SDC Journal Fall 2016

JOURNAL

FALL 2016

GRACIELA DANIELE

ALWAYS READY TO GO OUT + PLAY

ALSO IN THIS ISSUE

ROBERT FALLS LIZA GENNARO MABEL ROBINSON + MORE

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OFFICERS

Susan H. Schulman PRESIDENT

John Rando EXECUTIVE VICE PRESIDENT

Leigh Silverman VICE PRESIDENT

Oz Scott SECRETARY

Michael Wilson TREASURER

EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR

Laura Penn COUNSEL

Ronald H. Shechtman HONORARY ADVISORY COMMITTEE

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

SDC EXECUTIVE BOARD

SDC JOURNAL

MEMBERS OF BOARD

MANAGING EDITOR

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

Marella Martin Koch FEATURES EDITOR

Elizabeth Bennett GRAPHIC DESIGNER

Elizabeth Nelson EDITORIAL ADVISORY COMMITTEE

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

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

Travis Malone SDCJ-PRS BOOK REVIEW ASSOCIATE

SDCJ-PRS PEER REVIEWERS

Donald Byrd David Callaghan Kathryn Ervin Liza Gennaro Ruth Pe Palileo Scot Reese Stephen A. Schrum

Marti Lyons DIRECTOR

Tlaloc Rivas DIRECTOR

Seret Scott

PEER REVIEWERS

DIRECTOR

Thomas Costello Emily Rollie

Janna Segal

FALL 2016 CONTRIBUTORS

Laura Barati PLAYWRIGHT + DIRECTOR

UNIVERSITY OF LOUISVILLE

Tom Smith PACIFIC LUTHERAN UNIVERSITY

Doreen Bechtol MARY BALDWIN COLLEGE

Liza Gennaro INDIANA UNVERSITY

Danny Gorman INTERIM PROGRAM ASSOCIATE, SDC FOUNDATION

Ellie Handel FORMER SDC JOURNAL INTERN

Nina Kauffman FORMER SDC JOURNAL INTERN

Moisés Kaufman

SDCJ-PRS SENIOR ADVISORY

James Keegan

Anne Bogart Joan Herrington James Peck

DIRECTOR

SDCJ-PRS ASSISTANT EDITORS +

Kathleen M. McGeever COMMITTEE

Michael Landman

DIRECTOR + PLAYWRIGHT

AMERICAN SHAKESPEARE CENTER

Baron Kelly UNIVERSITY OF LOUISVILLE

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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Purchase online at www.SDCweb.org. Also available at the Drama Book Shop in NY, NY. POSTMASTER Send address changes to SDC JOURNAL, SDC, 321 W. 44th Street, Suite 804, NY, NY 10036.

PRINTED BY

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Sterling Printing SDC JOURNAL

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FALL

CONTENTS Volume 5 | No. 2

FEATURES 16 Artists Can't Retire INTERVIEW WITH MABEL ROBINSON

BY PRESTON

LANE

22 Collaboration + Community INTERVIEW WITH ROBERT FALLS

BY BRENDON

FOX

30 COVER

Always Ready to Go Out + Play INTERVIEW WITH GRACIELA DANIELE

BY JIM

LEWIS

37 Musical Theatre Choreography Timeline: 1921-1966

BY LIZA

GENNARO

46 PEER-REVIEWED SECTION

Early Modern to Postmodern Shakespeares: Three Approaches to Staging Romeo + Juliet WRITTEN + EDITED BY

JANNA SEGAL WITH JAMES KEEGAN, BARON KELLY + DOREEN BECHTOL EDITED BY

ANNE FLIOTSOS + ANN M. SHANAHAN

MAIN

Graciela Daniele PHOTO Walter McBride Mabel Robinson

SMALL

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IN YOUR WORDS

What I Learned...Tlaloc Rivas CURATED BY SERET LEFT Siddiq

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BY SUSAN

SCOTT

Saunderson + Isabel Pask in Peribañez by Lope de Vega, directed by Tlaloc Rivas in a version by Tanya Ronder, at Quantum Theatre PHOTO Samantha Pollack

FROM THE PRESIDENT H. SCHULMAN

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FROM THE EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR

BY LAURA PENN

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Why I Cast That Actor Marti Lyons

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PRE-SHOW / POST-SHOW Michael Landman

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Nurturing Emerging Directors: The National Directors Fellowship

BY LAURA

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BARATI

SDCJ-PRS BOOK REVIEW

Directing in Musical Theatre: An Essential Guide

BY JOE

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DEER

SDC FOUNDATION

2016 Foundation Fellows

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SDC FOUNDATION

Choreographers + Directors: Equal Partners The Making of a Musical

Tectonic Theater Project 25th Anniversary Gala in 20 Questions Moisés Kaufman

WITH JERRY ZAKS, CHRIS CHADMAN, SCOTT ELLIS, SUSAN STROMAN + SUSAN H. SCHULMAN

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THE SOCIETY PAGES

TCG 2016 L.A. + Boston Member Gatherings SDC/F Summer Interns ATHE in Chicago A.C.T. Women's Leadership Conference 68th Annual Emmy Awards 8th Annual Broadway Salutes + Reginald H. F. Denham

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“We have a Union—

so that, united, we can fight for and protect what is our due, and keep on track for what is often a long and arduous road.

”

FROM THE PRESIDENT

By the time you read this, you will have a new SDC Executive Board President.

So much has happened at and for SDC over the last three years. My presidency aligned with a period of enormous transitions, filled with growth and change. We moved offices, to our beautiful new location at The Plant. We launched the online Member Portal, giving Members across the country greater access to their records and a stronger connection to our Union. We co-authored the historic statement by SDC and the Dramatists Guild on collaboration agreements. In many ways, both large and small, we made important strides towards better providing for the needs of our Members through a series of important negotiations.

In my final letter as President, I find myself most proud of the work that led to acknowledgement and coverage for our Members working on developmental work in the commercial sector. While for the past several years we had steadily moved forward, gaining recognition for our contributions to developmental readings, workshops, and labs that took place under LORT and Off-Broadway jurisdictions, Broadway had remained elusive. Only after years of hard work did our clarity of intention and relentless pursuit of what was rightfully ours lead to our acknowledgement at the table and in a new developmental contract. Now, we can proudly say that this important work directors and choreographers do is recognized across all jurisdictions. The ramifications of this achievement on the present and future livelihoods of our Members, through the contributions now made on their behalf to health and pension, will be great and far-reaching.

I think of this because it is a great example of why we have a Union—so that, united, we can fight for and protect what is our due, and keep on track for what is often a long and arduous road. I remind myself of that when I think about the future, where a great deal more work is waiting to be done: diversity initiatives, licensing and property rights, and expanding jurisdiction, to name just a few.

I know that together we will accomplish that great work, and more. I would like to thank my fellow Board Members and Officers for their marvelously creative contributions to the theatre and to this Union. They managed, while still committing to the Executive Board, to direct and choreograph many incredible shows. I would also like to thank our intrepid Executive Director Laura Penn and the entire SDC staff, whose leadership and creativity have constantly empowered us as we moved on the path forward, and our Members At-Large, for their dedicated committee work.

You all have been so inspiring, helpful, and forward-thinking. I am grateful to have shared this time with all of you.

In solidarity,

Susan H. Schulman, Executive Board President

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FROM THE EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR With the energy and input of the SDC Journal Editorial Advisory Committee, we plan our issues of the magazine about a year in advance. When we consider thematic suites, subjects of the various columns, and events to be highlighted in the Society Pages, we are always thinking forward with an eye on the future of the craft and the industry. We try to surprise you with profiles of Members you might never cross paths with or of icons who share little-known secrets about their lives or their artistic processes. We plan with an awareness that our articles—read by so many emerging artists—capture the legacy of more well-established Members. We are proud to be a part of the process of passing down lessons about challenges, successes, struggles. The stories told in our pages are offered to enrich the craft and nurture the next generation of theatremakers.

The issue in your hands now is framed around a suite of articles loosely embracing the theme of legacy. The great Graciela Daniele tells of her journey as a young dancer growing up in Perón’s Argentina and takes us through her Broadway successes. We discover Robert Falls, now 40-plus years into leading the Goodman, still digging deeper into his own craft and seeking out new experiences. Liza Gennaro guides us through a family tree of Broadway choreographers with a timeline that links the “who begat whom” represented in landmark Broadway shows. And everyone should know the legacy Mabel Robinson leaves the Winston-Salem community as she retires from the North Carolina Black Repertory Theatre.

But when we planned the legacy issue almost a year ago, we had no way of knowing we would lose five iconic, singular, world-changing artists as we were putting these pages together. Edward Albee, Gordon Davidson, Zelda Fichandler, Jack Hofsiss, and James Houghton: five very distinctive, exceptionally brilliant artists who left indelible marks on the American theatre. The characteristics they

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shared bound them to each other and to us. They each possessed clarity of vision matched by passion and the tenacity and capacity to fulfill their dreams for all of us. They have shown us what courage and bravery look like. The loss of each one has sent reverberations through the industry and caused more than a few tears.

Jack Hofsiss. At 28, he made Broadway history as the youngest director to receive a Tony Award for his production of The Elephant Man. Jack’s life in the theatre is a story of brilliance and heartbreak.

His gifts as a director are heralded by all, and to say he had perseverance seems so inadequate. Life for a freelance director in this industry is never easy. Jobs are scarce, and anxiety rests just under the surface of even the most established. Jack forged a path filled with seemingly insurmountable odds following personal tragedy. Paralyzed by an accident at age 34, Jack never walked again, using a wheelchair to navigate the rehearsal halls and stages in an industry that (let’s face it) is not hospitable to the physically disabled. Jack mentored young directors through SDC Foundation’s programs, taught, and continued to make great work. Although I never met Jack, I was maybe 18 when I slipped into a performance of The Elephant Man on my first-ever trip to Broadway. I still have the Playbill and can feel the damp, dark confines of the Elephant Man. Zelda Fichandler. In 2009 SDC’s 50th Anniversary celebration was co-chaired by Tom Moore and Larry Carpenter. With Tom leading the way, they championed the establishment of the Zelda Fichandler Award that year. The award was created to honor SDC Members working with the same passion and dedication as the founders of the regional theatre movement. Founders such as Margo Jones, Gordon Davidson, William Ball, and Craig Noel. In Zelda’s name, the award honors the leaders of the regional theatre movement by recognizing current visionaries and providing them with a little spiritual support

and a modest financial gift to help hold the course. There were six winners since 2009 who were lucky enough to meet Zelda—artists who otherwise may not have had an opportunity to sit with her, to speak with her. And in the years ahead there will be many more who, through this award, will take with them a bit of her spirit and the responsibility to carry on. I believe it brought her joy to get to know these artists, and that she appreciated knowing SDC would join others in carefully stewarding her legacy.

James Houghton. It was too soon for us to lose Jim. Nearly 20 years ago—when Signature Theatre was maybe one or two seasons into its life—I was invited to a focus group at the Mellon Foundation. About eight to 10 of us gathered around a table to explore the opportunities and challenges ahead as we looked towards the turn of the century.

Jim was there, along with Kathleen Chalfant, Doug Hughes, and others. No one at the table was inarticulate. But the energy couldn’t help but bend towards Jim—towards his generosity and the force and clarity of his purpose. In hindsight, it was clear that the future for so very, very many theatre artists was to be with Jim and Signature.

Edward Albee. Yes, an SDC Member, his directing work included the Broadway debut of Seascape and his Drama Desk Award-nominated 1976 revival of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?—but, of course, he was Edward Albee, the great American Playwright. It seems safe to say that Albee’s impact on the lives of directors is immeasurable. His deep and long-standing relationship with a circle of collaborators is well-known; directing an Albee play is a rite of passage. He was a writer who had a very clear vision of how his plays were to manifest off the page. As Three Tall Women was released for regional licensing, a tug of war broke out in Seattle over which theatre would secure the rights. Usually, this local squabbling is resolved by the almighty dollar.

In this case, it was Intiman Theatre and Seattle Rep vying for Edward’s blessing. After plenty of back and forth, Edward came to Seattle. I can only state with certainty that he met with Intiman Artistic Director

Warner Shook, but I know he walked the stages of both theatres. In silence. He sat in the house. He had a writer’s eye, yes, but this was a very director-like moment. (He chose Intiman.)

Gordon Davidson had a smile that lit up the world, and the generosity of his spirit was legendary. He believed theatre belonged in the center of our communities, the center of our lives, and he always placed artists at the center of the work. In the shadow of the Hollywood sign, he directed and produced challenging, provocative theatre, and was more than successful in creating a thirst for more in audiences. Gordon showed all of us in the regional theatre how to be a home to new work. He opened the door for many, so very many artists, with an all too unique dedication to underrepresented artists, many of whom are now shaping the American theatre of the 21st century—and he gave a great hug.

We were so lucky to know them, to see their work, to cross paths with their greatness. Today none of that time seems enough as we process the reality that these geniuses of the theatre are no longer with us. I do know that it is the relationships they had with you that changed the course of the American theatre. I share in, and I am witness to, your mourning. They leave us with a vast, empty space and a silence—a kind of quiet for the moment, but one which will be filled by their legacies, by all they passed down. I believe the theatre will always be informed by the inspiration, friendship, and love you shared with Edward, Gordon, Zelda, Jack, and Jim. In solidarity,

Laura Penn Executive Director

Jack Hofsiss PHOTO Richard Perry/The New York Times/Redux, Zelda Fichandler PHOTO c/o Arena Stage, Edward Albee PHOTO Robert Giard.

Copyright@Jonathan Silin, James Houghton PHOTO Gregory Costanzo + Gordon Davidson PHOTO Jay Thompson FALL 2016 | SDC JOURNAL

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WHAT I LEARNED… TLALOC RIVAS CURATED BY SERET SCOTT BY

A back and forth often happens when I’m approached by professional colleagues who ask, “How do you get academic gigs?” while at other times, members of the academy will ask, “How do you get professional work?” This back and forth happens often for me these days. It did not start with a bang, but with a slow evolution from nascent experiences.

I studied at UC Santa Cruz, and every summer there allowed me to work with its former resident company, Shakespeare Santa Cruz. The rest of the year, I would travel an hour southeast to intern at El Teatro Campesino. As a student, I had one foot in the undergraduate world and the other in the professional one.

Today, I’m entering my seventh year of teaching full-time as an assistant professor at two different universities. The academic calendar allows me to teach and direct each semester within the department, and the rest of the time is geared toward freelance work regionally.

IN YOUR WORDS What I Learned...

Why I Cast That Actor Pre-Show/Post-Show 20 Questions Nurturing Emerging Directors

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.

CORRECTION In the Society Pages of the Summer 2016 issue, a photo was incorrectly captioned on page 61. Please note that Jonathan Cerullo and Tom Viola, Executive Director of Broadway Cares, were with Angelina Avallone. SDC Journal apologizes for this error.

Surprisingly, the hardest part hasn’t been the constant negotiation with the calendar; it’s been people’s expectations that one can only do one or the other. A mentality exists that once a theatre artist enters academia, you’re “hanging it up” professionally. For me, it’s been the opposite.

I’ve directed twice as many shows these last seven years than during my five years freelancing while living in New York City.

Here at the University of Iowa, our faculty is expected to fulfill a professional career outside of our teaching and service. As a stage director, it’s not about publishing, but about the quality of professional productions one accomplishes. Also, a percentage of my service work encompasses community engagement, so my work as a guest artist at prisons, schools, and other civic centers fulfills both an artistic and socially engaged pattern in my work and career.

Today’s directors are often left to their own devices. They are told to make their own work—and they do. We are more entrepreneurial, more independent, and less reliant on being accepted by the mainstream. Unfortunately, that comes at a deep personal and economic cost. Countless graduates are saddled with debt and must enter the workplace. Many artists of color often don’t have a legacy of financial security, and so they are left behind while others from the dominant culture continue to get ahead professionally. This systemic exclusion that favors the privileged few continues today.

The good news is that this is no longer sustainable. As our country becomes more diverse, an awareness of equity, diversity, and inclusion is key to the survival of our field. Many artists of color and our white allies understand that the theatre must be a place of acceptance, of bravery, and it must have a breadth of training that makes our students not only prepared to be great professionals but also great citizens.

This is my focus now: not only to make the theatre a more diverse and welcoming arena of artmaking but also to be an advocate for equity, diversity, and inclusion (EDI) at the academy as well.

There must be more targeted diversity hires in America’s leading training programs. We have to move away from white European-based approaches and theories, and incorporate more nonWestern perspectives in our offerings, curricula, and productions. And those of us who are artistscholars must impart to all of our students that there is no scarcity or a zero-sum mentality when we open the table to diversity; a multiplicity of voices and perspectives raises all tides.

TLALOC RIVAS is a stage director, playwright, and a co-founder of the Latina/o/x Theatre Commons. He is a member of the Dramatists Guild and an Associate Member of Stage Directors & Choreographers—from which he received the Sir John Gielgud Award in classical directing.

Playwriting credits include: Johanna: Facing Forward, Byzantine, and the upcoming Anthem to Aztlàn. He is currently assistant professor of theatre at the University of Iowa and holds degrees from the University of California, Santa Cruz and the University of Washington’s School of Drama. www.TlalocRivas.com Aviles, Tania Benites, Andrea Belser + Jason Estremera in Johanna: Facing Forward written + directed by Tlaloc Rivas at Teatro Publico de Cleveland PHOTO c/o Alejandro Rivera BOTTOM Tlaloc Rivas directs University of Iowa Theatre Arts students Caitlin Dorsett + Ariel Davis as they rehearse a theatrical reading of Mamle Kabu’s Love is a Word PHOTO c/o Jim Slosiarek Photos/The Cedar Rapids Gazette TOP Becky

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WHY I CAST THAT ACTOR

MARTI LYONS On casting Andrew Goetten in Prowess at Jackalope Theatre Company “There’s been an accident,” was the first sentence of a text I got the morning after our third preview of Prowess at Jackalope Theatre Company in Chicago. I sprang out of bed and picked up the phone. One of our actors, the insanely talented and absolutely lovely Andrew Swanson, had sustained an eye injury and was rushing into surgery. The doctors felt certain that he would recover, but there was no timeline on how long that would take. It seemed as though he would be out for the weekend of previews, possibly out for opening, and there was a chance he might not be able to return to the run.

I got on the phone with Ike Holter, our playwright; Gus Menary, the Artistic Director of Jackalope Theatre; Nate Silver, its Executive Director; and Elana Boulos, its phenomenal Casting Director. Finding a potential fullreplacement actor for a storefront, non-Equity world premiere is no small task. We went through a list of names and found many strong options, but then an image floated into my brain. It was an image of an actor we all knew and loved sitting in the audience, watching our play. An actor we had all worked with, an actor we all trusted, an actor who had happened to come out to support and happened to see the show with his girlfriend the night before.

“Andrew Goetten,” I said. Ike had been thinking the same thing.

We called Goetten at 10 a.m. on a Saturday morning, and he was there by noon. We canceled Saturday night’s preview so that our choreographer, Ryan Bourque, and his

assistant, Jon Beal, could teach him nearly 20 minutes’ worth of fights over four hours that evening. We rehearsed again during the day on Sunday, covering basic blocking, reviewing all from the day before, touching on scene work, and drilling lines. Goetten went on THAT NIGHT, our Sunday night preview, with book in hand while full performing all of the choreography. We opened the show with Goetten, off book and completely ready, four days later.

Goetten had seen the show and Swanson’s performance only once, and nevertheless learned the part and went on to perform in 31 hours. He had an absolutely extraordinary recall of Swanson’s performance and found his way to both authentically inhabit the character and somehow preserve the energy that Swanson had carefully and beautifully crafted for this role. When I pulled him aside to tell him that we didn’t know the timeline and that we hoped Swanson would re-enter the show, he said, “No problem! Whatever you need. I am happy to hop out the moment he is ready.”

Goetten entered with the grace, determination, and playful spirit required for a very intense performance and a very intense situation. Our cast, devastated as we all were that Swanson couldn’t open the show, relaxed when they saw that Goetten was also dismayed at coming in under these circumstances but nevertheless fiercely committed to them, to Swanson, and to this performance.

We chose Andrew Goetten because we knew he was a quick study, an insanely talented

Sydney Charles, Andrew Goetten + Julian Parker in Jackalope Theatre’s production of Ike Holter’s Prowess

actor, and a gracious and loyal human being.

Even with all this knowledge about why he would be the right choice if we could get him, Goetten still impressed. He showed the truest professionalism in the speed with which he acquired everything he needed to perform and the deepest empathy for his friend and collaborators. In a play about community and vigilantism, Goetten was our hero.

Swanson (though now fully healed) was not able to return to the run. Nevertheless, Swanson, a company member at Jackalope and one of my favorite actors and best friends, showed up for opening, even though he was still freshly in recovery. As he healed, Swanson continued to come by the theatre throughout the run to support and cheer on Goetten and his fellow ensemble.

We talk a lot about the community we have in Chicago. These two actors, both Andrews, both—ironically—playing a character named Andy, are precisely what I love so much about Chicago. We cast them both as Andy because we knew they were extraordinary, but both proved just how extraordinary in this process. Andrew Swanson was brilliant in the development of this character and also a huge support in helping the show go on, even after he had to step out. Andrew Goetten stepped in seamlessly to support his friend, take over the part, and carry the show onward. We cast Andy well both times we cast the role, but we could not have done so without these two brilliant actors who embody the spirit of true artistry and community.

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PRE-SHOW / POST-SHOW

WITH

MICHAEL LANDMAN UNIVERSITY OF ARKANSAS

1 My morning ritual…Over the past couple of years, I’ve developed “maintenance” or “early awakening” insomnia, especially when I’ve been working on a show. So my morning ritual begins far too pre-dawn early: I’ll lie in bed creating a lengthy to-do list of what I fantasize I might accomplish that day, also working through some problem, challenge, or delicate communication. Then I’ll get up and happily procrastinate on that task list by indulging quiet phone time: reading the New York Times top stories, attempting to solve the mini-crossword in under a minute, celebrating (or lately, mourning) the San Francisco Giants’ boxscore, and glancing at/avoiding/occasionally tackling the inevitable pile of new emails. I’ll feed myself and the cats, glance at the local paper, pursue other online indulgences (see #5, below), and then rush to get ready for the day.

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On my commute, I read/listen to…I’m blessed with a short, easy commute. It’s less than a 15-minute drive, and I’ll flit between ’70s music, the news, New Orleans jazz radio, and “Dial-A-Trade,” a local program featuring wonderful characters selling and trading prized goods. I’m preparing to direct Lauren Gunderson’s I and You, so lately I’ve been immersing myself in John Coltrane, Jerry Lee Lewis, and Elvis.

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If I could, I’d go back to…I’d take in the first production of Romeo and Juliet! I’d secretly bring a video recording device and report back to the present on where we hit and missed on how things really went down. I’d like to prove my long-held beliefs that the actor playing Romeo doubled as his father, and that the first “fake” death of Juliet was an incredibly funny scene, including the choral grieving of her family and joyfully juxtaposed entrance of the wedding musicians. I’d soak in the audience, acting styles, rhythms, expectations and broken expectations… can we make this happen?

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A performance I wish I could see again…This is tough: whenever I watch snippets of videos of my own work, I’m inevitably disappointed.

There’s nothing like the magic of the live event. That being said, I’d love to see Théâtre du Soleil’s Tartuffe again. It’s been nearly two decades since Ariane Mnouchkine’s production, and it remains the most indelible artistic experience of my life. The theatricality, physicality, and exacting specificity of every aspect of that event continue to inspire me.

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I’m embarrassed to say I love…/Guilty pleasure…I’ve got two embarrassingly guilty pleasures: the first is my continued interest in the Neko Atsume Kitty Collector app; I’ve already collected and

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photographed all 50+ rare and common cats and their mementoes, and I still check the app several times a day. My second guilty pleasure is my longtime weakness: online speed chess. If I have only six minutes of unplanned time to spare, I’m probably playing. Yet after all those hours, I don’t think I’m much improved, which is perhaps the tragedy of my life.

Regardless, all reader challenges accepted!

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My Netflix queue says I would love…Well, this is tricky: our Netflix recommendations are based on what my daughter watches. I tend to rewatch the same old favorites: great films from the ’70s and ’80s, and Dirty Harry flicks (although some of Eastwood’s recent political comments have left such a sour taste that my interest is diminishing). My wife’s keen interest recently got me hooked on Grace and Frankie.

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I am actually watching…Law and Order (the original series), Stranger Things, HGTV, and CNN. We turned off cable a few months ago—we got fed up with an outrageous 40 percent price increase from one provider and the aggressive marketing tactics of the other. We’re now exclusively a Netflix and SlingTV household.

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I’m reading or I want to read…I’m reading The Wahls Protocol, The Energy Bus, Bettyville, and Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power. I spend most of my time reading and rereading plays (of course). New plays I fell in love with this year included The Christians, King Charles III, and Outside Mullingar. I tend to forget what I’ve read, the plus side of which is that I get great joy from reading the same material a second or third time around.

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To wind down, I…Work in my garden. It’s my exercise and my pleasure. I grew up in an apartment in NYC, so planting was limited to the marigold on the windowsill that I bought Mom for Mother’s Day. Last year we hired a landscape architect and master gardener to collaborate with us on a 10-year plan for our wooded, sloped yard. This year’s adventures included preparing and planting sod, designing a yin yang rock garden, and tending to new and old flowers, shrubs, and trees. Next up: building a wood and gravel staircase, with a hosta border.

I’m also an avid snorkeler. It’s a deeply relaxing and fascinating activity, and a terrific way to exercise and cool off at the same time. My wife and I explored Grand Cayman this summer, where our underwater sightings included an incredible event: green sea turtles mating.

TECTONIC T H E AT E R PROJECT 25TH ANNIVERSARY GALA

IN 20 QUESTIONS

Michael Emerson + David Hyde Pierce in the October 2015 benefit reading of Moisés Kaufman’s Gross Indecency: The Three Trials of Oscar Wilde PHOTO Katherine Clark

Tectonic Theater Project, founded in 1991

by MOISÉS KAUFMAN and Jeffrey LaHoste, is an award-winning company whose groundbreaking plays include The Laramie Project, Gross Indecency: The Three Trials of Oscar Wilde, 33 Variations, The Tallest Tree in the Forest, and I Am My Own Wife. Tectonic plays have won one Pulitzer Prize, three Tony Awards, three Obie Awards, and a multitude of other awards. Today, Tectonic’s plays are among the most produced in America, and its method of creating theatre, Moment Work, is taught by company members in the Americas, Europe, and Asia.

The company is dedicated to developing innovative works that explore theatrical language and form. And they do this by nurturing a theatrical laboratory as an incubator for new ideas.

Daniel Beaty in Beaty’s The Tallest Tree in the Forest at Brooklyn Academy of Music, March 2015 PHOTO Max Gordon Christina Sajous + Peter Saide in Moisés Kaufman + Arturo O’Farrill’s Afro-Cuban adaptation of Georges Bizet’s Carmen, choregraphed by . PHOTO Stan Barouh

This fall, they celebrate 25 years with a gala performance at NYU’s Skirball Center, and SDC Journal asked Moisés to talk about the process for creating that event. Enjoy.

20Q • 20Q • 20Q • 20Q • 20Q Describe Tectonic Theater Project in three words.

Laboratory. New works.

When you founded Tectonic, what did you hope to achieve?

I wanted to have a laboratory and an incubator where we could take the time we needed to develop new plays, to do research, and to study how the theatre communicates as an art form: what constitutes a theatrical vocabulary, a theatrical language? We wanted to build a company that would allow us the time to delve into these questions.

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Moisés Kaufman working with students in a Moment Work Training Lab PHOTO c/o Tectonic Theater Project

In America, we’re very adept at working in naturalism and realism. Are there other vocabularies that can allow us to explore more deeply what is “theatrical”? In a similar sense, we’re very good at exploring dramatic narratives: character, action, story, plot. What about theatrical narratives? In our work, we are always exploring both. How can we create thrilling dramatic narratives and at the same time explore our art form’s lexicon?

I also knew I didn’t want to have an institution with a season, a space, or a subscription base. I felt that would distract us. Hence the laboratory approach.

You are celebrating 25 years as a company. For how long have you been working on the 25th anniversary gala celebration?

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25 years.

Where did the idea for the “greatest hits” structure come from?

25 years is a good marker to take stock of the past and also look to the future. The gala performance will have some of both: scenes from existing plays and excerpts from our work currently in development.

What has it been like to re-appropriate material from existing work and turn it into something new?

It’s good to revisit our work in this context. It’s given us an opportunity to look at things we hadn’t looked at for a long time. And to see how certain questions keep coming up.

For us, it’s always about finding a story that allows us to explore how the theatre tells stories—there’s always a fascination in every Tectonic play with theatrical vocabularies and languages. Gross Indecency attempts to create a theatrical language that encompasses all the contradictions inherent in trying to create a single narrative from several different historical sources. 33 Variations is a study in how music itself can carry part of the narrative, and how the membrane between the past and the future is so theatrically permeable.

If The Laramie Project explores how to theatrically tell the life of a town, I Am My Own Wife tries to delve into the theatrical possibilities of an individual’s biography.

Is there a difference between putting together a gala versus a “regular” performance?

There’s food and drinks at a gala.

Does the final context of a performance affect your approach to it or your relationship with the audience?

Yes. In this case, we want to revisit our history and look at what’s next. And we’re doing it among our peers and loved ones. So all that influences what will happen on stage. We’re going to perform excerpts from some of the plays and have the members of the company recreate some of the roles they originated.

We’ll also have some excerpts of new works in development. So hopefully it’ll tell the story of where we’ve been and where we’re headed.

Tell us a little bit about Moment Work.

Moment Work is Tectonic Theater’s process of devising theatre. It’s the method we’ve been using over the past 20 years to create our plays. It is a process that encourages us to create plays using all the elements of the stage, and to create in the rehearsal room.

It was born out of a need to have a process that would allow us to write performance as opposed to writing text. And to explore how to create theatrical narratives.

Do you have a favorite “Moment”?

(We usually ask, “Favorite moment, line, or gesture,” but I think “Moment” encompasses all possibilities…)

My current favorite moment is from a play I just saw at the Edinburgh International Festival. It’s called Interiors by a company called Vanishing Point. In the play, a dinner party is taking place. But the hyper-realistic set is separated from the audience by a large piece of glass, and a voice-over narrates what’s happening. It was fascinating.

If you could play any role from any production you have directed, which role would you choose and why?

Carmen. Because of the hair extensions.

Which characters do you relate to most?

I think I gravitate towards characters who don’t understand things, people who have a hard time living in a world they don’t comprehend.

Their attempt to find a way to survive in the world is always a moving pursuit for me to study.

Tectonic seems to always have a number of projects in development or production at any given time, as well as an educational training program.

What are some of the things you and the company are working on, separately or together?

It’s a very exciting time for us. The company has been growing its infrastructure, and that has allowed us to create more work.

Andy Paris and Anushka Carter Paris are developing a new play called Uncommon Sense about life on the autism spectrum.

I’m developing an Afro-Cuban version of Bizet’s Carmen, Leigh Fondakowski is working on a new play about the life of Charlotte Cushman.

What is (are) the most important thing(s) you have learned over the past 25 years?

Not to answer questions like this one.

But I’ll try anyway. At this moment, I’m thinking about these three things: First, I’m sure it’s commonplace to say it, but…follow your instinct. There are many ways in which we perceive and understand things; intellect is only one of them. Science keeps discovering new ways in which we perceive, analyze, and process information—all the things we attribute to instinct. We know more than we realize we do, most of the time.

So pay attention to your instincts.

Second, to paraphrase Beethoven, theatre is long, life is short. There will always be things to strive for in the theatre. In the meantime, everything you master in it should give you great joy.

Lastly, to paraphrase Joe Mantello, sometimes bad theatre happens to good artists. When that happens to you, forgive yourself, write down what you learned, and get back to the rehearsal room.

What are some high-water marks or notable bumps in the road?

Over time, the most rewarding thing is when we feel we’ve mastered something.

Or discovered something. When a new theatrical idea or a new perspective emerges.

Those moments are always thrilling.

Notable bumps: when something you thought was going to work doesn’t (and, unfortunately, that usually happens in public).

If you were not a director, artistic director, and writer, what would you be?

An architect.

Do you have any advice for artists contemplating forming a company?

(Or, what is the best advice you received when you decided to form the company?)

Forming a company is not for everyone. If you want to direct plays, go direct plays. But if you want a space where you can take the time to explore the art form, to spend time asking how the theatre communicates, then a company might be a good place for you.

Is there a question you wish you had been asked?

Would you direct Hamilton?

What would you have answered?

Yes.

In two words, describe your hope for the next 25 years of Tectonic Theater Project.

Discovery. Joy. Or…more revelations.

You and your husband, Jeffrey LaHoste, founded the company together early in your relationship. What has it been like growing together as artists and partners?

Awesome.

MOISÉS KAUFMAN is a Tony- and Emmynominated director and playwright. He most recently directed a critically lauded production of Bent at the Mark Taper Forum, as well as Daniel Beaty’s The Tallest Tree in the Forest at Kansas City Rep, La Jolla Playhouse, Arena Stage, and BAM. Broadway credits include The Heiress, 33 Variations (which he also wrote), Rajiv Joseph’s Pulitzer Prize finalist Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo, and the Pulitzer and Tony Award-winning play I Am My Own Wife by Doug Wright. His plays Gross Indecency: The Three Trials of Oscar Wilde and The Laramie Project (which he wrote with the members of Tectonic Theater) are among the most performed plays in America over the last decade. Kaufman also co-wrote and directed the film adaptation of The Laramie Project for HBO. He is currently directing and writing a new Broadway-bound Afro-Cuban adaptation of Bizet’s Carmen for which he’s collaborating with Tony-nominated choreographer Sergio Trujillo, Grammy-winning composer Arturo O’Farrill, and Tony-winning composer-lyricist Jason Robert Brown. Moisés was recently honored by President Obama as a recipient of the National Arts Medal. He and his husband Jeffrey LaHoste founded Tectonic Theater Project in 1991. In 2017, Random House will publish a long-anticipated treatise on the company’s trademarked method of theatremaking, Moment Work, written by Moisés, Barb Pitts-McAdams, Leigh Fondakowski, Andy Paris, Greg Pierotti, Kelli Simpkins, Scott Barrow, and Jimmy Maize.

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NURTURING EMERGING DIRECTORS

The National Directors Fellowship BY

LAURA BARATI

“I had been hearing of some discontent from emerging directors about the lack of professional development opportunities,” WENDY C. GOLDBERG, Artistic Director of the National Playwrights Conference at the Eugene O’Neill Theater Center, begins. “And as a director who has spent the bulk of my career nurturing and developing playwrights, I observed an imbalance in the number of opportunities for directors to develop community and their work compared to what exists for playwrights.” So when The O’Neill was approached by the Doris Duke

Foundation to come up with its next big idea, Goldberg jumped at the chance to create a program that would develop and nurture emerging new play directors alongside their playwright colleagues.

As a Member of the SDC Executive Board, Goldberg naturally thought of the Stage Directors and Choreographers Foundation while searching for “like-minded partners who could make this program really effective,” and also found keen collaborators in Gregg Henry, Artistic Director of the Kennedy Center American College Theater Festival, and Nan Barnett, Executive Director of the National New Play Network. And so the National Directors Fellowship was born.

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A five-year joint initiative, the National Directors Fellowship (NDF) promises to fast-track the professional experience of 25 emerging stage directors and propel the advancement of new plays. While the program provides fellows with laboratory-like environments for observation and experimentation throughout the year, the true focus of the fellowship is the vast network of artists each director meets. “NDF is an 18-month program where the directors spend time with the partner [theatres] at key moments in their seasons, meeting many, many artists and administrators from around the country,” explains Goldberg. “We have given the fellows access to individuals, projects, and institutions in an unparalleled way. We put the directors in professional environments quickly and also have a lot of time outside of the professional settings to discuss issues that confront directors.”

The culmination of the fellowship is a professional directing opportunity at one of the National New Play Network (NNPN) companies. The fellows get to know the core NNPN theatres over the course of the year, and “Nan Barnett and I have personal conversations with the fellows and the theatres throughout the season to see where relationships are

“One of the largest pieces lacking for professional directors, I feel, is community. It’s rare to find directors together, discussing what we do, how we do it, and in a space where we can be vulnerable and totally truthful,” says Goldberg. Each class shares a winter residency at The O’Neill, where fellows work with writers on very new drafts of work—an experience Goldberg found particularly special. While literally snowed in during a blizzard, the 2015 class workshopped scenes from Mike Lew’s Teenage Dick and Deborah Zoe Laufer’s The Three Sisters of Weehawken.

“Seeing how different people approach things, and what the different conversations are, was really illuminating for everybody,” Goldberg recalls.

“I know there is a great deal of focus on the professional aspects of the program and the final NNPN residency piece, but for me, the time we all spend together in the snow at The O’Neill in January is one of the most fulfilling times for me,” Goldberg admits. “There is so much to learn from each other. I find it inspiring to see everyone’s work and to dive deeper into issues that confront us as directors as we make work inside all of these various theatres across the country.”

OPPOSITE TOP The

2015 National Directing Fellows with Reed Birney at Eugene O’Neill Theater Center PHOTO c/o Eugene O’Neill Theater Center Eugene O’Neill Theater Center OPPOSITE BOTTOM Wendy C. Goldberg + 2015 NDF Fellow Lavina Jadwhani at the Goodman Theatre THIS PAGE The 2016 National Directing Fellows M. Graham Smith, Madeline Sayet, Jessica Holt, Laley Lippard + Jeff Liu, with SDC Board Member Wendy C. Goldberg (center) + Danielle King PHOTO Isaak Berliner OPPOSITE MIDDLE

forming and what company might be the best match,” says Goldberg.

While the opportunity may not necessarily be a production, “the idea is to start a conversation with a company that hopefully will lead to more opportunities down the line,” notes Goldberg. “We were in a unique position this past year where all of the fellows landed production opportunities at the companies—plus other workshop and reading opportunities.”

Goldberg’s own path as a director has greatly shaped the goals of this program. “As a director,” she says, “I have always been associated with an organization—first at Arena Stage as the artistic associate, running the new play programs, and now approaching my 13th season at The O’Neill…I realized that what I had experienced as a director and administrator was rare—to be inside these remarkable organizations at a moment of such artistic change, and to learn about both development and production at this level. I had a lot to share.” At the same time, Goldberg points out, “I never ceased freelance directing, mainly in large LORT companies, but also Off-Broadway as well. The last 20 years for me have been spent in LORT, and on the road a lot.” They’ve also been spent growing and supporting her family, a conversation—how to balance professional directing with one’s personal life—Goldberg hopes the fellowship can create a space for.

And as the 2015 fellows are starting their NNPN productions in 2016/2017 seasons across the nation, Goldberg just welcomed the 2016 class of fellows during the O’Neill Theater Center Summer Conference: “I wanted everyone to spend time together because there is something very special about what happens on our campus in the summer—this is where future relationships and opportunities are born.”

And Goldberg’s hopes for the coming class? “My biggest hope is that the fellows leave the program with so many new connections, relationships, and opportunities they wouldn’t have necessarily landed before being a part of this experience. I also hope that we continue to support the work of diverse artists who in turn will work to make our world a better place.”

As part of the program's partnership, the fellows are introduced to SDC and SDC Foundation in an effort to further prepare them for the profession. Through seminars with senior staff, participants are granted access to Foundation programming and are brought into conversations about critical issues facing the field. Upon completion of the program, all fellows are given Associate Memberships to SDC. FALL 2016 | SDC JOURNAL

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ARTISTS CAN’T RETIRE An Interview with BY

Mabel Robinson

PRESTON LANE

Mabel Robinson’s grandmother said that from the moment she could pull herself up in her crib, Mabel was always dancing. Little did her grandmother know that young Mabel’s dancing would take her to New York City’s legendary High School of Performing Arts and Juilliard, from which she would go on to work on legendary shows on and Off-Broadway such as Black Nativity, Purlie, and Your Arms Too Short to Box with God. Ms. Robinson also danced on film and created choreography for television, earning an Emmy nomination for choreography for the Houston Grand Opera’s TV production of Treemonisha.

In December 2015, Ms. Robinson retired as Artistic Director of the North Carolina Black Repertory Company, the producer of the National Black Theatre Festival. But, as she revealed recently in an interview with fellow North Carolina director Preston Lane, her “retirement” has only created more space for her to be creatively engaged.

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PRESTON | Whenever I hear your life story, I get the impression that you just knew you wanted to be a dancer. That there was never an alternate career you thought about along the way.

PRESTON | Are there any pivotal dance pieces or theatre pieces that you saw early on in your childhood, [or] teenage years, that influenced you, excited you?

MABEL | Never really, never thought of it, anyway. None. I was always just so happy when I was dancing. It was also so rewarding for me because I wasn’t a talker, per se. You wouldn’t know it now. You had to express dance through your body; you didn’t have to do verbal expression. That was my saving grace. That was just a part of me. Movement was my life.

MABEL | I saw Martha Graham when I was a freshman at the High School of Performing Arts. To see Appalachian Spring…I remember all the little ponies were dancing and jumping, but I couldn’t take my eyes off of her. All she did was sit for almost that whole first section.

But that was very instrumental in seeing what it took to capture your audience. How you use all the things that you have. It was the body without speaking, expressing what it was that she was feeling, and how she related to the other dancers.

PRESTON | You grew up in Savannah, Georgia, correct?

MABEL | I was born in Savannah. My grandmother was taking care of my sister and me while my mom went to New York for better job opportunities. I was raised in Harlem. You get a lot of teasing when you come from the South to the North. I immediately had to learn how to adjust to different people’s temperaments.

I saw José Limón’s pieces. I liked Doris Humphrey’s [work] a lot because it was more

I was very fortunate to have a variety of people from different backgrounds who taught me a great deal. I went to Juilliard to study choreography with Louis Horst. He was very influential: he could make you understand how you connect everything that was going on around you with what you lived, and how it was so important to capture those things as an artist. That was pivotal for me.

When I was at the school, it was about learning the technique and learning how to deal with different techniques. It was a lot to absorb. It all had to do with blossoming, preparing me to venture out and be able to widen my thought process.

All those old-school teachers had a way of teaching—really teaching you—and making you use your mind and your emotion about what was going on around you, what was going on in the world.

Vereda Pearson, one of my mentors, was my first real influence. She was the first person to talk about the true ability of how an artist should act or what an artist needed.

That you can’t just do what’s happening at home or in your community; you have to know what’s going on in the world.

PRESTON | I’m going to jump ahead from being a student to being a teacher. How is it that those things that you learned along the way kind of become things that you teach? How is that journey?

She told me about the High School of Performing Arts, where I went for eighth grade through twelfth grade. That was my first real professional training. It wasn’t until I went to the High School of Performing Arts that I realized the discipline and focus it was going to take to be an artist. I had to go into the ballet classes because the modern classes were full.

I didn’t have any technique, but I was always a performer and jumper. Ballet demanded that you learned and retained technical discipline quickly.

Contemporar y—modern— dance was what I ended up focusing on. I became a double major. I had ballet as well as modern every day of the week.

It was hard as heck! Especially when you don’t have technique and have a difficult body type.

Being a double major strengthened me as a dancer. It made me feel more versatile, to be able to go out and compete at auditions.

folk-ish. When Alvin Ailey came to New York, I was one of the first people that worked with him. It was Alvin, Cristyne Lawson, and myself; there were about five or six of us who danced always together. He did small pieces of what is now “Revelations;” we did all the different sections at the 92nd Street Y.

MABEL | A lot of times an individual would trigger it in me. If I had to try to reach a young person, it was always something that I could remember to relate to them that made it work. People will tell you, and if you are really a teacher, and a good teacher, and really wanting to reach that other person and give them what you have, you see those things. They help you to know what to give them. Everything else that you have, you automatically will do it because they say it’s the right thing to teach and what their needs are.

Mabel Robinson in Black Nativity at the Spoleto Festival in Italy

ABOVE

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[Such as] you don’t have to have a big, big, big old part to be the star for someone to see you. You can have the very smallest part in the back and be so powerful. If you trust what it is that you’re doing, and you are really into it, that truth happens. I get so angry with teachers who say they are teachers but all they want to do is teach you a couple of steps and then go after the class is over. Especially when you’re teaching college students—that’s where they’re making decisions on their own. They have been protected all along. There has to be somebody there that’s going to be able to listen when they really need it. Or to say, “Don’t give up just because you didn’t make it this way, try something else. Don’t give up, because you do have this to offer.”

That’s what I think really real, good teachers are, and that’s what I think that my teachers gave me. Maybe that’s why they were legends, and they continue to be known, and people continue to study them. A teacher is supposed to be an artistic person, trying to communicate what it is that the young artist is supposed to learn.

I get so tickled because I keep realizing how much I learned from other people. And I continue to learn. I say, “Wow, if I stop learning, I’m really going to be dead!”

PRESTON | And that because we are part of that tradition, we have a responsibility to learn from

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those who came before us, and then hand that tradition on down with those who come after us.

MABEL | Exactly.

PRESTON | And I think that was a really pivotal thing for me. And I sense that from you—that that was a really pivotal idea.

[Mabel’s cell phone rings] MABEL | It’s Samm-Art Williams.

PRESTON | I was just about to ask about Samm-Art. MABEL | Oh, goodness, he’s absolutely wonderful. Samm-Art would tell me stories about myself that I didn’t know about. He was with the Negro Ensemble Company when I was on Broadway with a show. He said he would always try to talk to us, and we wouldn’t talk to them. You know, “Who is this riffraff?” To be able to talk to him and do things with him now is absolutely fantastic. He’s a wonderful person.

PRESTON | Such a great writer.

MABEL | Yes, yes, yes, yes! He lives in North Carolina now.

You know what he did? He saw the teens— ages 13 to 18—that were participating in the North Carolina Black Rep Teen Ensemble, an educational outreach training program that I founded in 2008. The program was to give the

youth an opportunity to attend master classes, work with theatre professionals, develop their individual talents, and explore the many options available for professional performing careers in the performing arts industry, or guide them to become leaders whose focus is on continuing “work of excellence” on and off stage in the theatrical process.

Samm-Art made the comment that “nobody’s going to be able to do what you do with those young people.” I said, “Yes, there will be. You.” He started a project with them to help them understand what it meant to become a writer— that you have to be your own publicist, agent, and producer. What was great was that they were not only good actors but they were good writers. I’d been giving them an exercise to keep a journal. Samm-Art ended up doing several projects with the young people, and he also immediately included them in projects he was commissioned to write, like a piece for Horizon, a black orphanage that was having its 100th anniversary. He based the characters on a lot of the kids in the playwriting classes, and the kids ended up acting in the production.

For the Teen Theatre Ensemble, we collaborated on several pieces Samm-Art wrote and that I directed. The teens were cast in period pieces that encouraged them to research characters they were playing while learning their history.

They had playwriting classes and decided what topics they would like to do and then they would try to deal with things that they dealt

OPPOSITE LEFT Vinnette Carroll + Mabel Robinson reading the libretto for Your Arms Too Short to Box with God OPPOSITE TOP RIGHT Salome Bey + Mabel Robinson in Your Arms Too Short to Box with God OPPOSITE BOTTOM RIGHT Mary and the Angel in NCBRC's Black Nativity THIS PAGE LEFT Lazarus LeGrant + dancers in Black Nativity PHOTO c/o NCBRC THIS PAGE RIGHT Teen Theatre Ensemble performs Samm-Art Williams’ Excelsior PHOTO c/o NCBRC

with in everyday life: family, school, community.

Now they’re writing about bullying.

Samm-Art also taught them several playwriting classes in which they authored, produced, and starred in their own production of a play about bullying. They wrote a piece with a Q&A afterwards where they come out as their characters. They learned how to get the copyright on that play!

PRESTON | You started as a dancer, and then you had the opportunity to begin working with choreography.

MABEL | I [studied] choreography in school, so I had the basic training to be a choreographer.

I worked with enough choreographers to see how they were able to communicate and how you have to make the adjustments to work with different choreographers. Talley Beatty was my favorite choreographer. He had worked in Europe so much; they loved him and he was like a king. When he came to America to do some things, he wasn’t used to [people] talking down to him, or not wanting to do this or that.

I loved Alvin’s work, of course, but it was different. Talley allowed you to be a part of that creative energy, especially if you were doing solo work with him. And Louis Johnson—he was unreal! I got to do things like Cotton Comes to Harlem with him, dancing on a bale of cotton.

He has no fear of saying whatever he feels. He’s so creative.

I came in as his assistant on Ossie Davis’s musical, Purlie. Among other shows. If there was a problem with the production that involved Louis, he would ask me to stay in order to protect his choreography. I received calls for jobs because of the experience and opportunities that Louis gave me. The work I did with Louis was a positive and informative learning experience for me.

PRESTON | So dancing, choreography, and then you began to direct. How did that transition begin to happen as well?

MABEL | I think Jack O’Brien was the person to allow me the freedom to be creative as an assistant director. Jack’s style of directing had a strong sense of movement, which made our work together collaboratively compatible. The Houston Grand Opera’s production of Porgy and Bess on Broadway consisted of very large production numbers, such as the funeral and the picnic—and demanded choreography and scene work that Jack assigned to me with trust.

Choreographing large production numbers is one of my fortes. There are very few choreographers now that are interested in creating big musical numbers anymore. I love working with lots and lots of people.

Everything just developed for me. I was given the opportunity and was not afraid to take it.

PRESTON | You emerged as an artist in a time of enormous change in the country, and you

have continued to be an artist in a time of enormous change in the country. Some of that’s been good change, and some has not been good. What was the climate like when you first came out in New York as an artist, as an AfricanAmerican performer? And how do you think that’s changed in the time since then?

MABEL | As I recall, history has always played a big part in the arts. My journey as an artist seemed guided by history to a certain extent.

During the mid-’50s through the early ’60s, my artistic world was focused on education and training to be prepared for the real world. As a performer, I was mostly involved in dance: concerts with May O’Donnell, Alvin Ailey, Talley Beatty; a world tour with the Martha Graham Company; and tours or television specials with black celebrities such as Harry Belafonte. My first Broadway show was in 1964: Golden Boy with Sammy Davis Jr. It toured and then came to Broadway but was short-lived, even though the cast was multicultural. The focus of the mixed love interest became the downfall of a good and important show.

Fortunately, the civil rights movement put many changes into action. The unions of the performing arts followed suit with improvements for black artists. The minority ruling was enforced, the “minority” part stopped being filled by olive-complexioned Caucasians.

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being offered some of the time.

I was working steadily. And then black theatre emerged.

When I saw Don’t Bother Me, I Can’t Cope, I was elated and knew that I wanted to do that show. It was a new beginning.

would still do it. I would not let you pick me out because I was hurt. I wasn’t going to do that because what’s that going to do to the next chance that I get? If you leave, then they’re going to say, “Oh well, she left.”

Vinnette Carroll was another mentor who was a great influence in my career.

Vinnette taught at the High School of Performing Arts in the drama department while I was a student in the dance department. I was given the opportunity to work with Vinnette at this period at the Urban Arts Corps Theater in Moon on a Rainbow Shawl.

Cicely Tyson played Barbara Allen. Urban Arts Corps was the birthplace of Don’t Bother Me, I Can’t Cope. Vinnette became the first African American woman to direct a show on Broadway, with Micki Grant as the first African American female composer/ lyricist. I performed Don’t Bother Me, I Can’t Cope on Broadway, replacing Hope Clark. I continued to work with Vinnette; she gave me my first opportunity to work as a choreographer on shows that she was developing and re-mounting for tours, Cope being one of them. She gave me opportunities that helped me understand what I could accomplish.

Things were booming in the ’60s, ’70s, and through the ’80s, and then things started to quiet down a little bit. At that particular point, I was fortunate because I could get a gig as a dancer on Broadway if there was a choreographer I knew that needed a swing person.

I had a lot of friends that I might’ve given an opportunity [to at one point], and then they got their show and they gave me the opportunity.

I did Black Nativity with Vinnette. It was funny how I got the job. I was at the Graham School at the time, and the show was up the street at the York Theatre. I went to see Clive Thompson and Cleo Quitman as the dancing Mary and Joseph. I was friends with Clive, and he came out and said, “Come backstage. You’ll have to do Mary tonight.” I said, “What are you talking about?” Cleo hadn’t shown up. Clive said, “All you have to do is the birthing dance and then I can guide you through everything else.”

So I got a chance. That’s how I got involved with Black Nativity.

PRESTON | Wow. That’s an incredible story.

MABEL | I continued the role: I was the Virgin Mary, and then I became the Mother Mary.

Working again with Alex Bradford, the composer of Your Arms Too Short to Box with God. Alex was in Black Nativity as well. Vinnette kept her teams together.

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I tore my knee up quite a bit. By that time, I had started to work with Houston Grand Opera.

So that took me out of the environment that the lull was happening in. I choreographed Porgy and Bess, and it came to Broadway [in 1976]. I saw a lot of black artists become discouraged. I had a son and was a single parent, so I had to also think of him, how I had to make adjustments.

TOP Teen Theatre Ensemble performs Samm-Art Williams’ Horizon PHOTO c/o NCBRC BOTTOM Flier for Teen Theatre Ensemble’s production of Samm-Art Williams’ The Last Class PHOTO c/o NCBRC

Being able to work with Vinnette again on a different level was just perfect. I would get mad as hell with her but still learn how to deal with the business of theatre. Anger will only stop you from doing what you are trying to do. She’d say, “Don’t get angry. Get even, darling, don’t get angry.”

Coming from the South helped. In New York, they put a lot of lace on stuff, being negative or racist. You have to kind of wade through it. But my grandmother was a Sagittarian, and she was always very direct. She said, “If I give it to you straight now, then you won’t have to cry later.”

I said, “Okay.” I understood it. I was hurt, but I

I was offered a job in WinstonSalem, NC to direct and choreograph a production of The Wiz. The Little Theatre in Winston-Salem—which is Twin Cities Stage now—thought I might have to do it with a mixed cast. I said, “Well, let me try to do it with an all-black cast first.” I went to the churches and afterschool programs, went to the North Carolina School of the Arts, and did my auditions. I found that there was a lot of black talent here.

I saw Dick Kuch and Dick Gain, whom I was in the Graham Company with years before; they were also teachers at the North Carolina School of the Arts. Kuch said I should come to work with the kids at the school. The TV special I was doing with Salome Bey, Mood Indigo, was the last job on my list at that time.

The teaching job came when that lull happened.

I was fortunate when I made my transition into Winston. My son was 12 at the time, and we were living on West End Avenue in New York, but still they were stealing his bike, and he couldn’t go to the store. I said, “Maybe there’s a change of environment needed.” I didn’t want to have a job or ask a friend for a job if I knew that

I wasn’t capable of doing it 100 percent because of the knee injury.

Unfortunately, or fortunately, I had problems here that I had dealt with already—things that I had lived through as a young artist, at the High School of Performing Arts and Juilliard, when there were very few blacks.

PRESTON | You began working with the great Larry Leon Hamlin at North Carolina Black Rep, and then you succeeded him as the artistic director. Could you talk about what that theatre has meant to you, and how you see that theatre’s role in the community? Both the community of North Carolina, but also the national community, and with the National Black Theatre Festival?

MABEL | Black Rep was the saving grace for me on one level. Teaching at the North Carolina School of the Arts was great. But I needed an environment that would be fulfilling for me on a cultural level.

PRESTON | You have been involved in legendary productions of black theatre in America, and you’ve worked with some of the really greats of black theatre. What do you think the importance of, and the future of, black theatre in America is?

MABEL | I think it’s important. It would be wonderful if we didn’t have to say “black theatre.” But I think the stories need to continue to be told. And if that’s the only way that our stories can be told, then the importance is very great. Our younger people need to learn where they come from, what they are about, and to continue it. So if they don’t have a foundation to tell who they are and to grow, the only way they can do it is by telling the stories.

I think it is definitely a big part of the future. I can’t see not having black theatre be a part of theatre.

PRESTON | So you’ve retired.

It took Larry a while to really open up to me. I found out that he also strived to go beyond excellence in his creative projects. I worked with him for 30 years. We became a good team. I was given the opportunities that he didn’t have, so I could give him a lot of stuff that he wanted for his theatre company.

I wasn’t really ready to be an artistic director. It was such a big responsibility, and it was stifling.

I was the only theatre person on the staff, and that was also very, very hard. But I saw what Larry was trying to do in the 30 years that I worked with him, so it was easy for me to step in and continue to do small steps.

When I started the Teen Theatre Ensemble, it was because you have to prepare for Black Rep to continue to have a future. Having worked with the School of the Arts for so long, that element had always still been a part of me.

I’ll try to continue to write. I’m being a dramaturg now. This is a new thing. People had me reading their scripts, and I said, “Okay. I’ll help to develop it.” I’m doing one with Nathan Ross Freeman now about Nina Simone. She was an artist of my generation. I had great respect experiencing some of the things that she did and why she chose to be an activist. Her story definitely needs to be told and heard.

PRESTON | Are you optimistic about the future of theatre in North Carolina, optimistic about the future of theatre in the United States?

MABEL | Yes. I think that one thing WinstonSalem has learned is that art and culture is a necessity. I’m very optimistic. I think theatre will continue. There are enough young people that are coming back as guest artists for short and long periods of time. They find different ways of thinking to continue using theatre in some form as a source of communication.

He, Dr. Angelou, Sydney Hubert, and I all got together and he said he wanted to do a festival. “So do it,” we said. “What do you need to do it?” We put our heads together but didn’t expect for it to develop into what it has developed into.

Bravo, Larry Leon Hamlin!

I was fortunate to have been a part of the Black Rep and the Black Rep family. I saw the Black Rep grow.

When Larry Leon died, they asked me if I would be the artistic director. I had no idea I was going to take over. I think it was the shock of his death, and that was the year that we had to do the festival on our own, so I said, “Oh, okay, fine, I can see myself doing it for a short period of time.”

Performing Arts in Shreveport. Since I’ve been at Black Rep, a woman by the name of Gloria Gipson has been coming to the festivals and communicating with me, asking, “Could you steal away for a couple of weeks and work with my kids? They need to have the experience with professional people.” So every once in a while, I get a chance to bring the stars—the jazz greats or Melba Moore—to do a summer concert with them.

PRESTON | What advice would you give young artists starting out today?

ABOVE Mabel

Robinson at her retirement party.

PHOTO Larente L. Hamlin, Sr. c/o NCBRC

MABEL | For the fourth time.

PRESTON | What are your plans?

MABEL | Well, I’m doing some things now that I wanted to do. I wrote a ballet that I want to put into script form. It’s called Mothers Three; it’s my grandmother, my mom, and I. That was so much a big part of my life that I felt as though I had to put it into words. The ballet was very successful.

I want to continue to work with young people and see how I can guide them. I’ll be going to Louisiana and working with the Theatre of the

MABEL | Be open. Try to learn something new. Don’t get so comfortable with one person. That just stops your growth, stunts your growth.

I said I was getting tired, and I shouldn’t be getting tired as an artist. I should always have something that I want to do. Something that I feel I can offer, as an artist. I will always be creative.

PRESTON | I think that’s a fantastic way to end this conversation. There are these artificial concepts of retiring and not retiring, but artists never retire.

MABEL | Artists can’t retire. They leave a job as an artistic director to go on to another adventure. That’s why I say I’ve retired as artistic director. But I’ll somehow be floating around, in somebody’s spirit, I hope.

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For almost 40 years, Tony Award winner ROBERT FALLS has been electrifying audiences at his Chicago home base as well as around the country by directing and producing exciting, eclectic, provocative work, first leading Wisdom Bridge Theatre in 1977 until he became artistic director of the Goodman Theatre in 1986, where he continues today.

Falls' championing of great writers extends from the classics—with galvanizing productions of O’Neill, Miller, Shakespeare, and others—to contemporary premieres written

by Rebecca Gilman and Richard Nelson. In the 1990s, Falls created the Goodman’s Artistic Collective, which has grown and thrived over the years to include Pulitzer Prize finalists, Tony Award winners, and MacArthur “Genius Award” winners. The Collective is as much an example of Falls' commitment to diverse aesthetic approaches and powerful theatrical storytelling as the director’s work in rehearsal and on stage.

This past summer, director BRENDON FOX, a former Chicagoan who has seen much of Falls' work at the Goodman and elsewhere, spoke with Falls in a conversation in which the venerable director reflected on his life in the theatre— from his earliest memories of the stage to his evolving approaches in rehearsal.

Eugene O’Neill’s Desire Under the Elms PHOTO Liz Lauren

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&

Collaboration Community with Robert Falls AN INTERVIEW BY

BRENDON FOX

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Eugene O’Neill’s The Iceman Cometh PHOTO Liz Lauren

BRENDON | It sounds as though theatre has long been a part of your life, starting with— and I love this— putting on puppet shows as a kid.

Do you remember what the first piece of theatre that you saw was?

ROBERT | I must’ve been maybe five or six years old. It was a centennial pageant put on by the small town of about 900 people in central Illinois where I grew up. My father, who was about as far from an actor as imaginable and sort of an oddity in the community because he was a New Yorker who had married my mother, a proverbial farmer’s daughter who’d grown up in this town, was playing a pioneer who founded the town.

He rolled a cigarette in an old-fashioned way— with tobacco out of a pouch paper, licking the paper—while talking. I remember vividly how accomplished that was as an action, and how unlike my father it seemed, because he didn’t even smoke. It’s a memory that over time has come back to me. That was the very first play I saw, which I think captured my imagination,

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watching behavior on stage and being in a room full of people sharing that experience of being in an auditorium, being on a stage, watching people on a stage.

The first professional production I saw was in Chicago: the Broadway touring production of The Music Man. I had to be eight years old.

That set off a love of musicals. I would listen to my parents’ recordings of West Side Story, My Fair Lady, Oklahoma!, and others. I imagined staging the shows.

Usually the records were accompanied by a scene-by-scene synopsis, accounting [for] what was going on. It was enough to grab my imagination. I was also enamored of the Burns Mantle Best Plays of the Year. Those featured synopses of both plays and musicals.

I constantly checked those out of the town library.

“Saturday Night at the Movies,” where you could see a fairly recent movie on TV, was relatively new, and I watched The Day the Earth Stood Still, a science fiction film from the late ’50s. I recreated it with my friends at our town

park in what we would now call an immersive or site-specific piece. We had a water tower that became the spaceship, and I would take the audience around the park while narrating the movie. These kids that I’d organized would act out small scenes from the movie that I had transcribed by memory.

So I was just putting on plays, organizing kids to perform on our parents’ front porches. When I was 13, my family moved to Champaign-Urbana, which is also where I ended up going to the University of Illinois. I saw a touring production of Peter Brook’s very famous production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream—which was mind-blowing.

I was rather precocious and I remember creating a scandal in the town library when I discovered the plays of LeRoi Jones, who became the poet Amiri Baraka. These were incredibly scathing indictments of racism for their time, and they still are. The librarian told my parents that I shouldn’t be reading these plays, and my parents, to their credit, remarked that it was okay because I was checking them out from the public library. It was life altering when I read The Toilet and The Dutchman. The town I grew up in actually had a sundown law in the late ’50s, early ’60s; even in downstate Illinois, black people were not allowed to spend the night in the town.

I was one of the few Catholics growing up in the town. I wasn’t thrilled by it, but there was a certain theatricality to being a Catholic and

William Shakespeare’s King Lear PHOTO Liz Lauren

being subjected to the rituals of the Catholic church in Latin at that time.

BRENDON | I was raised that way as well.

There’s a kind of “production” feel to the sense of spectacle: the incense, the Latin.

ROBERT | There was. I still have nightmares of the Stations of the Cross and the crucifixions and kneeling for hours in this very, very small church in this very, very small town. And the Latin mass, which went on forever.

BRENDON | Were you ever tempted to act?

ROBERT | I acted a lot. I was Santa’s lead reindeer in the town’s Christmas pageant! In front of the audience, I fainted and took down the rest of the reindeer. Later, in high school, I played Willy Loman. My father thought I was much better than Brian Dennehy, who I directed in the role on Broadway many years later.

I was advised that I would never be an actor because I was too tall. Some of my acting teachers said, “It’s going to be very difficult for you to ever professionally work because you’re six [foot] five.” I didn’t take that personally. I thought they were correct.

Ultimately, I thought of myself more as a director. I was the first student ever to direct a play in my high school, and I was one of the few undergraduates to direct a play in my college.

BRENDON | When you were growing up and going to see theatre in Chicago, what was your impression of the theatre scene there? It’s obviously evolved over the years.

BRENDON | That’s a big deal at that age. What was it like for you? Were you confident, feeling, “Well, maybe this is what I’m meant to do”? Or, “This is pretty overwhelming”?

ROBERT | There are different periods of time in terms of my relationship to Chicago theatre.

I went to eighth grade and high school in the Chicago suburbs, and I was always reading reviews and articles about the regional theatre movement. At 16, I would get friends to drive into Chicago and we would see plays or go to Second City. I was really blown away by the improvisational work coming out of Second City. There was also the Kingston Mines Theatre Company, where I saw the first production of Grease when I was in high school. There were plays by an amazing company, the Organic Theater Company, which had just established itself. There weren’t many theatres in the early ’70s, and now there are more than 200.

ROBERT | Mark Twain said that the key to his success was ignorance and confidence. That was me. (Laughs.)

BRENDON | You graduated from college, living in New York for a bit, and then you decided to return to Chicago. What was that motivation?

ROBERT | A few years earlier, as a college sophomore, I directed Moonchildren by Michael Weller. Almost two years later, a lot of actors in that production had moved to Chicago and wanted to produce it there professionally. They had to spring me from my senior year in college—convince the dean that this was an unusual professional experience so that I could come up from the University of Illinois and direct.

Once I graduated, with Moonchildren a success at home, I went to Brooklyn for a few months to study acting. My friends Stuart Oken and Jason Brett, who had produced the show, called and said, “What are you doing in New York when you’ve got this hit play running in Chicago? You’ve got to come back and immerse yourself in this scene. It’s a happening scene, there’s a lot beginning to go on.” So I came back to Chicago in about 1976.

That I came back to Chicago, or that I had a hit play, just seemed sort of normal. It seemed exciting, it seemed fun, and the people that were producing it and the people that were acting in it were great friends of mine. There was a very strong sense of community. Stuart Oken and I continue to work with each other even 40 years later; he brought me in to work on Elton John’s Aida when he was an executive at Disney.

BRENDON | What was your work with Wisdom Bridge in the mid-’70s like? Looking back, what were some things that were the most impactful for you personally and professionally?

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William Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure PHOTO Liz Lauren

ROBERT | I have no idea where I would be if it were not for being asked to take over this tiny but very important theatre company.

I learned artistic direction on the job but was also doing everything else, from top to bottom. I directed three or four productions every year. Two of us ran the theatre. I would unlock in the morning, clean the toilets, wash the stage down, pick up the paper cups, prepare the box office, and start taking telephone calls. I’d be there from 10 in the morning until midnight every day. I’d go into rehearsals and get the show ready, and then shut down.

I realized that my work as a director was, to a great extent, inseparable from my work as an artistic director. For my entire 40 years now as an artistic director—10 at the Bridge and 30 at the Goodman—I’ve always seen myself wearing two hats. It’s gotten complicated at times, but I’ve always enjoyed the process of running a theatre and collaborating with other people in the running of a theatre, collaborating with the community, trustees.

BRENDON | How do you feel that those two prongs—the producing side, the artistic directing side—impacted your work as a director?

ROBERT | It kept me very invested in the community that I was in. It kept me very connected with the audience that I was

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working in and living with. It kept me aware, and it kept me feeling secure that I had a home. I think that the greatest thing the theatre can do is provide a home for artists.

Sometimes we throw that phrase out: “an actor’s home.” But it is possible to really create a safe place for people to work.

One of the things I’ve loved is to put people together on projects and also to watch other directors at work—to be able to be in the rehearsal room with many other directors over the years, amazing directors, and watch them work, which I don’t think, unless you’ve done a sort of an apprenticeship or you’ve been an assistant director, a lot of directors have had the chance to do.

BRENDON | What kind of mentors did you have, and how did that impact you later in your career when you had assistants and apprentices?

ROBERT | I’ve never felt I had any mentors other than an acting teacher named Edward Kaye-Martin, who I met in college, studied with in New York, and brought to Wisdom Bridge to establish a training program. I have people I looked up to, but I never assisted another director.

When I talk about watching other directors work, it’s been colleagues. I’ve learned everything on the job, really. And I continue to be inspired by other directors’ work. From Hal Prince and Tommy Tune to Peter Sellars and Calixto Bieito. And also by my Goodman

colleagues, including Michael Maggio, Frank Galati, and Mary Zimmerman.

BRENDON | Do you think for early career directors that observing and assisting is potentially helpful?

ROBERT | I think it’s a fantastic experience for emerging directors and younger directors.

Michael Maggio was a brilliant Chicago director who died too early. We’ve established a Michael Maggio Fellowship that, every year, brings in a very gifted director who’s with us all year. They can create whatever they want to do at the Goodman. It’s been a fantastic experience for the directors. Their work has grown as a result.

Directing is so hard. It is so hard to find those opportunities, to get a career, to maintain a career, to achieve longevity. Anything a young director can do [to get those opportunities] is important and valuable.

BRENDON | You mentioned earlier the importance of creating a home, a safe space for artists to work. It seems that the Goodman has this as part of its ethos. What would you say makes it particularly special?

ROBERT | I think what makes the Goodman unique has been this commitment to an Artistic Collective made up [of] really gifted individuals [who are] very diverse in their cultural and aesthetic identities. To have them around as colleagues to look at my work, but also to be around looking at their work, has—

Anton Chekhov’s The Seagull PHOTO Liz Lauren

again, it’s the sense of home. The sense of an artistic home has always been very important to me. To watch their work, discuss that work, and to have them around discussing my work has always been a vital part of artistic direction.

BRENDON | What was the impetus for creating the Artistic Collective in the first place?

ROBERT | At Wisdom Bridge, I felt very lonely and isolated. In my reading, I had become enamored of other companies. I was particularly intrigued by the structure of the Royal Shakespeare Company, with a team of directors committed to the production of Shakespeare but aesthetically quite different. I was also really drawn to the work of a Glasgow company, the Citizens Theatre. I got an NEA grant to go to Scotland to observe the work that they were doing in a theatre that was run by a collective. That sense of collaboration was very, very exciting.

When I went to the Goodman, the first thing I did was say, “I really want to bring in Frank Galati, as an associate director, and then, very quickly, Mike Maggio. [I wanted to] have the three of us, who had known each other for a long time, who admired each other’s work, to have a triumvirate.” The buck stopped with me, but I had two colleagues with whom to plan a season, discuss the season, and have in-depth conversations about the community and theatre.

Now it’s been 30 years. That idea of empowerment, community, and diversity has

really grown. We have artists such as Chuck Smith, or Henry Godinez, who represent African-American and Latino communities, mixed with somebody like Mary Zimmerman.

Or Regina Taylor, whose aesthetics are quite different from mine. The collegiality and the sense of having these other artists around have been exhilarating and has been able to liberate me to get outside the Goodman and work in other environments: regionally, on commercial Broadway, and in the opera world.

The Goodman artists are continual and able to self-produce. It is one of the reasons why I’ve been able to stay fresh and to continue happily at the Goodman for 30 years. It’s unusual for a lot of artistic directors to work in these other arenas.

BRENDON | It seems like it’s such an eclectic group. Can you see any common traits or characteristics they share?

ROBERT | All of these artists have distinct signatures, and they all have very strong interests in what they want to do. That’s the essential part of planning a season. When I ran Wisdom Bridge, I planned for five production slots and then I directed three and hired two people to direct the others. I felt the isolation of putting a season together, which, with my white, male, heterosexual experience, reflected a certain perspective. So to truly have a diverse group of artists contributing, I’m free to say, “Oh, well, this is the one play that I’m very, very passionate about doing,” and then go around and collaborate and work with these other resident artists, this collective, [who

each have] the one or two plays that they’re extraordinarily passionate about.

I have seen some theatres that feel a little bit more cookie-cutter over the years. While we have had to do that for various reasons on occasion, I’ve been very proud of the work feeling very, very much the product of considerable passion from a wide, diverse group of individuals.

BRENDON | Regina Taylor said about the collective—and others have said this, too—it’s a place to take chances, to risk, to dare. You must be central to creating that environment.

How does one create that space for people to be able to fail big, or risk big, or dream big, and feel like they’re safe doing that?

ROBERT | I have to attribute an enormous amount of that work to my partner, Roche Schulfer, who’s been at the theatre 10 years longer than I have; he’s in his forty-first year.

Roche, as a producer and as a collaborator, has been extraordinary in supporting artists.

He always says yes. It’s not just being in a rehearsal room and creating an atmosphere that allows risk-taking or encourages an artist to go out on a limb; it’s knowing that the work is actually going to get produced. It’s knowing that there’s going to be an audience, knowing there are going to be subscribers out there.

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pretty damn open towards new work, or new ways of doing classic plays. If for some reason it isn’t successful, or if audiences don’t like it as much, there’s going to be another one in six weeks that they might like.

So, unlike a lot of theatres that have trouble navigating rough waters, the Goodman has been so solid in its support, and, I think, its communications, that it’s been able to create this sense of safety for artists.

BRENDON | In the past, there have been great repertory acting companies and other artistic collectives, and many of them have disbanded.

Yet the Goodman’s Artistic Collective has continued. It sounds like what you’re talking about—audience cultivation, a sense of safety for the artists, a sense of home—is part of the reason for that. Are there any other factors why the collective is able to thrive?

ROBERT | I think that the audience has formed a relationship with these artists in the same way they’ve formed a relationship with me. Particularly when you talk about the subscribers. They’ve seen the work, they’ve seen a dozen plays by all of us, and so they have an investment in the vision and the consistency of artists. That doesn’t mean there haven’t been a lot of other guest artists, or other directors, doing a lot of other plays. But with the Artistic Collective, I think the audience, community, and critics have a relationship with those people.

Every associate doesn’t have exactly the same relationship with the theatre. Some maintain offices here, some don’t. Some live here, some don’t. Some people prefer to have a more tenuous relationship to the producing aspect, some want to be very involved in it. Everybody has their own different financial arrangement with the theatre; they all have it, but they also have the freedom to create their work in other ways, in other places. It’s not like they’re bound to the Goodman. They’re able to look at the Goodman as the place where they can do, quite often, their most daring work, or the risky work, or know that they’re going to be supported for their work on a level of support [in terms of the] size of productions and budgets that they wouldn’t normally get at some of the other venues with which they work.

BRENDON | It sounds like the relationship each of those artists in the collective has with the Goodman is unique as well. It’s not “one size fits all” for all of them.

ROBERT | That’s exactly right. That’s exactly right.

BRENDON | Could we talk about your own rehearsal process? When I’ve talked to a

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number of actors who have worked with you over the years, I hear a couple of common threads: openness to a variety of ideas, playfulness in the rehearsal room, the sense of collaborative spirit, an ensemble feeling, and trust.

ROBERT | Well, those are all lovely things. I’m delighted to hear that any actor would say those things because I don’t always hear them.

BRENDON | Is that something that’s overt on your part? It seems that there is a joy in your process regardless of the tone of the material.

ROBERT | Generally, I am drawn to darker plays. If I was to look back over the many plays I’ve directed, the ones that I often feel the most emotionally connected to are those that are the darkest. But, yet, in the rehearsal room, I do try to create a sense of play; it’s raucous, even bawdy at times. There’s so many ways with which I work on different levels with actors.

You want to create a space that is safe for actors to explore, to risk emotionally, to go all the way, to find a sense of truth and honesty. It can sometimes lead to complicated emotions that they experience or that they have with their fellow actors, or their director. But in order to do that, I think part of creating this rehearsal room environment is creating a company and creating a sense of trust. I do try to do that through laughter. Humor is a big part of that. I think the harder one laughs often in rehearsal, the more trust we all gain with each other. It also implies a sort of safety in the rehearsal room.

I’m very anecdotal. I tell stories. I try to move the actors towards a communion, a sense of togetherness.

BRENDON | A vulnerability can come from that.

ROBERT | The vulnerability comes out of that, rather than creating a sort of tense room, or a room where everybody’s desperate for approval, or a room where people get scared.

They’re naturally going to get scared; they’re scared from the moment they walk in. Every actor thinks they’re going to be fired at the first reading. That’s how vulnerable an actor is. I find that humor can be a very bonding experience, and that laughter can bring people together faster than anything. So I lead with that and will often use that as a way to work.

I also work in a very open way. My way of working has changed radically over the years. I used to take one actor in a corner and whisper something, and then another actor in the corner and whisper something, and put them, perhaps, at odds with each other. Now, I spend an enormous amount of time with table work,

much more than almost any director I know. I can easily spend half the rehearsal period with an open discussion that is controlled.

I have a methodology that I’ve developed where we’re analyzing the text together, and we’re also looking at the characters. It breaks that rule that actors should never talk to other actors about their characters. I encourage actors to talk about all of the characters. And I’ve evolved a number of exercises and ways of working that have to do with exploring, deepening, and enriching the text.

BRENDON | Do you mind sharing an example of one exercise that you might use?

ROBERT | I had a big breakthrough over the past decade. I was bored with my work. It was almost too easy. I didn’t think it was deep enough or rigorous enough. I was looking for another way—a deeper way—to shake things up. I realized that while I thought of myself, essentially, as a realistic director coming out of a Stanislavskian tradition, or a Method tradition, I didn’t really know all that much about it.

I began a journey that led me to study Russian work, beginning with the great British director/ teacher Mike Alfreds. I conferred with Russian scholars and observed at the Moscow Art Theatre. I watched Lev Dodin in rehearsal at the Maly Drama Theatre in St. Petersburg. The culmination was my production of The Seagull at the Goodman in 2010. For that production, I created my own adaptation, which was based on the first version written in English.

That has really transformed the way I work: a lot more methodically, a lot more carefully.

For example, one of the things I’ll do is make use of what the Russians call etudes, where I ask them to take their character and create a moment that can be an extended moment of exploration. I ask them to come up with something they’re working on that they need to fully understand. I’ll use these etudes throughout the rehearsal period to help an actor get in touch with something in the play, often that isn’t even referred to in the text.

BRENDON | You’re curating it and giving it for a reason, but it allows them to go deeper, to help the actor make a breakthrough.

ROBERT | It’s mostly about empowering the actor. I’m very lucky—and this only comes from running a theatre for 30 years—that I rarely direct a play with less than five weeks of rehearsal. I’m slow. I take a long time to think about a play. I want to have a design process that is full and goes through a real exploration of the work. I increasingly have asked for longer rehearsals for a play. Time becomes very important to me.

I rarely tell actors what to do anymore. I don’t tell them where to stand, where to go. As long as they’re achieving a level of truth and contact with each other, and they’re playing specific intentions, I’m willing to give up the authoritarian director’s sense of composition and picture-making in favor of some spontaneity and something real happening on stage.

BRENDON | I imagine the actors, especially ones who aren’t used to your process, have to really feel the trust that they can experiment.

And that you are putting your money where your mouth is in terms of saying, “I want you to explore, and I want you to go for truth; go where you need to go to find that.”

ROBERT | It’s incredibly liberating when you can do it. Like I said, I can’t always do it, but it’s something that I have been striving more and more to create in much of the work that I have done in the past decade.

BRENDON | You were talking about how your approaches to working with actors in rehearsal have changed. What about designers? Has that been consistent, or do you feel that has been evolving in its own way?

ROBERT | No, not really. I feel design is very important. I work very, very carefully on the design of a play, and I generally want to work for a long period of time with designers. I think that the world of the play, or the metaphor of the play, is extraordinarily important.

By being a producer/director, I’ve been able to create a body of work where I alternate between doing a new play, and then doing a classic play, and then going back to a new play, and then a classic play. I sometimes deliberately alternate. I can’t always do that, but if I can, it’s phenomenal.

My first responsibility in a new play is to the playwright. It’s got to be the playwright’s world as they imagined it, as they see it. I can challenge them and I can bring things to the table, but ultimately it’s their play. For a first production, I am there to realize their play.

I find that incredibly exciting, to have that collaboration.

But then, if I’m doing Chekhov, Molière, Shakespeare, or Ibsen, I’m a lot more free. I find them equally exciting and liberating. I believe with any classic play, you do have to blow as much dust off it as possible. I try to go into a classic play feeling the same way I do about a new play: that I’m there in the room with that playwright who is talking to me and I’m having a dialogue with them.

New York is a city devoted to doing new work.

You don’t get the chance to create a King Lear, or a Measure for Measure, or a Seagull,

very often. I think those are the things that allow a director to really stretch and challenge themselves and, often, to challenge their audiences. I’ve been very fortunate, having been a producer/director, to be able to curate my own work.

BRENDON | You’ve curated quite a few works

by O’Neill. Something I was struck by when I saw Iceman Cometh was the sense of that deep ensemble work, that feeling of history between the characters, and a world that had its own time and place. There were references to events that weren’t contemporary and yet there was an immediacy to it. What is it about O’Neill that seems to resonate with you?

ROBERT | Well, thank you. I appreciate that.

Everything you’re saying about that work indicates some of the things that I’ve been trying to do.

Another thing that we try to go very deep in is really, really researching the time and period of a particular play as a company and then creating elaborate character biographies. In Iceman, all 18 guys on stage had complete, fully developed lives that had been worked out with facts and research of the time, combined with their own extraordinary imaginations.

When they hit the stage, they had an authenticity and a depth of ensemble work.

O’Neill is just simply my favorite American playwright. I’ve directed plays by all of the other masters—Edward Albee, and I worked with Arthur Miller, and I’ve worked with Tennessee Williams—and they’re geniuses.

They are gifts to our theatre. But I think all of them owe a debt to O’Neill. Maybe because I am a lapsed Irish Catholic, because there was a considerable amount of alcoholism in my family, and addiction issues, and I’ve witnessed it, and been around it, that I just feel profoundly connected to O’Neill. I find his language rather glorious, and very accurate, and deeply moving, just as language, but larger than the language is what he’s trying to attempt.

The scale of what he’s trying, in virtually every play, is so monumental that you can’t go into that work unless there’s real blood, sweat, and tears.

He’s just been the playwright that I’ve been connected to. I approach him very, very much as a contemporary. I have enormous belief that his plays are primal. His Shakespearean and Greek tragedy-inspired size appeals to me. A lot of the work I’ve done has a sort of operatic quality or large scale-ness, and I think that O’Neill inspires that. You have to be rather grand, but you also have to be incredibly truthful in those circumstances.

I just love delving into virtually any of O’Neill’s plays. Every time I come to one, it’s just a new challenge and a thrill.

BRENDON | I think it’s always important as artists to be thinking about our own time and place, and what’s happening in the world.

The country’s going through a particularly challenging time right now, politically and socially. What are your thoughts on where theatre and storytelling is in terms of conversations about gender and race? Where do you see theatre’s role in that? As theatre practitioners, what can we do?

ROBERT | I’m terrible with looking at a crystal ball. It’s complicated. Theatre is slow in terms of being able to respond to the world around us. One of the things I would like to do at the Goodman is to create another stage and to create another way of working where perhaps artists can be quicker to respond.

We’re living in a new golden age of writing.

I think it’s more reflective of the world that we live in than ever before. Part of it is because of the diversity of hearing women’s voices, hearing writers of color, hearing work addressed more towards gender issues, and social issues—it’s quite diverse. We’re not there yet, but there’s an inclusion that exists in theatre that doesn’t always exist in other art forms.

All plays, by nature, are political. What is the difference between agitprop and a political play? We did a major production of [Lorraine Hansberry’s 1964 play] The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window, which is an incredibly prescient play about the world we live in right now, and it was playing at the same time as Thomas Bradshaw’s hilarious, utterly of-the-moment piece Carlyle, about a black Republican running for office, that is virtually eclipsed by what was going on in real time by our current crop of candidates. And then [there was] Soups, Stews, and Casseroles: 1976—a really wonderful play by Rebecca Gilman, who is, actually, a political writer. She’s a true socialist in terms of her thinking and the way she works. It was a remarkable play about the working class, about unions, and about community.

I think all three were intensely political and spoke to an audience very much in the now.

I’ve thought the Goodman has always, because of the diversity of and complexity of Chicago, tried to produce plays on this scale. But probably not enough. Hopefully, we’ll be able to create the ability to do it more in the future.

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GRACIELA DA N I E L E PHOTO

Walter McBride

ALWAYS READY TO GO OUT + PLAY

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INTERVIEW BY

JIM LEWIS Jim Lewis was a young dramaturg working at INTAR in New York City when he was introduced to dancer/choreographer GRACIELA DANIELE in the late 1980s. Their exploration of stories by Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges resulted in the musical adaptation, Tango Apasionado. That project led to a decades-long collaboration that has included the Tony Award-nominated musicals Dangerous Games and Chronicle of a Death Foretold. Recently, the two friends revisited some well-loved stories from Graciela’s long career when Jim interviewed her on behalf of SDC Journal.

JIM | Let’s go back to when you were a little girl in Argentina. Do you remember when you first started getting interested in dance?

And how important was dance and the arts in Argentina at that time?

GRACIELA | I do, even though it was about 70 years ago. According to what my mother told me, I had some problems with the arch of my feet. When I was six or seven, my mother took me to a doctor. She thought I needed orthopedic shoes. The doctor said, “Oh no, she’s very young. Just take her to ballet class and the technique that they use in the arch is going to be just fine.”

My mother took me to a small ballet school in the neighborhood. I remember walking into the long studio, with mirrors on either side.

I remember entering and seeing the studio reflected forever. It just kept on going. I felt this kind of exhilaration about flying through that space, owning that big space.

The next thing I remember is trying to reach the bar to learn my first position, but the bar was almost up there at the height of my head.

So I was kind of hanging like a monkey from the bar. But I tell you, Jim, that memory is just so vivid!

JIM | Had you ever seen a ballet before?

GRACIELA | No. I had no idea, and if I had, I don’t remember it. At that time in Buenos Aires, we didn’t have television. I might have gone to the movies. I wasn’t in any way connected with what dance was.

I didn’t go to that little ballet school for too long. My family was three working class women, and there was no money to pay for lessons. My mom had a good idea of taking me to the auditions at the Theatre Colón of Buenos Aires. At that time [1947], the school was subsidized by the government, so many children would try to get in. It was a very, very beautiful theatre—one of the greatest opera theatres in the world. The school of ballet was very, very well-known and had a fantastic corps de ballet.

I remember going to this huge dance studio called La Rotonde, because it was in the round.

I remember hanging on to the bar, and then

this teacher, with another two gentlemen, asked me to point my foot, and then they looked at it. I sort of saw that in the teacher’s head, she was saying, “Hmm, no.”

the school and they would choose the young blood, like us. I got to dance many beautiful ballets, like Usher by Massine, based on “The Fall of the House of Usher.”

And then she looked up at me. She looked into my eyes and said, “Well, okay.” My poor arches were not terrific yet, but something she saw in my eyes made me get into the school.

JIM | Were you paid for any of this, or was this just part of the school?

It started a very, very rigorous seven years of studies. It was very difficult. We had to audition at the end of every year. In the first year, there were 80 kids. When I was 14 years old, we graduated three girls and two boys. That was the kind of elimination that they had.

I took classes every single morning, from seven in the morning until 12 noon. I had to do my regular schooling in the afternoon.

They used us as extras in the operas or ballets.

The first thing that I did—it was the first year, I was a tiny little thing—was dancing as a little black slave in Aida. I even remember the choreography.

JIM | Were there any other dance programs in Argentina at the time?

GRACIELA | No, because we didn’t pay for our classes. All the studies were free. That was the only good thing that the Perón government did in his 12 years of dictatorship. And it wasn’t him; it was Eva, his wife. She helped young children with education. She was very good at that. She cared about that.

JIM | Do you remember your first paying gig?

GRACIELA | I didn’t get a paying job until I graduated. The Theatre Colón was subsidized by the government, and the corps de ballet could retire after 25 years, which means that half of the corps de ballet were in their forties and fifties—old to be ballerinas. I couldn’t get automatically into the corps de ballet because we had to wait until some of these ladies retired. There was no place for us.

JIM | And that was all you did.

I was very good—very young and very strong—at that time. They asked me to go to the Theatre Argentino in La Plata, a city about 15 miles south of Buenos Aires. It was a huge theatre. They had wonderful seasons there and a corps de ballet. I was 15 years old. I auditioned for them, and I got in as the soloist.

GRACIELA | That was all I did during the first three or four years. Then I started going to other schools to learn folklore, flamenco. But the Theatre Colón was always just ballet. The discipline was strenuous, but I adored it.

So that’s when I started actually getting paid. And I had to study privately to pass my examinations for my high school diploma. I couldn’t go to high school or to day college because I was working already.

I was at the Theatre Colón all morning, at elementary school all afternoon, and then I used to go to rehearsals. At night, I would be standing up on that huge stage, dressed as a page, holding a candle to the interminable Wagner operas, or dancing the little Aidas, or being one of the fairies flying in a basket 40 feet up in The Magic Flute. I was on stage all the time!

Then something very interesting happened.

There was a ballet company being formed in Rio de Janeiro. It was directed and choreographed by a Russian woman, Nina Verchinina, who was one of the big stars of the Ballet Russe, the ballet of Diaghilev. She came to La Plata and saw me there, together with another man who was in the corps de ballet.

She hired both of us to be the premier dancers, “étoiles,” in her company in Rio de Janeiro.

GRACIELA | Not at the Theatre Colón. There was another huge school [where] you could learn other dance languages, but at the Theatre Colón it was only ballet.

Whenever a great choreographer would come—Léonide Massine, Tatjana Gsovsky—to remount their ballets, they would come to

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I was 16, 17 years old, so I couldn’t travel without my mom. She chaperoned me. We went to the Municipal Theatre in Rio de Janeiro, and I started with the company. We did some ballet blanc repertoire and some ballets choreographed by Nina.

We traveled all through Brazil at many wonderful old theatres. We did a season at the Theatre National in Bogotá, Colombia, and then the company closed. My mom and Delphino, my dance partner, and I were going to return to Buenos Aires. But there was a big television channel in Bogotá called

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TOP LEFT Dennis Ferguson-Acosta, Graciela Daniele + Max Ferra at work on Daniele, Jim Lewis, William Finn + Astor Piazzolla’s Tango Apasionado PHOTO Carol Rosegg TOP MIDDLE Michael

John LaChiusa’s Hello Again PHOTO Joan Marcus

LaChanze + the cast of Once on This Island at Playwrights Horizons PHOTO Martha Swope

BOTTOM LEFT

the Panamericana. Somebody approached Delphino and me and asked if we would be interested in doing a weekly one-hour program on ballet. I was 17 years old! I said, “Yes, why not?” It was just extraordinary.

So we decided to stay. Panamericana didn’t pay much. My mom said, “Hey, we didn’t make that much money, so why not work for a little while and then we can go back to Buenos Aires?”

So we created a little dance group to do our weekly TV show. We worked very hard because we had to do a lot of research. Each week, I would choreograph with Delphino for half an hour, and the other half an hour was just

talk about the history of dance or ballet. We stayed there for about a year, and it was very successful.

The director of that program was Fernando Casan, and he fell in love with my mom. She had been divorced for many years, and they got married. I was so happy because, finally, my mother had a wonderful man and I had a father. I thought, “Oh, my goodness. This is great because now I can go to Europe.” In the late ’50s, beginning of the ’60s, the best ballet teachers were in Paris. I said, “Oh, I’ll just take some [of the] money that I made and go to Paris and study a month or two. Work with the best [to learn] different styles of ballet.” I got

on the plane and went to Paris. I had only $200 in my pocket, just to study.

Valerie Pettiford + Camille Saviola in Tango Apasionado PHOTO Carol Rosegg

TOP RIGHT

Gregory Mitchell, Tina Paul + John Mineo in Tango Apasionado PHOTO Carol Rosegg

BOTTOM MIDDLE

Chita Rivera in Terrence McNally, Fred Ebb + John Kander’s The Visit PHOTO Thom Kaine

BOTTOM RIGHT

I started taking lessons at the Salle Wacker, where the best teachers taught. I was totally alone in Paris, perfectly happy. What a beautiful city to be in when you’re young. The custom there was that when choreographers wanted to hire dancers, instead of doing auditions like we do here in America, they observed the classes and picked dancers from there. My second or third week there, Francoise Audret—who was the associate choreographer for Roland Petit— came. She called me and asked, “Would you FALL 2016 | SDC JOURNAL

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like to be soloist in Opera of Nice for the next season?” I said, “Okay.”

JIM | Sure, why not?

GRACIELA | I have to say, I was talking to Michael John LaChiusa the other day.

He’s writing a piece about, not me, but my wonderful three women who brought me up— my grandmother, my mother, my aunt—and he says, “You know that when I hear about your life, I see that the title of the book should be Okay!” Because I am always ready to go out and play.

So I went to Nice and spent three seasons there. I was living in Paris but would go for the winter season and then come back to Paris, and then go to the summer season and then come back. I worked with extraordinary choreographers. Anton Dolin, who mounted Giselle, and I was the queen of The Willis. I had a lot of repertoire. My favorite was Roland Petit’s Three-Cornered Hat. I could do the character stuff. I loved doing [it] because it told a story.

Until 1962, I spent time in France traveling all over. One summer, a friend said, “There’s this wonderful American choreographer, George Reich, who has a small ballet group. Ten people—five girls, five boys—plus Josephine Baker. They’re doing a tour of the northern countries. He’s missing a girl. Why don’t you audition?” I said, “I don’t know how to do that.”

He said, “No, no. He does ballet and jazz.” I said, “I am a ballerina.” He said, “Come, come, come, come. He’s going to love you.” I got the gig and traveled for three months.

and doing what I was doing, very happy in France. Of course, I missed my mom. I missed my family most of all, but I was happy. I was young. It was beautiful times, too. For a young woman to live in France, at least in those times, it was very liberating, you know.

It was very free. There were not too many prejudices, and it was beautiful. Paris is one of the most beautiful cities in the world, if not the most beautiful. I had good friends. I started going around with “literate” [people] and learning a lot. I had not been able to go to college because I was working. That became my education: what to read, what concerts I was going to, the theatre I was seeing. I was immersing myself in culture and loved everything I was seeing.

After I saw West Side Story, I left the theatre, sat alone by the Seine, and thought I had to go to New York to learn how to do what these people are doing. I wasn’t thinking, “Oh, I am going to do that.” I was thinking, “I have to learn.” It was the same thing I felt about going to Paris: to learn more than what I knew about ballet. I called my mom and my stepfather and said, “I am coming back to see you for Christmas because I really want to go to New York to study.” They were so happy. I worked on TV for a few months, just to make some money.

I arrived in New York City in September ’63.

I kept taking ballet classes at a little school on 57th Street, between Ninth and Eighth [Avenues]. I had a tiny little apartment—what do you call it, those rooms that come one after the other, like a train?

he told me to do. It was extraordinary work.

The classes were three, three-and-a-half hours [long]. I learned so much about everything that I had seen in Jerome Robbins choreography.

I asked him for advice, and he sent me to take classes at Martha Graham. For some reason, it just didn’t go with me. I adored her work, but my body was not about that. I felt depressed when I left the classes.

I told Matt that, and he laughed. He said, “Of course. You’re Latin. You want freedom.” I said, “Yes, I want to run through the space.” He said, “Okay, go to Merce Cunningham.” I went to Merce and loved it. The first exercise was to run across the stage however you wanted.

That was September 1963. In October, Matt approached me and said, “I’m choreographing a Broadway show and there is a role there [for you]: Rita Rio, the main dancer.”

JIM | What was the show?

GRACIELA | What Makes Sammy Run. [It was a fantastic novel] written by Budd Schulberg.

I don’t know anything about musicals, so I thought it was great. I was on Broadway!

JIM | So, months after you arrived in New York, you were already on Broadway.

GRACIELA | They took care of my Equity card, my green card; everything that I needed. I’ve been the luckiest person on the earth.

JIM | You worked with a number of major choreographers over the years.

GRACIELA | Major. I learned from all of them.

JIM | With Josephine Baker?

JIM | A railroad apartment.

JIM | As influences or mentors?

GRACIELA | With Josephine Baker! We traveled all through Europe with them. Finally, I came back to Paris. My boyfriend said, “Oh, you have to go to the theatre. You have to see the most fantastic musical.” I said, “I don’t like musicals.”

I had seen musicals in movies, but I was such a ballerina. He said, “You’re going to love this one.” So I bought a ticket, standing room only.

I stood there thinking, “Oh, God. What am I doing here? I am tired, I have jet lag.”

GRACIELA | A railroad, yes. I went to ballet class every day but started asking, “Who was the best jazz teacher?” Everybody said, “Matt Mattox, the disciple of Jack Cole.” I went into beginners [level] because my feet were like a duck, totally first position. [I was] fighting with closing my legs and moving my hips, and being grounded as opposed to always lifting up, as you do in ballet.

GRACIELA | I worked with wonderful choreographers: Alan Johnson, Bob Fosse, Peter Gennaro—so many. But my relationship with Michael Bennett was probably the most important to me because he asked me to assist him. I [danced in] Promises, Promises with him. He had the most fantastic associate, Bob Avian. Michael started using me as his girl assistant when he started choreographing Coco and Follies.

All of a sudden, I heard, “Parum pum para bum.” West Side Story! I was never so mesmerized in my entire life. I had seen Jerome Robbins work before. But when I saw these people telling a story through dance, through speaking, through the music, it was fantastic. It was such a revelation to me.

JIM | Did you know then and there you wanted to do musicals?

GRACIELA | No, I didn’t know that I wanted to do anything. I was very happy dancing

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I was taking classes with Mrs. Mattox, the wife of Matt. I saw a very tall man watching the class. When I left, he called me from his office and said, “You’re an extraordinary dancer. What are you doing in beginners [level]?” I explained my story to him in my bare, very bad English that I had to learn. He said, “Oh, no, you don’t have to spend money. I’ll give you a little booklet of exercises. Just do it every single day, and in a week come back to the professional class.” I said, “I can’t do that.” He said, “Yes, you can.”

Well, it turned out that the man watching the class was Matt Mattox himself! So I did what

Being in preproduction was fantastic to me: those talks, that research, those months and months before the first day of rehearsal. Just being in the studio, alone with him, Bob Avian, the pianist, and the drummer—who was Paul Gemignani. It was extraordinary to say, “What about this? What about that? What is this idea for this moment?”

He was brilliant. I learned so much from him.

He opened the window to [my] creativity.

He believed in me, kept saying, “You are a choreographer.” He recommended me right and left to choreograph. He would give my

name and say, “You have to have her,” even though I had not done anything. He was extraordinary for me, as a mentor.

JIM | Do you remember your first choreography job in New York at that time?

GRACIELA | I think it was a huge industrial called the Milliken Breakfast Show.

JIM | I was just going to ask you about the Milliken. Why don’t you explain a little bit what it was?

GRACIELA | I believe Milliken still exists. It was a very important [company] where they create fabrics. They did this industrial at seven in the morning at the Waldorf Astoria in the spring. They would hire great directors, the best choreographers, and 30–40 dancers, coming from all over America to be in the Milliken Show. They paid very well and treated everybody like kings. Mr. Kingsley, the head of Milliken, was an old gentleman who adored dancers and treated us like the la crème-de-lacrème.

I think the first year I danced in one was, I think, 1967 or 1968, when I was doing Promises. Michael Bennett choreographed a counterpoint between Donna McKechnie— who was playing the jazz dancer—and me, who was playing the ballerina. We had a little fight on stage with each other.

After that, he started asking me to assist him. Then he left and other wonderful choreographers came, Danny Daniels and Peter Gennaro. Eventually, I became the choreographer of the Milliken Show.

It was hard, but I was helped by the dancers.

They wanted me to succeed, so whenever I got into trouble, someone would say, “What about this? What about that?” Some of my assistants then were extraordinary people who have become great, great choreographers or directors, like Wayne Cilento, Baayork Lee, and Robbie Marshall. Robbie’s a genius. He was the assistant on The Mystery of Edwin Drood and Zorba. I had the best!

The other thing that Milliken did, which was very unusual, is that every year, they had 12 different production numbers and they would hire huge stars. I got to choreograph Ginger Rogers, Ann Miller, Cyd Charisse, Tommy Tune, Gwen Verdon, Gloria Swanson, Van Johnson, and—of course!—Chita [Rivera]. Amazing, amazing stars of the musical theatre. I worked with all of them. I got to know them and help them.

It was a great showcase for the fabric buyers, but because there were so many producers, directors, and choreographers, a lot of the theatre community would come and see it. It

was really spectacular. That’s when I started getting jobs to choreograph.

JIM | What was your first Broadway choreography job?

GRACIELA | A show called A History of American Film, [with] a brilliant book by Chris Durang and music by Mel Marvin!

JIM | We’re going to transition into your directing as well as choreographing. For how long did you choreograph before your first directing experience?

GRACIELA | Well, you should know that: you’re the one who got me to direct my first show. I can’t remember what year it was.

JIM | I can’t remember either. Do you remember meeting Max Ferrá that first time at INTAR? GRACIELA | Of course, yes. I remember how he came around. I’d had several Tony nominations; I had been choreographing for quite a while.

I think this is the mid-’80s maybe, something like that. Max said, “I would like you to do a little workshop for Latino actors on musicals.”

I said, “Well, I don’t really know that much, but [I] can help as much as I can.”

So I taught a workshop on musical theatre.

During that time, extraordinary, wonderful Max said to me, “Is there anything you would like to do? Something you would like to create?” I had never thought about it. I had been always receiving scripts, reading them, meeting, saying yes to that, no to that, and doing choreography. It had never occurred to me that I could create or direct something.

Max said, “Just think about it.” I said, “But I have no idea.” Then he introduced me to you, who had—as usual, Jim—the right questions.

You said it would be best if it were Latino. And then asked, “Who would you like to [work with?]” I said [the Argentinian composer] Astor Piazzolla. Max said, “Oh yeah, yeah. I can get him.” I said, “How can you get us to Piazzolla?” And you said, “It’s obvious that you want to do something about Buenos Aires, about Argentina.” And then you asked the right question: “What writer?” I think I said Borges.

Or was it you? I can’t remember.

JIM | I had read quite a number of these short stories by Borges. And thought they’d make for an interesting story.

GRACIELA | That’s when we started together, to create Tango Apasionado! That was the first time I directed. We did pretty well, didn’t we?

JIM | It was a wonderful first time for both of us.

GRACIELA | Many people ask me, “Well, but you’re a director, why do you choreograph?”

I say, “Because I can do both.” It is such a wonderful thing to be able to do both.

JIM | Can you talk a little bit about the differences in working with actors and dancers? Is there a difference for you?

GRACIELA | I don’t know. It is something in me, not something that I really copied from anybody, or even learned, maybe observed it. Maybe I observed that with Fosse when I worked with him in Chicago.

I always felt very strongly that, in musicals, dance is another language to tell a story.

It’s not the language of singing, it’s not the language of text, but it’s a language like music is. It’s a language of expressing the feeling of the character, and I do not separate it. I sometimes feel like I choreograph as a director and direct as a choreographer because it feels to me that all is one. There is no difference between one or the other.

I allow actors, singers, and dancers to liberate themselves. I said, “If something doesn’t feel right, change it or tell me and we’ll change it.”

Steps are like words. They don’t mean anything unless you’re meaning something, unless you’re telling a story or expressing yourself.

One thing that I remember very clearly that always confused me at the very beginning was that, whenever I got a script in the middle of a song, it said between parentheses “dance break.” It always drove me crazy to the point that now that I have worked with marvelous people like Stephen Flaherty, Lynn Ahrens, Bill Finn, and Michael John LaChiusa, they never used those words in the script—never!— because they know that I will tear that page away. What do we break from?

JIM | I don’t believe in dance breaks. It’s all story.

GRACIELA | I’ve never understood it. When I was doing preproduction on Ragtime, in the opening number, the script said, “dance break.”

I kept walking around and around [wondering], “What am I going to do? What am I going to do?” Poor Willie Rosario, who was my assistant, sat half-asleep with a yellow pad and pencil, waiting for me. Then I thought, “Okay. Forget about ‘dance break,’ forget about the opening.

What is this Doctorow novel about?”

I said, “It’s about the three tribes that created America.” Willie looked at me and I said, “I’ve got it.” He said, “Yes, you have.” And that was the dance break in Ragtime. There were no steps. There were three tribes confronting each other, fearing each other.

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JIM | It was an amazing opening.

GRACIELA | Isn’t it interesting that it didn’t have one single step? But that is dance because it tells a story.

JIM | Can you talk a bit about your preparation? Do you prepare for a choreography job different than when you’re approaching it as a director?

GRACIELA | There is no difference to me.

Research. Research. Research. Read about the period. Read about the place, the location in which it happens, the history of that time. If it is a political or social thing, what came before to provoke that particular problem in that time? What happened later?

What are the characters about? For the characters, what is written on the page—but what is not? What is the subtext of everything they say? Where are they coming from? Where are they going? I can help the singers, actors, dancers to create their own histories. When they go up there [on the stage], they’re not just saying words or doing steps; they are living a character that is perhaps totally different from who they are. Maybe they’re very courageous people and the actor is not, and they have to create that courage inside of themselves.

That’s the wonderful thing about acting. As a director and a choreographer, you can be so many things too, besides the boring housewife I am. I truly am, which you know.

JIM | I know you. When you’re choreographing, you also have to learn a number of different dance styles, prepare like crazy, and learn to incorporate the movement into your own body.

GRACIELA | Yes. It is hard! It gets harder and harder right now. My body does not respond as it used to 30 years ago. So I look for fantastic associate choreographers.

Preproduction is important. It can be very frustrating and boring because I’m all alone, by myself with my associate, saying, “What the hell? I don’t feel anything right now. What am I going to do?” It’s really tough, but it’s totally necessary. Many times, I write notes and then I come to the room, and all of a sudden, I have another idea. That’s okay, but there is a knowledge of the piece.

You know what I love, Jim? In one of his books, Peter Brook explains what the director is. I’m paraphrasing badly, but he says it’s like a blind person who walks on his own, close to the abyss, and then he comes back and is followed.

This blind director is followed by a bunch of blind actors. On the same road, by the abyss, and they could all fall and die.

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It’s not that we know anything, but it’s because we’ve walked that road. Hopefully we can guide all these blind people that are following us. I think that’s very much what we do, directors and choreographers. We are blind, we are totally blind, and sometimes we fall.

and Ira went to Lincoln Center, they called and asked, “Would you like to be associate director here?” I said, “Well what does that imply?”

André said, “You come in, you develop an idea, and then we test it.” I said, “Well, I’m always having ideas.”

JIM | And you get back up again.

Within three or four months, I met with Michael John LaChiusa, who wrote Hello Again.

Were there any other major individuals who influenced you when you were transitioning from doing choreography to directing?

JIM | Based on Schnitzler’s La Ronde, which I had recommended to you.

GRACIELA | The person who really inspired me—inspired my entire life as a director/ choreographer—has always been Jerome Robbins. Unfortunately, I never had the chance to work with him. Even now, he inspires me. I start a new project, and I Google some of his work.

GRACIELA | Yes. We did a workshop with the most extraordinary cast. They were extremely open—very, very supportive—and I loved working there. I adored it. It’s home.

It’s like going to the Met and looking at the great paintings. It’s an inspiration. It’s not that I do what he does. I wish I could do what he does. But it inspires me to dream higher, more than what my little brain may dream. He has been a major, major influence and mentor without having been close together. I don’t know if you call that a mentor, but, to me, to have that inspiration is extraordinary.

GRACIELA | Oh, yes. It’s the best. To have that kind of artistic support with people you really respect, and they listen and discuss. I got to work with fabulous people. Everybody wants to work at Lincoln Center.

I’ve been teaching at Pace University and Sarah Lawrence. I love teaching the kids. I always say, “Study the masters.” It’s not that you have to copy them, but study. Find out what they did, how they did it. You have to go and really find what these great people did and how they did it, and what the problems were. Martha Graham says, “Just keep your channel open” When you work with good people—somebody you respect—you learn from them. Sometimes you learn what not to do, which is good, too.

When you see somebody very good doing something, you learn and you should never stop learning.

JIM | You were at Lincoln Center for a couple of years. Was it an artistic home for you? How did that work?

GRACIELA | It was wonderful. Feeling that you have artistic needs, your home, where you can go and create things and come up with ideas, and they’re listening to you and supporting it.

That was not my first home. My first home was the Public Theater, when Joe Papp was there. It felt like we were creating extraordinary things, always under the nurturing of Joe, whom I adored. And Wilford Leach, the director with whom I worked a lot.

Later on, I met André Bishop and Ira Weitzman when they were at Playwrights Horizons, and I directed and choreographed Once on This Island there, which moved to Broadway. When André

JIM | An artistic home is something you really appreciate.

JIM | Coming up soon, I know you’re doing something with Chita [Rivera] at Carnegie Hall. Talk a little bit about your long-term relationship with Chita and how a collaboration like that can hold and work over the years.

GRACIELA | We are very similar in our thirst for life. We have tremendous energy. We love what we’re doing, and we love each other. We laugh so much together, and I just love that.

I met her during the Milliken Show, even before we did Chicago, where we got to know each other more. From then on, we did so many things together. She calls me “sister.” I’m one of the clan. I say to her, “What did I do to inherit a crazy Latin family?”

She’s amazing, a force of nature. When we were working on The Dancer’s Life, I was tired and would come into the room and say, “Oh, God, everything hurts today.” I was dragging my feet. And then Chita [would] come in. All of a sudden, my entire body [would go] up two inches. There’s a positive energy about her that makes you younger and makes you want to do more and do the best for her. I just love her.

JIM | Gracie, are there any things that you [have], looking forward, yet to do?

GRACIELA | Yes: retirement! It’s been 70 years, and I’ve done nothing but theatre. Can you imagine that? I can’t believe it. I keep saying, “It’s enough. I’m 76. It’s hard. I love my house in the country. I want to grow my flowers.” But then, somebody knocks at the door and says, “Gracie, do you want to come out and play?”

And I say, “Yeah, okay.”

Musical Theatre Choreography Timeline 1921–1966

Peter Gennaro with Tony Mordente in rehearsal for West Side Story, 1957 PHOTO Martha Swope

Beginning with the jazz-infused dances of Shuffle Along (1921) and ending with the choreographic debut of MICHAEL BENNETT, A Joyful Noise (1966), this timeline presents a selection of choreography offered in the early to mid-20th century commercial theatre, recognizes some of the earliest innovators in the field of musical theatre dance, and honors a portion of our choreographic heritage.

BY LIZA

GENNARO

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1921

Shuffle Along

"Above all, musical comedy took on a new and rhythmic life, and chorus girls began learning to dance jazz" (STEARNS 139). The history of Shuffle Along, one of the most influential musicals of its time, demonstrates the unfair common practice of white producers’ business dealings with African-American dance directors. While critics and audiences responded with exhilaration to the fast-paced, jazz-infused movement lexicon that had developed in African-American musicals and vaudeville, white producers regularly removed the names of and paid off black dance directors who created these sensations. They were then replaced with white dance directors who received the credit. Shuffle Along dance director Lawrence Deas was replaced by white dance director Walter Brooks.

Lawrence Deas (replaced by Walter Brooks)

1922

Liza

he Charleston dance that had a long history in Southern black communities first appeared on Broadway in Liza, danced as a T duet by Maude Russell and Rufus Greenlee (of the vaudeville team Greenlee and Drayton). No credit exists for a dance director; however, Walter Brooks received “staged by” credit. It’s fair to say that Russell and Greenlee created their own dances (STEARNS 144). Critic Heywood Broun wrote, "After seeing Liza we have a vague impression that all other dancers whom we ever saw did nothing but minuets."

The Ziegfeld Follies*

Walter Brooks

Ned Wayburn

Wayburn’s technique was rooted in American Delsarte, military drills, and the hierarchical systems of 19th-century ballet spectacles. His strategy for success was a methodically proscribed system for making dances that included six categories of musical theatre dancing: Musical Comedy Technique; Toe Specialities; Exhibition Ballroom; Acrobatic Work; Tapping and Stepping; and Modern Americanized Ballet (STRATYNER 8). In his book The Art of Stage Dancing, Wayburn reveals an exact approach to making dances, writing, “The average routine consists of ten steps, one to bring you onto the stage, which is called a traveling step, eight steps to the dance proper, usually set to about 64 bars of music or the length of two choruses of a popular song; and an exit step, which is a special step designed to form a climax to the dance and provoke the applause as you go off the stage.”

1923

The Greenwich Village Follies* John Murray Anderson

John Murray Anderson began his career as an exhibition ballroom dancer and produced The Greenwich Village Follies, which featured the “ballet ballad,” narrative tales that combined song and dance into a cohesive whole. Anderson demonstrated a sophisticated dance palette when, for “The Garden of Kama,” he featured a young dancer named Martha Graham before her breakthrough as one of the greatest modern dancers of the 20th century.

Runnin’ Wild

Lyda Webb In an example of how vernacular dance found its way to Broadway, the Charleston, performed in Runnin’ Wild by a group of “Dancing Redcaps,” was inspired by a trio of uptown street dancers discovered by Flournoy Miller, who brought them to rehearsal, where they danced for star dance team Willie Covan and Leonard Ruffin. The men liked what they saw, “agreed to develop the step into a routine,” and convinced African-American choreographer Lyda Webb to include it in the show (STEARNS 145, 148).

1924

Chocolate Dandies

Charlie Davis (replaced by Julian Mitchell)

In Chocolate Dandies, African American “Dancing Master” Charlie Davis engaged in an interesting cross-pollination to improve upon precision dancing and kicks by removing the kicks and adding taps (STEARNS 147). White dance director Julian Mitchell, who worked on 82 shows between 1898–1927, replaced Davis.

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1926 Peggy-Ann

Seymour Felix

In 1927–1928, dance director Seymour Felix wrote several articles in the Dance Magazine in which he discussed his system for making dances for Broadway: “When I am called upon to direct the dances for a show I study the book very carefully for weeks even before I think of the dance steps, even before the dancers themselves are cast. When I find a weak scene I collaborate with the author to make the dances help the plot instead of hinder it.” If read without revealing the author, these statements might be attributed to Agnes de Mille, Jerome Robbins, and other post-1943 choreographers.

George White’s Scandals of 1926*

George White

“The Black Bottom” is attributed to Ann Pennington, who introduced it in George White’s Scandals of 1926. The dance was, according to Henry “Rubberlegs” Williams, actually “as old as the hills…done all over the South; he remembered dancing it around 1915” (STEARNS 110). It was taught to Pennington by African-American dancer Freddie Taylor.

1927 Show Boat

Sammy Lee

Show Boat is a landmark in the musical theatre canon, but its dances have barely been considered. A 1928 review from the American reported, “Norma Terris (Magnolia) does a beautiful insinuating skirt dance with all the glorified girls as a background, Captain Andy does a humorous two-step with Parthy Ann, and Sammy White performs an extraordinary clog eccentric dance. Then, too, there are, in addition to these numbers, the extraordinary clogs, tap dances, waltzes and even a can-can.”

Rio Rita

Albertina Rasch + Sammy Lee

Nicknamed the “Czarina of Broadway,” Rasch trained from childhood in classical ballet and danced with the Vienna Opera until she came to America in 1910. Dancing first in spectacles, revues, and opera companies, Rasch later performed a solo “toe dance” in vaudeville on the Orpheum and Keith-Albee circuits. In 1923, she opened a dancing school in New York City and began producing units of six to 20 girls as the Albertina Rasch Dancers. Distinguishing herself by emphasizing classical ballet vocabulary over tap and precision dance, Rasch offered a fresh approach to dance on Broadway. In Rio Rita, the Rasch Dancers performed a waltz, a Mexican production number framed by 100 Ziegfeld girls, and a ballet en pointe (RIES 96).

1929

Hot Chocolates Leonard Harper

In 2015, 132nd street in Harlem was renamed Leonard Harper Way to honor the prolific African-American producer, director, and choreographer. “Hot Chocolate had all of Harper’s signature theatrical fundamentals. The rapid-fire dancing, a gospel-fashioned chorus, feverish ensemble dance pieces, outlandish adagio movements, uproarious comedy sketches, ‘transcontinental’ Oriental numbers and good looking crooning romantic couples” (REID 121).

1932

Flying Colors

gnes de Mille, known for building characters with a depth of texture and layered meaning, required dancers skilled in A pantomime, comic timing, and acting in addition to the ability to execute her hybrid brand of ballet and modern dance. Her choreographic lifeblood was a talent for discovering her dancers’ individuality and idiosyncrasies.

Agnes de Mille (SDC MEMBER) (replaced by Rasch)

Flying Colors, de Mille’s Broadway choreographic debut, was a valuable, if painful, learning experience. Coerced into hiring dancers not of her own choosing, de Mille was frustrated by the Broadway chorus dancers who were schooled in the chorus line attribute of sacrificing individuality to the presentation of a unified whole. Misjudging the tight rehearsal schedule, she arrived to rehearsals unprepared and wasted time. The chorus veterans became insolent, and de Mille’s collaborative team began sitting in on her rehearsals. Years later, she wrote, “It took me more than a decade of effort before I could say, ‘Clear the hall’” (DE MILLE 162). Five days before opening, exhausted and demoralized, she admitted defeat, was fired, and was replaced by Albertina Rasch.

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1934

Anything Goes Robert Alton

A showman whose career was cut short by his death in 1957, Alton was among those who set the Broadway standard for efficiency and unlimited creativity. With characteristic pragmatism, he summed up his philosophy as “I have exactly six minutes to raise the customer out of his seat. If I cannot do it, I am no good” (STRAUS 2011).

1936

The Ziegfeld Follies*

George Balanchine + Robert Alton

Balanchine’s choreography was first seen in America in Nikita Balieff’s La Chauve-Souris, a revue series imported from Europe.

For the 1927 edition, Balanchine created three dances. One, “Grotesque Espanol,” was described by dancer Tamara Geva as “a composite of a bullfight scene in which I was at once a matador, a bull and a priest and in which at the end I killed the bull but fell dead myself” (MASON 15, 16). A few years after arriving in New York, Balanchine began a very successful career, choreographing 19 Broadway shows between 1936–1951.

On Your Toes

George Balanchine assisted by William Dollar + Herbert Harper

Balanchine created two ballets for On Your Toes: “La Princessa Zenobia,” a parody of the Orientalist Ballets of the Ballet Russes, and “Slaughter on 10th Avenue,” generally considered the first Broadway dance to advance plot. He had two assistants, William Dollar, an American ballet dancer who danced in Balanchine’s American Ballet and went on to become a noted ballet choreographer, and Herbert Harper, an African-American dancer/choreographer/teacher/coach. Harper was employed by the successful African-American businessman Billy Pierce at his dance studio on West 46th Street, along with Buddy Bradley, another of Balanchine’s assistants on subsequent shows. Balanchine’s fusion of ballet and jazz not only introduced a new, innovative movement lexicon to Broadway, but also influenced his creation of an American ballet technique and the neoclassical choreography of his New York City Ballet.

1937

Hooray for What!

Agnes de Mille (replaced by Robert Alton)

As rehearsals progressed, infighting among the team of creators resulted in a lack of clear leadership and collaboration. Writer Yip Harburg had intended the show to be an anti-war satire, and de Mille and director Vincente Minnelli set out to create social commentary (BIRD 1995, 8). Unhappy with de Mille’s work, Harry Kaufman—representing the Shubert office—demanded that de Mille restage her dances. She refused, was fired, and was replaced by the successful and highly experienced Alton.

1940

Pal Joey

Robert Alton

In the New York Times, John Martin praised Alton’s choreography, writing, “The routines themselves are nicely characterized and worked into the scheme of the whole…Indeed, the whole production is so unified that the dance routines are virtually inseparable from the dramatic action.”

1941

Lady in the Dark Albertina Rasch

Kurt Weill collaborated closely with Rasch, conceiving three dream ballets: “The Wedding Dream,” “The Princess of Delight,” and “Circus Dream.” In his book Lady in the Dark: Biography of a Musical, Bruce D. McClung explains that “each dream sequence was conceived with a specific dance that would define the atmosphere and relationship between the characters.”

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1943 Oklahoma!

Agnes de Mille

To create the kinds of dances she envisioned for Oklahoma!, de Mille demanded a troupe of dancers of her own choosing— dancers who could embody character in dance, execute narrative content, and perform her fusion of ballet and modern dance techniques. Auditions for Oklahoma! became a battleground as she insisted on hiring talent and skill over sex appeal. When the dancers lined up at the final audition, director Rouben Mamoulian remarked, “They’re certainly not pretty. They’re useless to me” (WILK 1999, 63). It was said of de Mille that she didn’t “know a pretty girl from a three legged stool,” but, in fact, it was her belief in the chameleon ability of the artist that caused her to deemphasize physical appearance (DE MILLE 1956, 59).

One Touch of Venus

Agnes de Mille

Always looking for opportunities to make dances about female experience, de Mille used the story of the goddess Venus in 20th-century New York City to create a ballet about postwar women. The opening sequence depicting Venus engaged in housework and child rearing is interrupted by the appearance of nymphs and satyrs who dance a “Bacchanale” and carry Venus away to Olympus. “Venus in Ozone Heights” occurs at the end of the show, when Venus imagines her life as a suburban housewife.

Something for the Boys

Jack Cole

In a 1948 New York Times review, John Martin noted, “Cole fits into no easy category. He is not of the ballet, yet the technique he has established is probably the strictest and most spectacular anywhere to be found. He is not an orthodox ‘modern’ dancer, for though his movement is extremely individual, it employs a great deal of objective material—from the Orient, from the Caribbean, from Harlem. Certainly, however, he is not an eclectic, for the influences that he has invoked have been completely absorbed into his own motor idiom.” Cole rejected the notion that he was “the father of modern jazz,” commenting “the idea that some people have that I am in some way responsible for the ‘modern jazz dance’ movement today, is in itself a distortion…my real concern is not with jazz but with a form of stylized theatre dance which uses syncopated rhythms” (COLE 35).

1944 On the Town

Jerome Robbins

On the Town, an elaboration of Robbins’s ballet Fancy Free (1944), tells the story of three WWII sailors on 24-hour leave in New York City. The show featured an abundance of dance: “Times Square Ballet,” “Lonely Town,” “Miss Turnstiles,” and a psychological dream sequence, “Subway,” “Dream Coney Island,” and “Real Coney Island.”

Writing for the New York Herald Tribune, Edwin Denby said the dances “generally emerge from the stage action and melt into it again so as to give value to a scene rather than a hand to the dance. Often they express a sentiment, too, much as Miss de Mille’s musical comedy dances do.”

1945

Up in Central Park Helen Tamiris

The “Skating Ballet,” by American modern dance maverick Helen Tamiris, skillfully created the illusion of Victorian ice skaters gliding on a frozen pond. The effect was entirely dependent on Tamiris’s use of dancing bodies and did not rely on special footwear or stage mechanization such as tracks or turntables. In a Dance Magazine interview, Tamiris expressed her feelings about working in musical theatre, saying, “Broadway is warm…there is a feeling of not being isolated, so vital to any creative person…the exciting thing about the theatre is the collaboration” (LEWIS 22).

Carib Song

Katherine Dunham

Dancer/choreographer Katherine Dunham, a scholar and writer, did field work in Haiti toward her PhD in anthropology and was an expert in the dances of the African diaspora. Lewis Nichols, writing for the New York Times, described Dunham’s dances: “There is the song about rascality of woman, the voodoo dance, the lullaby, and something which apparently is even a dream ballet, Caribbean style.” Dunham’s intellectual power, combined with her charismatic stage personality and brilliant stagecraft, offered audiences an alternate vision of the black dancing body. She codified a technique that is the basis for most contemporary jazz dance classes and trained a generation of theatre artists at the Katherine Dunham School of Arts and Research.

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1947

Finian’s Rainbow Michael Kidd

A member of Ballet Theatre and Dance Players, Kidd worked with some of the most important choreographers of the 20th century, including Michel Fokine, Eugene Loring, Agnes de Mille, and Jerome Robbins. In Finian’s Rainbow, his Broadway debut, Kidd created the “Mute Girl Solo,” which is danced by Susan the Silent. In the course of the dance, Susan discovers the pot of gold that is central to the plot. Clearly inspired by agit-prop choreographer Jane Dudley’s “Harmonica Breakdown” (1938), which depicts the anguish of the Dust Bowl era, “Mute Girl Solo” is an example of how Broadway choreographers draw influence from a wide range of sources.

High Button Shoes Jerome Robbins

Of all the choreography Robbins generated in his early shows, it was with the “Max Sennett Ballet” from High Button Shoes that his singularity emerged. A comic chase ballet, it advances the plot in narrative pantomime with a line of bathhouse doors as the primary element of the chase hijinks. Richard P. Cooke reported in the Wall Street Journal that the ballet “reduced the audience to a pulp of laughter.”

1948

Ballet Ballads

Hanya Holm, Katherine Litz + Paul Godkin

Produced by Experimental Theatre, Ballet Ballads was a suite of three dances choreographed by three choreographers: Katherine Litz’s “Susanna and the Elders,” Paul Godkin’s “Willie the Weeper,” and Hanya Holm’s “The Eccentricities of Davey Crockett.” Walter Terry, writing for the New York Herald Tribune, reported, “Ballet Ballads has been a long time coming. Ever since Agnes de Mille created the now-historical dances for Oklahoma!, our theatre has been reaching toward a form which might be described as choreographed folk opera.” Holm’s dance garnered Terry’s most enthusiastic praise: “…choreography which gives the ballet ballad substance and entity.”

Magdalena

Jack Cole

“The Broken Pianolita” number, which exists only in the memories of those who danced or saw it, prompted Agnes de Mille to write Cole a fan letter. It also garnered this review from John Martin: “His art is strictly high-tension; it is nervous, gaunt, flagellant, yet with an opulent sensuous beauty that sets up a violent cross current of conflict at its very source…‘The Broken Pianolita’ is certainly one of the most delightful numbers within memory.”

Kiss Me, Kate Hanya Holm

Educator, company director, and choreographer Hanya Holm was born in Germany and studied at the Dalcroze Institute in Hellerau and with Mary Wigman in Dresden. She directed the Wigman Institute in New York, renamed the Hanya Holm School of Dance. Jennifer Dunning reported in the New York Times, “In 1952, she became the first choreographer to copyright a dance: her choreography for Kiss Me, Kate, submitted as a written Labanotation score on microfilm.”

1950

Guys and Dolls Michael Kidd

A gifted storyteller, Kidd created narrative dance scenarios while adding idiosyncratic textures in movement, mood, tenor, and character.

Like Robbins, he created dance in a wide range of movement styles. But, unlike Robbins, his dances always bore his particular movement style, characterized by hyper-athleticism and spectacular lifts.

The King and I Jerome Robbins

The ballet “Small House of Uncle Thomas” is a tour de force of Asian theatrical techniques—from Kabuki and Noh drama as well as authentic Siamese dance learned from scholar Mara Von Sellheim—combined with Robbins' tried-and-true comic sensibility.

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1953

Wonderful Town Donald Saddler

Brooks Atkinson wrote of Saddler’s choreography, “Although the ballets are animated pieces of theatre in their own right, the best thing about them is the skill with which they help to portray the ragtag and bobtail street life of the old Village and satirize the bizarre forms of revelry that manage to destroy the sobriety of Manhattan. Like the authors, composer and lyric writers, Mr. Saddler is a full-fledged collaborator.”

Can-Can

Michael Kidd

In a New York Times review, Brooks Atkinson wrote, “The chief source of Can-Can’s vitality lies in Mr. Kidd’s imaginative choreography. He has ideas. All his ballets have a point of view…Mr. Kidd’s swift caricature of the Garden of Eden includes several charming sketches of birds and animals. Dancing the part of Eve, Miss Verdon’s surprised discovery of the power of sin is incomparably more brilliant than anything in the book. And Mr. Kidd’s version of the apache dance is not only sensationally skillful but humorous.”

Kismet

Jack Cole

While Kismet is set in ancient Baghdad, Cole created dances based in his unique fusion of East Indian, Bharata Natyam, and American Lindy. His choreography did not aspire to authenticity in relation to the libretto.

1954

Pajama Game

Bob Fosse + Jerome Robbins directed by George Abbott + Jerome Robbins

For his Broadway debut, Fosse created the showstopper “Steam Heat,” danced by Carol Haney, Peter Gennaro, and Buzz Miller. A meticulous structuring of vaudevillian Joe Frisco’s eccentric dance, Jack Cole’s brand of jazz, and Fosse’s use of vocal sound to punctuate movement, the number launched Fosse as one of the most influential theatrical creators of the 20th century.

House of Flowers

Herbert Ross + Geoffrey Holder

A stellar cast included five male dancers who would have major impacts on the future of modern dance, ballet, and Broadway: Alvin Ailey, Louis Johnson, Donald McKayle, Arthur Mitchell, and Geoffrey Holder. Holder created his own choreography for the show and danced with his wife, the brilliant Carmen de Lavallade.

1955

Damn Yankees Bob Fosse

A tour de force for Gwen Verdon as Lola. Fosse created “Whatever Lola Wants,” during which Lola—as the devil’s helpmate— seduces Joe Hardy with a sexy, playful tease of a song and dance. Fosse directed Verdon to perform the number as the “little fat girl” that Lola had been before she sold her soul to the devil in return for physical beauty. Verdon recalled that she never thought of the dance as sexy. The tension between what she was doing and what she was thinking created a layered characterization that was both seductive and vulnerable.

1957

West Side Story

Jerome Robbins + co-choreographer Peter Gennaro

Robbins’s fusion of ballet, jazz, and 1950s social dance idioms was highly innovative. After the opening of West Side Story, he formed a new company, Ballets: U.S.A., where he continued to develop West Side Story’s Jets movement vocabulary for the concert stage, creating NY Export: Opus Jazz and Moves. Co-choreographer Peter Gennaro trained at the Katherine Dunham School of Arts and Research, where he learned dances of the African diaspora that informed his movement vocabulary for the show. Gennaro created the Sharks choreography in “Dance at the Gym” as well as in “America.”

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1957 CONT.

The Music Man Onna White

White began as a ballerina, performing classic leads with the San Francisco Ballet. She made her Broadway debut dancing in Finian’s Rainbow and became an assistant and close associate to Michael Kidd. A successful choreographer, she created dances for Broadway shows, including Half a Sixpence, Mame, and 1776, and for movies, including The Music Man, Oliver!, and Bye Bye Birdie. Over her career, she garnered eight Tony nominations and received an honorary Oscar for Oliver!

1958

Flower Drum Song Carol Haney

A brilliant dancer and skilled choreographer, Haney created and performed dances on Broadway, in film, and for early television. In his New York Times review for Flower Drum Song, Brooks Atkinson reported, “Carol Haney has designed at least one ballet that expresses the theme of the show more forcefully than the authors have.”

1959

Once Upon a Mattress Joe Layton

“Marvelously funny, filled with vitality and richly inventive” was how Walter Terry described Layton’s dances for Once Upon a Mattress. Layton was an alum of Camp Tamiment, a Berkshires summer resort that gave talented, young theatre artists— including Jerome Robbins, Imogene Coca, Danny Kaye, and Sylvia Fine—an opportunity to hone their craft with weekly productions. Layton developed a unique movement style packed with angles, isolation, and suspension. Considering himself a stager rather than a choreographer, he became one of the most successful director-choreographers on Broadway, film, and television.

1960

Bye Bye Birdie

Gower Champion

As a Broadway director and choreographer, Champion introduced a cinematic sensibility to the musical theatre stage by employing “continuous choreographed staging,” a transitional device first used by Robbins in West Side Story. The device allowed for a seamless flow from scene to scene, replacing blackouts and “in one” numbers that enabled set changes to occur upstage. “In ones” were discontinued as soon as technology caught up with the imagination of theatre artists who craved fluid transitions between scenes (GILVEY 88).

1964

Fiddler on the Roof Jerome Robbins

“The Bottle Dance” draws on the traditional Jewish wedding custom in which guests are obligated to entertain the bride and spontaneously perform tricks, comedy routines, and acrobatics for her pleasure. Robbins witnessed this custom at a Hasidic wedding ceremony in New York in which a Jewish comedian did a dance with a bottle on his head. Turning the solo into a group dance, Robbins created a brilliant number that emerged seamlessly from the dramatic action and appeared improvised by the characters. It stands as a perfect example of Robbins integrated brand of musical theatre choreography (LAWRENCE).

BIBLIOGRAPHY Bird, Dorothy, and Greenberg, Joyce. “A Bird’s Eye View of Hooray For What!” The Passing Show: Newsletter of the Shubert Archive, vol. 18, no. 1 (Spring 1995): 6–14.

Bordman, Gerald. American Musical Theater: A Chronicle. New York: Oxford University Press, 1978.

Cole, Clayton. “It’s Gone Silly: Jack Cole Explodes on the Subject of Modern Jazz Dance,” Dance Magazine (December 1963).

de Mille, Agnes. And Promenade Home. Boston: Little Brown and Company, 1956. de Mille, Agnes. Dance to the Piper. New York:

Bantam Books, 1951.

Duke, Vernon. Passport to Paris. Boston: Little

Brown and Company, 1955.

Felix, Seymour. “Speeding Up the Show,” Dance Magazine (November 1928): p. 61.

Gilvey, John Anthony. Before the Parade Passes By: Gower Champion and the Glorious American Musical. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2005.

Jowitt, Deborah. Jerome Robbins: His Life, His Theatre, His Dance. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2004.

Lawrence, Greg. Dance with Demons: The Life of

Jerome Robbins. A Berkley Book, NY. 2001.

Lewis, Emory. “Helen Tamiris: Plain and Fancy,”

Dance Magazine (June 1955): pp. 22, 23.

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Hello, Dolly!

Gower Champion

Champion’s further use of dance as a scenic element was evident in the opening of Hello, Dolly!, for which he created an 1890s New York City street scene by developing a movement style based on period photographs. When interspersed with song and dialogue, it served as a frame establishing a sense of place and style for the production. Champion used dance as a catalyst for ushering in a new era of musical theatre staging.

Golden Boy

Donald McKayle

Howard Taubman, writing for the New York Times, reported, “Early in the second half, Billy Daniels, who as a rackets boss is sinuous in movement and artful in song, sings a darkly atmospheric tune, ‘While the City Sleeps.’ Then Jaime Rogers, Lester Wilson and Mabel Robinson embroider the tune with a dance of blazing fury. The temperature could not be higher.” McKayle, a major figure in dance and theatre, moved successfully between Broadway and concert dance. His “Rainbow ’Round My Shoulder” (1959) is a classic in the American modern dance canon.

1966

Sweet Charity Bob Fosse

“If My Friends Could See Me Now,” “There’s Gotta Be Something Better Than This,” “I’m a Brass Brand,” “Rich Man’s Frugue,” and “Rhythm of Life” fall in line with Fosse’s previous Broadway output, while “Big Spender” opened the door on Fosse’s entirely new dance vision. The insolent, deadpan gaze, inverted limbs, splayed legs, broken-doll stance—overtly sexualized women tell the audience that though the libretto states that what these women are selling is a dance, Fosse’s choreography tells us that they’re selling a bit more. Fosse had attempted to introduce this hyper-sexualized style with his “Red Light Ballet” from New Girl in Town; however, Broadway audiences in 1957 had not been ready to accept such an overt display of eroticism.

A Joyful Noise

Michael Bennett

Walter Kerr offered some insight into Bennett’s early choreography, writing: “Michael Bennett has given most of his doublejointed antics to a lass with large economy-size eyes and a retractable spine, name of Leland Palmer.” The choreographer continued to make great dances for another wide-eyed, loose-limbed “lass”: his greatest muse, Donna McKechnie, for whom, in future shows, he created “Turkey Lurkey,” “Tic-Toc,” and “The Mirror Dance.” Bennett’s ascent coincided with Robbins selfimposed absence from musical theatre. While highly influenced by his predecessor’s genius, Bennett’s movement vocabulary was based in jazz rather than ballet and modern. Bennett made dances that represented a new generation.

*It should be noted that The Ziegfeld Follies (1907–1931), George White’s Scandals (1919–1936), and The Greenwich Village Follies (1919–1928) were important contributors to the development of dance on Broadway. I have included selected productions from these series.

Loney, Glenn. Unsung Genius: The Passion of Dancer-Choreographer Jack Cole. New York: Franklin Watts, 1984.

Reid, Grant Harper. Rhythm For Sale. Classical/ Master Revised Edition. Copyright 2012 by Grant Harper Reid.

Mason, Frances. I Remember Balanchine: Recollections of the Ballet Master by Those Who Know Him. New York: Anchor Books Doubleday, 1991.

Ries, Frank W.D. Albertina Rasch: The Broadway

Career. Dance Chronicle, NY vol. 6, no. 2. 1983.

McClung, Bruce D. Lady in the Dark: Biography

of a Musical. Oxford University Press, 2007.

Ries, Frank W. D. “Sammy Lee: The Broadway Career,” Dance Chronicle: Studies in Dance and the Related Arts, vol. 9, no. 1 (1986).

The Oxford Handbook of the American Musical.

Eds. Raymond Knapp, Mitchell Morris and Stacy Wolf. Oxford University Press, 2011.

Stearns, Marshall and Jean. Jazz Dance: The Story of American Vernacular Dance. New York: The Macmillan Company, 1968.

Stratyner, Barbara. “Ned Wayburn and the Dance Routine: From Vaudeville to the Ziegfeld Follies,” Studies in Dance History, no. 13, Society of Dance Scholars (1996).

Straus, Rachel. “Robert Alton,” Dance Teacher,

posted January 10, 2011 (www.dance-teacher. com/category/teaching/).

Wilk, Max. Overture and Finale: Rodgers and Hammerstein and the Creation of Their Greatest Hits. New York: Backstage Books, 1999.

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SDC JOURNAL PEER-REVIEWED SECTION

O

ne of the main goals of the peer-reviewed section of the Journal is to bridge perceived gaps between the crafts of directing and choreography with training and scholarship in the fields. The following piece came out of a new plenary session at the Comparative Drama Conference in Baltimore, MD, in March 2016, organized by Dr. Laura Snyder of Stevenson University. The format for the plenary, helmed by Dr. Verna Foster and our author, Dr. Janna Segal, aims to do just that—gather teachers and artists together to apply scholarly work to practice and exchange ideas, actively demonstrated. We are very pleased to print this peerreviewed essay by the plenary contributors here in the Fall 2016 issue, in the year marking the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare's death, and as inspiration and example for future submissions to this section.

INTRODUCED + EDITED BY ANNE

FLIOTSOS + ANN M. SHANAHAN

Early Modern to Postmodern Shakespeares: Three Approaches to Staging ROMEO AND JULIET WRITTEN + EDITED BY JANNA WITH

SEGAL

JAMES KEEGAN, BARON KELLY + DOREEN BECHTOL “WHERE WE LAY OUR SCENE” (1.P.2)

Fulfilling Prince Escalus’s concluding command, “Go hence to have more talk of these sad things” (5.3.306), Romeo and Juliet has been produced in myriad ways since its appearance in the 1590s. Although it is an adaptation of Arthur Brooke’s The Tragicall Historye of Romeus and Juliet (1562), which was likewise an adaptation, it is Shakespeare’s “talk of these sad things” that has been canonized as the quintessential love “story of more woe” (5.3.308). Shakespeare’s dramatization of Verona’s young lovers was informed by the conventions of the early modern English stage, which included male performers in female roles, the use of cue-scripts, and lighting that united actors and spectators. Similarly, contemporary productions of Romeo and Juliet, and all other Shakespeare plays, are informed by the staging conventions of their target culture. As such, Romeo and Juliet presents today’s directors with the challenge of retelling a famous story, often imagined as essentially Shakespearean, to a contemporary audience in an exciting way that would be unfamiliar to Shakespeare, who wrote within theatrical conditions different from those now practiced, even at theatres that strive to recreate early modern English staging practices.

The following is a description of different directorial responses to the question of how to stage Shakespeare’s well-known love tragedy for a contemporary audience in a way that is immediate, relevant, innovative, and attentive to a target audience’s expectations. This exploration was presented at the 2016 Comparative Drama Conference (CDC) at a plenary session organized by Dr. Verna Foster and myself. Three directors, Dr. James Keegan, Dr. Baron Kelly, and Professor Doreen Bechtol, worked with two performers, Tyler Dale and Sarah Wykowski, to illustrate to the target audience of professors and practitioners three approaches to staging one of the most recognizable scenes in the play: Romeo and Juliet’s first meeting at the Capulet party (1.5.92-109). The trio of approaches, presented chronologically from the early modern to the postmodern, were: Cue-Scripts (Keegan); Meisner (Kelly); and Viewpoints (Bechtol). After each director demonstrated her or his respective method in a 20-minute mock rehearsal session with the performers, Dr. Foster and I ran a Q&A with the directors, actors, and conference attendees.

The three directors, all of whom are also accomplished Shakespearean actors, were chosen because they represent a broad range of theatrical perspectives on Shakespeare. An Associate Professor of English at the University of Delaware, Dr. Keegan is also a member of the resident acting troupe at the American Shakespeare Center (ASC), a theatre dedicated to the performance of “Shakespeare’s works under their original staging conditions” (“What We Do”).

In his more than 10 years with the ASC, Keegan has performed such roles as Lear, Macbeth, Iago, Shylock, and Titus Andronicus in the ASC’s reconstruction of the private Blackfriars Theatre used by The King’s Men troupe, of which Shakespeare was a member. Four-time Fulbright scholar, director, and actor, Dr. Kelly is an Associate Professor of Theatre Arts and the Director

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of the African American Theatre Program at the University of Louisville. A film, television, and stage actor, he has played various Shakespearean roles, including: Othello (Utah Shakespeare Festival); King Duncan in Macbeth (The Bargello in Florence, Italy); and Aaron in Titus Andronicus (Stratford Shakespeare Festival, Canada). Kelly recently published An Actor’s Task: Engaging the Senses (2015), a practical guide to developing an actor’s physical, emotional, and sensory skills. An Assistant Professor in the MLitt/ MFA Shakespeare and Performance program at Mary Baldwin College (MBC), Bechtol was an actor and choreographer for the ASC’s resident troupe and is a co-founding member of the Performers Exchange Project (PEP).

Having trained with the SITI Company and with Joseph Chaikin, Bechtol uses ensemble-based theatre-making methods to annually direct a devised piece that is based on the five early modern plays that the MBC MFA students select and produce each season.

We selected actors from the MBC MLitt/MFA Shakespeare and Performance program to ensure that our performers were well-versed in Shakespeare. Our Romeo, Tyler Dale, had recently played Lucentio in The Taming of the Shrew, and our Juliet, Sarah Wykowski, had played Beatrice in Much Ado About Nothing. As graduate students in a program partnered with the ASC, Dale and Wykowski had also worked with Bechtol and Keegan on and off the ASC’s recreation of the Blackfriars stage. Additionally, Wykowski participated in a series of workshops Kelly had conducted during his visit to the MLitt/MFA program in Fall 2015.

We chose to present Romeo and Juliet’s first meeting (1.5.92-109) for its complexity, familiarity, and brevity. While the Act Two Prologue insists that upon meeting the lovers were “Alike bewitched by the charm of looks” (2.P.6), their first encounter suggests that it was their “looks” as much as the “charm of” spontaneously co-authoring a sonnet that left them mutually “bewitched.” In only eighteen lines, the audience watches Romeo and Juliet meet, co-create a sonnet, and fall in love.

This fast-paced courtship occurs under the surveillance of the attendants at the Capulet party, as the audience is reminded when, after they “kiss by th’book” (1.5.109), the Nurse tells Juliet, “your mother craves a word” (1.5.110).

Because this action-packed, brief sonnetbuilding sequence is well-known, we were able to proceed unburdened by the exposition we might otherwise need to orient an audience.

The scene’s conciseness guaranteed each director the opportunity to work with the actors on the exchange at least three times, which allowed for a better illustration of how the technique might be applied in a rehearsal room.

Below, each director describes the exercises he or she employed at the CDC to offer three retellings of the titular characters’ first shared, onstage moment. Following the directors’ contributions is a summary of our actors’ reflections on the process of working the scene multiple times from three different approaches.

In conclusion, I touch upon the discoveries made at the plenary session about the challenge presented by staging Shakespeare’s “story of more woe” (5.3.308) for audiences today.

JAMES KEEGAN

“YOU KISS BY TH’ BOOK” (1.5.109), OR BY THE CUE-SCRIPT

In any present-day play rehearsal process, the director and actors have access to the entire script prior to and during rehearsals; such was not the case in the theatre of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. As Tiffany Stern and Simon Palfrey tell us in Shakespeare in Parts, each actor in an Early Modern English production received his part—a scroll which a scribe had copied out from the company’s play-text. Each scroll would have only that part’s lines and a one-to-three-word cue for each set of lines in that part (91-95).

Such practice is understandable since the expense and time required to provide each actor a full copy of the playing text would have been prohibitive. Furthermore, the advent of the director, in our modern sense, was yet to come. If the playwright were a member of the company, as in Shakespeare’s case, he may have taken on some elements of this role, as is suggested in the character of Quince in Midsummer; otherwise, we may conjecture that the staging was a group effort. Evidence also suggests that a company like Shakespeare’s likely had only one full-group rehearsal prior to performance (Stern and Palfrey 70-71).

Therefore, as his cue-script did not indicate which character was speaking the particular cue for which the actor was listening, the single full group rehearsal—or perhaps even the initial performance—might have been the first time that an actor discovered a great deal about the scene that he was playing.

Although to a modern actor such a practice may sound nerve-wracking, there are advantages to using cue-scripts as an acting exercise. Working from such a “role,” the actor is removed from the comfort zone of preknowledge: not only does he not know who is speaking the cue for which he is listening; he also cannot know how much text intervenes between each of the passages he is to speak.

Everyone in theatre knows the joke about the present-day actor memorizing text: “Blah, blah, blah, my line, blah, blah, blah, my line.”

The joke suggests how accustomed we have become to having the full script before us; we can take for granted the lines of other actors in the scene precisely because they have been granted. If we remove this security, we may access once again a freshness, an immediacy, an engagement with the text that arises out of what we have not been granted. With a cuescript in hand, the actor must listen carefully to everyone in the scene because any of those speakers may suddenly utter his cue. Another

ROMEO CUE-SCRIPT If I profane with my unworthiest hand This holy shrine, the gentle sin is this: My lips, two blushing pilgrims, ready stand To smooth that rough touch with a tender kiss. .........................................................................................................................palmers’ kiss.

Have not saints lips, and holy palmers too? ................................................................................................................................. in prayer.

O then, dear saint, let lips do what hands do: They pray: grant thou, lest faith turn to despair. .........................................................................................................................prayer’s sake.

Then move not, while my prayer’s effect I take.

Thus from my lips, by thine, my sin is purg’d. .................................................................................................................... they have took.

Sin from my lips? O trespass sweetly urg’d.

Give me my sin again.

theatre chestnut is that good acting is mostly about listening; cue-scripts enforce this idea.

Our Romeo and Juliet at the CDC studied the cue-scripts provided below of the star-crossed lovers’ first meeting. See cue-scripts below.

In the case of the scene-portion chosen for our exercise, the anxiety that may attend many cue-script rehearsals was likely lessened by two factors: (1) the chosen snippet from Romeo and Juliet is a famous one, known to most actors familiar with Shakespeare; (2) if the actors know anything about this moment in the scene— even if they don’t know the exact text—they will know the characters are in a mini-scene inside a considerably larger group scene, so the “listening anxiety” present in fuller cue-script rehearsals will be reduced since Juliet knows her cues are all coming from Romeo, and vice versa. If, however, the actors were unfamiliar with the scene—as we assume the first actors playing these roles were—they might, with so many other characters milling about, expect another character to break in on their tête-atête, as the Nurse indeed would upon hearing Juliet’s “by th’ book” cue (1.5.109).

Though editors of modern editions of Shakespeare have long added stage directions for two kisses in this scene, the Folio text has no such directions and therefore neither would the cue-scripts. That at least one kiss occurs in the scene is suggested in both cue-scripts simply because of the frequency of the words “lips” and “kiss.” However, only Romeo’s cuescript seems to contain an embedded stage direction for the first kiss (“Then move not, while my prayer’s affect I take. / Thus from my lips, by thine, my sin is purg’d” [1.5.10506]), and for the second kiss (“Give me my sin again” [1.5.109]). Therefore, in the initial rehearsal/performance of this scene, the two kisses initiated by the actor playing Romeo may take the actor playing Juliet by surprise.

JULIET CUE-SCRIPT

.............................................................................................................................tender kiss.

Good pilgrim, you do wrong your hand too much, Which mannerly devotion shows in this; For saints have hands that pilgrims’ hands do touch, And palm to palm is holy palmers’ kiss. ............................................................................................................... holy palmers too?

Ay, pilgrim, lips that they must use in prayer ...............................................................................................................................to despair.

Saints do not move, though grant for prayer’s sake. .......................................................................................................................... sin is purg’d.

Then have my lips the sin that they have took. ......................................................................................................................... my sin again.

You kiss by th’ book.

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The genuineness of that surprise may be embedded in the cue-script, and perhaps that genuineness might be performed to greater effect in later performances precisely because it was actually experienced in the initial one.

Along with this potential for surprise regarding the stage kisses, the cue-script approach to this passage may offer some heightened awareness of the language-play these beautifully matched young characters are enjoying with one another. In a kind of mating display, they show off for each other by building together what turns out to be an English sonnet, followed by two more shared couplets. This poetically and theatrically reinforces the coupling that has just occurred and the marital one to come.

Romeo’s initial quatrain clearly states his character’s immediate objective in its final reference to “a tender kiss” (1.5.95), and offers the embedded stage direction for the actors to be holding hands. His quatrain also shows his wit in its devotional images of “shrine” and “pilgrims” (1.5.93-94). As the cue-script performer playing Juliet hears this quatrain for the first time, waiting for the “kiss” that cues Juliet’s responding quatrain, both actors experience the thrill of her matching cleverness.

Picking up his devotional metaphors, she manipulates them to her advantage and to her objective, which seems to be to stave off a too-easily-won kiss. How wonderful that she turns the language to turn her objective into Romeo’s obstacle!

After this point the poetic jousting proceeds and heightens in urgency. The two trade shorter exchanges, a fact that they might already have noted in the cue-script, especially if they assume their dual back-and-forth to be continuing, which the rhymes in the cue-script tend to confirm. Indeed, the actor playing Romeo has sufficient poetic hints in his cue-script to assume that they build another quatrain together when he sees his “too?” and his cue phrase’s “prayer” rhyme with the “do” and “despair” that end his next two lines (1.5.100-03).

The cue-script exercise is by its nature something of a “one-off” in the rehearsal room.

The actors will never be able to match the innocence and anxiety of this first exchange in which they cannot be sure what is coming, or from whence. But this feature is the key reason for offering actors cue-scripts as an initial acting exercise. The cue-script keeps them on edge, listening attentively for what is coming from their partner, delighting in discoveries in the moment of the scene. In a sense, the two actors will never be closer to the moment and the feel of Romeo and Juliet’s first meeting than they are in their first cue-script rehearsal.

That discovery and its feeling can become at

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the outset a valued element of the complex physiognomy of the scene in performance.

BARON KELLY

A “TRESPASS SWEETLY URGED” (1.5.108) IN MEISNER

Shakespeare’s iambic verse is clearly not seeking to reproduce colloquial speech since it is built on a regular verse form. What can be said is that the underlying rhythm of the iambics alternate short and long stresses is like a heartbeat, and thus naturally evokes emotion.

Shakespeare’s language shapes and directs the quality not just of what is expressed, but what is felt and experienced by the actor who speaks the words. The beauty of the iambic form is that once you have set it up as the basic, underlying rhythm or “heartbeat” of the text, the state of mind of each character can then be revealed by the nature and extent of their divergence from the regularity of that form. The language guides or instructs the actor when to adhere to the regular beat and when to disrupt or reverse it; when to speed up or slow down; when to speak loudly and when softly; when to sound staccato and when legato; when to pitch high and when low; and when to breathe. In many ways it is like a musical score, and any actor attempting this text needs to understand its notation and instructions.

While contemporary acting techniques such as that of Sanford Meisner stimulate a range of emotional choices for an actor relative to a play text, they offer little to grapple with the technical, or what we might even dub physical requirements demanded by the rhetorical structures in Elizabethan drama.

Meisner felt that an actor should find an emotion appropriate to the character’s state of mind and need at the beginning of a scene, and then allow the text to emerge naturally on the “river” of the emotional interaction.

Meisner developed a series of exercises aimed at fostering increased powers of observation, spontaneity, responsiveness, and communication with fellow actors, as a result of a series of external impulses. He focused on the need to explore the dynamics of scenic

action, the reality of behavior, in the exchange between characters. It is these discoveries of behavior, which happen in the moment in which they are being executed, which ultimately defined the Meisner technique.

The presence of technical instructions in Shakespeare’s language may at first seem incompatible with the application of Meisner’s theories. If the text is a canoe floating on the river of the emotion (Meisner and Longwell 115), then arguably you should not study its structure too closely beforehand, but rather allow it to emerge in the context of the scene.

As a starting exercise, Meisner often required actors to speak the text without expression or meaning to avoid a fixed interpretation. He famously asserted, “an ounce of behavior is worth a pound of words” (4). However, with Shakespeare’s iambic text it is both possible and necessary to operate a more analytical approach.

Through exercises such as those presented here actors can explore the “instructions” contained in Shakespeare’s language without going against the basic principles of Meisner’s technique. What might appear contradictory— the technical versus the intuitive, the analytic versus the emotional— is not necessarily.

In fact, in all aspects of their craft, actors work with a combination of the fixed, such as the text, and the variable, such as the audience. Furthermore, technical features of Shakespeare’s text offer actors a great deal emotionally: the language can help shape the emotion, while the breath required to deliver complex thoughts can help the actor to keep the voice resonant and the body open and responsive. These benefits cannot be accessed, however, if the body starts from a closed, purely analytic place—if there is no preparation to “particularize” the character within the actor’s emotional imagination and create a living human, who acts and reacts honestly in front of an audience. Likewise, when performing Shakespeare, both thought and word live in the moment of utterance. However closely you have followed the “instructions” in the text and however beautifully you speak the language, there will be no truth, humanity, and clarity in an actor’s performance unless he or she works from truthful emotion, with genuine vulnerability.

At the CDC, I led our actors through my “trespass” in Meisner technique, that aims to facilitate the open, spontaneous emotional communication while accessing the technical benefits of Shakespeare’s languages, both physically and emotionally. While this would naturally influence their choices, the actors were asked to temporally set it aside for the first variation, and play—always reacting to one another, within the confines of the exercise.

Simply put, this exercise is designed to get

actors “out of their heads” so that they can expand the range of natural behavioral options available, expressed ultimately with the text and its physical structures in the moments of performance.

Dynamic Interchange Between Beats

VARIATION 1 1. Actors begin the scene, and are then signaled by the coach to “change” at random moments throughout—to make a shift in action or energy, without thought or self-censoring.

2. Actors stop and take a moment to regroup.

3. Actors attack the text again with a fresh impulse—a new tactic, action, or thought, as above.

As a result of the first variation, actors get their muscles used to playing changes and explore shifts in posture, vocal pitch, eye focus, and tempo, etc. Most importantly, by responding to random external suggestions, the actors “get out of their heads” and feel freer to trust impulses.

VARIATION 2 1. Actors begin the scene. Actors are coached to produce and express “changes” on their own accord, throughout the scene. They may rely on instincts and intuitive inspirations, coming from themselves, reacting to each other, and from prior verse analysis.

2. Actors stop and take a moment to regroup.

3. Actors attack the text again with a new impulse—a change in action, tactic, or thought. They are encouraged to play the change fully, exploring the size of the space and how big the character and moment can be. The space between the actors can also be explored to its full extent.

2. Actors stop and take a moment to regroup.

3. Actors are asked to attack the text again with a new impulse—a change in action, tactic, or thought. They are prompted to speed up their changes in order to create more nuance and naturalness in their performance.

Playing subtly allows the actors to particularize the internalization of changes and more truthful use of space.

As Meisner insisted and the exercises presented at the CDC demonstrated, the text alone will not get the actor to the fullest, most expressive and genuine performance possible. As a result of these exercises, our actors connected with each other, explored the space dynamically, and conveyed the structure of the moment in which Romeo and Juliet first meet to the audience with more physical openness, emotional fullness, and honesty. Inspired

by Meisner’s emphasis on truth in doing, the exercises provided here help actors get "out of their heads" and expand the range of behavioral options available to their character, as well as the emotions influencing how he/she speaks the text.

These techniques help an actor live in the heartbeat of the text by training them to react instinctually and trust impulses while performing as the character, Shakespearean or otherwise.

DOREEN BECHTOL

VIEWPOINTS AND THE “HOLY PALMERS’ KISS” (1.5.99)

Having explored their characters, the space, and relational moment in broad terms, our actors were led through the third exercise.

VARIATION 3 1. Actors begin the scene. Actors are coached to continue to produce the changes on their own accord and to explore broad choices. Additionally, they are encouraged to internalize the changes, to connect them to realistic actions based in verse analysis and in reaction to each other, informed by freedoms gained in the previous two variations.

In her 2013 blog post entitled “Heat,” Anne Bogart contemplates the foundational elements that make for promising theatre: “Successful theater requires a combination of technique, content and passion. Like a three legged milking stool, if one of the legs is missing, the entire enterprise collapses.” As a movement practitioner, I am drawn to this quotation because it positions the importance of technique alongside content. Often traditional rehearsal processes begin with

an examination of the language and content before the director and actors stage the play.

Where Shakespeare is concerned, it’s not unusual for actors to spend a week hammering out scansion, rhetoric, and paraphrasing before getting up on their feet. Though there is merit and logic to beginning with tablework, doing so suggests that the content, or Shakespeare’s language, contains all the meaning that will eventually be transmitted to an audience.

In other words, in traditional rehearsals of Shakespeare, content is privileged over technique and passion. Or, to return to Bogart’s milking stool metaphor, we might imagine the content leg twice as long as the others.

An even-legged stool is useful; however, even at its most effective, this metaphor, which suggests content, technique, and passion build a sound structure, is problematic. These legs, though non-hierarchical, exist apart from one another, but they work together. Might we dissolve these boundaries and imagine that technique is content, too?

Although technique could signal any sort of rigorous training, whether vocal, physical, or rhetorical, I refer to “technique” as a physical vocabulary used to create meaning on stage. A physical technique, or a movement vocabulary such as Viewpoints, encourages actors to craft action with as much precision as they might dedicate to scanning every verse line they speak. After all, even a well-spoken and emotionally connected performance suffers from a fairly static body engaged in rote movement, which is the equivalent of a vocal monotone. If we regard action as a conveyor of content equal to spoken text, then even if we momentarily turned down the sound on a performance, an audience should still be riveted by the story.

A physical point of entry diminishes the assumption that Shakespeare’s plays are predetermined. Furthermore, it allows actors to reconnect to their imagination, and subsequently informs staging. For instance, I often begin with an evocative image from the play. I build exercises to encourage actors to articulate their ideas, actions, and gestures before they utter a word. By doing so, actors take ownership of their choices, which can lead to greater physical and emotional specificity along with more imaginative staging possibilities when they eventually marry their actions to text. This sense of agency often gives rise to the occasionally forgotten third ingredient that Bogart mentioned: passion, or the necessary heat that actors bring to their work when they are fully committed to the fiction they create. When actors are asked to set the play aside and work abstractly on embodying images and ideas derived from the text, they return with a renewed sense of investment in their language and a more acute awareness of how form heightens FALL 2016 | SDC JOURNAL PEER-REVIEWED SECTION

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emotion and communicates story. The physical exploration urges actors to focus on what they are doing in time and space, in addition to how they are doing it. Playing at the edges of how is exciting, especially when given tight parameters within which to work.

With this in mind, I began my movementbased approach to the sonnet scene in Romeo and Juliet by generating a body of physical material with our actors. Over the course of three rehearsals prior to the CDC session, the actors and I edited their material into a silent gestural score that traced the narrative of the sonnet. I also applied individual Viewpoints to the physical score to demonstrate the tools that actors and directors can use to create nuanced performances that are as articulate and specific on stage as the text is on the page. Our intention was to show our material and discuss the process, rather than present a finished scene; therefore, what follows is a glimpse of what we originally created and what we shared at the session, along with discoveries we made about the scene along the way.

Our physical exploration of the scene started with the evocative, iconic image: “And palm to palm is holy palmers’ kiss” (1.5.99). For the first physical representation of this line of text, Tyler Dale and Sarah Wykowski initially faced one another roughly three feet apart and pressed their upstage hands together while keeping their fingers upright in a prayer-like position.

Their bodies were mirror images, balanced and symmetrical. The image was serene and beautiful, yet the actors felt it lacked the dynamism and uncertainty that might better reflect two people falling in love. From there I asked them to apply the Viewpoint of spatial relationship (the distance between bodies in space) while keeping their palms together.

They experimented with moving in very close, nose to nose, as if about to kiss. Then, one person maintained distance while the other moved in very slowly. As they repeated this action, I asked them to change tempos, as if invading the other person’s space. Finally, both slowly moved as far apart as possible with finger-tips barely touching until they released entirely, only to then rush to find each other’s hands again, this time with fingers clasped and tightly interlaced. After an hour, the actors generated a bank of physical material from one line of text.

From this exploration, we discovered that since the sonnet ends with a close-proximity kiss, the actors preferred to start at a distance so they had room to meet one another, so to speak. This distance allowed them to advance and retreat as needed, which kept the negative space between their bodies awake until their lips finally met and the negative space

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dissolved entirely. We also discovered that instead of the mirror image they first created for “palm to palm,” they preferred to reach across their bodies with the same right arm so that their palms met in the middle, which also provided a physical obstacle when they tried to close distance. The actors capitalized on this physical obstacle by slowly lowering their hands while keeping their palms pressed together until their fingertips released. Once their hands separated, their lips immediately found one another and they repeated the “palm to palm” gesture, this time with tightly interlaced fingers to seal their union—an action that felt more intimate. When we highlighted this particular gesture sequence, an audience member commented on the seductive quality their hands took while moving slowly downward below their waists as they inched closer to one another’s lips.

Without any words spoken, the audience appeared to be affected by the action and commented not only on what the actors did, but how they did it.

In addition to this demonstration, we also showed material that we created during our second rehearsal based on the text’s pilgrim and saint imagery. We looked at several paintings and statues, and then the actors built three tableaus based on the research.

With the first tableau as our opening image, Wykowski represented Juliet as the “saint” in the sonnet—she liked the idea of playing with a longer duration of stillness throughout the score. Similarly, Dale imagined that as the “pilgrim” he would be the one to travel the most distance to get to his “saint” (1.5.101102). Again, the actors took ownership of the story and made sense of the significance of each individual movement.

Now that we had a body of physical material, we spent the remaining rehearsal marrying movement sequences to the text. We examined every piece of punctuation and tried to link movements to semi-colons, colons, and periods. We discovered that the speaker changed at the start of each stanza and subsequently decided to let that character initiate the action. We demonstrated the physical score first without text, and then with the actions and text married. The actors worked with precision and maintained their physical specificity, which allowed for dynamic shifts that translated into an emotionally expressive performance.

Just as scansion wakes up rhythm within verse and rhetorical devices reveal exquisite speech patterns, a physical vocabulary informed by Viewpoints unearths valuable content for the audience. Moreover, it allows actors access into the interior world of their characters while cultivating their agency and trust. Ironically, the physical approach requires the presence

of the actor’s voice inside the process: their movement, voice, mind, heart, and their heat.

OUR “TWO BLUSHING PILGRIMS” (1.5.94)

For this article, our actors generously shared the insights they gained from working with our three directors. Their feedback emphasizes the value of each approach and of utilizing different directorial strategies in a rehearsal process. This is perhaps especially true when playing such canonized characters as Romeo and Juliet, whose “death-mark’d” arc is announced at the outset of the action (1.P.9). The following discoveries made by our performers reveal some of the challenges to performing Shakespeare’s iconic “star-cross’d lovers” (1.P.6), and the benefits to using cue-scripts, Kelly’s Meisner exercises, and Viewpoints to revive their “death-mark’d” story.

Our Romeo and Juliet noted that the alertness potentially provoked by using cue-scripts was mitigated by their prior knowledge of the scenic unit; nonetheless, each felt the cuescript work heightened their attentiveness to their scene partner, the language, and the action. Tyler Dale found that the need to listen intently for his cue led “to honest, in-the-moment discoveries” in a familiar scene. For Sarah Wykowski, the process “shed new light on the linguistic game” played by the characters, and uncovered the following fiery moment in the dialogue: “After listening intently to his words, Juliet decides not to kiss Romeo, but to answer him with an additional quatrain, which surprises Romeo. A spark ignites, and the characters discover their improved poetic exchange as each cue is spoken.”

Dale and Wykowski remarked that while less text-centric than the cue-script approach, Kelly’s Meisner exercises likewise produced “organic…in-the-moment reactions.” Dale felt that rather than “studying the script for performance cues,” the actors explored the characters’ emotional journeys in performance.

For Dale, being “forced out of [his] head and into the scene” by the abrupt changes in action, tactic, and thought “prohibited prescribed action and created opportunities for truthful reactions.” Similarly, foregoing “the formality of Shakespeare’s scene” allowed

Wykowski to make “a new discovery in the same textual moment that [she] had using cuescripts.” She observed, “This time, I uncovered an assertive Juliet who denies Romeo’s kiss, as well as a bright, playful Juliet who uses the sonnet to correct him with, ‘And palm to palm is holy palmer’s kiss’ (1.5.99).”

Our Juliet and Romeo described their work with Bechtol before and during the conference as an affirmation of the union between Viewpoints and Shakespearean drama. For Wykowski, the gestural scoring led to a physical and emotional, rather than textual, discovery: “Juliet has the agency to both create and close space between the characters. Her movement choices stem from insightful assessment and acceptance of Romeo’s actions.” Dale, on the other hand, was impressed that “each movement, no matter how miniscule, was derived from and choreographed to every detail on the page, including punctuation.” For him, this created an ideal marriage of movement-based and text-based approaches: “Since the text inspired our movement, the acting choices organically sprang from and perfectly complemented both our dynamic physical score and Shakespeare’s script.”

The “pilgrims” of our staging experiment concurred that applying three directorial styles to this iconic moment from one of Shakespeare’s most produced tragedies revived what could seem like a staid text. Dale described the process as “revelatory,” and remarked, “Each approach offered a fresh, distinct take on a well-known scene” from a familiar tragedy. Wykowski came to the process believing that due to the play’s performance history, Juliet “no longer had fire and mystery, and no choice an actor made could resurrect the excitement [that] the character may have inspired on the Early Modern English stage.”

Reworking the scene using cue-scripts, Kelly’s Meisner techniques, and Viewpoints “revealed an enigmatic, fiery Juliet” she “want[ed] to play again,” and proved that there are “several ways to rejuvenate the beloved initial exchange between Shakespeare’s star-crossed lovers.”

CONCLUSION TO THE “TRAFFIC OF OUR STAGE” (1.P.12) The directors’ demonstrations at the CDC provided invaluable insight from all participants. The directors, actors, and audiences discovered something new in Shakespeare’s theatrical adaptation of Arthur Brooke’s The Tragicall Historye of Romeus and Juliet. For example, one respondent noted that while they had always felt that the scene’s value lay in its poetic language, the Viewpoints work revealed that the dramatic interest rested equally in the lovers’ physical vocabulary. For me, the CDC stagings emphasized the play’s layers of spectatorship. The scene is often staged as a private moment, unseen and unheard by the revelers and servants at the masque. Watching the conference attendees watch different approaches to the scene highlighted its levels of viewership and the ways in which the danger of discovery might be utilized to increase the dramatic tension.

The three different approaches to the lovers’ iconic scene provided diverse answers to the question of how to stage Shakespeare’s canonized love tragedy with immediacy for contemporary audiences more accustomed to the “traffic of our stage” than to that of Elizabethan England, even at theatres that seek to school spectators in Early Modern English staging practices. The demonstrations also provoked questions regarding why practitioners continue to confront the challenge presented by Romeo and Juliet.

Just as the popularity of Arthur Brooke’s prose poem may have provoked the initial penning of the play, the popularity of the play and playwright may be a driving force for the plethora of productions of this “story of more woe” (5.3.308) that have been and will continue to be staged while Shakespeare “by that name is known” (5.3.299). While one might prefer one theatrical approach presented here over the others, all three strive to bring Shakespeare’s version of the “star-cross’d lovers” back to life in the present (1.P.6), and are thus all “alike in dignity” to Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet (1.P.1).

DR. JANNA SEGAL is an Assistant Professor of Theatre Arts at the University of Louisville. She has published single and co-authored articles on Othello, Romeo and Juliet, The Roaring Girl, As You Like It, and Dario Fo and Franca Rame's Elisabetta.

Janna is also a dramaturg whose production work includes Shakespeare, contemporary plays, and new plays in development.

WORKS CITED

Bogart, Anne. “Heat.” Blog Post. SITI. SITI

Company, 27 Jun. 2013.

Dale, Tyler. “SDC Information.” Email to

Janna Segal, 24 May 2016.

Shakespeare, William. Romeo and Juliet.

Edited by Brian Gibbons. Arden Shakespeare, 2000.

Stern, Tiffany, and Simon Palfrey.

Shakespeare in Parts. Oxford UP, 2007.

Thompson, Ann, David Scott Kastan, and Richard Proudfoot, editors. The Arden Shakespeare Complete Works. Rev. ed.

Bloomsbury, 1998.

“What We Do.” AmericanShakespeareCenter.com.

American Shakespeare Center.

Wykowski, Sarah. “SDC Article Contribution.”

Email to Janna Segal, 23 May 2016.

CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS Published quarterly by Stage Directors and Choreographers Society (SDC), the 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: http://sdcweb.org/ community/sdc-journal/sdc-journal-peer-review/

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SDCJ-PRS BOOK REVIEW

Directing in Musical Theatre: An Essential Guide By Joe Deer REVIEW BY TOM SMITH Pacific Lutheran University ROUTLEDGE, 2014; PP. XIII + 264. $38.95 PAPERBACK.

Joe Deer’s thoughtful and detailed book, Directing in Musical Theatre: An Essential Guide, is a welcome addition to texts on directing aimed primarily at emerging and student directors. The author successfully lays out the complex process of directing musicals by aligning nine chapters into five production phases: conception, collaboration, rehearsal, production and performance. Deer’s book also provides supplementary material through publisher Routledge’s website. While some chapters are considerably stronger and more complete than others, Deer’s methodical approach and the breadth of information is impressive and would prove useful to early career musical theatre directors.

“Phase 1 - Conception” features two chapters.

The first, “Preparing for Collaboration,” suggests that directing requires “informed intuition.” Much of the chapter, therefore, is spent offering insights into how to best break down and analyze a musical’s libretto and score. The chapter offers methods for analyzing units, character, given circumstances, and style. It is a remarkably thorough examination that provides concrete tools for exploration, primarily through extensive questionnaires. The second chapter, “Imagining the Chorus,” offers directors both an opportunity to understand the role of the musical theatre chorus and the importance of actively engaging them. Deer provides examples of techniques used by Jerome Robbins, Trevor Nunn, and others to illustrate the difference between directors sharing their passion with the chorus and, by contrast, eliciting the chorus’s own passion.

Ultimately, the role of the chorus is framed as an important aspect of the production that should be examined and defined very early in the process.

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Deer’s “Phase 2 - Collaboration” is comprised of “Collaborative Partners” and “Directing the Design.” These chapters explore the varied ways to work with a design team, music director, and the choreographer. This discussion is less developed due to the exclusion of key collaborators and Deer’s need to justify the role of a director. In fact, Deer spends much of the chapter positioning the director’s role as more a spiritual leader rather than an interpreter or creative artist with agency. Further discussion focuses primarily on what the music director and choreographer do rather than ways a director might effectively collaborate with them. The designer discussion is more detailed, but Deer only addresses scenic, costume, and lighting designers. Sound design is not mentioned at all, which is odd considering how important it is not only for environmental effects but also for vocal and musical amplification and mixing. Instead, it is relegated to a later chapter, “Moving into the Theatre,” positioning it as a task performed by technicians rather than an artistic contribution.

Also absent is any mention of collaborating with a conductor, a props designer, the stage management team, or a video/multimedia specialist.

“Phase 3 - Rehearsal” begins with an excellent example of a timetable of events from auditions, to the first company meeting, to staging, to the sitzprobe and the final runthrough in the rehearsal room. “Auditions” illuminates not only the traditional process for actors to be auditioned by the music director, choreographer, and director, but also discusses the complexity of casting the chorus, who often play multiple roles and understudy.

There is valuable discussion of non-traditional casting, creative casting breakdowns, and negotiations with actors. “Staging and Coaching,” is the most comprehensive chapter in the book and, perhaps, the most valuable. Here Deer spends significant time addressing staging theory, tools, blocking notation, and coaching. Practical and handson questionnaires, tables, photos, and charts provide excellent and compelling insights—so much so that one wishes there were more of these used throughout. Of particular note is the blocking notation provided by Susan Stroman from the musical number “I Wanna Be a Producer” from The Producers, which offers a concrete example of musical staging notation that is clear and understandable. This chapter, more than any other, provides a strong balance of theory and practical application.

“Phase 4 - Production” covers the production process from technical rehearsals to final dress. This Phase, like others before it, offers a helpful timetable to clarify the traditional order of events. It isn’t until “Chapter 7 - Moving into the Theatre” that the stage management team is addressed for the first time, which is unfortunate considering their participation begins long before technical rehearsals.

Most of the discussion focuses on the job responsibilities of the stage manager rather

than advice for effective collaboration between the director and the stage management team, which seems like a missed opportunity.

However, Deer also provides discussion on professional courtesies, which is a welcomed inclusion.

“Phase 5 - Performance” includes “Shaping the Production” and “Etcetera—and all the rest.”

These chapters address preview performances through post-mortem. Deer’s considerations regarding staging curtain calls and how to invite honest dialogue in a post-mortem are solid, offering keen insights that should prove helpful to emerging directors. By contrast, the discussion on new works merely provides identification of the stages of development, but doesn’t contribute anything meaningful about a director’s involvement in that process.

Likewise, it ignores collaborators who are specific to new musical development, such as arrangers and dramaturgs. A section on directing revues is helpful, as is the list of habits of successful directors, which includes sound advice such as saying, “Yes, try it,” and learning to love what your collaborators do.

Deer provides supplementary material in his appendices, including examples of weekly and daily rehearsal schedules, unit breakdowns, concept statements, scene and song analysis, character analysis, and a scene “road map.” His sample "concept statement" discerns important themes, the journey of the characters, scenic ideas and challenges, and notes on costumes, props, and special effects.

It is detailed and presents a solid overall analysis. His “Staging Road Map” analyzes the beats of a unit of action and breaks it down into both what the audience sees (“Wistful Separation”) and what the characters are feeling (“Though couples are together, they are not satisfied”) (225). These documents would prove infinitely helpful for emerging directors and stage managers alike.

Deer’s text, Directing in Musical Theatre: An Essential Guide offers aspiring directors a solid foundation and overview of the varied components of directing musicals. The chapters that deal primarily with analysis and staging are the strongest, providing thorough discussion, examples, and processes. The supplemental online materials provide a wide variety of visual examples through YouTube video clips concentrating on major directors, choreographers, collaborators, authors and the like. Deer also provides exercises for four of the five phases as well as additional exercises through the online supplement. While the videos offer substantial first person accounts and insights, the accompanying exercises do little to enlighten, entertain, or engage.

Overall, for emerging directors and instructors of introductory courses in musical theatre, Joe Deer’s Directing in Musical Theatre: An Essential Guide proves to be a valuable new resource with many good chapters and a few exceptional ones.

Tom Smith Pacific Lutheran University

SDC FOUNDATION

2016 SDC Foundation Fellows For 50 years, Stage Directors and Choreographers Foundation has developed and promoted the creativity and craft of directors and choreographers. SDC Foundation’s mission is to create access to the field, to connect artists, and to honor the theatrical legacy of these artists. In accordance, SDC Foundation awards a number of Fellowships for early-career, mid-career, and established artists throughout the year.

Established by a wide group of friends and colleagues of Charles Abbott to honor him upon his retirement as Artistic Director of Maine State Music Theatre, the goal of the Charles Abbott Fellowship is to help early-career directors and director-choreographers of promise develop their skills in directing musical theatre by allowing them access to the entire rehearsal process as a master artist directs a classic American musical in a regional theatre of national recognition. This fellowship will continue to present a new generation of gifted artists with a remarkable education in—and unique understanding of—the directorial skills necessary to create musical theatre, the workings of regional theatre, and the leadership of those artists shaping the regional arts landscape.

JOSHUA CHASE GOLD is the 2016 SDCF Charles Abbott Fellow. Some of his directing work has been seen at the Orlando Repertory Theatre, Theatre Row, Aurora Fox Arts Center, New York International Fringe Festival, United Solo Theatre Festival, Hudson Theatre, and the West Village Musical Theatre Festival. Joshua has also spent time assistant directing at the Denver Center Theatre Company and Pasadena Playhouse. He has guest directed and taught at the University of Central Florida, Fordham University, TOP LEFT TO RIGHT Joshua

Chase Gold, Nathan Singh + Diane Rodriguez Kim + Rhonda Kohl

BOTTOM LEFT TO RIGHT Seonjae

Stevens College, and St. John’s University. For six years, Gold was co-Artistic Director of Counting Squares Theatre, where his productions of Bent and Woyzeck earned him one of the 2008 New York Independent People of the Year Awards. He has helped develop and directed The Unthinkable Pinks, Spanky & Spry, A Fistful of Bees, Into the Wild Blue, and The Best Day of Your Life. Gold is a candidate for an MFA in Directing from Brooklyn College, and his thesis, David Adjmi’s Marie Antoinette, will open on December 8. www.joshuachasegold.com As the Charles Abbott Fellow, Gold assisted Charles Abbott on his production of South Pacific at Walnut Street Theatre in Philadelphia, PA.  Established by Mary Orr Denham in 2006 with a bequest to SDC Foundation in honor of her late husband, Reginald H. F. Denham, the Denham Fellowship is an annual award to women directors to further develop their directing skills. Past recipients include May Adrales, Tea Alagic, Rachel Alderman, Kathleen Amshoff, Jessi D. Hill, Joanie Schultz, Bridget Leak, and Hannah Ryan.

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DIANE RODRIGUEZ is the 2016 SDCF Denham Fellow. She is an OBIEwinning theatre artist, a regional theatre director, and an associate artistic director of Center Theatre Group in Los Angeles. Rodriguez has directed and developed the work of many playwrights, including Nilo Cruz, Lynn Nottage, Lloyd Suh, Jacqueline Lawton, Sean Lewis, Erik Patterson (LA Weekly Best Director Nomination for Sick), Annie Weisman, Oliver Mayer, Octavio Solis, Jessica Goldberg, John Leguizamo (ariZoni Award Best Director Nomination Award for Spic-O-Rama), Dan Guerrero, Richard Montoya, Roger Smith, and Culture Clash (ariZoni Best Director Nomination for Border Town), among others. She has directed at City Theatre in Pittsburgh, Mixed Blood, South Coast Repertory, San Jose Repertory, Hartford Stage, Sundance Theatre Lab; in Arizona at Actors Theatre of Phoenix, the Phoenix Theatre, Borderlands Theatre; in Los Angeles at Playwrights’ Arena, the Fountain Theatre, East West Players, Center Theatre Group, Pasadena Playhouse, Cornerstone Theatre, and Ojai Playwrights Conference, among others.

As the Denham Fellow, in Spring 2017, Diane Rodriguez will direct her play The Sweetheart Deal in a co-production between El Teatro Campesino and the Latino Theatre Company in Los Angeles. The Sweetheart Deal, which takes place in 1970—in the midst of the largest Chicano social movement of the century, led by Cesar Chavez—sheds light on the struggles of farm workers, their family members, and their allies, and explores the political tension between the personal and public.

The Sweetheart Deal has been developed at New Harmony Playwrights Project and the Atlantic Theatre’s Latino MixFest in New York City.  Mike Ockrent was a British stage director whose London productions included Once a Catholic, Educating Rita, Passion Play, Follies, and Zenobia for the RSC. Ockrent also directed several productions of Me and My Girl, which earned him Olivier, Ivor Novello, and Drama Magazine awards. On Broadway, Ockrent’s Me and My Girl was nominated for 13 Tonys and earned him the Drama Desk Award for Best Director. In 1992, Ockrent worked with Susan Stroman on Crazy for You. They were married in 1996 and remained so until Ockrent’s death from leukemia in New York in 1999.

Modeled on SDCF’s prestigious Sir John Gielgud Fellowship in Classical Theatre, the goal of the Mike Ockrent Fellowship is to help earlycareer directors of promise develop their skills by working with a master director on the creation of a big-budget musical or play. The fellowship, established in 2001, offers up-and-coming artists a remarkable education in creating theatre on a Broadway scale.

SEONJAE KIM is the 2016 Ockrent Fellow. Kim is a theatre director based in New York City, originally from Seoul, South Korea. Her select directing credits include: The Essential Ella Maythorne (Dixon Place) You’re Amazing!!!, That Noise (Williamstown Theatre Festival) A Midsummer Night’s Dream (Rabid Bat Theatricals) Cloud 9, A Perfect Wedding, Kafka on the Shore (Northwestern University), Moksori (Chicago Fringe Festival). Recently, she took part in the inaugural class of Next Generation, a new residency for artists at La MaMa Umbria, Italy, where she developed Surplus Novel, a ritualization of the life and works of Theresa Hak Kyoung Ja, with collaborator Scarlett Kim. Seonjae has assisted Stafford Arima, Bill Rauch, Ed Iskandar, Teddy Bergman, and Morgan Gould, among others, and is honored to work with Pam MacKinnon on Amélie. She is the creator and director of Riot Antigone, a Riot Grrrl adaptation of Sophocles’ tragedy in collaboration with composer Erato A. Kremmyda, which will be presented at the Club at La MaMa in February 2017. She is an alumna of Directors’ Lab West, SITI Company Summer Theatre Workshop, Powerhouse Training Program, and Williamstown Directing Corps, and a recipient of the Van Lier Fellowship for Directing from the Asian American Arts Alliance. BA: Northwestern.

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As the Ockrent Fellow, Kim is assisting on Pam MacKinnon’s Amélie.

Her fellowship will last the entire length of the production process, with pre-production and rehearsals on Amélie beginning in October 2016 and continuing on through its run at the Ahmanson Theatre in Los Angeles and beyond.  In 1996, Sir John Gielgud made a generous contribution to SDCF to provide opportunities for early career directors to study the artistic processes of master directors of classical plays, and the Sir John Gielgud Fellowship was born.

NATHAN SINGH is the 2016 Sir John Gielgud Fellow. A director from Los Angeles whose work includes theatre, opera, and site-specific performance, he has worked at various theatres across L.A., including East West Players, Playwrights’ Arena, The Theatre at Boston Court, Son of Semele, Company of Angels, and Musical Theatre Repertory.

He directed the opera America Tropical for the Autry National Center and USC Vision and Voices. He also directed A Shipwreck Opera for the Definiens Project and USC Spectrum. He spent two seasons at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, serving as the FAIR assistant director on Willful (2011) and The Tenth Muse (2013). He is a graduate of the USC School of Dramatic Arts. Nathan is currently pursuing his MFA in Directing at The Theatre School at DePaul University in Chicago. This upcoming spring, he will be directing the Chicago premiere of Tarell Alvin McCraney’s Wig Out! As the 2016 Sir John Gielgud Fellow, Singh is assisting Seret Scott on her production of Electra at the Court Theatre in Chicago, IL.  In 1999, the Shepard and Mildred Traube Fellowship was established in celebration of the 40th anniversary of SDC and to honor the legacy of Shepard and Mildred Traube. Shepard Traube was one of SDC’s founders, and his wife Mildred Traube served for many years as the SDC’s Executive Secretary. The Traube Fellowship supports the development of future Broadway artists by providing early-career directors and choreographers with the opportunity to assist or observe a master director or choreographer at work on a Broadway production.

RHONDA KOHL is the 2016 SDCF Shepard and Mildred Traube Fellow.

Born in North Dakota, she has spent her life in search of warmer climates, leading her to Los Angeles where she now resides and recently served as the assistant director to Colman Domingo for the Geffen Playhouse’s West Coast Premiere of Barbecue by Robert O’Hara.

Previously she directed the LA Times Critic’s Choice Around the World in 80 Days for Actors Co-op and premiered the new work Pocket Universe at the Hollywood Fringe Festival. In addition to working as a director and choreographer, Rhonda produced the LA Weekly- and Ovation-nominated Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde for Actors Co-op Theatre Company. She is a proud Associate Member of the Stage Directors and Choreographers Society, holds an MFA in Acting & Directing, and is an alumna of Directors Lab West. Rhonda has guest directed and taught at Regent University and Azusa Pacific University. In all her free time, she also founded and runs The Play’s The Thing reading series and a nonprofit organization for young artists called Hollywood Youth Theatre. www.rhondakohl.com As the Shepard and Mildred Traube Fellow, Kohl is working with Kathleen Marshall on the Broadway production of In Transit at the Circle in the Square Theatre in NYC.

SDCF FROM THE ARCHIVES Choreographers + Directors: Equal Partners

The Making of A Musical JERRY ZAKS i SUSAN STROMAN C CHRIS CHADMAN C SCOTT ELLIS i SUSAN H. SCHULMAN How to balance the delicate relationship between director and choreographer so a musical’s many parts are woven into a seamless whole was addressed by creative teams Jerry Zaks and Chris Chadman (1992's Guys And Dolls) and Scott Ellis, and Susan Stroman (1991's And The World Goes Round). Director Susan H. Schulman moderated the discussion which was sponsored by the SDC Foundation and Arts Connection and held on May 7, 1993, in New York City.

The Development Phase SUSAN H. SCHULMAN | When you start working on a piece and a vision comes into focus, how much of that vision is collaborative?

How much is the director’s, how much the choreographer’s? Or does that depend on the piece, and when you come together as a team?

Jerry?

JERRY ZAKS | It starts with the director’s idea of what will make the show work and what is needed to tell the story. How to incorporate dance into telling that story is something I cannot do, so I need a collaborator. That is how it began with Guys and Dolls.

SCHULMAN | Do you think it’s the same way with a revival as it is with a new show? Scott?

SCOTT ELLIS | On The World Goes ‘Round, Susan and I sat down together from the very beginning. For most of the shows we’ve done together, we have worked very closely. We are in sync from the beginning and discuss everything together.

SUSAN STROMAN | The project itself dictates how closely we work. In the musical 110 in the Shade at New York City Opera, there was more book than dance. Scott had a very strong vision of the set and how the show was to be seen. We both looked at where dance could be placed, although the musical had not been written with that in mind. For The World Goes ‘Round, which is a musical revue, the collaboration was inseparable. The piece had to be seamless in order to survive. It is

the evidence of the collaborative work in The World Goes ‘Round that is its power.

SCHULMAN | Chris, can you speak about Guys and Dolls?

CHRISTOPHER CHADMAN | I was very curious to know Jerry’s point of view, so I could see the show through his eyes. Then I connect with that vision and work in concert with the entire approach.

ZAKS | There was a clear need for the choreographer to step in early and help tell the story. Since Guys and Dolls is a revival with a structure, a book, and a sequence of songs, I wasn’t interested in rearranging or redoing.

The opportunities for dance were clearly prescribed in the original scheme. For the most part, that scheme was a good one.

The question was how the dance will tell the story which had just been told up to that point in song or in the scene. There were many conversations in which Chris would constantly ask me, “What is this about? What’s happening? What event in this dance is a continued development or extension of the previous scene?”

In a sense, we were testing each other to make sure we both had answers before we parted and went our separate ways into our respective rehearsals.

SCHULMAN | When would one go into the other’s room and say, “Terry, or Chris, I have something for you to look at?” How far along would you get before doing that?

CHADMAN | I took my time. I locked the door.

It’s important to show exactly what you mean, not “sort-of” what you mean.

STROMAN | I work somewhat differently. I actually don’t do the number until I’ve seen the scene. In Crazy for You, I watched Mike Ockrent’s scene work and then developed the dance. Often, the director will use something in the scene which then I can’t use in choreographing the dance sequences. I don’t ever want a moment to be repeated. It needs to look seamless between the scene and the musical numbers.

ELLIS | As far as musicals are concerned, the director and choreographer are totally equal because the story is one continuous throughline. If that collaboration is not there, then it does not work. We‘ve all seen musicals where you think you are seeing two different shows, as if the director and choreographer never talked.

Choreography As Storytelling Device CHADMAN | I must admit I have a hard time making up steps if I don‘t know what the number’s about and I don‘t know that unless I know what the scene is doing. Sometimes you have to come up with something out of thin air. But in Guys and Dolls, it was much easier because the action in the script is very clear.

The choreography ought to be well-rooted in the storytelling.

ZAKS | What I realize now is that I have always wanted to be a choreographer! I choreograph

“The jobs of director and choreographer are ultimately the same: the tools and vocabulary are different.”

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the book scenes down to within an inch. I don’t have the language to do this in dance.

So, I realize I need to find someone to do with the dancers what I do with the actors, in such a way that you in the audience couldn’t tell where the choreographer started and the director stopped. Ultimately, our jobs are the same; the tools and vocabulary are different.

Choreography or Musical Staging?

SCHULMAN | Sometimes in a playbill one sees the credit “musical staging by” instead of “choreography by.” What’s the difference?

CHADMAN | I’ve worked on pieces where there is no dancing but people are moved around. I wouldn’t bill that as choreography.

I know how much work and time it takes to prepare choreography. I have too much respect tor choreography to ever want credit tor something that doesn’t take that kind of effort.

STROMAN | Usually, the same amount of research can go into a number with musical staging as it does in great dance moments-the same amount at intellectual pre-production.

A Little Night Music, which I did at Lincoln Center, required a lot of staging. It also had a big waltz. I think trying to make a mic stand go smoothly offstage during a musical transition is choreography.

When It Goes Wrong ZAKS | You can go into the previews with the best battle plan imaginable, but it really is so much trial and error. You think it’s seamless, but, as we all know, the reality is sometimes different. That’s when the collaboration between director and choreographer is tested.

How do we then deal with the problem?

Can we be honest with each other without it becoming personal? Can we focus on making the work better? That’s the tough part.

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ELLIS | Not that there aren‘t problems in rehearsal. But that’s the honeymoon during which time the creative process takes place— that’s the real thrill of doing a show. When you get into previews and see the problems, that‘s the time when the nature of the collaboration reveals itself. Sometimes, your best-laid plans simply do not work.

CHADMAN | Many times, everything is perfect in rehearsal. In the studio, it works great. Many times, what worked great in the studio did not work in tech where you can feel the clock ticking, the dollars falling, the people waiting.

When it doesn‘t work, you have to be able to let it go and solve the problems when they surface. Jerry and I had to come up with a better solution right there and then and not be frightened.

ZAKS | It’s not easy to acknowledge there is something wrong, because the next question is, whose fault is it?

SCHULMAN | A great revelation to me was to realize that you can’t just fix something. You have to come up with an alternative idea. In the preview period, when time is money, you have to be courageous.

ZAKS | A classic example of that kind of situation is the opening of Guys and Dolls.

Guys and Dolls begins with a dance number called “Runyonland” which features all the wild and crazy characters of this fictionalized version of New York City.

At one point l thought of taking it out because l couldn‘t understand the storytelling point of it. But that approach reflected my own naiveté about the extraordinary power of dance to set a mood and a tone. Chris then presented me with a seven-minute dance version of “Runyonland” that simply knocked me out. The style of dancing was very appropriate to the piece and to the storytelling.

The only problem was that the audience wasn’t ever to see those characters again at any point during the rest of the evening. At this awful moment, which was actually quite a liberating moment, l realized it was simply not working.

For a while, I cut it out and went straight to the “Fugue for Tinhorns.”

CHADMAN | I remember during rehearsal sitting in the audience and saying to myself, “It’s Guys and Dolls—we need an opening number.”

ZAKS | Chris compressed the basic story of the “Runyonland” in an extraordinary way. As I recaII you had done the prep work and four hours of intensive rehearsal. I came down to 890 Broadway [a complex of rehearsal studios housing American BaIIet Theatre and other major dance companies] to see it and clearly it was what we needed. It was so simple.

This version presented the audience with the primary characters in the show. Beginnings in musicals are so critical.

Whose Vision?

Solving Disagreements SCHULMAN | Who directs the Ieading character in a show?

ZAKS | I can’t imagine Chris choreographing Faith [Prince], for example, in Guys and Dolls and not talking to her as a director would to an actor. If, for any reason, he says to her something that contradicts What I might want, which is unIikeIy given the fact that we’ve discussed the scene beforehand, we deal with that in a three-way conversation, hopefully not in front of anyone else.

ELLIS | Susan talks to actors as I would in a scene. She discusses intentions, desires, needs, obstacles. What makes really great choreographers is not creating steps, but working with the complexity of intention.

SCHULMAN | Specifically, how do you deal with a difference of opinion in the vision of a piece?

STROMAN | If someone is passionate about a particular light cue or dance step, I think they ought to be able to try it and let the audience tell you whether it‘s wrong.

CHADMAN | I was very conscious of choosing the right time to approach Jerry about certain things that were on my mind. Because there are a hundred things going on in a rehearsal, I would sometimes wait weeks before bringing something up. But I eventually did bring it up with Jerry, because otherwise, if I didn‘t, I would be hurting the show.

ZAKS | I believe in happy endings in my collaborations with choreographers and actors.

I define a happy ending as coming up with a better idea. I do not like to receive other people‘s ideas in front of a group of people.

It‘s not my nature. If Chris has a good idea, if my stage manager has a brilliant idea, I can listen to them with on open heart in the privacy of my office or backstage where no one else is monitoring how I will react to that suggestion. In that situation, I’m less inclined to be defensive. If an actor has a great idea, he or she cannot voice it in the middle of a 25-person rehearsal. Not to me.

SCHULMAN | I feel the same way. I even make a speech at the beginning of rehearsal. I don’t want people to feel that if I say to them, “Can we talk about this later?” that what I‘m really saying is I don’t want to hear it. What I’m really saying is: “If you want me to listen to that, then let‘s talk about it later at the appropriate time and place.”

CHADMAN | I’ve had a lot of disagreement with a lot of people, but not with Jerry.

Probably, with those particular people, I would have had, from day one, those disagreements.

For some wonderful reason, there was a gut-level connection between Jerry and me.

Our disagreements are about coming up with a better solution. I also looked to Jerry for criticism because I trusted the collaboration.

STROMAN | Sometimes your best idea comes at a heated moment. There was a number in

The World Goes ‘Round called “Money Money.”

I wanted the cast to wear “Scrooge-like” coats and wear hats in which they could hoard money. Scott said, “No coins; they‘ll get all over the stage and we’ll have to clean it up. It won’t work.”

After some collaborative fireworks, Scott said, “Stick a light bulb in the hat!” This idea led to the actors “stealing” the light from the top hat with the use of a hidden “on and off” switch constructed in the brim. The light represented gold. So, out of that heated moment came the best idea. The number works conceptually and there are no coins on the stage.

SCHULMAN | I did a show that had these birthday party sequences which puzzled me as to why they were in the show. In my meeting with the choreographer, Michael Lichtefeld, he was so frustrated with me that he kept coming up with stupider and stupider ideas, the last one being an exploding birthday cake.

I said to myself, “This is it; this is the end of our relationship.” And then, a light went off in my head. Though the exploding birthday cake was the wrong idea, it contained the right instinct: that something had to jar both the people on stage and the audience.

We used a flash camera and it was the perfect solution, but l never would have arrived at that if not tor this really stupid idea.

Can One Person Do Both Jobs?

ELLIS | Certainly there are people who can direct and choreograph. I know Chris and Susan can direct; they are much more fortunate than Jerry and l because they also know how to choreograph, they know how to dance. You will never see director/

choreographer in my bio. Dance involves another language and l don’t know that language.

CHADMAN | l would like to direct. It’s like anything else. When you see someone who really knows what they do, you can’t help but respect that and want to be that good.

I would only direct pieces I feel a certain affinity towards, something l understand deeply.

STROMAN | l approach my work as a choreographer in a similar way that Scott as a director approaches a scene. I agree with Chris that l would only take on a project for which l felt a great deal of passion.

SCHULMAN | Unfortunately, I’ve known cases on Broadway where the choreographer was brought into the collaborative process very late. When that happens, it’s very difficult to have a meeting of the minds, because the choreographer has not been asked to participate in the creating of an overall vision for the piece.

CHADMAN | I’ve had problems such as not getting rehearsal time, a director telling me in the middle of a rehearsal in front of a cast, “I hate that, you have to change it, ” and on and on.

ELLIS | Chris is describing the behavior of someone who either doesn’t like dance or doesn’t respect the craft and the capacity and power dance has. I would hate to think there are directors who look at choreography as just a necessary evil in the course of a play.

STROMAN | When I am hired, I communicate the way I work. If I feel that it will not work out, then I step out. It’s too difficult to put up a musical. Right at the first meeting, it’s so important to be honest about how you work,

1. Harry Groener + Showgirls in Ken Ludwig, Ira Gershwin + George Gershwin’s Crazy for You, choreographed by Susan Stroman, at the Shubert Theatre. PHOTO Joan Marcus 2. Walter Bobbie, Nathan Lane + J.K. Simmons in Abe Burrows + Frank Loesser’s Guys and Dolls, directed by Jerry Zaks + choreographed by Chris Chadman PHOTO Martha Swope 3. Walter Bobbie + company in Guys and Dolls PHOTO Martha Swope 4) Sally Mayes + Howard McGillin in Joe Masteroff, Sheldon Harnick + Jerry Bock’s She Loves Me PHOTO Carol Rosegg / Martha Swope Associates TOP LEFT TO RIGHT

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how you wish to be treated and how you will treat everyone else.

ELLIS | That’s not so easy to do, because the choreographer in particular may feel she or he needs to please.

CHADMAN | Or need a job, need someone to see what you can do, need the credit? And there you are trying to get along with the director.

SCHULMAN | The only thing that really enrages me about a collaborator is a surprise. I say, “Don’t surprise me. I want to walk in there and see something I’ve talked about. If you have a surprising idea, share it with me.” That’s the one rule I make with all my collaborators.

Choosing Collaborators STROMAN | It’s hard to interview a choreographer. What do you say, do you dance? It’s a catch-22—if you have a show running, directors can see your work. Few directors will take a chance on an unknown. I was very fortunate because I had two shows running, The World Goes ‘Round and Liza at Radio City Music Hall. On the basis of those two shows, the producer and director of Crazy for You thought—the grand scale of Liza’s show and the comedy in The World Goes ‘Round—“this gal could do their show.” It was a case of luck and good timing and being ready for the break.

If you have a show up, directors can then see your work. That’s really the only way a director can understand what you’ve done and can do.

SCHULMAN | I always see a choreographer’s work first before choosing a collaborator.

ZAKS | On Guys and Dolls, l decided l wanted to work with someone new. My knowledge of choreographers’ work is limited for many reasons. I asked several choreographers to audition for me. For that, l received quite a bit of criticism, not altogether unjustified.

There were five or six choreographers who each presented bits and pieces from Guys and Dolls. l wanted to see something that would show storytelling ability, masculine athletic dance, etc. l watched Chris’s presentation and said, “Wow!” He was hard to forget when it came down to making the final decision.

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CHADMAN | l must say l was very excited at the prospect of presenting my work. I didn’t see it as an audition. I’ve auditioned as a dancer and competed for jobs my entire life.

I’ve always gotten the job because l was the best one there. Sometimes it’s very frustrating when you lose jobs not on the basis of ability.

But that’s the nature of what we do; everything is so subjective in our business. I was very excited to go out there, do my best, either get the job or not get it. At least, l had a good shot at it. What was even more exciting was the fact that Jerry knew what l could do when we finally went into rehearsal. My dancers at the audition worked for free. It was like the good old days.

It was great to see our little community come together; everyone was very anxious to help.

ZAKS | The stakes are so high that the more information, the better. Not only was Chris’s style right for the show, but also the way he worked with his dancers. At the audition, after his ensemble or dancers had completed the final number, they celebrated as if they were the winning team.

You know, the director’s and choreographer’s jobs are not that much different from Pat Riley’s at the New York Knicks. It’s to get extraordinarily talented individuals to behave as a team, to make each other feel important.

That made a tremendous impression on me, because it’s critical to forming an ensemble.

The Creative Team Vs. The Producers ZAKS | Producers have a critical role in enabling you to do the work that needs to be done during the preview period. Today, many shows have multiple producers, and all of them want to help. Everyone wants to see a bit of their idea go up on stage. You can understand the passion with which a lot of producers pursue an idea, since nothing will give them more satisfaction than seeing that idea up there on stage. It’s better to have a single producer in charge of all the others, so that after the first preview, there is one person to monitor all the notes ELLIS | In the old days, producers like Hal Prince were very hands-on. Today they really leave you alone.

SCHULMAN | When you’re in previews in New York, everyone knows how to fix the show. I mean every single person. It’s not just a joke that the matron in the restroom gave me very interesting notes one night. She said to me,

“They’re [the patrons] not telling me it’s too long anymore; you’re alright.” I took her note, I’m no fool.

Getting Work + Getting Paid STROMAN | You can’t sit around and wait for someone to hire you. Scott and I created our work—a show that made $2OO and we thought no one would ever see. It was called Flora the Red Menace, a revival in a hole-in-thewall. In fact, everyone came down to see it and it launched our career.

If you believe in something, you should go out, create it; get your own team together.

SCHULMAN | You have to make the work for yourself. Some years ago, I did a production of [A Little] Night Music at E.L.T. [Equity Library Theatre, which folded in 1989]. I pleaded with them, “Let me do this show, please, please, please!” I camped on their doorstep until they got sick of me. Finally, E.L.T. said, “Okay, if you can cast it, you can do it.” Fortunately, Steve Sondheim saw it, because he sees every work of his that’s directed. One thing leads to another...it’s called “connecting the dots.” Year later, that led to Sweeney Todd.

ELLIS | You will never have the luxury of saying, “Okay, now I’ve arrived.” You have to push yourself to the next step. There will always be someone out there who says, “Yeah, you did that, but you can’t do this.”

ZAKS | The focus on the process is critical. The process now is not that much different than when I started directing. I just say, persevere, press on.

SCHULMAN | And you’ve got to be courageous and not afraid of what people and the critics say. Be courageous and go forward, even though you may be terrified.

THE SOCIETY PAGES SDC MEMBERS @ WORK + PLAY

SDC Members and their colleagues from around the country gathered June 23-25, 2016, in Washington, D.C., for the annual Theatre Communications Group National Conference. On Friday, June 24, SDC hosted the sixth annual #SDCatTCG Members-only Cocktail Hour. Executive Board Members Ethan McSweeny + Joe Calarco welcomed more than 50 Members at Cuba Libre Restaurant.

TOP

Christian Parker, Nelson Eusebio, David Muse + Marc Masterson

MIDDLE LEFT

Brad Watkins, Brian Kite + SDC Contract Affairs Representative Adam Levi

MIDDLE RIGHT

Kristin Clippard + Christopher Hanna

BOTTOM LEFT

Brian Kite, Tom Quaintance + José Luis Valenzuela

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In July, Members gathered in Los Angeles and Boston to enjoy performances with their colleagues. On July 12, L.A. Members attended a conversation with Michael Wilson, followed by a performance of Grey Gardens, directed by Wilson and choreographed by Hope Clarke, at Center Theatre Group. On July 24, Boston Members met on Boston Common for Commonwealth Shakespeare Company’s production of Love’s Labour’s Lost.

This summer, SDC and SDC Foundation teamed up to welcome the first-ever Summer Intern Class. Ellie Handel (NYU) and Nina Kauffman (NYU) interned with the Union, and Amanda Johnson (Earlham College) and Coleman Ray Clark (Marymount Manhattan) interned with the Foundation. As part of their education, they attended staff meetings, board meetings, and a brown bag lunch with SDC Executive Director Laura Penn. They also met with representatives from Actors’ Equity and I.A.T.S.E. The interns also made a short film to explain the related but fundamentally different work SDC, the Union, and SDCF, the Foundation, do. What’s the Difference? can be viewed online at SDCweb.org/ TheDifference From August 11 – 14, 2016, the 30th annual Association for Theatre in Higher Education (ATHE) Conference was held in Chicago at the Palmer House Hilton. This year’s conference was subtitled "Bodies at Work", and had a special focus on labor concerns within the academy. Directing and choreography professors from across the country came together to present and enjoy panels on a wide variety of subjects, and to discuss the issues they face as artists and educators. On Saturday night, the Peer-Reviewed Section Editorial Board and SDC Members + Associates headed to Potter’s to celebrate the one-year anniversary of SDC Journal’s Peer-Reviewed Section with a toast by co-editors Ann M. Shanahan + Anne Fliotsos.

The following morning, Diversity and Inclusion Committee co-chair Michael John Garcés and Committee Members Lisa Portes and Chay Yew were joined by Ruth Pe Palileo, Emily Rollie, Ann M. Shanahan, and Jonathan Wilson for an SDC roundtable discussion, moderated by Irma Mayorga, titled “Influence, Responsibility, and DecisionMaking Power: Directors on Inclusion and Diversity.”

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In 2013, American Conservatory Theater (A.C.T.) commisioned a study by Wellesley Centers for Women to examine the gender equity of leadership opportunities in the nonprofit American theatre. SDC was proud to provide data to assist in the study. On August 22, 2016 A.C.T. convened the Women’s Leadership Conference at the Strand Theater to release and discuss the findings of WCW Senior Scholar Sumru Erkut and WCW Research Associate Ineke Ceder. A.C.T. Artistic Director and driving force behind the study Carey Perloff introduced the presentation by WCW, which was followed by a panel featuring SDC Board Member Anne Kauffman, Diversity and Inclusion Committee Member Seema Sueko, and Michele Shay, along with non-members Shafer Mazow, Elena Chang, and Rhodessa Jones.

Diversity and Inclusion Committee co-chair Seret Scott was also in attendance, along with many other SDC Members + Associates.

OPPOSITE TOP LEFT + RIGHT

On September 18, 2016 at the 68th Annual Emmy Awards, Michael Engler was nominated in the category of Best Directing for a Drama Series for his work on Downton Abbey, “Episode 9,” and Thomas Kail + Alex Rudzinski won for Directing for a Variety Special, for their work on Grease: Live.

ABOVE

Thomas Kail

Jennifer Chang, Snehal Desai + Gregory Daniels in Los Angeles | Charles Swan + SDC Board Member Michael Wilson

in Los Angeles Joey Frangieh + Lisa Rafferty in Boston | Coleman Ray Clark, Ellie Handel, Actors’ Equity Director of Education and Outreach Tom Miller, Nina Kauffman + Amanda Johnson

OPPOSITE MIDDLE TOP + BOTTOM

OPPOSITE BOTTOM LEFT TO RIGHT Co-editors Anne Fliotsos + Ann M. Shanahan toast the one-year anniversary of the Peer-Reviewed Section of SDC Journal; Michael John Garcés, Lisa Portes + SDC Board Member Chay Yew prepare for their panel at ATHE.; Ruth Pe Palileo + a colleague enjoy the SDC Cocktail Hour at ATHE

SDC Board Members Seret Scott + Anne Kauffman with Johanna Pfaelzer, Wellesley Centers for Women Study Director Sumru Erkut + A.C.T. Artistic Director Carey Perloff PHOTO Stefan Cohen

ABOVE

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On September 20, 2016 Coalition of Broadway Unions and Guilds (COBUG) and the Broadway League co-produced the eighth annual Broadway Salutes, recognizing the dedicated individuals who have reached the milestones of 25, 35, or 50+ years working on Broadway. Honorees walked the red carpet in Shubert Alley before enjoying a ceremony hosted by Alex Brightman and directed by Marc Bruni.

Leslie Kritzer performs It’s Today from Jerome Lawrence, Robert E. Lee + Jerry Herman’s Mame (50 Years)

TOP

David Turner of Stuart Thompson Productions + 50 Year Actors’ Equity Honoree Robert Schear

MIDDLE LEFT

Bob Wankel + SDC Executive Director Laura Penn PHOTO Marella Martin Koch

MIDDLE CENTER

President Susan H. Schulman + Daisy Eagan PHOTO Barbara Wolkoff

MIDDLE RIGHT

Daisy Eagan, Alex Brightman, Rashidra Scott, Leslie Kritzer + Broadway Salutes director Marc Bruni PHOTO Walter McBride

BOTTOM

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“I am frequently asked what I consider to be the most important ingredient in a melodrama.

My reply usually surprises people.

It consist of one word: humor.”

Mary Orr Denham + Reginald Denham PHOTO Richard Gummere/ New York Post Archives/ (c) NYP Holdings, Inc. via Getty Images

Reginald H. F. Denham was born in England in 1894. Best known for his work directing suspense dramas for theatre, film, and television, he was also a playwright, screenwriter, and producer.

Denham started as an actor, and spent two years in Sir Frank Benson’s Shakespearean company before World War I. After completing his wartime service he joined the Oxford Players and began directing. In 18 months with the company, he directed or appeared in more than as many plays, including several by George Bernard Shaw.

He made his Broadway directorial debut in 1929 with Patrick Hamilton’s dramatic thriller Rope’s End. He also directed Yesterday’s Magic, The Two Mrs. Carrolls, Obsession, Temper the Wind, Gramercy Ghost, Dial M for Murder, The Bad Seed, Hostile Witness, and Janus.

In 1938 he wrote his first play, Give Me Yesterday; Suspect, Dark Hammock, Round Trip, and Be Your Age followed.

With his wife Mary Orr Denham, he wrote more than 100 dramatic scripts for television in the 1950s and 1960s, as well as several plays. The Platinum Set, Sweet Peril, and Minor Murder were produced in London, their comedy Wallflower was produced on Broadway, and Dead Giveaway was produced Off-Off-Broadway in 1981. He also directed films in the UK and Italy, including Fast and Sexy.

Denham died in 1983. In 2006, Mary established the Denham Fellowship in his memory.

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