"You got a long curse, that goes all the way back to your ancestors… we got to get rid of this curse, or it ain't never gonna work with you and this guy… I'm going to need a very expensive candle and a very expensive crystal, so I'm going to have to charge you for this."
And so playwright Lally Katz, in New York to research a play she had been commissioned to write about psychics, ends up spending her commission money on psychics.
Now, she is staring in a one-woman show about her adventures with psychics between Australia and New York, called 'Stories I Want to Tell You in Person'.
The commissioning theatre company Belvoir describes it as "the story of what Katz has been doing instead of writing the play".
News that makes sense
Your trusted source for staying up-to-date with the world around you. Get free daily news updates and analysis, straight to your inbox.
Katz, a popular Australian playwright with successful shows such as 'Neighbourhood Watch', is not accustomed to being the subject of her stories.
"The first version I did was really - nothing really was revealed about me and it was all just about other people, and then the director said 'Well, no, this isn't what we talked about' and I was like 'Oh, I just thought this might be good...'," says Katz.
The re-written version is a confronting, hilarious tale of Jewish New York and of psychics advising Katz of her chances of marrying a "full Jew".
Describing herself as Jewish, "but on the wrong side - I'm only half Jewish, on my father's side," Katz was born in New Jersey and raised later in Melbourne.
She spent her recent time in New York in the East Village where shop-front psychics are "on every corner in Manhattan - theres a Duane Read and a psychic," she says.
"I actually think those psychics are a kind of a chain store too, they are selling the same thing, they have the same sales pitch. I guess it's buying belief, basically."
Finding herself in a city post-global financial crises when many people were struggling financially, thanks to her commission Katz had more money then she ever had in her life with "money flying out of her pockets", much of it going to psychics.
"I think they are also selling the American dream to a city that sort of lost its money in a lot of ways, and maybe that is what they are feeding off now," Katz says of the popularity of the psychics.
"People don't know how to read things anymore, so they are looking for help from a psychic or something."
Lally has been on stage before as a non-actor, in a play directed by Belvoir Artistic Director Ralph Myers when he didn't have enough actors to play the roles.
Asked if he is trying to get value for money by getting Katz to write a play about her adventures writing a play, Myers says: "The stories she told about the process of writing that play was so funny and so engaging, we all laughed and cried and just found them so incredible that we thought we should make a tiny little show out of these stories."
"The great thing about Lally is that she sort of lives her work," says Myers.
"I suppose to more rational people… the idea of spending all of our commission money on psychics in order to write a play about psychics seems like a crazy idea, but for her it's a perfectly natural kind of idea I think."
There are moments in the play so unguarded, one wonders if even a best friend would hear some of the detail in the anecdotes.
"One of Lally's great qualities as a human being, and indeed as a playwrite, but as a human being, is her incredible ability to over-share - to tell you more than you should rightfully, politely be told," says Myers. "And that is one of the thrilling things about this show, is you find out things we really shouldn't be being told in a room full of complete strangers, and that's a really charming quality but it also makes really good theatre."
Katz initially could not believe that the director encouraged her to learn her lines in a story about her own life.
Although when she sought sympathy from her friends, their gentle response - 'don't you think that's a good idea, though?' - made her realise her memoir-style show perhaps did need some structure.
"It's sort of being me, being myself, then (there is) like a shape as well," says Katz. "Which is good, because otherwise everyone will be there all night while I'm going 'and then, when I was four…'."
Things I Want to Tell You in Person is on in Sydney in March-April and then Melbourne in August.http://belvoir.com.au/productions/stories-i-want-to-tell-you-in-person/
