SDC Journal Fall 2015 by SDC Journal

JOURNAL FALL 2015

ETHAN MCSWEENY + DOUG HUGHES

GOING HOME MAKING WORK IN CONTEXT OF COMMUNITY

MICHAEL JOHN GARCÉS FINDING HER PEOPLE

ANNIE DORSEN ALSO

MARC BRUNI ROBERT BARRY FLEMING JEREMY HERRIN BLANKA ZIZKA + MORE FALL 2015 | SDC JOURNAL

OFFICERS

Susan H. Schulman PRESIDENT

John Rando EXECUTIVE VICE PRESIDENT

Leigh Silverman VICE PRESIDENT

Oz Scott SECRETARY

Ethan McSweeny TREASURER

COUNSEL

Ronald H. Shechtman HONORARY ADVISORY COMMITTEE

Karen Azenberg Pamela Berlin Julianne Boyd Danny Daniels Marshall W. Mason Ted Pappas

SDC EXECUTIVE BOARD MEMBERS OF BOARD

Julie Arenal Christopher Ashley Anne Bogart Mark Brokaw Joe Calarco Larry Carpenter Marcia Milgrom Dodge Sheldon Epps Michael John Garcés Christopher Gattelli Liza Gennaro Wendy C. Goldberg Linda Hartzell Anne Kauffman Dan Knechtges Mark Lamos Paul Lazarus Pam MacKinnon Meredith McDonough Robert Moss Robert O’Hara Sharon Ott Lonny Price Seret Scott Bartlett Sher Casey Stangl Michael Wilson Chay Yew Evan Yionoulis

SDC JOURNAL FEATURES EDITOR

Elizabeth Bennett EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR

Laura Penn ART DIRECTOR

FALL 2015 CONTRIBUTORS

Walter Bildberback DRAMATURG/LITERARY MANAGER, WILMA THEATER

James Bundy DIRECTOR

Megan E. Carter

Elizabeth Nelson

DIRECTOR, SDC FOUNDATION

EDITORIAL ADVISORY COMMITTEE

ARTISTIC DIRECTOR, GATE THEATRE

Walter Bobbie Sheldon Epps Graciela Daniele Liza Gennaro Thomas Kail Robert O'Hara Leigh Silverman Evan Yionoulis

Michael Colgan Peta Coy EXECUTIVE ASSISTANT

Mark Duncan WRITER

Robert Barry Fleming DIRECTOR/CHOREOGRAPHER

Jeremy Herrin DIRECTOR

SDC JOURNAL PEER-REVIEW SECTION EDITORIAL BOARD SDCJ-PRS CO-EDITORS

Anne Fliotsos Ann M. Shanahan SDCJ-PRS BOOK REVIEW EDITOR

Travis Malone

Doug Hughes DIRECTOR

Rebecca King SDC JOURNAL INTERN

Annie G. Levy DIRECTOR

Laura MacDonald

SDCJ-PRS BOOK REVIEW ASSOCIATE

SDCJ PEER-REVIEW CONTRIBUTOR

Kathleen M. McGeever

Laura Paone

SDCJ-PRS SENIOR ADVISORY COMMITTEE

Anne Bogart Joan Herrington James Peck SDCJ-PRS PEER REVIEWERS

David Callaghan Kathryn Ervin Scot Reese Stephen A. Schrum SDCJ-PRS ASSISTANT EDITORS + PEER REVIEWERS

Donald Byrd Thomas Costello Liza Gennaro Ruth Pe Palileo Emily Rollie

WRITER

Katherine Profeta DRAMATURG + ASST. PROFESSOR, QUEENS COLLEGE, CUNY

Ted Sod ACTOR/DIRECTOR

Seret Scott DIRECTOR

Laura Tesman DIRECTOR

Lisa Timmel DRAMATURG

Catherine Weidner SDCJ-PRS BOOK REVIEWER

Michael Wilson DIRECTOR

Evan Yionoulis DIRECTOR

SDC JOURNAL is published quarterly by Stage Directors and Choreographers Society, located at 321 W. 44th Street, Suite 804, NY, NY 10036. SDC JOURNAL is a registered trademark of SDC. SUBSCRIPTIONS + ADVERTISEMENTS Call 212.391.1070 or visit www.SDCweb.org. Annual SDC Membership dues include a $5 allocation for a 1-year subscription to SDC JOURNAL. Non-Members may purchase an annual subscription for $24 (domestic), $48 (foreign); single copies cost $7 each (domestic), $14 (foreign). Purchase online at www.SDCweb.org. Also available at the Drama Book Shop in NY, NY. POSTMASTER Send address changes to SDC JOURNAL, SDC, 321 W. 44th Street, Suite 804, NY, NY 10036. PRINTED BY Sterling Printing

SDC JOURNAL

| FALL 2015

FEATURES

17 Annie Dorsen FINDING HER PEOPLE

INTERVIEW WITH KATHERINE PROFETA

COVER

Going

Home

AN INTERVIEW WITH DOUG HUGHES + ETHAN MCSWEENY INTERVIEW BY TED SOD

31 Creating a Thinking Body for a Thinking Theatre

Blanka Zizka on the Hothouse

BY WALTER BILDERBACK

at the Wilma Theater

36 Michael John Garcés MAKING WORK IN CONTEXT OF COMMUNITY

FALL

CONTENTS Volume 4 | No. 2

INTERVIEW BY LISA

TIMMEL

42 PEER-REVIEWED SECTION The (Long-Running)

Path Unwinding

HOW DIRECTORS + CHOREOGRAPHERS MAINTAIN LONG-RUNNING MUSICALS ON BROADWAY + BEYOND

BY LAURA MACDONALD EDITED BY ANNE FLIOTSOS +

ANN M. SHANAHAN

FALL 2015 | SDC JOURNAL

SDCF FROM THE ARCHIVES

Working Abroad EXCERPTS BY PAUL

WEIDNER, JOSEPHINE ABADY + JOHN DILLON

Hamilton in 20+ Questions Andy Blankenbuehler + Thomas Kail

SDC FOUNDATION

Paying It Forward BY ROBERT

BARRY FLEMING E. CARTER

INTRO BY MEGAN

THE SOCIETY PAGES

Kennedy Center American College Theater Festival

"Legend of Off-Broadway"

Theatre Communication Group's Annual National Conference

Levy PHOTO Jessica Osber

5 FROM THE EXECUTIVE BOARD Pleasure + Power of Participation BY MICHAEL WILSON

FROM THE EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR BY LAURA PENN

IN YOUR WORDS

What I Learned... Evan Yionoulis CURATED BY SERET SCOTT

hy I Cast That Actor W Jeremy Herrin

15 MEMBERS IN PRINT + MEDIA

Annie G. Levy: What I Packed

Laura

47 9

BACKSTAGE

J. Jared Janas

Makeup + Wig Designer

Tesman: Magnificent Chaos

REPRINTED FROM WORLD WIDE LAB: A DIRECTOR'S FEAST ONLINE BLOG

SDCJ-PRS BOOK REVIEW

Creating Musical Theatre: Conversations with Broadway Directors and Choreographers By Lyn Cramer REVIEW BY CATHERINE

WEIDNER

Dramatists Guild Conference

Association for Theatre in Higher Education SDC Broadway Negotiations Committee

BC/EFA Flea Market

Alley Theatre Grand Reopening

In Memory of Melvin Bernhardt + Mark Rucker

José Quintero

Ethan McSweeny + Doug Hughes PHOTO Walter McBride COVER + PREVIOUS TOP

Blanka Zizka PHOTO Alexander Iziliaev | Annie Dorsen PHOTO Stephen Dodd | Marc Bruni + Doug McGrath during Beauitful PHOTO Jenny Anderson PREVIOUS

Phillipa Soo, Renée Elise Goldsberry + Jasmine Cephas Jones in Hamilton PHOTO Joan Marcus ABOVE LEFT

ABOVE Timothy

SDC JOURNAL

| FALL 2015

Douglas + Robert Barry Fleming

FROM THE EXECUTIVE BOARD PLEASURE + POWER OF PARTICIPATION Last fall, almost a year into my second term as a member of the Executive Board, I was asked to serve (along with Kathleen Marshall and Evan Yionoulis) as a Co-Chair for SDC’s Contract Negotiations with the Broadway League. The plan was that we would meet internally, determine our core asks, and then meet with the League, who had given signals it was interested in having a straightforward conversation that could lead to a new agreement in a few short weeks. In terms of a time burden, it sounded reasonable, and the opportunity to be a part of a leadership team that might break some new ground for our Union felt exciting. I had been a member of the LORT Negotiating Committee led by the formidable Mark Brokaw and Lisa Peterson in spring 2012 when we achieved recognition for our Members’ development work. Since then, our Off-Broadway Committee (led by the everready Evan Yionoulis) had also managed to integrate development for our Members into that collective bargaining agreement (CBA). The last Broadway negotiating committee (led by President Susan H. Schulman and Walter Bobbie) had introduced the idea of coverage for development work to the League. Would it be possible to bring it home this year as part of the new Broadway agreement so that our Members would finally have recognition in every CBA for their essential and proliferating development work? I signed on as Co-Chair. Under the astonishing leadership of Executive Director Laura Penn, backed by an incredibly devoted and imaginative staff (most especially, in this case, Director of Contract Affairs Mauro Melleno), and guided by the ever-vigilant and impassioned counsel of Ronald H. Shechtman, we began our internal caucuses last December. The venerable Walter Bobbie was there for us from the very beginning, proving to be an invaluable asset of experience, strategic thinking, and blessed humor. Board Members Mark Brokaw, Dan Knechtges, Leigh Silverman, Ethan McSweeny, John Rando, Pam MacKinnon, and Susan H. Schulman, were stalwart officers to the charge. Thomas Kail and Michael Mayer were early key representative of our non-Board Members currently represented on Broadway.

We met a number of times over the next several weeks, sometimes in person, sometimes on the phone, so that by February 17, 2015, when we first sat down with the League, our committee had become galvanized behind a platform that included not only development work recognition but also the inclusion of Associate Directors and Choreographers on Broadway within our Union. What happened next has been already disseminated in a number of our Union communication mechanisms: that we would not reach an agreement in a matter of weeks; on the contrary, an incredibly frosty chill descended onto these series of talks that not only extended into six bitter months, but also would not thaw until the wee hours of a late August night, with dawn approaching and only after threats of a complete breakdown of understanding between the League and SDC. There are numerous factors that elevated the dialogue to such a heightened and dramatic pitch, but the two most important ones to me were: first, our Union was both incredibly mobilized (from our leading Broadway directors and choreographers to our youngest Associate Members who dream of one day working on Broadway) and unified behind our committee’s core asks in the agreement; and second, a palpable and disturbing lack of understanding in the negotiating room about what directors and choreographers actually do in the process of creating and maintaining Broadway productions. It made many of us realize that we have a lot of education and advocacy work to do in order for the Broadway community to understand the vital and pervasive roles our Members play in what has become in the last fifteen years a multibillion-dollar industry. Which then led me to think, how many SDC Members truly understand their Union? Members join with a range of expectations: access to health insurance and a pension program; benefit from established minimum compensation across the nation (and often around the world, with more American exports on tour); and work rules and protections that define fundamental rights and creative contributions of directors and choreographers. Others are drawn to SDC out of a passion for labor, recognizing the historical and essential role unions have played in enhancing the lives of workers of every discipline and industry by ensuring that the pursuit of the American Dream is not only reserved for owners, but also is an unassailable right for workers. The delightful surprise of my own experience serving on behalf of our Union has been a tremendous gift of community and purpose. I can’t tell you how often I used

to think that I don’t get to see so-and-so director or choreographer, because we are always each in our own rehearsals; directors and choreographers rarely get the chance to share with one another the joys, trials, and tribulations of how their own brand of storytelling is unfolding. For any of you who are currently involved or have been with SDC, you have experienced (I am sure) the thrill of being in the room with your peers, who recognize and appreciate so deeply where you are in your evolvement and journey as an artist—the aspirations and achievements, yes, but even more the ongoing struggle to navigate a passion project to fruition, how to best manage relations with a producer or theatre, and how to best harness one’s purpose and potential in something that could reasonably be called a career. Lots of folks, in and out of the theatre, talk about how difficult our business is. They wonder how lonely it must feel at times, particularly when we are experiencing a somewhat fallow moment in our work, how impossible it must be to form any real relationships with fellow directors and choreographers who are by definition also our competitors for our next big job. Herein lies one of the truly great pleasures of participation in your Union: the more you work alongside your peers, the more you come to know a group of incredibly diverse, bright, imaginative, and compassionate people. And through this expanded knowledge of your peers and their rich attributes, you develop a greater sense of your own distinctive strengths and what it is you have to offer our community. Because, ultimately, our Union—along with the Broadway League—is part of a vital community drawn to the theatre as a powerful means of enriching lives and deepening empathy in our world. There is a lot of work to be done, and the pleasure of your participation is requested. Please take this as a personal invitation to get involved—run for the Board, serve on a committee, volunteer with the Foundation, and, by all means, vote. At the time of printing, annual elections are on the horizons—ballots will be out in October and the election is in November. Make your voice heard so that your leaders continue to represent and protect your interests—and so that you can continue to tell stories on stage that profoundly affect audiences everywhere. In solidarity,

Michael Wilson Executive Board Member FALL 2015 | SDC JOURNAL

FROM THE EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR As we prepare to send this issue of SDC Journal to the printer, I am headed to Ohio for parents’ weekend at Ohio Wesleyan University, where my son is a sophomore, and I am thinking about identity. Although I’m a parent on this trip, I can’t help but find myself drawn to the theatre department. Tomorrow I will spend a couple of hours with theatre majors: aspiring actors, designers, writers, technicians, and, of course, directors. (I must remember to extend an invitation to students from the dance department, just in case there is a choreographer in the making.) On my flight, I am beginning to read José Quintero’s 1974 autobiography, If You Don’t Dance They Beat You. This highly acclaimed SDC founder appears from time to time in historical journals, Board minutes, and, of course, in theatre lore; his legacy as one of the greatest directors of the 20th century is inescapable. But right now I am drawn to his personal story. How did he become possibly the most renowned director of O’Neill we have ever seen, as well as an accomplished stager of the works of Williams, Wilder, and others? What are the chances that a Panamanian-born Spaniard would become a leading figure in the American theatre, and that we would be grateful to him and his collaborators—including Theodore Mann—for carving Off-Broadway, with grit and determination, permanently into the NYC theatre landscape? How did this immigrant tap into the very “American” psyche of our early, mid-20th-century authors and audiences? “If you are going to go into the theatre you must understand that your identity is made up of everything that you have seen or heard.” José Quintero. I must remember to share this quote with the students tomorrow. Identity. In these days of renewed commitment to discourse and, more importantly, action around diversity and inclusion, the idea of identity is powerful and meaningful. Identity must be given consideration as we find a way through the work ahead. What makes up our identity? How are we identified by those around us? How do we reconcile the all-too-common lack of alignment between the givens, choices made for us, and our increasing need to self-identify? How do all the textures of identity deny or provide access? And if your identity is made up of all you have seen and heard, how does that manifest in the rehearsal room? In this issue of SDC Journal, we have published a special report: the results of a recent survey conducted by SDC’s Diversity Task Force. A very clear and powerful statement has been made by the Membership, and now the Task Force moves forward, creating measurable goals and actions to address this opportunity to lead. SDC is a collective of individuals with wide and varying levels of influence and power in a business that all too often operates in a world of scarcity. But we know when the Membership is unified, the power of SDC is significant. This issue was planned long before we knew we would place this report inside the centerfold, and today I find that the theme of identity weaves its way throughout. I’m going to take a leap and assume I don’t need to give background on the game-changing nature of Hamilton. Thomas Kail and Andy Blankenbuehler take us through an often humorous but deeply informative 20+ questions. And I think about: “Who gets to tell our stories?”

SDC JOURNAL

| FALL 2015

Michael Colgan, Artistic Director of the Gate Theatre, called upon two Americans to help tell American stories at the internationally renowned theatre in Dublin. Doug Hughes and Ethan McSweeny share their experiences while reflecting on the country of their families’ origins. Czech-born Blanka Zizka built her own aesthetic through the inspiration of Meyerhold and Kantor. Today she craves a new depth of experience for her company of American actors, and so she has called upon director Theodoros Terzopoulos to help her instill a new rigor in their work. And Michael John Garcés takes us through his path from America to Colombia and back again, passing through Miami, New York, and now Southern California, where his work as Artistic Director of Cornerstone takes him daily to the place where he is challenged with identity and the question of who gets to tell whose story. In the archives, we hear from John Dillon, Paul Weidner, and Josephine Abady on working abroad in the early ’90s. And Annie Dorsen takes us across Europe as she explores a new way of working—focused on chance and algorithms—and I pause when she says she believes we “meet our collaborators a bit by chance.” Quintero’s obituary from the New York Times (February 27, 1999) tells the story of how he convinced O’Neill’s widow to grant Circle in the Square the rights to produce The Iceman Cometh. It wasn’t because of his résumé or references; she didn’t appear to wonder how this young man from Panama could understand or interpret her late husband’s play. She said yes based on the hat he had selected for her to wear. Chance? I’m finishing this letter on the flight home. I am so very happy to report that faculty and students from the dance department joined us on Friday, without any prompting from me, adding a few choreographers to the mix. I fully enjoyed being in a room with a group of young artists in the midst of developing their aesthetic, considering options, and shaping their identity in the challenging but safe environment of academia. Other than New York, where are the best cities to move to after graduation? Is it really possible to make a contribution to the theatre by teaching? What about choreographers who choose to have their own companies—can they also work in legitimate theatre? And: “Will there be opportunities for me?” asked a young African American directing student. “Knowing it’s so hard for anyone to make it in this business, how can I? Do I have a chance?” Being the optimist, I said yes. Maybe—just maybe—the work of this decade will build on the work of the decades that preceded it, and you will find access and opportunity in a way that those before you did not. I shared the commitment I see every day from SDC Members to mentor and support young artists, to give back, as so many tell the tales of those who gave them a hand up. And I think I was able to successfully impart a few thoughts on why theatrical unions are important and share a few ideas about the various paths to the myriad destinations in this business. Flying home, I thought, wouldn’t it be great if we find this young man, in the not-too-distant future, taking on the great work of August Wilson while giving us gifted interpretations of Chekov and sharing new perspectives on the work of, say, Lillian Hellman?

Laura Penn, Executive Director

IN YOUR WORDS What I Learned... Why I Cast That Actor Backstage + Members in Print + Media

8 CONTRIBUTE If you wish to contribute to IN YOUR WORDS, would like to respond to any of the articles, opinions, or views expressed in SDC Journal, or have an idea for an article, please email Letters@SDCweb.org. Include your full name, city + state. We regret that we are unable to respond to every letter.

WHAT I LEARNED… BY

EVAN YIONOULIS

CURATED BY

SERET SCOTT

I had wonderful teachers and training, but to be frank, a lot of what I’ve learned as a director has come from trial and lots of error. Early in my career, I was directing The Crucible at Brandeis University with talented graduate students. We were working on the courtroom scene in a pretty abstract set, and I was trying to get the compositional focus right. I spent about an hour and a half adjusting the more than dozen actors six inches this way, a smidgen that way, and engineering motivated crosses and counters. But as soon as I’d “fixed” one moment, something else would throw it all out of whack. Finally, I gave up and just worked on the scene. The “staging” cleared itself right up. Work on the event and everything else will fall into place. Later, I was doing a play at Dallas Theatre Center, and there was a section that I just couldn’t crack. The event was happening fine, but something about the physical life was clogged. I spent hours in the rehearsal room trying this and that solution, but they were all parallel fixes, different but still not better. Then, at the first preview, watching the scene on the set and with an audience, I immediately saw the solution. The next day, I fixed it in five minutes. What I learned is that when you find yourself working for a long time on one particular section to no avail—stop, breathe, reassess. You’re probably working on the wrong thing, trying to fix a symptom rather than a cause. Or else there’s a simple solution out there, but you can’t see it yet. Be patient. Give yourself the time and space to find it. Of course, these lessons are not just about staging; I find they apply to all aspects of the work. EVAN YIONOULIS is an Obie Award-winning director who has directed new plays and classics at such theatres as Lincoln Center Theater, Manhattan Theatre Club, the Vineyard, Theatre for a New Audience, the Huntington, South Coast Rep, the Mark Taper Forum, and many others, as well as at Yale Repertory Theatre, where she is a resident director.

“WORK ON THE EVENT AND EVERYTHING ELSE WILL FALL INTO PLACE.” FALL 2015 | SDC JOURNAL

WHY I CAST THAT ACTOR

JEREMY HERRIN

On casting Lindsay Duncan in That Face at the Royal Court Jerwood Theatre I was working as an Associate Director at Live Theatre in Newcastle upon Tyne, a beautiful, proud city in the northeast of England, four hours by train from London. I’d been there for seven years, and I’d had an instructive time. I had created lasting relationships with writers and actors, but I was getting itchy feet. Keen to stretch myself as a director, I wanted to challenge myself with new artists and see if the lessons I’d learned in Newcastle made any sense in London. So when Dominic Cooke got the job of running the Royal Court, I was excited, as he was the one director with any power on the London scene that had seen my work in Newcastle. He sent me a play called That Face by a writer I’d never heard of, Polly Stenham. It was a searing portrayal of upper-middle-class dysfunction, with liberal swigs of alcoholism and psychological codependency. The first draft of the play was noble and bold and messy. At its heart was a stunningly accurate and humane and pleasingly gothic portrayal of a destructive boozehound—pillpopping mother Martha—and her sensitive carer/enabler, the try-hard bed-wetter of a son, Henry. It was unlike anything I’d read, and it felt incredibly fresh and energetic, and in need of a strong production. The big question was: who do I get to play Martha? I remember sitting with Lisa Makin, the legendary casting director on her last job at the Court, discussing actresses I had given up hope of ever being in a room with.

Lisa drew up a list and checked availabilities. From across the room the words “LINDSAY DUNCAN AV” sang out. I thought Lindsay would add a load of layers to Martha and that it would help the play. She isn’t obvious casting for the destructive drunk. She’s not in any way monstrous. She’s elegant and clearly a beauty, with a playful energy and a bold intelligence. I immediately saw that the audience would have a relationship with the woman she was before drink and drugs had destroyed her. She would add humanity to this vicious, unhappy woman. If we didn’t have empathy for Martha, it would be game over for the show. I said to Lisa, “She wouldn’t do it.” Lisa said that she might respond to the play. So the play was sent, with a polite and respectful postcard from an unknown director. Lindsay was interested enough to meet; I prepped and prepped. She was fantastic. Open, funny, up for collaboration, in love with the play, excited by the idea of an adventure. Here I was with this fantastic actress, clearly desperate to make her do this play, and Lindsay kindly calmed me down and started helping me to become a better director. She was so clear about how she thought the part and the play could work while being so open to my suggestions. She rewarded my good ideas, and used the bad ones as springboards into better territory. I felt we worked seamlessly together. I tried to give her everything she needed to deliver what had to be an emotionally exacting performance, and I’m grateful she must have seen something in me that was worth encouraging. I understood for the first time the potential for actors to make the director better. I rang her on the eve of the technical rehearsal, and she said, “There are only three places where I don’t know what I’m doing,” and reeled them off in a relaxed way for me to think about. It was a revelation to be working with someone with such a sophisticated control of her art. The success of that show propelled me into a phase of directing that has been highly rewarding, including the artistic directorship of Headlong. I feel as if I’m still on that lucky streak and that the lessons learned and the confidence gained with Martha and Henry and Lindsay and Polly and the rest of that company are still with me, particularly as I deal with yet another challenging drunk played by Denise Gough in Duncan Macmillan’s play People, Places and Things, a Headlong coproduction at the National Theatre.

Lindsay Duncan in That Face at the Royal Court in 2008

SDC JOURNAL

| FALL 2015

BACKSTAGE WITH MAKEUP + WIG DESIGNER

J. JARED JANAS

showed up, and they needed help in the hair and makeup department. At the end of the show’s run, I called my mother and I said, “I’ve made a terrible mistake. This is what I want to do.” I spent the next 11 years as a full-time mathematician, but I bought Richard Corson’s stage makeup book and I started learning about makeup and hair. I moved to New York in 1996 with a math education company. I’d always wanted to come here so I could work in theatre. I switched careers in 2005 and started designing full time. What are the skills one needs to be a successful makeup and wig designer? It helps to be a good wig maker, which means apprenticing and learning from different people. There are so many ways to make wigs, and everyone thinks their way is the best. Ultimately, you just need to have all the tricks in your pocket in order to make a really good wig. For makeup, you have to have a really good understanding of color theory. The sign of a decent makeup artist is someone who can take the primary colors, plus black and white in cream form, and make a foundation for anybody. How do you begin your design process? What are the first steps?

How did you get your start as a makeup and wig designer? I actually started as a mathematician. In 1994, I was finishing college at the University of Chicago, and I had friends who were working at the student-run theatre. At the same time, I was working at the student-run suicide crisis hotline. I worked with a woman named Dee, and I was complaining that the last month of school I had nothing to do. She said, “Why don’t you come help out at the theatre?” I said, “What am I going to do? I don’t know anything about theatre.” I had seen three shows in my entire life. She said, “Just show up and we’ll find something for you.” So I

The first step is the script. Before I meet with anybody, I look at the script so I understand the characters’ motivations. I break the script down: time period, time of day, socioeconomic status, health status of each character. The second thing I do is talk to the costume designer, even before I talk to the director and actors. I want to make sure I see where the costume designer wants to go. The costume designer is ultimately responsible for the entire look head to toe, so our job is to work with them to make one cohesive look. After the costume designer, it’s time to talk to the director and make sure we know his or her goal with the overall look of the show. The last step is actors. What are they comfortable with? How far do they want to go with their character? Then we go from there. What is the difference between designing for theatre versus designing for film and television?

Detail is so important in film, and effect at a distance is so important in theatre. We did Lady Day at Emerson’s Bar and Grill, and eventually that got filmed for HBO. We had no idea it was going to be filmed. At first, I designed the track marks that were going on Audra McDonald’s arm to be so realistic. I did a test with Audra and Lonny Price, the director. When Audra looked down at the track marks, she was actually a little grossed out. Lonny was blown away because they looked very real. Unfortunately, very real in person means in the theatre you see little tiny dots on her arm. So we had to alter the track marks to what in person looked like huge cigar burns. We had to think about the distance and what it looked like for the majority of the audience. So when we went to film it, I reduced the size of the track marks back down again. Because they were being shown on TV, we needed to think more about detail and less about how it looked from a distance. You really have to approach theatre and film so differently. Do you have experience designing for shows that come to New York from another country or collaborating with artists abroad? How does that affect your process? I’m the Associate Wig Designer for Wicked. I’ve set up almost all of the foreign companies we’ve had. My job was to be the stand-in designer for Tom Watson, who designed the wigs, and make sure his original design was upheld. What’s interesting is that the laws of the land very much affect my work. For example, in Germany, there really isn’t overtime. Due to the limitations in work hours, I had to have a double crew: four for the first eight hours of tech and then suddenly this new crew would come in. We’d be in the middle of a scene and they would have no idea what had happened for the previous eight hours. It was really challenging from a design standpoint to have to do everything twice. The law of the land was the challenge. In some of these countries, Japan especially, we needed a translator. Communicating specific hair terms was challenging. What are the chances a translator understands things like setting rollers off base? How would you translate that? In that case, there was a lot of demonstration in order to translate. So the language was another challenge.

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FALL 2015 | SDC JOURNAL

BACKSTAGE

CONTINUED FROM PAGE 9

How do you collaborate with the director or choreographer? After I’ve had the opportunity to read the script, talk to the costume designer, and come up with a plan, I ask the director about his or her vision. Directors often talk about the overall arc of the character. Choreographers often talk about where they see potential problems. Directors tend to deal more with the feel of the show while choreographers tend to deal more with the practicality of it. At the same time, when it comes to a dance scene, the choreographer talks about the feel of their show as well as the practicality. During tech is when I find the majority of the feedback is about practicality: I feel like she stands out too much or doesn’t stand out enough. Almost all of that happens in tech. What is one thing you would like directors to know about the work of makeup and wig designers? Sometimes directors want to use the actors’ own hair without realizing the ramifications. By using their own hair, it means they have to recreate the continuity every night, which is difficult depending on the weather conditions. If it’s a humid day, the hair may look very frizzy. We can control that with wigs; we cannot control it as much with a person’s hair. If we can control it, it’s often damaging. I will always ask to use a wig before I ask to use an actor’s hair, especially on an open-ended run. As a designer, we want the whole show to look right; we want the costume designer, director, choreographer, and actors to be happy. But what we don’t want to do is damage anybody’s hair. I want them to understand the reason we use wigs is not just to get a look or to have a design; it’s also to protect an actor’s hair.

Hamilton I

When SDC asked creative duo Thomas Kail and Andy Blankenbuehler for answers to 20+ questions regarding their Broadway smash Hamilton, we expected similar replies from the successful director and choreographer. To our delight, their replies—and even the questions they chose to answer—were uniquely characteristic and specific to their individual personalities and processes, which is perhaps what makes their partnership so special. Enjoy.

Is there anything else you want readers to know about you or about your work? If I’ve done my job well, the theatregoer will not notice my work at all. You’ll just take it for granted. If I age someone slightly, you’ll just think they look older. Without realizing the makeup, the audience just takes it for granted that they’re older. It’s rare that we get mentioned in a review because if we’ve done our job well, you’re not noticing our work; it just fits in. So we’re very unsung, and that’s totally okay. PREVIOUS TOP TO BOTTOM

Miranda Theatre Company's Snow Orchid PHOTO Jeremy Daniel | A Raisin in the Sun at Wesport Country Playhouse | Track marks for Broadway's Lady Day at Emerson’s Bar and Grill Father Comes Home from the Wars at A.R.T. PHOTOS c/o Jared Janas

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Phillipa Soo + Lin-Manuel Miranda PHOTO Joan Marcus

Joan Marcus PHOTO

In 20+ Questions Andy Blankenbuehler

Thomas Kail

Hamilton in two words. Go! Fight, cherish.

Hamilton in two words. Go! Reach higher.

What did you know of Hamilton before this production? Very little.

What did you know of Hamilton before this production? I knew about as much as the average American history major in college should, so some of the deeper insights and facts were certainly things that were revelations to me; but I had a basic structure for it. Ron Chernow’s book obviously was a great source of inspiration and information for us. Hopefully I didn’t make my thesis adviser too embarrassed.

What was your research process like? I love the process of research, but only part of that research is about understanding the material historically. Besides Ron Chernow’s book, I didn’t do any reading. I watched a ton of films, TV shows, and specials on the era. I love watching how people move in their clothing…how they handle their possessions. I love studying the way light exists in their lives. I know that those pieces of film are other artists’ takes on the material, but I love to see how they represent this period in history. I usually plaster my office walls with photos that inspire me (sometimes historically applicable, sometimes totally random). I found that with this period there wasn’t a huge amount of material to pull from, and the material that I did find were all paintings or sketches. I had copies of these on my walls, but, like Ron’s book, I quickly (more quickly than normal for me) found that I was ready to put all of this history behind me. Lin’s fusion of contemporary stylings demanded for me to just create all-new ground rules from the start. I rooted the physical moments in truth. The Redcoats, for example, load their weapons in a pretty authentic way. But we see the Redcoats and their guns only one time. The way the “Americans” use their weapons is totally impressionistic

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What was your research process like? Research was essential for this production. We owed it to the desire to try to capture real authenticity in the storytelling, and also we worked very hard to not just have this be a sequence of events but to try to tell the story of someone’s life. I read as much as I could. Lin and I sort of shared our respective syllabi with each other, and he passed on anything he read that he thought was relevant, and then my research also continued as I had a chance to dig in with all of my designers. Then once we got into the room, the reality is most of the focus becomes about storytelling; there’s a lot of reference back and forth to things. But once we got into rehearsal, I started to focus much more on what was happening in front of me and then using the time after rehearsal, or in between the Off-Broadway and Broadway productions, to make sure that the veracity was at a high level throughout.

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Andy Blankenbuehler CONTINUED FROM PAGE 11

Thomas Kail CONTINUED FROM PAGE 11

and contemporary. I followed the basic guideline of saying that the British had an established way of doing things, and young America was finding their own way of creating a new life. Following Lin’s example…understand what literally happened, but don’t get locked down to those specifics.

What do you think your fourth-grade social studies teacher would say about the production? I would hope that my fourth-grade social studies teacher would at least give me a B+ for my effort, which is probably a full grade better than I did back then.

And similarities between America now and then? It was a really emotional revelation to me to learn how we are presently creating our own history. We are still living so many of the struggles that the men and women undertook. Details have changed, but the root of so many things is similar. Bottom line: through being tested, we figure out what is important and we decide to fight for that life. That has not changed. Our wonderful country gives us a place where we can find an identity, build a life, and build a family. All those opportunities apply today. Although the obstacles may be different, all of those things can be as challenging now as they were before.

Learn any surprising facts about American history? Yes, I learned many surprising facts, and many of them are in the show. One of the things that really struck me was the fact that there was a duel between Hamilton’s best friend, John Laurens, and General Charles Lee, and the seconds for that duel were Hamilton and Burr, which we would have probably come up with if it were not true, but the reality is that happened, and we couldn’t believe it when we stumbled onto that.

That overarching truth is very powerful, but just as remarkable is the fact that so many details in the daily lives remain consistent today. We hang out at bars and in public, and we gossip and trash talk. We develop camaraderie and friendship based on emotional needs that we feel deeply, and those relationships stay for our whole lives. People still disagree, and those disagreements elevate until someone uses a weapon. Some weapons are the same (that’s why it’s fun for me in the show to shoot guns with contemporary affectations). Besides the gun, the word was as strong of a weapon then as now. What do you think your fourth-grade social studies teacher would say about the production? I think that my fourth-grade teacher would be very, very proud. I think that a huge message in our show is that we are living our history every day. I really thought that the American Revolution was really just about winning our independence. I thought it was the end of our journey as a country. It never struck me as a young person learning history that we were fighting to have the opportunity to build a foundation upon which we could place everything we find to be worthwhile. The American Revolution was the beginning, not the end. I think that our work on the show honors America’s insatiable need to keep pushing further into truth and into the heart. I’m proud that we have created something that mirrors America’s original swagger. Someone much smarter and much stronger than you hands you the ball. It’s our privilege and responsibility to run with that ball with all that we have. Learn any surprising facts about American history? At every bend there was a surprise, and those surprises really sunk in because Lin spoke them in language that I could understand today. Also, many of the things about American history that surprise and intrigue us are details that a teenager does not have the perspective to appreciate. I think that perhaps we learn about history before we have the ability to appreciate history. What a blessing it has been for me to get this fuel-injected history lesson again as an adult! Do you think Hamilton would like hip hop? Working on this show has taught me that the men and women who founded our country were rebels in many ways. They had strong voices and even stronger convictions. They were brash. They made up their own rules. I think that Alexander Hamilton would have an iPod filled with hip hop.

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Do you think Hamilton would like hip hop? I’m not sure if I’m qualified to give my opinion about whether Hamilton would like hip hop if he were alive today. But I do have a sense that whatever music he’d listen to would be very up-tempo. First thoughts about the show being produced at the Public Theater? And then on Broadway? When we learned we were going to be produced at the Public Theater, it was basically just a general wash and wave of enthusiasm and excitement, because it felt like it was exactly the right venue and building to launch the show, the right place to put the show into the world. And then when we found out that we were coming back to the Richard Rodgers, it felt like there was some sense of a return—some kind of homecoming—to the place where Lin and I felt, and Andy, as well, that we were really able to first find our footing in a community that we had so long respected and loved on Broadway; so it just felt right. What was the most exciting moment during the cast recording? I don’t know if I can identify the most exciting moment during the cast recording because there were many of them, but there was something pretty remarkable when the cast was recording “My Shot” and getting a chance to watch that on stage over and over again, and then see that song come together in the recording session was a really particular thrill. Favorite moment, song, or lyric? I’m not sure that I could distinguish my actual favorite lyric, but I know that one of the lyrics that resonates and lands on me every time I hear it is Eliza’s line, “Have I done enough?” With such current music, did you consider modern sets/ costumes as well? I talked with David Korins and Paul Tazewell about everything, from modern dress and a modern setting, and obviously Andy was very involved with a lot of these conversations as well. But it just always felt to me, from the very beginning when Lin and I first started talking about this, years before those conversations with designers, that the tension between something that looked like then and sounded and moved like now was at the core of what we were trying to do. So we were pretty certain that that was the way that we wanted to explore and had a chance to work on that idea for a long time before we ever realized it. And that was one of the real joys of the performances done at the Public—watching the intersection of then and now and seeing that it was resonating with audiences.

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Andy Blankenbuehler CONTINUED

Thomas Kail CONTINUED

First thoughts about the show being produced at the Public Theater? And then on Broadway? Everyone on our team loves the musical theatre. When I heard that we were going to start our path at the Public, I was overjoyed. Being able to dig into the trenches at a theatre that has made historic contributions to the theatre was very, very exciting to me. Many times when I was working on stage with the cast, it would hit me that I was standing on the very stage where Michael Bennett created A Chorus Line, and I was both humbled and inspired. We had the amazing opportunity to share the stage with the original cast of ACL on the 40th anniversary of their first preview. That was one of the most emotional and gratifying moments in my entire life. What a blessing.

How important was putting together a diverse cast? Casting this show was something that was discussed between Lin and I from the very first couple of songs, and it was something that we were really very focused on throughout the process of putting the show together—eliminating any distance between then and now. So this show, very consciously and intentionally, has created an ensemble, a cast of incredibly diverse performers, so that upon watching the show, we’ve immediately exploded any idea of this being about dusty old white men that we can’t relate to.

Most surprising moment in rehearsal? I had been working on the show for months and months. I had been in the zone and had methodically developed the stylized language in the show with great care. With only a few days left in rehearsals, LinManuel [Miranda] wrote a new song for Hamilton’s duel at the end of the show. After working so hard for 18 months to craft the show, all of a sudden I had no idea what to do with the last number of the show. I was totally blocked. I pulled an all-nighter and could not come up with one idea or one phrase of choreography. The next morning, freezing on the subway platform at 8 a.m., an idea popped into my head. I started choreographing on the platform with the morning commuters. I choreographed on the subway from Brooklyn to Manhattan. The cast arrived at 10 a.m., and by 10:45, the number was fully staged. I’m not sure how the inspiration came that day, but it’s a moment that I will never forget. Favorite moment, song, or lyric? I love so many moments in the show. Even after staging the show, I hear moments created by Lin and Alex, and they blow me away. “Room Where It Happens” is probably my favorite song. I love the drive and explosiveness of “Yorktown.” “Hurricane” is probably my favorite orchestration. Which of the 27,000 lyrics is my favorite? That may take some time to figure out. With such current music, did you consider modern sets/ costumes as well? I know that Tommy and the designers explored a few avenues, but as soon as we started working in period dress, everything felt right. How were you able to create a bond among the cast members? Go in with a vision that honored their ability. I knew that we all had the opportunity here to say something really special in a really special way. I think that the bond we all share might be similar to the bond of servicemen in the trenches. We know what we are there to do, and we know that it is a valiant goal. Making sure that every person in the cast fully understood how respected they were and how valuable they were to our team was vital. And along that line (and in line with how the men and women who started our country had a lot of individuality to offer), I wanted the people in the cast to feel like they were bringing their best selves to the stage. I wanted it to feel historic for them as well. I wanted them to look back at the end of their careers and know that they burned out the fuel tanks in Hamilton. What, if anything, have you been able to do on Broadway that wasn't possible at the Public? The design uptown was almost identical to the design at the Public, but at the Richard Rodgers Theatre, we were able to use much more height. That added height in the scenic design seemed to deepen the show’s impact. The scale added such majesty, firepower.

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If you could play anyone in Hamilton, who would it be? If I could play anyone in Hamilton, then something very bad has happened. I would say that, for the good of the world, it is really in the best interest that I stay in the seats and let the professionals handle playing these parts. If you probably took about two minutes total, if I could really pick and choose, there’s a two-minute version of Hamilton I could probably do decently, bordering on not good enough. If you could drop any of the characters from Hamilton into any other production, who would you choose and what production would you set them free in? I would love to take Mama Rose and Sweeney Todd and drop them into Hamilton—oh, the other way around? I would like to take, well, Burr in Assassins feels almost too easy, but I would maybe put Hamilton in Finian’s Rainbow just to see what happened. What do you hope for the future of Hamilton? One of the things I’m very excited about for the future of Hamilton is when the show is being done by high schools and colleges and small theatres and large theatres and non-professional theatres and community theatres all over. I think that there’s going to be something really thrilling about watching this show find its way into communities in a way that allows them to own it and to live inside of the show. Where does the strength of your director/choreographer relationship come from? The strength of our relationship comes from complete faith in each other’s abilities and incredible admiration and respect for Andy’s pursuit of truth and detail-oriented work. His work ethic, his desire to communicate the story in the clearest way, above all else, make him an ideal collaborator. So I look forward to the next 67 things we do together. If you had to describe Andy in one word, what would it be? Focused. How do you resolve any creative differences that arise between you? The only creative differences between Andy and me is that Andy is a much better dresser in rehearsal than I am. How have your associates helped realize your vision? My associate Patrick Vassel was an incredibly important asset and resource and collaborator for the last year, year and a half, as we really sort of geared up. Patrick was someone who brought an incredible amount of organization and clarity. His ability to make suggestions and also to articulate the larger ideas that we talked about to my design team and to the company—when we were in that crazy tech period where you just can’t be everywhere at once—were a really important part of our ability to make a fluid and highly functioning room. So I’m delighted that he was at my side. We’d worked together on a play called Magic/Bird a couple years ago and felt like we just picked up with our collaboration seamlessly that we built the fundamentals of

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Andy Blankenbuehler CONTINUED FROM PAGE 13 The lighting downtown was beautiful, but uptown it seemed that Howell was just taking no prisoners. It seemed as if the show was somehow in HD. The colors just pulled the performers off of the stage and into the audience’s lap. The richness that Howell was bringing to the picture really inspired me to chisel out the movement in even greater detail. If you could play anyone in Hamilton, who would it be? In my dreams, I would be able to dance like Seth [Stewart], Thayne [Jasperson], Ephraim [Sykes], and [Jon] Rua. I would LOVE to do this show as one of the dancers. I’m very proud that their contribution is so vital in the story. (P.S. Even if I could dance well enough to not break myself in half, I could NEVER be as cool as those four guys.) What do you hope for the future of Hamilton? As an artist in the theatre, our work is often really intangible. Shows play, but then one day they close. The book and music live on and get reproduced. But as stagers of the show, directors and choreographers work so hard and give such an investment of their hearts, but eventually our contribution only lives as a memory for the audiences who saw the show. I would be so very grateful if this production of Hamilton had a long life. I would be so proud to be able to say, “I helped make that.” My family, my dreams, my life experiences are all in Hamilton and having this production continue to live would be a tremendous validation for me. Where does the strength of your director/choreographer relationship come from? Tommy and I trust each other a great deal. We share a respect that allows us to stand side by side, knowing that we are trying to accomplish the exact same thing. He is a tremendous organizer of ideas. He pulls together a blueprint that offers countless staging opportunities. In developing a collaborative relationship with a director, there’s always the very vulnerable moment of showing your work and saying, “What do you think of this interpretation?” Even early in our In the Heights days, I have always felt very safe in showing Tommy my choreographic thoughts, even when they aren’t fully hatched. Somehow, we consistently share a vision of where we want the material to go. We were recently watching a performance of Hamilton together. There’s a moment in “Non-stop” that I am very proud of. He turned to me and said, “That’s the most beautiful moment you’ve ever made.” I was reminded of the truth that Tommy knows the material in his shows so well. He knows the costume design like he made it. He knows and

Andy Blankenbuehler Broadway: In the

Heights (Tony, Outer Critics, Drama Desk Awards), Bring It On, 9 to 5, The People in the Picture, The Apple Tree, Annie. Other work includes the world premieres of Hamilton at the Public (Drama Desk, Lortel, Obie Awards), Fly (DTC), A Little Princess (Andrew Lippa), as well as The Wiz (City Center Encores!) and Joseph... Dreamcoat (U.S. tour). Upcoming projects include Bandstand (Paper Mill) and Only Gold with British singer/ songwriter Kate Nash. As a performer, Mr. Blankenbuehler danced on Broadway in Fosse, Contact, Man of LaMancha, Saturday Night Fever, Steel Pier, Big and Guys and Dolls.

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understands the choreography, even though he does not dance. He is as fully invested as any creator of theatre could be. If you had to describe Tommy in one word, what would it be? Generous. How do you resolve any creative differences that arise between you? We have very, very few creative differences. A big reason for that is because Alex Lacamoire and Lin-Manuel are almost always in the conversation. Even if two people may have a difference of opinion, the other members of our quartet instantly open doors that allow us to find the compromise or re-articulation that enables us to find our way. Where Tommy and I differ the most is actually in our demeanor in the room. Tommy is very funny and joyful in the way that he leads the room. I am often quiet and deep in the zone of concentration. We’re a bit like the odd couple in our collaborative marriage, but it’s a marriage that works! Is there anything that only the director can help you solve or achieve? Tommy is so great at managing all of the moving parts. He clears the air of complications and distractions so that I’m able to really concentrate on my job. He creates an environment that really sets me up to win. How have your associates helped realize your vision? Stephanie Klemons is Superwoman. Hamilton is such a complicated show choreographically. It goes to so many impressionistic places, with a tremendous amount of detail and layering. Simply put, she is not in my mind, but over the years, she has developed the ability to follow my creative impulses even before they are fully formed. She translates my creative impulses into an understandable physical language. She’s tremendously versatile stylistically.

Thomas Kail CONTINUED FROM PAGE 13 on the first production and then just continued to evolve both on the Off-Broadway and Broadway productions of Heights—Heights? Ah, Hamilton. How do you handle the “mega” Hamilton fans? Anyone who is a fan of Hamilton is a friend of mine, and by friend of mine, I mean, yes, I can get you Lin-Manuel’s email address.

Thomas Kail Broadway: In the Heights

(Tony nom.), Lombardi, Magic/Bird. OffBroadway: Hamilton (the Public; Drama Desk, Lortel and Obie Awards), In the Heights (Callaway Award, Drama Desk/ OCC noms.), Randy Newman's Faust and The Wiz (City Center), Broke-ology and When I Come to Die (LCT), Family Furniture (The Flea, Drama Desk nom.), The Tutors (2ST Uptown). Other credits: Broke-ology (Williamstown), Once on This Island (Paper Mill), and In the Heights (national tour). Co-creator/director of hiphop improv group Freestyle Love Supreme. Martin E. Segal Award from Lincoln Center. Graduate of Wesleyan University.

IN PRINT + MEDIA

ANNIE G. LEVY + LAURA TESMAN WORLD WIDE LAB: A DIRECTORS FEAST

WHAT I PACKED BY ANNIE

MAGNIFICENT CHAOS

G. LEVY

There is a children’s game where participants sit in a circle and go through the letters of the alphabet, saying one thing that they would pack to take on a journey for each letter, starting with A (which will inevitably be for “apples”) and ending with Z (by which point everyone is tired, so Z usually ends up being “zebras”). I saw some kids play this game in the days leading up to my journey to Syros, Greece, for the fifth World Wide Lab directing residency (worldwidelab. wordpress.com). Now that I am here and four days into the residency (the fourth day being a “tired” day, with the initial burst of nervous energy gone, the pressure of time starting to sink in, and being three days from a day off…and someone stole your last apple and the zebras someone packed keep eating your socks), I am becoming more aware of everything I packed and subsequently brought with me on this journey. Here are a few of those items to give some context to the work that’s being done. Unlike the children’s game, this will not be in alphabetical order. I packed and brought with me a text to work with: Aristophanes’ The Ecclesiazusae (or The Assembly Women, or Women in Power). It’s a play about a group of Assembly men’s wives who band together and, by impersonating their husbands, get the Assembly to vote in favor of turning all of the political power over to the Women of the city.

BY LAURA

TESMAN

According to Greek mythology, Chaos came first. A primeval void, unbounded space and formless matter, all the elements bounded up in one shapeless mass. As a creator, I’m drawn to the creative potential of Chaos. For me, that “shapeless mass” is a living, breathing thing, vibrating with the potential to become something. Something with shape and power and beauty. For me, Chaos must be present in order for inspiration (all those wonderful creative muses) to appear. This is why I collaborate. Why year after year I put myself into the frenzied pressure cooker of the World Wide Lab. Here, we bring together a huge number of unknowns—unfamiliar locale, unknown

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Originally printed as part of World Wide Lab: A Directors Feast online blog | Reprinted with permission of the Member FALL 2015 | SDC JOURNAL

Originally printed as part of World Wide Lab: A Directors Feast online blog

PACKED CONTINUED FROM PAGE 15

I also realized that I packed a certain level of trepidation toward directing The Ecclesiazusae. We will be working with a new translation of the text, but the translation is in modern Greek. And I will be working with three Greek actors (and one American actor) who, no matter how well I prepare, will understand this text better than I ever could. AND the show will be performed for a Greek audience who will also understand the text better than I ever could. So, understandably, most of my trepidation increased by the number of people back in New York who would ask me, “How can you direct a play in a language you don’t speak?” before I left. What if I couldn’t do it? Then there were the many hours of great conversation between me and my wonderful codirector, Jocelyn Yuchia Chang (Taiwan), about how each of our two performance cultures would be reflected in the way we approach the process. I also packed those.

CHAOS

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actors, new collaborative teams, fresh material, multiple languages— and we create the circumstances in which chaos can be transformed into something unexpected. No matter how much planning we do in advance of arriving here, it always takes on a new life once we enter the void.

Annie G. Levy (second from left) + Joceyln Yuchia Chang, members of the World Wide Directors Lab, rehearse Aristophanes' Ecclesiazusae on the Greek Island of Syros ABOVE

World Wide Lab co-directors/writers Evan Tsitsias, Chang Nai Wen + Laura Tesman share notes during rehearsal for Echo at the Syros Institute, Syros, Greece

Many people think of chaos as a state of complete disorder and confusion… and sometimes it does feel that way. But really, when you are faithfully and committedly working toward a common goal, it only seems like disorder. The beauty of chaos is its unpredictability. It’s a delicate process creating the proper conditions, a system within which true collaboration can occur. There must be trust and laughter and risk and failure. But when you are able to generate these ideal conditions—as I think we have this year—that unpredictability becomes your greatest creative asset. Within this system, nothing is random. Every moment, every mistake, every unknown is an opportunity.

I knew I would be packing up and bringing all Chang Nai Wen (Germany/Taiwan), Evan Tsitsias PHOTOS Demitris Vamvakousis of my feelings about gender, about politics, and (Canada), and I started courting chaos months ago about the intersection of the two—these are the with the first inklings of what our project together central themes of the play, after all. But I have might be. As we gathered research (so much obviously also brought my awareness of the research) and shared ideas (so many ideas), the ways in which gender and politics are currently playing out in the project grew and shifted and transformed. What began as a vision lead-up to the 2016 presidential election in the States, as well as of a movement piece exploring the role of the individual within the what I learned from Jocelyn about how, right now in Taiwan, there group morphed into an exploration of the Greek crisis unfolding are two female presidential candidates (one from each of the two before our eyes over the spring and early summer (which I’ve come major political parties) running for office. And, of course, the current to view as a microcosm of emerging global crises, but that’s for political situation in our host country, Greece. another time), and finally mutated into a version of both of these things but with much broader scope. The trajectory was perhaps an And I knew I would also find myself packing my questions regarding unlikely one but also necessary. We had to enter the chaos in order to what role theatre has played and can play and should play in tackling see the structure that might give our question shape and power and issues of inequality, despair, and hope, especially as we come beauty. together to make work in and for a place that most of us do not call home. My interest in exploring a modern translation of an ancient In Greek, the word chaos means “yawning” or “gap.” Both of these text that satirizes both the incompetent way that a government is run words make me think of a chasm, an abyss that you must be willing and the seemingly ridiculous alternative way of life presented as not to leap into if you want Chaos to appear. Five days ago, with newly a real option, but also (maybe) a real option—both in Aristophanes’ minted (translated) scripts tucked under our arms, we leapt into the time and right now. void. Three directors entered the room with ten actors. Ten days to make it a living, breathing thing. I also found space to pack my appreciation for a key moment in the text when the leader of the women, Praxagora, explains the We’re right in the middle of the chaos, and it’s pretty magnificent. essence of why she wants to do away with any private ownership of land or goods and move completely toward a communal utopia, what she knows the city will gain from living a more communal life: “Communication, guys, connection! Human contact. Depression, that comes from loneliness, is the sickness of our century. Research says that, not me. I can’t stand this anymore: Wall, house, wall, house. It’s getting on my nerves. I’ll knock down every wall and the whole city will become a big home.” What a thought, in any country. And since we are at the end, let’s throw in a zebra or two. Okay, I’m packed.

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KATHERINE | So, Annie, how did you get here from there? ANNIE | The seeds really started during the period of 1998–2000, when I was in grad school for directing at Yale. I was in search of other influences, so I spent the two summers between school years in Europe. The first year, I went to the Avignon Festival, which was fun, but in the second summer I got incredibly lucky. I found a summer academy that artist and curator Hannah Hurtzig organized in Bochum, in the Ruhr region of Germany. I would love to go back in time and find whatever notice it was I saw that made me apply to go there; I’d never heard of anyone involved with it. But I went and it was greater than great. It included segments on dance, directing, acting, music, and design. Artists came from all over Europe, offering different workshops and presentations of their work, and there were field trips to former industrial sites that had been turned into art spaces. I’m still very much in touch with a lot of people I met there.

ANNIE DORSEN FINDING HER PEOPLE INTERVIEW WITH KATHERINE

PROFETA

here in the world is Annie Dorsen? Well, she is everywhere. Based—as she has

been since childhood—in New York City, Ms. Dorsen’s busy career and extensive artistic network have led to a peripatetic lifestyle working with performance venues in the United States and, among other locales, Oslo, Amsterdam, France, Germany, and the Netherlands. Over the last 15 years, she has directed in the fields of theatre, film, dance, and digital performance, and won awards including the Herb Alpert Award and a Sir John Gielgud Fellowship from SDC. In June 2015, Ms. Dorsen premiered “Yesterday, Tomorrow”—a new piece of algorithmic theatre that approaches music with the computerbased algorithms she has used toward text—at the Holland Festival in Amsterdam. During the summer in New York before setting off for more performances, she sat down with dramaturg, choreographer, and longtime collaborator Katherine Profeta to talk about the path that has led her to multidisciplinary work and new forms. PHOTO

Stephen Dodd

It was 1999, there were many discussions about issues between East and West, post-’89 discussions, and quite a few artists from the at-that-point-almost-entirely-former Yugoslavia who were obviously dealing with the war. KATHERINE | What did you think, as a young American grad student listening to these intraEuropean issues? ANNIE | It was illuminating. It was a whole new set of artistic and political concerns. The vocabulary that people were using was different. The discussions seemed urgent. There was a vital and present sense of experimental artmaking. In Bochum, I felt naïve in a lot of ways. I did a lot of smiling, nodding, and pretending that I knew what people were talking about. But I really felt that I was learning something about artistic engagement that I could actually use. It wasn’t about styles or techniques—nothing as practical as that. It was more of an approach or idea for making work. If you’re going to be an artist, your job is to keep tackling what’s happening in the world and trying to find a way to bring something into being that means something. So, a new phase for me started in Bochum. It shifted my sense of what the whole point of making theatre was. KATHERINE | What about the contemporary experimental theatre of that same time in New York? What was your relation to that?

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e r dance on o e r t a e h t ntal ed r experime e id s rge, engag n o la c s y a e h h t d , n s a ed an be untrie vishly fund So there c la In other co . y is it it c e d n n a o es in exports, ent theatr f context. r o fe s if m d of their big r e ix t s d in are support an , and there f s o e c s n m r ie e d t u a s in difference ig b y ll a e r , really

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Scott Shepherd in A Piece of Work c/o BAM PHOTO

Rebecca Greenfield

ANNIE DORSEN

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A Piece of Work PHOTO

Jim Findlay

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ANNIE | When I finished grad school, I went to New York and started directing around. I was doing whatever people asked me to do: a lot of readings, some assistant directing. I did projects at Clubbed Thumb, New York Stage and Film, the Women’s Project, and others. Honestly, I wasn’t very involved in the experimental theatre scene. I didn’t really know what was going on. I’m not sure why that is, but my memory is that, at that time, I didn’t really know where to look to find my people. I ended up with the almost-certainly incorrect assessment that there wasn’t much happening in New York that was relevant to me. I was seeing a lot of downtown work that I thought was too concerned with style. What I really got directly from Jan Ritsema, who is a Dutch theatre director and now a friend, and whom I met in Bochum, was this: don’t worry about your style, don’t worry about how, don’t worry about form. Worry about content. Keep going very deeply into your content without knowing anything about form. Over time, some kind of shape will emerge. Don’t think, “Oh, how should we do this and what if we make this part like this?” Don’t start at the end of the process and work backwards. Begin really with what are you researching, what you are working on. In 2005, Jan bought a former convent—a massive building in the northeast of France— and invited 40 or 50 people, including me, to spend the holidays there to help him figure out what he should do with the space. Now it’s 10 years later, and it’s still going as Performing Arts Forum (PAF), which is a space for selfeducation and, as they say in cute European English, self-motoring your own process. That’s become an important place for me. It’s a place I go to three or four times a year to work, to meet people and talk. There are sometimes organized events where speakers come from fields of philosophy, choreography, economics, and so on, or there are group meetings where people share their own work or propose projects to do with others. KATHERINE | Would it be fair to say a lot of your ideas are generated or incubated there? ANNIE | I definitely have gone there to try out some thinking on people casually. But I think it’s more that the way I’m working has been influenced by it. It means the thinking around what I’m doing, why I’m doing it. KATHERINE | Did you find your community with the formation of PAF? ANNIE | Yes, although I’d hesitate to call it a community because it’s really not. It’s a building and people pass through it. It’s never

one thing. The culture of PAF is completely dependent on the people who happen to be there on any given day, and it changes constantly. KATHERINE | What is Europe to you and why do you do so much work there? It’s not just Europe as a place; it’s Europe constellating around these people you met and the people that you continue to meet at PAF. ANNIE | I encountered a lot of ideas and approaches there that were new to me. A certain kind of critical engagement, a certain kind of institutional critique, an experimentation with working methods and the relationship of those methods to form and content. But it’s also partly luck that I encountered these ideas just when I was looking for them. You can trace a lot of things back to PAF and then before that to Bochum. I wouldn’t have been invited to PAF if I hadn’t gone to Bochum. At that first meeting at PAF, I didn’t just meet some nice friends, but also I met someone who, four years later, coproduced my [chatbot-based language] piece, Hello Hi There. We were friends for years before I even thought about pitching him anything because it didn’t seem appropriate until it was the right project. That was Florian Malzacher, who at the time was working at the Steirischer Herbst festival in Graz. And he then introduced me to a couple of artistic directors in Norway, with whom I still work. And then of course the first piece I ever made in Europe was a dance piece, a collaboration with DD Dorvillier and Anne Juren; I met both of them at PAF. So you can sort of trace everything back somehow. My experience is maybe a bit unusual. As far as I can tell, most American artists who start working in Europe make a project in the U.S. and then European presenters see it, get interested, and bring it over to tour. I had a whole network in Europe before I set foot there with a project. And the first pieces I presented in Europe were also made there. KATHERINE | What would you say are the differences between working in the U.S. and working there—for somebody who might be thinking “where do I belong or where do I work?” ANNIE | Well, first there are different ways to work there. It’s one thing to maintain your infrastructure in the U.S., make your projects there, but do some touring in Europe. And it’s something else to live and work overseas. But in both cases, the biggest difference is public money. Every country is different and individual cities are different within countries. Some countries have very active experimental scenes and in other countries, there might

be only one venue you’re talking about, in a smaller city, or in a less rich country, but there’s one venue that is really great—and normally in that case there’s an amazing leader of that venue who is fighting for it to exist. In other countries, they consider experimental theatre or dance one of their big exports, and it is lavishly funded and has large, engaged audiences, and there are six different theatres in one city. So there can be really, really big differences in terms of support and in terms of context. It should also be said that the existence of public funding doesn’t solve money problems. A lot depends on what kind of government is in power and who is running the ministry of culture, or other governmental arts agencies, what the level of support for the arts is like. In the last few years, as more right-wing governments get voted in, the arts funding is being cut like crazy. A bad kind of populism is taking over more and more. Some theatres ask me to send them a document at the end of the year to tell them how many performances I did and how many audience members showed up. That means that even though they’re getting subsidized, they still have to show politicians how many people they have coming, and if that number isn’t going up, then they’re perceived as doing something wrong. On the other hand, there’s also a venue I’ve worked at which is only responsible for making less than one percent of their operating budget through ticket sales. That’s astonishing, from an American perspective. The point that I want to make is that it’s not a fantasyland. You don’t show up at the airport and there’s Ed McMahon with your giant check from the government to make your art. On the other hand, there are certain things that sound, to an American, like luxury. I know people who have multiyear subsidies of, say, 80 or 100,000 Euros a year—out of which they’re expected to make a project and also pay themselves a reasonable salary. And they can count on that for maybe four or five years. The funding system is more centralized, so you don’t have this American situation of doing dozens of grant applications spread throughout the year that really becomes like another job. Then, too, the cost of living can be much lower, at least compared to New York. And of course the social services are much better, generally speaking. KATHERINE | That’s not as available to American artists working in Europe. ANNIE | Right. I’m talking about the situation for European artists. But even as a touring artist, you benefit from the European system without living there. You benefit from the engagement of the audiences who have grown FALL 2015 | SDC JOURNAL

IN DEFINITION… ANNE JUREN Choreographer and dancer Anne Juren is best known for her work in Vienna, where she founded the association Wiener Tanz- und Kunstbewegung and choreographed shows including A? and Code Series.

BOCHUM Bochum is the cultural center of Germany’s Ruhr valley. The city is well known for its interesting architecture and many performance spaces.

DE TOCQUEVILLE’S DEMOCRACY IN AMERICA Democracy in America by Alexis de Tocqueville was published in two parts, one in 1835 and the second in 1840. The work analyzes why a republican representative democracy works in the U.S. but fails in European nations.

HANNAH HURTZIG Hannah Hurtzig is a freelance dramaturg and curator based in Berlin. She has been the Artistic Director at Kampnagelfabrik in Hamburg, the Bonner Biennale, and has led the TOP + OPPOSITE

Mobile Academy in Berlin and Warsaw.

Hello Hi There PHOTO Steirischer

Herbst + W. Silveri BOTTOM TWO

Okwui Okpokwasili, Tony Torn + Philippa Kaye in Democracy

in America

Justin Bernhaut c/o Performance Space 122 PHOTO

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JAN RITSEMA Dutch director Jan Ritsema is known for his interpretations of Shakespeare, Bernard-Marie Koltès, and Heiner Müller. He cofounded Performing Arts Forum in France and teaches at the dance school P.A.R.T.S. in Brussels.

up with an expectation for experimentation, an expectation that commercial factors are not the driving force. On the practical side, there are a lot of places to work. Maybe not in every city, but overall, compared to the U.S., there are a lot of places interested in the kind of work we’re talking about. Not everyone’s going to love you, but if you get a few people who are behind what you’re doing, you can put together a few commissions for a project. That doesn’t usually add up to a full production budget, but it can get you halfway or mostly there. It also means that you have places to present your work.

ANNIE | I started both of them in 2004 and then they both finished and culminated in 2008. There was about a month when Passing Strange was on Broadway and PS 122 was presenting Democracy. It was a funny moment of overlap. At the time, I remember having a feeling that they were linked. I’d been spending a lot of time in Europe, not working there yet. I’d been making little things in New York, some of which I really liked, but I was kind of

That’s tended to be how I’ve done things—trying to put together several coproducers, one or two in the U.S. and the rest European. Then you try to flesh that out with grants or private funding from the U.S. I don’t know of anyone in Europe who has done any kind of “Dear friends and family, please give me $30” fundraising. That is an enormous time suck and it also puts you in a weird relationship with your friends and family— and audience. Here’s another big difference: artistic directors and programmers don’t have to scrounge in the same way for money. They work for it a few times a year, basically going back to a few different funds and the arts council. They’re not doing what U.S. artistic leaders have to do, which is be full-time fundraisers.

KATHERINE | Let’s talk about Passing Strange or Democracy in America, which were the pieces you made before you started working so much in Europe. Interestingly, they happened at almost the exact same time.

I started that in January or February 2004. In March, I got a call from Rebecca Rugg at the Public Theater, asking if I wanted to meet this guy named Stew to talk about doing some kind of cabaret show. When I talked to Stew, I remember saying to him, “I’m not going to be the right person for a cabaret show. But if you want to start talking and see where it goes and we start basically without a preconceived idea of form but we know it’s going to involve music, we know it’s going to involve something about your history between L.A. and Berlin, but we don’t know exactly where we’re going with it…If you want to do that, then I’m totally the person.” To his credit, he said, “Let’s do the thing we don’t know.” We started working together and with Heidi Rodewald, his longtime music collaborator. I recommitted to New York and here were these two really amazing things—one that I was doing on my own and one I was doing at an institution. Both felt open-ended and had exciting and interesting content. Then it was this funny situation where the two projects went in totally different directions.

KATHERINE | What do you think they do with all their extra time? ANNIE | [laughs] They go on holiday. They’re European. [laughs] But really: I think it opens up more time for them to meet artists, to develop longer-term thinking about their programming, to travel, to see work, to read. It eliminates the sense of nonstop emergency you sometimes feel in the U.S.

I started reading de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, and I thought I’d just invite a few people to hang out with me and we’d talk about this book and maybe eventually we’d make something. It was already designed to be a slow process of “let’s just see what comes up.”

dissatisfied and kept thinking I should move to Europe. I turned 30. I had been seeing a guy in Brussels, but we broke up. So in 2004, I felt as though I was “coming back” to New York, even though I’d been living in New York, but I had a feeling of recommitting. I decided to stop being a director for hire and start making my own work.

That summer, Passing Strange went to the Sundance Theatre Lab, and we showed a first draft of the first act. It had been a George C. Wolfe project at the Public to begin with, but Oskar Eustis was there at Sundance and was very positive about what he saw there. When he moved to the Public, he fasttracked it and started guiding it in the direction that it ended up going, towards Broadway, which had not been in my mind. I don’t think it was in Stew’s mind either at that point. KATHERINE | Meanwhile, on the other hand, how was Democracy in America?

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ANNIE | I was continuing to do it as a selforganized thing. I would get a little bit of money together somehow and rent space for a couple of weeks and do some work. I didn’t know how to self-produce anything. I didn’t have a model for that kind of process. So I didn’t have a plan. We did little showings at New York Theatre Workshop and at Soho Rep. We just kept working. I kept saying, “Okay, now what should we try? Let’s try these other things.” We went through a lot of different phases. KATHERINE | And yet it seems to still have had the same four-year process. ANNIE | Right. More than three years of getting together for a couple weeks once or twice a year to work on it. The whole project changed at a certain point. For a long time it was built as a series of structured improvisations around certain topics inspired by de Tocqueville. We chance operated on the different improvisations, putting them in different orders, or having certain scenes overlapping in different ways with other scenes. I have to say it was pretty cool. I regret that I never presented that version of the piece. KATHERINE | Was this before or after you had the crowdsourced ingredients? ANNIE | Way before. I had a John Cage-like big chart of all the improvisations. For every rehearsal, we used random numbers to change the order of events and give the actors cues about when to do certain things. Then I started thinking differently about it and decided to do it via crowdsourcing instead. We got rid of all the material we’d developed and the piece turned into a selling and buying of content. In its final form, the content of the piece was entirely chosen by the public. We built a website where anyone could input their content, and they’d pay a little something—$10 or $50 or something, depending on the complexity of their idea—and we’d work their material into the piece. Anything that can be part of a show was available for purchase. The whole piece was made from these bits of text or design ideas or actions that people provided. This idea developed directly from de Tocqueville. There is a guiding question that runs through the two volumes of Democracy in America, which is: can a nation achieve greatness on the basis of the accumulated actions of individuals, all pursuing their own self-interest? That became the guiding spirit of the piece.

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KATHERINE | How do you relate to that piece now? Is it fair to say that the seeds for what you’re doing now are in it? ANNIE | I love that piece. The big development was to make the ideas the performative structure. Don’t make a piece “about something”; the piece itself should be the thing that you’re doing. So put the ideas into the structure and not into what people are saying on stage. KATHERINE | Can you explain the term “algorithmic theatre,” which is one of the ways you’ve been working recently? ANNIE | I invented the term algorithmic theatre because I was trying to distinguish what I was doing from a lot of work I’d seen that uses technology—multimedia performance, digital dance, and performances that use digital technology to make design. I was thinking about early algorithmic visual artists, that first generation from the ’60s and ’70s who wrote computer algorithms to produce artwork. That process is much more like what I’m doing in theatre. How to work with algorithms as full creative collaborators in the creation of a performance. Practically, it means working with computer programmers to write a program that then will make the performance. KATHERINE | Talk about using algorithms to generate a piece of theatre. Is it different from just using chance or game structures? ANNIE | First, I should say that there’s been an evolution in the way I’ve been thinking about these things. When I started Hello Hi There in 2009, I wasn’t thinking about algorithms. I was thinking about chatbots and artificial intelligence. I was reading Alan Turing’s essay, “On Computing Machinery and Intelligence” from 1950, where he talks about the relationship between language and consciousness from a programming perspective. Then, of course, came Chomsky and Foucault; their 1971 television debate is the inspiration for the piece. During the making of that project, I started thinking about algorithms and what they mean. Could you start talking about algorithmic dramaturgy? Was there a way to think about how particular algorithms order information that could become theatrically interesting? Algorithms are active, they do things: they sort, they filter, they display, they make lots and lots of decisions. So there’s an inherent performative aspect.

KATHERINE | And they perform based on the criteria that you give them. ANNIE | Yeah. Humans make them, but they can act semi-autonomously or even autonomously, depending on how they’re set up. Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about the relationship between algorithmic theatre and chance operations in artistic practice. It’s actually not that different. In a lot of ways, the process is the same. By the way, when I talk about algorithmic theatre, I’m talking about computer algorithms, but an algorithm is simply a set of instructions. Look at the famous piece created by Tristan Tzara [one of the founders of Dada]: take a newspaper article, cut out each word separately, throw the pieces into a hat and pick out the words at random. Now you have a new poem in the order that you selected the words. That’s an algorithm. You could, of course, teach a computer to do that very easily. The main point of an algorithm is just that it is a concrete series of steps, precise instructions that turn an input into an output. KATHERINE | In a way, you’re saying there’s not that much difference between chance operations and algorithms because chance operations are not actually pure chance, they are algorithms. ANNIE | I’m not sure there’s any such thing as pure chance. There are always rules of some kind, always a specific area in which chance can function. So while chance artists emphasize the chance part, algorithmic artists emphasize the rules. John Cage, for example, was interested in chance. But of course there were rules to his compositions: a certain number of instruments, a certain organization of the piece into sections, and so on. KATHERINE | He’s setting up the trap to catch evidence of pure chance. The trap is the algorithm, right? ANNIE | Sure. So it’s partly just a difference in emphasis. But there’s also the difference between handmade and computer work. The difference in speed can become a difference in kind. Because computers work so quickly, you can make quite complex structures and the code can be complex in a way that would be very difficult for a human to do by hand. Hello Hi There and A Piece of Work [a digital take on Hamlet that premiered in 2013] both could have been made by hand. The amount of data we were dealing with, and the rules we established, would be a bit dizzying for a human brain to deal with, but you could do it.

My new piece, Yesterday, Tomorrow, is deceptively simple. We took a verse and a chorus from the song “Yesterday” by the Beatles and a verse and chorus from the song “Tomorrow” from the musical Annie, and we wrote a program that will transform one into the other in a series of steps. That transformation becomes the score for three singers to sing. For each performance, the algorithm charts a new course between the two songs. It’s simple. You could possibly do that by hand. But it would be time-consuming, it would be difficult, and once you were done you probably wouldn’t do it again. With our computer system, we can make something that operates in real time, or near-real time, and generates a new transformation at every performance. The action of the algorithm is the action of the performance. KATHERINE | How do you choose collaborators who you want to work with? How do you go about that? ANNIE | You meet all of your collaborators a bit by chance, a bit through people you know, a bit because you got to work with them on one thing where you didn’t choose them but you liked what they did. Finding computer programmers is a little tricky because they can make so much money doing other things. I’m always looking for people who will join the process, people I can actually develop with over time. I don’t ever want to use technology I don’t understand myself. I think the simpler programs might communicate philosophically better. Once you get into more sophisticated things, tricky things, you’re tending towards what I call trade show art, which is where the audience can only respond, “Wow, look how they did that.” It’s the statement of Arthur C. Clarke: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” With more sophisticated systems you get into the realm of magic, effects, or spectacle very quickly. KATHERINE | Yet you did a whole show with Anne Juren [Magical] based on magic! ANNIE | Yes, of course, that piece was entirely about magic. About the desire of the audience to be beguiled. At times in that piece, we beguiled, and at other times we refused to beguile. It was very much about the relationship of magic to spectacle and to the female body.

In that case, you could say the technology we were most concerned with was the body, which Anne and I both view as a technology. In many ways it is sufficiently advanced, and so in many ways it does seem to be magic. But I would say that piece is a great example not of trade show art but of a piece that tries to make an experiential critique of the way mystique is constructed—from an anti-capitalist, feminist perspective. When I talk about not wanting to use technology in a way where it becomes indistinguishable from magic, I mean that I want an audience that may not be computer savvy to be able to understand some of the underlying operating principles. So that the logic is graspable. KATHERINE | Does that change as we get more sophisticated as consumers of technology? ANNIE | That’s a very astute point. It’s happened already. When I did Hello Hi There in 2010, most audience members knew very little about how computers work. Over the last five years, I think there’s been a massive change in just what your average audience members are bringing to the table. As a side note, I think the person really responsible for a lot of that change is Edward Snowden. I think laypeople learned so much about how data works—what is metadata, where does data go, what can be done with it—from him. It’s like he did a massive public service education project. In addition, of course, to his main contributions. KATHERINE | Really interesting. How does working internationally affect your directing work, in ways positive or negative? Is the work itself affected by the fact that you’re making it in other places? ANNIE | I really enjoy how audiences can respond to things differently in different places. Maybe a general point is that you stop thinking so much about trying to track audience response because you really can’t know. There are too many cultural, linguistic, historical factors that you are unfamiliar with. On the negative side, you lose some sense of the local and therefore not only a continuing dialogue with an audience but also a possibility for there to be real politics going on. When you’re based in a place, there is something at stake between you and your audience. That’s

a precondition for politics to happen. You can make all the work you want about political issues, but if you’re never in the same place twice or maybe you’ll be back in three years for another show, there can’t be politics. You can talk about things. You can make a gesture towards something. It can mean something to the people who see it. But you have no lasting relationship there. KATHERINE | It seems that working in Europe also offered you opportunities to cross disciplinary lines. You’ve done a lot of dance work. ANNIE | Yeah, that’s been sort of a happy surprise, because I fell into it through PAF. I ended up around a lot of choreographers and got a haphazard but joyful dance education. I learned a lot from working with Anne Juren, not only about dance but about selfproducing. So it might be that the way I do things now is something like a hybrid between common theatre practices and common dance practices. Or maybe it’s just my adaptation of Anne’s working method. I’m talking about very concrete things: how to structure rehearsals, how to budget, that sort of thing. Working a bit in the dance field really changed my process a lot. I found it liberating. I got rid of a lot of the assumptions about what you need in order to make theatre. One of the things I didn’t always like in American theatre was how the division of labor operates. It’s really constraining. It’s really stifling. For a long time I thought it was a “U.S. versus Europe” thing, when possibly it was a “dance versus theatre” thing. Or just the specific early experiences that I had in Europe. I was in the mainstream of the mainstream in theatre in a lot of ways. Then I went into conceptual dance, if we can still use that term. Experimental dance, anyway. I went from one extreme to another. It wasn’t immediately clear where and what I’d fallen into, or the actual reasons for all the differences I noticed. KATHERINE | What you might have been ascribing to "U.S. versus Europe" could easily have been the difference between mainstream theatre and conceptual dance. ANNIE | Indeed, yes, very much so. KATHERINE | Have you sorted it out yet? ANNIE | Still working on it.

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GOING HO

AN INTERVIEW WITH

DOUG HUGHES + ETHAN MCSWEENY BY TED

SOD

Veteran directors Doug Hughes and Ethan McSweeny boast extensive careers on and off Broadway, regionally, and internationally, and as artistic leaders, but the two have more than this in common. They are both of Irish American heritage and have made a name for themselves in Ireland at Dublinâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Gate Theatre, where Hughes directed productions of Glengarry Glen Ross and The Price, and McSweeny directed A Streetcar Named Desire (for which he won the 2014 Irish Times Theatre Award for Best Director), An Ideal Husband, and most recently, A Month in the Country. In this interview with Ted Sod, the two discuss shared and unique experiences directing at the Gate, working with international artists, responding to Irish audiences, and what has been learned throughout the process.

PHOTO

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Walter McBride

OME

TED | How did your respective gigs at the Gate in Dublin come about? Were your agents involved in getting you the work? DOUG | I met Michael Colgan, who runs the Gate and is a tremendous force in Irish theatre, years ago. Joe Dowling introduced me to him. Michael is a larger-than-life theatrical manager, a genuine producer, one of those vivid people you’d hoped you’d meet more of when you began your career. About 10 years ago, Michael was kind enough to invite me there to direct. I dearly wanted to do it. I hold an Irish passport. I have dual citizenship. Finally, in 2012, everything aligned, and I had a fantastic time directing there. It’s not the kind of job your agent wants you to do, but it’s a thrilling experience. ETHAN | For me, the call from Michael Colgan came a bit out of the blue about three years ago. I had just opened a production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream at the Shakespeare Theatre in D.C. when he rang and said, “Would you be interested in coming to direct A Streetcar Named Desire?” Of course, my immediate answer was “Yes.” He said, “I’ve cast Blanche, so you need to meet her,” and about a week later I found myself dining with Michael and Lia Williams in Dublin. However, I am absolutely positive that the trail originates with Joe Dowling. In fact, I would say that’s likely true of all of the American directors at the Gate for the last 15 or so years. TED | So it’s six degrees of separation from Joe Dowling? ETHAN | More like one degree of separation. TED | You both have extensive experience in American regional theatre—would you say the Gate is a regional theatre? DOUG | No. I think it is an essential theatre in a country that has a great theatrical tradition. And it’s a theatre that belongs in a world capital. The Abbey Theatre is the national theatre of Ireland, and its mission is to do Irish work. The Gate was founded in 1928 by Michael MacLiammóir and his partner, Hilton Edwards, a gay power couple who were not in the least deterred by the pieties of early 20th-century Holy Mother Ireland. They wanted to look beyond the island to European literature for the stage. The Abbey was doing Synge, Yeats, and O’Casey, while the Gate was doing Maeterlinck and Shakespeare. Of course, Colgan has done some extraordinary productions of Irish work at the Gate: a definitive Juno and the Paycock, directed by Joe Dowling in the late ’80s. Ralph Fiennes was brilliant in Beckett’s First Love at the Gate. It’s the theatre where Barry McGovern, the foremost Beckett actor alive, works regularly and has assembled his phenomenal one-man shows. It’s the theatre where Orson Welles first trod the boards, where Pinter oversaw a number of productions of his plays, where Michael Gambon has worked FALL 2015 | SDC JOURNAL

IN IRELAND, THERE IS A SOVEREIGNTY ABOUT THE THEATRE, AN IMMENSE INVESTMENT IN THEIR OWN REPERTOIRE, AND A PROFOUND INTEREST IN AMERICAN PLAYS. DOUG HUGHES

Directing Glengarry Glen Ross PHOTO Matthew Thompson

repeatedly. When I work there, I feel as though I’m working in a world-class theatre in the middle of a city with an amazing, tortured history. TED | Are you able to talk about similarities and differences to the American theatre? DOUG | It may be a boring answer, but I think there are far more similarities than differences. There is a haste through the period of technical rehearsals that is particular to the Gate that was absolutely frightening but bracing. Michael Colgan urges everybody to get on with it. The tech process is— ETHAN | Not quite three days. TED | Musicals too? DOUG | I haven’t done a musical there. But it concentrates the mind, let me tell you. I’ve never worked faster on a stage. ETHAN | They close a show on a Saturday afternoon, final dress is Wednesday, and the first audience comes on Thursday. Bracing is a good word—it’s also a little old-school. The Gate has to sell tickets in order to survive. They don’t announce a season, because they don’t have subscribers. They announce a play or two and run those, and while those are going on, they prepare for the next one. It can be scary as an American to get a call in December for a show that’s starting rehearsals in June. Here, we look for 12 to 14 months of lead time to prepare and cast and design.

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TED | You mentioned raising money through ticket sales. Do they have arts patrons like we do? DOUG | They don’t. There isn’t that huge corporate phenomenon. That seems to be drying up in the States as well. During the period Ethan and I have been working over there, Ireland has been extraordinarily depressed economically. Fiscal mortification set in after the excesses of the Celtic Tiger era. The country was, and still is, reeling from the imposition of Europe’s draconian austerity policy. But the citizens of Ireland have still found a way to keep theatre alive. People drive from Wexford— ETHAN | People come in from Galway. They’ll make a trip into Dublin for a weekend or a day of culture. That includes going to the Abbey and the Gate. The audience support is absolutely incredible. The Gate seats 371. They routinely fill it in with an eight- to ten-week run. When I was there with Streetcar, there was an unprecedented heat wave in Ireland. It didn’t rain for 45 days, and the temperature soared above 90 degrees. No one has air conditioning in Dublin, because they don’t usually need it. And still the theatre filled to capacity. In that heat and discomfort, a good portion of an American audience would probably have left at intermission. But the Irish audiences stayed and were undistracted by the temperature. You could have heard a pin drop. Their focus was incredible. I think some of them even felt the heat added to the New Orleans atmosphere.

DOUG | And the conversations immediately after the shows that happen in the theatre bar go until four in the morning. That kind of life around the play is something that I’ve really relished over there. In Ireland, there is a sovereignty about the theatre, an immense investment in their own repertoire, and a profound interest in American plays. The Gate is a beautiful theatre that was carved out of the Rotunda Hospital, which had a ballroom in it because that’s how money was raised for the operation of the place. Edwards and MacLiammóir designed a stage using a gorgeous Georgian ballroom. TED | Ethan, when you were invited to direct, did you seek out advice from Doug? ETHAN | I did. I called Doug and I asked if we could talk about the Gate. Doug took me out to lunch, and we had a really great conversation in which he helped me understand the context of how the Gate produces theatre. The Gate theatre staff might be 15 full-time employees. If you compare that to any major institutional theatre here, it’s a vast difference. That’s partly because the Gate doesn’t have a development office and their board of trustees is about six people. But the great gift that Doug gave me was a sense of confidence about working there.

Directing The Price PHOTO Daragh McDonagh

Michael Colgan + Hughes at the opening of The Price PHOTO Mark Stedman/Photocall Ireland

TED | Were either of you able to select the plays you directed, or were you asked to do a specific title in all instances? ETHAN | I was asked to direct An Ideal Husband and Streetcar. I think that maybe over time one might be able to influence those choices, but for the moment I would trust the Artistic Director of 35 years to know what fits in his season. I do think Michael is open to ideas. DOUG | There was a list of plays that Michael and I were interested in. Both the American plays I’ve done over there, Glengarry Glen Ross and The Price, have to do with money, what people are owed, what you must do for money, the humiliations associated with money or its lack. It seemed to me that both plays, which are very different, hit home in depression Ireland. TED | Are there specific titles you want to direct in Ireland? ETHAN | I’m going back to do Brian Friel’s adaptation of Turgenev’s A Month in the Country. I’m hoping to do an O’Neill play there, because I feel O’Neill is the greatest Irish playwright who didn’t happen to be born in Ireland. I would love to do Long Day’s Journey into Night with Irish actors. DOUG | I’d love to do a Molière or a Goldoni, because there is a special aptitude for the absurd in Ireland.

TED | Doug, would you consider directing a production of Outside Mullingar there? DOUG | John Shanley’s play was successful in New York, Tony-nominated, etc. It’s a beautiful piece. I loved directing it here. But I wouldn’t want to revive it there. I’d feel presumptuous. The Irish would abhor the idea of an IrishAmerican directing a piece set in contemporary rural Ireland. An Irish director should do it over there. TED | Do you see a fundamental difference in the ways that Irish and American actors work? DOUG | I think every actor works differently. I haven’t identified a particular school, method, or process among the Irish actors. We held auditions. There were no givens. I found myself really in agreement with Michael about crucial casting. And in both plays I directed, I was able to bring a favorite actor of mine over to work there. Reg Rogers came to play Richard Roma in Glengarry, and Lewis J. Stadlen played the furniture dealer, Solomon, in The Price—both were roles those gentlemen were born to play. Lew won the Irish Times Award for best actor that season.

A BRIDGE OF INESTIMABLE IMPORTANCE BY MICHAEL

COLGAN

Because we operate on a smaller budget and have only one auditorium, the Gate has been forgiven for regarding itself as being in permanent opposition to our National Theatre. Because of this, some of our programming is due to what I would term “unjustifiable neglect” in the city’s repertoire. When I became Artistic Director of the Gate in 1983, this neglect was evident, particularly when it came to Beckett and Pinter, as well as the great American authors. To address this neglect has been a salient part of the Gate’s mission.

TED | Have you been able to bring favorite actors, Ethan?

There was a clear understanding why Irish directors were being invited overseas to direct Irish work, and so it naturally followed that to produce American work it would be wise to employ American directors. However, at that time—and this is some 30 years ago—it was widely believed that in the main there were better directors working in the United Kingdom. As I traveled increasingly throughout the States, I realized there was excellent talent at work.

ETHAN | Since Streetcar, the plays I’ve directed at the Gate have been from the Irish canon, so there hasn’t been the same need to bring actors over from the States. I’ve actually been surprised at the real depth of talent in Ireland,

At the end of the ’90s, we produced Long Day’s Journey (Don Moffat) and Streetcar (Fran McDormand) both with British directors, but it was soon after I decided that we should make every effort to match American

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Directing A Streetcar Named Desire PHOTO Matthew Thompson OPPOSITE

Directing A Month in the Country PHOTO Pat Redmond

IN A NATION OF IMMIGRANTS, SUCH AS WE ARE, IT BECOMES VITAL TO DEFINE WHERE YOU’RE FROM. ETHAN MCSWEENY

which, after all, is a country with a population less than half that of New York City. In the three shows I’ve directed, there’s only been a handful of the same cast members. There is also some crossover with Anglo-Irish talent living in London; Lia Williams, who played Blanche in Streetcar, is British but had worked at the Gate before and she won the Irish Times Award that year for best actress. The cast I’ve assembled for A Month in the Country is about 90 percent Irish and is led by an Irish actress who recently moved back to Dublin from London and an English actor who relocated to Dublin some 20 years ago. So there is a fair amount of cross-pollination. TED | When Irish actors are playing Americans, what are the challenges directing them? Do you have to change your vocabulary? ETHAN | Is that a question about dialects? TED | I think it’s a question about sensibility. If you’re doing an American play set in New Orleans with Irish actors... ETHAN | Once I’d gotten the job, I visited New Orleans because I thought, as the sole American in the room, I’d better have a really strong purchase on what New Orleans is about so I can tell that story to my cast. I ended up sending my Blanche on a trip to New Orleans as well, so we both had that vocabulary in common. Everyone did their best American accent. Irish actors tend to have grown up with a lot of American television. So it’s generally an accessible accent for them. That said, while

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I don’t think we were 100 percent perfect with all the nuances of our Southern accents on Streetcar, we were good enough to convince our Irish audiences. And we certainly were no worse than American actors doing Irish accents. DOUG | The Irish actors were really attuned to the utterly distinct cadence and drive in the Mamet play. Keep in mind, there is the Irish love of language. I know it’s a cliché, but literature is the country’s most important export. And in each case, I had an American in the company, which was helpful, too. One day, I’d love to just go over there and say, “We’re doing The Front Page and to hell with the accents. Let’s just hear what it sounds like with Irish people doing it.” ETHAN | I found one or two cultural disconnects on Streetcar that I didn’t expect. The Irish cast didn’t initially understand why where you were from is so important in a nation of immigrants. Why Stanley’s being Polish was so important to him, or Blanche’s French Huguenot lineage, each stressing when a family arrived in this country. But how could they? While the Irish are famous for immigration, there hasn’t been a lot in the opposite direction, and so people know where they are from with a level of detail that we don’t have in this country. However, with the integration into the Eurozone, that is starting to change.

TED | Was working with your design team there much different from working with designers here? DOUG | I didn’t find it so. I worked with Joan Bergin on Glengarry, a wonderful costume designer who is very well known in British film. I felt an instant rapport with her. She had this amazing aptitude for the hierarchy of that lousy real estate office and what the characters’ suits should look like. She was dividing her time between us and The Tudors, I believe. One of the things that is very different in Ireland is tailoring. Joan really tailored the suits so that the cast looked very persuasively middle American circa 1980s. TED | What about lighting and sound—stateof-the-art equipment? ETHAN | I wouldn’t necessarily say so. I’d say maybe a generation behind where our state of the art is. I think it’s a question of inventory catching up. I’m really proud of the lighting and sound designs we’ve done, because they haven’t been super high-tech. We ended up doing a design for Streetcar that was actually a cage of lights around the central space. We found these spectacular old pieces of lighting equipment in the Gate inventory. They were these square boxes with a single source in the middle. We hung those all around because we had 24 of them. I wasn’t sure what exactly they were going to look like when we turned them on. And, of course, they looked exactly like the headlights of a streetcar. The lighting designer, Paul Keogan, who is Irish, found them.

BRIDGE

I’d say at the Gate, although they’re capable of doing really wonderful design work, the priority isn’t always on technical elements, and that is reflected in the tech time. The priority is on acting. The design priorities often are on costumes and getting the frocks right. I had an Irish fashion designer named Peter O’Brien who did the clothes for An Ideal Husband and is doing A Month in the Country. And the clothes were extravagant. The fabrics were sourced in Paris. The dressmakers were mostly Irish, and they had to know how to do these old techniques. Mrs. Cheveley came into the third act in a full-length crimson gown that was covered by a full-length black velour wrap. It was really something.

good way, creatively and imaginatively. I found both of my experiences so rewarding as an artist. I don’t know if in our more commercially centered theatre that that’s always as true. Sometimes I feel safer as an artist in Dublin. You can get in a taxicab and get in a conversation with the driver about what’s on at the Gate. And he’ll have seen shows that you’ve done.

DOUG | Jim McConnell, who manages production for them, has this absolute quiet command of the place. He can pull off these amazing turnarounds with regularity. He delivers things you just can’t imagine are going to be realized, given the size of the place.

TED | So no such thing as premium seats?

TED | The first time you worked in Ireland and came back to America to work, did you have to readjust? DOUG | I just come back invigorated. The spirit of the proceedings over there and the hospitality are remarkable. I’ve always come back recharged. ETHAN | There is always a bit of excitement about getting outside of your comfort zone. I think anytime you’re working with people you don’t know well, you’re challenged in a

DOUG | It cuts across economic lines. You have merchant bankers and people who work for the post office coming to see the shows. It’s less expensive to go to the theatre there. ETHAN | I think a ticket at the Gate is 35 euros.

DOUG | No, it’s very different here. Doing a Broadway show is an extraordinarily different experience from working at the Gate. I’ve had a lot of fun working on Broadway. But I’m going to confess to the envy I feel for Ethan that he’s on his way there to direct. TED | What would you say to the directors who are reading this thinking: I want to direct at the Gate. Do they have to know Joe Dowling? DOUG | I’d say there is a great interest on the part of Michael Colgan in American literature and what American directors are up to. He likes having guests. TED | New blood—

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plays with American directors. My good friend, Joe Dowling, was by now running the Guthrie Theater, and I spoke to him about those directors who he felt were at the top of their game and could be persuaded to come to Dublin. It was at that point that Joe spoke to me about Doug Hughes and Ethan McSweeny. One can’t audition a director, but I had seen the work of Doug Hughes, and what was more important, when we met it was instant friendship and shared taste. Like a flame hitting a gas jet, it was powerful and immediate. Ethan came later, and again I recognized an artistic affinity and the possibility of real friendship. Between them, they have given the Gate five hugely successful productions and have brought about a unique admiration and respect from the Irish acting community. These collaborations have no doubt led to the Irish theatre scene having a greatly improved understanding of American theatre. They are both highly sought after in this city, and I know that casting becomes much easier when actors know their name is attached. They have built extraordinary relationships here in Dublin, not only with actors but with designers, composers, and many artists, and in doing so have inspired truly valuable cultural crossovers. For me, it has been of huge benefit to form these working partnerships—partnerships that have formed a bridge of inestimable importance between Ireland and the United States. FALL 2015 | SDC JOURNAL

ETHAN | If Doug hadn’t been a big success at the Gate, there is no way that I would have been asked. And probably that tracks back to Mark Brokaw. DOUG | Mark directed A View From the Bridge in 2005, I think. The other thing I would say is that Michael Colgan and Fiach MacConghail, who will soon conclude his tenure at the Abbey, and Garry Hynes, who runs the Druid, all travel quite a bit. They see work in the United States. And they see work in other countries. You have to attract them here. But it’s a challenge because we’re such a big country and we’re much better at importing art than we are at exporting it. TED | Do you have advice for directors who are about to direct in another country? ETHAN | Turn off the data roaming feature on your phone. You will get a very big bill. You might want to think about how you’re going to communicate while you’re there. We’re an Internet- and text message-dependent culture. So if you go to Ireland or wherever it is you’re going to go work and you don’t have the appropriate communication device—you won’t be able to participate quite as vigorously in the community. I also found it deeply useful to talk to a colleague who had worked there, who came out of the same theatre traditions that I did and could offer some translation for what was happening, so I would say you should seek that out if at all possible. DOUG | I would second that. TED | Did you talk with Joe Dowling about working in Ireland before you went, Doug? DOUG | I talked to Mark Brokaw. TED | So many of our artists would benefit—as you two obviously have—from working in another culture. ETHAN | Exactly, because the perspective changes and you learn things about the value systems. It’s great because you speak the same language, which is theatre, and you have the same goals. And the truth is actors have more in common between one another than they have differences. You get a whole different perspective on theatremaking and on what is important. You come up against your own limitations and expectations, and you have to learn to be a good guest and say, “Okay, that’s not what I thought it was going to be. It’s my job to fit my work into their process.” TED | But you never felt compromised?

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ETHAN | No, no, not in the least, no. Whenever you feel like that’s happening, you speak up for yourself and say, “I need it to go a bit more like this.” And there are times when that’s necessary. There was an Irish position that I wasn’t familiar with. And that was the “stage director.” I said, “I’m the stage director!” But that’s what they call the production stage manager. DOUG | I still don’t properly understand stage management as it works in Dublin. It works, but I don’t understand it. TED | Why? Is it that fundamentally different? ETHAN | It has to do with people who are called stage managers who are never in rehearsal and are devoting their time to the acquisition of props. At the Gate the assistant stage manager is the properties supervisor. And their skill set includes property construction as well. We had one wonderful young man on Streetcar named Trevor who has since become a friend of mine. It got to a point in the theatre that whenever I asked for something from the stage director/production stage manager, he would simply shout out Trevor’s name. Because this is a union publication, I think it’s worth talking about the function of unions in Ireland and the UK. The artistic unions, in particular, are either not as strong or nonexistent in many cases. People are not quite as regimented about “this is my job and that is your job and never the twain shall meet.” TED | What was it like being Irish American men working in Ireland? Were you confronted in any way by what it means to be Irish? DOUG | I’ve been going there ever since I was 16. I have many relations there. And a lot of my people come from the midlands, from County Longford, probably the least scenically beautiful part of Ireland. My friend Brían O’Byrne, who is from Cavan, which adjoins Longford, always refers to my people as “ignorant pig farmers.” But I must say, they are highly enlightened, fantastically successful pig farmers. I’ve seen Ireland change a great deal, but all those years ago, the first time I went over, I felt instantly at home. In some ways, and this may be deeply sentimental of me, I felt more at home there than in Manhattan. And I continue to feel that way. It seems like a country where there is a tolerance for eccentricity. And the older I get, the more eccentric I get. The Irish seem willing to put up with me.

ETHAN | I had been to Ireland as a youth, but I hadn’t been back as a grownup until I went to work there. And I wasn’t raised to be particularly Irish. So I had the very odd experience of looking around and suddenly being in a place where people not only looked like me, but they thought like me, too. There were a number of things that I thought were family traits that turned out to be cultural traits. I had an acute sense of identity and belonging that I hadn’t known until I experienced it. When I walk up to pick up a ticket at a theatre or a reservation at a restaurant, I’m used to saying “McSweeny with an M” because usually people think my first name is Mick and that my surname is Sweeney, and then they go look under S and they don’t find it. The first day I arrived, I was checking into the Gresham Hotel, and I said “McSweeny with an M,” and this nice Irish woman looked up and said, “And how else would you spell it, then?” DOUG | It’s easier for me to talk to a stranger in Ireland than it is for me to do so in the U.S. ETHAN | You would be rude not to speak to somebody that you were in a car with or sitting next to on a train. It would be uncouth. I find, though, that there is a lot about being Irish that I don’t understand. I don’t ever want to make the mistake of thinking I know Ireland just because I’ve spent a fair amount of time there. And fortunately, a couple of my good friends are willing to remind me any time I start acting like I know what’s going on in Ireland. To grow up American is to grow up surrounded by a lot more privilege than any of my contemporaries in Ireland have experienced. I have to say, there is this great unknowable quality to Ireland. There are qualities that are very clannish. Until you can prove that you can be one of them, you’re kept outside. DOUG | People say you’re going back home if you’re of Irish extraction and you visit. I feel so privileged that Colgan has given me the opportunity to return to work in a country from which my grandparents emigrated. I am enthralled with the place. It’s not just a matter of a couple of nice Irish American boys being invited over to have some fun in Dublin. The Republic of Ireland is an extraordinary country defined by bloodshed, beauty, poetry, and exile. For me, it’s not just pleasant to come home, it’s profound. ETHAN | We all benefit from it. In a nation of immigrants, such as we are, it becomes vital to define where you’re from. That’s how you make yourself individual from all the other people that are here. And working at the Gate afforded me the opportunity to do that.

CREATING A THINKING BODY FOR A THINKING THEATRE BY

WALTER BILDERBACK

“I’m returning to my roots,” Blanka Zizka says about the Hothouse, a new artistic initiative of the Wilma Theater, her artistic home for nearly 40 years. “Five years ago, I was so dissatisfied with the way I was creating theatre that I decided I either had to change the way I’m working or leave the theatre altogether.” | The Hothouse grew over the past several years out of a series of productions directed by Blanka, as well as actor-training workshops led by international master teachers, that led her to feel that a company of actors sharing a common training aesthetic was the best way to further her artistic vision. The core of the Hothouse is a company of 15 actors. These actors have all participated in some of the workshops, and most have been in several of the productions that led to the formal creation of the Hothouse. Company members will be represented in three of the four productions in the 2015– 2016 season, including the opening production of Sophocles’s Antigone, directed by Greek director Theodoros Terzopoulos.

Jennifer Kidwell in Antigone PHOTO Matt Saunders FALL 2015 | SDC JOURNAL

The company will take part in ongoing advanced actor training, using techniques Blanka has adopted or created in recent years, to further develop and refine an evolving performance aesthetic and collaborative company dynamic, as well as readings, intensive workshops, and other experiments (with company members and guest artists). “These explorations allow actors to become true authors of their performances, and not just fulfill a director’s or designer’s vision,” Blanka believes. It will also include continued work with international teachers and directors. In future years, the Hothouse hopes to expand to commissioning new work written for and developed with these actors. With the Hothouse, Blanka hopes to create a new vision of regional theatre for the 21st century. The project reflects a steady evolution of her artistic thinking and practice that has grown from a series of productions and independent workshops, most of which I, as the Wilma’s dramaturg, have had the privilege of being involved with. “When I worked in Prague,” the Czech-born director says, “I was part of a collective of actors, exploring physical, vocal, and emotional connections in the body and creating performances out of improvisations and search for memories that live in the body. The work that we have been doing in Philadelphia the past few years builds on where I started several decades ago.” Blanka cites the commitment in the Wilma’s mission statement “to create living, adventurous art and to engage artists and audiences in imaginative reflection on the complexities of contemporary life,” and believes the Hothouse advances that mission. “Central to the Wilma’s evolving model is the belief that we must create the best possible conditions for experimentation and the development of original ideas, excellence of craft, and genuine collaboration. Theatre is an ephemeral art form. It’s happening in the specific time and place. It’s all about a present moment, the now, which has to be vibrantly alive.”

Kevin Meehan, Brian Ratcliffe + Lindsay Smiling in Don Juan Comes Home From Iraq TOP

MIDDLE

Cast of Our Class

BOTTOM Brian

Ratcliffe, Krista Apple-Hodge, Sarah Gliko + Steven Rishard in Hamlet Ed Swidey, Kevin Meehan + Allen Radway, Dan Hodge in Our Class OPPOSITE

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PHOTOS

Alexander Iziliaev

Blanka’s 2011 Wilma Theater production of Polish playwright Tadeusz Słobodzianek’s Our Class marked the beginning of the path to the Hothouse. Słobodzianek’s play poses challenges for conventional American theatre practice: the story follows the lives of 10 Poles (5 Jewish, 5 Catholic) from village childhood in the 1920s through World War II, the rising and dropping of the Iron Curtain, and up to the early years of the 21st century, when the last survivors die. Much of the spoken text is directly addressed to the audience and emotionally charged with the depiction of the horrors of the century—rape, murder, genocide. In addition, inspired by the Polish theatremaker Tadeusz Kantor’s Dead Class (alluded to in Słobodzianek’s title), Blanka wanted all the actors on stage for the entire three-hour performance. Having grown up seeing the work of Grotowski and Kantor, Blanka realized the production she wanted required the same emphasis on the actor’s presence found in their work. She contemplated bringing a teacher from Grotowski’s theatre to Philadelphia for a workshop but saw a posting for a voice class— sponsored by Philadelphia’s multidisciplinary Pig Iron Theatre—that mentioned both Grotowski and Artaud. She and I took the

weekend class to investigate. We wound up as two of six students in the class (most of the rest dancers), but the work of the teacher, Jean-René Toussaint, inspired us and we quickly decided to hire him to do a workshop for Our Class.

with introductory work—learning to recognize different resonators, becoming aware of our voices as physical presence in space, receiving energy from other actors—but moved to improvisations inspired by themes within the play but without touching the text itself.

Toussaint calls his technique Stemwerk, inspired by the work of voice pioneer Roy Hart. Stemwerk involves the whole body in vocal production, exploring a broad range of resonators. For Toussaint, the actor’s enemy (any human’s, in fact) is the “horizontal, social voice.” He opposes this to the “vertical voice.” The horizontal voice is limited to the head, throat, and upper chest, and vocal energy flows in only one direction—forward from the mouth. Vertical voice flows upward from the ground. Because of this, an actor can choose any resonator to project from, a greater part of his/her range is accessible, and energy flows in all directions at all times. Toussaint’s exercises also require actors to listen actively with their entire body.

When we got to rehearsal, we started with a trust and comfort level between the company of actors and between the actors and Blanka that allowed us quickly to probe deeply into the inner life of the play. In performance, the energy and connection between the actors, even when they weren’t interacting with each other in a scene, was remarkable.

Because most of the actors were local, Blanka tried an experiment. She scheduled a workshop in mid-July, six weeks before rehearsals started. Blanka and I took part in all the exercises alongside the actors. We began

The experience of Our Class led Blanka to reject the standard audition process and the regional theatre habit of auditioning in New York for leading roles in her productions. Of that decision, she notes, “I finally became fully frustrated with the casting process and the fact that with each production I was starting again from the beginning. Many times there was no history between actors and me. Yet, in the following few weeks, I was going to be involved with them in a very intimate, intense, complex process of putting on a production. After the show is over, we part, and the process of casting the next show starts again. I felt

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that in the time I was repeating myself, not able to push the art form forward, not able to investigate the possibilities and explore in depth the existential questions contained in the texts with my collaborators. I thought that institutional theatre had succumbed to our prevailing consumer culture and basically been shopping for talent instead of investing into continuity, development, and experimentation.” Since Our Class, Toussaint has been a regular collaborator on Blanka’s productions, often conducting workshops weeks or months before rehearsals begin. For her most recent productions, Paula Vogel’s Don Juan Comes Home from Iraq (2014) and Hamlet/ Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (2015), workshops involving Toussaint have replaced much of the conventional role of auditions and callbacks. For example, Don Juan, a Wilma commission, was cast a year in advance out of an eight-day workshop, before the play was written, allowing Paula Vogel to craft the play specifically for the actors involved. The work with Toussaint also convinced Blanka to produce master classes for Philadelphia actors. “I decided that the Wilma was going to invest into Philadelphia actors and give them an opportunity to continue their training,” she says. Toussaint has led a handful of workshops, introducing actors to Stemwerk techniques, varying in length. Actors are invited to participate and are paid a stipend to attend, making it easier for them to set aside four to eight days in their schedule. During the preview period of Our Class, we first encountered the other artist central to the creation of the Hothouse. In October 2011, I read a review of a one-night, sitespecific performance at St. Pancras Church in London in The Guardian. Michael Billington had reviewed it to draw attention to the work of Theodoros Terzopoulos, a Greek director of whom I’d never heard. “What puzzles me,” Billington wrote, “is our ignorance of Terzopoulos. Feted the world over, he has created a theatre that, while it has elements of the work of Jerzy Grotowski, seems very much his own: one that explores the cornered human animal in all its naked desperation.” The description echoed conversations Blanka and I had been having: I emailed the review to Blanka and it caught her interest as well. Between rehearsals and previews she found video clips of work by Terzopoulos’s Athens company, Attis Theatre, and a workshop in Poland led by Terzopoulos. “In the videos, his actors had a power and a presence I rarely see,” she remembers. Terzopoulos founded Attis in 1986. He had spent much time in the 1970s at the Berliner Ensemble, the theatre founded by Bertolt

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Brecht after World War II. While there, he was tremendously influenced by the discipline of actor Ekkehard Schall, who played leading roles in many productions. Schall spent two hours or more on training, breathing exercises, and makeup before every performance, inspiring Terzopoulos’s practice. The playwright/director Heiner Müller became a friend and mentor. Their conversations increased Terzopoulos’s love of mythology and tragedy. He realized he was more interested in reconnecting with the ancient impulses of tragedy, with an eternal triangle of conflict between the individual, the gods, and the city, than in contemporary social drama. On returning to Greece, he furthered his study of ancient Greek ritual and eventually found a company of actors with whom to work. Their first production was The Bacchae; the company found immediate international success and supporters, including Tadashi Suzuki and Robert Wilson. In addition to Attis productions, Terzopoulos has directed in Europe, Asia, and South America. A new production of The Bacchae was the first at Moscow’s Stanislavsky Electrotheater in January 2015.

Blanka emailed Terzopoulos and introduced herself and her work. They began corresponding, and the following summer, during a research trip to England, she made a side trip to Athens to observe the work in person. “I was shocked to see the stamina, presence, endurance, and strength of his actors. Watching a three-hour-long improvisation by one actor, I saw him exploring the subterranean world under the text through movement, sound, rhythm, and breath,” she recalls. “From time to time, Mr. Terzopoulos quietly said a few words. Without stopping, the actor adjusted and continued in his improvisation. I hadn’t seen actors as powerful as the members of Attis Theatre since I watched the work of Jerzy Grotowski. I wanted Philadelphia actors to learn this system of training and make it part of their practice.” She invited Terzopoulos to lead a workshop in Philadelphia, and the Wilma coproduced performances of Attis’s Ajax, the Madness (from Sophocles’s play) with the Philadelphia Fringe Festival. With Savvas Stroumpos—an actor, director, and teacher with Attis—Terzopoulos led a four-day workshop for 22 local actors, as well as Blanka and myself, in September 2013. The workshop introduced us to the rudiments of Terzopoulos’s training and introduced him to Philadelphia actors and the Wilma staff. He agreed to direct a play for the Wilma with a mixed cast of Attis and Philadelphia actors. Antigone was chosen, inspired by a Daniel Mendelsohn essay in The New Yorker,

comparing the controversy over burying the body of Boston Marathon bomber Tamerlan Tsarnaev to Sophocles’s tragedy. Antigone began rehearsals in late August 2015. It is the first formal Hothouse production and is intended to perform in Athens and perhaps elsewhere after its Philadelphia premiere. Mr. Terzopoulos’s work begins with intense physical training that puts the actor’s body through a series of increasingly difficult positions while focusing on breathing deeply into the diaphragm, followed by vocalizations in a series of sometimes strenuous body positions. Once learned, the process usually takes about 90 minutes. The exercises are designed to free the actors’ bodies of their social conventions and free their focus from everyday life. “This is the body of Dionysos,” Mr. Terzopoulos says. “And if the body is free, the mind is free, the soul is free, the thoughts are free, everything is free.” For him, “the tragic body is the body in passion; the body that vibrates,” even when it is still. Like Toussaint, Terzopoulos describes this vibration traveling vertically and reaching out in all directions. “Art is a medicine for our souls,” Terzopoulos has said. “I produce theatre so as to improve as a human being, to be able to listen to others and to understand them.” In notes she wrote in Athens, Blanka writes, “TT evokes the image of Dionysos, who looks at himself in the mirror and breaks it. This is the metaphor for breaking fixed ideas, prisons, rules, and reconstructing a new image, or reassembling the image one by one anew.”

The idea of a company kept nagging at Blanka. Terzopoulos and Toussaint both told her that the work she wanted to do required a company. We were also inspired by word of Sean Holmes’s Secret Theatre project at the Lyric Hammersmith in London. Like Blanka, Holmes felt the status quo was stifling theatrical art, expressing his frustration in words almost identical to hers. In his speech announcing the creation of Secret Theatre, Holmes complained that with the standard system, “All you can do in that time is stage the play literally. You don’t have the time to imagine anything other than what the playwright has written down. So we have a theatre culture that, when it approaches text, especially new writing, is rooted in literalism… maybe the existing structures of theatre in this country, whilst not corrupt, are corrupting.” Among the things Holmes did to break from convention was select a company for the entire season—before selecting the plays— and committing to use them in all the plays. I visited the Lyric, observing rehearsals, seeing two of the plays, and speaking with Holmes

and the actors. Their specific approach was different than the direction Blanka was headed, but the advantages of a steady company working on multiple plays, sharing an aesthetic vocabulary, was clear and further inspiration to press ahead.

The outlines of what could be done with a company became clearer with the experience of Don Juan Comes Home from Iraq. Wanting to find a way to continue the work and expand the commitment to actors, Blanka decided to direct Hamlet alongside Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, one of the few major plays by Tom Stoppard that the Wilma had not produced. As with Don Juan, the plays were cast from a workshop months before rehearsals began. Five days were spent with Jean-René Toussaint. The other five were spent using a combination of Terzopoulos exercises and exercises developed by the British verse and speech specialist Cecily Berry to explore text from Shakespeare’s play. Following this workshop, Blanka returned to Athens and spent four weeks training with Attis, in addition to visiting several Dutch and Belgian theatres to investigate how they worked with resident companies. One of these companies was Jan Fabre’s Troubleyn theatre in Antwerp. Like Terzopoulos, Fabre has established a teaching system based on his work. Blanka arranged for one of his teachers/performers, Ivana Jozic, to come to Philadelphia for a workshop in December. Fabre’s technique, like the other methods the Wilma has explored, is very physically demanding. Introductory exercises, including a series of transformations from cat to tiger to lizard to insect—progressively becoming less anthropomorphized—followed by a “dying animal” exercise exploring emotional extremis, and an exercise asking the performer to take 10 minutes to cross a room with the physical intensity and difficulty of a “120-year-old person.” Although Blanka came out of the workshop feeling that Terzopoulos’s system of training was closer to the direction she wanted to pursue, this workshop was valuable for a number of reasons: the lizard exercise even found its way into her production of R & G. Terzopoulos’s second workshop, from which Antigone was cast, took place a few weeks after Jozic’s. This workshop lasted 10 days. It allowed Terzopoulos and Stroumpos to go deeper into the training exercises, as well as time for Terzopoulos to improvise directly with individual actors. Eight actors were chosen out of this workshop for Antigone, and two— Jered McLenigan and Brian Ratcliffe—were selected to lead training during Hamlet/R & G rehearsals and to train as teachers of

Terzopoulos’s method. They spent the month of July in Athens studying at Attis: three other Hothouse company members have studied in Athens on their own over the past two summers. Terzopoulos’s rehearsal process is almost entirely on the feet. Rehearsals begin with training for 90 minutes to two hours before moving onto the text. “I need the liberation of the body, the free body. If the body is blocked, the voice is blocked, it’s impossible to start.” When working on the text, “I don’t use the training literally. Sometimes I have a concrete idea for the actor. If the actor is open, we can do improvisation, but with a target—not an abstract improvisation. The improvisation will show me the actor’s capacity, his concentration, how they use the body, the voice. I have a concept before I start, but I forget my concept. I never say, ‘This is the scenography, you go here, you go outside, you come inside, now it’s very quick, now it’s very slow.’ All the time I’m connected to the feeling of the actor, and he has to follow my feeling. It’s a collaboration with the actor. I don’t try to explain everything. Tragic texts are very simple. I need fundamental energy; I need the actors to be spontaneous; I need them to deliver the text without description. For me, rhythm is very important, and I need the actors to handle the rhythm of a violent, urgent situation. It’s always an emergency; it never stops. We don’t talk about characters; we don’t talk about roles. How do you interpret the mania in The Bacchae? It’s impossible to be a character in The Bacchae. You have to bring this emotion of trance, of ekstasis, in your body. You cannot interpret it.” For Terzopoulos’s frequent collaborator, Etel Adnan, an Arab American poet, what makes his approach to tragedy distinctive is “the belief that we each are inhabited by the past, by our ancestors, participating in a collective memory that is stored not only in the mind but also in the body. He gets closer than others to the original vision of the ancient authors. He does not look for symbolism or metaphors, but rather to that ancient Greek realism, which also encompasses the gods…The ‘body’ is itself caught between two worlds: the conflict between humans, and the confrontation between humans and gods. Humans are therefore living under the double pressure of the natural and supernatural worlds…When performed, the written play becomes a sacred text, sacred because the performance makes its world explode into chaos, and into the following silent, final order.”

As Antigone continues rehearsal, the Hothouse company will begin meeting on Mondays. “We are going to adapt Theodoros’s method for our own training,” Blanka says. “We are using his physical and vocal exercises for our 90-minute-long warm-ups, which take place at the beginning of each rehearsal and company meeting. In addition to building physical and vocal flexibility, these warm-ups help actors get rid of what I call ‘the pollution’ from the outside world, and become present in the space and open to the creative impulses.” She has become convinced that this is necessary to the vibrancy she seeks in her productions. “Actors have to find that vibrancy in their bodies. That’s where their craft resides. Movement lives in a body, voice lives in a body, emotions live in a body.” Following the training, she expects the company will also “improvise and explore texts for future productions. Later, I’ll be inviting into the process new directors, who’ll have a chance to work with the company members on texts they are interested in and who will be also learning about the actors’ techniques and the physical style we’re developing. As with Antigone, I’m also interested in developing international projects, when we can develop new work with another company. I’m now discussing another possible engagement with a company in Hungary. These new methodologies all support each other in exploring the possibilities of a ‘thinking body.’” There will also be further workshops for Philadelphia actors as well as the internal Hothouse work. In addition to Toussaint and other master teachers, the two actors sent to Athens during summer 2015 will become teachers of Terzopoulos’s method in the U.S., and the Wilma hopes to offer paid classes taught by them. This is ambitious work, and requires much work and imagination to fund and produce. The Wyncote Foundation, Pew Center for Arts and Heritage, and Independence Foundation have all provided generously in support of productions, workshops, and travel. The Knight Foundation is supporting workshops by master teachers for the next two years. Coordinating a production involving both international and American actors in this fashion took much work as well: visas for the three Attis actors were not approved until the beginning of the second week of rehearsal. But Blanka persists. “If our mission is to create live, adventurous art, we have to invest and create the best possible circumstances for the art!”

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MICHAEL JOHN GARCÉS MAKING WORK IN CONTEXT OF COMMUNITY INTERVIEW BY

LISA TIMMEL

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In 2012, Michael John Garcés (center) directed the first Hunger Cycle play, Café Vida, Cornerstone’s collaboration with Homeboy Industries + Homegirl Café exploring the intersection of food, gang culture + rehabilitation PHOTO John Luker

for Woolly Mammoth Theatre. Garcés is the recipient of the Princess Grace Statue and the Alan Schneider Directing Award, and an alumnus of New Dramatists. How Garcés worked his way to helming one of America’s most innovative, multicultural theatre companies is a tale of incorporating the different theatre traditions and approaches that he learned through work in the United States, Mexico, and Colombia. Over the summer, Garcés sat down to talk with longtime friend and collaborator Lisa Timmel. LISA | We have known each other for so long, but as I read through your résumé, I remembered some amazing work that we’ve just never talked about. Let’s start with your experiences growing up in an ex-patriot community. You grew up in Colombia. MICHAEL | I was born in Miami. We moved to Colombia when I was five or six, and I lived there until I returned to go to college at the University of Miami. LISA | And your folks were there a little longer? MICHAEL | They were there at least four or five years longer, and then they wound up in Chile for 10 or 15 years. LISA | A lot of times when you ask a theatre person about how they got into theatre, they say, “Oh, my mom took me to Broadway shows.” One assumes that you and your mom were not hopping on a jet plane to see a Broadway show every year, so how was it that you got into the theatre in the first place? MICHAEL | I went to an American school in Colombia. I was a pretty quiet and shy kid but had an opportunity to be in one of the school plays because somebody dropped out. I was probably in sixth grade when I did that first show. I wound up loving it and doing it more and more. It was just a way to shine. LISA | Do you remember the type of theatre you saw? MICHAEL | I remember—quite vividly—going to see a production in high school that made a huge impression on me. I saw Bent and Waiting for Godot by professional companies in Colombia. And once I was skipping class or something and hid in the English department storage closet. Out of sheer boredom, I read Death of a Salesman. That made a significant impact on me, too. Up until I saw Bent and Waiting for Godot and read Death of a Salesman, I had no idea that plays were much more than Agatha Christie mysteries and Little Mary Sunshine. Those are pretty formative experiences. LISA | Did that spark an interest in working in theatre or was that an intellectual interest? When did the idea of a career start to take hold?

Cornerstone Theater Company Artistic Director Michael John Garcés has been described as “a force of nature” and “more political, more multicultural” than almost any other director in America. He is also known as a playwright and has authored California: The Tempest and Los Illegals for Cornerstone; Points of Departure, which premiered at INTAR in New York City; Acts of Mercy; and others. He recently completed a workshop at the Telluride Playwrights Festival of a commission

MICHAEL | Honestly, during my senior year of high school, I was much more interested in being in a rock band. The guitar player, the other guy in my band, and I wrote songs together. There was a big self-produced senior project where you took a month off school and did something or studied something related to your professional aspirations. I made a play with two other students. We had to find a theatre, so we built one in a bar where they let us produce the play. We designed it, mounted it, did the marketing, and ran it for a week. I think that experience really shifted my thinking towards what the possibilities were but also the power of theatre. Audience members spoke about being very personally affected by the work. FALL 2015 | SDC JOURNAL

Most of my American friends were evacuated from the country when Pablo Escobar and some of the other drug lords of the time threatened to kill 10 American citizens for every Colombian who was extradited when the Colombia congress approved extradition. The American oil companies and the embassy pulled out their nonessential personnel, which included all families, so my school went from a fairly diverse, international school to mostly Colombians. My family wasn’t particularly identifiable as American, so we stayed. My father is Cuban and I didn’t have an American last name. I grew up with Lou Moreno, who I brought to INTAR and who is now its Artistic Director, and we have been lifelong friends in part because we shared so many of the same experiences. We were somewhat anomalies: we were both Latino and fit into Latino society, but we were both Americans with Spanish surnames. I wasn’t quite Colombian, but I wasn’t quite American, so to speak. LISA | I think an interesting aspect to your biography is living at that intersection. You have a WASP mother and a Cuban father; you’re living in Colombia and you’re American, but you’re not living in America. Can you talk a little bit about how those various identities and traditions molded together to create an identity? What did you choose to keep? What did you choose to let go of? MICHAEL | There’s a generation of contemporary Colombian novelists coming to prominence right now who are writing about, or in the context of, what I would call the transnational condition as integral to their identities as South Americans and as writers.

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This very much resembles the world in which I grew up, very specifically Colombian, but not at all folkloric or “exotic”; very urban, and very influenced by a multiplicity of cultures. Certainly American culture. And one participates in all of these cultures actively, without really differentiating, so that the notion of national identity is in question. In many ways, the writing and some of their rhetoric is in response to how Gabriel García Márquez’s writing and what has been labeled “magical realism” has been received and misconstrued through the years. Their writing is also in response to a society that has been permeated by a culture of violence for several decades. Writers such as Santiago Gamboa and Juan Gabriel Vásquez are taking on the theme of having grown up in Colombia during a time of extreme violence, of civil war, and yet not having been directly affected by the events. They take on politics and war from an oblique, very personal angle. They are exploring the experience of coming of age during a time of war, and the very real psychic trauma of that, the impact it has on shaping who one becomes, even though one’s childhood is, on the surface, a perfectly banal, middle-class upbringing. I never really thought about it before reading these books. How growing up in a place where violence and corruption were endemic might have had an impact on my sense of self. In retrospect, the people in my world became used to the events that occurred in this context—a classmate’s father is kidnapped, there’s an explosion downtown, a political assassination down the street. People tend to “normalize” their current situation unless in direct danger. I think it must [be] what it’s

like for many people living in areas directly affected by wars the U.S. is participating—and has to a large extent instigated—in the Arab world, but outside the actual combat zones. I’ve been thinking a lot in terms of how growing up in that context impacts a person’s sense of place in the world. My sense of it. Never quite believing that anything is permanent, uncontested. Never quite landing. You always are a little bit “observing.” It’s possible that’s simply the contemporary, postmodern experience. But I think growing up in the context of pervasive violence has had a specific and very real impact on my work and perspective. LISA | You left Colombia and came to Miami for college in 1985. In what ways did Miami affect your development? MICHAEL | Miami was the city I knew in the United States before I moved here. It’s a very transnational city: there’s a Cuban world, an American world, folks from other countries like Haiti, Nicaragua, Colombia. It was really a city that was not quite American. The city was really fractured and troubling in interesting ways. Right before I got to Miami, it had one of the highest murder rates in the world. There was a lot of drug money pouring through. Because of my experience in Colombia, I was aware of it, but it didn’t shake me the way it shook my friends. My training at the University of Miami was about being in a pretty traditional conservatory program. In fact, I think I was being trained to have a completely different career than I have had, to be, perhaps, in the chorus in a Broadway show. Their motto was

In 2013 Garcés directed Plumas Negras, by Member Juliette Carrillo, a collaboration with the community of Alisal in East Salinas, California PHOTO Kevin Michael Campbell

“our graduates work.” I got a very solid training that was all craft. You learned how to go out and audition and get jobs. Which is not a bad thing! About a month after I graduated, I came right to New York. LISA | I remember that you came to New York as an actor. Was there a production that you feel really changed the course of work that you were doing? Where something clicked and you thought, “Oh, this is what I want to be doing?” MICHAEL | When I got to New York, I was pretty lucky with a couple of things that happened in the first few years. Early on, I was in the chorus of Mac Wellman’s Crowbar that Richard Caliban directed for En Garde Arts. Crowbar was a site-specific work written for the Victory Theater on 42nd Street. The audience sat on the stage and saw the play through the perspective of the actors, and that made for surprising, exciting theatrical experience. The plot had a fractured narrative and tested how much to break the language and keep the audience engaged. The whole experience exploded my notions of text, theatre, and direction, and was really transformative in terms of my understanding of what some possibilities of the form are. I might not have stayed in theatre if it hadn’t been for that production. At the same time, I met Tom O’Horgan at INTAR Theatre. I assisted him on a revival of the Spanish playwright Fernando Arrabal’s The Body-Builder’s Book of Love. Then he did a revival of his production of Futz! that I saw at La Mama and Forty Deuce at Theater for a New City. Talking to Tom and working with him expanded on what I thought that Crowbar

experience was for me. Both of those helped set the course of the kind of work I wanted to do. I also got to be in one of the original readings of José Rivera’s Marisol at INTAR. It was originally commissioned by INTAR, and this was an early reading. I just happened to be around, and they pulled me in to read stage directions. That was a mind-blowing experience. So, those are all things I saw in New York in the early ’90s that helped me define what I was interested in and what was possible, to use and to push against, to think harder. LISA | You acted more, early on, and you also were a playwright, but you also worked a little bit more as a director. How has the acting experience informed your process as a writer and your process as a director? MICHAEL | Well, definitely early on, even in the ’90s in New York, I was acting here and there, and it was going okay. I loved the process of being in rehearsal, but it wasn’t feeding me. LISA | We were talking about it one day, and you said, “I really don’t like myself when I’m acting.” MICHAEL | I didn’t like having the need for approval. I started doing a lot of solo performance work, and that was pretty satisfying. But even then, you don’t have the perspective you get from stepping outside it, the ability to compose the performance and have control over its rhythm. Which is why directing was ultimately what I wanted to do.

I was also being drawn into projects where I could be generative, where I was able to fulfill the vision that was coalescing for me, where I was as much of the process as of the final product. I think, from being an actor, I got the gift of understanding, respecting, and admiring what actors do and the ability to speak in a language that is useful to them. I occasionally get on stage to do a stage reading or something, just to keep myself honest, remind myself of the difficulty of performance. I deeply respect actors who, over the course of a lifetime, fully pursue their craft. It clearly wasn’t for me, but I think it’s given me some of those tools. LISA | There are three institutions you spent a lot of time at that contribute to the path of your résumé: INTAR, Woolly Mammoth, and Cornerstone. How did you first get involved with INTAR and what did you learn there as a young artist? What were the challenges faced by Latino artists working in New York City? MICHAEL | Max Ferrá, the then-Artistic Director at INTAR, was the person who really acted as a mentor to me. Max was concerned about what he perceived as a dearth of young Latino directors. I think he recognized in me a tremendous desire and the will to work. Max gave me a couple of smaller opportunities, liked what I did with them, and started to give me bigger ones. I think he respected that I had been making work on my own and had that “I’m going to make it happen” gene. While at INTAR, I really started asking the question of what it meant to be Latino and to be a Latino artist. I wanted to make work FALL 2015 | SDC JOURNAL

that was based on my lived perspective, but I experienced the quandary of identity-based politics: people want one identity to work well for all kinds of people. All kinds of people from all sorts of backgrounds, countries, ethnicities are Latino, right? We don’t even all speak Spanish. What does it mean? What, specifically, is that commonality? How does being in New York affect that? I was working with artists of all kinds, from all different backgrounds: was that Latino art or not? The artists that we worked with didn’t want to be limited by one notion of what it means to be Latino. Trying to sort of think about that and in the context of INTAR was complicated and really interesting. I think there are challenges. There are assumptions made about the kind of work Latinos make. I think that remains a challenge because when people are looking for Latino plays, they’re looking for plays of “that type.” Some of that gets defined by your ethnicity. At INTAR, we found audiences and professionals would come in and did not feel the play felt “Latino” if it didn’t have certain things in it. But I also think the joy of that is the ability to push against it.

obliged to respond to that aesthetically. That feels like America to me; it feels like the world. When I’m not in the presence of that kind of diversity, I feel like I’m in a big bubble. I feel like there are plugs in my ears and I can’t quite hear. Here, you don’t feel that way, and I love that. But that diversity in and of itself is a challenge, in terms of defining the context in which we are working. We make theatre with communities: how do we define that group, and their commonality, without somehow limiting the diversity of that very community? We fall into mistakes. We make assumptions about what the community is or might be, consciously or not, and get called on it. And those assumptions get blown up, as do our assumptions about the aesthetic strategies, and that makes the work thorny, difficult, and exciting.

MICHAEL | Yeah, absolutely. It was exciting and enjoyable to do. Friction is a major challenge, but it’s also an opportunity, right?

I think that has led me in my work to be wideopen to what happens in the room versus having a really locked-down, preconceived notion of what the piece is going to be. The Cornerstone process confronts you with your lack of control. You never know who will show up, who you will cast and work with. So, how do you turn that uncertainty into an opportunity instead of a problem? Presence, responding to the moment. I think that has been a lot of what I’ve learned working here, and that’s been invaluable to me as a director certainly.

LISA | I wonder if the ultimate impact of that experience is about learning to live and sort of love the restriction. But then you carry it forward.

LISA | Yeah, it’s that lesson about the control and relinquishing it. What are the most important elements of storytelling for you as a director?

MICHAEL | I would say that’s a big one. But I also think part of what landed me at Cornerstone was the excitement of working with a company that deeply embraces and challenges itself to think about, and constantly rethink, diversity without being based in the context of a particular identity.

MICHAEL | I’m very, very interested in the structure of the script. I tend to be a very text-based director. Structure and rhythm are important to me. I don’t tend to see a script when I read it: I tend to hear it. I think about its rhythm and I think the structure is how you make that rhythm coherent. I’m looking for internal themes and repetitions, sort of like you would be with a piece of music; you turn to create a context for these different colors and rhythms of the piece, making sure there is internal consistency as you move forward.

LISA | Certainly, a lot of what you did in the New Work Lab at INTAR pushed really hard against that.

LISA | Los Angeles County is one of the most ethnically diverse places in the U.S., right? Queens and L.A. County. MICHAEL | The composition of our company at Cornerstone reflects that ethnic diversity, and that’s exciting. LISA | Can you articulate a little bit more of what living in that kind of diversity is like? Interfacing with different cultures? MICHAEL | Working in Los Angeles has been both affirming and challenging. It’s affirming in the sense that there’s so many kinds of diversity constantly in your face that you’re

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It’s been really great to be out here and to also be part of the family at Woolly Mammoth and to have that as a place to do a different kind of artistic practice and be pushed towards a different aesthetic and its own measures of rigor. Woolly Mammoth is a bit of artistic calm, a place where I’ve been able to create a body of work and a way of working in a more controlled environment, but at the same time I’m trusted and given space to take certain risks. It’s nice to have a home where, in

general, there is a culture of risk taking. I have two of them. LISA | You have a lot of different communities that you’ve worked in, or companies where you found and created community. What about the international communities where you’ve worked? Could you talk about when you were in Chiapas in 1999, what that project was and what was the experience like? MICHAEL | On a personal level, the work in Chiapas was the most crucial work I’ve done outside of the United States. I did two residencies there with an indigenous writers’ collective called Sna Jtz’ibajom, which means “the house of the writer” in the Mayan language of Tzotzil. They had a theatre company that had been performing for maybe 10 or 15 years before I worked with them. They were not professional theatremakers and had limited experience, but they performed and produced one play a year. They had collaborated with some folks from Bread and Puppet, and then for many years they had collaborated with Ralph Lee, the brilliant New York-based puppeteer. They would make giant puppets and were doing plays in outdoor spaces. At a certain point, they decided to do more acting. Ralph had seen my work and invited me out for coffee and said, “Look, I don’t know anything about acting. Do you want to go to Chiapas in the summer and work with these guys?” I said sure. I went down there, and we made a piece together. They were very much a collective: they made all the decisions through consensus and wrote the piece together. It was very challenging to make anything, to move things forward. But, at the same time, I learned a lot. And it was a very politically fraught time there. LISA | This was only a few years after the Zapatista uprising, right? MICHAEL | Correct, so I experienced that as well. We got in some fairly dicey situations a couple of times. There was a lot of tension around it and particularly tension around Mayan political and cultural expression. At the time, indigenous culture—Mayan culture— was equated with the Zapatista rebellion. The piece we created was the first piece that the collective had done that had explored Mayan creation stories. It also placed women at the center of the work. When they shared it with people, a lot of audience members took it a lot of different ways. In general, it seemed the audience found it very inspiring, but some people felt threatened.

The centrality of the female characters and performers impacted the spectators in a way that I did not anticipate when we were in rehearsal. I was largely unfamiliar with the politics or social context. I was just trying to solve dramaturgical problems and make the play happen. It was fascinating to experience the intense aesthetic response the audience had to, say, one of our actors performing, through movement and vocalizing, the act of birth. This was very shocking for some who were watching. People were moved, felt empowered, some were dismayed. I had not anticipated at all these kinds of reactions to the moment. I simply thought it was right for the story and for the production. This really got me thinking about making work in the context of community. Exploding people’s assumptions—and my own—is really exciting. I was thinking about how I can do that more often. I wasn’t really getting that experience in the more conventional theatre contexts, the LORT theatres that I was working in. It was doing the two projects I did with Sna Jtz’ibajom and Chiapas that surely led me eventually to Cornerstone. LISA | I remember you saying that led directly to Cornerstone because of the notion of being in the community and engaging the community where they are, where they live. You moved to Cornerstone in 2006 after many years of living in New York. Could you talk about some of the work that you created with Cornerstone, maybe that has traveled through the state? MICHAEL | We just did a project—the California Tempest project—that we performed in nine different communities across the state. Every summer, we do a geographic-based residency somewhere in California. We get to know the state better that way, and it has led us to explore the question of what it means to be a Californian. In each community, we work with groups of residents to hold story circles so we can collect and create stories, interview community participants, and to introduce an artistic practice. With California Tempest, we went back to communities we had worked with every summer starting 10 years ago. This helped create a larger conversation about the state— making theatre in the specificity of given communities and then, with this play, linking them to other communities to look at bigger questions. It also reinforced our commitment to create an ongoing narrative that takes place over time. We were picking up the narrative. Doing this kind of culminating project means that each play we’ve done is part of a longer journey, as opposed to a fragmented quilt of singular experiences. It was a continuation of

longer-term relationships and inquiries. That has been an ongoing, unfolding exploration for me here at Cornerstone.

ultimately did really well in the play, and I think it had a profound effect on his life. He wound up becoming very active in his community.

LISA | Is there a big difference in your thought process for Cornerstone or any of the other places where you work, or is it pretty much the same trying to push the open inquiry as long as possible?

LISA | Have you continued to travel in Latin and South America? Have you done any more work down there since Chiapas?

MICHAEL | There are different challenges, and Cornerstone’s rooms are much more chaotic. It’s not a very precious environment. People bring their dogs and kids to rehearsal. You just have to find a way to find your center and create within that. People bring more emotional baggage into the room with them when they’re not coming out of the theatre culture. The reality is that in any theatre process, you’re working on compromises with your colleagues all the time. At Cornerstone, the complexity is added to by community concerns. You’re just trying to negotiate all that to come up with the best aesthetic product that represents the best compromise—the best collaboration. That’s the challenge. LISA | I remember you stepped into Los Illegals pretty late in the run. MICHAEL | I did. I had to jump on stage for multiple roles early in the run. Los Illegals was one of my first shows at Cornerstone; we did it in 2007. I wrote the script, and it was directed by Shishir Kurup, a Cornerstone company member. It’s based on Lope de Vega’s classic Fuente Ovejuna and tells the story of migrants making their way to the U.S. and the life they are trying to make here. It was part of our cycle of plays exploring justice and how laws—in this case, immigration and labor laws—shape a community. I was working on this project with un- and under-documented day laborers and domestic workers, as well as immigration activists. Many of our community members were under a lot of pressure—economic, political, etc. Many of them were separated from family and trying to make their way in a very new culture that often does not seem at all welcoming. One of our community members was having some personal problems. He was really angry because he was having trouble getting services for some of his health issues. We tried to help. He started acting out his anger in rehearsal, arriving late and being disruptive, and ultimately did not show up for the first performance. So I got on stage and did the role. The next day, he came and wanted to be in the play. So we put it to the community, and it was a long, hard conversation, but they finally decided he could continue, as long as he agreed to change his behavior. They challenged him to step up and he did. He

MICHAEL | I recently led a master class on directing at the National University in Colombia. During that trip, I also led a set of community-engaged art-making workshops for theatre professionals and another for activists. Being at the National University was a big deal because politically it’s contested territory. It’s a free university—or virtually free university—and it’s considered an excellent university, but when I was growing up, it was often shut down or otherwise affected by political turmoil. It was really exciting to work there—to be at a place that is respected as an important place for the development of craft and people’s education. For the culminating class, we created site-specific, devised pieces all over the campus. Some of the work that the students created was fantastic. I had the privilege of being there during the big Festival Iberioamericano de Teatro de Bogotá and saw a lot of outstanding work, particularly from Latin America. The work I saw was often oblique in relation to the contemporary political situation but deeply connected to sources of violence in ways that were sophisticated, funny, and disturbing. LISA | Has what you were seeing there had a big influence on what you’ve been creating? MICHAEL | Absolutely. Much like the novelists I was telling you about, the work was, on some levels, new and exciting and at the same time very familiar. There are commonalities in experience and perception, but they’re responding to it aesthetically in ways that are new to me. It’s frightening to experience work that is familiar yet frightening in unexpected ways. It definitely has pushed me to make work that is sort of braver and bolder. LISA | Are there other things that you would like to see brought more to prominence in the U.S. or things that we should be looking towards Central and South America for? MICHAEL | I think too many theatres, whether commercial or not, are stuck in this place where they’re not making work that’s relevant to where they are and to the people who are seeing it. I start to question why it exists. I think as artists it is our job to make theatre that’s relevant. Why wouldn’t we want to?

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The (Long-Running) Path Unwinding: How Directors and Choreographers Maintain Long-Running Musicals on Broadway and Beyond BY LAURA

MACDONALD, UNIVERSITY OF PORTSMOUTH

INTRODUCED + EDITED BY ANNE

FLIOTSOS + ANN M. SHANAHAN

fter the forum on “The Relationship between the Academy and the Profession” that inaugurated our first issue of the SDC Journal Peer-Reviewed Section (PRS), the editorial board invited leading international scholars writing on the arts of theatre directing and choreography to provide our initial set of essays. In this issue, we are pleased to publish the following piece by Laura McDonald, Lecturer in Musical Theatre at the University of Portsmouth and a prolific scholar in the field. This inaugural essay serves as an example of practice-based scholarship, focusing on historical trends in practice and application of technique and theory in the field. We hope these first essays inspire authors working in and thinking about our professions to submit pieces in the future. For detailed submission guidelines, please see page 51.

“The musical seems as washed out as an old Polaroid snapshot that has blanched with age,” Peter Marks wrote in his review of the Broadway company of Les Misérables in 1996, following the announcement that a dozen cast members would be replaced (“Act IV”). Co-director John Caird had visited the nearly decade-old production with producer Cameron Mackintosh, and they deemed it in need of rejuvenation. New York Times critic Marks concurred, observing in his review, “The show is a wan, labored imitation of the landmark musical of a decade ago, an oddly static production drained of passion and emotional sweep” (Marks, “Act IV”). A sense of urgency was missing, and Marks placed the blame not on the performers giving bland performances but on “the production team responsible for insuring that the show…remains close to what it once had been.” He wondered if keeping a long-running musical close to its opening night standard was an impossible task, or if megamusicals like Les Misérables faded away rather than died.

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For Cornelius Baltus, the current resident director on the London production of Disney’s The Lion King (a sixteen year-old production), keeping long-running musicals fresh and engaging for new audiences is no impossible task but rather his full-time job—and has been for nearly two decades. “A resident director puts on a spectacle that is created already, and the main task is to keep it in the same shape, as if it has been just yesterday a premiere,” Baltus explains. Marc Bruni, an experienced assistant and associate director now helming Beautiful: The Carole King Musical, echoes Baltus and says one of the main challenges in directing a long-running musical is “[m] aintaining energy and the illusion of the first time” (Bruni). Twenty-nine years after the first production of The Phantom of the Opera opened in London, a 2015 performance of the current German production in Hamburg (in the second year of the revival’s run) had such energy and excitement that it seemed as though the international mix of performers was unaware the musical had ever been performed before. The performances, some by understudies, were so thrilling that it might well have been an opening night. While Stacy Wolf recalls a “curiously unambitious and passive” Christine Daaé, “mostly in a daze” on Broadway and on tour, in Hamburg, Lauri Brons’s Christine had a backbone, was spirited and manipulative, and drove the musical’s narrative (153). The Hamburg resident director, Marcel Meyer-Landgrebe, and those supporting other companies of Phantom adhere to original Phantom director

Harold Prince’s direction, Prince explains, “but should also pay attention to the strengths and weaknesses of their actors” (qtd. in Flint).1 Wicked’s director, Joe Mantello, similarly discusses his desire to react to new companies and performers in the musical, even years after he directed the original Broadway cast: “What we try to do is instill this sense of ownership to every company, that it’s not a replication but that there’s a form there…within that we really want it to be infused with their own personalities, their own sense of humor” (“Wicked”). Indeed, when Marks re-evaluated Cats, Miss Saigon, and Phantom following his return visit to Les Misérables, it was specific performers he singled out, wondering “[w] hether someone has been cracking the whip, or the shows are simply more attentively cast” (“5,001”). Prince, Mantello, and Marks recognize the variations different performers bring, and the range of work achieved by the production supervisors, associate and resident directors, and leading and supporting performers in these longrunning musicals. Theatre scholar Dan Rebellato takes a different view of shows such as Phantom, focusing on the longrunning megamusical as a dehumanizing machine in which “directors…use little of their training or experience, as they are merely supervising the reconstruction of a show that already exists” (Theatre and Globalization 44). Jonathan Burston, another widely cited expert on the circulation of megamusicals, recounts how “globe-trotting artistic staff ‘directed’ performers on matters pertaining to blocking, gesture and interpretation with new and profoundly alienating levels of precision” (162). Suggesting that directors of new companies of long-running musicals are not using their skills unfairly reduces the talent, labor, and experience of many of the diverse directors who maintain hit musicals year after year. Baltus’s and Bruni’s reflections on their leadership positions, and the high energy of the German Phantom, illustrate the potential for musicals to engage audiences decades beyond an originating cast’s opening night. This article draws on conversations with Baltus and Bruni to explore the work of resident directors and offer a more nuanced

understanding of the ongoing life of longrunning musicals beyond their original productions. Their approaches to re-creating and sustaining musical theatre staging, and examples from other long-running musicals, will help establish that although the resident director maintains another director’s original work, he or she must deploy a diverse range of tools and strategies, combining creativity with personnel management, to offer audiences around the world an opening night experience again and again. Archiving a Repertoire of Musical Theatre Directing While Miranda Lundskaer-Nielsen has considered some directors of long-running musicals in her study, Directors and the New Musical Drama,and Jessica Sternfeld has explored the music and visual spectacle defining megamusicals in her monograph

OPPOSITE

Beautiful table read directed by Marc Bruni (left) with Liz Larsen, Jake Epstein, Jessie Mueller + others PHOTO Jenny Anderson ABOVE

Cornelius Baltus, resident director on London production of Disney’s The Lion King © Stage Entertainment / Morris Mac Matzen

The Megamusical, neither scholars nor critics have taken into account what these long runs have created—namely a repertoire of musical theatre directing. Cameron Mackintosh and Disney regularly celebrate achievements in the length of the runs of their multiple musicals and productions. Yet despite such persistence and distribution, scholars primarily have

concerned themselves with the visual spectacle of long-running musicals and their marketingdriven success as global commodities. Former Broadway performer Susan Russell analyzed her own experience in the ensemble of The Phantom of the Opera in a 2007 article on musicals as “simulations of live theatre,” which has been frequently cited by scholars as the chief source on the mechanics of long-running musicals (97).2 Russell reports: “[W]hen it comes to replicating the performances of human beings, a technique, a methodology, and a system of checks and balances must be put in place to control a live actor.” Similar systems, she writes, “are found in every corporate theatre production on Broadway” (101). Scholars have accepted Russell’s narrative as a blanket statement on the day-to-day running of these musicals. Wolf writes in response, “Generations later, actors have no knowledge of the original purpose of or motivation for blocking choices, pieces of stage business, or singing style” (158). Such a disconnect has not, however, been the rule. In discussing Phantom’s associate director, Arthur Masella, Harold Prince explains, “We think almost like one and the same person” (qtd. in Flint).3 More than trafficdirecting the umpteenth cast through blocking and cues, resident or associate directors must connect the latest performers to the impulses and intentions that first developed a given musical. He or she must become an archive of a repertoire of musical theatre directing. In sustaining the work of Prince, Julie Taymor, Nicholas Hytner, or Trevor Nunn, they learn firsthand from the inside of the original staging, consequently maintaining a repertoire of musical theatre directing. “We learn and transmit knowledge through embodied action, through cultural agency, and by making choices,” Diana Taylor urges in her seminal work, The Archive and the Repertoire. “Performance, for me, functions as an episteme, a way of knowing, not simply an object of analysis,” Taylor explains (xvi). One of the most prolific repertoires of musical theatre directing has not only not been analyzed, but it has not been sufficiently acknowledged as the repository of practical musical theatre knowledge it is. FALL 2015 | SDC JOURNAL PEER-REVIEWED SECTION

“How does an established theatre career underline the success of a megaproduction, if at all?” Susan Bennett asks in her discussion of tourism and commercial theatre. “And how does working in one of these shows underwrite and sustain the pursuit of a theatre career?” (427). Bennett’s important questions might be answered through a closer look at the resident and associate directors’ relationships with the established theatre directors mentioned above. The strength of the original staging helps make long runs possible, and the salaries the established directors receive may subsidize less lucrative theatre work in future. The residents and associates who continue to transmit the original staging also have established careers that qualify them to sustain these productions. The knowledge and stability that working on long runs offers them can lead to further professional opportunities. “I do see Roman Polanski as my mentor and Julie Taymor as an inspiration,” Baltus explains. He credits them for lessons in timing and precision as well as allowing him to bring in his own ideas and observations. After years of maintaining Polanski’s original staging as both associate and resident director, Baltus directed his own new Vienna version of Dance of the Vampires. Setting a new production of that musical in Russia prompted an invitation to adapt and direct an operetta at the St. Petersburg Theatre of Musical Comedy, where the tables are now turned and Alla Semak works as an associate director, maintaining Baltus’s production of Hollywood Diva.4 Assistant? Associate? Resident Director?: WHO DOES WHAT ON

LONG-RUNNING MUSICALS?

“A performance gets set and usually has to be repeated—and repeated as well and accurately as possible,” director Peter Brook (himself a director of Broadway musicals) notes. “But from the day it is set, something invisible is beginning to die,” Brook suggests, proposing five years as the longest period a piece of staging could survive changing styles and outside influences on actors (18). To stave off the dying Brook identifies and to achieve accuracy, long-running musicals—whether on Broadway, in London’s West End, or around the world—depend on staff such as Bruni and Baltus to maintain performances year after year. As Bruni explains, “They are really in the trenches doing the day-to-day work, and their work is critical to the longevity of a show” (Bruni). Broadway director-choreographer Kathleen Marshall confirms: “You have to have a good team in place…it’s a hard thing on Broadway to keep a long-running show going” (qtd. in Cramer 134). Musicals typically have dance captains who maintain the work of a choreographer and may also perform in the production. They often work as assistants to

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the choreographer, noting the choreography for a given musical, but also become a living archive, embodying the choreographer’s style. Veteran Broadway performer Gemze de Lappe is a well-known re-creator of Agnes de Mille’s iconic choreography, setting it for regional and international productions well into her nineties. Director Gary Griffin worked with her in 2013 at the Lyric Opera of Chicago to recreate Oklahoma! and considered de Lappe “a link to the original intent of the production” (Rousseau). Likewise, Gwen Verdon toiled not only as a star in Bob Fosse musicals but also helped to maintain his work on Broadway and on national tours. When a national tour or new sit-down company is formed, the original director of a musical may be in charge of staging the production, but this can also be delegated to an associate director, who may already oversee other productions of the same musical. The associate director will have learned the production from the original director, noting shifts in energy as well as the original intention of the show (DiPietropolo). Bruni says there is a great deal of communication; as an associate director on long-running musicals, he was in constant contact with the original director, and now, with the tables turned, he is in close communication with his associate director on Beautiful. Setting up new casts in the London production of Legally Blonde, Bruni recalls working with the local resident director and says, “The goal is to pass on as much of the original information about why the choices were made the way they were and make the actors feel comfortable and confident in their performances” (Bruni). As a resident director observing the setup of the new company or a new cast by the associate, Baltus says, “You can hear and listen to the depth of the storyline.” The resident then takes on the responsibility of maintaining the run, communicating regularly with the associate or original director, including during regular checkup visits. Baltus welcomes such ongoing engagement with associate directors. “[B]eing so strongly involved in a show, of course you get a bit blind sometimes, and it’s nice when somebody from outside comes in and says, ‘Oh, why is this happening?’ or ‘Why do we not see that anymore?’ or “Have you thought of…?’ and that’s just really great. And you get an inspiration and you continue” (Baltus). Just as performers feed off of each other’s energy and offerings on stage, so too do the directors who keep long-running musicals running. Bruni adds that, along with participating in casting replacements, a resident will “watch and note the show with an eye toward keeping it fresh and vibrant” (Bruni). If a long-running production participates in a press event, the associate director or resident might be called upon

to package a performance excerpt, making decisions regarding what will be performed, adjusting it as needed, and preparing the cast. It’s in the Details: MAINTAINING

LONG-RUNNING MUSICALS VIA DIRECTORS AND BIBLES

In his discussion of long-running megamusicals in the context of globalization, Rebellato describes the impact of producer Cameron Mackintosh on British theatre in the 1970s and his desire for audiences everywhere, whether seeing a regional tour or the London company, to “have the same high-quality experience as first audiences did” (Theatre and Globalization 41). Rebellato likens this approach to franchises producing standardized McDonald’s hamburgers and calls these musicals “McTheatre” (“Playwriting” 99–100). While Mackintosh may have been raising the standard for touring productions in Britain, Michael Bennett and Bob Avian implemented changes in the United States in the 1970s following the unprecedented success of A Chorus Line. National tours in the U.S. traditionally cut down the physical production of musicals for ease of transportation and to make a show accessible to different-shaped theatres, but as Bennett lamented in a 1977 interview, “It’s always bothered us terribly when we’ve worked on road shows and we look up at the stage and we’re missing things[,] and we know that these people are seeing less than we wanted, or than we once had” (Bennett and Avian). As a result of A Chorus Line’s profile and success, “What you see in New York is exactly what you see when you see it anywhere else because we are co-producers and we demand the standard of the show because the show is about Broadway,” Bennett explained. In practice, this means, “Our touring company has two sets. One set goes ahead of the other and is set up before the cast arrives…And that is a very expensive proposition to fulfill,” Avian noted. Achieving such exacting standards requires experienced staff like Bruni and Baltus. Bruni assisted Broadway directors such as Jerry Zaks and worked as an associate for more than a decade on musicals such as Legally Blonde, Anything Goes, and Nice Work If You Can Get It. Originally from the Netherlands, Baltus performed in musicals throughout Europe. In 1996, he was cast as a swing in the Steven Pimlott staging of Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat in Essen, Germany. When the production’s resident director left, Baltus was asked what the company needed. “Out of my intuition, I said, ‘Maybe somebody who is watching and telling the people what to do and especially what they should not do, because that’s always the problem.’” The creative team asked Baltus to do just that,

and he was catapulted from the ensemble to resident director. He stayed in that position for four and a half years and credits his multidisciplinary background with helping him succeed. “I danced, I sang, myself…and now it’s great because now my eye is not only touching a singer or an actor or a dancer but the whole picture,” Baltus explains. All of the theatre professionals who discussed their work for this article noted how important it is for a resident director or choreographer maintaining another practitioner’s work to pay attention to detail. Baltus emphasizes the need to make a “bible” for each new project in order to document and track detail. “You really make a staging book, an act one and an act two staging book, with everything the original director has said” (Baltus). A former member of the Broadway company of The Phantom of the Opera and now musical theatre scholar Russell discusses a show bible more critically as a source of control rather than of detail or inspiration: “The document, referred to as ‘The Bible,’ contains the original staging of Phantom, as well as notes about the original performances. The Bible is present at every rehearsal, and its writings reinforce specific images. These images include facial expressions, vocal inflections, physical bodies, gestures, and choices of movement” (Russell 100). Standardized Commodities, or Leaving Room for Actors to Play? Russell’s experience of enforced replication is in line with what British actor Henry Goodman experienced when he became the first replacement to play Max Bialystock in The Producers on Broadway, taking over in 2002 from Nathan Lane, who originated the role. Goodman, perhaps ironically, sought to channel the screen performance of Zero Mostel, who created Max in the original film of The Producers, from which the musical was adapted: “I just wanted the freedom to deepen my character, make him darker, more like Zero Mostel” (qtd. in Gans). Fired after nearly a month of performances, Goodman spoke to the press about feeling like a commodity and suggested the producers of the musical simply wanted a clone of Lane. The assistant directors putting Goodman into the company did not seek his alternative characterization but instead focused on having him repeat timing, blocking, and characterization (Riedel, “Fired Actor”). Antoinette DiPietropolo has fulfilled a range of director and choreographer positions on regional productions and national tours and explains that the resident director’s or choreographer’s job is “to maintain the integrity of the original material and intentions that were expressed from the original director/

choreographer” (DiPietropolo). Susan Stroman’s staff were doing just that, and while she went on record calling Goodman “a wonderful actor,” Stroman also explained that “the producers have decided to pursue a different quality for the role” (qtd. in Pacheco). Understudy Brad Oscar was ultimately promoted to the leading role, having “received favorable notice from occasional reviews” (Pacheco). His humorous portrayal (according to the press) and Goodman’s darker approach illustrate the spectrum of performance possibilities within a long-running show; they also reveal the complexities of maintaining these musicals (Pacheco; Riedel, “Big”; Hofler). Oscar’s casting was seen by many as an “attempt to protect the show’s franchise” through consistency rather than variation—a priority for producers wishing to maintain the production’s more than $1 million weekly gross (Pacheco). While critics of megamusicals emphasize their industrial nature and perceived standardization, Baltus notes how actors also approach their work with a similar attitude, finding motivation in the paychecks they earn and the ability to support a family thanks to the stability. “It’s business. There is some show in it, but there is a lot of business in it” (Baltus). Delivering the same level and intensity of shows eight times a week makes it an industrial form, he says. “If you’ve given everything in the first show, and then you have to repeat it again? That’s rough!” Like any unsatisfied customer, musical theatre audiences do not hesitate to provide feedback, which resident directors must address. Emails about performers’ enunciation of lyrics or amplification are discussed. “They [Disney] would not invest in me if they did not think I could do something with the product,” Baltus observes, and he calls such quality control a good thing. Like Rebellato and Russell, Millie Taylor and Dominic Symonds, in their handbook for students, Studying Musical Theatre: Theory and Practice, credit the producers and management of megamusical productions with maintaining standardization. “The down-side of this process, as we’ve seen with workers in other industries, is to alienate them from creativity,” Taylor and Symonds suggest. “In the main, and especially as the complexity of moving scenery has been computerized, performers in large-scale spectacles have increasingly become cogs in the wheel; if they stand in the wrong place they are in danger of being hit by the moving flats,” Taylor and Symonds continue (106–107). Though this approach may be practiced by some production staff, other actors and directors have had different experiences in long-running musicals. While

Bruni has not worked on the most visually spectacular megamusicals, the long-running musicals he has supported have all featured complex scenery and computerization. He acknowledges, “[B]ecause the lighting cues, automation, etc. are all set, there are certainly parameters you need to work within.” Dancers sometimes find this easier because they are accustomed to being told “this is what it is,” he says, whereas “actors sometimes like to find their way and can be more resistant to a fixed structure” (Bruni). One of the challenges for Bruni as an associate director has been “dealing with an actor who wants to reinvent the wheel more significantly than the production will allow…I’ve found, though, that with a good show, actors thrive within the structure and enjoy getting to find their own moments within the guidelines” (Bruni). At a roundtable discussion on musical theatre acting, British actor Miriam Margolyes discussed playing Madame Morrible in the London company of Wicked. Carole Shelley had created the role on Broadway, and while Margolyes replicated her blocking patterns in London, she nevertheless made choices as an actor, deciding that Morrible fancied the Wizard, and pursuing that overall goal of a romantic relationship in every scene (Margolyes et al.). Simon Russell Beale participated in the same discussion and characterized taking on the role of King Arthur in Spamalot, created by Tim Curry on Broadway, as a pleasurable experience, almost a vacation, with much less pressure than originating a role. Like Margolyes, he recalled being directed to hit specific marks in keeping with automated set and lighting cues. “I used to think that the key to Arthur was the fact that deep down he knew he didn’t have a horse,” Russell Beale confessed (qtd. in Wieg). He found the impulse for his performance in Arthur’s fear that someone would tell him his horse, famously suggested by banging coconuts, was not real (Margolyes et al.). Though hitting the marks imposed by a large-scale, long-running musical, Russell Beale still developed his own character, illustrating the range of experiences actors can have working with the directors maintaining these productions. Eight "Live" Shows a Week Recognizing the strong audience responses to megamusicals in global production sites, and the fandom for particular performers, David Savran questions Rebellato’s comparisons to standardized fast food, pointing out, “A musical is not, after all, a hamburger, and consumers develop a much more active and complex relationship with a two-and-a-halfhour musical spectacle than with a Big Mac. The laboring bodies onstage produce not a

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thing to be ingested but an experience as elusive and polyvalent as it is ephemeral” (334). Audiences desire a different experience but of the same performance, Philip Auslander notes, and “the ostensible evanescence and nonrepeatability of the live experience ironically become selling points to promote a product that must be fundamentally the same in each of its instantiations” (52). As this article has tried to establish, it is the careful, sophisticated labor of the resident directors supporting these performers that continuously offers audiences an energized and engaging live experience of the same musical. That it is ephemeral makes these directors’ work even more important. Baltus calls the performers envelopes, explaining, “You get an envelope with a person in it, who is cast by the original director or the associate director…And so sometimes you get an envelope and you have to make—out of this person you don’t know—you have to make a performer.” Working with actors he or she may not have cast to develop coherent performances from an entire company, the resident director needs diplomacy, social skills, and psychological skills, Baltus and Bruni stress. Kathleen Marshall does not envy the staff who put replacements into an existing company. She emphasizes the need for performers “to see themselves in the mirror again, that’s what makes them feel like a company,” so beyond giving notes, she will get back in the studio with the company of a longrunning show (qtd. in Cramer 135). Reflecting on the replacement casts he has directed, Bruni insists, “I don’t ever want anyone to feel like they are being slotted into a machine, so it’s important that they have a process to find their way in” (Bruni). Director-choreographer DiPietropolo has been part of such a process as an associate and dance captain on national tours of musicals such as Annie and Ragtime. She explains, “When I was working with Martin Charnin or Liza Gennaro, they understand that you don’t put the people in the mold; you use their qualities to interpret the intentions behind the piece” (DiPietropolo). Baltus points out that his approach to working with actors is universal, and that he has set musicals with Americans, Russians, Dutch, South Africans, Brazilians, and Asians, stating, “You have to deal with the world…Every human being is the same, you have to deal with their insecurities, everybody has the same fights in life.” In the cast of The Lion King, he directs highly trained performers and untrained natural talents. The raw talent often comes with fewer insecurities, much like the children Baltus has worked with in Joseph and The Lion King. “If they would be aware of what they had to do, really aware, they probably couldn’t do it

anymore” (Baltus). Guiding children in a playful way is his strategy for achieving their best performances, without telling the boy playing Simba that he is the lead of the musical’s first act. The Lion King is an intense drama, telling the story of the prodigal son, a story to which audiences can connect, but only if, every day, it is performed with the same intensity. “And that’s a challenge for me, to watch out that the actors are not flattening out, blubbering their lines, and that they play with each other and are aware of each other” Baltus admits. “You have to create a lot of awareness. I always say don’t perform in your own bubble; you’re on stage with people, wake up. When you play with a cover, he or she will do it differently; be open, be ready, grab that energy” (Baltus). Different City, Different Company, Different Energy In Germany, Baltus was assigned to make The Lion King a more authentic show, given its South African inspiration. Based in a contemporary theatre on the Elbe river in Hamburg, he worked to increase the number of South Africans in the company. Sitting in a Covent Garden coffee shop around the corner from The Lion King’s home at the historic Lyceum Theatre, he observes that in London, “It’s a global story…which is a bit different than in Hamburg.” Baltus enjoys the diversity of the company, which he sees as a reflection of the multicultural city. Marshall has also noted differences between London and New York performers: London is a smaller pool of people to pick from. There are some wonderful dancers and incredible people. But I found, especially when we did Kiss Me, Kate, that we had to really pull it out of the dancers. It was very athletic and grounded style of choreography. At that time in London, the jazz was much more lifted and cool. It was huge effort to get people to bend their knees and really get into the floor. (qtd. in Cramer 135) Though directors like Baltus and Marshall experience differences between casting pools, sites of performance, and audience demographics, do these ultimately influence the company of a musical, in one city versus another? Bruni highlights the simple fact of a different group of performers and suggests, “Even with so many of the same elements, people are not robots, and so the energy of a new company always has its own character.” Indeed, the ensemble of Bruni’s London company of Beautiful features performers with noticeably different body types and dance technique than their Broadway counterparts. Josh Prince’s choreography, consequently, looks different, as the dancers’ lines, speed, and

energy culminate in different performances. Upon arriving in London in 2015, Baltus went to visit “the neighbors,” the other musicals running in the West End, “just to see what’s going on, and then to see, where is The Lion King?” Just as he asks his performers not to work in a bubble and to engage with each other, Baltus recognizes that The Lion King does not run year after year in isolation but rather in the company of other productions, productions that may affect the industry, audiences, and, The Lion King. Musical theatre scholar Bruce Kirle suggests, “As of now MacIntosh’s [sic] musicals are regarded as universal, but universality is mythical and consequently has a pitifully short life. Text and performance are products of given cultural moments; when those moments change, what seems closed magically opens” (10). Along with the potential impact of changing cultural moments outside the theatre, every show has its own culture. Bruni explains: “How much freedom actors are given and how they find their way into a performance can vary. With the best stage managers, residents, and associates, actors can feel protected and confident in their performances and understand why they are being asked to do something a certain way.” Multiple productions of musicals are made possible in part by original direction that holds up with the passage of time and that engages a range of audiences, but skillful directors are also needed to continue connecting performers to those creative impulses that first suggested a musical might be worthy of an extended run and multiple large audiences. While the global circulation of large-scale musicals is necessarily industrial, with design elements reproduced and original staging maintained through blocking and technical cues, the liveness of theatre and the individuality of performers means variations will occur. Offering audiences exciting musical theatre experiences, whether at the original production or the latest in a string of international productions, is not achieved solely with crashing chandeliers, flying helicopters, or exotic animal puppets. Crucially, it is the result of the support and leadership provided by skilled dance captains associate and resident directors who make eight energetic shows a week possible, year after year. ENDNOTES

1. Author’s translation. 2. See Wolf (2011), Burston (2009), Rebellato (2009), Taylor and Symonds (2014). 3. Author’s translation. 4. Hollywood Diva is adapted from Ralph Benatzky’s 1936 musical comedy Axel an der Himmelstür (Axel at Heaven’s Gate).

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SDC JOURNAL

PEER-REVIEWED SECTION | FALL 2015

SDCJ-PRS BOOK REVIEW

CREATING MUSICAL THEATRE: CONVERSATIONS WITH BROADWAY DIRECTORS AND CHOREOGRAPHERS By Lyn Cramer REVIEW BY

CATHERINE WEIDNER,

Ithaca College

NEW YORK: BLOOMSBURY METHUEN DRAMA, 2013. PP. 283. $33.20 PAPERBACK.

Lyn Cramer’s Creating Musical Theatre: Conversations with Broadway Directors and Choreographers fills a need not met by the most standard collections of interviews with theatre directors. Artists whose work focuses on musical theatre can now turn to Cramer’s book for insight into the intricacies and unique challenges that face directors and choreographers of musical theatre. Reading indepth interviews with leading stage directors can help illuminate the artistic process and define a generation of theatre visionaries. Twelve interviews provide a wide variety of approaches to transitioning between creative roles, collaborating with actors and production teams, and scheduling and managing budgets. In all, the interviewees explore ways to achieve artistic success directing musicals. This volume includes interviews with (alphabetically) Rob Ashford, Andy Blankenbuehler, Jeff Calhoun, Warren Carlyle, Christopher Gattelli, Kathleen Marshall, Jerry Mitchell, Casey Nicholaw, Randy Skinner, Susan Stroman, Sergio Trujillo, and Anthony Van Laast. The interviews convey a diversity of opinions and approaches, covering topics ranging from textual interpretation to process. These artists vary in their opinions about, for example, how much preparation is required of the director, or whether reading music is a necessary directorial skill. However, they are in agreement about the value of collaboration, the necessity of a strong work ethic among the creative team, the need for effective leadership in the rehearsal room, and the value of a reliable and innovative support staff. The book has potential value to nascent choreographers, professional actors and directors, researchers, and all students of the craft of musical theatre. Kelli O’Hara (the author’s former student) states in her foreword that Cramer’s interviews achieve what all great teachers aim to do, “[to] open a window to

their process, and give us all a chance to be better prepared” (ix). The book is equal parts page-turner biography, directing textbook, and celebrity-artist feature. Scattered among the cautionary tales and success stories are guideposts: dos and don’ts for casting, the value and limits of research, and pet peeves that artists face in the creative process, such as Andy Blankenbuehler’s pet peeve: “I cannot stand it when people wear gym shoes in rehearsal!” (45). The effect of this collection is inspiring, informative, and full of precious insider information. Cramer’s questions elicit a range of responses that come across like rich roundtable discussion rather than a series of individual interviews. The conversations consistently illustrate the collaborative roles and driving forces it takes to get a musical theatre production from opening night to a life on the road. Cramer’s preface discusses “how luck is made by work ethic and reputation,” two things over which individual artists have complete control, especially in a business where so little control exists (x). Yet throughout the book, interviewees express gratitude equally to directors who came before them and to their own assistants or associates who helped them throughout the development of a production and their careers. Without exception, each artist relays how much he or she has learned and continues to learn from observing others, and from having been mentored and encouraged by other directors and choreographers. One of the great joys of reading the interviews is seeing credit given to other musical theatre artists who have often collaborated with the directors. For example, Susan Stroman calls swings “the smartest people in the room” (213). Christopher Gattelli refers to Wendi Bergamini as his “genius dance captain” for South Pacific and states how lucky they were “to have such a competent and left-brained dance captain” (102–103). Several interviewees share stories about those who helped them shape their approach or the work ethic that helped them achieve success. Rob Ashford mentions directors such as Michael Mayer, Scott Ellis, and Mark Brokaw, who “gave me really important information, knowledge, humanity” (19). Sergio Trujillo champions “the unsung hero of dance in terms of musical theatre: the dance arranger” (232) and speaks highly of working with Des McAnuff, who guided him “to make sure the choreography was character-driven.” He also states, “We never wanted it to seem as though the actors were dancing. Instead, we wanted it to feel as if the characters were dancing” (239). All interviewees are in agreement on points such as treating others with respect and maintaining a positive reputation. As Susan Stroman states, “Your reputation is everything” (221).

The interviews reinforce the value of regional theatre’s contribution to the development of new work, not simply as an out-of-town tryout but as an incubator, a place to create and devise solutions, to imagine a new world or reimagine a classic. Rob Ashford states, “The old notion of out-of-town tryouts is quite different from today’s process. Today, you workshop new shows in regional theatres like La Jolla. The great thing about regionals is that you are under the theatre facility’s umbrella…a machine to assist in all aspects…in the early stages of producing a musical.” Ashford goes on to express the challenge of creating a new work in today’s digital environment: “Now, after your first preview in Poughkeepsie or Anywhere, United States, you’re on the internet and you’re reviewed by intermission. Regional theatre is still the best place to develop a show” (12). Susan Stroman attests that the regional try-out process isn’t always so smooth: “[W]e did two readings of Scottsboro Boys, and then we moved to the Guthrie Theater where it was a huge hit. We moved to Broadway and we had trouble selling tickets” (217). These individual voices come together to express the value of developing the productions outside the commercial pressure of Broadway. Even with these similarities, the background and training of these artists differ widely. Some (Blankenbuehler, Carlyle, Gattelli, Nicholaw, and Skinner) began dancing at age three or were choreographing by age ten. Others (Ashford, Calhoun, Marshall, Mitchell, Stroman, Trujillo, and Van Laast) explored other fields such as law, athletics, liberal arts, literature, biochemistry, and medicine before they found their calling. Whether climbing the ladder from dancer to dance captain, then from to assistant/associate choreographer to choreographer, or seeking alternative ways to get their work seen, such as Dance Break (Nicholaw) or Broadway Bares (Mitchell), these artists make it clear that, for them, grit and persistence win over luck. While these reflections offer a valuable assessment of current conditions in the fields of directing and choreography, the interviewers do not address their vision for the future of the profession. The tectonic plates of Broadway have now shifted, given recent convention-breaking, critically acclaimed productions like Hamilton and Fun Home, and it would be interesting to learn how the game has changed for these artists. Creating Musical Theatre is an essential resource for aspiring directors and choreographers. Throughout the book, the interviewees affirm the roles of the director and choreographer as storytellers first, hitmakers second—reinforcing a hierarchy that privileges art over commerce. They all prioritize storytelling over the precise

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FALL 2015 | SDC JOURNAL PEER-REVIEWED SECTION

SNAPSHOT Paul Weidner in Estonia and Haiti BY PAUL

WEIDNER

Paul Weidner spent three months in 1993–1994 at the Noorsooteater in Tallinn, Estonia, directing a production of Sam Shepard’s Buried Child. Some 10 years earlier, he supervised a production of Neil Simon’s Barefoot in the Park at the Theatre National d’Haiti in Port-au-Prince.

FROM THE ARCHIVES

WORKING ABROAD EXCERPTS REPRINTED FROM THE JOURNAL OF THE SOCIETY OF STAGE DIRECTORS & CHOREOGRAPHERS, INC., SPRING/SUMMER 1994 VOL. 8 NO. 1.

My opportunity to work in Estonia came through personal contacts—U.S. friends living in Tallinn. I visited them in November ’93, met people at the theatre, and discussed the possibilities of my guest directing an American play. I suggested several plays and sent them copies, and they chose Buried Child and commissioned a translation of it into Estonian. We set up a schedule, and a year after my first visit, I started rehearsals. The Noorsooteater reminded me of small theatres in the early days of U.S. regional theatre. It had a small, capable staff and production crew. The actors worked very much the way American actors do. The major difference was that the rehearsal period was three months long, with two weeks on stage with set, lights, and costumes before any performance. This is a rotating repertory theatre, so many of the actors were performing at night; we worked an average of four hours a day. The foreignness of the play and the language complexities made some of that long rehearsal period helpful, certainly in the beginning. But I didn’t really need all that time. Used to that schedule, the actors worked slowly, at least compared to American actors. It took some adjusting on my part. I don’t speak Estonian, and that language isn’t related to other European languages except Finnish and Hungarian. The theatre had on its staff a woman who spoke fairly good English who served as my interpreter. She was extremely capable of conveying the sense of my directions and, more important, the spirit; I came to trust her implicitly. Working through an interpreter, however good, does exclude little offhand comments and witticisms; things become rather deliberate. I always spoke in short sentences and waited for her to translate rather than overloading her. The theatre is quite important in Estonia— people go on a regular basis and go back to see shows they like. It’s a rotating rep system, with about 10 plays in the rep. The ticket prices are very low—$I.00 to $2.00, a hangover from state-supported theatre under the Soviet

SDC JOURNAL

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regime; the rub is that there’s no more socialist state around anymore, and the theatres are in a crunch. I was paid by the theatre—a per diem and a fee. Housing and airfare were donated by Western business concerns. Estonian currency is convertible only in certain internationally equipped banks. My advice to someone who goes to work in Estonia is to take lots of photographs, pictures, and especially American music with you. Thank God I’d taken a lot of country-and-western cassettes—they loved the music. Be ready to adjust to the longer rehearsal period; you can be relatively laid back and unpressured. In poorer theatres, such as the one where I worked, be ready for makeshift rehearsal conditions (i.e., a rehearsal room smaller than the stage, the absence of a stage manager during the rehearsal/room work). Learn a few basic words in Estonian (or whatever)—you get points for trying, and it does make things easier.

EXPERIENCE IN HAITI For the work in Haiti in 1983, I was recommended by George White of the O’Neill Foundation to the United States Information Service and their program of sending U.S. directors abroad to stage American plays. The Theatre National d’Haiti was not well organized; it was more a group of actors led by the leading actor. They were given space in the French Cultural Center for two performances, and we rehearsed also in donated space. I took on the job of stage manager myself; the actors scrounged props and costumes. There was no problem with censorship, but then the play, Barefoot in the Park, was hardly censorable. I understand that the group had run into some problems with the government, which at that time was the Duvalier regime, and wanted to do something completely apolitical. The country is so poor, only the wellto-do could afford tickets. This was in 1983— God knows what’s going on there now. In Haiti—and other third-world countries—be ready for anything. Or maybe I should say be ready for nothing except a group of talented and dedicated actors—they have no money, nothing to work with. Be ready to pitch in for beyond the usual demands made on a director. Or don’t go.

THE NEW EXPERIMENTAL THEATRE, VOLGOGRAD The Truth About Blanche BY JOSEPHINE

ABADY

On May 18, 1992, Josephine Abady participated in an SDC Foundation roundtable entitled “Working Abroad.” The following is an excerpt from that discussion. In March of 1991, the director of the New Experimental Theatre of Volgograd came to Cleveland as a part of a sister cities program designed to promote understanding and set up economic and cultural ties. The New Experimental Theatre is the drama theatre of Volgograd. Under the old Soviet Union system, there were many theatres in major cities—a music theatre, an opera theatre, a drama theatre. So the main drama theatre in Volgograd had taken on the name of the New Experimental Theatre, and the reason for the name is interesting. Volgograd is southeast of Moscow and one of the larger industrial centers. It’s not unlike Cleveland in that it’s in the middle of the country, it’s industrial, and it’s not very beautiful. The Volga region is kind of like the Midwest of Russia. Under the U.S.S.R. it had become one of the poorest regions—it got the last of everything: goods in the department stores, food, culture. Over the years Volgograd’s theatre had deteriorated— the people in the theatre had become so ancient that the theatre was starting to shrink and die. The citizens of the region petitioned the governor about it and said, “We have to have culture here. You have to do something about it.” So he recruited a man named Otar Djangisherashvili, who is a Georgian, which means that he was an outsider to begin with. Otar came to Volgograd under the condition that he could do some things that had never been done before. First of all, he laid off the entire company, even though it was a very, very old company. That was unheard of seven years ago in Russia. Second, the actors he gathered for his new company were hired on contract for only five years. They would not be promised a life job, which was standard practice. Third, the company itself would get to keep some of what it made at the box office. It would not take its full subsidy from the state. It would try to make its way on some of what it earned. So, in an odd way, it was attempting to become the first commercial theatre in Russia. Otar fought very hard for those things and, in fact, his insistence on being able to survive partly on the box office is probably the thing that enabled his theatre to survive when the political system changed and lots of other theatres folded.

Otar came to Cleveland as part of the sister cities exchange, and at the Playhouse we were doing two plays about South Africa. He was incredibly impressed that what he considered a capitalist, upper-class theatre would do plays about black people, about the struggle in South Africa, and that there would be lots of black people in the audience. He was fascinated by this, and he invited me to come back to Volgograd and direct a production of A Streetcar Named Desire. The first Russian production of Streetcar was done in Moscow in 1971. Tennessee Williams was encouraged under Brezhnev because it was thought that his plays were a wonderful reflection of the decadence that capitalism causes. But at the end of Streetcar, Blanche goes off with the doctor to an asylum—and people who were going to asylums at that time in the U.S.S.R. were considered to be political dissidents. So the censors would not let Streetcar have that ending. This landmark production, which is still in the repertoire, ended instead with Mitch entering at the last minute, rescuing Blanche, and taking her up a flight of steps into the white light, which I guess represents Heaven. So, our production in Volgograd was to be the first Russian production with the original ending as Williams wrote it.

NO QUESTIONS ASKED What can I tell you about my experiences in Volgograd? Suppose someone said to me, “Would you like to go to a city where it’s 110 degrees every day, there’s no hot water for six weeks, there’s very little food, nobody speaks English, and the country is on the verge of a revolution?” I’d say, “I don’t think so.” But since I didn’t know any of those things before I got on the plane, I went. I worked in Russian with a translator. Ironically, that was by no means the most difficult part. Glasnost had only been in existence for five years, and you cannot change the minds and hearts of a people in five years. So there was a great amount of distrust. When you say to someone, “Do you have a question?” no one ever asks a question. To ask a question means you are a troublemaker. People don’t ask questions in that country. Furthermore, nobody ever looks anybody else in the face. Under the Soviets, people kept their eyes down—it was a way of not causing trouble, of not having your thoughts be seen. Now, the only way you can direct theatre if you can’t speak the language is to make eye contact. I’ll speak English to you and you speak Russian to me, but you must look at me so that we can learn about each other through our eyes, through our body language, through the timbre of our voices. It took me almost three weeks to have anyone

look at me. I was constantly having to touch people’s faces and hold them to have them talk to me. And that kind of physicalization was something with which they were very uncomfortable. There was also a great deal of resistance to working with a woman director. In this group of actors, not one of them had ever worked with a woman director before. I solved this by teaching all the men in the company to play poker for the poker scene in Streetcar. Then we played for money, and I won! I didn’t have any more problems.

APPETITE FOR THEATRE The production was, I think, very timely. Blanche DuBois is a person trying to break out of her own skin, trying to break out of her aloneness. In the Soviet Union, at that time, and in Russia today, people are trying to break out, reach out, get information. That aspect of the play coupled with the war between men and women, which seems to exist in every culture no matter what the language, was universal enough to make the play work. I had a company of 23 actors. The play has 12 roles. I used the rest of the company to evoke New Orleans. We had transvestites, we had two prostitutes, we had three sailors who did crossovers between the scenes to say “American streets.” We did this play in six weeks. Russian theatres usually do a play in 15 or 16 weeks. It takes that long not because the company is exploring the work, but because they don’t work with the kind of pacing we are familiar with. There’s an old saying in Russian: “We pretend to work and you pretend to pay us.” You have to remember that no matter how long you work or how hard you work, you get paid the same, whether it’s excellent or not. So getting things accomplished is very difficult. There was no wood. If we could get wood, we couldn’t get nails. There was no material. If we could get material, we couldn’t get dye. If we could get shoes, we couldn’t get stockings. There were two people at the theatre who did nothing all day long but work the black market. It took an enormous amount of work to put this production up. It was very well received. On opening night, 1,000 people showed up at the 700-seat theatre. They put them all in. They don’t have fire marshals there. On the second day, 60,000 tickets were sold for the run of the show. I must say, in spite of the hardships, never in this country have I ever felt as celebrated as an artist. I never felt there was an appetite for theatre here the way there is in Volgograd. And once in my life to have that experience was worth whatever hardship I encountered. FALL 2015 | SDC JOURNAL FOUNDATION SECTION

SNAPSHOT Tokyo, Japan BY JOHN

DILLON

John Dillon continues his work in Japan and is now associate director of the awardwinning Institute of Dramatic Arts in Tokyo. He makes his home in Seattle and where he’s the founding president of the service organization Theater Puget Sound. He served for sixteen years as the artistic director of the Milwaukee Rep and for six years as the director of the theatre program at Sarah Lawrence College. He was awarded SDC’s Extraordinary Contribution Service Award during his time on the union’s board of directors. (Bio current as of September 2015.)

TRANSLATION When I’m working in Japan, I have two interpreters on either side of me. One is there to handle the verbal communication between the cast and me; the other helps me follow the text. My script is laid out with the English text on one side and the text in phonetic Japanese on the opposing page. The other interpreter then uses a pointer to follow the dialogue in English as the actors speak it in Japanese, giving me, in essence, subtitles. Further, each line on both sides of the text is individually numbered so that when I give a note, the translator can instantly tell the actors to which moment I am referring. And, if possible, we make a tape of the actors reading the script before rehearsals begin so that I can start to get a feel for the text as it will sound in Japanese. That, used in conjunction with the phonetic Japanese edition of the script, means that it’s not too long into the rehearsal process before I’m able to follow along with some ease.

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execution of a move, though the latter has its own intrinsic value. The insights within the interviews serve as confirmation for seasoned professionals that some of the best ideas come from collaborators who feel valued and treated with respect. If used as a textbook, it reminds college professors that teaching values and ethics matters as much as teaching performance skills. To students of musical theatre, the book presents cautionary tales of the benefits to leaving their egos and attitudes at the door. For professional performers, musicians, and practitioners of musical theatre, it provides an oral history illustrating that information, preparation, and relationships are at the core of the creative process. Cramer’s collection of interviews takes its place on the shelves among The Director’s Voice (both volumes), Jon Jory’s Tips: Ideas for Directors, Helen Manfull’s collection In Other Words: Women Directors Speak, and Peter Brook’s The Shifting Point, all books that offer insight, advice, and inspiration to directors and choreographers at any stage in their career.

DIRECTING STYLE

PEER-REVIEW: PATH

Repetition is the key to perfection in most of the traditional Japanese arts, so while some of the younger actors are sometimes more open to improvising business, some of the older actors assume it’s the director’s job to tell them what to do and when to do it. In addition, they tend to assume that written stage directions are mandated behavior, not suggestions or optional guidelines for the director, and can get confused when they’re not followed.

WORKS CITED

CULTURE CLASHES Without question, the most difficult problem for me was how to balance my understanding of a uniquely American play like Death of a Salesman or Cat on a Hot Tin Roof with the very different values that Japanese actors bring to the project. There’s no point in my being there if I try to “adapt” the play to a Japanese context (making Willy into a Japanese traveling salesmen or Big Daddy into a landowner from southern Japan); but, at the same time, I must leave myself open for a take that a Japanese actor might have on a moment that could be unusual but not inconsistent with the meaning of the play. (Thus, when my Japanese Willy tells his sons that he’s been fired, it was full of rage but also a heartrending pathos as he loses face in front of them.) At the same time, I wouldn’t let the actors playing the servants in Cat blacken their faces, explaining that since the Japanese actors playing the Caucasian roles weren’t using white face, it would be inconsistent for the actors playing servants to use face makeup—which saved the complicated discussion of “black face” as an instrument of racial stereotyping and discrimination for another day in rehearsals. One thing that made my life easier on Cat than on Salesman was my greater involvement in the translation. This allowed me to eliminate stage directions or scenic descriptions that I wasn’t going to follow to the letter as well as tip me off in advance to some of the elements that were going to be more difficult to explain to a Japanese cast. In Cat, for example, we were able to use the rich variation in status found in the Japanese language to clarify relationships. My favorite moment, along this line, was during Salesman rehearsals, when Miss Forsythe enters Frank’s Chop House, and Happy says, “Look at the binoculars on that one!” Puzzled, Happy wanted to know if perhaps this meant she wore particularly thick glasses. My explanation, of course, meant the costume designer needed to augment the costume of the slender actress playing the role…

BOOK REVIEW

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Auslander, Philip. Liveness: Performance in a Mediatized Culture. London: Routledge, 2008. Print. Baltus, Cornelius. Personal Interview. 3 June 2015. Bennett, Michael, and Bob Avian. Dialogue with Michael Bennett and Bob Avian, Theatre on Film and Tape Archive, New York Public Library for the Performing Arts. 24 Oct. 1977. Bennett, Susan. “Theatre/Tourism.” Theatre Journal 57.3 (2005): 407–28. Project MUSE. Web. 24 Aug. 2015. Brook, Peter. The Empty Space. London: Penguin, 1972. Print. Bruni, Marc. Personal email. 6 Aug. 2015. Email. Burston, Jonathan. “Recombinant Broadway.” Continuum 23.2 (2009): 159–169. Taylor and Francis+NEJM. Web. 24 Aug. 2015. Cramer, Lyn. Creating Musical Theatre: Conversations with Broadway Directors and Choreographers. London: Bloomsbury, 2013. Print.

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DiPietropolo, Antoinette. Personal email. 12 Aug. 2015. Email. Flint, Michaela. “Harold Prince.” MusicalsOnline.com. N.p., 2013. Web. 12 Aug. 2015. Gans, Andrew. “Actor Henry Goodman Discusses His Producers’ Firing.” Playbill. N.p., 16 July 2002. Web. 13 Aug. 2015. Hofler, Robert. “‘Producers’ Plot Thickens After Axe.” Variety. N.p., 15 Apr. 2002. Web. 18 Aug. 2015. Kirle, Bruce. Unfinished Show Business: Broadway Musicals as Works-in-Process. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois UP, 2005. Print. Lundskaer-Nielsen, Miranda. Directors and the New Musical Drama: British and American Musical Theatre in the 1980s and 90s. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008. Print. Margolyes, Miriam et al. Roundtable Discussion: Musical Theatre. How to Act Conference, Central School of Speech and Drama. London. 15 Feb. 2007. Marks, Peter. “5,001 Broadway Nights: Shows With 9 Lives.” The New York Times 17 Jan. 1997. NYTimes.com. Web. 19 Aug. 2015. “Act IV, Years Later: The Cast Battles Time.” The New York Times 5 Nov. 1996. NYTimes.com. Web. 12 Aug. 2015. Pacheco, Patrick. “Producers Pull Backing From New Star.” Los Angeles Times 16 Apr. 2002. LA Times. Web. 18 Aug. 2015. Rebellato, Dan. “Playwriting and Globalisation: Towards a Site-Unspecific Theatre.” Contemporary Theatre Review 16.1 (2006): 97–113. Taylor and Francis+NEJM. Web. 30 Aug. 2015. Theatre and Globalization. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. Print. Riedel, Michael. “Big Shows, Small Names: Brad Oscar Is the New ‘Producer.’” New York Post. N.p., 16 Apr. 2002. Web. 30 Aug. 2015.

Russell, Susan. “The Performance of Discipline on Broadway.” Studies in Musical Theatre 1.1 (2006): 97–108. IngentaConnect. Web. Savran, David. “Trafficking in Transnational Brands: The New ‘Broadway-Style’ Musical.” Theatre Survey 55.03 (2014): 318–42. Cambridge Journals Online. Web. 13 Aug. 2015. Sternfeld, Jessica. The Megamusical. Bloomington, IN: Indiana UP, 2006. Print. Taylor, Diana. The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2003. Print. Taylor, Millie, and Dominic Symonds. Studying Musical Theatre: Theory and Practice. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. Print. “Wicked—2013 Media Night.” YouTube. N.p., 23 Dec. 2013. Web. 24 Aug. 2015. Wieg, Chris. “Simon Russell Beale Webchat— Full Q&A.” The Guardian. 24 Apr. 2014. The Guardian. Web. 13 Aug. 2015. Wolf, Stacy. Changed for Good: A Feminist History of the Broadway Musical. New York: Oxford UP, 2011. Print. LAURA MACDONALD, Ph.D., is Lecturer in Musical Theatre at the University of Portsmouth, U.K. With William A. Everett, she is editing The Palgrave Handbook of Musical Theatre Producers (forthcoming in 2016 from Palgrave Macmillan). Her articles and reviews have appeared in Studies in Musical Theatre, The Journal of American Drama and Theatre, New England Theatre Journal, Theatre Research International, Theatre Journal, and Theatre Survey. She is preparing a monograph investigating the making and marketing of long-running Broadway musicals. She also researches cultural imperialism and postwar productions of American musicals in Germany, Austria, Japan, Korea, China, and the Philippines.

SDCJ-PEER REVIEW CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS Published quarterly by Stage Directors and Choreographers Society (SDC), this new peer-reviewed section of SDC Journal serves directors and choreographers working in the profession and in institutions of higher learning. SDC’s mission is to give voice to an empowered collective of directors and choreographers working in all jurisdictions and venues across the country, encourage advocacy, and highlight artistic achievement. SDC Journal seeks essays with accessible language that focus on practice and practical application and that exemplify the sorts of fruitful intersections that can occur between the academic/scholarly and the profession/ craft. For more information, visit: www.sdcweb.org/community/sdcjournal/sdc-journal-peer-reviews ANNE FLIOTSOS (Co-editor SDCJ-PRS) In recognition of her scholarly activity, Fliotsos has been named a Purdue University Faculty Scholar for 2013-2018. Her research is primarily in theatre pedagogy, women directors, and 20th-century Broadway Theatre. Edited and authored books include Teaching Theatre Today, American Women Stage Directors of the Twentieth Century, Interpreting the Play Script: Contemplation and Analysis, and International Women Stage Directors. ANN M. SHANAHAN (Co-editor SDCJ-PRS) is Associate Professor of Theatre at Loyola University Chicago, and serves as Graduate Program Director of Women’s Studies and Gender Studies. She has directed over 50 productions in academic and professional venues. Her recent scholarship on gender and space in directing is published in Theatre Topics, Theatre Journal and Text and Presentation, and a forthcoming anthology entitled Performing the Family Dream House: Space, Ritual, and Images of Home (U of Iowa). Shanahan is an Associate Member of SDC.

“Fired Actor Didn’t Provide Enough Yuks for the Bucks.” New York Post. 17 Apr. 2002: n. pag. Print. Rousseau, Caryn. “Choreographer Recreates ‘Oklahoma’ at 91.” The Huffington Post. N.p., 2 May 2013. Web. 13 Aug. 2015.

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n our age of I made choices social media, because I was very video conferencing, curious and I sought ACCESS | CONNECTIVITY | LEGACY and email, the act out opportunities of being in the to do new things. I room together—as got my Equity card a collaborator, swinging the third an observer, an national/bus and audience member— truck tour of Cats creates a different and for a while made and necessary kind quite a mini-career of energy. SDC filling in for injured Foundation exists “cats” in different for that energy, companies on tour, creating access most notably in and connection Hamburg. Filling in among directors as a dancer/singer/ and choreographers actor in Cats for a through couple months while observerships, someone healed up fellowships, public was, for years, how conversations, and I paid to study to community forums. be an actor in NYC. The work to make all Whenever money of SDCF’s programs got tight, I would happen is deeply inevitably get a call gratifying and never and be on the road BY ROBERT BARRY FLEMING | INTRO BY MEGAN E. CARTER more so than when again. Through we hear a story this experience, about the gifts of I learned that I SDCF’s programming. Robert has used his mentorship and curiosity in an artist’s journey. had more interest in exploring authentic Abbott Fellowship to reinvigorate his artistry movement than seeing how many pirouettes and find a new path in leadership. His story In 2010, a group of friends and colleagues of I could do, so I figured out early that dancing highlights the fact that there are infinite ways director Charles Abbott created a fellowship in the chorus was only a step toward to make a life as an artist and renews SDCF’s to honor him upon his retirement as Artistic something rather than a destination. deep belief in supporting directors and Director of Maine State Music Theatre. In choreographers at every stage of their careers. Chuck’s long career, he has helmed most Within a couple of years of that early of the great American musicals, as well as professional experience, I developed working orn in D.C., I was raised in Frankfort, having developed and premiered a number relationships with mentors like Ron Link and Kentucky, many miles away from either of new works, and has a deep understanding George C. Wolfe, who were formative, creative of the entertainment capitols of NYC or of the complexities and nuances of the influences on me. From my Stanislavsky and L.A. Yet, to my good fortune, my professor form. The goal of the Abbott Fellowship is Meisner training, I was trained to identify parents exposed me to the arts—concerts, to present gifted artists with active training excellence based on how realistic the work opera, ballet—which led me to a calling. (I in directing classic musical theatre. But was. Ron challenged that notion with his played Travis in A Raisin in the Sun at Kentucky Chuck’s vision reaches farther than that. meta-theatricality, as did George. My work was State University where, coincidentally, my late The Abbott Fellowship combines this very small and behavioral, and they both asked for father taught biology to George C. Wolfe, one specific artistic experience with his desire to performances with more size, metaphorical of my mentors!) Beyond that early nurturing support leadership development in nonprofit gestures in design and performance. George of creativity, I have had in the course of my regional theatres across the country. Following had a passionate, rough, but sophisticated 51 years the privilege of working with some a rigorous selection process, the Abbott and presentational aesthetic that I was drawn of the best in the business. I was on the Fellowship gives an artist the extraordinary to and incorporated into my work. The acting team producing Tennessee Williams’s Twoopportunity to assist an acclaimed musical in a George C. Wolfe show was heightened Character Play Off-Broadway with Amanda theatre director, who is also in an institutional while maintaining a deep authenticity. He was Plummer; acted in the Oscar-winning film leadership role, thereby allowing the fellow to the first great artist I heard say, “I don’t know” L.A. Confidential; played opposite Dave explore the workings of a regional theatre . with some frequency in the rehearsal room Chappelle on a not-so-successful sitcom (which seemed, at the time, at odds with his and opposite Tony nominee Lauren Ward Like most SDCF fellowships, the Abbott boldness and clarity of vision). I eventually in the regional premiere of Jeanine Tesori’s Fellowship can serve to launch an artist or, intuited that his repetition of that phrase beautiful show, Violet; dialect coached in many cases, allow an experienced artist was a mark of his enormous confidence. He the brilliant Mare Winningham at the Old to reinvent himself. Robert Barry Fleming trusted that his instincts were keen enough to Globe; and directed the inimitable Amelia received an Abbott Fellowship in 2012, and figure “it” out. Both Ron and George not only McQueen in Blues in the Night. I’ve gotten his long journey, which took many twists significantly shaped me as an artist but also to explore dramatic storytelling from many and turns on the way to the Arena Stage in helped me see myself as an artistic leader by perspectives, from both sides of the table. D.C., exemplifies the values of the Abbott asking me to take on more responsibility for Fellowship and of the goals of much of a production than just my own role as actor. ABOVE

PAYING IT FORWARD

SDC JOURNAL

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Robert Barry Fleming + Molly Smith Cameron Whitman Photography

PHOTO

I was approached to be dance captain for my Broadway debut, Stand-Up Tragedy, but resisted and declined, because I was determined to fit in the box of legit actor, not triple-threat actor-singer-dancer. When I got Young Jelly in Jelly’s Last Jam, I was again asked to be dance captain and just accepted that this was likely to be a part of what accompanied my pursuit of work in the theatre. After Jelly, George had me audition some L.A. actors for his production of Spunk. I began to resist the limitations my self-identification as an “actor,” a “dancer, ”etc. implied. I realized that I probably wasn’t going to fit in any of the boxes I was trying to stuff myself into. More importantly, I discovered that my resistance would serve me in the future, not only professionally in my work as an artist but also personally. It was a mindset that allowed me to think outside the box about ways I could contribute to an artistic enterprise. From the start of my training, I often found myself coaching, too. Dancing led to choreographing, acting to directing, voice work to dialect coaching, singing to teaching singing. A pattern was established. Along the winding road of my career, I ended up in academia, a tenured professor at the University of San Diego, where I eventually chaired the undergraduate theatre arts and performance studies department. I put down roots in Southern California and, in addition to teaching, served as a vocal and dialect coach at the Old Globe and La Jolla Playhouse, which proved to be a great way to be in the room and observe some terrific directors. My relentless curiosity continued to serve me, and that time strengthened my aesthetic and practical toolbox as a director. The death of my father in June 2011 led me to resign my academic position to care for my mother, who has Alzheimer’s. I moved us closer to our surviving family in the D.C. area. With that move, I felt as though I was starting over entirely. So when I saw the call for applications for the SDCF Charles Abbott Fellowship with Molly Smith on the Arena Stage production of The Music Man, I jumped. I used the application to reflect on my process as a director, and that essay got me an interview with Anita Maynard-Losh, associate director on most of Molly’s musicals, and then with Molly. That fateful meeting with Molly and the receipt of that fellowship was an incredible gift. The fellowship was framed as an observership opportunity, but both Anita and Molly trusted in my ability to serve a larger role on The Music Man as a true assistant director. We discussed the work that took place in the room each day—Molly shared her methodology in working with actors staging in the round and gave me the opportunity to take my own notes and share them with her and the actors when appropriate. I witnessed the deep amount of

respect and confidence she had in the actors’ ability to figure things out—things that I would tend to prescribe to the cast—and I utilized much of what I learned in The Music Man process on my production of Lucky Stiff, which I directed immediately after, to good effect.

like has been challenged and strengthened through this work. Simultaneously, I feel my previous experience and perspective equips me to keep pushing boundaries of what regional theatre can do and to plant seeds of new ideas that allow for us all to keep growing.

In 2014, two years after my Abbott Fellowship with Molly, I was hired as the Director of Artistic Programs at Arena Stage. That connection led to a job in which the full range of my varied career experiences are called upon. From scouting new work and commissioning playwrights to supporting actors, designers, and playwrights engaged by Arena and seeing that the day-to-day in the rehearsal room for our season shows is going smoothly, this is a role that gives me great joy. The internal and external interaction with personnel, collaborators, community partners, and the public is a remarkable and stimulating challenge and opportunity.

Growing up, I was reminded by my late father, a biologist, that diversity in an organism inevitably makes that organism stronger. I think that’s true for organizations as well. Coming into the Arena, I was heartened to find friends and colleagues like Seema Sueko, Lisa Kron, Lydia Diamond, Charles RandolphWright, Timothy Douglas, Cheryl West, and Robert O’Hara already engaged in meaningful ways by the institution. Their presence helped ground me in a new professional situation. It reminds me that Arena continues a commitment to an environment that is inclusive, diverse, and equitable, and looks to host artists who demographically mirror our local and national communities. Working with these and other remarkable artists since my arrival has helped me continue to grow as a practitioner of the arts. All of which supports my ability to facilitate the artistic ambition, creativity, and genius of our artists. That I get to continue my varied career learning from all of these dynamic theatre professionals and contributing to the American theatre in my birthplace feels like a generous quirk of fate for which I am immensely grateful.

Since 1998, Molly has ensured that Arena is a place of opportunity for many, regardless of race, age, or sexual orientation. Large institutions like Arena are rarely known for their extreme engagement with diversity, but Molly and her staff value inclusivity, so I, a middle-aged black queer artist who had just spent a decade in academia, was welcomed into an organization that may have otherwise left me unengaged. These details of my profile were not obstacles but attributes that could contribute to the diverse work force that Arena prides itself in. Molly’s vision of a theatre that focuses primarily on American artists and American work has, similarly, proven to be a way of thinking that is rather revolutionary. I find that so much of the canon and ethos that the American theatrical community draws from is unconsciously entrenched in a Eurobiased perspective. Challenging the gender, ethnicity, and race of whose stories get told is often met with hostility by some who feel “serious” theatre should look a certain way and be created only by certain kinds of artists— privileging the so-called “dominant culture.” Fortunately, Arena Stage has become one of the great regional theatres to reinvent classic works and develop and nurture new plays and musicals through a lens of multiplicity. It has been a dream come true for me to be an integral part of leading the season planning of this great institution and to supervise our casting, literary, dramaturgical, and audience engagement efforts, and the effort that I am especially energized by—overseeing the playwriting residencies of our American Voices New Play Institute and curating our Kogod Cradle Series, which hosts local and national artists providing resources and public showings of the work during a week residency at the theatre. I think my own sense of what cultural competency and artistic risk taking looks

CHARLES ABBOTT Artistic Director, guest director, sometimes director/choreographer for multiple productions at Alabama Shakespeare; Alley Theatre; The Alliance; 5th Avenue Theatre; Fulton Theatre; Maine State Music Theatre (20 years as Artistic Director); Music Theatre Wichita; Portland Stage; Houston’s TUTS, including the world premiere of Yeston/ Kopit’s Phantom and Follies twice; and Walnut Street Theatre (30 productions from Oliver in 1983 to And Then There Were None in 2015, including four world premieres, two Barrymore Awards, five nominations, and the Edwin Forrest Lifetime Achievement Award). Off-Broadway: I Forgive You, Ronald Reagan. He received the first-ever Directing DramaLogue Award for L.A. Opera’s Oklahoma!; he coauthored Games, produced in Toronto by Marlene Smith; a new book for Cole Porter’s Panama Hattie tour; and Not Just Kidstuff for The Alliance. Broadway and regional theatre actor: played over 1,000 performances as Cabaret’s Emcee beginning in the first national tour under Harold Prince’s direction. The Charles Abbott Fellowship is funded by friends and associates in recognition of his retirement from MSMT as Artistic Director. Thus far, it has allowed burgeoning directors to assist Artistic Directors of Pittsburgh Public, Arena Stage, Signature, Pioneer, and Hartford Stage during the production of American musical theatre classics. FALL 2015 | SDC JOURNAL FOUNDATION SECTION

THE SOCIETY PAGES SDC MEMBERS @ WORK + PLAY

On April 13–18, 2015, the Kennedy Center American College Theater Festival (KCACTF) in Washington, D.C., held the 2015 National Festival. Two student directors were awarded SDC Directing Fellowships LEFT TOP + MIDDLE

Jeremy Cohen participated in a master class with students from colleges + universities from across the country On May 19, Robert Kalfin was honored as a “Legend of Off-Broadway” by the Off-Broadway Alliance. Kalfin is the founder of New York’s Chelsea Theater Center. LEFT BOTTOM

Robert Kalfin BELOW

Members at the 2015 TCG Conference including Executive Board Member Chay Yew + Snehal Desai + Victor Maog, Orlando Pabotoy + Diane Rodriguez

SDC JOURNAL

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SDC's step+repeat at the fifth annual Members-Only Cocktail Hour TOP LEFT ABOVE

Staff members Jennifer Toth, Adam Levi, Randy Anderson + Kristy Cummings

TOP RIGHT

Bridget Leak + Laura Kepley

Tom Quaintance, Katie Lupica, Blake Robison, Lisa Portes, Steve Woold + Seth Gordon

From June 18–20, SDC staff attended Theatre Communications Group’s annual National Conference in Cleveland, Ohio. This year’s theme was Game Change and focused on diversity, inclusion + allyship. In conjunction with the conference, SDC hosted its fifth annual MembersOnly Cocktail Hour on June 19 at A Bar + Kitchen. Hosted by Executive Board Member Chay Yew + Member Lisa Portes, more than 50 Members from across the country mingled at the event. The Dramatists Guild Conference was hosted on July 16–15 in La Jolla, CA, with the theme “Writing the Changing World.” Featured artists included Stephen Schwartz, Lisa Kron, Marsha Norman, and Doug Wright. SDC Members pictured include Executive Board Member Christopher Ashley, Doug Wright + Executive Board Member Michael John Garcés

FALL 2015 | SDC JOURNAL

On July 31, SDC hosted a reception celebrating the official launch of the new SDC Journal Peer-Reviewed Section. The reception was part of the 2015 Association for Theatre in Higher Education Conference in Montreal from July 30 to August 2. TOP LEFT

Peer-Review co-editor Ann M. Shanahan + Executive Board Member Sharon Ott TOP RIGHT

Members of the SDC Journal Peer-Reviewed Section board: co-editor Anne Fliotsos, James Peck, Ann M. Shanahan, Thomas Costello, Kathleen M. McGeever, David Callaghan, Ruth Pe Palileo, Travis Malone + Emily Rollie On August 19, SDC Board, staff + Members of the SDC Broadway Negotiations Committee, worked into the pre-dawn hours during the six-month long negotiations with the Broadway League. BELOW

Mark Schneider, Benjamin Endsley Klein, Executive Board Members Evan Yionoulis + Michael Wilson, Counsel Ronald H. Shechtman, Executive Board Member Ethan McSweeny + Executive Director Laura Penn

SDC JOURNAL

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On September 27, SDC supported Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS by selling theatrical merchandise + “experiences” at the BC/EFA Flea Market. SDC raised $ 10,900 for the cause, $4,000 more than the previous year. SDC was in the top ten fundraisers this year. TOP LEFT

Gerald vanHeerden, Robert Schneider, David Charles, Neal Kowalsky, Jonathan Cerullo, Nancy Fisher, Jennifer Toth + Kappy Kilburn TOP RIGHT

Jonathan Cerullo, co-chair of the SDC Flea Team

September 19 marked Houston’s Alley Theatre Grand Reopening + gala. Artistic Director Gregory Boyd + actor Josie de Guzman celebrated the $46.5 million building renovation PHOTO Pricilla Dickson

FALL 2015 | SDC JOURNAL

IN MEMORY OF

MELVIN BERNHARDT

Legendary director Melvin Bernhardt began his directorial career at New York’s Cherry Lane Theatre in 1965 with a play entitled Conerico Was Here to Stay. Born in Buffalo, NY in 1931, he directed countless awardwinning productions both on and off Broadway and in the regions, including the Pulitzer Prize-winning plays The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds and Crimes of the Heart. Mr. Bernhardt won a Tony Award for Da and a nomination for Crimes. He also worked in television, most notably directing for Another World and One Life to Live. Mr. Bernhardt joined SDC’s Executive Board in 1982 and served as Secretary from 1988-90 and Vice President from 1991-93. Active until the end, Mr. Bernhardt passed away at age 84 at his home in New York City. He is survived by his husband, Jeff Woodman. In 1980, I was an artistic dogsbody at the Manhattan Theatre Club, where casting of the first New York production of Beth Henley’s Crimes of the Heart was underway. After an afternoon of auditions,

IN MEMORY OF MARK

I asked his opinion of a designer he’d worked with whom I was considering for one of my own fledgling efforts: “He was interested in making art. I was interested in giving the audience an experience.” We talked about the trouble he was having casting the role of the young lawyer in Beth’s play: “The fact that the character is a lawyer is nearly superfluous. We need a guy with the soul of a poet.” At that point, I had known Melvin for two years. He and my father

| FALL 2015

Directing Breaking The Code with Jamie Sheridan, Marian Seldes + Remak Ramsey at Berkshire Theater Festival, 1993

had had great success with Hugh Leonard’s Da, a small miracle of a play that ran for 700 or so performances at the now-vanished Morosco. But that afternoon, I wasn't Barnard Hughes' son. I was suddenly a colleague of the thunderously talented Melvin Bernhardt. We went our separate ways at 81st and Central Park West, and I walked on, inspired.

RUCKER BY JAMES BUNDY

I met Mark shortly after he graduated, when I was a first-year student, and he was SDC JOURNAL

HUGHES

the production’s director, Melvin Bernhardt, and I decided to walk west from the fantastically funky MTC headquarters on East 73rd Street and continue across the park. Were we in company 45 minutes? An hour? I can’t recall. But I vividly remember that stroll as an ambulatory master class in directing. Melvin was a walking/talking embodiment of all the paradoxes that are essential equipment for anyone interested in the strange racket of directing plays. He was practical and passionate, hardheaded and idealistic, rigorous and hilarious.

On August 25, theatre artists around the country lost a friend and collaborator: 56-yearold Mark Rucker. Since 2010, Rucker had worked as Associate Artistic Director at A.C.T. in San Francisco. That position followed 20 years as an Associate Artist at Costa Mesa’s South Coast Repertory, a theatre PHOTO Kevin Kopjak that he first worked at as a high school-aged usher while growing up in Newport Beach. Rucker was a beloved and valued member of the community at Yale School of Drama—from which he received an MFA in 1992—and Yale Repertory Theatre, where he returned many times to direct. Hours after news of Rucker’s death became public, James Bundy—dean of the Yale School of Drama and Artistic Director of Yale Rep—reached out to the Yale community and shared these thoughts.

BY DOUG

a newly minted and kindly alum who had recently directed a legendary YSD production of Stage Door. In just a couple of years, he was back at Yale, directing a luminous Twelfth Night (1995) that featured a swimming pool and Mark’s beautiful collaboration with my classmates, who adored him, as had their predecessors. His association with Yale Rep continued through Landscape of the Body (1996), The Cryptogram (1996), Measure for Measure (1999), The Imaginary Invalid (1999), Kingdom of Earth (2001), All’s Well That Ends Well (2006), The Mistakes Madeline Made (2006), Rough Crossing (2008), and A Streetcar Named Desire (2013). That remarkable body of work is dwarfed by the more than 20 productions—including world premieres by Richard Greenberg, Christopher Shinn, Annie Weisman, and Culture Clash—that he directed at South Coast Repertory, where he was an Associate Artist. In 2010, he joined A.C.T, where he directed Mr. Burns, a Post-Electric Play; 4000 Miles; Maple and Vine; Higher; Once in a Lifetime; Marcus, or The Secret of Sweet; The Rainmaker; and The Beard of Avon while teaching in the Conservatory. Mark also

directed at the Magic Theatre, Arena Stage, La Jolla Playhouse, Berkeley Rep, Intiman Theatre, The Old Globe, and Shakespeare Santa Cruz, among other theatres. His first feature film, Die, Mommie, Die!, won a special jury prize at the 2003 Sundance Film Festival. Mark’s extraordinary career can be ascribed not only to his rangy artistry, adventurous taste, and inventive spirit, but also to his tremendous charm and truly humane bearing, which led his many collaborators to cherish working with him. He had a magnificent sense of humor, and he was a deeply compassionate and kind man. I cannot think of a moment in all his time here at Yale Rep where Mark was anything other than gracious to every member of our community. I particularly remember his willingness to step in and take over direction of All’s Well from me when I was having open heart surgery. He arrived in New Haven within 48 hours of getting the phone call and saved that production both from my illness and from my worst ideas. I will miss him terribly, as I know many of you will, and I will treasure his memory and example always.

JOSÉ QUINTERO

“

1924-1999 The deeply sensitive and intuitive José Quintero is most known for

When you direct, you're after that shy, inner thing hidden in the woods of your being. But it is not technique that I was ever searching for, but rather the treasure of the blind heart.

his dedication to Nobel Prizewinning playwright Eugene O’Neill. His direction of The Iceman Cometh in 1956 has been credited with rekindling the world’s interest in the acclaimed playwright. Born on October 16, 1924, in Panama

”

City, Quintero was sent to Los Angeles City College, and later the University of California, to be educated. Despite his father’s wishes for him to enter medical school, Quintero was determined to pursue dramatic arts; he improved his English, gained a bachelor’s degree in 1948, and enrolled in the Goodman Theatre Dramatic School in Chicago. A year later he moved to Manhattan where he—along with Theodore Mann, Jason Wingreen, Aileen Cramer, Ed Mann, and Emily Stevens—founded Circle in the Square Theatre in 1951. Quintero directed a number of acclaimed productions at Circle, such as Summer and Smoke, Grass Harp, and Balcony, making him a major figure in the Off-Broadway resurgence that began after World War II. Quintero’s work not only elevated Off-Broadway theatre, but also his direction launched the careers of many celebrated actors, including Geraldine Page and Jason Robards. The director’s real legacy, however, lies in his deep connection to Eugene O’Neill, whom Quintero looked to as a father figure and thought his work singlehandedly transformed American theatre into a credible institution. From 1956 to 1996, he directed 19 productions of O’Neill plays, most notably Iceman and Long Day’s Journey into Night. Other notable productions directed by Quintero include Thornton Wilder’s Our Town and Tennessee Williams’s last play, Clothes for a Summer Hotel. PHOTO c/o

Billy Rose Theatre Division, The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, Astor, LenoxFALL and 2015 Tilden | SDC Foundations JOURNAL 59

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