SDC Journal Winter 2016

JOURNAL WINTER 2016

AN ECLECTIC CAREER

BILL CASTELLINO

JOE MANTELLO

WE'RE IN THIS TOGETHER INTERVIEW BYTRIP CULLMAN

EMBRACING THE CHALLENGES

DIANE PAULUS SO YOU THINK YOU CAN DANCE

WARREN CARLYLE + SONYA TAYEH ALSO

MICHAEL ARDEN + SPENCER LIFF JAMES LAPINE MELISSA MAXWELL GIOVANNA SARDELLI WINTER 2016 | SDC JOURNAL

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OFFICERS

Susan H. Schulman PRESIDENT

John Rando EXECUTIVE VICE PRESIDENT

Leigh Silverman VICE PRESIDENT

Oz Scott SECRETARY

Michael Wilson 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 Jo Bonney Mark Brokaw Joe Calarco Larry Carpenter Rachel Chavkin Marcia Milgrom Dodge Sheldon Epps Liza Gennaro Wendy C. Goldberg Linda Hartzell Anne Kauffman Mark Lamos Paul Lazarus Pam MacKinnon Kathleen Marshall Meredith McDonough Ethan McSweeny Robert Moss Robert O’Hara Sharon Ott Ruben Santiago-Hudson­ Seret Scott Bartlett Sher Casey Stangl Chay Yew Evan Yionoulis

SDC JOURNAL FEATURES EDITOR

Elizabeth Bennett EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR

Laura Penn ART DIRECTOR

Elizabeth Nelson EDITORIAL ADVISORY COMMITTEE

Sheldon Epps Graciela Daniele Liza Gennaro Thomas Kail Robert O'Hara Ann M. Shanahan Leigh Silverman Evan Yionoulis SDC JOURNAL PEER-REVIEWED SECTION EDITORIAL BOARD SDCJ-PRS CO-EDITORS

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

Travis Malone SDCJ-PRS BOOK REVIEW ASSOCIATE

Kathleen M. McGeever SDCJ-PRS SENIOR ADVISORY COMMITTEE

Anne Bogart Joan Herrington James Peck

WINTER 2016 CONTRIBUTORS

Elizabeth Bennett FEATURES EDITOR

Megan E. Carter DIRECTOR, SDC FOUNDATION

Trip Cullman DIRECTOR

Christina Gutierrez-Dennehy NORTHERN ARIZONA UNIVERSITY, SDCJ-PRS BOOK REVIEWER

Kenneth Jones THEATRE JOURNALIST

Rebecca King SDC JOURNAL INTERN

Melissa Maxwell DIRECTOR

Ryan McKittrick DIRECTOR OF ARTISTIC PROGRAMS/DRAMATURG

Elizabeth Nelson SDC COMMUNICATIONS MANAGER

Giovanna Sardelli DIRECTOR

Seret Scott DIRECTOR

Harvey Young CHAIR + PROFESSOR OF THEATRE AT

,

NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY SDCJ PEERREVIEW CONTRIBUTOR

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

SDC JOURNAL is published quarterly by Stage Directors and Choreographers Society, located at 321 W. 44th Street, Suite 804, NY, NY 10036.

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PRINTED BY Sterling Printing

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WINTER CONTENTS Volume 4 | No. 3

FEATURES 16 Bill Castellino AN ECLECTIC CAREER

INTERVIEW WITH KENNETH JONES

33 Embracing the Challenges AN INTERVIEW WITH DIANE PAULUS INTERVIEW BY RYAN

21 So You Think You Can Dance

Interviews with Warren Carlyle + Sonya Tayeh

BY ELIZABETH BENNETT

about choreographing for the camera.

MCKITTRICK

37 PEER-REVIEWED SECTION Sustaining Black Theater

BY HARVEY YOUNG

EDITED BY ANNE FLIOTSOS +

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COVER

We're

ANN M. SHANAHAN

in This Together

AN INTERVIEW WITH JOE MANTELLO INTERVIEW BY TRIP CULLMAN WINTER 2016 | SDC JOURNAL

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5 FROM THE PRESIDENT

BY SUSAN H. SCHULMAN

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FROM THE EDITOR

BY ELIZABETH BENNETT

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hy I Cast That Actor W Melissa Maxwell

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BACKSTAGE

Jennifer Smith

Production Manager

15 IN THE COMMUNITY Meaningful Connections: BC/EFA Flea Market + Grand Auction

BY REBECCA KING

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SDCJ-PRS BOOK REVIEW

Shakespeare for American Actors and Directors

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By Aaron Frankel REVIEW BY

CHRISTINA GUTIERREZ-DENNEHY

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IN YOUR WORDS

What I Learned...

Giovanna Sardelli

CURATED BY SERET SCOTT

SDC FOUNDATION

Enjoy the Process: The "Mr. Abbott" Award

BY REBECCA

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KING

Spring Awakening in 20 Questions Michael Arden + Spencer Liff

The 2015 Zelda Fichandler Award INTRO BY REBECCA

KING

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THE SOCIETY PAGES

Broadway Salutes

National Alliance for Musical Theatre

Gregory Awards

Joe A. Callaway Awards

Ovation Awards

The Zelda Fichandler Award

2015 Extraordinary Service Award

Annual Membership Meeting

2015 Theatre Bay Area Awards

2015 Theatre Hall of Fame

Theatrical Unions and Law Class

+

COVER

Anna Sokolow

PREVIOUS

Joe Mantello PHOTO Dave Krysl Diane Paulus + choreographer Darrell Moultrie working on Witness Uganda Ryan

PHOTO Jimmy ABOVE TOP

Giovanna Sardelli in rehearsal with playwright Suzanne Bradbeer PHOTO Richard Lovrich

Joshua Castille, Austin P. McKenzie, Daniel N. Durant (seated), Alex Wyse, Miles Barbee, Andy Mientus (top row) in The Deaf West Theater production of Spring Awakening PHOTO Joan Marcus ABOVE BOTTOM

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Recently, I was at SDC’s offices for a meeting, and I spent a few minutes with staff, passing the time before my appointment began. We were talking about higher education and the numerous challenges facing teachers today.

While we were talking, I mentioned that today, as an educator, you are required to be evermore mindful and even more sensitive of how your words and actions are perceived as well as meant. A closed door or a hug might be misinterpreted. One of the staff members said she couldn’t imagine tackling the challenges of college and entering the industry without the support—often in the form of a hug or, in fact, many hugs—of her teachers. That sort of connection isn’t only found in the arts, but the arts are a place uniquely fitting for deep connection between all participants, and perhaps especially between teachers and students, mentors and mentees.

FROM THE PRESIDENT

This exchange led me to think about safety, because isn’t that what these connections help create? A safe place to explore, learn, risk, experiment, even fail—all the necessary processes to help one grow and succeed. So how does an educator, as well as a director and choreographer—all of whom are leaders— create a safe environment for this creative work in today’s world, a place safe enough to experiment with choices that you may not ever be able to make anywhere else?

In part because of our deepening relationship with Association for Theatre in Higher Education (ATHE), and in part as a result of this fairly new relationship, SDC has been increasingly involved in conversations around higher education and its inherent challenges. You may or may not know that SDC has been working to bring more teachers into the ranks of our Membership, inviting them into our community and showing how important it is for directors and choreographers in all aspects of the craft to be a part of the Union. As a result, the challenges and experiences related to higher education have been much discussed.

Many Executive Board Members who also teach often discuss the difficulty of casting nearly all-male plays when women make up more than half the student population of most theatre programs. And then there is this issue of guns on campus and laws that may allow for even more weapons to be present. How do we conduct ourselves? How do we keep ourselves and our charges safe? How do we live up to what we want and hope for ourselves and inspire the next generations of artists?

These are some of the questions and thoughts that have been on my mind as I look toward this next year as SDC’s Executive Board President. We have been enormously successful in our recent endeavors, and we understand that to continue we must diligently work to shape policy and develop strategies that speak to our goals and the challenges that directors and choreographers face. In addition to strengthening our relationships and bolstering our numbers in higher education, there are a number of goals for the coming year. SDC wants to increase its jurisdiction in Los Angeles, Boston, Chicago, and Portland, cities where more and more of our Members—and non-Members, for that matter—work and make their livings. We continue to work toward expanding our bargaining unit to include fight choreographers, and for years the Union has worked to increase its technology capacity so that it may facilitate more Union business online.

(Already we stream our annual and biannual Membership Meetings for those who live and work outside of New York City.) And perhaps most importantly, the Union is looking to determine its role in the current diversity conversation. If you read the special report in the last issue of SDC Journal from our Diversity Task Force, you’ll know the message is clear: SDC Members want to be involved; they want to contribute to the solution. Your Union wants to support you and take a leadership role.

It’s an honor to serve as your President, and I couldn’t be more proud of our Board and Membership.

We are truly a unique, powerful, and tremendously creative group of individual artists. Directors and choreographers touch countless lives as they progress through their craft and career. Maybe it’s helpful to remember how much influence we truly have, from the day-to-day collaborations to the finished productions that audiences fill the seats to witness. Let us make our mark in the most honest, humble, and significant way we can.

In the last issue, Michael Wilson, who is now the new Treasurer for SDC, called the Members to action, encouraging participation and activity. I echo his sentiments. Get involved, speak up, be heard, serve on a committee. We are here for you, and you for us.

In solidarity,

Susan H. Schulman, Executive Board President

WINTER 2016 | SDC JOURNAL

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FROM THE EDITOR I’m hoping that the name Elizabeth Bennett rings a bell for some of you—and not just because it’s the name of the main character in Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice.

joining the ranks at SDC would be an extension of my personal mission to highlight the work and concerns of the Union’s Members.

What I wasn’t prepared for was the immense scope of SDC’s work, the abundance of meetings and events that are held to serve the Members, and the fierce commitment of the staff to supporting the principles on which For a little over a year the Union is founded. A letter written for our now, I have had the honor and pleasure of Fall 2015 issue by Executive Board Member working with SDC as the Features Editor for Michael Wilson gives a great summary SDC Journal. I joined forces with Laura of the kinds of activities SDC engages Penn and Elizabeth Nelson at a point in to benefit and support its It’s no exaggeration when I was pulling out of a long Members. Michael’s words when I tell friends that recovery period following 15 also reflect the passionate years as a resident dramaturg commitment that I have being enfolded into the and literary manager. Ready found in almost every advocacy work of SDC is to reengage with theatre conversation I’ve had with as an art form and as an SDC Members over the one of the most invigorating industry, I relished an past year. experiences of my life...I have opportunity to create long been an advocate for editorial content that I am thrilled to formally would speak to the introduce myself to the directors, playwrights, incredible work being you as Features Editor. designers, actors, and theatre made by SDC’s Members.

Our theme for the suite companies with whom I work. I To present the history of of articles was one of the craft and the business breaking conventions— hoped that joining the ranks at of an art form that, despite for career trajectories, SDC would be an extension of the advent of performance working in nontraditional my personal mission on professional cameras venues, and in creating or iPhones, remains an new artistic formats. I to highlight the work and ephemeral practice. SDC learned early that diversity concerns of the Journal represented, for me, and versatility are necessary one of those few remaining elements of a theatrical career.

Union’s Members. publications where people and ideas could be explored and discussed My own artistic sensibility was with depth rather than as a quick sound shaped significantly by the experience of byte. being taken to an experimental, site-specific downtown NYC theatre piece involving nearI was also eager to work with the astonishing darkness, a Day Glo-painted indoor climbing Laura Penn, of whom I had heard much from gym, and interaction with a group of chanting her Seattle days, and who I sensed was the hippies. It both scarred and exhilarated me for kind of energetic, visionary leader I have life. That unusual experience was balanced out spent my career trying to work with. Within 20

by Saturday matinees spent at the Bil Baird minutes together, we were laughing together Marionettes on Barrow Street or watching as we shared stories of friends and colleagues the original Broadway productions of Annie and began discussions that reflected similar and The Wiz multiple times, courtesy of the value systems and priorities for the theatre five-dollar standing room ticket policy. Later industry. It felt (and still feels) as though I’d on, my first job as an artistic staff member found a home. was at Arena Stage, where the proportions and sightlines of the legendary theatre-inThis Winter 2016 issue marks my work through the round again compelled me to think more a full yearlong cycle of Journal issues with the expansively about theatrical possibilities.

SDC Editorial Advisory Committee, Members at I thought often of those experiences in large, and staff. It’s no exaggeration when I tell reflecting on the diversity of possibilities friends that being enfolded into the advocacy created in places not traditionally thought of work of SDC is one of the most invigorating as theatres. The Editorial Advisory Committee experiences of my life. As a dramaturg, I have talked to and read about the artists featured in long been an advocate for the directors, this issue, and we had enormous fun. playwrights, designers, actors, and theatre companies with whom I work. I hoped that

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You’ll find all of that in this issue’s suite of articles that address thinking outside the box about theatre architecture, career pathways, and where the jobs of the future can be found.

We were excited to have writers sit down and talk with master-of-all-trades Bill Castellino as well as Diane Paulus, who has truly redefined the geographic boundaries of the stage.

Choreographers Warren Carlyle and Sonya Tayeh take us behind the cameras of television favorite So You Think You Can Dance but also share how having an open mind about what kind of work to undertake can lead to artistic leaps and bounds. In our relatively new “20 Questions” column, Michael Arden and Spencer Liff share with us the vision they had for the groundbreaking Deaf West production of Spring Awakening, which was still astounding Broadway audiences as we went to press. We also hear, in her own words, from Jennifer Smith at Arizona Theatre Company, and Melissa Maxwell writes about her casting choices at Ithaca’s Kitchen Theatre. Through SDC’s Observership Program, Adrian Alea and Andrew Williams were in the rehearsal room for Lear deBessonet’s production of The Odyssey at the Public Theater last summer, and they share with us some of their observations about creating a large-scale work of participatory theatre.

Presiding as the cover story is Joe Mantello, a man who began his career as an actor but whose directing talents over the past 20 years range from the brilliant blockbuster Wicked to more intimate dramas written by promising, emerging writers. Joe is a longtime friend to your Union, one who has advised well as an advocate for directors’ rights and who truly leads by example in all areas of his life and career.

Sometime soon, the SDC Editorial Advisory Committee will gather to review ideas for upcoming issues. Everyone involved with SDC Journal looks forward to this biannual meeting of the minds. It’s significant that the story topics are generated primarily by the Membership, and I hope you will agree that our committee members are serving the Union well by putting their ideas forward. We’re all working toward a common goal: the support of the inspiring artistic work being created by all of you, the Members. Thank you for helping to move the field forward, on stage and off.

In solidarity,

Elizabeth Bennett SDC Journal Features Editor

Giovanna Sardelli (left) rehearsing with Anna Kull + Andrea Hiebler at the Lark Play Development Center for the Russia/US Exchange 2015 PHOTO

Gillian Heitman

WHAT I LEARNED… IN YOUR WORDS What I Learned...

Why I Cast That Actor Backstage + 20 Questions

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.

BY

GIOVANNA SARDELLI

CURATED BY

SERET SCOTT

I grew up in Las Vegas, where the only professional straight play I had ever seen was one the Acting Company presented during a tour (thank you, Acting Company), and yet I knew I wanted to move to New York someday and be part of the theatre. My first audition in my life was for the Graduate Acting Program at NYU, and Ron Van Lieu, the master acting teacher, kindly assigned monologues for me to use for the callback, since I didn’t know any plays. Zelda Fichandler, then head of the program, had to encourage me to actually face her and not the wall during the audition. Somehow, these two icons of the American theatre were able to see through my nerves and general confusion.

They said yes to me and changed my life.

Years later, when I wanted to transition from acting into directing, Zelda again said yes and invited me to attend the Director’s Lab she had started with Paul Weidner.

From these master teachers I’ve learned the profound impact a dedicated teacher and mentor can have on your life. I’ve learned to take a risk on young talent and always try to see the “long shots” when I’m auditioning, and I rejoice every time I give someone their Equity card. I’ve learned to say yes to the crazy choice in the rehearsal room and design meetings, if for no other reason than to celebrate someone’s imagination and bravery—but, more often than not, something magical transpires in those unexpected moments.

If you say yes to the artists around you, they will surprise you, delight, and challenge you. If you create an atmosphere of “yes,” people will go to extraordinary lengths and exhibit a breathtaking willingness to embarrass themselves in the pursuit of human connection. And it is from that raw and willing place that the best stories get made.

GIOVANNA SARDELLI is an award-winning director who has worked on world premieres of plays by Rajiv Joseph, Matthew Lopez, Theresa Rebeck, Lynn Rosen, Joe Gilford, Jeff Augustine, Lauren Yee, and Zoe Kazan among others. She has worked Off-Broadway at the Cherry Lane Theatre, Second Stage, Vineyard Theatre, Playwrights Realm, The Women’s Project, Ensemble Studio Theatre, and Roundabout Theatre Company. She has directed numerous productions for Dorset Theatre Festival, where she is the Resident Director, Barrington Stage Company, Actor’s Theatre of Louisville, The Old Globe, Hartford Stage Company, Cleveland Play House, Cincinnati Playhouse, CTG, Hudson Stage Company, San Francisco Playhouse, and TheatreWorks Silicon Valley among others. Giovanna spent over a decade on the faculty of the Dance Department and five years on the faculty of the Graduate Acting Program of NYU, the program from which she received her MFA. She is also a graduate of their Director’s Lab. Though based in NYC, she is the Director of New Works for TheatreWorks Silicon Valley.

WINTER 2016 | SDC JOURNAL

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WHY I CAST THAT ACTOR

MELISSA MAXWELL

On casting Judi Jackson in Slashes of Light at Kitchen Theatre Casting is a fascinating and exciting process, and perhaps one of my favorite parts of the creative journey. It’s like Christmastime: sure, you make a wish list, but you’re never certain of what you will ultimately end up with until the last offer has been accepted. And that old adage is true: casting is 90 percent of the job.

So, it’s crucial. However, even when you have actors in mind—with whom you’ve worked or whose work you admire or who absolutely look the part—sometimes they’ll come in to read and end up not being the right fit. And often is the case where you’ll see three or four candidates who could potentially do a decent job with the role but fall short of wowing you; until finally (as they say in The Full Monty) glimmer walks in.

Rewind to the spring of 2014: I was directing the world premiere of four-time Emmy Award winner Judy Tate’s Slashes of Light, a coproduction between Civic Ensemble and the Kitchen Theatre (Ithaca, NY). Set in Chicago’s South Side in 1966, Slashes of Light is a coming-of-age story about a young girl in an all-black parochial school whose world turns upside down when the first white teacher arrives and her first crush breaks her heart.

Civic Ensemble member Sarah K. Chalmers was already on board to play the teacher. And we were jobbing in Robert McKay from New York City to play “The Conductors,” a track that required one versatile actor to play Sunny’s father, an Art Institute guide, a Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters

conductor, an El Train conductor, and a British Rail conductor who spoke some German.

Robert had read the role in previous iterations of the play and done a masterful job.

That left the three kids: Sunny (the lead); her best friend, Kaleb; and her crush, Steven. It wasn’t feasible to cast teenaged actors. So the plan was to hire young adults who read much younger; the hope was to find them locally.

We were lucky enough to find Kaleb (Jelani Pitcher) and Steven (Ryan Hope Travis) among Ithaca’s talent pool. However, Sunny eluded us. We saw a lot of lovely young women, but none were right. As the character description dictates, Sunny is “effervescent, curious, musical (plays the guitar), book-smart, but very naïve.” While the first four qualities may be easy enough, in today’s modern world it’s hard to find that kind of never-been-kissed, pre-MTV, pre-Madonna, pre-internet porn naïvety that rings true of 1966. All of the young women we saw brought a womanliness and sexuality that only comes with a certain knowledge, and, let’s face it, once that genie is out of the bottle, it’s hard to put back in.

So immediately it became clear that we were going to need to cast a wider net.

We posted casting calls and received close to 60 video submissions. We narrowed those down to a dozen or so candidates whom we auditioned in New York City. We started the day with a silent prayer to the casting gods (I’m not the least bit religious, but I find this always helps). Again, lots of lovely young women, but none were right…until Judi Jackson walked in. Tall and gangly, adorably awkward, fresh-faced with an infectious smile, and complete with a guitar, she was everything we were looking for and more. She had an innate understanding of the material like no one we’d seen. And the few adjustments I gave her she incorporated seamlessly and impeccably.

But wait—there’s more. Turns out, Judi was a friend of one of the actresses on my original “Sunny Wish List”: Susan Heyward. Susan hadn’t auditioned because she was already in a show that conflicted with our dates.

However, the character description reminded her of Judi, so Susan called Judi and urged her to audition. But wait—still there’s more.

We discovered that Judi was just finishing her junior year at the University of Mary Washington and had traveled six hours from Virginia to audition for us. Her acting teacher had driven her because Judi didn’t have a license. And that’s why I cast Judi Jackson: for her dedication, drive, commitment, passion, and laser-beam focus. Choosing her for the role went beyond her look and her talent. Judi Jackson has “it,” that indefinable yet palpably recognizable star quality, which she proved every night as she stole the audiences’ hearts with delicious aplomb.

And that’s why I love the casting process: though you never know from where it’s going to come, it is undeniable when glimmer walks into the room.

Jelani Pitcher + Judi Jackson in Slashes of Light by Judy Tate at Kitchen Theatre Company PHOTO Dave Burbank

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Arizona Theatre Company's world premiere of Five Presidents PHOTO Tim Fuller

BACKSTAGE WITH PRODUCTION MANAGER

JENNIFER SMITH How did you get your start as a production manager?

I went to DePaul University and studied stage management.

The degree was actually called production management, but as a stage manager, you did so much more, which actually helped introduce me to the role of a production manager. And back then, production management wasn’t as defined as it is now. So stage managers, especially at a college level, had a lot more responsibility. Right after college, I worked with the company called Chicago Children’s Theatre, which is not the Chicago Children’s Theatre that there is now. That really gave me my first experience as a stage manager and production manager, and that’s where I really started to exercise those skills.

How would you define the role of a production manager?

I am responsible for everything related to the physical production, meaning scenery, costumes, lighting, sound, and the communication between all of those areas to make sure we have a smooth process that stays on time and within budget.

What do you think is the most important skill a production manager needs to have to be successful?

I think an understanding of all areas, and that’s where I believe my college training and choosing stage management to start off with came into play; those were two important decisions that got me to where I am. Being a stage manager put me in the room so I really learned the process of putting on a show. Also, as a stage manager, communication is key.

You learn a ton about being organized and about communicating, which helps production management. In college, I took all the classes that were required and even more than I needed to so that I learned how to be a scenic painter. I learned what it meant to ventilate a wig. I took the sewing courses that taught

you how to make a vest. I took scene design, lighting design; I took all the different areas.

Learning what other people actually do helped me to support their process as a production manager.

How did you first become aware of the position of production manager?

My first introduction to the actual position was when I took an internship while in high school.

It was an internship at Playwrights Horizons in New York City, and it was there that I got to see a production manager. Even though I didn’t know at the time the details of what they did, I still got to see that position and I knew that it was there.

At your current job at Arizona Theatre Company, what’s your daily routine like?

I come into my office, turn on my computer, and the first thing I do is usually read reports from the day before. I read the stage manager rehearsals report and the show reports.

Currently we have one show in tech, and I also have another show in Phoenix that’s up and running. So I read those reports and see if there’s anything within them that I need to follow up on. After that, I just go through the priorities of my day. We have seven shows in our season, and at this point in the season, I would say right now I probably have something going on in each show somewhere in the process. So I’m either checking on coproduction status or I’m contracting designers for shows later in the season and getting that process going. I have a little priority list as to what show is brewing a little bit more than the others, what things I need to get to, and what things I can put off for a little bit longer.

One thing that’s unique about Arizona Theatre Company is we produce in two cities, and everything that we open in Tucson we then move up to Phoenix and also run. So our first show is actually still running in Phoenix, and we’re now back in Tucson getting the second show in previews.

What’s the theatre scene like in AZ? We are the state theatre in Arizona, and the only LORT theatre in the state. Outside of us,

here in Tucson, we also have a roadhouse that produces big, Broadway-style tours, and we have a lot of smaller storefront theatres. One of the challenges for me, just having moved here, is trying to get into the community and learning more about our scene.

Is that part of your process? To better learn how to communicate to the community you’re in?

I think there can be a production manager who doesn’t know the community, but I have definitely learned that I still enjoy seeing theatre, even though I work in it, so I try to stay current with what’s out there. And I’m also one that finds the community where I’m living important to me. So I like to know what other people are up to and what other plays are being produced. That stems more from a personal desire.

What’s the most challenging production you’ve worked on and why?

The one that always comes to mind for me is The Tempest at Chicago Shakespeare Theater because there were a lot of specialty needs that weren’t necessarily connected to a staff position. So it was a challenge figuring out what resources we needed to get all of that done, between water flying, special-effect magic, all of that.

What’s your favorite part?

My favorite part is communication with regard to the actual process. I don’t think it ever gets old to see how we’re going to create the work, how we’re going to take what’s written on the script and bring it to life on stage.

Every team of designers, every director brings a completely different concept and way of working, and I still like that introduction to new people, new scenes, and new ways of creating the work and the communication it takes around that to make sure that we’re all doing the best that we can.

How do you approach collaborating with other artists?

I try to stay as flexible as I can. I do like to have a solid foundation, so I like to have a grip on what the company is capable of doing, how WINTER 2016 | SDC JOURNAL

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BACKSTAGE

CONTINUED FROM PAGE 9

we usually like to go about doing business, and represent that well. You have that stable ground. And then remain flexible beyond that so that you can bring your best resources, listening skills, all that to a process that might be new to what you do based upon how the others like to work.

What would you like directors and choreographers to know about the work of a production manager?

I do find that the role of the production manager is part of the team—part of that support mechanism. So I don’t want to be defined as the “yes man” or the “no man.” I want to actually help the work get done. I want them to be able to trust that and also trust that I respect what they do, and I will bring my best game to the table as well. I really think that starts any really good relationship, to know that I’m one of those people that helps the process and really helps you do your best work. I’m an ally. And sometimes I even refer to words like that because I don’t want to send off the idea that it’s a “good or bad” or “us versus them” kind of thing. I’ve had some of those relationships in the past. People think, “You’re a production manager, so you’re only going to say no,” or “You’re just going to keep referring to the budget.” And, actually, I can talk beyond numbers. You can really trust me and rely on me.

Is there anything else you’d want readers to know about the role of a production manager?

I would say it’s a really important role and I’m happy that production management has gotten to where it is, and that people do realize that it’s an important position. I think there are still a lot of theatres that start out that don’t incorporate production managers because everyone else is doing so much.

But it is an important role that has a lot of responsibility and can be a huge resource and help.

Jennifer Smith is in her second season as Arizona Theatre Company’s PM. A graduate of the Production Management Program of The Theater School, DePaul University (TTS), she returned in 2014 as the Production Coordinator, a position she held for five years after graduation.

Prior to TTS, she was the PM of Northwestern University’s Theatre and Interpretation Center where she taught Production Management.

Jennifer was the Director of Production at Chicago Shakespeare Theater for five years, and worked as a General Management Associate overseeing two productions of Chicago for National Arts Management. Other experience includes Assistant Production Manager at the Goodman Theatre, Production and Stage Manager for Lookingglass Theatre Company and Chicago Children’s Theatre.

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| WINTER 2016

Treshelle Edmond, Ali Stroker, Amelia Hensley, Lauren Luiz, Kathryn Gallagher, Krysta Rodriguez + Alexandra Winter PHOTOS Joan Marcus

SPRINGAWAKENING IN 20 QUESTIONS The Deaf West Theater production of Spring Awakening – book and lyrics by Steven Sater, music by Duncan Sheik – started as a “crazy idea” between friends and collaborators Michael Arden and Spencer Liff. Through a series of 20 questions, the two charmingly amiable Members sat down together at SDC to share their intimate accounts of bringing the hit show to life in a new way. Enjoy.

Austin P. McKenzie (center) + cast

Sandra Mae Frank

Spring Awakening in two words. Go! MICHAEL ARDEN | Impossible dream.

SPENCER LIFF | Lightning in a bottle, but that’s four words!

What about Spring Awakening seems most relevant to the deaf community?

MICHAEL | The themes of communication and miscommunication are incredibly relevant. It’s ultimately about a group of people literally, in this case, dying to be understood and heard.

At its core, it’s about a group of people who are denied a voice. I think that speaks to the deaf culture and what they’ve experienced in the past 100 or so years.

SPENCER | I would add, from the sign language aspect, the sort of the awakening of the body in the play and what you’re going through physically with your body, being able to communicate that so beautifully with your body. I think those parallels are beautiful.

Introducing sign language into a piece that’s all about finding yourself in your body.

Favorite moment, song, or lyric?

SPENCER | My favorite moment is the ship.

We make a ship out of bodies and lift one of our characters up, and he signs as he’s carried across the stage. It was the first moment we developed in the workshop two years ago, and one of the first times I realized how powerful our cast and what we could do with them could be.

MICHAEL | One of my favorite moments is toward the very end of the play when the entire company forms a line downstage with their hands on the back and shoulder of the person in front of them. Two of the characters are convincing Melchior not to kill himself, and they’re echoing the words “Not gone, not gone.” We chose to have the entire cast sign this together. For me, it’s a really incredible moment to see the entire company so connected physically, all expressing the same thought that on the page was only coming from two people.

Which character to do you relate to most?

MICHAEL | I guess Melchior. As a director working in the arts, you have to question everything constantly, which is what Melchior does—pointing out the flaws that the authorities are trying to pigeonhole him in. I felt like that throughout this process, definitely.

You can’t raise money for a play on Kickstarter and then bring it to Broadway. Then we did.

SPENCER | It’s funny. I’ve been asked that before, but I don’t actually find myself incredibly relatable to any of these characters.

I had a very different upbringing and was

homeschooled and brought up on the road. I was very aware of who I was early on. It might be Hanschen in his slyness. He’s a little more aware than everybody else in terms of what’s going on around him. But, yeah, the way that these kids play these roles [is] so unique that I don’t necessarily see myself in any of them.

Where did this begin?

MICHAEL | I’ve known Spencer for a long time as a friend, and I loved his work. And I had worked with Deaf West as an actor a couple of times prior and they approached me, asking if I wanted to direct something for them. Andy, my partner, actually suggested [Spring Awakening], and I started digging deeper into it, and thought, “Oh, this might really work.” So I came to Spencer and said, “I've got a crazy idea.

How about choreographing a musical with deaf actors?” We managed to scrape together some funds to do a little two-week workshop.

We just worked on a couple of numbers and a scene to see if the material lent itself to the treatment and…

SPENCER | We thought we would get six songs done. I think we got two and a half. That was the first time we realized how long it would take, how detailed it was. I had absolutely no idea how to go about it. I had never spent any time in the deaf community, but I was in a place where I was really interested in doing things that scared me, that were way outside of my comfort zone. This ticked all of those boxes by a mile.

SPENCER | That it just wouldn’t happen, that it would all fall part, it would all crumble. I’ve said this before—any other sane man would have pulled the plug because everything in the world went wrong leading up to our first real rehearsal. If Michael had not pushed and kept us all somehow together, when we didn’t have a space, when we had lost half our cast, and our stage manager got injured and we had to replace him…It was just one thing after another. We had no rehearsal space, no money, and all these kids had flown in from across the country to start rehearsal, and I just remember thinking that there was no way this was going to happen. And then it did. We started rehearsal, and it was a little scary because, on the outside, we had to remain very calm and collected, but there was a lot of turmoil underneath.

MICHAEL | A big fear I had was: how do I begin to direct a play not knowing what the design is, what the space is going to be? We had initially planned to do it in a church. But [losing the space] actually forced us to look at the text in a way we may have glossed over before. [It forced us] to find out what was going on in the scenes as opposed to putting it into our preexisting vision. We had to let the words be our guide.

SPENCER | It was a month of sitting in a circle, just signing, setting it to music, doing the scenes with dialog in only signing—there was a lot of work to be done before we got on our feet and started to put things together.

I love working with Michael and knew what his brain was like and knew that he had absolutely no interest in doing things that had been seen before, and that is what drew me to him.

And he has a remarkable ability of getting people to say yes to things. If you go over to his house on a random Tuesday, he has seven Tony winners sitting in his living room, reading a play for him. I’m not joking. I trust him in the ability to gather groups of really talented people to just have fun.

MICHAEL | The translation process was really involved. Everyone was asked to learn something new. The deaf actors were being asked to move to rhythm for the first time, and the hearing actors were being asked to sign.

Some of the musicians were asked to play new instruments. So it all felt like we were stepping into uncharted territory, which allowed us to move forward in an ego-less manner, which was very helpful.

In those early workshops, I would get in my car at the end of the day, completely brain-fried, feeling like I wanted to cry. I didn’t know how to do this. But there was always a moment, like the ship, and you would be so near this elated, heavenly experience, watching these kids sign.

There were these glimmers of hope.

SPENCER | Once we made it to opening night of that very first version, it was this huge triumph to have accomplished something, to put the story on stage and to get the reaction we did. Then the second round was: how do we go from 99 seats in a very immersive setting to a football field stage? That was another fear.

MICHAEL | Little life rafts in the middle of an ocean.

SPENCER | Yeah, something would click in, and you’d be like, “Oh, my God. If they can do this, then we can do this.”

What was your biggest fear about this production?

MICHAEL | With a completely new design and a two-week rehearsal.

SPENCER | We wanted to preserve what was great about it the first time. I was terrified that we would fuss with and mess it up, taking it from this [intimate experience] to something huge with all the bells and whistles that could ever be in a production.

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Taking it from that stage to putting it on a Broadway stage, which is actually smaller, was less scary, somehow, because there was no time to be scared. I had just signed a contract that was going to take up my entire fall. And he called and it was like, we have an offer for a Broadway house right now.

SPENCER | I remember when I started dreaming in sign; that’s when I knew that I had reached a new level. And then I would walk down the street and listen to music, and I was able to start interpreting it in my own way, based on the things I knew. I can’t stop doing that now.

MICHAEL | Like two weeks from now. It was trial by fire. A fear of mine was that people would think it was too soon to be revived. But I clung to the notion that we are telling the same story within a new context, and so the story is different now. It’s about deafness and that wasn’t part of the original play. In a way, it’s a different play than it was before, almost like the material has changed. I was definitely worried people would not come because they felt they had just seen it.

MICHAEL | I remember a change I saw in you—you would be talking to me and you would start to sign, and I was like, hey, I can hear you.

Did you know American Sign Language (ASL) before the production?

MICHAEL | I did, but “know” is a relative term. I’m still learning. I have an okay grasp of conversational ASL and an understanding of how it works because of the past productions I’ve worked on. But, Spencer, you didn’t know a sign besides “Hello” and “Fuck you.”

SPENCER | I knew nothing. That changed as we went along. Every time we came back to it, I knew a little bit more. Then we brought on Alexandria Wailes, a deaf actress and dancer.

She was brought on as my associate, and that was a wonderful tool: to create with her.

There were some cast members I could totally communicate with early on that were great at lip reading and could deal with my terrible signing. Then there was Daniel Durant, who is probably our deafest actor. I didn’t have a relationship with him where I could look into his face and communicate with him without the use of an interpreter. It was really amazing to have that wall broken down and to be able to communicate with him with the signing that I had learned. That felt really good to be able to go out to drinks with a deaf cast after without somebody there to help me.

Like when you learn any language, they say go to the country and be immersed so you have no choice.

MICHAEL | And drink with the people.

Something amazing happens when you’re a little intoxicated. When you’re a new signer, it’s incredibly intimidating to be around deaf people because you don’t want to sign wrong; there’s a sense of a fear that comes with it. So, actually, that is one of the things they say— have a drink first and you’ll actually sign better than you think you can.

SPENCER | It was cool. I would leave and go home, and I’d want to go back so I can sign with people because it felt great.

How has doing the production multiple times informed your process?

SPENCER | A lot of my work is done on TV, where you get one week to create a number, and then that number goes up and you’re done and you never touch it again. So it is a beautiful gift to have been able to go back three times within a year to have this process again.

MICHAEL | For the company too, because you’re absorbing stuff so fast…a lot of the hearing actors were doing the movements without realizing what it was. Now, going back to the show, you can see they’ve spent time together, and the language is now part of them. It’s like, “Oh, I was just doing this as a motion before, but now I understand what it means and that can inform my choice.” It’s exciting to watch.

SPENCER | It grew from standing and signing to dance, I think, once everybody had practiced the concept, because our whole cast now signs, hearing and deaf. Every single one of them can communicate. On day one, it was a bunch of hearing kids sitting on one side of the room, all the deaf kids sitting on the other.

MICHAEL | That’s one of the most exciting things for me to see—when we started, even if we all went out together, the deaf people would be over at this table and the hearing people would be over here. A little bit Jets and Sharks, you know? But I looked over the other night, and I saw there was no distinction between them.

That is better than any review or box office receipt, honestly, because, I mean, what we should be doing with our work is attempting to build a bridge and help people communicate better regardless—it’s more than a metaphor.

It’s actually happening, and it’s really rewarding.

How were you able to create a bond among your cast members?

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MICHAEL | There isn’t a star of the show— everyone is incredibly integral. The deaf actors rely on the hearing actors for internal cues, and the hearing actors rely on the deaf actors to help them learn how to communicate. So everyone needs each other so much. It’s like the game of Mousetrap. If one domino isn’t in line, the entire thing doesn’t work.

I think the cast began to realize how important and vital they all were, and it was something we stressed from the beginning. They’re all equally important. They didn’t feel like there was a class system within the production, which there shouldn’t be in any. I don’t know if that answers that.

SPENCER | Imagine being the star of a play and having to do your scene and your songs and sign and cue the actor sitting across from you while he’s singing and still stay in character and then have to get up and go move a chair, and then go help somebody with a change or bring somebody a prop, and then you’re doing your solo again. There was no room for…

MICHAEL | Ego. I went to you, Spencer, and said, “Every morning I want us to have an hour of mandatory warm-up together. I want them to be an army.”

SPENCER | We did boot camp every morning.

Pushups, exercises, improv across the floor, learning a little combo. I found a lot of their movement within those mornings, just realizing what some of our non-dancers could do. Myles [McCarthy] has never been in a play, never taken a dance class, and he is one of my favorite people I’ve ever seen on a stage. The way he moves is exhilarating to watch, and I wouldn’t have known that without breaking through that boundary, watching him in improvs. We’d sweat together every morning and then dry off and start rehearsal.

What are the challenges of working with deaf or partially deaf cast members?

SPENCER | The ones that you would assume.

We didn’t really use counts in the show; it just wasn’t an option for a lot of us. Instead, you would say, “You three are going to look over there, and you three will look over here, and you’re going to see a breath and then down, and then you stand, and then you’ll see her do a little shoulder nod, and then you take a step.”

And that would be the equivalent of a five-sixseven-eight step. And every single moment had to be planned like that.

You also had to make sure the placement was right. You couldn’t have a first row of all deaf actors staring out into the audience. They’d have no one to cue them. We had to arrange the stage so that every single time they moved, there were anchors throughout the stage so they could use their peripheral vision

and keep in time. That was the big one. Taking out the ability to stay in rhythm without the visual.

MICHAEL | I think the challenge for me was more in terms of needing to be incredibly clear with the information I was trying to impart. It forced me to be specific and eloquent because ASL is a literal language. I couldn’t speak in metaphor.

Also in the staging, making sure that both the audience could see what was happening and the actors on stage could see each other. That was a challenge because it’s not like—I mean, in the original production, in the Ilse and Moritz scene, they were both at microphones facing out, and we got the disconnect between those two characters. But if you have a deaf actor and a hearing actor, you can’t do that. Communication between people [being] primarily visual and not oral was a big challenge but also incredibly helpful in the storytelling.

Spencer, if you had to describe Michael in one word, what would it be?

SPENCER | Dreamer.

Michael, if you had to describe Spencer in one word, what would it be?

MICHAEL | Fervent.

Where does the strength of your director-choreographer relationship come from?

MICHAEL | I think we work well together because neither of us pushes the other person’s idea out of the room. Even if it takes a while to get there, we get that the best outcome is going to come from when we develop it together. We really work together as a team.

SPENCER | We were constantly tag-teaming.

He’d start working on a scene, and I’d run behind him and pretty up how everybody got from here to there with their chairs and their things while he focused on directing the scene.

We had the same vision in mind. And we’re both incredibly sensitive, passionate people that had been with this for a long time. You asked us about our favorite moment—we each had a lot of things that we were passionate about, and those were strangely different from each other. So every once in a while, we’d be like, “No, you cannot change that. That’s my favorite thing. It’s not changing.”

MICHAEL | We were both performers, so if we’re working on something together, we both hop up on stage and play together and sort of understand what it feels like having to do those things. We wanted each other to know that it feels right in our own bodies.

SPENCER | We’re also both doers. We’re not going to sit back and explain what we want to happen, which doesn’t work in this case anyway because, like we said before, there is no real God mic. We were constantly running up and physically [getting] in it with them. It was a marathon for us in tech between being at that table and racing up on stage.

MICHAEL | We have a lot of bruises from the seats in the theatre.

SPENCER | We would run up and do all our notes and look at each other and be like, “Ready? Okay.” We’d run back down [and] do it again.

MICHAEL | I think there’s a lot of trust there in terms of both being on the same page so I can give someone a choreography note and you can give someone a staging note. We just knew what we set out to do.

How do you resolve creative differences that might arise between you?

SPENCER | Punching, throwing things, screaming. [Laughter] I don’t think we ever had creative differences that lasted more than 30 seconds. And then we’d just fix it.

MICHAEL | I think it helped that we’re both willing to look at anything. I think it’s better to try and I think we both feel that, so we put away our differences in those moments.

SPENCER | Michael would let me try anything, which was very lovely. Even if we were in the thick of tech. He would always give the respect to all of the designers in the room to let them have their first pass to see if something could work.

Can you talk about how you felt when you found out the production was going to be on Broadway?

MICHAEL | Terrified. I remember sitting in Los Angeles, thinking, “I can’t believe this is actually happening because it was never our goal. Our goal was to do something really art for art’s sake.” [Spring Awakening] had just been on Broadway so recently, and that production was so beloved, and so I think it was just like, “Oh, God, this has to be good.”

My reaction was it has to be so good. It can’t be something that’s nice, a special production.

Deaf actors are being used and therefore we forgive it.

So I felt a tremendous responsibility and also just overwhelmed. As a director, I went from literally the first thing I directed was for 10 people in my living room, and then my next job is a huge revival. But I try to remind myself that good work is good work and we couldn’t worry about it being Broadway. We just had to tell the story as best we could.

SPENCER | I thought, “I can’t believe this is happening,” and then there was that other voice that was like, “Hell, yeah, we’re going to Broadway.” I immediately started imagining all of our kids having that experience and me wanting Broadway to love them and adore them so much.

When I was a kid on Broadway, I remember how cool that felt and how much I loved that. I was filled with pride and joy that these kids, who a year before had never done a show…I think that’s where my head first went.

Broadway is going to fall in love with these kids, and they deserve every second of it.

MICHAEL | Now they’re signing autographs on 47th Street. It’s incredible, and I think it goes to show that what some people might see as disability is actually people’s greatest ability.

People are learning sign language so they can speak to people at the stage door. It’s cool.

I couldn’t wait to tell the cast because they had done it for next to nothing and it wasn’t easy. I mean, there were some low moments in that first rehearsal process…I was buying the costumes the day of and using my furniture from my living room. And just to say, “Hey, guys, thanks for your hard work. Guess what?

We get to do this on a real stage.” That was pretty awesome.

SPENCER | All we had was each other in the beginning. It’s truly all we had. And we kept our family intact. We were able to take our key family, those who had paid their dues with this production, and that doesn’t ever happen.

What’s been the most important thing you’ve learned from this production?

SPENCER | I go back to lightning in a bottle because something like this doesn’t happen often. The first time around, it passed me by and I didn’t truly enjoy it until our final week, when we were in previews and the show was up. It was a really rough process. When we did it again at the Wallis, I thought, “Please be present. Please enjoy this and don’t just stress out.” A process like this, a show like this, this cast, this family doesn’t come around all the time. I learned to truly keep my eyes open and feel all the things so that I remember them because this is special.

MICHAEL | I have learned that the best work comes from both collaboration and negotiation. So many things that I had envisioned that didn’t turn out, there was always something better given the incredible talents of the people coming together to achieve it. I think this process made me a better listener both with my ears and my eyes.

And I learned that it’s incredibly important to be willing to let things go.

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What do you hope your younger audience members take away?

How have audience members surprised you?

MICHAEL | The idea that anything is possible.

It’s my hope that if someone can see the play and begin to have a conversation that they didn’t think they could before, whether that’s as literal as signing “I enjoy the play” at the stage door or as complex as beginning to talk to a family about who they are. I think that’s what I hope to accomplish—the spark of conversation, which is what the play warns us against. If we don’t have those conversations, then this is what can happen.

SPENCER | My answer is in the same world of “Anything is possible,” but in the literal sense of performing. Ali Stroker had an interview recently, and she talked about how she’s always wanted to perform and she had nobody to look up to on Broadway. She kept dreaming and kept pursuing, and now she’s the first actress in a wheelchair on Broadway. Almost every night at the stage, I’ve seen someone in a wheelchair waiting to meet Ali. That is unbelievable, that they now have somebody to look up to.

So whether or not there are a lot of young deaf teenagers coming or there are people who feel different on the outside or struggling with whatever—to see people that are conquering this huge feat every night…to see what all of our kids have done—that takes my breath away. Watching the kids wait for these kids at the stage door. That’s the tops.

MICHAEL | They might see [that] what makes them strange is something that makes them special.

MICHAEL | It’s the people who say to me afterward that they can’t image this play not being about deafness, that it seems like it was written as such; and we didn’t change a single word. That’s been surprising and incredible, that we’re able to shed light on this culture and the incredibly dark history that deaf people have experienced and are still clawing their way out of because of the decisions of a bunch of hearing people. It’s really surprising that people are not only interested, but that’s what they’re taking away. I had no idea this was happening.

SPENCER | People who hadn’t seen the play before say to me, “I don’t understand—how does it work without the sign language?”

That’s when we knew that we didn’t slap on the gimmick of sign language, that we truly interwove it. I also hear this a lot: “I couldn’t tell who was deaf and who was not; I kept forgetting that they were deaf on stage. How did they do that?” To know that we can take you on a journey and you could get lost in it. That is rewarding for me, when you strip away the labels of the kids, and they are just a unified army.

Anything you’d like to ask one another?

MICHAEL | In terms of what you do next, how will that be influenced by this experience?

SPENCER | Greatly. I think in terms of how I go about bringing a cast together. A thousand percent, the techniques [we used] will carry over. When we opened this in the 99-seat theatre last year, I immediately went into another play, and I remember being almost

SPENCER LIFF’s choreography can be seen on Broadway in Hedwig and the Angry Inch and in Sleepless in Seattle at the Pasadena Playhouse; Two Gentlemen of Verona: A Rock Opera for the Shakespeare Theatre Company; a new production of Oliver! for The Human Race Theatre; A Snow White Christmas and Aladdin for Lythgoe Family Productions; On a Clear Day… (dir/chor) and The Wedding Singer for MTW; two original shows for the Disney Fantasy cruise ship; and Broadway by the Year at Town Hall in NYC. Recent television work includes the past five seasons of FOX’s So You Think You Can Dance; the Emmy Awards, starring Neil Patrick Harris; Mike and Molly, 2 Broke Girls, Dancing with the Stars, and the upcoming MTV series Happyland. As a performer, Spencer earned his Equity card at the age of seven in the first national tour of The Will Rogers Follies. He made his Broadway debut in Big—The Musical, followed

by The Wedding Singer, Cry-Baby, Equus, and 9 to 5. Film/TV: Hairspray, Across the Universe, Footloose, Smash, and Gypsy with Bette Midler. Spencer has performed for the Tony Awards, Academy Awards, Kennedy Center Honors, and Grammy Awards, and for two presidents of the United States.

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upset. It was strange that everyone could hear, that I could use counts. When I couldn’t, I had everybody together in the company squeeze each other on the one. And then they’d take a breath together, and then move out. And [then] came a moment when they didn’t need to do that, but those techniques worked very well and unified them. The things I’ve learned in terms of unifying a company, those will forever carry on.

We both have fast-tracked in this world and got put onto very large stages very quickly.

What did this experience feel like? Did it feel like what you thought it would—directing your first Broadway musical with me?

MICHAEL | It feels great. It feels incredibly cosmic and better than I ever thought it could be. It’s been very spiritually rewarding to work with you, as a dear friend, and to do a play with my husband-to-be and this company that I love, and all of these people who I called and asked favors of back when we were doing it for no money. Now we get to bring it [to New York]. I think right now I’m incredibly spoiled, because I doubt it will ever be that organic again.

SPENCER | I think one of my favorite moments in this process was walking to the theatre the first time the marquee had been put up and standing there with you, looking at both of our names on that marquee with Steve’s and Duncan’s names and sort of thinking, “Oh, my God.” MICHAEL | It was better than I expected. So hopefully [in] the next one, if there is a next one, I’ll learn as much.

MICHAEL ARDEN made his Broadway debut in Deaf West and the Roundabout Theatre Company’s production of Big River. Directing credits: La Ronde for The Forest of Arden; For the Record: John Hughes (Los Angeles, NYC); A Tale of Two Cities (Associate) on Broadway; and various other plays in bedrooms and kitchens.

Other theatre credits include: The Times They Are a-Changin’; Ragtime (Avery Fisher); It’s Only Life; The Winter’s Tale; The Secret Garden; Pippin (Mark Taper Forum); and Aspects of Love, directed by Sir Trevor Nunn. Film credits include Source Code, Bride Wars, The Good Shepherd, My Eleventh, and The Odd Life of Timothy Green. TV credits include GCB, Royal Pains, Unforgettable, Off the Map, Kings, The Closer, The Forgotten, Bones, and The Return of Jezebel James. He can currently be seen in Anger Management on FX and FOX. Concert work: Barbra Streisand, Chris Botti, BELOW 54, Feinstein’s at the Regency, and Joe’s Pub. Michael also formed the site-specific theatre company The Forest of Arden; its immersive production of La Ronde is currently being developed into a feature film. Training: the Juilliard School. Michael recently appeared as Quasimodo in The Hunchback of Notre Dame at the La Jolla Playhouse.

IN THE COMMUNITY

MEANINGFUL CONNECTIONS

BC/EFA FLEA MARKET + GRAND AUCTION BY

REBECCA KING

The SDC community came together on Sunday, September 27, to participate in the 29th annual Broadway Flea Market and Grand Auction. After months of sorting through boxes of Broadway merchandise, generously donated by many SDC Members, the Union’s table raised $10,944 for Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS. The Broadway Flea Market and Grand Auction is a theatre fan’s antique paradise. This year’s market included 74 tables covered in Broadway memorabilia and collectibles, including an autograph table and photo booth where fans could meet their Broadway idols.

“At the Flea Market, there are shows and unions and ticketing companies—it’s just a little bit of everything of the community,” says Associate Director of Member Services Jennifer Toth. “It’s one day where we’re all together supporting a good cause.”

This year’s Flea Team included Toth, Jonathan Cerullo, D.J. Salisbury, Gerald vanHeerden, and David Charles.

“We had a great energy, and it was a lot of fun,” says Charles, an Associate Member of SDC. “Jonathan really led the team into having a great experience. He kept us focused on what the real goal was: to help raise money for AIDS research and to help with Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS.” SDC had the ninth-highest earning table, contributing to the overall record total of $756,655 raised to support people battling HIV/AIDS. Collectively, the Broadway Flea Market and Grand Auction events have raised a grand total of $11.8 million. SDC was also the only non-producing organization to break $10,000.

“One of the amazing things about this year is that we actually made the top 10 tables,” says Charles. “It’s just incredible to be there and have us known. We were across this year from Hamilton, which was obviously one of the big tables. We were next to Allegiance. Our booth was across the street from the Public Theater.

To have us not only there but working so hard to show presence, it really puts us on the radar.”

Among the items offered at the SDC table were souvenir programs, old playbills, and swag from shows that have long since closed on

Broadway. The most exciting things given away

by SDC, however, were Broadway “experiences.”

In the silent auction portion of the day, fans could enter to win tickets, backstage tours, and meet-and-greets at different Broadway shows. Bringing in the most money for the SDC table were two tickets and a backstage tour with Thomas Kail to Hamilton, which sold for $1,650.

“We really wanted to make the experiences unique this year,” explains Charles. “They not only helped establish us as a table but what we do. They’re all experiences geared towards directors and choreographers. Especially when you have backstage tours given by the director or choreographer, all of a sudden it makes our experience something really special and different from what other tables were offering, and it really focuses on what we do.”

SDC’s participation in the Flea Market not only raises money for a great cause but also gives people the chance to understand and appreciate more fully what directors and choreographers do. The winners of the SDC experiences are given a rare and unique look at the work of SDC Members—work that is integral to any theatrical experience. In this way, these experiences are mutually beneficial to both theatre fans and SDC Members: the former get an unforgettable night at their favorite Broadway show, and the latter get the chance to discuss the nuances of their craft with someone who may not be aware of what a director or choreographer truly does.

David Charles Noah Racey, Alex Perez, Jonathan Cerullo, Jennifer Toth, DJ Salisbury + David Charles PHOTO Jonathan Cerullo

This is the third consecutive year SDC has joined the Broadway community at the Flea Market; in 2013, SDC raised $2,121 for the cause after a nearly 10-year absence from the event. In 2014, SDC raised $6,157.

“It’s important to us that we continue to make meaningful connections to the Broadway community, and this is a great visual way for us to highlight our Members’ work,” says Toth. “I think, especially for a union, they might think it’s a lot of paperwork, but being involved with the community is so important. This is a great way to use that muscle.”

The SDC table at the Flea Market was also a place for Members and Associates to make connections with the Broadway community and each other.

“It’s just great to meet other Members and work alongside them,” says Charles of his experience participating in SDC events.

“The sense of community, the sense of that mentorship. Full Members have been so gracious and have really helped me to refine who I am as a director and grow, especially at this early career stage.”

“It’s

wonderful to have SDC participate in the Broadway Flea Market and Grand Auction with a table for the third year running. A top-ten fundraising table this year, I should add! The enthusiasm and great spirit of community that SDC brings to the Flea Market is the energy that makes the event a success. I am grateful for the creativity and extraordinary commitment that SDC's Membership brings to the work done every day in the theatre and shares so generously with BC/EFA. SDC’s involvement in the Broadway Flea Market is always welcome, eagerly anticipated, and much appreciated.”

TOM VIOLA BC/EFA EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR

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James Alexander

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From Las Vegas show rooms and New York cabarets to cruise lines and corporate events, legit director BILL CASTELLINO reflects on using his directorial skills for unconventional projects. The mythological popular view of a modern stage director usually paints the practitioner as dwelling in just one place, seemingly instantly created from day one as a master crafter of only plays and musicals in no other realm but the high-profile commercial world. SDC Members know that the world is wider than that. A lifelong career more often than not is a cobbling-together of eclectic gigs that draw on the director’s skills. The range of work is vast: galas, industrials, academic productions, concerts, revues, cruise ship entertainment, Vegas, indie theatre, resident theatre, Off-Broadway, and beyond.

Director/choreographer Bill Castellino has walked this nomadic path. His 40-year résumé is spiced with readings, starry cabaret shows (with Amanda McBroom, Ann Hampton Callaway, and others), galas and tributes (including SDC’s 50th Anniversary celebration and 2013 tribute to outgoing President Karen Azenberg), concert and Las Vegas acts (the Supremes’ Mary Wilson, the Four Tops, and the Australian vocal group Human Nature), Off-Broadway productions (the acclaimed Storyville, Ionescopade, and, most recently, Cagney!—all for York Theatre Company), cruise ship revues (like the upcoming Soul Mates: A Journey to Hitsville), and many regional plays and musicals, including work at Cherry County Playhouse in Michigan, where he was producing director for four seasons.

SDC Journal talked with Bill, an SDC Member since the mid-’80s, about his small-town roots, his circuitous path to directing (via journalism and acting), and his experience working in unconventional arenas while continuing his career in the legitimate theatre.

Looking at your bio, it’s clear you’ve been a bit of a nomad, working in various live platforms beyond traditional theatrical spaces. Do you think you are atypical?

Is it easy to calculate what percentage of your career income has been from “non-theatre” gigs, such as corporate galas, cruise shows, and concerts?

For most of us, necessity is the mother of invention. As our work in the theatre continues, we use the skills that we’ve developed and apply them to as many opportunities as possible. As a result, I found myself working in cabaret and using my understanding of format and structure to help cabaret artists. That moved into the revue format and to cruise ships and galas and special events. All of that was using the skills that I developed and used as a theatre director. There are those of us who make their living exclusively in the theatre and that’s wonderful. But I think, for most of us, [a career] becomes a kind of creative patchwork.

It changes year to year. The overarching truth for me is that the commercial world pays more than the not-for-profit world. I think most people would corroborate that. Not to say that you enjoy or give more or less energy to one thing or the other, but I think that, when you are doing commercial work—be that commercial theatre or for-profit work for an event or a cruise or another entity—typically the payday is in your favor.

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No matter what the platform, do you feel you’re using the same muscles?

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It’s the same muscles, although the situational structure is different. If you’re doing, let’s say, a one-off event, there is no dress rehearsal. [You have to] be prepared in a particular way—you have one shot to make it work, as compared to theatre where we have structured time and mechanisms to address things that we theatre people think merit attention.

Before we go on, I’m curious about your roots. Was your family sensitive to the arts, and how did you experience the arts as a kid?

I didn’t experience it. I grew up in a very rural community—Burgettstown—in Western Pennsylvania. Coal miners, 600 people. There was a movie theatre there for a while and a drive-in movie [theatre]. So we did see movies.

But when I think about what interested me in 5

Soul Mates at Florida Studio Theatre; will perform on cruise ships beginning Dec. 2015 PHOTO Matthew Holler | LEFT TO RIGHT 1 Nightclub Cantata

by Elizabeth Swados + directed by Bill Castellino (second from the right) at the Odyssey Theatre Ensemble in LA 1978 PHOTO Ron Sossi | 2 David Edwards, Nancy Anderson, Tina Stafford, Leo Ash Evens + Paul Binotto in 30th Anniversary Production of Ionescopade at the York Theatre in NYC 2013 PHOTO Carol Rosegg 3 Cristina Gerla + Tom Lowe in Ionescopade written by Eugene Ionesco + Mildred Kayden at the Odyssey Theatre Ensemble in LA 2014 PHOTO Ron Sossi 4 10th Anniversary production of Nightclub Cantata at The Odyssey Theatre Ensemble in LA 1988 PHOTO Ron Sossi | 5 Nancy Lenehan + John Rourke as Nancy + Ronald Reagan in Rap Master Ronnie by Garry Trudeau + Elizabeth Swados at the Odyssey Theatre Ensemble in LA 1985 PHOTO Ron Sossi OPPOSITE TOP

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this whole idea [of a life in the theatre], I have to go back to television—TV specials or variety shows.

This is the age of Ed Sullivan.

Exactly. That would be my first lesson in entertainment. Television, and we’re talking about the ’60s, so it’s a much tighter focus than it is now—only a few channels. That’s where imagination took flight. Walt Disney and Ed Sullivan on Sunday night. The Untouchables, Alfred Hitchcock Presents, or The Twilight Zone…

And when you watched television, did some inner part of you say, “That’s a world I want to be involved in”—show business?

I think it’s connected to the fact that I was kept out of another world. I was infirm as a

Boston University. I was accepted at those schools and chose Boston University, in part to be somewhere else, to be in the Northeast and to be in a city. [At Boston University] I was in journalism for two years, and I had my eye on the theatre school. I auditioned as an actor and was accepted.

You ended up getting a BFA in acting in 1975. What attracted you to acting?

I don’t think that making a living was part of the logic here. It was really about expressing.

Remember, we’re talking about hippies. We’re talking about an era of finding expression and alternate expressions, and [being] from a small town, raised a Catholic boy, I was looking for a way to express. Language became the first means to do that. Ironically, I got interested in dancing at that time, too. There were dance classes outside of school. The Boston

avant-garde—with Swados as the director.

This piece had an enormous impact on me.

Simultaneously, I got cast in a movie [See How She Runs] in Boston with Joanne Woodward.

When I did the movie, Joanne was very encouraging of me to work in the movies. I went to L.A. and did a couple of films, but as most people can tell you, even when you’re busy in L.A., you have plenty of time.

So I had this idea to [direct] Nightclub Cantata in Los Angeles, where it had never been done before, to showcase myself [as a director] and an actor. Swados approved. I did it at the Odyssey Theatre. When she came to see it, she said she thought that the pictures that I had made were more sophisticated than the ones that she had made as the director. She gave me a lot of encouragement in that regard. I realized, working on that piece as a director,

Robert Creighton in Cagney! written by Peter Colley, Robert Creighton + Christopher McGovern at the York Theatre in New York 2015 PHOTO Carol Rosegg

child and physically challenged. So the world of “play day” and sports and all of that was kept away from me for health reasons. So my imagination took flight via television. That was my outlet—that and school. I went to a Catholic high school in West Virginia, about 40 minutes away from where I grew up. It was a sports- and athletic-oriented part of the world.

I was a bookworm, and there were school plays in high school. I was Ali Hakim in Oklahoma!, of course, as the most ethnic-looking person in that school.

What was your path to theatre?

I had good grades, and my parents thought highly of us getting further education. I was interested in English and writing. I applied to a number of journalism schools: Northwestern,

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University conservatory was very connected to modern drama. Musicals were not part of the department’s thinking.

Share a little bit about the switch to directing—your trajectory as a working director.

As an actor, who came at this as a journalist, I was guilty of seeing a bigger picture all the time, and that made it problematic or challenging for me to fit into it as a piece of a bigger picture. So, even as an actor, I was stepping outside the frame in my head, which challenged me as an actor.

Out of college, I was cast in Nightclub Cantata, Elizabeth Swados’s breakthrough piece in the ’70s—all about language and innovative,

that’s what I wanted. The community rallied around me in that way, and I was awarded and praised for that work. I was drawn to offbeat stuff. I found myself directing, leaving acting behind. I picked up occasional acting jobs here and there, but the directing thing took hold as a way to make a living. The Odyssey Theatre Ensemble became my home theatre where I directed nine productions over the years.

Your connection to Liz Swados would continue.

I’ve done more than a dozen productions of Liz’s shows over the years. I’m one of the few directors who she trusted to do that, and I’m very grateful for that…

How did you, as an avant-garde leaning director, transition into more commercial forms like cabaret and cruise shows?

Amanda McBroom, a composer and a cabaret singer, came to me, having seen some of the work that I did. Amanda had a trunk of songs; “The Rose” is the most famous. We crafted a revue called Heartbeats to feature her, and it premiered at the Matrix Theatre in Los Angeles, to some considerable appreciation. Jack O’Brien saw it. His affection for Amanda and her work led us to developing it further at the Old Globe in San Diego in 1983.

Meanwhile, since Amanda had such a lively and successful life in the cabaret world in the ’80s, I found myself associating with a lot of cabaret artists. I worked on Amanda’s cabaret act, writing her act with her and writing other people’s acts—like Ann Hampton Callaway. I found a real freedom in [cabaret]. My definition of cabaret comes from a Brechtian, no-rule world. Plus, working with singer/songwriters enabled me to work with many exciting and original songs.

But you still had a responsibility to structure and story…

Yeah, a good cabaret, in order to be satisfying, needs to have a beginning, middle, and an end. What you learn about structure and language and format in the theatre applies here—you know where to put the ballads, where to put the upbeat, where to put “funny,” and all of that.

How do you move to the world of cruise ships from there?

Elizabeth Swados comes back into the picture.

I was involved in a project called Rap Master Ronnie by Garry Trudeau and Swados. I originally co-directed it in Los Angeles, and then I went on to direct seven productions of my own, and I choreographed it for [HBO]. The casting director for Rap Master Ronnie for HBO just got a job producing shows for a cruise ship, and he asked me if I wanted to go into business with him, creating cruise ship shows.

It’s the classic story of luck and circumstance. What cruise line?

Holland America. I wrote, directed, and choreographed all the revue entertainment aboard Holland America for four years, 1988 to 1992.

This is before Broadway shows were licensed for high seas presentation, right?

Yes. This is when the cruise ships were looking to get away from their usual formula of dancers and feathers, and were looking to do more theatrical, character-driven shows in the same format—meaning the same amount of

time, the same amount of limitations, the same amount of assets.

Can you give me an example of a show you created?

The client wanted shows with themes. So the first show I wrote was No Oscar, Not Tonight.

My concept was famous songs that lost the Oscar; I created it as an Oscar ceremony. It was a variety show, like Ed Sullivan, and it had a theme, like a good cabaret act or a revue, but it had ongoing characters in it.

And an ensemble?

Twelve! What was great about Holland America is that they had an 11‑piece orchestra. And, not unlike cabaret, you can pick any song you want because it’s an ASCAP-BMI situation, so the room pays a licensing fee so there was no limit [to access to content]. It’s an amazing opportunity, inventing something brand-new using your skills and imagination. By the time I finished my tenure with them, I had written something like 10 or 12 revues.

It might seem that working on Vegas revues might be a natural result of the cruise ship work.

Not yet. The next big unconventional chapter was [directing, writing, and producing] corporate events. One of the early jobs that I got was because I worked on two engagements of Heartbeats at Goodspeed Musicals in Connecticut. Hartford Public Schools contacted me. They do an annual celebration of the arts in Hartford for the public schools and asked would I be interested in putting together their annual event? What they had done up until this time was basically feature a Broadway singer—a dinner and then the act. But this year they wanted to do something else. Did I have any ideas? My idea was: if you’re trying to raise money for students of the arts, let’s put the kids on stage.

So I started a three-month project of trolling the public schools for great things that the students were doing that I could make a show out of. I ended up putting together this show that celebrated the students. They raised hundreds and hundreds of thousands of dollars. From that, I was asked to be the creative consultant for all the entertainment in the Hartford School District. I did that for a couple of years while still working around the country in the legitimate theatre.

What was the major challenge of that, and is that challenge echoed in other formats that you’ve worked in?

One of the main skills that I’ve been able to use through all of this stuff is organizational skills. A director needs to be able to look at the chaos of a script in a circumstance—the

theatre and the casting and the staffing and all of that, which is a lot of moving parts—and be able to bring order to it. Being able to look at something and organize it has been common in all of this.

The second thing is to be able to organize it on a timeline and a budget. As somebody who’s been a producer, I understand money, and I understand how money is spent, and I don’t like waste. It’s anathema to me. Figuring out a way to not be wasteful is important—to not pursue an idea for so long that it costs more money at the expense of another idea, which might be the idea you want to bring to the finish line. And we all know that time is money.

So scheduling is really a critical part of being efficient with the budget.

Then there is the aesthetic we all develop for all of the reasons that are unique to any one of us. Taste—what do we like? What do we like to talk about it and how do we like to talk about it? And a director as storyteller is key. I mean, the writer writes the story, but the director tells the story, and that is an incredibly symbiotic relationship, but it is a function of the director to tell the story.

Did the bulk of your muscle building in terms of organizational and budget planning come from being a producercreator of cruise shows?

The skills evolved simultaneously. Because I was involved often with the creation of a budget, which is not common for a director, I was able to learn more directly how to manage a budget. Sometimes the director doesn’t know [he’s] spent too much money until somebody says, “You’re spending too much money on costumes.” That knowledge has been powerful. I can be very proud of how much I can get out of a certain amount of money because I’ve been charged with how to spend it for years.

How did you land jobs directing other corporate events over the years?

I’ve been associated with different production companies over the years, and I obviously have forged alliances with other entities, like event planners and different corporations that have these needs. It’s always been concurrent with working in a legitimate theatre.

Are there examples of corporate events for which you found a creative way to get SDC involved?

Our Union is very supportive of our efforts to educate these entities about the advantages of working with a Member that has the experience that a professional director brings to a project. The challenge is convincing the producer in a situation where it does not WINTER 2016 | SDC JOURNAL

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require an SDC contract what the advantages to having an SDC contract would be. Well, the first advantage is you’re getting an SDC Member and everything that Member brings to the situation.

For the Member, the advantages are that your pension and health is being contributed to, and that’s enormously important, as well as securing basic protections through a union contract.

What can a Member do to encourage a producer to consider SDC guidelines in this special event area?

What’s on the Member to do is begin the process of educating a producer that this need not be costly to them and there is no real threat to their power or any jeopardy to them by entering into a contract with us. It’s to the Member’s advantage, and there’s no peril to the employer.

What’s one of the major challenges of directing a corporate event?

Another way to look at these corporate events, from a theatre perspective, is that they’re onenighters, typically. I mean, you have one chance to get it right, and the more organized you are, the more paperwork you have, the more likely you are to succeed. You cannot afford to get it wrong because you will not get return business. So it requires an enormous amount of vision because often it’s not rehearsed until that night, because you can’t get all the moving parts in the same room at the same time.

It’s all prep.

It’s all in the prep. And organizing the different parts and making sure you have enough people to get the right people on the stage doing the right thing at the right time. The staffing is incredibly important in the corporate events. You just need more help.

It’s also important to manage your own expectations of what clients know. It’s not fair to ask somebody who has not spent their life in the theatre to know when we need to break and what “half hour” means. People just don’t know why at “half hour” you shouldn’t be backstage or you shouldn’t be rehearsing 12 hours on the day of a show. There’s a lot of things that we, in the theatre, have worked out because we know usually it’s the best way to get the best result.

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How can a young director today get experience in the areas you’ve worked in?

[With] anybody who is making a living as a director, I think it is our responsibility to hire those who are starting out as assistants. First of all, for them to gain the experience of our wisdom. Also for us to get the advantage of their energy, time, and talent, but also to give them entrée to situations that have taken us decades to get into. The Union’s Foundation has been very clever with the Observership Program and other grant-giving situations to get emerging directors in the room. But I know, for me, I did not have that opportunity and, certainly in the corporate world and nonconventional venues, there’s no formula for that.

Directors need to involve other people, and sometimes that costs a little bit of money, but, in the long run, it’s really worth it, especially since we’re trying to expand our jurisdiction, which makes our pension and our health funds healthy for all Members.

What was the genesis of your directing in Las Vegas?

Through these various legitimate and unconventional situations, I became the Creative Director of Aruba Productions in New York, [run by] Ken Denison, a producer I met when directing Heartbeats at the Old Globe in San Diego. Ken was invited to look at a project called “Human Nature” in Las Vegas; it’s four white Australian men who have a Motown show. As the Creative Director part of Aruba Productions, I helped them re-craft their show and physical production. I worked with them to move from the Imperial Palace to the Venetian, where Human Nature: The Motown Show is now in residence for the fourth year.

During my time with Human Nature, I also got involved with Mary Wilson of the Supremes, and directed and choreographed a show for her, which was a thrill. The Four Tops approached her about a double bill, and I put that whole show together with them in Chicago. We tried to place it in Vegas, but, so far we haven’t found a venue.

Can you point to the major challenge of Vegas and star concerts versus other venues?

With Human Nature, with Mary Wilson, with the Four Tops, or any time you’re crafting a story that’s about the artist, what they want to say is what this needs to be about. Now, how they say it or how they lay it out is something you help them with. With Mary Wilson, there are parts of her story that she wants to tell and

parts of her story she’s not interested in telling.

So it was up to me to spend the time with her to figure out what that was, to ask the right questions of her and then put together what ended up being her act, her comeback tour.

There are equivalents in the legitimate theatre to all of these things. There are people, no matter what kind of work you’re doing on a stage, no matter where it is, that have opinions and have the right to approvals. Whether that is in the commercial theatre, an investor that’s invested a lot of money who has notes that you have to listen to, or the cruise director on a cruise line who’s trying to keep their fingers on the pulse of what their guests want. They have opinions. Or a celebrity who says, “I don’t want to say that.”

For your latest project, you’ve taken elements of the Human Nature origin story and turned it into a cabaret musical with an American setting, with four actor-singers playing the boy-band characters.

The Vegas work led me to create and direct Soul Mates, which is a concert spinoff, inspired by the Human Nature story. That’s playing at Florida Studio Theatre as a cabaret through February 2016. I then reformatted the show for cruise ships. Currently, there are two Soul Mates companies, one originating in New York, the other in Sydney. Each company is booked through 2016.

Are you mindful of the web of connections in your career and how everything touches back on your history?

I am now.

Kenneth Jones is a dramatist and theatre journalist who writes at ByKennethJones.com.

His play Alabama Story had its world premiere at Utah’s Pioneer Theatre Company in 2015 under the direction of former SDC President Karen Azenberg.

SO YOU THINK YOU CAN DANCE BY

ELIZABETH BENNETT

In the 10 years since television sensation So You Think You Can Dance hit the FOX network, millions of audience members have been thrilled by the intricate dance steps, dazzling costumes, and intense competitive drive of its dancers.

The show has inspired thousands of hopefuls to pick up their own feet in pursuit of graceful expression on stage and behind the camera. What audience members don’t see is the hard work done behind the scenes to create those minute-and-a-halflong dance works. SDC Journal spoke recently with two SDC Members— Tony Award-winning director/ choreographer WARREN CARLYLE and Emmy Award-nominated choreographer SONYA TAYEH—about their work creating choreography for the cameras of the extraordinarily popular television show.

The Wild Party choreographed

by Sonya Tayeh PHOTO Joan Marcus

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So You Think You Can Dance PHOTOS c/o Warren Carlyle Hugh Jackman at the 2014 Tony Awards PHOTOS Getty Images

LEFT + ABOVE RIGHT

WARREN CARLYLE

BORN REACHING Creating dances is something Warren Carlyle seems to have always done, and it counts among his earliest childhood memories.

Growing up in an English village that didn’t have a theatre, the would-be dancer and choreographer avidly watched the films of Fred Astaire, Ginger Rogers, and Gene Kelly on television. At ballet school, he created dances for his classmates. He finally experienced a big Broadway-style show at age 11 with a performance of Cats. Six years later, Olivier Award-winning choreographer Gillian Lynne gave him his first job as a dancer, and Carlyle found himself dancing in—of all shows—Cats, first in Hamburg and then in London’s West End. It was an incredible experience for a boy from a small village who had a big imagination and was, as he puts it, “born reaching.”

Carlyle thought he would dance forever. As his career progressed, he found himself moving from dancer to dance captain to assistant choreographer to associate choreographer, and then on to choreographer and director in a way that he describes as “natural and easy—without a life-changing decision.” Carlyle believes that great things have happened to his career because he has an open mind about the possibilities.

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“The philosophy of a career that is broad, that goes sideways and not up, is becoming more and more important for all of us,” he says. “You have to have the broadest platform possible.

It’s why, as a director/choreographer, I haven’t said that I’ll limit myself and only direct or choreograph. I try to keep a broad platform and say, ‘I want to choreograph, I want to continue to learn from great directors.’”

One of the opportunities Carlyle has delighted in is choreographing for So You Think You Can Dance, where he is proud to represent Broadway. Carlyle, who loves to entertain, speaks rapturously of the show and the work created there. “It’s so important that there’s a place for dance on television,” he says emphatically. “It reaches so many people so much faster than theatre does. In a minute, you can reach millions and millions. I love that there’s a place for someone like me to go, that there’s a platform for us to choreograph and there’s a place for us to continue to learn.”

Carlyle’s association with the show came through the executive producer, Jeff Thacker, a friend from England who has been one of the show’s producers since the start. After attending a performance of Carlyle’s Broadway production of After Midnight, Thacker insisted that Carlyle join So You Think You Can Dance as a choreographer. Relishing a unique opportunity, Carlyle enthusiastically joined in, partly because he was inspired by the outlet the show gives to young, aspiring professional dancers. “I love dancers and actors,” he

exclaims. “Whenever I step into a rehearsal room, I always hope that I am creating work that is worthy of them. I feel that responsibility.

With So You Think You Can Dance, those young dancers are so special and they’re so talented. Whenever I get on that plane to Los Angeles, I think, ‘I have got to do work that is worthy of those kids. I have got to do work that challenges them, is interesting, is relevant.’

To watch those kids—some of them were nine years old, and they first started watching the show 10 years ago, and there they are.”

The show is challenging. Choreographers and crew don’t find out which dancers they will work with until the night before the show.

Carlyle does his homework by watching each episode. A normal schedule for him is to fly to Los Angeles on a Monday or Tuesday and rehearse for the first time for a threehour session on Wednesday. Because the rehearsal time in Los Angeles is so limited, Carlyle organizes a pre-production rehearsal day in New York with talented friends who he can try his ideas out on. Creating dances without knowing the performers can feel as though he is working in a vacuum, so Carlyle is careful to leave room for the show’s dancers to show their own skills, and he adjusts as much as he can. He stresses the importance of coming prepared with ideas: costumes and lighting must be prepped, and the show’s legal department must clear the music selection a few weeks in advance.

At the end of the first rehearsal, Carlyle works closely with Nikki Parsons, a former dancer turned television director, to create a scratch tape from both sides of the room to capture the routine. Carlyle talks into the camera when capturing or highlighting particular steps, a process he describes as “a director’s DVD commentary over the scratch tape.”

Carlyle’s comfort with cameras developed through observation, practice, and experimentation. An important learning experience behind the camera was as director Susan Stroman’s associate choreographer on the film of The Producers. Carlyle describes it as “a massive undertaking” in which everything from the stage production—on which he also worked as associate choreographer—became larger and larger. “It was really something to watch Stro’s imagination fly and to watch her be unlimited,” Carlyle recalls. “The camera is almost like another person; she used it like another character. It’s not just the dancers that were dancing; the cameras were dancing. I loved it. It was very special.”

Some people working for the camera grumble about how it limits the viewer’s experience by not providing the whole picture. Carlyle is not one of those people. “In a Broadway show, you’re in a wide shot the whole evening,” he explains. “The only way to control focus is by putting a girl in a red dress, having someone jump up and down, creating a big lift or doing something pyrotechnical. But with a camera, I can choose exactly what the audience sees.”

The result is that he can show the dancers and the choreography at its best. For the 2013 Live from Lincoln Center production of Carousel, Carlyle used an iPhone scratch tape for director Glenn Weiss, highlighting how the châinés turns looked coming toward the camera, what an arabesque would look like if the camera moved away, or how a dancer could be seen through a reverse shot.

That sense of perspective—and the convenience of iPhones—has resulted in other memorable work. Carlyle affectionately recalls choreographing Hugh Jackman’s joyful opening number for the 2014 Tony Awards, during which the host hopped his way from the sidewalk outside Radio City Music Hall into the aisles, backstage, and then on the microphone at center stage. Carlyle had great fun conceiving the number through an iPhone, which he held as he walked backward through the enormous hall during rehearsal and wandered around the backstage hallways at midnight while trying to figure out what could be seen. He got into an elevator with director Glenn Weiss, who told him to do a 360-degree turn so at-home viewers could see the audience, before they went down into the basement and backstage for a look at Sting and the casts of Cabaret, Les Misérables, and others. From their iPhone experimentation, Carlyle and Weiss ended up with a four-minute segment shot as one continuous take while the Steadicam operator walked backward, leading a beaming Jackman.

Carlyle recognizes that his choreography for the camera has changed not just how he sees pictures and movement but also the choreography itself. “I think some of my proscenium work has gotten slower and less frantic since I started to learn about a camera,” he says. “A camera doesn’t always love fast, fast, fast movement. It just can’t; it doesn’t read. Sometimes it’s better to move a little slower on camera. The camera comes to the performer. The camera can discover you, whereas on stage you have to make an entrance, make your presence known. On camera, it feels like a quieter relationship.”

America’s obsession with recording and capturing life can also lead many to artistic expression. “I think anyone in America who owns a phone can be a director,” Carlyle notes.

“That’s both a wonderful and a terrible thing.

I think having an iPhone has freed all of us up in a really good way because we don’t have to wait for camera crews or formal training. We can just try. No one has to wait. They can just find two friends and a studio, and that’s it.”

Carlyle recommends that young artists go into a studio with an iPhone and experiment. “Start to decide what you like and what you don’t like,” he says. “Try to film things from a million different angles and choose the ones you like. That way, you’ll develop a style and you’ll develop your eye.”

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Cast of The Wild Party RIGHT Brandon Victor Dixon, Steven Pasquale + Sutton Foster in The Wild Party PHOTOS Joan Marcus OPPOSITE Cast of The Last Goodbye at The Old Globe PHOTO Matthew Murphy LEFT

SONYA TAYEH

A BEAUTIFUL ROLLER-COASTER RIDE When choreographer Sonya Tayeh began work on So You Think You Can Dance in 2008—the show’s third season—she achieved one of the main goals she had set for herself after years of working with dance companies in Los Angeles and San Francisco. Propelled in part by her own nontraditional career path, Tayeh was inspired by the idea of bringing dance to people who had seen dancers thrive.

“The caliber of dancers on So You Think You Can Dance has been exquisite,” Tayeh says.

“The show has been on for so long, and the dancers have been training for this. It has turned into a dream for them.” It has been something like that for Tayeh, too: the show has introduced her to many dancers, choreographers, and directors that she loves and has lifelong relationships with, an important thing for choreographers and dancers whose routines get a minute and 30 seconds of airtime. To prep for rehearsals and the taping, Tayeh has streamlined her process from one that includes many options to one that uses one piece centered on a particular idea that she builds in advance with her assistants. The preparation keeps her mind calm, enabling her to think on her feet, and she is proud that she can now figure things out at

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the last minute with a dancer who has never worked in a particular style or isn’t technically strong. Tayeh feels that she has found a way to talk to dancers that eases the brain—which then enables movement to come easily.

She likes her movement to move the space so the camera seems to swim in it. Like Warren Carlyle, she has high praise for Nikki Parsons and describes moving the camera with her to be “like heaven, because she knows if you want the arabesque to be focused in this way or the abatement in another way.”

Seven years after landing in the national spotlight with the show, Tayeh admits that the exposure has been magnificent and lifechanging. She holds two Emmy nominations for her choreography on the show and has created concert and video choreography for performers including Madonna, Kylie Minogue, Miley Cyrus, and Florence and the Machine.

But Tayeh is far from resting back comfortably.

She embraces an expanse of opportunities that choreographing a show with mass appeal has opened up for her. In the past five years, that has included stage work created for both traditional and nontraditional theatre pieces.

Tayeh’s early dance experience came from Detroit’s underground house music and rave scene, which she explored with her sisters.

Tayeh found the scene immersive, exploratory, and experimental—all of which fed her desire for creative expression. She was also nurtured by her family; her mother bought her books about Martha Graham and Twyla Tharp, whom Tayeh cites as her heroes. “It wasn’t just

about their style,” she explains. “It was that they were inventors, and how righteous and disciplined they were. They really honed who they were as people. I really desire to have that kind of discipline and obsessive behavior when it comes to dance.”

At Wayne State University, where she studied modern dance and contemporary jazz dance, Tayeh’s professors encouraged her. “The way I like to base movement with music was nurtured and embraced. I learned to hone on myself and let that be the driving force to create my own style of movement,” Tayeh recalls. Tayeh fused dance styles to create a style she describes as “very full bodied, pretty combative, and possessing an underlying sense of angst.” She thrives on the process of staging and finding different ways to enhance the story. No matter what format her work takes, she thinks it’s paramount for the choreographer to find a personal and emotional connection to each project. “In the midst of anything I’m doing, I really try to find inspiration by digging personally. I really take it to heart that way. Sincerity is important in all aspects,” she says.

That personal connection was easy to locate with Tayeh’s first job working on a conventional theatre piece. When she was offered the role of choreographer for the Old Globe’s production of The Last Goodbye—a Romeo and Juliet adaptation set to the music of Jeff Buckley— Tayeh wondered how she could do it. The choreographer was a longtime fan of Buckley, but she was nervous about working with actors and singers who weren’t primarily dancers.

But the minute she walked into the room, she felt something shift in her brain and felt at home with the sense of collaboration and the process. “I loved sitting at the table and reading the script, going to the music director and asking for a key change or adjustment, and exploring all of the bodies and how they move differently,” she recalls.

The experience proved life changing. “I knew that my career was going to change in terms of being versatile and tapping into many forms, styles, and projects,” Tayeh says. And that it has. Her theatrical choreography work since then has included Spring Awakening at San Jose Rep, David Henry Hwang’s Kung Fu at Signature Theatre in New York, and The Wild Party as part of the Encores! series at City Center. Last spring, she created a piece for the Lamentation Variations project at the Martha Graham Dance Company, and she is currently

doing a residency at New York Live Arts. And Tayeh is eager for more.

“I will take anything that is challenging,” she says. “I’ll do anything that I feel maintains my artistic integrity, allows me to explore things, and where the collaborators are nice and respectful. It’s just a beautiful rollercoaster that I’ve chosen to live. It’s so hard and exhausting, but I wouldn’t change it for anything.”

Both Warren Carlyle and Sonya Tayeh praise television shows such as So You Think You Can Dance for bringing dance into the homes and lives of people who might not otherwise experience it. They both encourage young artists to have flexible, open minds about career possibilities. Carlyle’s advice? “Bring something to the table. My mom taught me when you go to someone’s house, never go

empty-handed; you always take something,” he offers. “When I go to someone else’s house, I don’t go empty-handed. Even if it’s three ideas, I go with them. Always take something.”

Similarly, Tayeh says, “The worst thing is to go into a room without having done the work to be prepared. It’s just not productive.

Be respectful, be nice, show up early so you can get yourself together.” Tayeh notes that not just artistic preparation is required to have a fulfilling, adventurous career. “I think what has gotten me through is knowledge. Being aware of who I am so I can go into a room, speak clearly, and have ideas, because I’ve done my work on myself and the project, and I have a voice. Being able to study what you love, obsessively, is the work you do in the process. Do everything in your power to be fulfilled.”

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INTERVIEW BY TRIP PHOTO

Walter McBride

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CULLMAN

"Everybody's Got the Right" in Assassins PHOTO Joan Marcus

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Long ago, JOE MANTELLO and TRIP CULLMAN outgrew the boundaries of a master director/mentee relationship. Their professional partnership—dating back to 1998, when Cullman assisted Mantello on Jon Robin Baitz’s comedy Mizlansky/Zilinsky or “Schmucks” at Manhattan Theatre Club—has become one of respect and admiration. Their personal friendship was evident when they recently sat down to talk about the trajectory of Mr. Mantello’s career—from his days as an actor at Circle Rep to directing his Tony Awardwinning production of Assassins, and much more in between.

TRIP CULLMAN | I’ve had two major influences and mentors in my own directing career and you are one of them. Was there such a person for you?

JOE MANTELLO | The greatest influence on my becoming a director was Circle Repertory Company. That’s where I first directed in New York. I started in the Lab and was made a company member after a few years. I directed a Lab production, which then moved to the main stage and was slaughtered. And they said, “Do it again, do it again.” It was that kind of belief and opportunity. I don’t know that that exists today.

TRIP | I was going to say that. I don’t think it does.

JOE | If you took the path that I was on and set out on it today, it would never happen. Circle Repertory Company was that kind of a theatre that could take those kinds of chances, that could nurture somebody who was finding their footing.

I never really considered that there was this other component named the director. Of course, they were there. They were in rehearsal, but I didn’t think of it. I didn’t think of it as a real position. Or it didn’t add up as something that I was on track to do. You always thought of yourself [as a director], right?

TRIP | No, I was definitely an actor first and then got frustrated by being directed by people who I thought were incompetent, and thought I could do a better job. And then realized that I was an incredibly mediocre actor.

That’s how I became a director, which was not your path. You’re a genius actor.

JOE | There are certain things that I can do okay. But I do think there is a point where you think, “I don’t want to be the passenger anymore. I’m a better driver.” So you go and see what that feels like.

I think it’s being able to see a larger vision of something and wanting to be a part of executing that. I think that was nascent in me

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for a long time. I didn’t know what the feeling was. I look back on it now and understand, but at the time I didn’t really know what it was.

In fact, it got in the way of acting sometimes because this other part of my brain kicked in, and I would watch myself, which was not helpful to anybody.

TRIP | Have you ever had another director tell you something that you found useful in forging your own career?

JOE | I was given some really great advice by Graciela Daniele several years ago. She said to me, and I think Bob Fosse said it to her, “Always know why you’re doing something.”

So, as you go into a project, identify what it is.

It can be “I love the play.” It can be “I’m such a fan of this actor, I want to do this play.” It can be “I want to make a lot of money.” It can be “I want to hide out and do something small and rediscover something that I may have lost.” It can be any number of things. But really identify what it is that you are hoping to achieve. Set that goal for yourself, because at the end of the process you can only check in with yourself to see if you’ve achieved what it is that you want. I think a lot of people look outside for some sort of validation or some sort of acknowledgement of your work. If you feel this way, it’s a dead end.

TRIP | It’s hollow.

JOE | There is no way that a person who comes to see a production once can actually fully understand and comprehend everything that went into it. So, you always end up feeling slightly disappointed with the notices, unless you’re British.

TRIP | It’s incredibly fortunate when your first show is a hit. But I have also directed a lot of bad plays, and that was a wildly helpful experience. I learned this from you: oftentimes, when the play itself is not working out to be artistically successful, the measure of a director is how good the production can be in spite of that. I remember from assisting you that sometimes the shows were magnificent pieces of writing. Sometimes there were complications with actors or the writer, or

whatever it was, and that’s where I saw great directing happen. How to mitigate problems or how to negotiate and navigate those issues.

When you go to the theatre, can you see that?

How do you look at a director’s work and see whether her or his work is good? How do you evaluate that?

JOE | Probably the same way that any audience member does. Are you transported? Do you forget about your life for a while? Is the behavior truthful? Is there an intelligence at work in all aspects—the staging, the acting, the design? I truly love going to see a great director’s work. I’m inspired by it, not threatened by it. There are people out there— you being one of them—that I always feel I still can learn stuff from. That’s the hallmark of a great production. I’m seeing it all the time right now. We seem to be in this period of really extraordinary and adventurous and singular voices with young writers. People are doing really, really vibrant, exciting work.

TRIP | Is there a particular production of yours that you feel changed the course of your work or that you feel the most proud of or the closest to?

JOE | Love! Valor! Compassion! was probably the play that changed the course of my career.

I had an angel in Terrence McNally who— based on absolutely nothing but instinct— trusted me with this play. I certainly didn’t have the credits or the experience to direct that play.

But he had a good feeling, and he went with it.

I’ve been thinking about that a lot lately, and I’ve been trying to pay it back in some way, to do what Terrence did for me. Give people a chance. Somebody who has been an assistant for a while or someone who is coming up.

And to answer the second part of your question, I think the one production that came closest to how I envisioned it in my head was Assassins. That was as close as I’ve ever come to achieving exactly what I saw in my head.

TRIP | What is your experience of the first day of rehearsal? I always find it an incredibly vulnerable experience. And I feel enormous pressure to win the cast’s approbation.

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Reed Birney, Jayne Houdyshell, Cassie Beck, Sarah Steele + Arian Moayed in Roundabout Theatre Company’s The Humans PHOTO Joan Marcus ABOVE LEFT

Nathan Lane, Anthony Heald, Justin Kirk, Stephen Bogardus, John Benjamin Hickey + John Glover in the original production of Love! Valor! Compassion! PHOTO Martha Swope RIGHT

Michael Cerveris in Assassins PHOTO Joan Marcus WINTER 2016 | SDC JOURNAL

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JOE | I have a terrible fear of the first day of rehearsal, standing in front of a group of people at a meet-and-greet—which should be outlawed—and having to speak about the play. I feel like I’m mid-process with it. It’s not that I don’t have a vision. I’m waiting for the rest of the guests to arrive to see what we make together. And then I can only evaluate it afterward. It’s a really personal time for me, and I want to hold that close.

There is that inevitable moment where you have to share it, and that’s part of the process and you should be able to defend it. But, for me, it’s not that early, and it’s certainly not until we’ve all sat in the room and everyone has made their contributions. The thing organically becomes what it is going to become.

I really admire people who can stand up and discuss the play. I’ve just never been that person.

TRIP | Do you find that once the hoards of people have left the room and you start the process of table work, that’s where the sharing of your ideas, thoughts, and visions really come into play?

JOE | Yes, because by that time I will have read it and read it and read it hundreds of times, and have all sorts of ideas. I like a similar vibe in my collaborators—that they come in with ideas, and then you see how those things collide, play off one another, and ricochet. You can make something better by the quality of the artist that you’re working with. I feel that I show up ready to work, and more and more as I go on, I expect and require that in others.

I’ve started saying to people, “Show up with your lines learned.” I know that that’s terribly unpopular in terms of actor training. But it actually can release you and your time isn’t spent bogged down in technical work like memorization. You start to play right away.

More and more, I tend to be drawn toward actors who want to work in that way. The other way is equally valid. It’s just that I have found that it’s not as satisfying and as invigorating for me.

TRIP | I love what you’re saying about that first day. It does feel like how the contract is set up.

The expectation is that the director is there to show off everything that he or she knows already instead of “Let’s all sit down at a table and talk about all the things that we think we might know together.” And then collectively come to an agreement that this is the story we’d like to tell together.

JOE | There is this presumption that the director is all knowing, and that he or she is waiting for the actors to catch up. I don’t feel

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that way, which doesn’t mean that I don’t have very strong opinions.

TRIP | Well, I have to tell you, I do the same thing now too, and it’s fascinating to hear.

TRIP | Sure, ’cause that’s our job.

JOE | It came from George.

JOE | Yeah, but I’m not trying to dupe anyone into my vision of the play.

TRIP | How would you describe your own sensibility? Your own taste? Do you think there is such a thing as empirically good taste or bad taste?

TRIP | We were talking about the beginning of a process. I’d love to talk about the end of a process—when you’re in previews and you don’t have a lot of daytime rehearsals.

Oftentimes you are relegated to giving notes after a performance. That was one of the clarion bell moments for me in watching you work—the specificity, incisiveness, and incredible usefulness of how you give notes to actors. I remember being gobsmacked while listening to you give notes on Take Me Out— both at the Donmar and at the Public. As a young director, I thought, “I have to step up my game.” I felt that you were super-cognizant of how an actor is going to take things. Therefore, you weren’t just talking at them. It was surgical.

Is that something intuitive, or have you learned that over the course of your career?

JOE | I think some of it is intuitive. Some of it is the actor part of my brain.

Someone who was very influential in the way that I give notes was George C. Wolfe.

I remember, when we were doing Angels in America, the notes session would always start with “What did you think?” And he would go to every person and say, “What did you think?”

I always thought that was very, very useful, not only to be able to express to him what I felt like the night before or the performance before but also to hear what everyone else was thinking. It was a great equalizer for the notes session to start. He wouldn’t respond.

He wasn’t judging or negating whatever our experience was.

I think I tend to do that now because I found it useful. Although in a play that I did recently, one of the actors told me that they really hated that question. They were interested in what I thought. I said, “Well, I know what I think. I want to know how you felt about the performance, and where do we align, and where do we differ? How do we bridge that gap if there is a gap? But I don’t want to presume that my experience of the preview was your experience of the preview. I’m curious; it’s just curiosity because the experience of performing it in front of an audience is vastly different than watching it from the last row of the theatre.”

I think the preview process is about finding a way to meld those two things so that you’re listening to the actors, but also trying to respond as honestly as possible to what you’re seeing.

JOE | That’s a very good question. Doesn’t everyone think...?

TRIP | [Talks over] That their taste is good?

JOE | I think there are particular tastes. You’ve been where I live, and I have a particular sensibility about how I want to live, which is different than how my friends live. Is that good? Better? It just is. It’s how I see the world and the things that I want to surround myself with. It’s objects that inspire me, that I find beautiful, and that are pleasing to my eye. I live quite minimally, but that doesn’t mean that I don’t have great appreciation for somebody who likes a very cozy cottage with lots of chintz. I can enjoy that. It’s just not my particular taste. I think I try to do with less, but I think that came from starting in a place where we didn’t have a lot.

A few years ago, I felt that I had lost the message. I was working on Broadway with bigger budgets, and I was letting the budget be the problem solver. In doing so, I was letting the budget lead the design process.

I remember having this moment where I thought, “I have to go back to my roots or go back to Off-Broadway.” I made a really considered decision to back away from more commercial ventures. I could feel that I had lost touch with something. I spent about a year and a half doing stuff Off-Broadway, with good budgets, but certainly not what I was used to.

I felt like I got something back, and I was glad to have that clarity to step back and get in touch with a good story well told with not a lot of bells and whistles.

TRIP | So you would not say that there is a unifying aesthetic to your work. There is a sensibility, but that could be...?

JOE | I think that would be for other people to say. I think there are people who have a really clear sensibility, like Ivo van Hove.

He works in a very particular, really exciting way. I don’t think I have that kind of stamp. I approach each play individually, in terms of what it needs. Sometimes that’s very realistic, and sometimes that’s something more abstract. I tend to like things that are much more abstract. But sometimes it’s not what is needed.

TRIP | Let’s talk about preparation for rehearsal. I feel that you and I both do a lot of looking at things that resonate for us vis-àvis the particular show that we’re directing.

I always make a playlist for myself for every show that I do.

JOE | You do? Of music?

TRIP | Of music that I’m listening to in the background when I’m rereading the play for the gazillionth time. It’s possible that none of those songs make it into transitions, but it’s something that keeps me in contact with how I feel when I originally thought about the play.

Do you do any stuff like that?

JOE | I don’t do anything that specific. I tend to read the play a lot, and because the play is rattling around in my head, it informs every waking minute that I have. Everything that you’re experiencing goes through that filter. I tend to collect pictures, photos sometimes.

TRIP | You’ve worked on so many new pieces, both musicals and plays, and a lot of the preparation for a rehearsal process is about working with the writers. That can be a very fraught but also incredibly rewarding experience. Are there any anecdotes or thoughts about that process that you might want to share in terms of how involved directors can oftentimes be with the shaping of new material? And how vulnerable that relationship can feel to a writer and how to nurture it?

JOE | As you know, it’s such an intimate relationship. If it’s somebody that I’ve never worked with before, I try to listen very hard to what they’re telling me about the play or how they work. If it’s not a match, I will usually say, “Maybe we should go our separate ways.” It’s too hard to write a play. It’s too hard to direct a play, and if you don’t agree on actors, then that’s usually a sign of a relationship that’s going to go south pretty quickly. Because then you probably don’t agree on the play, which doesn’t mean that you can’t have discussions or even respectful disagreements, but…I’ve been listening to that more and more because I don’t want to waste anyone’s time. Like I said: it’s hard to write a play. And you should have a person who you’re completely in sync with directing that play.

TRIP | Josh Harmon, who I just worked with, talks to me a lot about a fundamental underpinning of trust between the writer and the director. He feels it’s almost like a dialectic wherein for him it’s more fruitful creatively if the director and he don’t see eye to eye all the time. So, it could be fractious, could be loving, battling things out, which is exhausting.

But I also know my experience with him was extremely rewarding, and I would work with him again in a heartbeat.

JOE | But you said something really important.

You said that you can do that when you understand the fundamental trust that exists between the two of you. What I’m speaking about is that core sense of “We’re in this together.” There are people whose process is very private, and they don’t want to share, and that’s okay, but I don’t know how to access that. But if there is a sense of “We’re going to go on this trip together, and sometimes you’ll drive and sometimes I’ll drive,” that’s totally cool. I agree with Josh that you have to have a little bit of that.

difficult. I try to leave a better director than when I entered the process. I feel that, for the most part, I’m going to be around tomorrow, so I have the luxury of being able to choose projects wisely—or hopefully wisely.

TRIP | You articulated that so beautifully. I think that is exactly the feeling. When you know that the collaboration is going to feel right, it’s like you feel...

TRIP | The entry point for me into a project now is always, “Is there something that I want to learn about myself, or about the subject matter, or about the writer as a person, or the actors that we’re working with?” The paradox or irony for me is that I choose the projects I work on selfishly.

JOE | You know it.

TRIP | ...that you’re on an adventure together and should something go wrong in either camp, the other person will be there for support. That’s such a beautiful way to think about it.

Something that you said to me that has always resonated with me: “Slow and steady wins the race.” I found that to be so useful when I was coming up and trying to get noticed and trying to get work. Can you talk about what you mean by that, looking at the span of your own career? I think a lot of the time directors are so myopic: we’re inside of the thing that we’re doing. Which is a good thing, but I’ve started to feel that everything I do is a life-ordeath situation. Every play I direct gives me more gray hair.

JOE | These are not necessarily bad things.

This goes in your toolbox. It seems simple to say, but when your time comes, just do good work. It’s hard. It’s really, really hard, and there are many things that exist in this business that make that extremely difficult.

TRIP | What we do is so hard and there are so many things that you could get defeated by.

It is like a marathon: you have to keep putting one step in front of another. That’s the way to survive the things that make you feel like you’ve been hit to the ground.

When you have experienced a big success or disappointment, how has it affected the work that has come after it? Or has it?

JOE | The answer is different for different points along the way. I feel that there was a time in my life where everything was life and death, that I was really on that treadmill and trying to stay relevant. I lost my way because of that. Some of my proudest moments in the theatre have nothing to do with commercial success. I try to have a good time and work on stuff that is exciting and intriguing and

But I’ll only do things now if I feel there is somebody in the room or if there is something about the play that will make me better. To do something just for the possibility of it being commercially successful—it’s not enough anymore. But I’ve been doing it for a very long time.

JOE | When I go and see the work that you’ve directed, I feel like only you could have directed it. It’s hard to explain, because I don’t want to make you self-conscious, but there is a hallmark to what you do, the kind of actors that you like, your visual sense. I find your productions super musical. There is a vibrancy, an electricity, and an irreverence that’s inyour-face. But it’s also friendly, deeply honest, and full of empathy and compassion. And it’s really entertaining. You understand the value of entertainment, which is not a dirty word. It’s also not at the cost of sacrificing emotion.

TRIP | Well, that’s incredibly kind of you to say all those things.

Totally switching gears: do you think that there is a difference in approach to directing revivals [from an approach to] directing new work?

JOE | I do. I don’t particularly like revivals.

I’ve had an okay experience. I like having the writer sitting next to me, even if we’re...not going to be best friends on that day or even if we disagree. I like that. I like that partnership.

A revival with a living author can be okay, or that can also be challenging because they bring their own baggage into it. I like the act of making something new. You’re not battling any ghosts.

TRIP | I agree. I think that the tricky part of directing a revival with a writer who is going to be in the room with you is that his or her memory of the original production may be so fond that you might be really excited by what you’re trying to do. And then that writer says, “Well, that’s not what I want with the play,” which is crushing, you know. And I might be wrong, but I think my responsibility is to the writer—to please him or her. Do you agree with that?

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JOE | I do agree. I feel like having lived with a writer for such a long time, I can see how much goes into writing a new play. And so, yes, I do feel this deep sense of responsibility to the writer. But I also think I’m more excited by the idea that it’s like clearing the brush for the first time, and making a trail for the play, which is why I find it so disconcerting when other productions come along after the original production that not only mimic it, but replicate it. I just don’t understand that.

I don’t understand how someone would call themselves a director if there’s a guy out there who just hires the original designers. It gets really tricky because, of course, a designer needs to own their work. They are the owners of that work, but how that work gets utilized and how it evolves out of many, many, many conversations is tricky to unpack.

they said at the time was, “Well, we didn’t have time.” And I said, “Well, my name is not in that problem. Then don’t do the play. Do Belle of Amherst or something.” The excuses that I’ve heard over the years of why it can happen or why it should be allowed to happen are mindblowing.

TRIP | Are there other areas, or trends, that you are seeing in theatre these days that you find unfair in terms of practices?

JOE | I wouldn’t limit it to the theatre, but I think that the proliferation of the art police and virtual vigilantism is becoming more and more prevalent. There was an incident at Mount Holyoke College where they were going to produce The Vagina Monologues. And one person in the school newspaper accused Eve Ensler of being reductive If another director comes along and not inclusive enough. That’s and hires a sound designer, and laughable. This is a person who ...oftentimes, when has devoted their entire life to then takes those sound cues and places them in the exact same raising awareness and activism the play itself is not place as the original production surrounding women’s issues. design, that’s not directing as I All of a sudden, a person working out to be understand it. It’s a very, very who is really trying to make complicated thing, and I find good in the world is put on artistically successful, it deeply upsetting. the defense. I kept thinking the measure of a director that we’re lucky to have Eve There are smart people out Ensler. I don’t see a lot of is how good the there who do not understand people devoting their lives this issue. I think it’s incumbent to what she’s done. She’s put production can be upon us to start to articulate her money where her mouth and claim what it is that we do. is, literally. I said to someone at in spite of that.

I don’t know that I feel at this the time that there is definitely point in my life that it’s about an enemy out there. I can assure MANTELLO copyright. I don’t know that I feel you it’s not Eve Ensler. It just isn’t. that way. I think that’s opening a can of worms that you don’t want to get I understand the feeling of into. I think it’s about educating directors, powerlessness, but there has got to be theatres, and producers. a way of entering into a dialogue about it without destroying the good work that people TRIP | What we do is our art and it’s our claim are trying to do. That one was shocking to me. to what is ours. I love what you said about I didn’t even know where to process that. educating the theatres. It’s on them about who they hire and how they use the same We’re in a time where certain things have source material while creating something that’s to be addressed, redressed, and we need excellent that has nothing to do with another to reevaluate how things have been done. person’s work.

I’m not talking about inclusion or things like nontraditional casting. I’m talking about a kind JOE | Unfortunately, there is a group of people of public shaming that seems to happen about who have made names for themselves and quotas. won awards by replicating other peoples’ productions. Meanwhile, interesting, intelligent I just saw what went on with Manhattan creative people aren’t getting the work. That’s Theatre Club this fall. What’s interesting to me a real shame; I just don’t get it. When we were is that people are desperate for a negative going through what we went through with story and it takes on a life of its own. I sense Love! Valor! Compassion!, there were plenty a lot of fear, and I don’t think great art comes of other productions out there that were out of fear. I think the issue has to be raised completely different. I would see photos and and has to be discussed, but I don’t believe art think, “Oh, that’s an amazing solution.” Or can be achieved by quotas.

“How great, I never would have thought of that.” Really clever, wildly inventive stuff. And TRIP | I think this is such a complicated and then the Caldwell Theatre basically replicated thorny and loaded issue to discuss. the Broadway production. One of the things

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JOE | Absolutely.

TRIP | For me, it’s always a moral responsibility to try to represent the world as I see it. For instance, if it is a contemporary play, there is no reason why that play’s world cannot reflect the world that I experience in terms of the fact that people of different genders, colors, and creeds interact with one another.

And oftentimes, at the beginning of a casting process, I feel the need to articulate that to the casting director, so that they can understand that I don’t want this production to be populated only by white people. Tell me if you think I’m wrong, but I do feel that is a viewpoint that is being adopted in the casting process across the board.

JOE | I do. I tend to work with the same few casting directors, and the Telsey + Company office has always cast a wide net. It’s never been limited to Caucasian actors. I feel there is an implicit understanding when we work together that that is going to be the case.

I think, project to project, it’s different. The play that I’m doing now, The Humans, involves a family. It’s the initial production of this play, so I think certain things have to be adhered to or addressed in the script. But one of the daughters is in a relationship with a man, and we’ve cast Arian Moayed.

And then when you do You Can’t Take It With You, you can make James Earl Jones the grandfather, and you don’t have to explain it because it’s James Earl Jones.

TRIP | Right, and it’s not the inaugural production.

JOE | It’s not the original production, and what you’re seeing is a great actor taking on this role. But I think there is work to be done. I’m really excited and encouraged by this kind of broadening of peoples’ visions.

TRIP | I’ll let you go soon to your first night of tech, but I’m curious: is there something you haven’t done yet that you want to do? A dream project or venue or an actor you want to work with that you haven’t yet?

JOE | I want to be in the room with people that are going to challenge me and push me and make me better. I don’t want to play it safe anymore, or I’d rather just stay home.

My favorite directors are people who go big.

Some of my favorite directors have had real crash-and-burn disasters—and their successes are the equivalent of that because they go big. Directors should have some real disasters because they aim so high and it comes crashing down. Those are the things that I’ve really learned from and that I cherish the most.

I like that high-wire act, and I like watching other people do it as well.

INTERVIEW BY

RYAN MCKITTRICK

EMBRACING THE CHALLENGES The Donkey Show—an adaptation of A Midsummer Night’s Dream set in a nightclub.

Pippin—created with associates from Canadian circus company Les 7 doigts de la main and populated by acrobats, magical illusions, and circus tricks. These productions and so many more directed by DIANE PAULUS have been some of theatre’s most challenging, awe-inspiring, and unexpected recent productions. As SDC Journal considered how directors are redefining the theatrical experience and where those experiences take place, Paulus and her vision as both a director and as Artistic Director at American Repertory Theater took center stage. Recently, A.R.T. Director of Artistic Programs Ryan McKittrick sat down with Paulus to discuss how she is redefining theatre and why.

You entered Harvard as an undergraduate thinking that you might want to be a lawyer and left wanting to pursue a career in the theatre. What changed your mind? How did you decide to become a director?

My real passion at the time was politics. I had been involved in a lot of activism as a high school student. I had lobbied for Planned Parenthood and marched for nuclear disarmament. I looked at my surroundings as a teenager growing up in New York City, and my impulses were always to try to fix things, to organize people, to get kids on their bicycles to go around the neighborhood and pick up garbage. I also danced at the New York City Ballet, played the piano, and performed in musicals at my high school.

I went to college thinking I would continue being passionate about the arts, but that it would be extracurricular. The longer I was at Harvard, however, the more I started to identify those interests as what really fueled me. A lot of that had to do with being exposed to the American Repertory Theater (A.R.T.). I saw a lot of theatre growing up in New York City, but at the A.R.T. I was able to experience things that I had not been exposed to previously—Philip Glass world premieres, productions helmed by the visionary Andrei Serban. Watching Robert Wilson’s work was the

first time I saw theatre as a puzzle for the audience to solve, like a great poem. You left the theatre wanting to decipher and decode what you saw. Being exposed to international, world-class theatre had a profound effect on me.

I ended up concentrating in social studies, which is an interdisciplinary major at Harvard, and writing my thesis on The Living Theatre. I actually interviewed A.R.T. Founding Director Robert Brustein for my thesis because he was so integral to The Living Theatre’s work at Yale in 1968. By the time I finished college, I knew theatre was something I wanted to pursue professionally because of what I witnessed at the A.R.T.—a whole organization buzzing with people who were professionals working in the theatre. I also realized that a life in the theatre was not only creatively exciting but also intellectually and emotionally fulfilling. Once I understood that theatre was a career that could engage the mind, heart, and body, there was no going back.

ABOVE Diane

Paulus + composer Matt Aucoin working on his opera Crossing PHOTO Gretjen Helene WINTER 2016 | SDC JOURNAL

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You eventually went to Columbia’s graduate directing program. Who were your mentors there and how did they influence you as a director?

My experience at Columbia’s MFA directing program was seminal in terms of mentors. The two people who really changed my life were Anne Bogart and Andrei Serban. Anne is the head of the directing program. Spending three years at her side was invaluable because she is such a theoretically inspired teacher and also a practicing director. She would come to class and speak to us as peers: this is what happened in my rehearsal last night; this was the crisis I had; this is how I dealt with this actor; this is the situation I had with this playwright; or this is the way I want to dive into this subject matter. It was so important to have the teacher I revered sharing what was difficult and how she got through it. Her pedagogy is incisive and penetrating, but she’s also so nurturing. She was the Earth mother to all of us. And on the other side, we had Andrei Serban, who is the head of the acting program. It was an invaluable experience to watch Andrei work with actors. I was completely riveted by his process.

What about it?

How he spent hours on the text and the language, and how he would push actors to go to places they didn’t think they could go. Andrei comes from the Eastern European school that says you’re never good enough. That’s a tough way to teach. Some people crumble under that, and some people thrive. For me, there was nothing more stimulating than being told I was completely banal. I would leave class thinking I was worthless as an artist. Rather than getting angry or upset, I would be that much more determined to break through to something that was actually meaningful. To this day, I carry Andrei and Anne with me when I walk into a rehearsal room. They are in my DNA. Prior to Columbia, I also trained with Mike Nichols at the New Actors Workshop. Mike would take any scene and break it down beat by beat to analyze what happens—what the event is. It was like a Socratic method with actors. That training with Mike went handin-hand with the work of Paul Sills, who I have to mention because not enough people know who he is and the impact he had on the American theatre. Paul’s work in improvisation and theatre games had a big influence on me. I still play theatre games I learned from him with every company of actors I work with, whether they’re opera singers, Broadway veterans like Audra McDonald, or college students.

In recent years, everything you’ve directed has been a musical or an opera. What draws

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you to music in theatre? Why is music important to you as a director?

In many ways, the theatre is music. The theatre is rhythm. The theatre is emotion, which is music. So the idea that there’s theatre over here and music over there doesn’t ring true to me.

As a director, you’re always trying to respond to all possible stimuli. When you work in a form that has music, you have more information. In addition to the words, you have a thousand clues in the music. You have tempo, dynamics, and rhythm. You also have a conductor, a musical director, a musical supervisor, and usually a choreographer. And in the case of a new musical, you also have a composer! All of a sudden, you have five more creative minds working with you as part of your brain trust.

I’ve always been interested in looking at how we can expand the boundaries of theatre through the kind of music that we bring into the theatre. When I am sent a musical, I always listen to the music first. I’m interested in composers who are pushing the boundaries of what kinds of sound and scores we hear in the theatre. The show I’m working on now, Invisible Thread—which we premiered at the A.R.T. under the title Witness Uganda—is a good example. I remember listening to the demos and thinking that I’d never heard music like this in the theatre.

What was different about it?

As a director and as Artistic Director of the A.R.T., how do you decide which musicals you want to direct or program?

This score in particular has a very strong pop sensibility, combined with African sounds that came from the creators Matt Gould and Griffin Matthews’s experiences in Uganda. The songs are written in English and Luganda. The only thing I could equate it to is the remarkable experience of hearing Paul Simon’s Graceland album for the first time.

My own personal interests are very much in sync with the mission, which is to expand the boundaries of theatre. It’s such an enlightened and inspiring mission, and that’s why I took the job as Artistic Director eight years ago. We’re constantly exploring the possibilities of what theatre can be.

The other thing I consider when selecting a new musical is the story and the emotional impact. I am very interested in pieces that have a big emotional impact. That probably comes from working in opera. I think that if characters can die on stage and sing while they’re dying, then let’s go for the big emotions.

That’s always been an interest of mine. I think that came from growing up in the ’90s, when the idea of the government supporting you as an artist felt like a non-reality, so you turned to the audience to “subsidize” your work. I got very excited about making theatre that connected with the popular culture—theatre that had a meaning to society at large, that wasn’t siloed and elitist, that wasn’t art with a capital “A.” Often, elements of pop culture live outside what we traditionally consider theatre.

I staged a production of King Lear at Columbia as a directing student that was, by all accounts, terrible. I remember sitting back, looking at it, and thinking, “Who in their right mind would want to sit here and watch this?” Maybe it was interesting for me and the actors in the rehearsal process, but I had gotten too deep into the process of laboratory exploration.

You have to do that in graduate school, but by the time I left Columbia I was ready to get back in the trenches of putting on a show that audiences might actually want to see.

A lot of people see musical theatre as something light and entertaining—that it’s not serious theatre. But I think the opposite is true—even with a musical like Pippin, which so many people remember as the show you do at summer camp. People don’t usually think about Pippin and Artaud, but that was my inspiration for that show; and that was Bob Fosse’s interest when he worked on the show in the 1970s. I believe he was using Pippin to create a kind of Artaudian experience for the audience.

One of the first productions I did out of school was The Donkey Show, which was a very dark reading of A Midsummer Night’s Dream through the lens of 1970s disco drug culture. The audience responded to the show because they knew and loved those disco hits, and now they were hearing them embedded in the context of a narrative that gave the songs new meaning.

Your production of Waitress, which premiered at the A.R.T. this past summer and opens on Broadway this spring, featured a score by Sara Bareilles, who had never written songs for a musical. What made you want to collaborate with her?

I had been a huge fan of Sara’s music, and I was thinking we needed a voice for Waitress that had the spirit and aesthetic of the independent film that inspired the musical.

Sara has loved theatre all her life, thought she might get into theatre, but ending up having this huge career as a pop star. I saw the opportunity to channel all that back into this new musical.

I want artists who haven’t worked in the theatre to come to our playground, teach us, and take us to new places. Sara’s music in Waitress doesn’t just expand the kind of music

The Donkey Show butterflies over the crowd at OBERON PHOTO Marcus Stern

we hear in the theatre; it’s also expanding our audience. When I first met Sara, I suggested she watch the movie and write whatever song came to her. I told her not to worry about narrative or drama, but just to go where her instincts took her. And the very first thing she wrote was “She Used to Be Mine,” which has become the signature song of the show. Now she has recorded it, she sings it on tour, and by the time we open on Broadway this spring, millions of people will have heard this song.

Our world is increasingly without boundaries, and I’m interested in how we can break out of the current silo of theatre. It’s a very powerful silo because there is an audience and a culture of artists and a community that is so strong.

But I am interested in how we can bring theatre to more people. I actually think Sara has been writing theatre songs her whole life, because her songs are narrative and they’re highly emotional. But they have just never been framed inside a theatre project.

Let’s talk about getting out of silos in terms of space. You’ve staged a number of productions in unconventional performance spaces—Il Mondo Della Luna in a planetarium, The Donkey Show and Prometheus Bound in club venues. What drew you to these spaces?

I am always looking at how to “wake up” the theatre experience, and so much of that has

to do with architecture. I am a theatre history addict. When you look back to Shakespeare or the Greeks, you see that theatre was happening for thousands of years before there were indoor auditoriums with seats bolted to the floor, a curtain, and an audience facing forward in the dark. When Wagner turned out the lights, it was revolutionary. He was sick of theatre as a social event. He wanted to concentrate on the art, turn off the lights, and immerse the audience in the performance. It was radical.

But the danger is that we inherit this and start to think that’s the only way theatre should be.

I’m interested in what theatre can do that no other medium can. Theatre is undeniably a physical ritual, which isn’t the case with film or television or your laptop. In theatre, you are moving through an event with other people in time and space. So much of that has to do with the audience’s experience physically and the performance environment.

Hair is a great example of this. When Jim Rado and Jerry Ragni wrote Hair, they wanted to take it to Broadway so they could jump on those bolted-down seats and say, “Bourgeois audience, here we come!” They wanted a revolution in the theatre. They wanted to react against the architecture of the proscenium arch theatre. That reaction to architecture can stimulate you to create a new kind of theatre.

The environment in which you see something

really impacts how you experience art, and in the 20th century, those environments were, in many cases, anesthetized. It was very purified and routine.

That’s one reason why I was so fascinated by Robert Wilson’s work. When I first saw Einstein on the Beach, it was over four hours long. It was hypnotic, and the audience experienced it over an extended period of time. It showed me that you could explore different rules of time and behavior in the theatre. The same is true for [Punchdrunk’s immersive, interactive, site-specific adaptation of Macbeth] Sleep No More, which we premiered at the A.R.T. That theatre experience puts the audience in the driver's seat, almost like a living video game that combines storytelling with theatrical art installation. So I’m always thinking about how we can break the rules of space and wake up the audience experience.

The Donkey Show is a great example of that.

It’s not just an adaptation of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream; it’s also an adaptation of a space. How did you and Randy Weiner develop that show?

As a teenager growing up in New York City, I spent time at Studio 54. When you left 54th Street and walked through those red ropes, it was as if you had stepped into a fantasyland. It was like the enchanted woods of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. There were fairies, music, drugs, WINTER 2016 | SDC JOURNAL

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Anthony Wayne, Patina Miller + Andre Fitch in Pippin at Broadway’s Music Box Theatre in NYC PHOTO Joan Marcus

“ In many ways, the theatre is music.

The theatre is rhythm. The theatre is emotion, which is music.

” lights, and people flying from the ceiling. It also was democracy on the dance floor. The most powerful celebrities were side by side with a kid from Queens who got into the club because he was fabulous enough to get past the red ropes. It was this unbelievable amalgam. And it was also theatrical. With Randy at my side in our partnership of creating works together, I’ve always been interested in looking at theatrical events outside the theatre, whether it be nightclubs, professional wrestling matches, rock concerts, or sporting events. We’re always looking outside of the traditional theatre to these other forms of live performance in order to learn from them.

We started The Donkey Show in a tiny former speakeasy downtown called the Piano Store.

In our own way, we turned it into a nightclub.

We borrowed red ropes from the restaurant across the street to make the entrance feel like a nightclub, and with the audience lined up outside, we started the action of the show out on Ludlow Street. Then we moved the show to the Pyramid Club on Avenue A, because that club was willing to host us at 8:00 p.m. on Thursday evenings—not a popular time for the club’s regular activities! That was our way as a young, downtown company to find free space.

Then New York producer Jordan Roth saw the show and wanted to give it an Off-Broadway commercial run. I’ll never forget sitting in a restaurant with Jordan and the Yellow Pages.

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We literally had the phone book out and were going club to club in a taxi to look for a space.

We finally found El Flamingo on 21st Street, where The Donkey Show played for six years.

It was really important to us that we were performing in a real club because that was part of the experience for the audience— traveling to 21st Street, walking over to 11th Avenue, lining up on a street with abandoned warehouses, and then walking into a real club, with bouncers and security. Nightclubs have speaker systems that are truly Artaudian. You feel those subwoofers. The base beat rattles your bones. It’s a visceral experience. Having that framework liberates you to create other kinds of theatrical events. That became a model for turning our second stage at the A.R.T. into a club theatre that could stimulate artists to create new kinds of work.

Is there any advice you would offer to early career directors?

I would say a couple of things. The first comes from Anne Bogart, who told me that the more you grow as a person—the more you stretch your mind, the more life experiences you have—the deeper and better you will be as an artist. That’s the utter joy of being in this profession: everything you experience in life—the ups and downs, the challenges, the traumas, the family life crises, the health

issues—everything by definition makes you a deeper, more complex, and more powerful artist. To embrace that is so empowering.

Everything you’re challenged to do in your life is actually going to help you be a better artist.

That leads to my second piece of advice, which is that you have to embrace the challenges.

You learn to welcome them and develop the muscles to stay standing through it all. The great producer Lyn Austin once said to me, when I was a young artist, that directing a show is like being on a boat in an unbelievable storm. The ship is tilting right and left and everybody is jumping overboard, and it’s the director’s job to stay standing and keep the ship sailing. That takes strength and courage.

But when you know that’s part of what you do, you learn to be like an athlete and endure.

The last thing I would say, especially to a young artist, is that you have to identify what you love. This business is filled with so many challenges. You have to be interested in it as a fulfilling life pursuit on a very deep level. If you can identify what your inner light is, then you’re going to have an internal guide to what projects you should pursue and how to chart your course through all of the challenges. Then doors will open and experiences will add up.

It’s not something you have to know when you’re 18, but you always have to be asking yourself why you are doing this.

SDC JOURNAL PEER-REVIEWED SECTION

Sustaining Black Theater

BY HARVEY

A

YOUNG, NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY

fter the forum on “The Relationship between the Academy and the Profession,” inaugurating our first issue of the SDC Journal Peer-Reviewed Section (PRS) in the summer

of 2015, the peer-review editorial board invited leading scholars of theatre to provide our initial set of essays on topics relating to directing and choreography at universities and on professional stages across the country. In this issue, we are very pleased to publish the following piece by Harvey Young, Chair and Professor of Theatre at Northwestern University, Presidentelect of the Association for Theatre in Higher Education (ATHE), and a prominent scholar writing on theatre and race and black theatre in America. This inaugural essay serves as an example of scholarship focusing on important contemporary issues and historical trends in the fields. We hope these first invited essays inspire authors working in and thinking about our professions to submit pieces for peer-reviewed publication in future. For detailed submission guidelines, please see the website or contact the co-editors directly.

INTRODUCED + EDITED BY ANNE

FLIOTSOS + ANN M. SHANAHAN

T

he frustration and, indeed, anger of the Black Lives Matter movement centers on the alarming number of unarmed men, women, and children who have been gunned down by law enforcement officials. Protestors actively critique a justice system that often declines to hold the individuals who pulled the trigger criminally responsible and, ultimately, allows black folks to be killed with alarming frequency. The movement inspired people with varying complexions to bring the conversation on the importance of black life to their local communities by posting placards on front lawns and holding vigils to remember lives lost senselessly. In the theatre, it led to the commissioning of artists to create new works that capture the emotion and energy of the moment. Hands Up: Six Playwrights, Six Testaments, produced by New York City-based New Black Fest is one of many recent examples.

Black life has long been a significant—and, arguably, a central—concern of mainstream American theatre. Abolitionists employed the stage to present portraits of the devastating dayto-day experiences of American chattel slavery. As bodies hanged from trees across the United States, New Negro proponents called for the creation of a wide array of performances to record the emotional toll and the devastating loss of lives. The experience of living in segregated and, later, slowly desegregating America was captured in the dramas and musicals of the Civil Rights and post-Civil Rights era. With regularity, artists have gathered over the past fifty years to assess the development of black theatre and call for the creation of new works that tell the stories of black life and preserve the richness of black culture.

FIG. 1

Bert Williams Library of Congress Prints + Photographs Division FIG. 2

WPA Federal Theatre Presents The Case of Philip Lawrence, 1936/1937 Poster (silkscreen) Library of Congress Prints + Photographs Division

This article offers an overview of the imbricated nature of black theatre and black life. In the following pages, I chronicle how the stage offered an opportunity to raise awareness and bring attention to experiences of racial violence and abuse. I look at how arts professionals and civil rights proponents repeatedly, for more than a century, advocated for the development of creative works about, by, for, and near African Americans. I draw attention to the frequency of such calls to sustain black theatre in order to reveal how black theatre, like black life, is simultaneously vibrant and under threat.

Black Life On Stage Blackface minstrelsy is widely considered to be one of the most significant American contributions to western theatrical practice. Conventional wisdom is that Greece contributed tragic form, Italy opera, England a recognizable narrative structure, and Japan a gestural vocabulary that inspired generations of avant-garde and experimental artists. The US contribution was the actor “blacking up” and impersonating someone with brown skin. Thanks to the circuits travelled by troupes of artists, blackface reached not only Great Britain but also the expanses of the British Empire. Audiences flocked to see the minstrel show. They reveled in the opportunity to spend time with a “black” person and to be entertained by a set of acts imagined as being essentially or authentically black. Their preference for this style has been WINTER 2016 | SDC JOURNAL PEER-REVIEWED SECTION

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well documented, from Mark Twain publicly declaring his adoration of the “nigger show” to the manner with which the blackface form was eagerly adopted by nascent film producers in such Hollywood cinematic fare as The Jazz Singer.

As legend has it, actor T.D. Rice first delighted audiences in the 1820s by costuming himself like a nearby African American porter or “stable hand” (Thompson 169). This performance, which would blossom into his widely popular “Jump Jim Crow” song and dance routine, would be staged in sold out venues across the United States and, by Rice and his imitators, around the globe. Through his racial impersonation, Rice rendered black bodies dramatically interesting for a worldwide audience. He also framed expectations for the performing black body as being marked by excess in regards to dialect, costume, and movement. Whereas Rice toured the United States and the United Kingdom, the artists whom he influenced traveled increasingly broader international circuits. In so doing, they introduced black lives—albeit in stereotypical fashion—to a diverse, worldwide set of attendees.

The legacy of Rice and his followers is evident in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, George Aiken’s 1852 theatrical adaptation of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s popular novel. Early in the play, a young black slave child named Harry performs for the amusement of two white men. Aiken’s directions reveal that Harry “sings and dances around the stage.” The link to minstrelsy is made certain when one of the men greets the boy: “Hulloa! Jim Crow!” Harry, as slave, must perform. The danger of his situation is made legible in the entrance of his mother, Eliza, who “grasps the child eagerly in her arms, and cast[s] another glance of apprehension” in the direction of the men before she and her son exit.

Numerous scholars have written about the excesses contained within the myriad stagings of Uncle Tom’s Cabin across the nineteenth century. The academic focus on the presence of live animals or technological wonders—for example, a treadmill on which horses allegedly galloped in pursuit of Eliza—as well as the many Tom themed souvenirs and collectibles can obscure a simple truth: the success of the play and the novel depended upon its spotlighting of black life and experiences.

Uncle Tom’s Cabin, as penned by Beecher Stowe, was intended to be an abolitionist text. The play offers a fictionalized version of everyday black existence and reveals the savagery of a system of enforced servitude.

Even as audiences may have rejoiced at the minstrel-inspired singing and dancing of Harry, they were forced to witness and, perhaps,

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empathize with the title character being subjected to the lash of Simon Legree.

The whipping of Tom proved to be one of the more memorable aspects of the narrative.

Indeed, the visual spectacle of poorly treated and physically abused black bodies informed the popular iconography of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Among the more extreme material objects produced by the Tom trade were miniature cardboard character cutouts which were inserted into regional newspapers and allowed the user, presumably children and their guardians, to reenact the play, including the abuse of Tom, within their homes. These cardboard cutouts were akin to present day toys found in children’s cereal boxes. They were intended to amuse. The invitation to role play may have allowed children to find pleasure in the abuse of the black body—similar to the way in which performance historian Robin Bernstein astutely describes the treatment of Tom-themed black dolls in her book Racial Innocence (210). Regardless, the novel, theatrical adaptation, and themed collectibles staged the precarity of black life.

As the nineteenth century concluded and the subsequent century began, black artists managed to achieve greater authority in the scripting of black culture through performance.

Aida Overton Walker’s choreography shone a spotlight on the social dances of black folk.

It revealed how African Americans actively contributed to American performance culture by remixing a range of elements inspired by African diasporic ritual and the witnessing— from the margins of servitude—of white genteel dance. Black life could be expressed through gesture and movement. A similar articulation occurred within the theatre, as the work of George Walker, Overton’s husband, Bert Williams, and their collaborators demonstrate. Williams’s performance of the 1905 song “Nobody,” with lyrics penned by Alex Rogers, offers a refreshingly candid insight into the experience of living a marginalized existence. Despite being a comic song sung in an invented black dialect by the Bahamian actor, the lyrics reveal the harsh conditions of black life: “When life seems full of clouds and rain, And I am full of nothin’ and pain, Who soothes my thumpin’, bumpin’ brain?

Nobody.” The fact that lynchings of black men, women, and children continued to occur in an unchecked manner across the United States as Williams sang “Nobody” may have allowed the song to resonate with the contemporary experiences of listeners.

The rise of naturalism, despite being tainted by the residues of the previous century’s sentimental, melodramatic, and blackface styles, offered an opportunity to better reflect the experiences of black folk. The most famous definition of black theatre was penned by W.E.B. Du Bois who called for

the creation of art that was “about us, by us, for us, and near us” (134). Reflecting on recent nineteenth-century stagings of black characters as caricatures, Du Bois understood that representations of African Americans often were staged by white Negro delineators and performed before primarily white audiences.

Although putatively “about” African Americans, these works imagined an unrealistic, stereotypical picture of black life that was not consonant with the lived realities and daily experiences of actual black people. If black artists created theatre about black folk and shared them with black audiences in their own communities, then those performances could be understood as political acts that worked to revise the social standing of African Americans in public life.

With limited production venues, Du Bois and his contemporaries, especially Alain Locke, encouraged the publication of plays and poetry within periodicals such as Theatre Arts Monthly and Crisis. They invited readers to share these printed artistic works with family members and, perhaps, neighbors. Plays were read aloud. In some households, roles were distributed among family members in order to facilitate the staging of the play.

The drama of black life entered the homes of African Americans and non-black allies of the New Negro movement. Through the telling, listening, and re-performance of stories about the everyday experiences of black folk, the bonds of community were forged. Sitting within his or her parlor, a person could be transported to another place and encounter a range of black folk whose daily realities were shockingly familiar. They could commiserate with friends, family, and neighbors who shared a point of view on the experience of being black in the early twentieth century. The drama of the New Negro era was essential to articulating the black experience. As theatre historian Koritha Mitchell has observed, New Negro artists “wanted African Americans to recognize themselves in the scripts and to take pride in what they saw, even if it was laced with sorrow” (41).

Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, communities of artists gathered to revise the depiction of black life with an aim to create art that reflected the complexity as well as the beauty of African American culture. Scholars, including David Krasner and Jonathan Shandell, have written authoritatively about the development of such communities across the United States, from Georgia Douglas Johnson’s famed S Street Salon at the heart of the BaltimoreWashington corridor, Beale Street in Memphis, and along “the Stroll” in Chicago to name just a few places. These homes and clubs nurtured the creation of black artistry that could rally community and effectively articulate socio-political critiques. In Harlem’s Theaters,

Adrienne Macki Braconi offers a series of rigorously researched case studies that demonstrate the political charge that results from the intermixing and political organizing of activists and artists. Writing about Harlem’s Krigwa Players, Macki Braconi notes, “Du Bois and the theater’s founders saw themselves as progressive social revolutionaries entrusting the local stage as a laboratory for their social experiments” (50).

African American theatre companies spurred the development of black artistry by issuing calls for new work and establishing a network that aided its circulation. For example, Krigwa “discovered” and widely disseminated the writings of playwrights Willis Richardson and Eulalie Spence. The “negro units” of the Federal Theatre Project existed in dozens of US cities, spanning the east and west coasts.

Art begets art. The campaign for black art, in the 1920s and 1930s, introduced and widely shared the work of artists whose aesthetics revised stereotypical minstrel representations.

Although scholars have rightly noted that black intellectuals debated the merits of “high art” and “folk art,” a general agreement existed on the fact that black artistry allows diverse audiences an opportunity to bear witness to African American experiences.

Writing a generation later for The Drama Review, Larry Neale, cofounder of Black Arts Repertory Theatre, outlined how the Black Arts Movement was a folk arts campaign intended to engage neighborhoods, reflect their residents’ voices, and effect political change.

He opens with the following declaration: “The Black Arts Movement is radically opposed to any concept of the artist that alienates him from his community” (29). Further noting that the “[p]olitical values inherent in the Black Power concept are now finding concrete expression in the aesthetics of Afro-American [artists],” he asserts that black life is inseparable from black artistry. This is evident in Amiri Baraka’s 1964 play Dutchman, arguably the most famous drama of the period. In it, Clay confronts societal racism, vents about the misperceptions of black life that are rampant within society, and, ultimately, loses his life. He is murdered. The play, which Baraka initially staged in the Lower East Side before moving it to the streets of Harlem, invites audience members to bear witness to the articulation of black experience. As theatre, it presents these experiences in a communal setting and invites spectators to reflect with one another.

Certainly, the message of the play was not lost on Howard Taubman, in his New York Times review. Taubman observed, “If this is the way even one Negro feels, there is ample cause for guilt as well as alarm, and for a hastening of change.”

In calling for a more forceful articulation of identity and advocating for the development of (black) community-based theatres, BAM artists underscored the importance of collective organization to the advancement of black arts and politics. In a nation struggling with segregation, debating the necessity of civil rights, and beginning to witness an increasing disparity in how darker complexioned folks were treated by the justice system, a movement emerged that succeeded in championing the independent production of art that engages the personal and the political.

Holding Ground In June 1996, playwright August Wilson stood before the full membership of the Theatre Communications Group at an annual meeting at Princeton University. The keynote speaker occupied the highest rung of the American theatre. He had won the Pulitizer Prize twice and collected numerous major theatre awards, including the Tony Award. His presence at the lectern was a sign of how far the American Theatre had come, from the antics of T.D. Rice and the minstrelsy of Aiken to this moment and this man. What could have been a celebratory occasion at the arrival of perhaps the “black hope” of late twentieth century theatre ended up serving as the staging ground for a forceful, impassioned, and searing critique of the racial divide within the theatre industry.

Although mostly remembered for his comments on colorblind casting, which spurred a series of debates with a prominent critic and detractor, Wilson’s address advocated for the expansion of opportunities for black artists by calling for the development and support of black theatre companies. Despite the fact that his comments often are framed as a lamentation on the decline of black theatre, the playwright was optimistic about the state of black artistry but, admittedly, pessimistic about its sustainability. He declared, “If you don’t know, I will tell you that black theatre in America is alive…it is vibrant…it is vital…it just isn’t funded” (495). The address, titled “The Ground on Which I Stand,” served as the first salvo in a campaign to restructure American theatre in a manner that would render black theatre companies financially stable. The urgency of his address anchored itself in his belief that it is only through black artistic collectives that the experiences of African Americans can be translated to the stage. This was a lesson that he learned as a young adult during the Black Arts Movement, a period that he memorably identified as “the kiln in which I was fired” (494). It was also something that he sought to teach within his own plays, which offer ample opportunities for actors and audiences alike to immerse themselves within majority black communities. Theatre historian Harry J. Elam expresses it best, in The

Past as Present in the Drama of August Wilson, when he succinctly notes that within Wilson’s dramaturgy, “the truth of race lies in the intersections of lived experience and the social, cultural, historical constructions of blackness” (221).

To this day, Wilson’s TCG speech continues to exist as a widely circulating manifesto, available in its entirety in a variety of online and print outlets. It is considered to be the best reflection of his voice and politics. The significance of “The Ground on Which I Stand” to his legacy is evidenced in the fact that a 2015 PBS documentary, which premiered on the 10th anniversary of his death, bears the same title.

The importance and easy availability of his remarks inspired a new generation of black artists, such as director Derrick Sanders, who recalled the impact of reading Wilson’s words in college (qtd in Young and Zabriskie). Sanders cofounded Chicago’s Congo Square Theatre Company, to which Wilson’s widow would later request that mourners of her husband’s passing send financial donations in lieu of flowers. At the very least, the speech initiated a national conversation on the future of the American theatre. It prompted a consideration of what role black arts might play in the new millennium, especially as the “century of the color line,” as W.E.B. Du Bois famously called the twentieth century, neared its end.

Wilson, again, placed a spotlight on the necessity of sustaining black theatre in 1998 when he cohosted, with theatre critic Victor Leo Walker II and literary scholar William Cook, a national conversation at Dartmouth College.

“On Golden Pond,” the name of the gathering, was enabled through the fortuitous timing of several interrelated events: the playwright’s residency at Dartmouth as well as the presence of multiple Dartmouth faculty members with a commitment to aiding the development of black artistry. Wilson’s celebrity, coupled with the lingering controversies from his TCG address, attracted “leading black theater artists, scholars and community organizers, entrepreneurs and corporate executives,” including Ntoshake Shange, Ifa Bayeza, and Thulani Davis among others (“Playwright”). “On Golden Pond” offered a compelling reminder of the power of collective advocacy. It recalled the combined efforts of past arts leaders who understood the political potential of black artistry. Walker, in an article announcing the impending summit, asserted that the event “reflects the spirit of Langston Hughes, W.E.B. Du Bois, Paul Robeson and so many others who struggled to attain social and cultural equity for Black people in America” (621). This first contemporary gathering, a five-day, closed door discussion followed by a single day public conference, existed as a space and site of collective possibility. The mission was to devise strategies to sustain black theatre and foster WINTER 2016 | SDC JOURNAL PEER-REVIEWED SECTION

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FIG. 3

FIG. 4

Chicago Black Theatre Summit Ron OJ Parson, Kenny Leon + Eileen Morris PHOTOS Harvey Young

Kenny Leon + Sidney Chatman

its growth. It is estimated that three hundred people attended the public portion of the Dartmouth summit (Kendt, “August”).

From a contemporary perspective, few theatre artists can identify concrete outcomes of that gathering. What were the lasting reforms inspired by Wilson, Walker, and Cook’s National Black Theatre Summit? In a 4 February 1998 Dartmouth news release, the planned structure and closed-door discussion themes were revealed: “Participants will break into small groups to consider such topics as how to encourage black playwrights, build audiences, and address the legal, social, financial and aesthetic issues related to developing African American theater” (“Playwright”). Journalist Ronald Roach, in a recap of the summit that merged the language of the Dartmouth release with excerpts from a post-event interview with a participant, noted that one attendee, theatre scholar Samuel Hay, hoped that the conversation would spark the development of a National Endowment for African-American Theatre with a $25 million endowment.

There were several limited term accomplishments of the Dartmouth summit.

In response to the gathering, the university created scholarships for underrepresented minority graduate students in theatre management. Although such a designated program no longer exists, Tuck Business School continues to incentivize nonprofit work by offering graduates working in such areas access to a loan forgiveness program. The most significant outcome of the National Black Theatre summit was the creation of the African Grove Institute for the Arts. Theatre historian

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Annamarie Bean notes that it “was formed with August Wilson as the Chairman of the Board and Victor Leo Walker II as the CEO and President” (123). The African Grove, borrowing its name from William Wells Brown’s theatre company from the 1820s, was established with a mission to support and revitalize black performing arts institutions. Active for nearly a decade, AGIA succeeded in organizing two additional summits in Los Angeles and, more generally, existed as a service agency in support of black artistry, especially in secondary schools. Ultimately, AGIA fell short of Wilson’s goals. As Talvin Wilks notes in a 2013 Howlround article, “after a few convenings and an unwieldy bureaucracy, it resulted in very little, leading Wilson to lament in an interview, ‘I’m willing to bet that if you go back and look that after the speech there was less money given to black theaters than before.’”

Since “On Golden Pond,” there have been several gatherings of theatre professionals with the explicit aim of revisiting Wilson’s call to assess and sustain black theatre. The first one held at the Los Angeles Theatre Center (LATC) in May 1998 continued the conversation begun at the New Hampshire conference and provided a progress report. In addition to the announcement of the business school scholarships, organizers—Wilson, Walker, Cook, Bayeza, and UCLA professor Beverly Robinson—expressed a desire to “publish a quarterly journal and/or a popular monthly about black performing arts” (Kendt, “August”).

Three years later, Walker and Cook organized a second AGIA-sponsored summit at the LATC. Reports of that gathering suggest optimism

at AGIA’s likely ability to achieve its aims. Rob Kendt, writing for Backstage, notes, “Convening more than 100 theatre professionals, …the African Grove Institute for the Arts (AGIA) unveiled to the West Coast its initial plans to become the ‘NAACP for the arts’ at a three-day private retreat and a two-day public forum last week” (“Meeting”). In addition to touting the success of the Tuck scholarships, organizers expressed a desire to create “a national capital campaign to help dispense grants, loans, and lines of credit to artists and arts organizations and a full-length documentary on black theatre aimed to air on PBS.” Until 2008, AGIA actively served as an advocate and, at times, a sponsor of black artistry. Its most significant publication is arguably Black Theatre: Ritual Performance in the African Diaspora, coedited by Walker, Gus Edwards, and Paul Carter Harrison. In the introduction, the “Praise/Word,” to that 2002 collection, Harrison succinctly defines the goals of black theatre: “whatever value it might have as entertainment, the inventive process of Black Theater must illuminate the collective ethos of the black experience in a manner that binds, cleanses, and heals” (5).

National black theatre summits have experienced a resurgence in recent years. In August 2014, Dr. Barbara Ann Teer’s National Black Theatre in New York City hosted a fourday symposium, “Moving the Black Theatre Legacy Forward,” attended by representatives of twenty theatre companies. The culminating event of the gathering was a public conversation moderated by Dafina McMillan, director of TCG’s Diversity & Inclusion Initiative and also its director of communications, and featuring Ruben Santiago-Hudson,

FIG. 5

Woodie King, Jr., Tsehaye Geralyn Hébert + Chuck Smith

Alia Jones-Harvey, Sade Lythcott, Kwame Kwei-Armah, Carmen Morgan, and Bridgit Antoinette Evans. It was webcast live by Howlround, the online “knowledge commons.”

In the wide-ranging discussion, Morgan noted how the current financial struggles of black theatres could be caused, in part, by a new challenge: the “intentionality on the part of white theatres” to engage “diversity and inclusion” that results in programming “competing” for audiences traditionally served by black theatre companies. Other panelists noted the necessity of improving the management structure of black theatre companies, beginning with developing capacity building initiatives and creating arts leadership internships for artists of color.

Kwei-Armah, artistic director of Baltimore Centerstage, stressed the importance of expanding the audience base and squarely placed the onus on everyone for bringing folks to the theatre. He imagines a straightforward recruitment conversation: “Have you been to the theatre lately? Come along with me.”

The 2014 convening was mostly diagnostic.

It provided an opportunity to spotlight contemporary challenges and cleared space for a collective brainstorming of how to maintain the vibrancy of black artistry across the 21st century.

The most recent convening was held in April 2015 in Chicago at the Goodman Theatre.

Organized by director Chuck Smith, Ron OJ Parson, Willa Taylor and myself, the summit was one of the closing events of a two monthlong, city-wide celebration of August Wilson’s life and career curated by the aforementioned organizers with Costanza Romero, Wilson’s widow. Whereas the previous summit

functioned as an opportunity to address the state of black theatre, the Chicago gathering sought to offer practical lessons and advice on how to sustain black theatre by focusing on the financial pressures faced by theatre companies. Attended by artistic directors of prominent black theatre companies, including Kenny Leon, True Colors Theatre Company; Eileen Morris, Ensemble Theatre; Woodie King Jr., New Federal Theatre, and Ekundayo Bandele, Hattiloo Theatre, as well as theatre scholars, the two-day closed-door gathering offered the opportunity to reflect on the financial realities of black theatre companies.

Discussion centered on board development and the topic of leadership succession. One of the most compelling insights of the gathering was an acknowledgement that the effort to sustain black theatre demands the active recruitment of both African American and non-African American allies as donors (and board members) and audience members.

Black theatre in the 21st century can only thrive with an ethnically diverse alliance working collectively to create new work as well as stage classic plays that still adheres to a commonly held principle: black theatre needs to offer an honest reflection of black experiences.

The need to sustain black performing arts was made palpable by two events coinciding with the Chicago summit. The first was a series of protests organized by or aligning with the “Black Lives Matter” movement. Participants spoke about the recent murder of Walter Scott, a fifty-year-old unarmed black man, whose death was recorded on a cell phone camera. Scott was shot in the back as he fled a police officer. The second was the Goodman’s production of August Wilson’s play Two Trains

Running. In that play, which is set in 1969, the precarity of black life is openly discussed.

Memphis, the protagonist, makes a comment that seems to be ripped from the headlines.

He declares: “They had that boy Begaboo. The police walked up and shot him in the head and [protestors] went down to see the mayor.

Raised all kind of hell. Trying to get the cop charged with murder. They raised hell for three weeks. After that, it was business as usual” (84).

The name Begaboo could have been replaced with Tamir Rice or Scott among many others.

It was compelling to hear the truth of present represented in a play that not only was twentyfive years old—it premiered in 1990—but also was set almost a half-century ago. Not much seemed to have change.

The movement to champion and sustain black performing arts institutions is ongoing.

Indeed, it has been a continuous campaign since the founding of Wells Brown’s African Grove. Despite the continued call to devise strategies to preserve black artistry, it would be a mistake to assume that progress has not occurred. Financial sustainability is a concern of every theatre company, regardless of the racial or ethnic make-up of the company and staff. What the summits have allowed is an opportunity for artists to talk specifically about their reality while underscoring the continued necessity of developing work about, by, for, and near black folks. An ancillary benefit is that summits, conferences, and gatherings forge professional networks and encourage the passing of history and knowledge across generations. Black theatre is black life.

WORKS CITED on following page.

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WORKS CITED

Aiken, George L. Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Or, Life Among the Lowly.

New York: Samuel French, 1858. Web. Bean, Annamarie. “Black Theatre: Ritual Performance in the African Diaspora” Rev. of Black Theatre: Ritual Performance in the Diaspora, edited by Paul Carter Harrison, Victor Leo Walker II, and Gus Edwards.

Research in African Literatures, Vol. 36.1 (2005): 122-24. Print

Neale, Larry. “The Black Arts Movement,” The Drama Review. Vol. 12 (1968): 29-39.

“Playwright August Wilson Convenes National Meeting on Future of African American Theatre.” Dartmouth News. 4 Feb. 1998.

Web. Roach, Ronald. “A New Script for Black Theatre: Dartmouth Conference Focuses on New Strategies,” Black Issues in Higher Education. Web.

Bernstein, Robin. Racial Innocence: Performing American Childhood from Slavery to Civil Rights. New York: New York UP, 2011. Print.

Stowe, Harriet B. Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Or, Life Among the Lowly; the Minister’s Wooing; Oldtown Folks. New York: Literary Classics of the United States, 1982. Print.

Du Bois, W.E.B. “Krigwa Players’ Little Theatre Movement,” Crisis. July 1926: 134.

Taubman, Howard. “Dutchman.” Rev. of Dutchman, dir. Edward Parone, by LeRoi Jones. New York Times 25 March 1965. Web.

Elam, Harry J, and David Krasner. AfricanAmerican Performance and Theater History: A Critical Reader. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2001. Web. Elam, Harry J. The Past As Present in the Drama of August Wilson. Ann Arbor: The U of Michigan P, 2004. Print.

Harrison, Paul Carter, Victor Leo Walker II and Gus Edwards, Black Theatre: Ritual Performance in the African Diaspora.

Philadelphia: Temple UP, 2002. Print.

Thompson, Katrina D. Ring Shout, Wheel About: The Racial Politics of Music and Dance in North American Slavery. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 2014. Print.

Walker, Victor Leo II. “The National Black Theatre Summit,” African American Review, Vol. 31.4 (1997): 621-27. Print.

Wilks, Talvin. “The Tradition of Defining a Tradition.” Howlround. 10 Mar. 2013. Web.

Hill, Anthony D. and Douglas Q. Barnett, Historical Dictionary of African American Theater. New York: Scarecrow, 2008. Print.

Williams, Bert. “Nobody.” By Alex Rogers and Bert Williams, Bert Williams: The Early Years. Archeophone, 2004.

Jones, LeRoi [Amiri Baraka]. Dutchman and the Slave: Two Plays. New York: Morrow, 1964. Print.

Wilson, August. The Ground on Which I Stand.

Callaloo. Vol. 20.3 (1997): 493-503. Print.

Kendt, Rob. “August Wilson Convenes Town Hall on African American Theatre.”

Backstage 21 Feb. 2001. Web. ---. “The Meeting Is Called.” Backstage.

Feb. 21, 2001. Web Krasner, David. Resistance, Parody, and Double Consciousness in African American Theatre, 1895-1910. New York: St. Martin’s, 1997. Print.

Macki Braconi, Adrienne. Harlem’s Theaters: A Staging Ground for Community, Class, and Contradiction, 1923-1939. Evanston: Northwestern UP, 2015. Print.

Mitchell, Koritha. Living with Lynching: African American Lynching Plays, Performance, and Citizenship, 1890-1930. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 2011. Print.

“Moving the Black Theatre Legacy Forward,” National Black Theatre. 4-7 August 2014. Web.

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---. Two Trains Running. New York: Plume, 1992. Print.

Young, Harvey, and Queen M. Zabriskie. Black Theater Is Black Life: An Oral History of Chicago Theater and Dance, 1970-2010.

Evanston: Northwestern UP, 2014. Print.

Young, Harvey. Theatre & Race. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. Print.

HARVEY YOUNG is Chair and Professor of Theatre at Northwestern University, and President-elect of the Association for Theatre in Higher Education. His books include Theatre and Race, Embodying Black Experience, Black Theatre is Black Life, and The Cambridge Companion to African American Theatre.

SDCJ-PRS BOOK REVIEW

Shakespeare for American Actors and Directors

By Aaron Frankel REVIEW BY

CHRISTINA GUTIERREZ-DENNEHY Northern Arizona University LIMELIGHT EDITIONS: MILWAUKEE, 2013.

Aaron Frankel’s Shakespeare for American Actors and Directors aims to provide new ways to access and interpret Shakespeare’s texts and characters. Breaking away from the models set by other Shakespearean acting manuals, such as Peter Hall’s Shakespeare’s Advice to the Players (2003) and John Barton’s Playing Shakespeare (published in 2011, based on a 1982 television miniseries), Frankel’s focus is on action rather than on verse. Shakespeare for American Actors and Directors begins with four brief chapters that introduce Frankel’s approach to close reading, character relationships, and key words. The rest of the book is devoted to readings of sixteen scenes, drawn from a wide variety of Shakespeare’s texts, which Frankel uses to suggest ways in which practitioners might apply his concepts.

Frankel’s work, aimed primarily at actors, and, secondarily at “the director’s work with the actor” (x), operates from the premise that work with Shakespeare should be considered “basic,” rather than advanced, training (ix).

Although Frankel’s treatment of verse (or lack thereof) may be off-putting to directors who have experience working with Shakespearean texts, his work with actions and relationships provides useful insights for directors working with actors who are new to Shakespeare.

In a brief section in the first chapter titled “How to Read a Play,” Frankel uses the opening scene of Hamlet to demonstrate the value of close reading. Bernardo’s simple “Who’s there,” Frankel argues, provides a wealth of information about the uncertainty and fear present in the scene. In addition to his emphasis on the importance of close reading, the strongest argument Frankel makes in the introductory chapters is that an understanding of action should be central to an actor’s work with Shakespeare’s texts. He suggests that actors work to uncover what Shakespeare’s characters want by identifying both the source of conflict in a given scene and what a character does to address this conflict— which Frankel terms “action” (18). Although Frankel does not discuss directing explicitly, his succinct discussions of conflict and action

within early modern texts may prove useful to a director working with an actor encountering Shakespeare’s texts for the first time.

Continuing this action-centric analysis in the fourth chapter, Frankel suggests that the situation of Act 2, Scene 1 in Taming of the Shrew, in which Petruchio first encounters the “shrew,” Katherine, is the “first meeting” of two highly stubborn characters (54). Given this situation, Kate’s action is “to hold sway” or “to repel” Petruchio, while Petruchio’s is “to lord it up,” or to prove his dominance (54). If given by a director, these suggestions would provide actors with goals to achieve, grounded in their relationships between the characters in conflict. The actions are concrete, playable, and easily comprehendible even if an actor has no formal training with Shakespeare’s language.

Frankel goes further in the final chapter to provide suggestions for sixteen scenes that cover the breadth of Shakespeare’s writing styles.

Frankel’s approach generates scene readings that may provide fresh insight into character development. Frankel’s analysis of the trial scene in The Merchant of Venice (Act 4, Scene 1) argues that Portia’s action throughout the scene is to entrap Shylock. This reading runs contrary to a conventional interpretation of the scene in which Portia discovers the loophole in Shylock’s bond. Instead, Frankel’s reading necessitates that Portia enters the scene with knowledge of the bond’s undoing and that she works cunningly and actively throughout the scene to undermine Shylock rather than reason with him. Frankel does not directly discuss his own work with the text in production, but the implication of the fourth chapter is that Frankel himself has used these approaches in his directing. As bold as his approaches to the plays may be, Frankel is careful to note that many other—potentially opposite—interpretations may also exist. These brief scene analyses may help directors provide insight to inexperienced actors.

Another of Frankel’s more useful tools is the identification of a character’s “role” in the text or the relationship to other characters and to the world around her. Frankel’s analysis reveals Ophelia’s role is “obedient” (33). Although these adjectives may be reductive, they can be useful to a director attempting to describe a character’s arc to an actor. For example, a fundamentally “obedient” Ophelia is driven to madness by a desire to please both her father and her lover. Frankel does not, however, detail his process of identifying these roles, nor does he provide evidence for them, leaving readers to trust his judgment in most cases.

Indeed, the broad, undetailed nature of Frankel’s analysis throughout his scene readings is one of the book’s major limitations.

Often a full scene, sometimes well over 100 lines, will merit only a short paragraph of Frankel’s commentary. Although his insights are useful to shaping character, those with no prior Shakespearean experience (presumably Frankel’s target) could benefit from more detailed guidance. His reading of Act 5, Scene 2 of Henry V—the scene in which the victorious Henry must woo the French princess Katherine— reduces Henry to the role of “conquering hero” and Katherine as the “crowning prize” (87). There is little else to Frankel’s reading of the 260-line scene, which he presents in near-entirety. While these identifications may prove useful, they ignore the nuance of the scene, avoiding, for instance, the often-subtle textual clues as to whether Henry and Katherine are attracted to each other or whether they operate exclusively according to their understandings of political duty. These are questions a director cannot avoid when approaching such a crucial scene.

Frankel often includes his own staging choices in his interpretations. In the aforementioned scene from Shrew, Frankel makes reference to a number of props, which are clearly not in the original text, including “a parasol, a flowerpot, and a squash” (51). Although a brief footnote identifies these props as “my own invention,” (49), Frankel’s analysis implies that they are necessary in order to create the broad physical comedy that he argues is the backbone of the scene. He does not describe his process in selecting these props, nor does he provide any insight into how working with them enriched his rehearsal process or led his actors to discover or explore physical comedy.

The reader is left to take Frankel’s props as givens in the world of the scene, rather than as directorial choices. This omission of discussion is a missed opportunity, particularly given Frankel’s stated desire that his work appeal to directors.

Frankel’s readings stem from a troubling central assumption—that American practitioners approach Shakespeare from a place of intimidation or fear, and that they therefore require a less-than-nuanced approach to the texts. As such, Frankel’s descriptors may prove useful in beginning work, but they lack the power to inform holistic, nuanced analysis. In particular, Frankel’s assumption that American actors are somehow less equipped to attempt Shakespeare than their European counterparts (ix) leads him to largely dismiss work with verse. The entirety of his explanation of iambic pentameter is relegated to a footnote.

An approach to Shakespeare that suggests

action-based analysis as an addition to work with prosody would be a welcome addition to the canon of practical Shakespearean analysis. However, Frankel’s determination to ignore verse entirely seems more aimed at shocking traditional practitioners than it does at providing an applicable system of working. Rather than explaining how actors have traditionally “scanned” verse lines looking for words or sounds in position of stress or importance, Frankel argues that key words or syllables may occur at any point in a sentence or phrase. This radical suggestion might indeed prove revolutionary if Frankel had given more space to its development or rationalization.

Instead, the concept is presented with little analysis in the introductory chapters, and is largely abandoned in analysis of the example scenes. Combined with the extreme brevity of his scene analysis, Frankel’s failure to elaborate on his dismissal of verse leaves directors with no clear system for approaching text work.

Shakespeare for American Actors and Directors provides a clear, if somewhat cursory, introduction to analyzing action in Shakespeare’s texts. Rather than a holistic approach to Shakespeare, the text may provide directors with a provocative way to re-think action. As a supplement to work with verse and text, it might prove most useful to directors working with younger actors, or with actors who are intimidated by Shakespeare.

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-review

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SDC FOUNDATION

James Lapine + his wife Sarah Kernochan being presented with the Broadway bar mitzvah cake BELOW Lapine + Mrs. George Abbott PHOTOS Walter McBride

ENJOY THE PROCESS

THE “MR. ABBOTT” AWARD BY

There’s an anecdote Joy Abbott tells about her late husband, the world-renowned director George Abbott. She recalls when a reporter asked him what the greatest change on Broadway has been since he began in the theatre, to which the everconcise Mr. Abbott responded, “Electricity.”

“He had a wonderful sense of humor,” says Mrs. Abbott. “He was a very kind man, very practical.… He was just a person you could live with and enjoy life with.

We had a wonderful life together.”

It was this combination of wit and practicality that earned Mr. Abbott the respect and acclaim of the theatre world. He was a writer, director, actor, and producer, known for such works as

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The Pajama Game, Damn Yankees, Fiorello!, and A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum. His legacy, which spans nine decades (Mr. Abbott lived to be 107 years old), is the reason the Stage Directors and Choreographers Foundation (SDCF) chose him to be the namesake of their most prestigious award. The “Mr. Abbott” Award is given to a director or choreographer in recognition of a lifetime of achievement in their respective craft.

“They asked Mr. Abbott, he was a very modest person,” says Mrs. Abbott about her husband’s reaction when SDCF asked to name the award after him. “And he said, ‘Me? Why?’ Whoever were the powers that be said it would be a very important award and asked if he would lend his name to it, so he said yes.”

Mrs. Abbott extols her husband’s many achievements, explaining how he was the first director to advance the plot of a show through music and dance. She praises his ability to support actors, keep tempers at bay in the rehearsal room, and make suggestions that would set right shows that weren’t working.

For example, Mrs. Abbott points to when her husband saw Cabaret for the first time. When

REBECCA KING

Harold Prince asked Mr. Abbott what he thought of it, he told Prince to change the then three-act show to two acts. On Mr. Abbott’s advice, the show was reworked, becoming one of the most successful shows in theatre history.

Prince is one of many former “Mr. Abbott” Award winners that have learned and grown from the award’s namesake. He and others who have collaborated with George Abbott, who was known for encouraging and shaping young talent, have come to know and exude the four qualities that make up what is called the “Abbott touch”: honesty, pace, brevity, and clarity. Jerry Mitchell, another past “Mr. Abbott” Award recipient, for example, started as a chorus member in On Your Toes, where he met Mr. Abbott. Mitchell has since gone on to become one of the most successful contemporary directors working today and was awarded the 2013 “Mr. Abbott” Award to celebrate his achievements.

This year, James Lapine was honored with the “Mr. Abbott” Award. Lapine has written and directed such works as Sunday in the Park with George, Into the Woods, and co-wrote Falsettos, and has been lauded with awards,

including the Peabody Award, the Pulitzer Prize, an OBIE, five Drama Desk Awards, and three Tony Awards, among 12 nominations.

Beyond his theatre work, he has also made a name for himself as a screenwriter and film director. Lapine’s award ceremony was held on Monday, October 19, at Stage 48.

Lapine wanted the celebration to be like the bar mitzvah reception he never had. Chairing the event was Jordan Roth, Vanessa L. Williams, Leigh Silverman, and Dan Knechtges, with Stephen Sondheim serving as the honorary chair. Many of Lapine’s friends and collaborators were there to help celebrate the achievement. Some of the most celebrated names on Broadway gave performances, including Bernadette Peters, Christian Borle, Christine Ebersole, and Andrew Rannells.

Rannells also served as the emcee for the event—or the “Broadway Rabbi.” Along with the performances, friends of Lapine stepped up to the mic to congratulate and praise him.

Those who couldn’t make the celebration, like Mandy Patinkin and Andrea Martin, had others read their remarks in their stead.

Mrs. Abbott, who has been attending the award ceremonies since their inception, praised the night as one of the best “Mr. Abbott” award ceremonies to date.

“The program was very entertaining,” she says.

“We had Broadway luminaries performing, like Andrew and Christian and Bernadette Peters— it was just such an entertaining evening…I think the whole board did a wonderful job selecting James Lapine as the recipient, who certainly deserves the honor. He himself was so animated. I think he’s still smiling.”

Lapine commented on the liveliness of the evening during his remarks, saying he wanted to avoid the stuffiness of normal gala events. He thanked Stephen Sondheim for his continued support and described everyone who works in the theatre as a family that, when functional, can produce “wonderful” things.

The "Mr. Abbott" Award Committee CoChairs Dan Knechtges + Leigh Silverman with event writer Doug Wright + event scenic consultant David Korins TOP

LEFT

Lapine, Committee Co-Chair Jordan Roth + Host Committee member Daryl Roth

ABOVE

Lapine with his daughter Phoebe Lapine + wife Sarah Kernochan BOTTOM LEFT

BELOW

Bernadette Peters

Honorary Chair Stephen Sondheim PHOTOS Walter McBride

Just as George Abbott cultivated the talents of young people in the theatre, Lapine, too, showed a dedication to promoting new voices. He also urged those in the room to show continued support for SDCF, in order for up-and-coming directors to receive the opportunities they deserve in a time when salaries for new directors are low and benefits are few and far between.

The Broadway bar mitzvah closed with a traditional candle-lighting ceremony and a quick hora dance. And thus James Lapine, draped in a Broadway-style tallit, joined the ranks of the legendary directors and choreographers honored with the “Mr. Abbott” Award.

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Stephanie Block, Lapine + Sebastian Arcelus PHOTO Walter McBride

REMARKS BY

JAMES LAPINE Wow. This has been a trip. Is this where I make my bar mitzvah speech? Okay. Just by way of explanation, when they asked me what kind of night I wanted, I said not the usual stuffy benefit evening, and I think we’ve succeeded here. [Applause] I hate being the center of attention, but tonight may have changed all that actually. [Laugher]

When Leigh Silverman and Dan Knechtges and I chatted about the kind of party I would like, I casually said the bar mitzvah reception I didn’t have when I was 13 – and I might add I never thought that idea would be translated literally. A short explanation: My family moved from a small town in Ohio to Connecticut when I was 13, so my bar mitzvah was a small affair made up of what family came up from Ohio and the few people we had met in Stamford. I have very little recollection of that event and no photos. Basically I recall learning my Haftorah off a record.

I'm sure I had to make some kind of speech, but I can’t imagine at the age of 13 what I had to say that would have been of much interest to anyone. The ceremony was followed by a little luncheon and that was that. I didn’t feel any different after it was all over and I certainly didn’t feel like I had somehow become a man but I guess I did feel like I was part of something bigger than myself by partaking in the ritual and I did feel a strong tie to my family.

Tonight has made me realize that I am now part of two families—the genetic one and the theatrical one. I was not one of those kids who knew I was going to join this profession. I acted in a few productions in high school. My sister, who is 10 years older than me, was an English teacher in my high school and ended up directing a production of Carnival! at the school. I made my debut in the chorus as a juggler. I went on to be in a Neil Simon play called Come Blow Your Horn. As an actor, I had absolutely no concentration. I will admit that I did improvise many comic bits on stage, at which point I would simply lose my composure and laugh along with the audience. Thoughts of a life in the theatre didn’t exist then. I wanted to be an architect, and as my college advisor was also my gym teacher, I didn’t exactly get very good career advice on that front.

I sort of fell into the theatre, and I had the opportunity to learn on my feet. Sadly, I’m not sure that would be possible today in the current state of nonprofit theatres—in New York, at least. I was very lucky to have a place like Playwrights Horizons as a home. The vibe was pretty much: “Hey, let’s put on a show.” Everyone was very supportive of one another. We were given the freedom to experiment, and I don’t think anyone was thinking particularly about “a career trajectory,” and if they did, they certainly weren’t talking about it. I was lucky enough to have William Finn ask me to direct my first musical, March of the Falsettos, and Andre Bishop put it into rehearsal, even though it was half-written. Today, you have to have umpteen readings and a workshop before anyone will produce anything.

Again, another stroke of luck when I met Steve Sondheim, and we ended up working together.

Meanwhile, I was scheduled to do my first Shakespeare play indoors at the Public Theater. Joe Papp had another show fall out for the summer and announced to me that I would be directing Midsummer in the 1,800-seat Delacorte. Never mind that I had only directed three shows in my life. That was what was great about Joe Papp. He had more faith in me than I had in myself.

There were many things I was proud of in that production, but it was somewhat muddled and received pretty negative notices. I thought, “Well, I guess I won’t be working with Mr. Sondheim after all.” The next morning, Steve called and said with a laugh, “Come on over and I will show you all my bad notices.”

It takes time to learn that what we do is not so much about the outcome but the process. I try to remind myself of that. As you get older—it’s maybe one of the gifts of being older—you have

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had your successes, but you also had your failures. The failures sometimes teach us more than the successes do. I’ve learned to enjoy the process of doing what I do—I enjoy getting to work with old friends and new people, and I try to inspire them and myself to do our best work. And I hope I’ll keep doing it, even though I have a Lifetime Achievement Award now. [Laughter]

One of the most pleasurable experiences I have had in the last three years has been serving on a joint committee of the SDC and Dramatists Guild to work together to try and address the issue of shared royalties. First of all, it was great fun to sit down with colleagues and talk about what we do. I remember reading a quote of Mike Nichols about directing. It went something like this: “Directing is like having sex. You think everyone else is doing it differently.” I had never before had that opportunity to sit and chat about the work with fellow directors and playwrights. We discussed the issue of a director’s contribution to a play, and we hammered out a series of guidelines that we presented to our unions, and this contentious issue that has contributed to tension between our groups was not so contentious after all. Those discussions made me feel very proud of my profession and the people in it.

Also, I want to say that the money that is raised tonight is crucial. We need to give young directors opportunities to be mentored. If they can’t learn by actually doing, at least they can be involved in a production and learn by watching and maybe eventually assisting. This gives them an opportunity to make important relationships in our field. I have come to depend on my assistants, and whenever I have the opportunity to recommend them for directing jobs of their own, I am thrilled to do so. So many of our talented directors have gone off to television, where they can make a very good living. We need to keep talented writers and directors in our field, and the only way we can do that is by supporting them.

That’s why the recent negotiations with the League were so disappointing when they did not recognize the importance of directors’ assistants and their need to be paid decently and, more importantly, be given benefits. So thank you for being here to support the SDC mentors program.

And thank you for this recognition tonight.

And I think everyone should throw themselves the bar mitzvah reception of their dreams at an age when you can actually appreciate it. I’m going to try and not have this evening go to my head. I will keep working and keep trying to challenge others and especially myself.

Today I am a man, an old man, and it’s great.

Thank you.

THE 2015 ZELDA FICHANDLER AWARD INTRO BY

REBECCA KING

One of the Stage Directors and Choreographers Foundation’s (SDCF) most prestigious awards, the Zelda Fichandler Award, was given to Tim Dang on Monday, November 9. The celebration, held at Vespaio L.A., honored Dang as one of the city’s essential artists, continuing to shape and sustain regional theatre on the West Coast.

To celebrate the importance of regional theatre and shift focus from the bright lights of New York to other, equally necessary theatre communities, SDC announced in 2009 on its 50th anniversary that SDCF would give an award to the artists who enliven and transform regional theatre. The award, naturally, bears the name Zelda Fichandler.

Zelda Fichandler, along with a small but fearless cohort, pioneered the regional theatre movement. She founded Arena Stage in Washington, D.C. in 1950, and remained the producing artistic director until 1990, the longest tenure of any non-commercial producer in the annals of the American theater.

Under her leadership, Arena Stage soon rose to great acclaim, premiering groundbreaking and influential productions, while cultivating the talents of artists across the theatre spectrum.

A heroine of regional theater, Zelda’s legacy proves that regional productions are essential works that support and elevate American theatre. Today SDCF recognizes the profound impact of the founders of regional theatre and pays tribute to their legacy with the Zelda Fichandler Award.

“This represents a story—a history,” said Fichandler of the award in her address at the 2011 ceremony. “It celebrates the past, a vibrant present, and promises an evolving future if we stay with it and solve our problems as we’ve always solved them—with tenacity, imagination, and hope—and, if we can, continue to be tough in the service of something that is tender.”

Instead of honoring a lifetime of work, the Zelda Fichandler Award aims to celebrate the artistic visionaries at work today. The award is given to an artist in a different part of the country each year on a rotating basis; the regions are broken down into Western, Central, and Eastern. Winners receive a $5,000 unrestricted grant to support their work in their respective region. Past recipients include Joseph Haj, Charles Newell, Bill Rauch, Blanka Zizka, Michael Halberstam, and Jonathan Moscone.

ABOVE Tim

Dang, Ruth Pe Palileo, Juliette Carrillo + Sheldon Epps PHOTO Michael Palma

REMARKS BY

SHELDON EPPS

Looking around this room, I’m reminded of the richness of talent and ability in this region, and certainly in this city. I didn’t have to learn to love Los Angeles because I’m from Los Angeles. And I so celebrate the work that all of us do in this city and in this region.

I have a few words from Zelda about the work that we do. “The problems of creating a theatre institution, or inheriting one and sustaining its development, have always been insurmountable.

Then we found a way to surmount them. Then new problems take their place, or old ones reappear in a new guise. It was never any easier and it won’t be.” How true is that?

This is what Zelda said regarding leadership, and particularly about being an artistic director: “We need what we always needed, and what every artistic director needs in a country that doesn’t provide sufficient subsidy or have genuine respect for culture. We need stamina to persist, capacity for a deep interiority on one hand and a practical manipulativeness on the other.” Very wise, Zelda. “We need concentration to hear one’s own voice, and courage to listen to it in the midst of the cacophony of other voices. Toughness in the service of something that is tender, while you try to remain tender yourself. Imagination, taste, risks, risk tolerance, a nose for the audience’s subconscious hopes and fears, fiscal and emotional support from a community and from colleagues who can share your despair and at the same time, lift you out of that despair— again and again and again—because it is a long and winding road. And you need colleagues who reassure you, as you do them, that what you are trying to do is good for life and life affirming.

And the one who gives up last is the one who wins.” Certainly those fine words apply to the winner of the Zelda Fichandler Award this year.

Tim Dang is a transformative artist. He has given us a model for an inclusive theatre, a theatre that invites everyone to the table and truly reflects the American experience. He has been the artistic director of East West Players since 1993 and has been affiliated with that organization in many capacities since 1980. East West Players grew exponentially under his leadership. He has been and continues to be an advocate and an activist for diversity and inclusion in the American theatre. He is an accomplished director, bringing fresh perspective and life to the cannon of 20thcentury musicals. He is an innovator in the Los Angeles theatre community, fully committed to the artists who live and work in this community.

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Going off the script Tim Dang accepting the for a moment, I just Zelda Fichandler Award want to say that PHOTO Michael Palma Tim is a man of quiet but elegant passion. You sense in him someone who has a fire burning constantly, just beneath the surface.

And that fire, to our great benefit, has emerged so often as he’s led a wonderful theatre, spoken passionately about the necessity for diversity in American theatre. Not just in this community but nationally. I believe that Tim has reassured all of us, over and over again, that what we are trying to do is good and that it is life affirming. And my friendship with Tim here in the L.A. theatre community has been good and it has been life affirming. And it has been a burning light that has kept me going for all of these years, as we’ve shared the joys and the hazards and the frustration and the excitement and the tears of being artistic directors in this city. It is an honor and a great personal pleasure to present this year’s Zelda Fichandler Award to Mr. Tim Dang.

REMARKS BY

TIM DANG

LOS ANGELES, CA REMARKS

PREPARING FOR 2042: SEECHANGE Thank you, Sheldon, for those kind words. I am inspired by your leadership and courage in advancing the American theatre with your direction at the Pasadena Playhouse. And thank you to the SDC Foundation for this recognition.

I am also honored to be in the company of such extraordinary colleagues: Juliette Carrillo, Chris Coleman, and Ruth Pe Palileo.

Your passion and vision to make a difference in this world by using our art as a platform for change is extraordinary.

Our country and culture is experiencing extraordinary seismic shifts. The communities

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What was Zelda Fichandler thinking when she dedicated her early career to the establishment of America’s regional theatre movement?

That movement that all of [us] have invested our lives in and that tens of thousands have been a part of for decades.

Had she all these seismic shifts in mind?

We channel Zelda or we tap our inner Zelda to advance her vision for a new generation. We look toward the woman whose leadership initiated this movement.

we serve, rooted in tradition for generations, are now having to reexamine themselves and accept new traditions and norms. The Los Angeles theatre community is grappling with these shifts with robust and passionate dialogue about their future, which in itself is compelling theatre. Whatever the outcome, it’ll make Los Angeles theatre better.

And we as directors, the ones with vision, are asked to do more than shape and clarify the story. We must make the story relevant to an audience whose cultural values are evolving.

We are the guides to an America that is becoming majority-minority. Where samesex marriage and transgender rights have advanced faster than anyone imagined. Where the millennial generation is changing our definition of engagement. Where women are breaking down barriers and leading the way and will no doubt assume the highest office in the land…real soon.

We need to provide access points for our audience, to invite them into the story, to experience and become part of the story. We need to exhibit the intersections where our different lives can understand what others are going through. And we need to do it fast, because life is happening faster than theatre.

Sometimes I feel like the American theatre is behind film and TV.

This is a quote from Zelda: “Theatre must be of its times, of its audiences and their concerns as well as, of course, of pressing interest to its artists.”

Many of you know that I am an advocate of a movement created at East West Players called 2042 SeeChange. “See” spelled S-E-E. It refers to the year that the U.S. Census predicts when America will be majority-minority. 2042 SeeChange includes an initiative called the 51% Preparedness Plan for the American Theatre that challenges theatres across the nation to create programs and policies to increase the employment of people of color, women, and youth.

To you master storytellers and visionaries, we are the ones—in this room, in this Union—who can make this change as quick and as bold as we want to. Let’s not just “see change”—let us “lead the change.”

Thank you.

DANG has dedicated his career to initiating and innovating diversity and inclusion across the American theatre. He has been the Producing Artistic Director of East West Players (EWP), the nation’s premiere Asian American theatre and the longest-running professional theatre of color in operation today, since 1993 and affiliated with the organization

since 1980 in various capacities, from actor to director to producer. Under his leadership, EWP has grown from a 99-seat black box space to a professionally equipped 240-seat mid-sized theatre, the David Henry Hwang Theater, located in Los Angeles. In addition to his outstanding work at EWP, Tim played an instrumental role in creating the Next Big Bang: The Explosion of Asian American Theatre, the first-ever national gathering of 200 APA arts leaders, academics, and artists.

CHRIS COLEMAN PORTLAND, OR REMARKS | As a

grad student in Pittsburgh, some of the theatrical experiences I remember most vividly were the road trips we made to D.C. to see work at Arena Stage. Zelda Fichandler’s vision and curatorial skill were early inspirations for me, so it’s a particular honor to be included in the list of those acknowledged this year.

COLEMAN has been the Artistic Director of Portland Center Stage (PCS) since 2000. Before moving to Portland, he was Artistic Director at Actor’s Express in Atlanta, a company he co-founded in the basement of an old church in 1988. Most recently, he directed the Off-Broadway debut of Threesome at 59E59 Theaters (a production that had its world premiere at PCS and was presented at ACT—Seattle). Other recent credits include the world premiere of Edward Foote (Alliance Theatre) and Same Time Next Year with Phylicia Rashad and Kenny Leon (True Colors Theatre Company). Chris has directed at theatres across the country, including Actors Theatre of Louisville, Oregon Shakespeare Festival, Dallas Theater Center, Pittsburgh Public Theater, New York Theatre Workshop, and Center Stage (Baltimore). A native Atlantan, Chris holds a B.F.A. from Baylor University and an M.F.A. from Carnegie Mellon. He is the board president for Oregon’s Cultural Advocacy Coalition.

JULIETTE CARRILLO

RUTH PE PALILEO

REMARKS | As one of

REMARKS | When

LOS ANGELES, CA

the founding steering committee members of Latino Theatre Commons, I’m incredibly proud to see our work thriving across the country.

Now an 11-year ensemble member of Cornerstone Theater Company, I have both written and directed in both geographic and theme-centered Los Angeles communities. I continue to be deeply touched by the power of Cornerstone. A perfect marriage between social activism and art, our work in communities has brought political and social issues to light through creative and invigorating conversations on stage. I can feel the impact I’m making on my community through the work, on both a macro and a micro level, and it’s immensely gratifying. Thank you, SDC Foundation, and the award panelists, for honoring me in this way.

A graduate of the Yale School of Drama, CARRILLO has directed critically acclaimed premiere and revival productions in theatres across the country, including Oregon Shakespeare Festival, Mark Taper Forum, South Coast Repertory, Yale Repertory, Denver Theater Center, and Seattle Repertory. As a member of the Cornerstone Theater ensemble, she has developed work for and with various communities, such as the Los Angeles River community, the addiction and recovery community, the Hindu community, and senior community and their caregivers. She was an Artistic Associate and Director of the Hispanic Playwright’s Project at South Coast Repertory for seven years, developing work with writers such as Nilo Cruz, Octavio Solis, José Rivera, and Karen Zacarías. Juliette’s own play, Plumas Negras, was runner-up for Repertorio Español’s Nuestras Voces in 2015. Currently developing a Solis play at the Goodman’s New Stages, she is a proud advocate for Latino work in this country. www.juliettecarrillo.com

“

...we as directors, the ones with vision, are asked to do more than shape and clarify the story. We must make the story relevant to an audience whose cultural values are evolving. ”

LAS VEGAS, NV

I first joined SDC three years ago, I was so frustrated with Vegas theatre.

I would think, “Oh GOD, they’re doing Hamlet this year?

Utah and Oregon revived Hamlet last year!” Or “Why bother to do Godot when everybody knows Stewart and McKellen are on Broadway right now doing it?” Basically, if only Vegas theatre people would get out of Vegas into other cities, they’d really know theatre. But I’ve spent three years now reading SDC Journal cover to cover and listening in on SDCF Masters of the Stage podcasts conducted by many of my directing heroes. Their collective wisdom, as well as having my running crew defend me from a rabid police officer, have made me realize theatremakers belong to their cities. It’s good that what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas, and maybe that what happens in NY stays in NY, or LA in LA. Theatre is the most personal art you can have with people. That’s why we’re not film or television or even music. In theatre, there is nothing between you, the director, and the people you are trying to reach except—more people you are also trying to reach in the form of cast and crew. So if what we make happen in the theatre stays in the theatres, lingering in that personal, intimate manner with our audiences and our theatremakers, what could be sweeter?

PE PALILEO, from Antique, Philippines, directs for Current Theatrics, Las Vegas; writes for Pintig Cultural Group, Chicago; and serves on SDC Journal’s Peer Review Board. Ruth has a Ph.D. in theatre and performance from Trinity College, Dublin, and is an Associate Member of Stage Directors and Choreographers Society. Ruth’s directing credits include an adaptation of Tim Powers’s time-travel novel The Anubis Gates (London, 2014), Fairy Tales by Neil Gaiman (Chicago, 2012), Ionesco’s The Chairs (Best Production of 2011, Las Vegas Citylife), Dr. Horrible’s SingAlong Blog (Chicago, 2011), Ismene (Chicago, Dublin; Los Angeles; South Dakota; St. John’s, Newfoundland; Toronto; Las Vegas, 2010), Waves of Migration (TI Casino, Las Vegas, 2010), The Green, The White and the Orange (Cleveland, 2009), Endgame (Dublin, 2006), and The Passion of Christ (Church of Ireland, Dublin, 2011). A documentary of The Passion was nominated for a 2011 Jerusalem Award.

See more productions at ruthpepalileo.com.

TIM DANG WINTER 2016 | SDC JOURNAL FOUNDATION SECTION

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THE SOCIETY PAGES SDC MEMBERS @ WORK + PLAY

On September 29, 2015, the 7th annual Broadway Salutes celebration was held in Anita’s Way in Times Square to honor the dedicated professionals who have worked on Broadway for 25, 35, and 50+ years. The event was co-hosted by the Coalition of Broadway Unions & Guilds and the Broadway League, and celebrates actors, producers, directors, choreographers, musicians, ushers, and more.

Broadway Salutes director Marc Bruni, Sydney Lucas + Jake Lucas PHOTO Walter McBride LEFT TOP

On October 17, 2015, the National Alliance for Musical Theatre held its Fall Conference at the TKP Conference Center. SDC Deputy Director of Contract Affairs Randy Anderson participated as a panelist on the Collaborating with Unions panel, which discussed navigating the creation of new works of theatre while adhering to union contracts.

Ralph Sevush, Co-Executive Director of the Dramatists Guild listening to Randy Anderson speak LEFT

On October 26, 2015, the 7th annual Gregory Awards, funded and produced by Theatre Puget Sound, was held at Marion Oliver McCaw Hall. Outstanding Director went to Desdemona Chiang for Measure for Measure at Seattle Shakespeare Company, and Outstanding Choreography went to Kathryn Van Meter for Mary Poppins at Village Theatre. Other Members nominated were John Kazanjian, John Langs, and Brandon Ivie for Outstanding Director, and Trina Mills and David Armstrong for Outstanding Choreography.

PHOTO

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Frank Blau + Erik Stuhaug

On November 2, the 2015, SDC Foundation hosted the Joe A. Callaway Awards at the West Bank Café’s Laurie Beechman Theatre. This year, SDCF honored Mike Donahue for Outstanding Direction on The Legend of Georgia McBride at MCC Theater and Alex Sanchez + Lainie Sakakura for Outstanding Choreography on Red Eye of Love at Amas Musical Theatre. The finalists for Outstanding Direction include Ken Rus Schmoll for The Invisible Hand at New York Theatre Workshop, Rebecca Taichman for The Oldest Boy at Lincoln Center Theatre, Trip Cullman for Significant Other at Roundabout Theatre, and Jesse Berger for 'Tis a Pity She’s a Whore at Red Bull Theater. The finalists for Outstanding Choreography were Joshua Bergasse for Cagney at the York Theatre Company, Peter Pucci for The Money Shot at MCC Theater, and Mimi Lieber for Cymbeline at Public Theater—Shakespeare in the Park.

TOP LEFT

Jesse Berger + Jonathan Cerullo

2014-15 Callaway Award Committee (top left to right) Amy Saltz, Leslie (Hoban) Blake (Press Liaison), John Going, Richard Hamburger, Barry McNabb Linda Burson, William G. Martin Jr. (Vice-Chair); (bottom left to right) Sue Lawless (Chair), Edie Cowan + Jonathan Cerullo; (not pictured) Bruce Heath, Michael Montel, DJ Salisbury + Clinton Turner Davis TOP RIGHT

(Vice-Chair),

BOTTOM

Mike Donahue, Lainie Sakakura + Alex Sanchez

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On November 9, 2015, the Ovation Awards were held at Center Theatre Group’s Ahmanson Theatre in downtown Los Angeles.

For their work on Spring Awakening, Members Spencer Liff and Michael Arden won for Choreography and Direction of a Musical, respectively. Other Members who took home awards included Michael Matthews for Failure: A Love Story at Coeurage Theatre Company, and Mike Mahaffey, who received an Ovation Honor for his fight choreography in She Kills Monsters at Loft Ensemble.

ABOVE (left to right) PHOTOS

Spencer Liff, Michael Arden, Michael Matthews + Mike Mahaffey

Ryan Miller/Capture Imaging c/o LA Stage Alliance

On November 9, 2015, Tim Dang was honored with SDCF’s Zelda Fichandler Award. The ceremony was at Vespaio L.A. Dang is the Producing Artistic Director of East West Players in Los Angeles and received a $5,000 award from SDCF to honor his accomplishments.

BELOW

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Tom Moore, Julie Arenal, Ruth Pe Palileo, Tim Dang, Oz Scott, Juliette Carrillo + Sheldon Epps PHOTO Michael Palma

| WINTER 2016

The 2015 Extraordinary Service Award, given annually by the Executive Board President, was presented

by Susan H. Schulman to Benjamin Endsley Klein, Sarna Lapine (not pictured), Lorin Latarro + Mark Schneider in recognition of their vital contributions to the recent SDC/Broadway negotiations, most remarkably their resolve + dedication to the Broadway Associate/Resident initiative + securing development coverage.

On November 16, 2015, SDC held its Annual Membership Meeting at Shetler Studios in New York. Among the topics discussed at the meeting were details on the recent Broadway negotiations, proposed by-law changes, information on Member access at the Union’s new office, and results from the 2015 Executive Board elections. Members who could not attend in person had the option to join via live stream.

Julie Kramer + David Hilder | Denis Jones + Brandon Ivie | Debra Whitfield, Wendy Davidson + Christopher Gurr | Sidney Erik Wright, Andy Sandberg + Markus Potter RIGHT (top to bottom)

Also on November 16, the 2015 Theatre Bay Area Awards, honoring excellence in professional theatre, was held at the American Conservatory Theater’s Geary Theater in San Francisco.

Members Liesl Tommy, Jon Tracy, and Millicent Johnnie (below) all took home awards.

PHOTO Cheshiredave

Photography

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The 2015 Theatre Hall of Fame welcomed its inductees in a ceremony held at the Gershwin Theatre on November 16. Among those inducted were Members Julie Taymor, Robert Falls, Tony Kushner, and Roger Rees.

ABOVE LEFT

Julie Taymor + David Siegel

ABOVE RIGHT

Ethan McSweeny + Robert Falls PHOTOS Aubrey Reuben

On November 19, 2015, SDC’s Deputy Director of Contract Affairs Randy Anderson and Business Representative Kristy Cummings were guest lecturers for Professor Lisa Dozier King’s Theatrical Unions and Law Class at the University of Miami. The lecture was held over Skype, with the attending students working toward a BFA in theatre management and stage management.

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SDC JOURNAL

| WINTER 2016

Founding Member Anna Sokolow had the rare ability to turn the intangible qualities of emotion into physical expression through dance. Her choreography was often inspired by feelings of alienation, pain, and rebellion, and she was known to represent the disenfranchised in her work. Sokolow’s most notable dance pieces include 1955’s Rooms, which was turned into a short film in 1966; 1954’s Lyrics Suite; and 1965’s Odes. A child of Russian immigrants, Sokolow lived in poverty on the Lower East Side for most of her early life. She first studied dance at a settlement house and later at the Neighborhood Playhouse. After her training, she joined Martha Graham’s company in 1930 and danced with it for eight years while also pursuing her own endeavors. During this time, Sokolow made a name for herself choreographing theatre.

She went on to become the dance director for shows such as André Obey’s Noah, Elmer Rice’s Street Scene, and Leonard Bernstein’s operetta, Candide. She also worked on the musical Hair during its early stages in 1967 but was eventually dismissed. Sokolow's jarring choreography reached beyond New York—she has affected modern dance movements around the globe. In 1934, her dance troupe, Dance Unit, toured the Soviet Union, and in 1939, it performed in Mexico to great success, despite the country’s limited exposure to modern dance. Her work also led her to Israel after Jerome Robbins asked her to help improve Inbal Dance Theatre, a Yemenite Jewish dance ensemble chosen to represent Israeli dance abroad. She steered the group toward a successful European debut. Sokolow was a teacher at Juilliard, the Lincoln Center Repertory Theatre School, the HB Studio, and the Actors Studio, of which she was a founding member. She was inducted into the Mr. & Mrs. Cornelius Vanderbilt Whitney Hall of Fame at the National Museum of Dance in 1998.

ANNA SOKOLOW 1910-2000

“

The artist should belong to his society, yet without feeling that he has to conform to it...Then, although he belongs to his society, he can change it, presenting it with fresh feelings, fresh ideas.

”

PHOTO c/o

Sokolow WINTER Theatre 2016 |Dance SDC JOURNAL Ensemble 55

SDC MEMBERS + ASSOCIATES continued...Kathleen

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