Have YOU ever wondered what it’s like to be a potato?
Hysterical is a film that follows a girl-woman as she scours her mind-farm for her missing uterus.
The Team
Mia Fowler
Mia Weathers-Fowler (she/her/hers) is an actor, director, and writer based in New York. Mia has spent the past three years focused on new play development—directing five premieres and performing in three. In 2020 she and her co-writer Seth Herschkowitz won the Yale Playwright's Festival for their one-act play Terminal 3. With the constraints of the pandemic, Mia has turned her attention to film, directing her first feature Hysterical in October. Outside of her artistic pursuits, Mia moonlights as a medieval scholar (anything before 1600 will do).
Cyrus Duff
Cyrus Duff (he/him/his) is a cinematographer and director. With Edward Columbia, he runs Sulde Productions, which produces commercial content for a variety of clients as well as narrative and documentary shorts. His short film Without Wax began its festival circuit at the 2020 RIIFF. In the past year, among other projects, he directed a documentary on the trendy New York fashion startup Café Forgot, now in post-production. He also served as cinematographer on a new narrative feature film by director Jimmy Bontatibus, is in prep as cinematographer on the second documentary feature by Hayley Garrigus, and has shot a number of ads, shorts and music videos. You can see more of his work at his website.
Background
The Adaptation
Hysterical is a film-adaptation of a one-woman theatre performance. The stem-level plot is this: a girl-woman lost her uterus and sorts through her mind-farm-memories to find it. On a deeper level, the show explores intergenerational womanhood and inherited trauma. It weaves together themes of independence, institutionalized mental health, the female body and its policing, fertility, immigration, and growth to present to you, the audience, an unintentional coming-of-age tale for and of us all, just trying to do the best we can with what we have.
Originally, Hysterical was written for live-theatre. And then COVID. Yet, like running water down a mountainside, we flowed with what life presented us. You see, the thing about a project like this is: once the water breaks, breaching is imminent. Less metaphorically, once Emma had a clear vision for depicting this, she couldn’t sit back and wait while theaters, her show, and her passion for them decayed. Sometimes you’re just soul-constipated and need to evacuate immediately because life is waiting! Writer and Performer Emma Speer found the phenomenal Mia Fowler to direct and the legendary Citrus Duff to take charge of production. Despite the unanticipated rerouting, the adaptation is not compromised at all. In fact, for the creators, the film version has supplanted the original as the story’s purest expression.
Follow the project on instagram @hystericalpotatoes or on Seed and Spark!
