come from their burrow and they would come to my deck because they knew I had a little bit of food that I would put out at about seven, and they were always punctual. 7:15 they would arrive, and I would let the little guy watch them three nights in a row. On the third night I thought, ‘I’ll just open the little hatch,’ and he nibbled with them and ran home with them, and then the next night four little guys came back.
Were you able to launder any possum experience into “Dog Mom”?
No, they’re very different creatures. A dog is so attuned to you, and maybe mimicking and mirroring — of course, it depends on the dog and dog breed, right? A possum has like two settings: food and not food. But I do hope to at some point represent possums in the play. But dogs are very special. They’re just so eager to please, and they’re such deep empaths, and you’re God to them, and what a good boost for the ego to be loved by a dog.
Because I come from an acting background, I notice all these nuances, and I find them delightfully inspiring to kind of impose what they might be thinking. It was a really fun game to simplify thoughts and come up with a vernacular for Dog [note: the named character in the play that is a dog is simply called “Dog”], and the way they see things. A refrigerator might be “food jail.” A dog has a different perception of what’s going on, and that was just really fun as a writer to play with.
How anthropomorphized is Dog, on a scale of human to dog?
We are not watching an actor on all fours like pant and bark. Our pets are our best friends, and I’m assuming most people talk to their pets in their home and have conversations with them as if they’re their friend. I wanted to create a love story between two best friends, so therefore Dog is very human, and it even says in the stage directions of the play, like, “the most human embodiment of a dog possible, with dog-like energy.” The energy and the exuberance and the joy, and you know, the quirks are very Dog, but it is, if you were walking down the street, you would think, “Look at those two best friends, and that one is very animated.”
Understanding that Dog is more of a best friend, what did including dog “tics” or callouts for dog lovers look like?
It wrote itself. There’s so much material, and everything becomes this like delicious comedic bit when you’re watching a dog and human relationship through that lens, because there’s so much polarity, right? Like a dog is like, “Oh my god, look at this stick, it’s so exciting,” and a human’s like, “Yeah, it’s a stick. Can we not bring it inside?” So you already have this fun dichotomy and position for comedy that just works beautifully. There’s always positivity and excitement. With this particular dog I’ve chosen, which is a golden retriever, they are there to please. A different dog is going to have a different disposition, and I lean into that a little bit.
What has it been like seeing it in progress at OCT?
There is so much love in this production. I’ve heard the play 50 times, maybe 100, right? I’ve never heard it like this. They’re so specific in their choices. Each one of the actors has latched on to their character in a new, fresh way. I can’t believe how much I’m laughing, and I’m not laughing at jokes I’ve written, I’m laughing at how they’re doing it there, and like, from the costumes, the detail, the set, every department has just so clearly brought so much love. Craig [Willis, OCT’s producing artistic director] is just an incredible human. He has this, like, ease about him, but he’s completely running this theater while hosting me, while putting a show up, while probably handling 10 other things, you can see it all comes from the top.
With that experience of hearing the play 50 to 100 times, is there anything you understand on a deeper level now about what you’ve written that you didn’t at first?
The audience kind of tells you. I knew I wanted to talk about grief coming out of COVID. There’s so much loss, but you’re not always sure what’s landing with people.
An audience member said to me, “You know, the title, it really doesn’t do your show justice. Oh, it’s so much deeper than that, this is such a commercial title,” and I said, “Well, you know, that’s really the point, because I just want to get people in, and if they’re surprised that they’re having a shared experience and their hearts are cracking open, and you know, they’re just feeling so much empathy towards others, because that’s a big theme in the play. We’ve got a dog in there who is, he’s not an easy dog, but it’s sort of an allegory for “Let’s treat each other in life like a bunch of rescue dogs, and everybody’s got a little bit of damage, and we all need some love.”
I have to ask, because it’s now a media rating system in of itself: Does the dog die?
How do I put this? I always hesitate to share how the play goes, because you don’t want people to go, “Oh, I can’t go experience that.” It is a celebration of life, and it was really important to me that we don’t give that away. The way it is written in the show, we are always celebrating joy and life, and so my hope is that if you’ve lost someone, you feel them still with you, and so in the play, we’re always celebrating the presence and the gift and the angel that Dog truly was in her life.
How to see ‘Dog Mom’
Opening night is Saturday, May 30 at 7:30 p.m at Oregon Contemporary Theatre, 194 W. Broadway, Eugene. The play runs through Sunday, June 14. Tickets are available online, from $25 to $52 based on seat choice; student tickets are $20.
