Making the Best Lemonade

by Rahul Chadha

Poet Lemon Andersen–by his own choice–has never seen Lemon, the film that directors Laura Brownson and Beth Levison made about the Brooklyn native’s struggle to produce his one-man play, The County of Kings. In that regard, Andersen was a minority of one at the sold-out U.S. premiere of Lemon, which was featured as the Centerpiece Gala of DOC NYC on Friday night.

“There’s a lot of reasons why I haven’t seen the film,” Andersen said. “I think a lot of it has to do with the fact that you don’t want to see yourself living through something you wanted to be over. You want to go through the process of trying to grow.”

Lemon documents a years-long period of turmoil in Andersen’s life, but he clearly grows both personally and artistically over the course of the film, taking County of Kings from the small, but scrappy, American Playhouse Theater to a critically acclaimed staging at the highly esteemed Public Theater. Still, the growing pains captured on camera during that time remain raw for Anderson.

“Even watching the trailer, it was kind of tough to look at the person I was just two years ago,” he said. But Andersen also wanted to give Brownson and Levison free rein to tell the story as they saw fit. “I wanted to let the filmmakers become their own artists, to give them the respect of creating their own version of me.”

In true artistic (and altruistic) spirit, Andersen was also quick to credit the immense amount of labor that went into creating Lemon. “These filmmakers spent four years of their lives working so hard at proving themselves as much as I did,” he said.

Levison and Brownson said that, initially, they expected filming on the project to last about a year. “What happened was that we soon started filming Lemon, and Lemon’s life started unfolding, and we just had to stick around,” Levison said.

“When you’re doing these things, you end up really attached to your subject. And for a long time we didn’t really know what was going to happen. I don’t think Lemon knew,” said Brownson. “That’s the beauty of documentary filmmaking, but also the really painful part of documentary filmmaking.”

Photo by Katie McVeay