Hannah Church
@hannahrosechurch1 in her cozy back yard after a long day of camp and nannying
-Theatre-
Hannah and I had scheduled this interview a few times. But today was the day. She was working until 6, but I was going to be over near her home in Mableton and I was going to make today work.
I waited in my car outside for a while as I waited for her to get home. She called me on her drive to apologize for being late and we caught up about recent drama as she drove home.
Hannah has lost wedding showers, bachelorette weekends, a rehearsal dinner, and her wedding during Covid. There are bigger things at stake in the world today but, seeing as I’m looking at roughly the same losses ahead of me with my wedding scheduled for October, we were able to commiserate in the safe space of her backyard for things lost. And in times like now, that is a rare and cherished thing.
Interviewed 6.2.20
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Casey: So first and foremost, how are you?
Hannah: Every day, it gets a little bit better. I think once I got past what was going to be the wedding day, it's all felt so much better.
Casey: And what was the original wedding day?
Hannah: May 16th. It's changed like four times because it was May 16th, and then we postponed until June 13th, and then we realized June 13th couldn't happen and then we changed it. But yeah, it was supposed to be May 16th.
But after, it was like we grieved it and then we moved on. And we had a couple friends over and they celebrated us. And it just felt so special, like a birthday. And then the next day I was like, "Okay, I can let this go and just focus on other things." And slowly, work is coming back. Auditions are starting to filter through. It's getting better every day.
Casey: What have you been doing during quarantine? We are on day I think 78 or 79.
Hannah: Well, I was working on “[The] Yellow Wallpaper” for the Riser Lab at the Alliance Theatre and that got canceled or postponed. We're still unsure. We don't really even know if we're going to have a showcase. We think we will, but we don't know when the Alliance will open. So I've been dealing with a lot of guilt because I just don't want to work on it. You know, you work for a year, every single day on this project and you involved 50 people and it's gotten so big. And like, I still had to pay everyone even though there was no product. So I'm almost out of grant money now. I haven't touched “Yellow Wallpaper.” I haven't opened it. I haven't listened to it, looked at it, any of that. And every day I'm like, "Maybe today will be the day," but I don't. I've been doing a lot of open calls with my film TV agent. I've been submitting to like random theatres that I never submit to, making videos. And I'm going to start working with a voiceover aficionado to make a demo so that at the end of this quarantine, I'll have two voiceover demos, so I can start being represented in that world. I've been teaching classes at the Alliance and I taught a playwriting class to sixth through twelfth-grade students. That was really cool because I didn't have to create, but I kind of got to give tools on how to create and then watch what they created, and that was really neat. But mostly teaching, watching a lot of Netflix.
Casey: Do you have any new hobbies or rituals that you've developed during quarantine that you want to continue to do whenever we go back to real work?
Hannah: I started doing yoga because Hannah Lake got me started on it. January 1st, she was like, "Do you want to do this 30-day yoga practice with me?" I was like, "Yeah!" She finished it in 30 days. I finished it in May. But I've been doing yoga a lot. I try to do it every day. I don't. And I only do about 20 minutes-worth because my wrists hurt. But I've been stretching a ton, like little workout stints. You know, where you just do like maybe 35 sit-ups, 20 squats, that type of thing has helped.
Then I've gone mostly vegetarian, which I kind of was before, but I've committed to it because now I have the time to cook meals. So just trying like tofu, and tempe, and cauliflower steaks and like how to cook these things that I would have never set aside the time to figure out how to do.
So mostly just all stress relieving, anxiety relieving stuff. But I've had crazy insomnia, which I've heard tons of people have had crazy insomnia, but I probably have one night a week where I just go to bed at like five, six, and just my brain won't stop.
Casey: What do you miss?
Hannah: Friends. I think that's the number one thing. Like when great Governor Kemp decided to open up the beautiful peach state of Georgia, everyone I know was pretty upset. And my thing was like, I don't want to go bowling. I don't want to get a tattoo right now. I want us to be able to find two friends that I'm allowed to go to their house and they're allowed to come to mine like that. I'm a very extroverted person when it comes to just being around people. You know, we go see shows all the time and we run into 30 people we know when we're doing auditions or rehearsals, and we're always meeting new people. So that has been the shittiest part—is just wondering, like, when am I going to see my friends not on a virtual phone call? And slowly it's been happening where I've got probably about five friends that I can call up and see. And we've opened up our circles and we're fine. But I miss friendship more than I miss doing theatre, which is crazy.
Casey: How has it been creating in quarantine? How do you find the motivation?
Hannah: I don't create the things that people think I would create.
Casey: What are you creating?
Hannah: I don't want to work on writing at all. I've gotten into photography a bit. Just singing has been something I really love. Fixing up the house and just deciding what colors I want to paint, and what shapes, and what textures, and how I want to do things. I've bought plants that have only halfway died. I'm learning about that. I've done more virtual dance calls than I've done in like ever, maybe. Ever. So I've done a bit of dancing.
Casey: It's so funny because every time I ask you a question, you'll say something that I want to ask a follow up question to. But then I'm listening to what you say. And then I forget what the follow up question is so I'm obviously I'm...
Hannah: I speak in run on sentences.
Casey: What will you take away from this time? What do you think you have learned about the world and about yourself?
Hannah: I think what I'll take away from it is this is the most I've talked to my family in years. We had Sunday Zoom calls and I've called and talked to my brothers more in the last three months than I have maybe ever. I just feel so close to them. I feel like, you know, I missed out on a wedding. I missed out on a honeymoon. All the wedding stuff. I feel like it's made John and I stronger. And we've just gone through it with a smile because we know there are so many people that have had worse—way worse than us. Especially with everything going on right now with the protests and Black Lives Matter, I feel like this moment is this crazy catalyst for change racially, environmentally, creatively. I feel like this may be the moment that's in the history books that says, you know, in the past they did it this way. And then the world shut down for a third of a year … Maybe everything will just be a bit closer to the utopia that we all want at the end of this, if we don't fuck it up and go back to what we think is the correct way, the orderly way.
Casey: What would you like to not see come back?
Hannah: I would like everybody to not put so much pressure on themselves to be so busy all of the time, myself included. I would like to learn from other cultures and countries where they just allow themselves to live and there's no pressure to fill up every single moment with being busy, or looking at your phone, or trying to get ahead, or trying to achieve whatever you want to achieve next and then you achieve it and then you don't even let yourself enjoy it … I feel like everybody wouldn't need so much anxiety and stress medication if we all just took a step back, and just went back to being a little bit more simple and enjoying the simple things and not needing to be so successful.
Casey: Changing our definition of successful.
Hannah: Yes. You don't need to work 16 hours a day to be successful. There's gotta be a way where you can enjoy your life and not spend a decade of your 20s trying to get to where you think you need to be by 30. I'm turning 30 in less than a month, and I wish that I hadn't put in so many hours because, you know, everything's closed. What was the point of all of it, you know?
Casey: When do you think we'll start back, theatre will start back?
Hannah: Theatre? No clue. I know that's phase five of Mayor Bottom's plan. I don't even know what phase we're in right now and then with all the protests, I hope our numbers don't go up. That would be just awful. So I just, you know, in two weeks, we're going to know what this all means. So from where we are today, I'd love for us to be able to have Christmas shows, holiday shows, but I don't know if we'll have an audience.
