SDC Journal Fall 2017

JOURNAL FALL 2017

RAISING EXPECTATIONS

A FIGHT CHOREOGRAPHY ROUNDTABLE

WHAT DOES A DIRECTOR DO? 16 ESSAYS

FROM THE ARCHIVES: THE JOB OF THE DIRECTOR

SIR TYRONE GUTHRIE PEER-REVIEWED SECTION

WHAT IS YOUR STATUS?

+ MORE FALL 2017 | SDC JOURNAL

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OFFICERS

Pam MacKinnon PRESIDENT

John Rando EXECUTIVE VICE PRESIDENT/SECRETARY

Leigh Silverman VICE PRESIDENT

Michael Wilson TREASURER

EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR

Laura Penn COUNSEL

Ronald H. Shechtman HONORARY ADVISORY COMMITTEE

Karen Azenberg Pamela Berlin Julianne Boyd Marshall W. Mason Ted Pappas Susan H. Schulman

SDC EXECUTIVE BOARD

SDC JOURNAL

MEMBERS OF BOARD

MANAGING EDITOR

Christopher Ashley Walter Bobbie Anne Bogart Jo Bonney Mark Brokaw Joe Calarco Rachel Chavkin Liz Diamond Marcia Milgrom Dodge Sheldon Epps Michael John Garcés Liza Gennaro Wendy C. Goldberg Linda Hartzell Anne Kauffman Mark Lamos Kathleen Marshall Meredith McDonough Ethan McSweeny Robert Moss Robert O’Hara Sharon Ott Ruben Santiago-Hudson­ Seret Scott Bartlett Sher Casey Stangl Eric Ting Chay Yew Evan Yionoulis

Kate Chisholm FEATURES EDITOR

Elizabeth Bennett GRAPHIC DESIGNER

Elizabeth Nelson EDITORIAL ADVISORY COMMITTEE

Jo Bonney Graciela Daniele Liz Diamond 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

David Callaghan Ann M. Shanahan

SDCJ-PRS PEER REVIEWERS

Donald Byrd Jonathan Cole Thomas Costello Kathryn Ervin Liza Gennaro Travis Malone Sam O'Connell Ruth Pe Palileo Scot Reese Stephen A. Schrum FALL 2017 CONTRIBUTORS

Bill Gelber TEXAS TECH UNIVERSITY

Loretta Greco DIRECTOR

Aimée Hayes DIRECTOR

UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN– MILWAUKEE

Geoffrey Paul Kent FIGHT DIRECTOR + ACTOR

Anne G. Levy UNIVERSITY OF ALABAMA

Kathleen M. McGeever

Allison Narver

ASSOCIATE

Emily A. Rollie

DIRECTOR

Ann Noling DIRECTOR

SDCJ-PRS SENIOR ADVISORY

Seret Scott

COMMITTEE

DIRECTOR

Anne Bogart Anne Fliotsos Joan Herrington James Peck

Shawn Aebi Father Gregory J. Boyle, S.J. Anne Cattaneo Ted Chapin Rinde Eckert Larissa FastHorse Wendall K. Harrington Rachel Hauck David Henry Hwang Mara Isaacs Ezra Knight Matthew Loeb Susan Medak Jonathan Parker David Shiffrin Amy Wheeler

Tony Horne

SDCJ-PRS BOOK REVIEW EDITOR

SDCJ-PRS BOOK REVIEW

"WHAT DOES A DIRECTOR DO?" CONTRIBUTORS

Dick Van Dyke ACTOR

Kristen van Ginhoven DIRECTOR

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

SDC JOURNAL is a registered trademark of SDC. SUBSCRIPTIONS + ADVERTISEMENTS Call 212.391.1070 or visit www.SDCweb.org.

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

PRINTED BY

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Sterling Printing SDC JOURNAL

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The Three Musketeers at Cincinnati Playhouse in the Park, with fight direction by Drew Fracher PHOTO James Kronzer

FALL

CONTENTS Volume 6 | No. 1

FEATURES 15 COVER

Raising Expectations A ROUNDTABLE DISCUSSION MODERATED BY FIGHT CHOREOGRAPHER, DIRECTOR + ACTOR GEOFFREY PAUL KENT

23 What Does a Director Do? 16 ESSAYS

BY SUSAN

MEDAK, DAVID HENRY HWANG, DAVID

SHIFFRIN, AMY WHEELER, TED CHAPIN, ANNE CATTANEO, RACHEL HAUCK, MATTHEW LOEB, RINDE ECKERT, WENDALL K. HARRINGTON,

FACILITATED + EDITED BY

SHAWN AEBI, EZRA KNIGHT, MARA ISAACS,

KRISTY CUMMINGS

JONATHAN PARKER, LARISSA FASTHORSE + FATHER GREGORY J. BOYLE, S.J.

42 PEER-REVIEWED SECTION What Is Your Status?

USING KEITH JOHNSTONE'S EXERCISES WITH BERTOLT BRECHT'S CONCEPT OF HALTUNG IN THE CLASSROOM + REHEARSAL HALL

BY BILL

Geoffrey Paul Kent PHOTO Eric Laurits COVER

GELBER

EDITED BY ANN

M. SHANAHAN FALL 2017 | SDC JOURNAL

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Zoot Suit at the Mark Taper Forum, with fight direction by Steve Rankin PHOTO Craig Schwartz

5 FROM THE PRESIDENT

BY PAM

MACKINNON

48 SDCJ-PRS BOOK REVIEW

The Art of Rehearsal: Conversations

60 IN MEMORIAM

SDC Members

with Contemporary Theatre Makers

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FROM THE EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR

BY LAURA PENN

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IN YOUR WORDS

What I Learned...

BY AIMÉE

HAYES CURATED BY SERET SCOTT

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Why I Made That Choice

BY ALLISON NARVER

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Pre-Show / Post-Show

BY TONY

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he Berkshire Leadership Summit T in 20 Questions

HORNE

BY KRISTEN

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SDC JOURNAL

VAN GINHOVEN

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Edited By Barbara Simonsen REVIEW BY ANNE G. LEVY

March 23, 2016 – August 17, 2017 Remembering Danny Daniels

BY DICK

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SDC FOUNDATION

From the Foundation Director

VAN DYKE

Remembering Sam Shepard

BY LORETTA

GRECO

My Observership with Dan Sullivan on The Little Foxes: A Reflection

BY ANN NOLING

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THE SOCIETY PAGES

Directors Lab West

Thank You to SDCF Mentors

Phoenix Members Meeting

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FROM THE ARCHIVES

Joint Regional Meeting of the Dramatists Guild and SDC

The Job of the Director: To Chair the Proceedings

2017 TCG National Conference

Tony Awards Toast

Powerhouse Season

Directors Lab North

Retirement Party for Mauro Melleno

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SDC Founder Jerome Robbins

BY SIR

TYRONE GUTHRIE

FROM THE PRESIDENT As I write this letter in mid-August, mayors are pulling down memorial statues of Confederate officers in our cities, governors around the country are discussing new street and highway names, and school board officials are gearing up for another year of doing more with less. I feel nervous and angry—at times exhausted—while also fiercely committed.

With this issue of the Journal, another election season is upon us. I encourage all our Members to participate at every level, for it is often the local official who voices today what winds up becoming state and national policy tomorrow. We are a highly motivated, national Union of storytellers, educators, administrators, and leaders. Use your voice to demand continued arts funding, attention to health coverage, fair labor practices, and support for the First Amendment that does not conflate “free speech” with white supremacist violence and intimidation, among other important issues that affect not just your Union, Members, and fellow artists, but your community writ large.

I also ask that you participate in your Union’s elections. In 2014, 598 Members voted in the Board elections; in 2015 only 535 voted. Last year, when we first instituted electronic balloting, our election participation went up to a record 790 votes cast. A huge leap, but keep in mind that this is out of a potential 2,015 Members, so an all-time high participation rate of 39 percent is exciting but I’m not writing home quite yet. I am hopeful that our participation rates will continue to improve. Please vote! We count each ballot, and it makes a difference.

As the Union’s agenda becomes more ambitious, it is even more important that the Board truly reflects the Members’ interests and concerns. The composition of the Board as a diverse body is crucial. Geographic, racial, generational, and gender diversity are all important to the Board’s understanding of Member needs and ability to support and protect issues in our workplaces and about our craft. As a freelance director based in New York City, I know I am able to think more deeply and therefore make better decisions when the Board represents our breadth. The choreographer passionately and patiently walking us through an issue brought forward for our consideration is critical to our deliberations, just as someone familiar with the intricacies of the Off-Broadway Agreement provides the needed expertise that an artistic director from a different jurisdiction may learn from, and vice versa.

As you review the slate and consider your votes, please remember we need all these voices to ensure we represent the Membership.

You will be receiving an electronic ballot shortly. Please dig in. There are eleven Board positions available. Several incumbents are running along with many new candidates. You’ll find their statements deeply personal and focused on action. Please review the slate and cast your vote to strengthen your Board. And, if you are running, I encourage you to reach out to colleagues with a friendly reminder to vote. I am eager for our Union to break last year’s participation record.

In Solidarity,

Pam MacKinnon, Executive Board President FALL 2017 | SDC JOURNAL

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FROM THE EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR Please save me from googling. I begin this letter for each issue by reviewing the magazine and considering what we hoped to accomplish.

Have we given readers a glimpse into the full range of the Membership, sharing what you do and how you do it? Are there surprises? Have we taken the opportunity to celebrate successes while also illuminating the challenges directors and choreographers face as they ply their trade? Are we an interesting read for collaborators, friends, and family?

Given the central topic at hand in this issue, “What Does a Director Do?”, instead of staying on task, I found myself in Google hell. I meant to just fact check a couple of things.

Knowing that the role of the director as an independent entity is fairly new, I wanted to throw in a couple of dates and historical references as a lead into the body of my letter.

Something about how in ancient Greece, the author staged his own plays and that the task of directing was referred to as didaskalos, the Greek word for “teacher.” Or in medieval times, elaborate productions of the mystery plays required vision and coordination to pull off, and so we saw the emergence of the pageant master or stage manager. I do love the French metteur en scène—scene setter.

And, of course, I wanted to talk about the brilliance of a generation of directors who in the first half of the 20th century began to bring their extraordinary vision and ambition for the theatre to bear on elevating the craft of directing to an art form: Bertolt Brecht, Peter Brook, Zelda Fichandler, Margo Jones, Eva Le Gallienne, Yuri Lyubimov, Vsevolod Meyerhold, Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko, Giorgio Strehler, Margaret Webster, Orson Welles, Mary Hunter Wolf, Franco Zeffirelli…

I knew I was in trouble when I began reading someone’s dissertation on the topic written some 25 years ago. I pulled myself out of the black hole of the internet—although I bookmarked the dissertation to come back to later—to return to the question at hand.

What does a director do? Does the answer lie somewhere in these words of Jerome Robbins? “For it isn’t only what one says, but how one says it that lifts a work from the ordinary.” For SDC’s 50th anniversary, we

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produced a rather irreverent video of industry colleagues trying to answer the question. For some, the result was a perfect encapsulation of our challenges, as it was nearly impossible for anyone to succinctly communicate what it is a director does—and this came from some of your closest collaborators. The only saving grace was that at the time, even fewer could articulate what SDC did. I’ve been challenged

by Members over the years to take up the question again. This time not for a video for a party, but seriously. As the industry has evolved and the collaborators expanded, do people know what it is a director does? As an experiment, we asked 16 people to answer the question for this issue of SDC Journal. Smart, passionate, theatre-loving, and some theatremaking people.

As we consider what it is a director does, we also share with you another way in which choreographers choreograph. While plays have included fight scenes since long before the time of Shakespeare, over the course of the past couple of decades choreographing violence has emerged as a critical skill set within the creative team. Someone with the capacity to envision and train actors to execute fights safely and with precision has become a necessity. This particular type of staged movement, as is the case with dance, is critical to storytelling and requires professionals at the top of their game. Geoffrey Paul Kent moderates a roundtable with a team of SDC fight choreographers and directors. It is an honor to feature this illustrious group and a privilege to all of us here at SDC to be representing them in numerous jurisdictions across the country.

One of last year’s Fichandler finalists, Aimée Hayes, shares with us from her base in New Orleans in “What I Learned”, while Allison Narver is featured in our newest column, “Why I Made That Choice.” Several years ago, the majority of you responded to a study conducted by the Wellesley Centers for Women as they were commissioned by Carey Perloff and A.C.T. to try to uncover the reasons for the lack of women in leadership positions within the field. That study inspired Member Kristen van Ginhoven to host the first Berkshire Leadership Summit this fall. SDC will be on hand at the summit and will report back!

We lost two greats this summer, Sam Shepard and former SDC President and founder Danny Daniels— two artists I never imagined putting in the same sentence. I know we lean towards Sam Shepard as a writer, but his career brought him to SDC as well. From all accounts, he was a great friend to directors and Loretta Greco shares her reflections on Sam’s passing.

Some weeks back, I received a call from Danny Daniels’ daughter, Ann Giagni. Danny passed away following a stroke. He was 92. It was a sad and wonderful conversation. She shared stories and told tales of his last years and expressed deep appreciation for SDC. I never had the honor of meeting him and am sorry I didn’t try to make that happen on a number of my travels to L.A. We talked about Tap Heat and how his first stroke came just days after he finished filming. (To see the film, search for Tap Heat on YouTube.) Ann repeatedly talked about how significant Danny’s SDC pension was to him later in life, and wondered if young choreographers fully appreciate how meaningful this benefit of SDC Membership really is. Although most recently he suffered from dementia, Danny enjoyed his connection to the Union, sitting with his SDC Journal as soon as it arrived. She loved looking through it with him. (Yes, by now I am on the verge of weeping.) The most amazing story came at the end of our conversation. She had read that there had been some success in reaching dementia patients through music, so she began to play show tunes from great musicals of the ’40s and ’50s. I swear she said he died as they were listening to Gypsy. As much as I wanted to ask her to repeat that to make sure I heard her correctly, I just couldn’t. So I will imagine that moment as I believe I heard it.

Whatever the truth of that moment was, we have all experienced the indelible mark that certain pieces of theatre or dance or music have made on our lives. The work we do—that you do—reveals our shared humanity. Perhaps that is what a director does.

In solidarity,

Laura Penn Executive Director

IN YOUR WORDS What I Learned...

Why I Made That Choice Pre-Show / Post-Show 20 Questions

 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.

THIS PAGE

Buzz Podewell

WHAT I LEARNED…

BY AIMÉE

HAYES

CURATED BY SERET

SCOTT

What have I learned? Hm. I look back and see Me: a kind of very bossy eight-year-old making the neighborhood kids dance to the Carpenters on somebody’s pool table. “Trust me, your parents won’t mind—they’ll love it!” Me: 18, buried in the library, worriedly thinking that if I know enough about enough I might be able to make it in the world. Me: adult-ish, in various academic settings and many rehearsal rooms, asking (probably sincerely), “Can we just burn this all down?” What I have learned from my own dogged, arduous, roundabout journey to who I am and how I work today is that although all these things about me are still true and revealed in my work, they are all counterbalanced now by time, success, experience, loss.

Choosing to be a director has been good for me. I needed to control things as a kid. Now, I revel in our business of collaboration. It is a creative sanctuary affording deep connections to other artists and to the text. My bookish-monk thing got absurd a few decades ago as I had surrounded myself with so many books, albums, videos, magazines, plays—and then, the internet came. And, I mean, forget about it, right? Just like that, another part of me mellowed. I actually enjoy the hell out of revealing, “I don’t know,” because, then, anything is possible. Especially in a rehearsal room.

My first mentor, Buzz Podewell, was a tough-talking guy who was such a dear human being. We talked often about smashing the sentiment. “When there is emotion revealed on stage, it must be earned.”

“Everything is political.” “Get the joke right.” We were kindred spirits of a kind, especially appreciating the ridiculous, absurd bits in plays because from there arose the real stuff. We cackled over Shakespeare’s ironic pieces in the tragedies—tip the Porter!

(Macbeth). Chekhov was so funny it made us weep.

In those shared moments, I felt so alive. I was in love with those plays. No wonder I would howl out an ecstatic, “Burn it down!” It feels so right to be in the penultimate moment of a great play. Past the middle and not quite the conclusion. That perfect spot where you want the play to never end, yet you can’t wait to experience the end. If I could stop time there…Buzzy made plays rich with moments like this.

I am still learning how to get there, grappling with my humanness, striving to know more, and always delighted and sort of amazed that this is how I get to spend my life. I still see myself as a beginner halfway on a journey. SDC Journal should check back to see what I’ve learned after another 25 years…you know, because “we’ve only just begun…”

Since joining Southern Rep Theatre in 2007, AIMÉE HAYES has focused on new play development, producing and directing many writers during her tenure, including Andrew Hinderaker, John Biguenet, Eric Coble, Zayd Dohrn, Catherine Filloux, Jim Fitzmorris, Ross Maxwell, Tarell McCraney, Peter McElligott, Peter Sinn Nachtrieb, Joe Sutton, and Steve Yockey. As Producing Artistic Director, she has also overseen the incorporation of a slate of new play development programs into Southern Rep’s Lagniappe Series, including its new collaborative playwriting model, 4D; Debauchery!; The New Play Bacchanal; and The Ruby Prize, a cash award to a female playwright of color. At Southern Rep: Colossal, Airline Highway, Detroit, Venus in Fur, Red, Speech & Debate, Grey Gardens, The Lily’s Revenge, as well as numerous works by Tennessee Williams.

Regional: Detroit (Theatre Squared), Venus in Fur (Geva). 2016 finalist Zelda Fichandler Award. TCG Board, co-chair of TCG Alumni Board.

SUMMER FALL 2017 | SDC JOURNAL

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WHY I MADE THAT CHOICE

BY ALLISON

NARVER

As a director, I’ve always felt delighted and lucky to work too much and too hard. I was the person who dove headfirst into projects, reveling in the mosh pit of developing new plays and projects—the sticky dance of joyful discovery, diplomacy, last-minute revelations, first encounters, and shameless begging that sometimes seems to typify a career in regional theatre.

As clichéd as it may be, I’ve always believed that theatre can change peoples’ lives, or I wouldn’t have done it all these years. I’ve always spoken passionately about the unique capacity that theatre has to build bridges between people of radically different backgrounds, thereby creating common understandings of complex ideas.

In the last several years, though, I started to get really tired. By the end of 2016, I was exhausted. Burnt out and depressed, I began to question the whole endeavor. Did my work in theatre accomplish anything at all? Was my voice useful? Was my audience diverse? Was I speaking to people of radically different backgrounds? Despite good intentions on everybody’s parts, I felt the answer to all those questions was no.

The constant passion seemed excessive and the pack-mule mentality to get to opening night wasted energy, time, and resources. Instead of reveling in collaborative creation, I had started to feel like a good cover band playing at an upscale resort in Aspen. My own eccentric voice suddenly felt fake and wellpracticed; what sounded convincing in post-show discussions and first rehearsals rang hollow and disingenuous to me.

Last year, I had a big show that was going to be the one that would encompass everything I do well and care about. It was going to be beautiful, big, frightening, and prescient in its relevance. The audience would leave in tears, determined to live differently because of the experience they had just shared.

During the process (which, by the way, was a nightmare), I remember thinking, “If this show doesn’t work, it’s going to break my heart.” It didn’t work. It broke my heart.

We’ve all had those shows. We’ve probably all had several of them. As pack mules, we know how to get over the pain and move on. That’s what directors do, right? This time, however, I was done for good. I decided to quit theatre. I turned down work.

I sulked, I watched reality TV, I researched different careers—I was going to go into advertising, the ministry, social work, dog training, typewriter repair—anything but theatre.

Just as I was submitting my application to become a Lyft driver (anything but theatre!), I got a call. The woman on the phone was an Italian doctor who asked if I would be interested in developing

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a play in the EU about pregnant refugees from West Africa and Syria. Could I come over soon to start our work together? “Yes, immediately!” I said.

Despite my dramatic insistence to the contrary, I hadn’t quit theatre at all—I had just grown older and didn’t belong in the mosh pit anymore. What fueled me 15 years ago is, of course, different now. It’s easy to forget how much we need to grow outside of familiar institutional structures. I’m glad I decided to quit theatre because if I hadn’t, I couldn’t have started doing it again.

My work on this project is just starting. My collaborators, all first-time theatremakers, have no expectation or experience in the new play development process. As a result, the formerly ingrained protocol and timeline of professional theatre has no purchase. However, as I take baby steps forward, the basic tenets of any good rehearsal room abound: imagination, respect, creativity, ambition, laughter, and grace. The process is, however, a revelation—it’s slow, it’s unsettling, and, ultimately, it’s one of the most honest experiences I’ve had in theatre.

I’ve always believed that theatre can change peoples’ lives...

I have no idea what will happen with this project—how or if we’ll ever get to a production is a complete mystery. As a well-trained theatre practitioner, this is both terrifying and liberating. As we start to lurch forward, a small candle has been lit in me again, and I think my earlier mission has begun to reemerge. In the distance, I can dimly begin to see the outline of a bridge being built as people of radically different backgrounds begin to create common understandings of complex ideas.

ALLISON NARVER is an award-winning stage director whose work has been seen at theatres across the country. Regional work includes productions at the Seattle Repertory Theatre, ACT Theatre, Seattle Children’s Theatre, Intiman Theatre, The Fifth Avenue Theatre, Book-It Repertory Theatre, New Century Theatre, Portland Stage Company, Yale Repertory Theater, Studio Theatre, City Theatre, REDCAT Theater, Portland Center Stage, and Oregon Shakespeare Festival. In New York, her work has been seen at New Victory Theater, Ars Nova, The Public Theater, Cherry Lane Theatre, New Dramatists, Kirk Theatre, and Women’s Project Theater, among others. Allison was the Resident Director for The Lion King (Director, Julie Taymor) both in London and on Broadway in New York. Internationally, she has developed new work with companies in Palestine and Nairobi. She is the former Artistic Director of The Empty Space, Annex Theatre, and the Yale Cabaret.

To start my day, I…typically pray before I get out of bed. Then, if I am really on my game, I will either do the “morning pages,” as described by Julia Cameron in The Artist’s Way, or write a response to one of the readings in Dr. Michael Beckwith’s 40 Day Mind Fast Soul Feast. Next, I start my regime of 17 different exercises prescribed by my physical therapist. While exercising, I usually begin to prepare my vegan breakfast: oatmeal and/or smoothie. Post-exercise, I sit down to eat while watching CBS This Morning. Then I shower and dress. Finally, I travel four blocks to the university on foot, on bicycle, or on the bus.

I’m reading or I want to read…Read! Who has time to read? On a serious note, given how much reading I have to do as a professor, I don’t have much time to read for pleasure. But the next time I get to sit down to read a book, I will start with Wench by Dolen Perkins-Valdez.

Meanwhile, I am carrying around two terrific plays in my backpack: Night Is a Room by Naomi Wallace and Between Riverside and Crazy by Stephen Adly Guirgis. I try to read a little bit of one or the other when I can.

My relationship with social media is...addictive. I am a Facebook fanatic! I love reading and posting a lot. Since I have relationships with folks far and wide, Facebook is the most efficient way to stay in touch with family members, former students, theatre professionals, and friends.

However, to maintain balance, I have begun taking periodic “breaks” from good ole FB. Then there is Instagram. A few years back, I was getting too busy, so I challenged myself to slow down and be more aware of the beauty all around me. Now when I see something amazing, I snap a photo with my iPhone and post it on my primary Instagram account. I have also created accounts on many different social media platforms with the intention of promoting my freelance directing career.

However, I must admit that I don’t actually use any of them.

PRE-SHOW / POST-SHOW WITH

TONY HORNE UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSINMILWAUKEE

I balance my work and creative life by…going walking/hiking to completely detach from the academic and theatre worlds. Being outside, while moving and observing the natural world, feeds my soul and lifts my spirits. It helps me become more centered and have more gratitude.

I also find balance by creating art just for me. With no deadlines and no expectations, I take photographs with both film and DSLR cameras (leaving the iPhone behind). This allows me to exercise my creativity in a quiet, intimate manner.

Before a performance, I…relax and dress up to attend shows that I have directed! After relaxing (which may include a nap), I put on something casual and fun. I spend most of life in rehearsal clothes, so it is a blast to dress up a little bit. I am known for my colorful shirts, especially my orange ones!

The work I am most proud of is…the work I have done in Memphis over the last 20 years as a director and/or producer of theatre that illuminates the experiences of black folks throughout the diaspora. Memphis, with its majority African American population, is my hometown, and it is where I was inspired and encouraged to pursue a life in the theatre. Bringing the black experience to life on stage for all the citizens of Memphis is my way of giving back to the city that has given me so much.

The best thing about working on a campus is…being surrounded by students of all ages who are hungry to learn and excited about the future. I am blessed to be surrounded by that type of energy every day. It enlivens me and keeps me young.

A performance I wish I could see again…is Bob Fosse’s Dancin’. In 1978, at the age of 17, my dad took me on my first trip to New York City to lay the groundwork for me coming back that summer to study at Dance Theatre of Harlem. While there, we went to see two Broadway shows of my choosing. Dancin’ was nothing short of electrifying. I was blown away by the inventiveness of Fosse’s choreography and the technique, precision, and stage presence of the world-class performers. Everyone in the show dazzled me; I will never forget the performances of Ann Reinking and René Ceballos.

To wind down, I…morph into a couch potato and watch TV. My favorite show during the regular season is How to Get Away with Murder. During the summer I’ll watch any of the limitedrun sci-fi series, such as Zoo. A native of Memphis, Tenn., TONY HORNE is a freelance stage director and Associate Professor/ Head of Musical Theatre at the University of Wisconsin—Milwaukee. He holds an M.B.A. (UCLA) and an M.F.A. (University of Memphis). Professional career highlights include directing the world premiere of the TYA version of The Wiz at First Stage in Milwaukee, winning an Ostrander (Memphis theatre award) for Direction of a Musical for The Color Purple, and directing the Memphis/MidSouth regional premieres of Marcus Gardley’s The House That Will Not Stand and Katori Hall’s The Mountaintop. Favorite university productions include No, No, Nanette; The Sparrow; and Oedipus Rex.

PHOTO

Ross Zentner

FALL 2017 | SDC JOURNAL

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East coast steering committee members Kristen van Ginhoven + Akiba Abaka PHOTO Todd McNeel Jr.

Why did you attend the Women’s Leadership Conference at A.C.T.?

I first heard about the WCW study that was commissioned by Carey Perloff and Ellen Richard when they did a Kickstarter campaign early in the research phase. I made a donation, and so I received regular updates and information as the research progressed.

Then, in July of last year, an invitation arrived in the mail for the conference and my name was printed on the back as one of the donors who supported the study! I didn’t think I’d be able to attend the conference, since I live on the East Coast and it was a one-day conference on the West Coast, but thanks to a generous WAM board member and the help of A.C.T., I was able to attend.

What research was presented there and why is it significant? Did you participate in the organizational research as an SDC Member?

THE BERKSHIRE LEADERSHIP SUMMIT IN 20 QUESTIONS

In August 2016, as KRISTEN VAN GINHOVEN listened to the results of a study on gender imbalance in theatre leadership presented at the Women’s Leadership Conference at A.C.T., she was motivated to take action. Her commitment to continuing the discussion about gender parity led to the planning of a pilot leadership summit that will be held in October in the Berkshires of Massachusetts. SDC Journal asked Kristen about the research, the summit, and her hopes for the future.

20Q • 20Q • 20Q • 20Q • 20Q Describe the upcoming Berkshire Leadership Summit in two words.

Creating opportunity.

What inspired you to produce this event?

I attended the Women’s Leadership Conference at A.C.T. (American Conservatory Theater) in San Francisco in August 2016. During the opening panel session, results from the “Wellesley Centers for Women (WCW) Report on Women’s Leadership in Resident Theatres” were shared.

When I heard the results of the research and listened to the panel of researchers, artists, and conference hosts discuss the issues identified in the study as barriers to leadership for women in the nonprofit theatre, I was moved to stand up at the microphone and say that, as one next step to continue the national conversation around gender parity in the theatre, I would host a pilot Berkshire Leadership Summit in 2017. During the rest of that one-day conference, various people came up to me expressing an interest in being involved, which resulted in a dedicated steering committee of four people and a few advisory committee members committing to helping make that pledge a reality.

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I did participate as an SDC Member in the organizational research. One interesting loop that came back to me at the A.C.T. conference from doing the SDC survey was that the two researchers of the study, Ineke Ceder and Sumru Erkut, made a significant discovery during the SDC survey about women who were artistic directors: many of them were women who had founded their own theatre companies, like me. We had a fascinating conversation in San Francisco about how the path to leadership for many women comes through creating their own opportunities.

In terms of the research that was presented, this is what I came away with after the A.C.T. conference: there are four areas that female theatre professionals identified as main barriers to leadership positions. They are: fundraising (e.g., the ability to go from a $200,000 company to a $2,000,000 company); producing (e.g., the ability to produce a highbudget event from the ground up); relationship building (e.g., the opportunity to meet the people who work at the theatres who will hire you for leadership positions); and awareness building/creating opportunity (e.g., the necessity for a deep dive into what is needed to shift the consciousness and perception around women and leadership).

Okay, now tell us about the summit in more detail. What is it?

It is a two-day summit, October 28 and 29, 2017, hosted by WAM Theatre at the Elayne P. Bernstein Performing Arts Center at Shakespeare & Company in Lenox, MA. The summit is for women aspiring to leadership positions in the nonprofit theatre in both the artistic and management tracks. This pilot Berkshire Leadership Summit is informed and supported by the research that A.C.T. commissioned from the Wellesley Centers for Women.

The summit has three central aims: 1) providing participants with an experience that grows their network of allies, 2) enriching vocabulary that supports the current industry while advocating for their future as women leaders, and 3) expanding concrete skills to apply on their path to leadership.

member who helped get me to the A.C.T. conference. A special shout-out goes to our 49 GoFundMe Scholarship Campaign supporters who paved the way for us to provide scholarships, coffee and snacks, and even childcare for those who need it.

What topics will be explored and how?

Who is involved with the planning?

Who are your organizational partners?

In addition to myself, the Berkshire Leadership Summit Steering Committee includes Akiba Abaka, Audience Development Manager at ArtsEmerson; Rachel Fink, Managing Director of Theatre Bay Area; and Shafer Mazow, who currently works at the Exploratorium in San Francisco and was a lead developer and organizer of the Women’s Leadership Project and convening. We all met and joined forces at the A.C.T. Women’s Leadership Conference last year.

We also have people working with us in an advisory capacity as we plan this pilot

In addition to the four main areas identified in the WCW report and mentioned above, the steering committee conducted a survey in February that received more than 300 responses from target participants across the nation who indicated a desire for the working sessions to include discussions around strategic planning, identifying and articulating qualities that distinguish summit participants as leaders, and directly addressing intersectionality and the complexities of diversity.

Given the survey results, which stressed the desire for relationship-building opportunities alongside the skill-building and consciousness-

as a first step, this inaugural two-day summit is targeted at people who navigate the field as women (e.g., transgender, cisgender, gender nonconforming) in early to mid-career who are theatre professionals on the path to leadership.

What do you hope to accomplish with the summit? How will you know it has been a success?

The steering committee jokes that if we manage to provide participants with free coffee in the morning, then we can call the summit a success! Seriously, though, bringing a diverse group of women from across the country into the room together to continue the conversation and having the summit run as smoothly as possible is how we define success. Our hope is that everyone leaves with a few new skills, contacts, and allies. We hope everyone returns home reminded that they are not alone on this journey to leadership and with renewed energy and skills to continue working toward their leadership goals.

The Women’s Leadership Conference at A.C.T., 2016 PHOTO Stefan Cohen

West Coast steering committee members Shafer Mazow + Rachel Fink

summit. They include Ineke Ceder, Research Associate, and Sumru Erkut, Senior Scholar, from the Wellesley Centers for Women, who wrote the WCW report; Elena Chang, Associate Director of Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion at TCG; Mandy Greenfield, Artistic Director of Williamstown Theatre Festival; Carey Perloff, Artistic Director of A.C.T.; Laura Penn, Executive Director of SDC; and Martha Richards, Executive Director of WomenArts.

These people, and more, have been extremely supportive and helpful as we plan the summit.

We have individual and corporate sponsors who are helping make the summit a reality, including support from the same WAM board

shifting conversations, the summit will have a three-part structure: Networking (e.g., brownbag lunches, dine arounds, and affinity spaces); Concrete Skill Building (e.g., workshops and seminars); and Advancing the Discourse (e.g., sessions that set the tone for the summit).

Who do you encourage to attend?

The summit is for women across the nation who are aspiring to leadership positions in the nonprofit theatre in both the artistic and operational tracks. We hope to have 75 women from diverse locations, backgrounds, and experiences participating. We acknowledge that gender discrimination is a complex topic, so,

What is your hope for the future of the summit?

We are focused on creating a fulfilling summit, and we shall see what that leads to in the future.

I could never have predicted what would come out of attending the Women’s Leadership Conference at A.C.T., so who knows what will come out of this pilot summit? At A.C.T., in one day, I met people who remain contacts and allies. I’m organizing this summit with people I met there; plus, many more unexpected opportunities came out of that one-day event.

For example, I made a connection while there with Seema Sueko that led to an emerging director I mentor, Kelly Galvin, being her FALL 2017 | SDC JOURNAL

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Kim Stauffer and Oliver Wadsworth in Emilie: La Marquise du Chatelet Defends Her Life Tonight by Lauren Gunderson, at WAM, 2017 PHOTO David Dashiell

assistant on Smart People at Arena Stage, where Seema is Deputy Artistic Director. That all came out of a one-day conference, so imagine the potential of a two-day summit!

What are the main barriers to theatre leadership positions for women?

The WCW report identifies the main barrier as the conscious and unconscious bias around women’s leadership, like the belief by some that women don’t fit the stereotype of what a leader looks like.

Beyond the focus of the WCW report on nextin-line positions, the results of the steering committee survey identified the following two areas that women are eager to expand upon in their journey to leadership: gaining more concrete skills required for those leadership jobs, in areas like fundraising and producing (also identified in the WCW report), and the personal ability to articulate what makes them unique as leaders.

What do you think is needed to shift the consciousness and perception around women and leadership, and break the “glass ceiling”?

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As the WCW report identified, a pipeline isn’t the issue. Therefore, to break the glass ceiling, search firm professionals, board members, and all those in hiring positions have to embrace women’s leadership and commit to doing two primary things: 1) supporting the women leaders who are already out there, and 2) finding and cultivating the next generation of women leaders. Allies need to actively mentor and advocate. Colleagues need to actively create opportunity. We all have to agree to hire women on their potential, just as we do for men. That will help us get beyond having only 27 percent of leadership positions in the nonprofit theatre being held by women.

How can SDC support these efforts and dialogue?

As an organization, SDC is already an integral part of this conversation in so many ways.

Individually, SDC Members are also out there supporting these efforts and participating in the dialogue. The more this can happen, the better, as that support creates so much opportunity. For example, I met Anne Kauffman and Seret Scott at the Women’s Leadership Conference at A.C.T. last year, and they both encouraged me to follow up with them. I did, and they responded to my outreach, which was already amazing. But, then,

they took action on my behalf, which makes all the difference in creating opportunity. Anne is responsible for connecting me to SDC for this article, while Seret connected me to SDC to host a Member meeting in the Berkshires.

Having SDC Members like Anne and Seret advocating for us and taking those extra steps to be connectors and allies makes ALL the difference. This is how opportunity and advancement happens.

How does the summit fit into the mission of your company, WAM Theatre?

WAM’s mission is to create opportunity through our vision of theatre as philanthropy. I was inspired by the book Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide by Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn. The thesis of that book is that the oppression of women and girls is the seminal moral issue of our time, as slavery was in the 19th century. Finding ways to turn oppression into opportunity for women and girls is central to WAM’s mission. The summit is another way we can help create opportunity.

WAM has a slogan: “WAM is a place where arts and activism meet.” Describe what that means.

The Emilie team at WAM presents a check to the production’s beneficiary, Flying Cloud Institute. Their donation provided 10 scholarships for public school girls to attend science workshops and work alongside professional female scientists in a laboratory setting. PHOTO David Dashiell

The first question people always ask is: what does WAM stand for? They want to know what the letters stand for, but I’m more interested in what we stand for in terms of our values.

We chose the name because we liked the energy of the word—we wanted to make an impact and “WAM” has that onomatopoeic effect—but since so many people asked us at the beginning what it stood for, we created what I call a “backronym.” WAM came to be because Half the Sky is a call to action to join the movement to help women, ergo, initially we said WAM stood for Women’s Action Movement. But as the years passed, our identity grew as we became involved in activistoriented community events like Facing Our Truth around Trayvon Martin’s birthday and the Women’s March this past January. As we have grown, we have literally become a place Where Arts and Activism Meet. While out on a walk

last year, it hit me that now, that is what WAM stands for, both literally and metaphorically.

other, help our neighbors, and do what we can to lift each other up.

What is your political passion, and how do you act on it?

Have you always combined art and activism in your theatrical work?

Personally, I’m not a marcher. I’m not a natural protestor. I don’t, in general, sign petitions or call my representatives—although that hasn’t been so true in this past year. One of my proudest days so far has been co-hosting one of the Sister Marches on January 21 in Pittsfield, MA, as part of the Women’s March. Generally, though, the way I choose to act on my politics is through my art; through the stories I choose to tell, the plays I pick for WAM, and the plays I choose to direct, at WAM and elsewhere. Those stories share my politics—and my politics are interchangeable with my worldview—that we all need empathy and need to care about each

No. I’m a late bloomer. My activist self wasn’t awakened until I read Half the Sky. My early theatre work was based on survival—wanting to work and needing to earn a living. If I’m honest, it was only after I’d gotten those essentials in place that my eyes were ready to be opened to the other essentials—the ones that involve equality, inclusivity, and opportunity. Activism is in my genes, though, as my grandparents were active in the resistance during World War II in Holland, so I think it was always in me—it just didn’t get unleashed until my mid-thirties. Now, I’m making up for lost time.

Vieux Carré by Tennessee Williams

directed by Will Detlefsen, MFA Directing Class of 2017 Photo by Jim Carmody

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DIRECTING FACULTY: Robert Castro, Area Head Judith Dolan Kim Rubinstein Gabor Tompa THEATRE.UCSD.EDU FALL 2017 | SDC JOURNAL

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Do you have any recommendations for theatre artists who want to become more politically engaged?

You may be one person, but you are one person who can make a difference. The little and the big things are equally impactful.

Do the work with positivity and hope. Be informed. Talk to many people. Gain lots of perspectives. Let your anger fuel the work, not define the work. Create opportunity. Hold on to your positivity. Reach out to others. It’s like exercise—find the ways that will make being politically engaged a routine for you and stick to those. Whatever you do, you will make a difference. And, of course, as ever, persist.

What is your hope for women in American theatre?

As Nicholas Kristof says, “Talent is universal but opportunity is not.” My hope is that women get the same opportunities as men to achieve their potential in the arts. My life has been changed significantly a few times by someone seeing something in me and giving me an opportunity. Having a life in the theatre is tough. Full stop. Being a woman, or a person of color, or a female person of color, makes it even tougher. So my hope is that opportunities are handed out equally to all.

Is there anything you would like to add that we haven’t covered?

My passion about WAM is best encapsulated by how I feel on the closing days of our mainstage productions. I stand on stage after the curtain call and look around at the 30+ professional theatre artists who’ve gotten a contract job—over 75 percent of them are women, and most of them are local to the Berkshires. I look at the audience, who has just enjoyed watching a story written by a woman

playwright, which makes me very proud, given that less than 20 percent of plays produced nationally are written by women playwrights.

Finally, I look at our beneficiaries, the organization that is about to be given a donation that represents 25 percent of the box office proceeds, and I’m struck by the impact our production will have beyond jobs and storytelling. I think of the 13 housemothers at the Mother of Peace Orphanage in South Africa, who received their first-ever stipend for caring for 84 orphans; or the 8th grader and the rest of her peers in a local Berkshire County rite-of-passage program—among the first in their families to dream about going to college—who went on a college tour. I imagine her standing on a college campus, thinking, “Maybe I could come here someday,” and she’s standing there because WAM put on a play.

The impact of theatre as philanthropy never ceases to amaze me.

I often say that WAM’s early success is because we live in a county and a state that truly values arts and activism. WAM is proud to be a place in Berkshire County Where Arts and Activism Meet. We are proud of our mission to create opportunity for women and girls through our vision of art as philanthropy. We are deeply honored to be hosting the pilot Berkshire Leadership Summit and are excited to welcome the inaugural participants to the Berkshires in October!

For more details about the summit, visit: www.wamtheatre.com/berkshire-leadershipsummit-2017

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KRISTEN VAN GINHOVEN is the Artistic Director of WAM Theatre, which she co-founded in 2010. Based in Berkshire County, Massachusetts, WAM Theatre is Where Arts and Activism Meet.

WAM’s vision is to create opportunity for women and girls through a mission of theatre as philanthropy. In eight years, WAM has produced 12 mainstage productions, provided paid work for over 200 theatre professionals, and donated over $32,500 to local and global organizations taking action for women and girls in areas such as girls’ education, teen pregnancy prevention, sexual trafficking awareness, midwife training, and more. In addition to the mainstage productions and special events, WAM Theatre’s activities include a comprehensive educational outreach program and the Fresh Takes Play Reading Series. Kristen is a Member of the Stage Directors and Choreographers Society and Canadian Actors’ Equity Association, and is a theatre artist for the International Schools Theatre Association. She was a member of the 2013 Lincoln Center Directors Lab and is a member of the Michael Langham Workshop for Classical Direction at the Stratford Festival of Canada. She has a B.A. from Dalhousie University, B.Ed. from Queen’s University, and an M.A. from Emerson College, where she received the Presidential Fellowship.

raising expectations

A ROUNDTABLE DISCUSSION MODERATED BY FIGHT CHOREOGRAPHER, DIRECTOR + ACTOR GEOFFREY PAUL KENT FACILITATED + EDITED BY KRISTY

CUMMINGS

This past spring, the SDC/LORT negotiations resulted in LORT’s recognition of fight choreographers who are SDC Members—a historic moment, as it is the first expansion of the SDC bargaining unit since the Union’s founding in 1959. As this new coverage takes effect, SDC Member and fight choreographer Geoffrey Paul Kent sat down with fellow SDC Members and fight choreographers Drew Fracher, Steve Rankin, Tom Schall, and Robert Westley to discuss the craft of staging violence, including their creative processes, biggest challenges, and what Union recognition means to them.

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Trent Dahllin, Jennifer Vosters, Sceri Sioux Ivers, Geoffrey Paul Kent + J. Todd Adams in the Utah Shakespeare Festival’s 2017 production of Treasure Island, with fight direction by Kent PHOTO Karl Hugh/©Utah Shakespeare Festival 2017

GEOFFREY | What got you started in this profession? When did you realize that you were a fight director/choreographer?

ROBERT | I started off as an actor and, like most actors, eventually you’re in a production that has some sort of violence. For me, it was playing Malcolm in Macbeth, which had a lot of sword fights. The fight director mentioned that I took to it pretty well and that I should consider exploring it further. I did. Having grown up watching Zorro and all of the Errol Flynn movies, it was a joy to pick up. It fell into my lap at the right time in my life, and I slowly transitioned into it.

STEVE | You know, that is the single most difficult question that I have to answer! I've tried to condense it over the years but it always ends up being a long conversation because people don't really have any idea that this is a profession. I've even had to explain it to my mother!

land on my head. I decided that there needed to be a better way to do this, so I started training through gymnastics, competition sword fighting, medieval Renaissance fairs, and falling off of horses—all of which established my skill set.

I went to graduate school at Florida State University/Asolo Conservatory, where I had two years of training in stage combat with Norm Beauregard. After getting my MFA and my Equity card, I was cast as Valvert in Cyrano de Bergerac with F. Murray Abraham in 1979.

The fight director was none other than B. H. Barry. Then I was cast as Comte de Wardes in The Three Musketeers, and the fight director was David Boushey. To have the experience of being staged by these two gentlemen—with the two best fight directors in the U.S. at the time—was the most valuable training that one could hope for.

I think that all of us in this profession discovered we had a natural proclivity toward it. I really started this career when I was a kid on a farm, swinging from a rope and jumping off of a hay mound.

It carved out a path of no return for me. Their wisdom and approach to staging remains with me on every production. All paths to fight directing lead back to them. We would not be able to be having this conversation with SDC Journal if it were not for the two of them. We would be remiss not to mention their names.

I was also an actor. I was an overzealous one who would jump from 10 feet in the air and

DREW | I discovered sport fencing in my freshman year of college. I was always the

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scrawny kid in the class, and suddenly fencing seemed like, “Wow, this is something I could do.”

Then, in my sophomore year, Joseph Martinez—who is one of the founders of the Society of American Fight Directors—became my movement teacher. Suddenly, I was acting and sword fighting. I thought I had died and gone to heaven.

Once I got out of school, I was trying desperately to be an actor. I think I was pretty terrible, but I was able to get some jobs because I had these other skills. I was often hired to be the fight captain or the guy that died a glorious death somewhere downstage.

I ended up following Joseph out to graduate school at Western Illinois University and worked with him pretty closely for four or five years. Then I got into the SAFD world on the ground floor. The rest was kind of history.

TOM | Drew and I actually went to undergrad together, so part of my story is very much the same as his: training in school and then, out of school, working as an actor for many years.

Early on, I was a company member at the Folger Shakespeare Theatre for two seasons, which meant a lot of classical works and a fair amount of violence. I was cast in the fighting

Harvey Blanks, Michael Potts, Brandon Dirden + André Holland in Manhattan Theatre Club’s Broadway production of Jitney, with fight direction by Tom Schall PHOTO Joan Marcus

roles, such as Hector in Troilus and Cressida, and was picking up the fight captain position fairly regularly. Around that time, I started training with the Society of American Fight Directors and started choreographing as well.

anything that’s salient. That’s where I begin to think about how the fights fit into the play.

When I moved to New York to pursue an acting career, I stopped doing fight direction.

I was afraid of being slotted as “the fight guy.” But I ended up performing fight roles pretty frequently: Athos in Three Musketeers— choreographed by Drew, in fact—Mercutio a couple of times, Petruchio. Over about a 10-year period, fight direction crept back into my life and by now, 30 years on, it’s a good 90 percent of what I do. But it’s very much the same story.

STEVE | I’ll just back that up. It’s story, story, story. It’s always about why, who these particular people are, and how they’re able to carry out what they’re about to do.

GEOFFREY | All of us started with one foot in that acting world.

When you get the script of a play you haven’t staged before, how do you first approach it from a fight director’s perspective?

TOM | I try very hard not to approach it as a fight director, at first.

On my very first exposure, I sit down with a yellow pad and try to simply read the play as an audience member would experience it, reading it for story and character. I jot down

After that, I start digging in. But at first, I try to be as open to experiencing the story as I can be.

What’s the story? Is there anything that involves an encounter? What happened in the story at some other time that affects the encounters? What happens before an encounter, and what happens after it—why is it there? Just as Tom said, you’ve got to read the play.

GEOFFREY | Do you ever find that you have to go back and reread the plays that you have done many times?

DREW | Oh, there’s always something to learn.

TOM | I agree. It becomes a whole new discovery to reengage with a play. The work is infinitely evolving because you’re infinitely evolving, and the world evolves too, so the same play means different things at different times. It speaks differently, which has to be reflected in your work.

DREW | I would be willing to bet you that all of us would say, “I’ve never used the same choreography twice.” It just doesn’t apply.

Fight work is a very particular thing that happens at a very particular moment. The point about what happens before and what happens after the action is really interesting, and I would absolutely agree. To me, the aftermath is very important.

TOM | The fights are part of a larger context, and you need to honor the entirety of the piece. Sometimes, as a fight director, it’s awfully tempting to think, “I’m going to go in there and make this really cool thing happen.” But that’s like an actor figuring out his character before the first rehearsal. It is just potentially disastrous in terms of how you serve a play.

GEOFFREY | Several of you also work as movement directors, which includes work on any choreography in a show, including character movement, ensemble imagery, character transitions as well as visual composition in scenes. Robert, you often work as both. Is that a different hat from your fight choreographer hat?

ROBERT | For me, they’re always the same hat.

I think we’re all movement choreographers.

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Scott Drummond, Carson Elrod, Sarah Manton, Claire Karpen in Bedroom Farce at Westport Country Playhouse, with fight direction by Robert Westley PHOTO Carol Rosegg

is violent. Even in the violent elements, there’s always a movement component.

I think we’re always looking for how to emphasize the strengths of the actors, how they move and tell a story physically. Every actor is different. Every actor has different physical traits, so part of my job as a fight choreographer is to maximize the strengths.

TOM | I concur. It’s all about storytelling, and it’s about safety in physical movement.

Whether your character faints and needs to be lifted into a wheelchair or whether you attack somebody with a dagger, the same things apply. You’re telling a nonverbal story, and you want to tell it safely and repeatably.

I’ll occasionally have my feelings about things too. I’ve found instances where in order to feed that conversation, I throw in a thought or an idea. Even if it’s wrong, it always leads toward something productive.

DREW | I’m sure you would all agree that sometimes directors are very specific: “It needs to be this long, and we’re going to have this music.” And then some say, “Just don’t let anybody get hurt.”

STEVE | You can learn a lot from a director during that first meeting. Some of them will say immediately, “This is how I feel about the kind of fighter Tybalt is,” or “This is what I think Blanche DuBois’ real center is and why she needs to strike out.”

TOM | In early conversations, I try to get a feel for how the director wants to work in the room. As Drew said, some directors really want to have a hand in it. Others want to leave you alone in the room with the actors, then come back in and have an opinion. So, it’s often a useful thing to ask, “How would you like me to be in the room with you?”

Then again, you get a lot of directors who ask, “Well, what are your thoughts? How do you see it?”

TOM | That “getting to know you” phase is a really important one. That first date.

I think we’d all agree that it is so important to get the conversation started and then, hopefully, we’ve read the play so we are ready to participate. Sometimes, though, the play isn’t even discussed. I met Nicholas Hytner when I was going to do Twelfth Night with him. He didn’t really want to talk about the play; he just wanted to talk to me and get a feeling for who I was. There are some directors who are like that.

It really is a first date. That’s exactly what it is.

I try, as much as possible, to get the director to talk so I can listen. To just listen is a good way to start to get an understanding of the production, as the director sees it. Of course,

ROBERT | In that conversation, what I try to do is figure out what the collaboration is going to be like. What kind of collaborator they are and how they want me to be in the process.

GEOFFREY | Let’s talk about that first experience—that very first meeting on the phone or at a coffee shop—when you talk to a director you haven’t worked with before. What do you look for in that conversation to help you in the rehearsal process?

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ROBERT | We adapt our skills as best we can to whether the directors are very hands-on or hands-off.

It’s funny. When you’re working in rep, in the morning, I can be with one director who is actively hands-on and we’re really collaborating, and then in the afternoon, the other director might say, “Let me know when you’re done, and I’ll let you know what I think.”

You’re shifting gears on your lunch break.

GEOFFREY | Let’s move into the first fight rehearsal with the actors. What goals do you want to achieve?

Steve Rankin works with Carolyn Braver in rehearsal for Kill Local at La Jolla Playhouse.

STEVE | For me, it’s imperative to size up the actors within the first few minutes that I meet them.

The first type of person I look for is someone who is scared. If they’re scared, it’s good, but it’s also bad because they could be dangerous.

The second type is the overzealous actor. The “I’ll do anything” type of actor. Again, that’s a good thing because they’re going to be valuable, but it could also be a dangerous thing. The third one, which is the subtlest, is arrogance. “Yes, I’ve played Cyrano six times. So I know how to do this.” I go to that person right away and ask, “How do you want to do this?”

Meaning, from my point of view, “Do you want it to be difficult, or do you want it to be easy?”

I want to identify those people because then we’re all on the same page, and we can all get to work.

We also have to work within the limitations and capabilities of the actors. That means emotional, mental, and physical capabilities.

We’ve got to get inside their heads and figure out how to get the ideas in their minds down into their bodies. So, that’s what I do. I size people up and I ask people to move around.

We talk about what we’re going to do, and then we try to do a little staging. But it’s mostly, again, another first date.

DREW | I think we all have some version of that exact same process, Steve. That makes complete sense to me. I talk to people about their training. I talk to people about their physical past. “Do you have injuries? Do you have a knee I need to think about?” Those kinds of questions.

And then I always try to spend a little time talking to them about character. They’ve obviously thought a lot about it by the time the first rehearsal rolls around. Is Tybalt really skilled and arrogant, or is he scared? Is he secretly in love with Romeo? I don’t know—but you tell me and that will help me make some decisions as I start to think about the actual staging.

ROBERT | That’s perfect, Drew. I think a lot of the time the thought is that fight choreographers come in and tell actors exactly what their choices are. The actors forget that they have choices. They have done their work; they know their character.

There has to be a dialogue established with the actors at the beginning so they understand that I am not coming in to tell them what to do. I am there to enhance the choices they are working on. I always want to create a physical vocabulary that everyone can use to collaborate and make the staging unique to that production.

Michael Hayden + Ethan Hawke in the Lincoln Center Theater production of Henry IV, 2004, with fight direction by Steve Rankin PHOTO Paul Kolnik

STEVE | I’m getting ready to do a fabulous new play called Kill Local, with four women who are a family of assassins. One of the actresses called me before rehearsals started and asked, “How am I going to need to train before I get there? I’ve got a bad back and I know I’m going to need to do this and this and this…” I needed to calm her down and remind her that the action will be based on her character. How does she relate to the weapons she’s going to have? How can I make her feel comfortable?

GEOFFREY | It’s really a series of first dates, then, right? From the first look at the play, then the meeting with the director, then the first rehearsal with the actors.

At the first rehearsal, I like to have the director in the room while we chat through the story as it stands so that if I have an actor who has a really strong opinion about the character and the director disagrees, we can begin that discussion before we start codifying movement that dictates one of those choices.

Then I like to start a little smaller so I can take the temperature of the actors to see where they’re at. If they’re really taking to it quickly, then we move forward. But if not, I can step back and reevaluate after that first short rehearsal.

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DREW | Everybody else gets the time in tech, but they think because you’ve been rehearsing for three weeks, you are all set. The fact of the matter is now it’s all new.

STEVE | Yes to time. Also, the environment. Is everything safe? For example, suddenly, the lighting designer has a bunch of footlights along the front of the stage that you hadn’t planned on when you were creating your movement. It’s going to be right where one of your actors’ heads was supposed to land.

So you’ve got to negotiate and arm wrestle with people to make it all safe. Are the sets safe? Are the costumes safe? Is the edge of the stage suddenly too close? Is there scaffolding that somebody’s going to run into? Are the escape stairs safe?

It can be a minefield. But, again, you’re right, Drew; it’s about time. Generally speaking, people are friendly about it, but it’s still a negotiation. I always tell my director that when we get into tech, anytime there is a lull, I’m going to be on stage. If you don’t want me there, just say, “Steve, get off of the stage.”

I won’t take offense at that, but I will try to be a master of five minutes because that’s sometimes all you get.

DREW | You’re so right. If you do that and you are really proactive, everybody wins.

ROBERT | It’s also about the dynamic interaction with lights, sound, and costumes because these other elements can either eliminate or elevate the work you created in the rehearsal room.

I’m constantly saying, “Talk to me about this sound cue” and, “Could we add a layer of frenetic energy to this beat?” or, “Talk to me about that light cue. Is there a way we can time that blackout to cover this?” or, “How do you feel about pushing the audience’s focus over here?” and “Can you help me?”

Joe Curnutte + Randolph Curtis Rand in Fifth Third Bank’s Dracula at Actors Theatre of Louisville, 2014, with fight direction by Drew Fracher PHOTO Bill Brymer

I’m currently doing a big production of Treasure Island, and I have nine actors moving around with swords. It was nice to have a first rehearsal where I sketched in movement and let them invent things with invisible swords.

Just by watching, I could figure out who I needed downstage center, who I needed up center, who needed encouragement, who needed a dictator.

As Steve said, you’re trying to read the room as quickly as you can so you can take the tools you have and make the best action you can.

DREW | I also try hard to make sure the actors understand that nothing is etched in stone with anything I’m about to show them at this point

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in the game. And if it doesn’t make sense to their character—if it hurts their knee, if there’s an issue—they shouldn’t just suck it up and be a martyr. I make it clear they need to tell me and we’ll do something else.

GEOFFREY | Let’s fast-forward to tech. We’ve rehearsed our action. We’ve got it to where we want and now we have all these new facets— the stage, set, lights, costumes—thrown at us.

What’s the main problem you most frequently have to tackle?

DREW | Time.

GEOFFREY | Drew’s one-word answer sums it up, doesn’t it?

That collaboration with the right group of tech people is crucial. Sometimes it really is the costume or the new prop or the light effect that actually elevates the violence beyond what I could ever have done in the rehearsal room.

STEVE | That collaborative process is so important—which is why it is so important for the producers to recognize the viability of the fight director as part of the creative team. This way, when we get into tech, we’re all working together. Just as the dance choreographer is going to go ask for a light cue, we’re going to as well.

I will also say this about tech: if you, as the fight director, don’t get the time needed, you have to speak up. I always tell my actors that if they feel anything is dangerous, they need

to tell me. I will stop the rehearsal and take the heat because I do not want them to get hurt—ever.

DREW | I completely agree, Steve. You do have to be on top of that aspect of the process.

The time will get sucked up, and then they’re only going to give you one shot to run your sequence. You have to advocate and say, “No, no, no, no. Everybody else got hours to do their work. Let me do mine now.”

GEOFFREY | Safety takes the front seat for me, and then aesthetic comes back later. The first thing I do is to make sure the actors survive tech, or there won’t be dress rehearsals or previews.

ROBERT | I think all of us would agree that, hopefully, we’ve had enough time that we’ve worked out any potential hitches before we get into tech. Sometimes tech is a negotiation.

Sometimes you have to be the good cop, and sometimes you have to be the bad cop. There’s the safety component of it, but everybody also wants a good, strong story. Sometimes there needs to be a reminder that we’re all here with the same goal—for that story to be told—which means I might need a little more time here.

GEOFFREY | All right, so now it’s opening night. We don’t often do this, but if you were going to say something to your actors before the show started, what would you tell them?

What’s your best advice?

STEVE | I’ve thought about this a lot, and I want to tell you something that Jack O’Brien told me.

I was doing Henry IV at Lincoln Center with Kevin Kline, and I staged a huge battle with 30 people. It was basically a 15-minute sequence in the play in which there are all different kinds of violence. Everybody got to participate. Some people died right away, some people got killed later.

I kept giving notes during previews. Jack pulled me aside and said, “Steve, Steve: you need to realize that they are never ever going to do it exactly the way you want them to do it. Once you realize this, you can give really good, specific notes based upon how they are going to do it now.” That was such a wise piece of advice that let me suddenly release a little bit because everybody was safe. So, on an opening night, what I tell the actors is, “You’re doing great. Just slow down and enjoy the ride.”

DREW | At that stage of the game, I think all you can do is exactly what you’re saying: just be supportive. That’s it.

ROBERT | I like to tell them, “Trust you’ve prepared and that we’ve created the action so you can let it all go and live and respond in the moment. Don’t focus on the choreography.

Focus on the moments.”

GEOFFREY | I tell them, “Celebrate the mistakes.

We’ve trained to be able to safely make mistakes, so celebrate those. They’ll become the moments that make it live and breathe as you move forward.” Half of the time, we’ve choreographed those “mistakes” to happen.

For instance, the dropping of the dagger or the stumble—that choreography actually keeps the action alive and moving.

Comparing your first fight gigs to now, how has this craft changed since you started working in the field? What has changed technically or artistically for you?

ROBERT | Film and how things are filmed have prepared an audience to be more challenged and have greater expectations. I think cirque and dance have also expanded what our perceived limitations are when it comes to action. These other art forms have allowed for a freedom of physical storytelling that only enhances what is possible with stage violence. That and technology have opened so many doors for keeping actors safe while still creating impact or the illusion of impact.

The challenge for me has been to keep on top of how things have been progressing and make sure that the movement being created on stage is still new and exciting, and encourages an audience to keep coming back.

STEVE | More and more, the audience wants to see movie effects on the stage. To create that kind of impact, you have to have people capable of doing it. You also have to share with the playwrights and directors that people are not going to experience what would be a close-up movie shot in the same way they’re imagining it on the page because people are sitting back 25 rows. So we have to adjust because we’re going to be considering the entire stage when we do it.

I also agree that the technology has changed.

The great thing that I celebrate about us as fight directors is that they can’t do this without us. If it’s film, they can use CGI. But when you can only use the raw material and the actors’ physical capabilities to do this in the theatre, you can’t replace this craft. That’s the great thing about doing theatre—they need us to tell these three-dimensional stories.

DREW | I would agree with everything everybody has said. Also, our tools are much better. The technical director didn’t make them in his garage over the weekend.

GEOFFREY | The swords aren’t made out of rebar anymore.

DREW | Exactly. And I think there is a huge new percentage of people who have skills and training. There was a time when you basically started from scratch on every show you did.

You had to teach that this is the end of the sword you hold.

But, boy, the vast majority of people that I’ve come in contact with lately have had some sort of training. I think that’s helped a lot in terms of giving us a broader range of options when it comes to telling stories. Directors are also more tuned in to our work and more opinionated about it, which I think is a good thing.

ROBERT | I agree about the directors. I’m definitely finding directors who are excited to communicate about the violence of their show, and they are raising their expectation of it.

DREW | Exactly. They have some expectations now. For a long time, you were given free rein to do whatever you wanted, which isn’t necessarily a good thing.

GEOFFREY | For me, the evolution has been prevalent in thrust theatre and theatre-in-theround. I’m working in those predominantly right now. The techniques have adapted. We’re evolving past the kind of upstage, downstage, clap knaps—where an actor uses his or her hands to create the sound of impact for a punch or hit that doesn’t actually make contact.

We’re moving into action that’s much more sleight of hand.

It’s nice to feel that our form is evolving past where it started. Fight direction is young compared to the other design disciplines. We have so many gaps in our knowledge of how they really executed stage fights at certain times. We’re playing a little catch-up with those other artists, but we’re evolving. And not just in terms of moving toward cinematic action, but also embracing the theatricality of violence and what it can do that film can’t.

I have been in the profession for the past 20 years, and I wouldn’t want to look back at the things I created in the late ’90s. The skills I could bring to that room now would be so much different. And, as Drew said, the actors have evolved as well. Partially, the reason we’re getting more options is we’re more often getting a chance to work with people who can run with those ideas, enhance them, and make them better.

How about you, Tom? Have you found it’s changed much since you’ve started?

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TOM | I couldn’t agree more with Drew, Steve, and Robert. I particularly feel that pressure of expectations primed by movies.

As for change, the only other thing I can think to add is that I’ve recently been working with some directors who have developed a very unadorned, dry, prosaic style of storytelling.

Sam Gold is a brilliant example of this. Annie Baker, as a playwright, seems to do this too.

They strip away so much to expose the essence of the story and relationship, and the results are deeply human.

I’ve been lucky to work with Sam on a few things, recently Othello at New York Theatre Workshop and the Hamlet currently at the Public Theater. I don’t know whether any of you saw his Glass Menagerie this season. It was a very empty stage. The actors wore rehearsal clothes, with a folding table and a few chairs.

The acting was very simple and direct. I’ve found that kind of aesthetic affects how I’m being asked to approach the violence. Just like the acting, the action wants to be simpler: unspectacular and very exposed.

From a technical standpoint this is tough, because a lot of the tools we usually use to hide techniques and generate the sort of energy that experiencing violence should convey—such as our knaps and non-contact blows—become less useful. I don’t know that I’ve completely cracked the code yet, but I see this type of challenge showing up more.

GEOFFREY | As we start to wrap up this conversation, I want to talk about the wonderful Agreement that was negotiated between SDC and the League of Resident Theatres. Now, for the first time in history, we have union recognition in a collectively bargained Agreement. We now come to the table with the representation that every other director, choreographer, designer, actor, and stage manager I’ve worked with has had. What does that mean to you—to your work—as professional fight directors and choreographers?

DREW | I’ve been involved with this effort for several years. There was a time before when we tried to get coverage, and it was like herding cats. Nobody could agree. It feels to me that we, as fight directors, have finally been able to find some common ground and sit down and talk to each other. I think that was one of the biggest takeaways from this process. Now there’s a much better exchange between us across the board.

If you just want to talk about the basics, think to yourself, “Wow, I have access to healthcare.

That’s a radical concept for a fight director.” As

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you just said, Geoffrey, everybody else in the room has had that for a long time, and we’ve been the red-headed stepchildren. I think a lot of that was our own fault, but a lot of that was the result of producers not wanting yet another expenditure on their docket. But I’ll tell you, I haven’t found anybody yet from the management side of things or an artistic director who hasn’t said to me, “That’s a long time coming and that’s a darn good thing.”

I’m sure the people having to pay the bills are wishing they didn’t have to deal with this, but I think everybody is reacting positively. I’m really, really thrilled.

STEVE | I am too because now we’re going to be considered in the process when they are putting the productions together. We’re not an afterthought anymore.

Before this coverage, the theatres wouldn’t bring us in from the start. Suddenly, an actor would get hurt because somebody wasn’t staging something correctly, and then they would bring us in late in the process in the middle of a tenuous situation. That’s no good.

Our consideration in the process needs to be earlier. Now they have to think of us when they are putting together the finances.

ROBERT | We’re a budget line item now.

DREW | Exactly. And it’s already happening. I’ve recently had a theatre contact me about jobs way in the future, radically earlier than ever before.

ROBERT | That is good news. In addition to empowering our collaborative voice, which this coverage enhances, personally, I want to speak to the pride that I now have when I walk into the room: I am represented by a union. It has given me even more of a sense of belonging that wasn’t as fully present as it is now.

TOM | From a completely practical standpoint, in the past you or your agent, if you’re lucky enough to have one, have always had to negotiate from essentially a zero position because there was no union contract. There were no given protections, given standards, like property rights.

GEOFFREY | For me, I act, direct, and fight direct. Every year, I’ve had to make sure I get enough acting jobs to qualify for health insurance because that was the only option I had. So, my career path has been dictated by health insurance!

This movement with SDC and LORT’s recognition actually allows me to pick and choose what project I work on from an artistic standpoint, not based on which job will get me

to the doctor or fix my teeth. It sounds small, but it means a great deal because it opens up what I can do artistically.

STEVE | Thank you for asking me to be a part of this discussion. I’ve enjoyed the discourse with all of you so very much. I don’t get enough of it. I look forward to being able to see you all face-to-face and continue this conversation.

GEOFFREY | I completely agree. Let’s do it every Tuesday! I always tend to stay in my market because I’m out here in the middle of America. I rarely get to see other people’s work, and we all grow by seeing other people’s choices. It’s really helpful to talk with this group of colleagues, to hear about the different routes everyone took into this profession, and to be self-affirmed by learning that we all have similar feelings about the room, the director, the script, and the tech process. Now when I get in my head during a rehearsal process, I will remember that we all struggle with the same problems. Any other final thoughts?

DREW | I would just add that the best part of the job for me is facilitating the actor’s job, making it simpler and safer for them to do the action every single night. So I would just say to directors: let me come to rehearsal. Use me. If you’re going to hire me, let me come and have input throughout the course of the production because I would like to think I can make everybody’s job easier. And that’s really satisfying.

And, of course, thanks to all who negotiated the new SDC/LORT Agreement, for making all of that happen.

ROBERT | It means the world to all of us. I’m excited to see where this continues to go, and I’m excited for us to have more conversations like this to keep growing together.

TOM | Amen to that.

GEOFFREY | Thanks for taking the time, everyone. I look forward to talking to you again soon.

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Directing D irecting is an ineffable art, a kind of alchemy. It is often so difficult to discern what is the director’s choice and what is the actor’s impulse, the writer’s word, the designer’s line, or director’s the audience member’s eye. Executed well, a director’s vision can seem effortless despite months of preparation, weeks of rehearsal, and the long hours of tech. Does an audience member sense the depth of the director’s contribution? What do collaborators observe as they watch a director direct?

es wears many hats ensures quality

ifies

What does a director do, really?

SDC Journal set out to answer that question by posing it to theatre practitioners and playgoers who don’t sit in the directorial hot seat. Over the past few months, we drew together lists of people inside and outside the theatre industry who might offer enlightenment, bafflement, and a few questions of their own. The essays you’ll read in this section range from the outsider’s view, such as that expressed by Father Gregory Boyle—a Jesuit priest working with gangs in Los Angeles—to that expressed by Wendall Harrington—a projection designer who has spent most of the last few decades in the twilight of tech with some of the theatre industry’s most renowned names.

We offer their thoughts to help prod your own thinking on the craft, practice, and intangible nature of how a director ties it all together.

Susan Medak

Ted Chapin

Rinde Eckert

Mara Isaacs

David Henry Hwang

Anne Cattaneo

Wendall K. Harrington

Jonathan Parker

David Shiffrin

Rachel Hauck

Shawn Aebi

Larissa FastHorse

Amy Wheeler

Matthew Loeb

Ezra Knight

Father Gregory J. Boyle, S.J. FALL 2017 | SDC JOURNAL

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SUSAN MEDAK Susan Medak has worked as Berkeley Repertory Theatre’s Managing Director since 1990. She has served as president of the League of Resident Theatres (LORT), treasurer of Theatre Communications Group, president of the Downtown Berkeley Association, and is the founding chair of the Berkeley Arts in Education Steering Committee for Berkeley Unified School District and the Berkeley Cultural Trust. Ms. Medak is a proud member of the Mont Blanc Ladies’ Literary Guild and Trekking Society.

What directors do is not nearly as varied as how they do it.

I’ve been an avid hiker for many years. And, as such, I have spent more than my fair share of hours bushwhacking (if not with a machete then with hiking poles), caught in brambles and thorns, through ravines that appear to have no outlet, and, way too often, with absolutely no sense of where I am. When hiking, there is inevitably a moment when one starts to make tracks toward a high point from which to scan the terrain. Only from there is it possible to get one’s bearings and chart a course that is likely to deliver one to a hot bath, dinner, and a cold beer before hypothermia sets in. When I ponder the question “What does a director do?” I find that I keep coming back to those treks in the wilderness as I think about the distinct role of a director.

Throughout the past 40 years, I’ve watched directors who work in so many different ways that it is hard to think of directing as a specific set of actions. I’ve seen directors who stage every flick of the hand and turn of the head. And I have watched others who provide only a loose framework that encourages—and even demands—the full and active participation of every artist in the room. I’ve watched directors who revel in collaboration and others who exercise precise control over every moment. And I have watched the truly wily director who appears to be completely collaborative but is simply a brilliant dictator.

But when the matter of personal style is removed from the mix, every director I’ve ever observed shares a fundamental strategy with every hiking guide I’ve ever known.

Directors are the ones who get up high enough to be able to see where they want to end up. When I write about a “high,” I use the term broadly.

They may very well get a chemically induced high that brings a sort of clarity to their vision. But the kind of high I’m writing about goes way beyond the artificial state induced by a good inhale.

The high I’m referring to is an intellectual high, an emotional high, and a visceral high that allows directors to see beyond the individual components of a production to its larger intentions. They trace the topography of a play so that they can lead the rest of their collaborators out of the underbrush. They anticipate what perilous crossings need to be avoided and which passages may lead to a clearer path. They compensate for the one who makes slow progress and manage the potential impacts of the reckless daredevil who engages in feats of daring abandon but who may put others at risk. They note the strengths and weaknesses of their team and develop strategies for getting the entire group to the same place at about the same time. The best of them do so while making room for endless personal epiphanies by everyone on the journey with them.

What directors do is not nearly as varied as how they do it. The remarkable thing about directing is just how many different paths directors take. And how many “right” but different routes can bring a cast to that metaphorical hot bath and cold beer that constitutes a truly satisfying production.

And for those of us who know that this is not our calling, there are few things as satisfying or gratifying as the pleasure of following someone with the vision, fortitude, skill, and strength that makes us want to go wherever they lead.

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PHOTO

Gregory Costanzo

Stephen Pucci, James Waterston, Angela Lin, Larry Zhang + Jennifer Lim in Chinglish at Goodman Theatre, 2011 PHOTO Chuck Osgood

DAVID HENRY HWANG

Which he then pulled. Without refunding his fee. Or the time...

David Henry Hwang is the Tony Award- and multiple Obie Award-winning author of plays, including M. Butterfly, Chinglish, Yellow Face, Kung Fu, Golden Child, and FOB, as well as the Broadway musicals Elton John & Tim Rice’s Aida (co-author), Flower Drum Song (2002 revival), and Disney’s Tarzan. He is also America’s mostproduced living opera librettist. Mr. Hwang is a Writer/ Consulting Producer for the Golden Globe-winning television series The Affair.

Now, you may find yourself asking: why the hell would I ever want to direct the world premiere of a new play? Of course, that’s a decision every director must make for themselves. I suspect that for This Director, there may be a certain satisfaction—after the agony of labor—in being one of the two principal artistic “parents” responsible for bringing a new theatrical life into the world.

Maybe even some joy.

In my twenties and thirties, I was something of a slut when it came to directors. Though I enjoyed excellent artistic collaborations, I continually moved on after one-show stands to the next relationship. Since my late forties, however, I have spent the majority of my artistic life with one director, who would feel self-conscious if I were to name her, so I won’t. This Director and I are currently working on our sixth show, our fourth world premiere.

Why did I settle down?

Primary of This Director’s virtues is her dedication to realizing the playwright’s vision. Many directors fall more into the auteur category, and I am excited to work on projects they initiate or on revivals of my own plays. But the world premiere of a new show is a moving target. The script changes—sometimes radically—over the course of readings, rehearsal, and previews. Under these circumstances, it’s vitally important that I work with a director committed to the show I see in my mind—especially when I change my mind.

I could go on about This Director, but I’ve got to go. Our new show is premiering in less than a year. And my script still needs a lot of work.

So she’s been giving me deadlines. To meet the workshops she’s scheduled. And checking in every few weeks to make sure I’m on track. If This Director is reading this, she should know that I’m getting back to work on Act II. Now.

Early drafts of my 2006 play Yellow Face, for instance, used a village of the minority Dong people in China as a sort of Shangri-La destination for my play. Eventually, however, we realized I was guilty of exoticizing the Dong, and I rewrote my script to make the village more of a metaconstruct for the play. As our set had been designed to illustrate the earlier concept, however, it had to be redesigned. This would be at the very least an annoying task for any director less committed to following the growth of the play—wherever that might take us.

Realizing the playwright’s vision does not mean becoming a slave or servant to the author. On the contrary, This Director has strong opinions about the script, and we routinely argue about the text. In fact, she often comes up with the best idea for the next rewrite. So, This Director is also a first-rate dramaturg.

The world premiere of a new play requires very specific skill sets. This Director is deft, flexible, inventive, and works quickly. Like the time right before our first preview of Yellow Face, when we realized my one-act play actually needed an intermission. Or the time she had to master a new projection system for my play Chinglish so the English translations of Mandarin dialogue could be visible on the set, rather than above it, without being washed out by area lights. Or the time for my play Kung Fu, when I forced her to use a Chinese choreographer who withdrew from the project only a few months before rehearsals began, having provided us with only one dance.

Jennifer Lim + James Waterston in Chinglish at Goodman Theatre, 2011 PHOTO Chuck Osgood FALL 2017 | SDC JOURNAL

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DAVID SHIFFRIN David Shiffrin is a “lapsed lawyer” who should have worked in theatre in the first place and now serves on several nonprofit boards in Washington, DC, the community he has called home for 40 years. He is most grateful for his 26-year association with Arena Stage, which has changed his life, and that of his family, in so many positive ways.

“What does a director do?” That is a question my then 11-year-old daughter asked me nearly 23 years ago.

I was then, and still am, a member of the Arena Stage Board of Trustees.

Arena has a groundbreaking program called the Board Internship, initiated in the late 1980s by Doug Wager, and continued with enthusiasm by Molly Smith. As an intern, a trustee has the opportunity to be a “quiet observer” of the process in the rehearsal hall. So I could answer my daughter’s difficult and thought-provoking question with the equivalent of “a picture is worth a thousand words”: a peek behind the curtain to observe a director in action as we spent weekends as a family in the rehearsal hall. Doug initiated the Board Internship program to give trustees a fuller understanding of why we engage them in the critical job of raising the funds needed to support the theatre and to show firsthand how we spend those funds in the productions that comprise our seasons year after year.

O’Neill is a favorite playwright of mine and Long Day’s Journey is one of his best, which is what drew me to this internship. This is an intense play, filled with myriad emotions and motivations that Doug Wager had to slowly draw out of his company. The acting company was a stellar group, but some tensions that arose among its members threatened to derail Doug’s ability to get the best out of them. With the skill of a peacemaker, Doug worked hard behind the scenes to smooth out these tensions. The level of intensity and passion he drew from his company was a testament to his success in this effort, as he drew the best performance out of each actor.

The opportunity to observe Zelda Fichandler in the rehearsal hall is what drew me to Awake and Sing! I was fortunate to have this chance; it would turn out to be her last directing engagement at Arena. Zelda spent the first couple of days in the rehearsal process steeping her company in what life was like for a Jewish immigrant living in New York City during the Depression. She brought into the rehearsal hall artifacts of Jewish living that her parents had brought with them from the “old Rainn Wilson, Casey Biggs, Richard Kneeland + Tana Hicken in Long Day’s Journey into Night at Arena Stage, directed by Doug Wager, 1995 PHOTO Joan Marcus

For me, it has been a unique and eye-opening opportunity to observe what transpires in the rehearsal hall as the hard-working “instant family” that a company becomes brings pages of dialogue to life.

Those of us who are not working in the theatre world probably have some lay formulation in mind of what a director does. However, my experience in the rehearsal hall has taught me that things that never crossed my mind are often among the most important contributions that directors make to a production.

Each of the more than two-dozen internships I have experienced over the years has been a rare and enlightening experience. I credit these experiences with making me a more knowledgeable trustee, equipped to be a more effective ambassador and advocate for Arena Stage, and theatre in general, in our community.

From what I have observed, directors wear many, many hats. They are called upon to perform disparate functions in the productions they helm, including but not limited to artistic leader, interpreter, psychologist, final decision maker, coach, instructor, educator, visionary, collaborator, consoler, father/mother, confessor, editor, friend, arbiter, creative manager, referee, teacher, guide, and peacemaker (in no particular order). Each of these functions contributes critically to the final product that appears on stage when the curtain rises on a production.

Of these internships, three productions stand out in my mind: Doug Wager’s production of Long Day’s Journey into Night in 1995, Zelda Fichandler’s production of Awake and Sing! in 2006, and Molly Smith’s production of Mother Courage and Her Children in 2014.

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country,” explaining their significance in Jewish life. It was important for the actors to understand the motivating factors that drove the play’s characters to make the decisions and take the actions they did in Odets’s play.

Armed with this understanding, the company was transformed into a close-knit Jewish family by opening night. Wearing the hat of a teacher/ educator, Zelda also made effective use of the Socratic method, posing questions to her actors rather than giving them the answers about character motivation, rationale, and choices. This stimulated critical thinking and drew out ideas and underlying presumptions that allowed the actors to reach the conclusions on their own that Zelda felt were critical to the development of their characters. Zelda also focused as intently on the “look” of the play as she did on the acting. She personally approved such small details as the table settings in dinner scenes, wall hangings in the apartment, and costumes, ensuring that they were appropriate for a Depression-era family.

For Mother Courage and Her Children, Molly Smith put together what I considered to be an artistic “perfect storm” of actors, designers, literary management, and stage management that made this one of my most intellectually stimulating internships! This is a play in which storytelling, above all other aspects, is critical. Each member of the creative team contributed to the telling of this story. Using movement,

I have been fortunate to have the opportunities I have had to observe the creative process through the lens and perspective of these unique internship experiences. And for this, I am thankful.

Amy Wheeler is the Executive Director at Hedgebrook, a retreat for female writers located on Whidbey Island in Washington. Under her leadership, Hedgebrook has, among other accomplishments, launched the first residency for female screenwriters and won the Humanitas Prize. Ms. Wheeler is a playwright who holds an MFA from the Iowa Playwrights Workshop and has taught at the University of Iowa, Cornish College of the Arts, and in the Young Playwrights Program at A Contemporary Theatre.

A director is a mystic. She surrenders herself to the work to obtain unity among all the moving parts of a theatre piece. If her work is done well, you won’t see her touch. And yet none of it would happen without her. She holds the world of the play in her mind’s eye, lifting it off the playwright’s page and breathing life into it in the room. She coaxes the actors as they find the characters in their minds, bodies, hearts, and souls, inciting them to go deeper into their intellect and emotion than they thought possible. She drives the creative process, divining the designer’s vision from sketches into whole cloth.

She is adept at shifting gears, moving fluidly from the focused den of creativity in the rehearsal room to the material world of production, where she works with the prop master and costume designer to figure out solutions to stage directions like “He becomes a porpoise” or “The sky weeps” or “All hell breaks loose.” She works with the set designer to structure the empty space into a physical container that holds the play while giving it room to breathe.

The director holds the big vision of the piece in her mind, and the spirit of the play in her heart...She soothes the nerves of the pensive playwright and the mercurial actors. Even when it seems certain that this time, this piece of theatre cannot possibly come together by opening night, it does. Because she believes it will.

Tom Marks

Viewed from 30,000 feet, a theatre director oversees and orchestrates the mounting of a production by unifying its various endeavors and aspects. I believe a director’s principal responsibility is to ensure the quality and completeness of a theatre production by leading the creative team in a collaborative effort to realize his or her artistic vision for that production. Every director I have observed has his or her own style and approach, and makes use of a wide variety of techniques, philosophies, and levels of collaboration to achieve the best possible result.

AMY WHEELER

Tech rehearsals are the director’s laboratory. In the darkened theatre, she collaborates with lighting and sound designers to orchestrate all the metaphysical and physical elements into a cohesive theatrical world—creating patterns of vision, sound, and movement that somehow, magically, tell a story. The director is in her element here, at the full height of her conjuring powers, as she renders everything into an impossibly beautiful whole.

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music, pantomime, dance, masks, and text, Molly illuminated the opposing viewpoints and contradictions contained in the material, causing the audience to think and feel and question from moment to moment. Molly created a safe place in the rehearsal hall that unconditionally supported each member of the cast so that they could experiment and take artistic risks. As the rehearsal process progressed, I observed the actors developing and deepening their characters as Molly shaped and refined their performances.

Unlike playwrights and designers, who work first in solitude, the director’s process is on full display. Her canvas is the blank page, the empty space. With the stage manager as her trusty guide, she navigates the rhythms of stopping and starting, the missed cues, the missing props, the fine tuning of light, color, texture, and timing that can make or break a scene—in full view of us all. We witness the clunky missteps, her questioning, her decisiveness and indecision.

And then we witness those breathtaking moments when all of it— light, sound, the actor’s breath—coalesces into a perfectly timed moment, and we exhale together: “That’s it.”

Throughout the process, the director holds the big vision of the piece in her mind and the spirit of the play in her heart. She holds the reins.

She keeps things on track and everyone focused. She keeps the faith.

She soothes the nerves of the pensive playwright and the mercurial actors. Even when it seems certain that this time, this piece of theatre cannot possibly come together by opening night, it does. Because she believes it will.

A director’s work is quite possibly the most important, least visible work that happens in the theatre. We wouldn’t have plays without playwrights. But we wouldn’t have theatre without directors.

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Ezio Pinza + Mary Martin in the original Broadway production of South Pacific, 1949, directed by Joshua Logan PHOTO c/o Rodgers & Hammerstein: An Imagem Company

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Matt Murphy

Paulo Szot + Kelli O’Hara in Lincoln Center Theater's 2008 revival of South Pacific, directed

by Bartlett Sher PHOTO Joan Marcus

TED CHAPIN Ted Chapin is the President and Chief Creative Officer at Rodgers & Hammerstein, where he has been responsible for managing the copyrights of musicals created by Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II and others. He began his career as a production assistant on several Broadway productions, and then assisted directors on The Unknown Soldier and His Wife (John Dexter), Bernstein’s Mass (Gordon Davidson), and The Sunshine Boys (Alan Arkin). His book Everything Was Possible: The Birth of the Musical Follies was published by Alfred A. Knopf.

everyone feels appreciated and free to do his or her work. Sometimes you don’t need to appear to do much, provided the mood is right and group creativity is encouraged.

Well, let’s start by asking who would want to be a director? What kind of personality wants to be the undisputed chief at the beginning, but whose job is gradually to let go of pretty much everything, to the point where he or she walks away and hands it over? That has always fascinated me.

In my early years, I was an assistant to directors. I was a note-taker, a scheduler, and a conduit. Today, there are bona fide assistant or associate directors. That seems like a smart move. Even though I was only an assistant, I felt comfortable enough to give the directors I was working with some thoughts about staging. My memory (sometimes— alas—faulty) is that both John Dexter and Alan Arkin took my suggestions and used them. That was very cool. But I wasn’t fooled into thinking that meant I was actually close to the director. I was support staff, to be sure.

When it works best, the director is indeed the leader, understanding profoundly what the author has written, often helping to shape it (but then that’s also the purview of a dramaturg, which is a relatively new but extremely useful position), understanding enough to cast the show entirely appropriately, hire the absolutely correct designers, and then lead everyone through the stumbling, awkward yet focused and exciting creation of a production. Oh, and he/she has to be personable enough, and have talent enough, to have the producer hire him/her in the first place.

It’s also a plus if a director likes actors and is willing to work with them.

That seems obvious, but, oh, how often it isn’t the case. Directors: you only look better if you put yourselves in the service of your actors.

And that works best if you create a spirit in the rehearsal room where

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Does any of that seem easy? Absolutely not. The director is all-important until the moment when the work is done, the production is up and running, and he or she can go on to the next project. Of course, if the show is a big hit, maintaining it is another whole skill that some directors are better at than others.

One last thing: concept. Since I toil mostly in the world of revivals, the notion of how important it is that the director come up with a “concept” is often spoken about. My feeling is that concepts are fine, as long as a) they serve the piece itself, b) they make sense, and c) you get buyin from everyone on the team. I’ve been around some extraordinary concepts and I’ve been around some lousy concepts—and for the very same work. A caution I would offer with concepts is not to overlook the fact that theatre is an emotional experience and concepts are often intellectual. They need to work hand in hand to work best.

I have always looked to a director to do a large variety of difficult things well, including some of the things I’m listing here. I’ve been fortunate to work with a number of directors who actually did all these things well. I deeply appreciate just how hard this is. Is there an order to this list? No! They all must be done simultaneously!

1. A director has to look with totally fresh eyes at a play, without relying on clichés or past interpretations. And a director has to take time to do this. In my experience, this is the only way an original vision can be realized. We’ve all read the Greeks and we know this period. But it took Bryan Doerries to put two and two together and realize that if on Aeschylus’s tomb it doesn’t say “He wrote the Oresteia” but instead “He fought in the Battle of Marathon,” then these plays were being performed for an audience of military veterans, male citizens of Athens who were mobilized to defend Athens at the many battles during the fifth century BCE. And so Theatre of War came into being. If it’s a classical play or revival, this kind of “fresh seeing” is very difficult: to find something new, relevant, and personal in the play without imposing on or “violating” the play. I believe strongly that great plays have a multitude of levels that change as history progresses and can be discovered in each new production.

One of my very favorite directors, Peter Stein, once said, “I have no ideas. I only have the text.” Need I add I have never seen a director with more radical ideas than Peter Stein?

In working on a new text—a world premiere—a director has to be enormously careful to truly understand the new work and allow it to be what it wants to be. The questions to the playwright, the “trying” or “showing” of different ways of approaching scenes, or how to approach playing specific characters, can do this, if done with a light hand. “Telling” a writer how a totally new play should be played usually leads to disaster.

And, most importantly, for very new work, understanding what may be missing, or on what section of the play the attention of the writer should be focused during the rehearsal process, is the apex of the director’s art. It’s very hard to do. Who’s good at doing this? George C. Wolfe.

2. A director needs to be the most enthusiastic and caring collaborator to his/her artistic team

Len Cariou and Kate Burton in Measure for Measure at Lincoln Center Theater, directed

by Mark Lamos, 1989 PHOTO c/o Lincoln Center Theater

3. Every year in the Lincoln Center Theater Directors Lab, the guiding question of control emerges. How much? How to exert it? We were once fortunate enough to invite Jacques Lassalle—then Artistic Director of the Comédie-Française—to the Lab to work with American actors (including Zeljko Ivanek and Beth Marvel) on The Misanthrope. Referring back to point #1 above, he staged it in a way I’d never imagined: there were post-coital bedroom scenes, where the banter (usually located in a drawing room) had a totally different resonance and impact. In a reception given in his honor by the French Embassy, to which we invited a group of brilliant New York theatre actors, I found him seated on a low dais in the Versailles-like reception room, with the acting community arrayed at his feet, leaning in as he whispered to them. “That’s how he does it!” I realized.

4. Design, design, design. All the directors I admire hold their design teams close, start work when they approach the play, and ask for their thoughts about every part of the production. Bad ground plans have sunk many a production; over-designed shows can overwhelm a play. A visual sense informed by art and design outside the world of theatre is an enormous asset. How many times have directors I admire taken a team to wander in a museum, with the director—not the designer—leading the way?

5. I love directors who reach out and work with actors who might not be those currently most “in demand.” There are so many good actors around.

6. A director who can create a company with unity and with surprises, who discovers a way of working together that brings a unique style to the production, is something I admire. Finding the right actors to embody a new text for the first time is everything. Who are Mamet actors?

Beckett actors? Wasserstein actors? Wilson actors? Durang actors? Shepard actors? Fornes actors? Shange actors? These were the questions that dominated my early days in the theatre.

A great example of a director doing a range of very difficult things well came very early on in my time at Lincoln Center Theater. I was fortunate to work on a production of Measure for Measure with Mark Lamos. Not an easy play. It was originally planned to be in rep in a Broadway house but ended up in the Mitzi Newhouse. John Conklin and Pat Collins designed.

Sara Krulwich

Anne Cattaneo is the Dramaturg at Lincoln Center Theater and the founder of the Lincoln Center Theater Directors Lab. A sample of the many plays she commissioned and developed include Wendy Wasserstein’s Isn’t It Romantic, Mustapha Matura’s Meetings, and Christopher Durang’s Beyond Therapy. Ms. Cattaneo is a faculty member at the Juilliard School.

and intuit how to guide them. “Ride the horse in the direction it’s going,” says Mark Lamos. “What do I do well?” asks Dan Sullivan. “I can sense when an actor is in trouble because they’ve tried something interesting but perhaps wrong, and I can help them get out of the trouble they’re in.”

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ANNE CATTANEO

Here’s where Mark began—and I can’t think of two more exciting ideas for this mysterious play. He realized (as anyone who reads the play could; see note on Bryan Doerries above) that the very final image Shakespeare leaves us with is of a monk kissing a nun in a sexual way. And, another radically new idea: Mark wanted to set the play on a rotating stage where all the rooms and places in the city would be simultaneously visible. A character would exit a scene to enter into another location. The audience could see the characters who remained in the room that was left. The city of Vienna itself, with its many worlds, its oddly questionable morality, would be visible on stage. These two ideas alone gave us a frenzy of possibilities.

Next, he assembled a brilliant cast that, like the disparate worlds of Shakespeare’s Vienna, brought many worlds together: Len Cariou played the Duke; Kate Burton and Campbell Scott played Isabella and Angelo. The subplot team was led by Jack Weston, Reggie Montgomery, Ethyl Eichelberger, Lois Smith, and Thom Ikeda.

Brad Whitford and Lorraine Toussaint played the secondary lovers. This was a world!

When the production was moved up here to the campus, John Conklin pivoted and created a Cy Twombly-like background wall, simple, and covered with Twombly-like scribble marks, that threw complete focus to the actors and the language of the play. This experience for all of us was a dream, of collaboration, exploration, freedom, and a luxurious bath in the deep waters of Shakespeare.

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RACHEL HAUCK Rachel Hauck is a New York City-based set designer who has designed extensively for Off-Broadway and regional theatre, and who was the Resident Set Designer at the O’Neill Playwrights Conference for 10 years.

Her design work has been recognized with Drama Desk, Lucille Lortel, and Ovation Award nominations as well as an Obie Award for Sustained Achievement. She frequently works on new plays and musicals, and has been honored to work with remarkable directors.

What does a director do? Well, that’s an oddly intimidating question. I really love and deeply admire directors. It’s really hard to describe what they do.

But until I know what about the play is interesting to the director, I can’t take even a first step toward what the environment might look like. It’s the director’s initial impulse about the text and the story that will shape every choice I make. No matter how specific the playwright’s descriptions of the world may be (if there are any descriptions at all), there are countless forms that design could take and still honor every word the playwright has given us. Tone, take, interpretation—all of those things are at the heart of that first step, and then we’ll discover the second step together. Of course, none of this works without an enormous amount of trust.

I would guess that directors’ relationship with writers is their most intimate, but the intimacy of their work with the actors has to be a close second. Sometimes, as a designer, you get a job that’s like being handed a winning lottery ticket because it means that you’ll be in a rehearsal with a great, great director and a brilliant actor while they shape and craft a performance. If you’re lucky, you watch as somehow the actor disappears and a new person emerges in their place, discovered one thought, one beat, one breath at a time. That new character appears only after a million conversations that all start with “What if...” or “Try...” If I didn’t get to be such a shameless voyeur and watch that process, I wouldn’t have any idea how complex that journey is.

In tech, when everything starts to come together—even though the director has been living in the story for so long by then, beat by beat and blow by blow with the actors— somehow, when everything moves into the theatre, he or she takes a step back and sees it fresh all over again. Now the whole world is there: set, lights, costumes, and sound. Block by block, we start to build again.

Taking it all in, adjusting now that we’ve learned what we’ve learned from the actors and rehearsals. Maybe some of that stuff that sounded like a good idea months ago actually steers the story in the wrong direction; maybe a lot of it does. I’ve often admired the way that, in the middle of a tech, when we are all watching a scene for, like, the 15th time, trying out one new idea, this time somehow the spark ignites—and the director can see it and how it should work. The poor assistant keeps writing and writing as the director whispers notes, never taking his or her eyes off the stage. Suddenly, there are notes for all of us. We all take the notes, make the changes, try again, and this time the ball drops, and it works. And we move on. It’s like a tiny tech miracle.

There’s a whole side of being the director that would honestly make my head explode: the producing part, the marketing, the logistics and management side of the gig. I don’t have any idea what’s involved with that part, but it looks really hard.

What does a director do, eh? How about this? If the story starts to unfold and you, as an audience member, slowly become totally absorbed—less and less aware you’re in a theatre and more and more involved in the story—and, slowly, you go down a rabbit hole, and you’re not even quite sure how you got there, but emotionally you have been engulfed by what you’re watching...well, that’s great directing.

Above all, a director is a great storyteller. To do what they do, they need clarity and vision, talent and instinct, artistry, craft, a kind of insatiable curiosity, generosity, and humanity.

Above all, a director has to be a great storyteller. To do what they do, they seem to need this simple list of skills: clarity, vision, talent, a great gut instinct, artistry, craft, a kind of insatiable curiosity, generosity, and humanity. They need killer people skills. Sometimes (maybe a lot of the time?), the gig requires pure muscle and borderline superhuman stamina.

The routes directors take and how they use these skills are as different as the people who sit in that chair at the front of the room. Whatever the path—whatever crazy, bumpy ride we’re in for—when we get to the end of the road and every artist is in sync, feels strong, and is doing his or her best work, and the sum has somehow become greater than its parts, it is the director who has shaped, influenced, and inspired every choice on that stage—and, along the way, they have made their own work invisible. No wonder no one knows what a director does.

Making theatre is weirdly scary and vulnerable work. To do it well, every artist in the room has to crack open his or her heart and put it on the line. It’s the director who invites us in, making us feel safe enough to try anything, to put all our good and totally terrible ideas on the same table.

Directors sift through that giant pile of ideas and start down a path. They push or coax us, or lead us past our safe zones, past the terrain we’ve been on before, past where we thought our limits were until we find the strongest, most interesting, most unexpected choices. The great ones make us all work really hard because it turns out that people are never as simple as they seem to be. If you’re going to make plays about people and the absurd things we do, you have to look past the things we will admit we do.

From a designer’s perspective, I can never start work on a project until I’ve had a cup of coffee with the director and we’ve talked about the text for a couple hours. That conversation is rarely about the set. Sure, I know where the story takes place and whether or not we need a couch.

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of IATSE Local One PHOTO c/o

MATTHEW LOEB Matthew Loeb is the International President of International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees (IATSE), a position he has held since 2008.

As President, Mr. Loeb established IATSE’s Education Department and established, among many other programs, the first Training Trust for the union’s members. Mr. Loeb serves as a board member at the Museum of the Moving Image in Astoria, NY, and on the World Executive Board of UNI Global Union.

An actor, a director, and a stagehand walk into a bar, and there are only two parachutes.

What the hell? A disjointed setup for a joke, indeed. Who can take the story, coordinate the characters to work in concert, and weave the narrative into a proper punchline? Who can coordinate the collaborative presentation of ideas; create physical wit, beauty, and ambience that will be engaging; awaken the imagination; and, ultimately, delight an audience? Well, if all goes according to plan, the director, of course.

In assembling the multidimensional puzzle of a stage production, the director is uniquely situated to observe the many moving pieces and adjust them toward a cohesive vision. The director must sometimes remold the pieces themselves to find a fit that’s suitable.

So how will the characters in the disjointed joke setup behave? The director will work with casting to find performers who have attributes compatible with their place in the story and mentor them toward a unified vision that suits the theme. The director will sculpt the performances and give attention to details in dialogue, movement, expression, and delivery of the performance.

And what will they look like? Will they be kempt and clean-shaven or scruffy, rugged, and disheveled? Or will each of them be unique to reflect their given position in the story? Decisions, decisions. Will their clothes reflect a period or contemporary appearance? The director will need to work with the costume designer and hair and makeup personnel to exact the intended look of the characters. And their appearance must comport with the desired environment created by the set and lights.

What will the bar look like? Old or new? Will it be built with a look of wood, marble, or something else? How will it be positioned on the stage to best accommodate the actors and the visual conveyance of the message to facilitate the punchline? Will there be projected elements to focus or contrast the overall look? Will lights be dim or bright to illuminate the deliberate choices relative to the scenic elements? The director will need to consult and collaborate with the set designer and lighting designer to establish the intended atmosphere.

And what of sound and music? Will the ambience in the bar be created with quiet jazz or heavy metal? Perhaps neither are compatible to the period established and conveyed by scenery and costumes. Or maybe the director, composer, and sound designer want to juxtapose the sound with the feel of the other elements—a decision certainly within the realm of creative choice and with collaboration among the sound mixer, sound designer, and director. Will there be incidental background music or other sounds? More decisions for the director and the other members of the artistic and technical team to consider.

The cohesive vision of the director will permeate all the various layers of the production. The director and set designer work with drafters to supply plans to shops that then build them to specifications. They are constructed by carpenters, painted by scenic artists, and technical and other scenic elements may be installed by property or special effects people. Once loaded into a theatre, the lights and scenery are ably installed by stagehands whose work is critical for the artistic integrity of the show. They also respond and adapt to changes requested by the director as the installation occurs, and sometimes afterward as adjustments are made. Costumes and wigs are built and bring defining characteristics to the overall production.

The mass collaboration and unification of the crafts and skills of so many is essentially coordinated by the director. Of course, each person who brings expertise to a production is crucial to its success. But the director is responsible for coordinating the big picture, seeing to it that the puzzle fits together and there are no missing or misshapen pieces.

Q. How many directors does it take to change a light bulb?

A. That’s not your jurisdiction!

Who can coordinate the collaborative presentation of ideas; create physical wit, beauty, and ambience that will be engaging; awaken the imagination; and, ultimately, delight an audience?...

The director, of course.

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Wallflowers Scene from Eye Piece by Rinde Eckert with The University of Iowa Department of Theatre Arts in collaboration with Hancher Auditorium.

RINDE ECKERT Rinde Eckert is a total theatre artist: writer, composer, librettist, performer, director, and musician. His opera/New Music Theatre works include Ravenshead, And God Created Great Whales, Orpheus X, Highway Ulysses, and The Aging Magician. Mr. Eckert has been honored as an inaugural Doris Duke Artist, as a recipient of the Alpert Award and a Guggenheim Fellowship, and as a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in drama.

Here is how it works in the classical regional theatre model of work making: Playwrights write plays. Readers read them. The scripts that read best are sent higher up to the artistic directors of the theatres to read. If those directors like the script, they champion readings.

If the readings go well, a workshop of about (or precisely) 29 hours is organized. If the theatre is excited enough about the play, they might do a staged reading—another minimal commitment to the development of the play. If the play passes this last test, the theatre might then book it. A director is chosen. Actors are auditioned. Rehearsals begin. In American theatres, this will be about a three-week process. The first few days involves the cast seated around a table, reading and discussing the play. Then they get on their feet and start working on staging. For most directors in these theatres, the process is primarily psychological: talking to actors about motivation, trying to get out of the way of the actors as they develop approaches to their characters and negotiate with the other actors as they, too, form their ideas.

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This is what I call “theatre as extension of literature.” The actors are bringing a written world to life.

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plausible, rational, edifying, and psychologically complex, perhaps even poetic, but necessarily words on a page.

This paradigm of theatre is particularly American, born in part, I suppose, by the lack of government funding that constrains theatres in this country. Still, it has resulted in some remarkable work. But it has discouraged the development of theatrical work that cannot be captured or even discovered on the page—work that can only be found in situ with a director and actors working in actual space with actual objects in actual time. Starting without a map, of course, this theatre requires more time.

Still, as difficult as it is to work in this way, it is my preferred way to make things. I love the openness of the uncharted waters, the possibility of sudden changes of course, changes of destination, even. One starts out trying to get to some shining city on the far hills only to discover in the process that the city was a mirage and the actual shining city is over the hills to your left, unnoticeable from where you were and lost to you if you insist on moving in a straight line to your imagined (and, as it turns out, imaginary) goal.

Let’s say you are working on a scene involving Tiresias, the blind, transgendered wise man of Greek myth. He has been guiding your protagonist (a now blind painter) into the world of the non-seeing, the blind leading the blind. Tiresias has been a calming presence in the piece. He has the sobriety of one who has seen all that man is and can be, from the heroic to the horrifying. He has that benign sadness of one who has never turned away from the world, no matter how unjust or terrifying it has been. One who, in his blindness, has seen more than the sighted.

On the set, there are a number of old wooden folding chairs. Tiresias sets one folding chair in the center of a relatively bare stage. He invites an actor to sit in it. Music begins to play— Messaien’s “Praise to the Eternity of Jesus,” from his Quartet for the End of Time. Tiresias speaks to us, inviting us to imagine a dance hall with a single row of folding chairs around the perimeter of the large room facing the dance floor. He asks us to imagine wallflowers, those no one invites to dance, seated in these chairs. The actor in the chair begins to move languidly and gracefully with the music, lifting his/her legs and arms in graceful patterns while remaining fixed to the chair.

Tiresias comes up behind this seated dancer, placing his hands on her face, lifting his own face up and to the left or right, as if he is listening to the shape of his hands on the face of the dancer, like a blind person exploring the face of a lover or a stranger.

The director fosters an atmosphere of openness and trust, embraces the moment, uses what is at hand, what presents itself, what the performer has brought into the room, listens to the tables and chairs, what the floor is trying to tell us, takes in the music of the theatre itself, its volume, its rhythm.

Suddenly another actor comes up behind Tiresias and begins to feel the face of the old seer in the same way the old seer is feeling the face of the seated dancer. Others come with folding chairs, sit in them, and begin to dance, seated. Others come to feel the face of the seated dancers. Others come to feel the face of those who feel the face of the seated dancer. Suddenly it seems as if the line behind Tiresias never ends, the blind feeling the face of the blind feeling the face of the blind.

This construction was heartbreaking and beautiful. I built it; that is, I directed the actors to their places and told them what to do. I set it in motion, but it seemed like it was the inevitable result of myriad small steps that had been taken up to that point by all of us: actors, designers, producers. But in this situation, it was the director’s job to notice the possibility, to see the folding chair, take in its fragility, connect it to the character of Tiresias, his vulnerability, the dance of his dual lives as woman and man, to see the dance hall in the arrangement of folding chairs, to then imagine the actors as wallflowers. It was only after the physical image had been discovered that a text was written to make all these elements adhere. The text served the physical idea, not the other way around In a process of development that gives physical elements (movement, props, set pieces) equal weight with the text ( just “text,” not “the text”), this is what I hope for as a director: a moment of supreme clarity, when all the various psychological pressures and meaningful objects pull against each other and leave us suspended there between heaven and hell, between the tragic and the burlesque.

In an open process where the theatrical work is still being imagined (as opposed to a fait accompli in the head of the playwright), the director fosters an atmosphere of openness and trust; embraces the moment; uses what is at hand, what presents itself, what the performer has brought into the room; listens to the tables and chairs, what the floor is trying to tell us; takes in the music of the theatre itself, its volume, its rhythm. Directing in this way becomes a dance: more visceral than cerebral, more music than literature, more of the room, less of the page.

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Anna Billingskog

WENDALL K. HARRINGTON

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Wendall K. Harrington has been working in the field of projected media for live events since the mid1970s. Her designs for Broadway include The Who's Tommy, Grey Gardens, The Elephant Man, My One and Only, The Heidi Chronicles, The Will Rogers Follies, Having Our Say, Company, and Ragtime. She has designed extensively for opera, ballet, and concerts, including Talking Heads’ “Stop Making Sense” and Pete Townshend’s “Psychoderelict,” as well as tours for Chris Rock and Simon & Garfunkel. Ms. Harrington teaches at the Yale School of Drama, where she is the Head of Projection Design.

A director is a person with the imagination and confidence to take words on a page and bring them to life in four dimensions—with the fourth dimension being “space-time.” We hear often about putting a show on its feet and of creating a world for a play; these are clearly directors’ tasks. Theatre is a collaborative medium, and without producers, we would live out our dreams just in our heads.

The director is the one who comes to the work with an abundance of trust, comprehension, flexibility, and, indeed, love.

The director is, at his/her best, the calm center of the storm: steering and being steered with one eye fixed on the destination, the other reading the room.

A director trusts herself to bring justice to the playwright—an awesome responsibility.

A director trusts actors to become these particular characters, and is open to the discoveries and questions that might revise—even reverse—the director’s own thinking. Graceful enough to embrace the valuable discoveries and smart enough to discard the invaluable no matter where it comes from, great directors ought to be running the U.N. A director must trust also his/her own instincts regarding the physical production. Reading a quarter-inch model and knowing it will serve the play is a miracle of faith that can compete with the Transfiguration of Christ, in my mind. Who doesn’t love tiny chairs in a little box? Seeing beyond that and knowing the play should live only there is an exhibition of self-reliance and faith in designers.

Great directors always exhibit that trust. This isn’t to say that they love everything one does, but even when they don’t like “this,” I always feel that if we ask enough questions, we would get to “that.” That trust is empowering to the designer. There are directors for whom I would crawl through broken glass to prove that their trust in me was well placed. I write about trust because it is the quality I appreciate most when working with a director.

Over the years, several directors have suggested to me that I ought to direct. I was flattered: I know I have strong dramaturgical skills, and I am terrifically organized, but I thought it was mostly a way of getting my endless questions out of their room. I tried it only once. I had no illusions that it would be easy, but all those questions! From all directions! And actors! Actors are so needy! I never felt less adequate in all my life. In my frustration and uncertainty, I consulted Sir Richard Eyre and was schooled: “Actors are the bravest and most generous people in the world.” His is a worldview that makes for great work on the stage, and those words have made me a better collaborator.

A director is a craftsman of compromise. So many forces are competing to put on a play. The odds really are stacked against it: time, money, uncertainty, and insecurity in every department. The director is, at his/her best, the calm center of the storm, steering and being steered with one eye fixed on the destination, the other reading the room. Focused on the timing of a phrase, proposing a cut to the writer, suggesting the loss of a beloved prop or scenic gesture, using all the empathic skills that every director must possess. I often stand in awe.

Not all directors are good at everything equally. Some are terrific with the text—writing, adapting, translating language into space, time, and feeling. Some directors are brilliant with actors, eliciting great performances or perhaps getting out of their way. Some are great with the choreography of actors, making space itself dynamic and emotional. Yet some directors with many of these essential skills can exhibit an insensitivity to visual subtlety or do not know how to run a tech efficiently and are easily distracted. That’s where the trust comes in. When an artist feels the trust and can see the goal, we will all stroke together to get elegantly to the shore. Maybe that’s the aging hippie in me, but after nearly 40 years in this business, I have plenty of examples to share.

The obverse is also true: micromanaging is the opposite of trust. Giving line readings, telling designers what to do, and calling out fade counts rarely makes for a collaborative room. I suppose good work can come out of that, but it might have been transcendent if built on trust. It takes courage and enormous generosity to face the questioning crowd (actors, designers, writers, producers, the audience) and trust in their innate wisdom to find and serve the answers.

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What does a director do? They do it all. They are conductors, parents, shrinks, Mother Superior, comrades-in-arms, teachers, students, at times dearest friends, or frustratingly obtuse. They are the center of the theatrical universe. Shhhh…don’t tell the writers, or the producers.

Peter Brook’s The Tragedy of Hamlet PHOTO P. Victor, c/o Seattle Repertory Theatre

SHAWN AEBI Until recently, Shawn Aebi long held the position of the General Manager for Customer Service and Support at the Microsoft Corporation in Seattle.

He is now an Information Technology Consultant for 501 Commons.

As an avid theatre-goer for many decades, it is natural that I am now seeing a play produced for the third or fourth time in different regions of the country and during various economic and social climates. Styles, settings, and budgets range wildly in the theatre world; it is easy to fall into the trap of comparing these productions and then contemplate why one version of a play connected with you differently than another.

I have slowly figured out that the director is perhaps the major force in determining what I took from the play.

I was fortunate enough to witness a remarkable production of Hamlet directed by Peter Brook in Seattle. It was a stripped-down version performed on a simple square shag carpet with a minimal cast. And yet it was the most powerful of the many iterations of that classic play that I have seen. I’ve read that Brook claimed that the director was the main creative force in any production. As a serial reader of novels, poetry, and plays, I struggled with that concept for some time. Surely the playwright was the main force, and all others were simply following an imaginary instruction manual with varying degrees of success. And yet, over time, it’s become clear to me that Brook is right: the words on the page are literally two-dimensional and there needs to be some powerful vision to make those words triumph in the current hyper-interruptive world in which theatre lives today.

Ideally, directors pick plays, and not the other way around. Directors, like all artists, have big messages they want delivered—and the works they select support this larger intent. We read interviews with directors who talk about why a certain play was selected and how it was produced in a specific manner to elicit this abject emotion, perhaps there on the surface, perhaps buried beneath layers of other baggage. The director

interprets the work and brings to light this potent component called relevance: why perform this play, in this way, right now? I suspect this is what drives the director to experiment with devices like time or geographical substitutes as well as gender switches. In the past year or so, I have seen Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew set in a Southern trailer park and watched as an all-female cast representing the Houses of York and Lancaster battled it out in a powerful adaption of Henry VI. The directors here either had a different message to convey through their interpretations of the work or they wanted to present the traditional message using an entirely new method. Executed correctly, shifting a play to a different setting can emphasize a certain point the director feels is highly relevant, bringing a larger spotlight on gender or ethnic dimensions. It breathes new life into the written words.

Part of the joy of theatre is sitting down and not knowing how the message is going to be delivered. Directors are in charge of tone; like orchestral conductors, they set the pace of the play. Certain words are “punched” during those climactic scenes. The amplitude and violence (or softness, if needed) rest on the shoulders of the conductor.

Ultimately, the director is responsible for how we feel at the end of the performance. You should feel crestfallen at the end of The Glass Menagerie, conflicted during Mrs. Warren’s Profession. The plot itself sets your mood along those vectors, but it feels that the director should challenge you, using either the dialogue or some device to propel you in the right direction.

Of course, directors do so much more beyond the artistic construction— assisting in the marketing, informing boards and supporting communities on why certain approaches were taken, and participating in vital fundraising activities to ensure the theatre continues to thrive fiscally. Their skills span numerous disciplines, but it is their role as curators of the written word—translating plots into magically entertaining living canvases—that distinguishes them as creators.

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EZRA KNIGHT Ezra Knight’s work as a professional actor began at Arena Stage with the Living Stage Theatre Company in Washington, DC. He was seen most recently in Billions on Showtime and in the Goodman Theatre's production of Ivo van Hove's revival of A View from the Bridge.

“What does a director do?”

This question was first asked of me in Mrs. Judy Steele’s Drama and Speech class at Thomas Jefferson Junior High School in Arlington, VA. I was 12 years old at the time, and the question was part of a larger test/quiz on the many working parts of the theatre, such as: “What’s the difference between a Leko and a Fresnel?” “What’s a gel?” “What’s an apron?” “Name three things a stage manager does.” “What does it mean to ‘strike’?” And for extra credit: “What does a director do?”

In my theatre-nascent, early adolescent brain, “Everything” was my one-word answer. (I may actually have added an exclamation point for dramatic emphasis.) The “high C” I received on the test left me feeling dissatisfied and robbed, particularly by her harsh Ezra Knight (left) in P.S. I Love You at Wakefield High School, directed by Judy Steele critique—delivered in classic red ink—of my extra-credit attempt.

“No specifics/unacceptable,” it read.

How could she not accept that answer?! Everything was what I saw the older student directors—and even Mrs. Steele herself—doing! Everything: brainstorming, conceptualizing and writing whole scenes—or even the entire play itself when we created original works. As for the scripted plays, more of Everything: production, set design and construction, props, choreography, wardrobe, publicity, music, snacks, and, of course, even acting. It was obvious!

Mrs. Steele agreed to speak with me briefly after class and gave me the opportunity to redeem some extra credit if I could verbally provide more specifics to my answer. I did so, and my “high C” became a “low B.” Bully for me. Mrs. Judy Steele was not only an excellent teacher but was my best and favorite teacher from junior high all the way through high school— and remains, to this day, among the dearest of friends. But that’s another story...

After more than 35 years as a professional actor who has worked in everything from free street theatre to prisons, from downtown performance art to Broadway, from television to film, I can say with severe clarity that—across all media—all actors need directors.

Therefore, I will lose no love or respect for Mrs. Steele by modifying my original, unacceptable extra-credit answer in this way: a director does not have to do everything, but a director must be aware of everything. Working in the highly compartmentalized world of professional theatre is profoundly challenging. For all kinds of reasons practical and political, it’s easy to forget those earlier years of working or the crucible of conservatory or the formative experiences where we were allowed—or even forced—to do everything. No money. No resources. No clue. What a director creates from these circumstances is deeply revealing—and a test of craft as well as skill.

A director must also be something of a know-it-all because, like Mrs. Steele, a director must also teach. My favorite directors have all taught me something about the character or

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the craft, or about the world or about myself. Or sometimes all of the above.

MARA ISAACS

The director is also a learner. Any good teacher will speak of how much they learn in the teaching process. The deeper the director’s learning of the cosmology and specific details of the world to be presented, the greater the teaching and, therefore, the stronger the leadership. For, ultimately, a director must lead. The style of leadership depends on the director, from the bold, brave commander to the enthusiastic cheerleader, and everything in between.

Mara Isaacs is the Founder and Executive/Creative Producer of Octopus Theatricals and is dedicated to fostering an expansive range of compelling theatrical works for local, national, and international audiences. She has produced more than 100 productions that have been seen on and off Broadway throughout the United States and internationally. Prior to founding Octopus Theatricals, she served as the Producing Director at McCarter Theatre Center and produced play development programs and productions for Center Theatre Group/Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles.

A director is a team-builder, insomuch as a cast and crew is a “team,” and an ultimate connector of energies and purpose. Directing invariably attracts type A personalities, as directors are required to harness a mass of individuals—most of them creatives—to a singular vision. Good luck with that.

From the eyes of a four-year-old, a director’s role can be described as follows: she is the one in the room with the most visible authority and she tells everyone else what to do. Unfortunately, this oversimplified assessment of a director’s role is often all that non-practitioners (including some critics!) understand.

The director envisions worlds. Like all visionaries, the obstacles of translation abound, so a good director must be an adept communicator of that vision—or delegate successfully to those who can.

I’ve worked with directors who were less verbal in their approach but found other means to communicate a vision through music or musicality, through movement or physicality, or through visual means. I’ve been fortunate throughout my career to have encountered directors who trust my abilities and allow me to do my work, trusting that we are “on the same page,” as it were.

So what does a director do?

But the collisions always occurred when I unwittingly (or otherwise) allowed my improvisational background to get the better of the moment and I broke from the director’s vision. A director must also be a vigilant protector of the vision at all costs. It is my task as the actor to align with that vision and contribute what I can.

There are very good actors who are actually very good directors. I like that this is a rare fact. It gives respect to the collaborative room that lies between the director’s task and that of the actor. Not all directors are former (or continuing) actors; nor are all actors directors.

Not all directors are actor-friendly, but I prefer the ones who are and have an understanding and tolerance of the actors’ process and our unique space in the creative process.

Balance: neither over-awed of an actor nor leaning into animus for the role player. A director must know the actor...and so much more. And there I am...back at the director and Everything—everything in balance.

When my daughter was quite young, she would regularly accompany me to tech rehearsals for shows I was producing. One day, as we were leaving the house, I reached for the front door and she stopped me and said, “No, Mom. Let me show you how to open the door. I am the director.”

The truth is that no two directors I know approach the work in quite the same way. The best directors are shape-shifters, psychologists, anthropologists, painters, mechanics, and engineers. They are surgeons, drill sergeants, talent scouts, coaches, confidants, and cheerleaders. What follows are some of the key attributes I have observed in the directors I most admire.

Directors create an atmosphere of trust. It takes a tremendous amount of courage—courage from the performers, the authors, the director, the designers—to create anything original. Everyone feels a certain vulnerability every time they make something. Creating a safe environment means creating a place where people can be exposed, where they can let their guard down. In our increasingly cynical (and sometimes hostile) industry, that’s asking a lot. I’ve seen various strategies for creating community in the rehearsal room or on stage—from a daily ritual of yoga practice, Viewpoints, or “cush” volleyball at the top of each rehearsal—to ending each day with a company reflection. The best rooms are the ones in which the company, production, and creative team become a cohesive unit—open to discovery, challenge, failure, and true innovation.

Safety does not, however, mean coddling. If you’ve been able to create a foundation of trust, where everyone accepts that we are working toward the same goal, it is easier to bring criticism into the conversation in a way that is constructive rather than threatening. The best directors are frank about the aspects of the work that are not yet satisfying.

Directors are patient; directors are demanding. Yes, at the same time! It is all too easy to just lay out the result one is seeking. It is far more challenging to meander a bit, allowing a performer to discover for him or herself over an extended rehearsal process why a particular interpretation might be the more effective one. But not all performers will naturally arrive at the desired destination. Then the director must coax the performance that supports the larger vision for the production.

Directors are musicians. Plays have their own time signatures, and the best directors are like conductors, guiding the actors and designers in an aural and physical symphony of words, gestures, and images. Great directors know that the transition is as important as the scene and is a part of the score of any great production.

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Directors are diplomats. There are many aspects of the production process that no training can prepare you for. What happens when members of a company have wildly different methodologies or a personality conflict? What happens when there is a difference of opinion with a producer? These are the moments that test a director’s mettle.

Successful directing is marked by an ability to see the big picture while also caring for the details, bringing out the best in others, allowing them to play to their strengths, and taking responsibility for decisions when they are required while also being able to listen and adjust one’s course.

Heidi Schreck + Peter Friedman in Circle Mirror Transformation at Playwrights Horizons, directed by Sam Gold, 2009 PHOTO Joan Marcus

Directors are fierce advocates. When resources are limited (and when aren’t they?), directors are in the best position to articulate the vision for a production and why time, personnel, or materials are important for executing that vision. But sometimes they must champion ideas, articulating the overall vision for a production to inspire and empower all those gathered to support it—from backstage to the box office.

Directing takes a village. Directors, more than anyone, understand the power of collaboration and work best when they assemble a company of colleagues who push the director as much as the other way around. There is no hard line between the work of the director and an actor, or of a director and a designer. The unifying vision that results from seamless teamwork is, in fact, one of the defining characteristics of great theatre.

The four-year-old from the beginning of this essay is now in high school, with adulthood around the corner. With parenting, like directing, I know that there are myriad variables that have influenced her development along the way—teachers, friends, neighbors, the confluence of the many events and experiences we have shared—along with the values and principles her father and I have instilled in her.

Similarly, how much of the final production is the specific result of the director’s hand and how much comes from the performers, designers, stage manager, technical director, producer, and others? The director’s job is to navigate those disparate elements, people, and approaches, unifying them to produce something far greater than the sum of its parts. Or, in other words, to shepherd the production through infancy, adolescence, and into adulthood.

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JONATHAN PARKER Jonathan Parker graduated from Yale, where he devoted many hours to a cappella singing, with a B.A. in psychology. He then moved to New York and spent his entire career at The Segal Company, the benefits and human resources firm, before retiring in 2012. When he’s not attending live performances, Jonathan spends his time auditing classes at a local university, volunteering as a teacher of English to immigrants from West Africa and Asia, and traveling extensively in South Asia and Europe with his partner, Bill.

As a Segal Company consultant, I was privileged to work as an advisor to the health and pension funds covering many theatre professionals, including SDC directors and choreographers. Throughout my adult working (and now, retired) life, theatre-going has always been my second “profession,” one for which I have incredible passion. Still, I never imagined I’d be asked to write down my reflections on what a director does.

My first thought was to compile a partial (and extremely subjective) list of theatrical and operatic productions that have left an indelible mark on my memory. My second thought was to reflect on how a director’s influence is (or isn’t) visible in a play, musical, or opera. Last, I thought about the number of shows I’ve seen more than once, with different directors at the helm, and how those differences affected my experience and assessment of the work itself.

Ultimately, I realized that the first thing to do was flesh out my own sense of what a good director does (or should do) and how I sense that the director has been successful. Some random thoughts follow.

Directors need to be able to: work collaboratively with a wide range of theatre professionals; choose the other professionals with whom the director will collaborate (of course, the casting process is extremely important, but so is the choice of the other members of the nonperforming creative team); bring the characters, as well as the author’s and composer’s words/ music, to life; enhance the power and impact of words and music; listen well; edit effectively; accept input from others; move bodies across the stage and focus an audience’s attention; put themselves in the shoes, ears, and eyes of the audience, and imagine what we will experience; and so much more.

opportunity to undertake a “compare and contrast” exercise that really brought home the impact different directors have on the same source materials.

Among the shows we’ve seen recently in this category are The Glass Menagerie, Six Degrees of Separation, Sunday in the Park with George, Dreamgirls, Angels in America, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, and The Goat. Regardless of when I saw my first production of these works, I’m sure that I believed I’d seen the definitive version, even if it was a revival. My first encounters—years ago—with the classics The Glass Menagerie and Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? were overwhelming. And for Angels in America, Dreamgirls, and Sunday in the Park with George, being in the audience as these shows made their initial appearance on New York stages (or elsewhere, as when I was in Boston for the pre-Broadway tryout of Dreamgirls) was beyond exciting.

Here are six productions, including one opera, that not only were extremely memorable to me when I first saw them but also have remained with me over time. Of course, the core material (play, music, libretto, book, lyrics) in and of itself, and the performances, must have the power to move you. But I think these particular productions were so meaningful to me because of the direction and/or directorial choices: Dialogues of the Carmelites (John Dexter) Circle Mirror Transformation (Sam Gold) The Royale (Rachel Chavkin) Sunday in the Park with George (James Lapine) Othello (Nicholas Hytner) Scenes from a Marriage (Ivo van Hove).

For all these works, my experience was thrilling, and if I close my eyes today, I can still see those performances almost as vividly as when they actually happened. At least in part, this is because each director was willing to trust the audience in many different ways.

In Dialogues of the Carmelites at the Metropolitan Opera, John Dexter collaborated with David Reppa, whose spartan and minimalist set designs were a key part of what made the storytelling extraordinarily powerful. The choice of artistic partners, and the way in which a director’s vision is executed by and with those colleagues, is essential to a successful directorial effort. In the opening moments of the opera, Dexter’s seemingly simple placement of the Carmelite

nuns, all in black, prostrate on the bare white stage, was gasp-inducing. And throughout, we were allowed to imagine much of the physical world in which the operatic scenes play out. While the final few minutes of Carmelites have music and a libretto that are as harrowing and moving as any work in opera, Dexter’s direction, coupled with the set and lighting design, made for an even more tragic conclusion—one as devastating as anything I’ve ever experienced live in the theatre.

In Circle Mirror Transformation, Sam Gold (and playwright Annie Baker) asked audience members to endure long silences, going well beyond what Pinter might have written in his works. Certainly, this made many people uncomfortable; for me, it had great impact and made me listen that much more intensely.

And in The Royale, I don’t believe one actual boxing punch was landed and yet—through Rachel Chavkin’s direction and a brilliant collaboration with set, lighting, and sound designers—we felt the visceral impact of the physicality of the world created by the playwright.

In the past two months, my partner, Bill, and I have had the good fortune of spending a week in London going to the theatre nonstop, and also seeing many of the new shows that have recently arrived on Broadway. Both in London and New York, the number of revivals is notable, and it has provided me with an

So it was with a mix of great anticipation and some trepidation that I returned to these shows. In thinking about how the current incarnation of each show compares to one or more of its predecessors, it’s virtually impossible to unravel the complex factors that go into what makes a revival different from what came before. Not only are the directors, creative teams, and casts different, but so are the actual venues. And we, the audience, have all become older, if not wiser, and our reactions to these works (even if we saw them exactly as they’d been directed before) have undoubtedly changed.

It’s not important to know whether in my view any of these revivals surpassed, or paled in comparison to, earlier productions. What does seem relevant is that in each case, I was keenly aware of how the new directorial approach had changed my experience—for better or worse, and in most cases, for better and worse.

After seeing each of these revivals (even the ones I didn’t care for), I felt enriched by the new perspective that had been brought to bear on these works and thankful that I had had another opportunity to appreciate art as reinterpreted by a group of consummate professionals.

That’s really where I end up answering the question “What does a director do?” At the core of a director’s responsibility is the obligation to bring a point of view about the play being presented, to help the audience experience the work in ways well beyond what we would feel if we simply read or listened to it, and to create memories that stay with us well after the curtain comes down. I look forward to many more nights in the theatre and am so thankful that directors (and their fellow artists) will continue to create magic for all of us.

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I was surprised once I got into the gig how little my director friends had spoken about psychology and leadership. Perhaps when you are trained as a director, those things are a given. But since I skipped that step, I was taken off guard. It’s not just the actors; it’s the writer and dramaturg and artistic director and designers and crew and staff. Perhaps the extremely difficult subject matter of this particular script amplified the psychological stress, but I felt as though I were counseling someone every minute— and, unfortunately, there was some collateral damage. Then, even when things went really bad, a room full of people needed me to bring them back together to move forward. I found that the energy needed to keep everyone going and leave no one behind was exhausting. It is a much more tiring job than playwriting.

Our Voices Will Be Heard at Perseverance Theatre Company, 2016 PHOTO Akiko Nishijima Rotch

PHOTO

Conor Horgan

LARISSA FASTHORSE Larissa FastHorse is a playwright, choreographer, and director whose professional career began as a ballet dancer. Since she started focusing on writing, Larissa’s produced plays include What Would Crazy Horse Do?, Urban Rez, Landless, Average Family, Teaching Disco Square Dancing to Our Elders: A Class Presentation, and Cherokee Family Reunion. She has written commissions for ASU Gammage, Cornerstone Theatre Company, Artists Rep Portland, Children’s Theatre Company of Minneapolis, AlterTheater, Kennedy Center TYA, History Theater, Native Voices at the Autry, and Mountainside Theatre.

I’m a playwright and choreographer who recently directed my first play, a world premiere by Vera Starbard titled Our Voices Will Be Heard. Because I’m a writer who works in close collaboration with my directors, I thought I knew the gig. Because as a choreographer for theatre I am often tasked with staging the whole scene, not just the dances, I thought, “This is easy; just add the talking.”

I was wrong. Yes, the design and production meetings were familiar once I remembered that, unlike writers, directors talk a lot. And yes, the staging bits were quite similar to choreography. I have also trained as an actor, so breaking down a scene or character was not a problem. However, pacing myself was a big problem. Writers work really hard during rehearsals. They are alone with the screen every night and “day off,” making their brains bleed under the pressure of getting those pages to the stage manager with enough time to print. I can predict and guard against that type of exhaustion. The part I was deeply unprepared for was the amount of psychological and leadership energy a director spends keeping the rooms together and moving forward.

I had more than a year’s notice to direct my first show, so I prepared. I got into SDC’s Directors Lab West and did all kinds of interesting workshops. I asked director friends for advice and books to read. All of those things gave me some useful vocabulary and exercises, and I think if it weren’t the premiere of a new play, I would have used a lot more of them.

To be honest, directing a new play felt like having fireworks shot at me all day and night. Is this one going to be a lovely rain of white twinkly fairy dust? Or is it going to be one of those invisible ones that simply explode with a bang? Perhaps one of those screamers that goes wild and spins out of control? Or one that starts as one thing and then changes color and shape into another? For months leading up to the production and all through rehearsals, I stood there waiting for the fireworks to go off and then dealing with the fallout. It’s insane and different every time. It’s exhausting, but it’s also exhilarating when it goes well. Which wasn’t all of the time, but the majority, for sure.

As I write this, I realize that being unprepared for the role of leadership is a stupid thing to be surprised by as a director. To be clear, I knew I was going to be “leading the room,” but I hadn’t spent enough time thinking about what kind of leader I wanted to be. I had heard horror stories of directors who make everyone in the room miserable. No one gets paid enough in theatre to be miserable, including me. I believe that the tone of the room is everything—especially when new pages are coming every day and the costume shipment is lost in the mail and...and...and...

As a playwright, I ask my directors for an extremely collaborative environment. I honestly didn’t realize how tricky leadership can be when you are trying to balance everyone’s artistic input while also being the one who makes the final call. The majority of the time that I was called “director,” I succeeded in the style of leadership I admire. I prefer a leader who earns trust without assuming it. I admire the ability to admit when you are wrong and hear the better suggestion in the room. I like leaders who respect time and individual processes while building a team. I love a leader who has fun!

I can say all of that now, but more critical thinking about those qualities of leadership before I got the gig would have been so helpful. My dream workshop would be one that analyzes my personality and leadership goals, then gives me tools to put those goals into practice in a fluid artistic setting. I don’t know if that exists. If not, I’d love someone to create it and invite me.

So, back to the original question, what does a director do? According to this newbie, too much. I still don’t have a good system for the endless email chains and disorganized Dropbox folders. I never got enough done in a rehearsal day, and too many times I realized I was looking at plots upside down. I felt guilty about every actor we didn’t use and alternately loved and hated the ones we cast. I will never again take it personally when a director forgets to tell me—the playwright—a detail that I think is important; I better understand now how many people are constantly fighting for the director’s attention.

I did get into shape running up and down the house steps, though. And in the end, I was proud of the production and so relieved that I didn’t screw up the beautiful script I was trusted with.

I am happy to be back behind my writing table, but I admit that with the right script and right collaborators, I’d do it all again.

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FATHER GREGORY J. BOYLE, S.J. The Rev. Gregory J. Boyle, S.J., is the founder of Homeboy Industries in Los Angeles, the largest gang intervention, rehabilitation, and re-entry program in the world. He has served as the pastor at Dolores Mission Church in East Los Angeles and as chaplain at Folsom State Prison and Islas Marias Federal Penal Colony in Mexico. Father Boyle is also the author of the New York Times best seller Tattoos on the Heart: The Power of Boundless Compassion and was named a Champion of Change by the White House in 2014.

context, but tenderness is the methodology. Without it, love stays stuck in the air…or in your head…or even in your heart. Unless it becomes tenderness, there is no connective tissue that joins us to each other.

The director who berates and humiliates his actors doesn’t achieve what one would ultimately hope for. It is tenderness that gets us to make friends with our own wounds. If we don’t welcome our wounds, we will be tempted to despise the wounded. The best performances come from those who can be at home with their own brokenness.

Thich Nhat Hanh speaks of the need to “keep your loneliness warm.” This is to say, keep your wounds close by, because you will need them. Not just to deliver a good performance but to possess a compassion that can stand in awe at what the poor have to carry rather than in judgment at how they carry it.

Jermaine, a 30-year-old gang member, stepped into my office, having made a discovery that day. He was only in his third month with us at Homeboy Industries. In this community of tenderness, he was finding training and therapy, and acquiring the skills to leave us after 18 months.

But today, he retrieved a long, buried memory and needed to tell me about it.

He is nine and watching TV. His mother enters the room and she stands silently with her arms outstretched. He brings his focus to bear on her and discovers that she has deeply and profoundly slit her wrists. Blood is coursing onto the floor. Then, she says quietly to her nine-year-old, “See what you made me do?” The next day, he is taken from her care and

What do I know from directing? For 30 years, I’ve worked with gang members and currently run the largest gang intervention, rehab, and reentry program on the planet. I suppose I’ve dabbled here and there. I’ve been connected to Café Vida, the Cornerstone Theater Company project, modeled on our own Homegirl Café. It was thrilling to watch our homies and homegirls perform in that production and inhabit another layer of their own goodness and truth.

In a previous life, almost 40 years ago, I directed high school students in productions of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and a non-musical version of Candide. I suppose I know some of the mechanics of directing.

But for nearly half of my life, I’ve been privileged to walk with many thousands of gang members as they seek to redirect their lives. It’s safe to say the day won’t ever come when I am more noble, have more courage, or am closer to God than these men and women.

A good director doesn’t hold up a bar and ask an actor to measure up but rather holds up a mirror so that the person (actor) can discover the unalloyed truth of themselves… placed in a foster home. Most tellingly, his two older siblings were left in her care. At 13, after multiple foster home placements, he joins a gang.

At 17, he is raised the rest of the way by incarceration.

I think that just about everything is counterintuitive. That if you want some result, you address something completely and seemingly unrelated. Then the result that you desire turns out to be a byproduct of your other effort. If, for example, you want to stem gang violence, you don’t address the violence head-on but rather the lethal absence of hope that undergirds it.

Now he’s sobbing in my office, unable to speak until he can finally articulate the insight born of this retrieval. “I discovered today that I had always preferred my rage to my shame.” And because he made this discovery, he was finally able to forgive his mother for having been mentally ill. And to forgive himself for having once been a nine-year-old boy.

A good director, I suppose, shapes the production, guides the staging, and blocks the movement. But a good director with actors finds a way to return people to themselves. After all, we are all called to be enlightened witnesses who, through our kindness, affection, and focused, attentive love, return folks to themselves. A good director doesn’t hold up a bar and ask an actor to measure up but rather holds up a mirror so that the person (actor) can discover the unalloyed truth of themselves, devoid of mask and posturing.

What do I know from directing? I suspect that part of the task is to create a community of tenderness where folks can safely find their truth and passion and pain. A good director helps actors keep their loneliness warm. After all, you’re going to need it on stage and in the world we inhabit.

Anything worth doing will be relational. The fostering of these relationships happens in a community of tenderness. Tenderness is the highest form of spiritual maturity. If love is the answer, community is the

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SDC JOURNAL PEER-REVIEWED SECTION In the political climate surrounding the 2016 US presidential election and its wake, the plays of Bertolt Brecht are produced in professional and university theatres with renewed energy. Several universities will produce The Threepenny Opera and Mother Courage this season, and Brecht’s lesser known plays, such as The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui, gain new attention in professional venues for the relevancy of their critique of Hitler’s rise to power in Nazi Germany. I have found students in university classes—ranging from production courses to general distribution requirements—fascinated and enlivened when we study Brecht’s theories, especially when actively demonstrated through performances of his Lehrstücke, or “learning-plays,” and songs. Hungry for alternative practices to support aims of resistance and protest, students’ interests perk when Brecht’s aesthetics are connected to his political goals, or connections made between his theories and related contemporary concepts regarding, for example, the performance of gender. Even, and perhaps especially, Brecht’s aims of revolution—dismissed only a few years ago for their connection to what many argued was the demonstrated failure of larger Marxist projects—enjoy new attention in university classrooms with the reinvigoration of socialist revolutionary politics. In the following essay, Bill Gelber at Texas Tech University describes his process connecting the practices and theories of Brecht in teaching and production. Using the more recent status techniques of British director Keith Johnstone, Gelber documents his successes teaching even the most complex of Brecht’s aesthetic theories, such as Haltung and Gestus, for use by actors in performance. (Please see the note on style for German words and foreign spellings at the end of this essay.)

INTRODUCED + EDITED BY ANN

M. SHANAHAN

What Is Your Status?

USING KEITH JOHNSTONE’S EXERCISES WITH BERTOLT BRECHT'S CONCEPT OF HALTUNG IN THE CLASSROOM AND REHEARSAL HALL BY

BILL GELBER

TEXAS TECH UNIVERSITY

FIG. 1 Mother Courage (Kelsey FisherWaits) sings “The Song of the Great Capitulation” to the Soldier (James Macon Grant) and the audience. Mother Courage and Her Children, Texas Tech University, 2015 PHOTO Tif Holmes

Teaching graduate seminars on the life and works of Bertolt Brecht and in recent rehearsals for a production of Mother Courage and Her Children at Texas Tech University (Fig. 1), I used British director and teacher Keith Johnstone’s status exercises to explore Brecht’s idea of Haltung. This key aspect of Brecht’s theory, most often translated as “attitude,” “stance,” or “bearing,” can sometimes be challenging for actors trained primarily in realism and naturalism to understand and execute.

Johnstone created his exercises for the Royal Court Studio in response to seeing the Moscow Art Theatre production of The Cherry Orchard in 1964. He observed that while the actors performed in a naturalistic playing style they seemed unnatural to him nonetheless: “Everyone onstage seemed to have chosen the strongest possible motives for each action….The effect was ‘theatrical’ but not like life as I knew it”(Impro 33). For Johnstone, the acting style failed to portray how survival instincts shape behavior in social circumstances. Brecht likewise considered naturalism a “superficial representation of reality” and developed his form of theatre in order to show “the real social forces operating under the immediately visible surface” (205). Because both directors share interest in revealing underlying social factors on stage, I have found Johnstone’s status exercises offer a good point of entry for actors in the classroom and rehearsal hall to comprehend and more readily apply Brecht’s ideas. In this essay, I outline how teachers and directors may productively combine the theories of Johnstone and Brecht in order to foster complex characterizations that reflect the socio-political forces operating in plays.

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HALTUNG OR “ATTITUDE”

When Bertolt Brecht founded the Berliner Ensemble in 1949, he trained his new company in practices he had been formulating for many years. Brecht stressed that human behavior changes according to shifts in relationship and circumstance. These changes reflect social conditioning that both motivates actions and limits choices. Brecht sought ways his company could communicate the complexity of this changing behavior and its social causes on stage. Once Brecht and his production team determined a shared socio-political analysis of the story of the piece, called the Fabel (generally translated as “fable” in English), the work in rehearsals began with careful placement of actors in scenes to reflect social relationships (Fig. 2). Brecht described these socially meaningful staging configurations, which he called “groupings” or “arrangements” as: “… not just an effect or a ‘purely aesthetic’ phenomenon, conducive to formal beauty.

They are a part of a theatre of grand subjects for the new social order, and they cannot be achieved without deep understanding and passionate support of the new structure of human relations” (269).

Within these arrangements, Brecht asked that each actor adopt an attitude or stance for the person they portrayed towards the other people in the scene and/or events.

This attitude, which Brecht called the Haltung, signified the means whereby actors’ observations “of human relations” could be expressed. In the introduction to the third edition of Brecht on Theatre, editors Marc Silberman, Steve Giles, and Tom Kuhn explain the meaning and function of the term: The German etymology relates it to the common verb halten (to hold), as well as to the familiar nouns Verhalten (behaviour) and Verhältnis (relationship)…. and [it] can mean both ‘attitude’ in the intellectual sense of a cognitive category and ‘stance’ in the pragmatic sense of physical comportment, combining what is usually a mental state in English

FIG. 2 Courage is asked to identify her son Swiss Cheese (Isiah Columbus) as the Soldiers and Chaplain (Anthony Burton) await her response. PHOTO Tif Holmes

with embodied expression or an actor’s bearing….Together attitude and gestus represent analytical concepts that enable the actor to separate into single gestures social actions and appearances and contrast them with one another, indicating how meaning can be established, named or produced in a consistent way by the actor on stage. (6-7) These critical stances could be expressed in part through demonstrating posture, facial expression, gesture, tone of voice, choice of words, and/or style of speaking. However, the meaning went beyond gesture and speech.

Haltung was designed to show an actor’s critical assessment of the behavior of the person they played, from a social or relational point of view.

It is useful to note up front that in outlining Haltung and other performance techniques, Brecht used the word “figure” as opposed to the more commonly used term “character.” In his book Brecht in Practice, British scholar David Barnett explains: “Brecht’s model of character was radical and presumed that a unified character did not exist. On the contrary, what might be considered ‘character’ was only the accumulation of a character’s behaviours over time” (58). For Brecht, “a figure is something that is unfixed and flexible” and “susceptible to changes in circumstance and environment in

opposition to a character that exists as a stable entity, independent of social context” (59-60).

A figure might alter its Haltung based on each new circumstance; a series of Haltungen (plural) define the figure: “a figure is the sum of all its Haltungen” (97). A combination of Haltungen thus gives the audience an overall view of a contradictory person or figure who changes from circumstance to circumstance, as opposed to a character who is motivated by an overall need or objective.

Along with Brecht’s key concept of Gestus, which Meg Mumford describes as the “vivid gestural expression of social bearing and the social relationships prevailing among people at a given historical moment” (59), Haltung is primarily a tool for communicating the importance of external socio-political factors in shaping behavior on stage. Gestus encompasses both arrangements and Haltung: the grouping of figures on stage and their attitudes towards each other. Within this context Haltung has a broader purpose: it reveals the constraints society places on individuals. David Barnett explains the overall method: “The actor blends Gestus (position in society) with a repertoire of contradictory Haltungen (responses to specific situations). Both factors limit the figure’s room to manoeuvre, just like a character’s psychology limits possibilities.

Yet in the case of the gestic actor, limitation comes from society and the behaviours it either permits or forbids” (99). All of this is done in the

service of revealing the larger socio-political analysis of story in the Fabel.

STATUS

Keith Johnstone introduced status exercises at the Royal Court Theatre in the 1960s. In his work with young playwrights, he assessed that an element of truth was often missing, namely how people behave based on social hierarchy or status in order to successfully interact with others in given environments.

According to Johnstone, to survive and avoid conflicts, we “read” the behavior of others, determine where we stand within a hierarchy, and adjust accordingly: “Our behavior (reinforced by our appearance) signals our importance, otherwise we wouldn’t be able to pass someone in a corridor without trading punches” (Storytellers 219). He observed that human beings adopt and project status behaviors which they adjust according to their social circumstances. He calls these intuitive adjustments “status transactions.” Much of this behavior is unconscious and/or conditioned at a deep level; therefore playwrights and actors may not think to replicate it on stage. However Johnstone advises theatremakers: We understand that no behavior is ‘insignificant,’ that when we interact together our brains are counting the FALL 2017 | SDC JOURNAL PEER-REVIEWED SECTION

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blink-rate, and measuring changes in pupil size, and examining sentence structure, and observing left-right synchronization, and registering even the tiniest head movement, and gauging the distance between hand and head… (220)

songs and scenes, to create critical distance or Verfremdung and “make the familiar strange,” and then ultimately to meet Brecht’s aim to inspire audiences towards the critical attitudes and revolutionary actions that might create a better, more just world.

In his exercises, Johnstone devised a system to replicate this fundamental relational behavior on stage. In order to distinguish between dominant or high status and submissive or low status behaviors, and to codify status transactions, Johnstone designated a behavioral hierarchy numerically on a scale of one to ten: dominant status at its highest level is signified by a ten; the most submissive at the opposite end of the scale, a one.

Human beings relate to each other from a point represented by a number somewhere on this scale, and shift according to changes in relationships and circumstances. For an actor, this means analyzing a character’s behaviors for the relatively high or low status they adopt in a given situation, and finding the corresponding number. According to Johnstone, actors use one of two strategies: if they play higher status, they either raise and promote themselves or lower and denigrate their partners; when playing low status, they either lower themselves or raise their partners.

He called this the “seesaw”: “If I’m trying to lower my end of the seesaw, and my mind blocks, I can always switch to raising the other end” (Impro 38).

In order to identify Haltung by the use of status the actor progresses through a set of steps. First, she conducts a relational analysis of the person she plays compared to other persons in the play. Does she dominate and take charge, or follow and submit? Does her character (or figure) look up to others? Ally with certain people and against others? Next, she determines a social hierarchy for the scene by positioning all of the characters/figures in order on a scale from highest to lowest. Actors generally become expert quickly at establishing this hierarchal scale. Once this order is determined, actors assign corresponding status numbers. Does the most dominant person in the scene qualify as a full number ten, or is she lower than that? Does the scene contain a person as low as status one? What are the numbers of people in the middle range?

STATUS REVEALS HALTUNG

I introduce Brecht’s idea of Haltung and relate methods to student actors through application of Johnstone’s exercises. I have found that Johnstone’s work not only helps actors to quickly identify Haltung; his exercises also provide an alternative system for actors to develop performances which reveal their social analyses of circumstances, and thus a method of readily communicating changing Haltungen to an audience. In a sense, I reverse Barnett’s proposed formula: we begin by identifying status because it is an easier concept for the students to grasp than Haltung or Gestus; they have experienced status transactions throughout their lives, even if they have never given them this label. I then lead them towards an understanding of Haltung through an analysis of the social implications of the status and status changes they find.

Adjustments in status coincide with Haltung changes, as both involve changes in behavior made because of social dynamics. Finally, they arrive at consciousness of Gestus and the social conditions that cause such behavior in the first place. By this process, playing status leads to understanding of Haltung, and then Gestus, as well as several related theories and practices in Brecht’s larger political project in the theatre. Actors are able to experiment more easily with Brecht’s performance techniques in

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In some cases, the actor may be the only person in a scene. She can still play status and assign a corresponding number by examining her relationship to the environment. Does it present a challenge? Is it one that she can handle easily? For example, an actor playing a visitor to a museum might be intimidated by the expensive art and play a low status relative to her surroundings.

The actor then looks for the changes in status that occur in the scene. Do the power dynamics shift? Status changes will occur in response to new situations or characters. The actor asks, “Is this new person higher in status than the one I play? How must I play a shift in status as a result?”

Once the status and the status changes are determined, the actors identify those behaviors which will make their status clear to the audience. They choose from the possible high or low status behaviors or a combination of the two types. Low status behaviors include, for example: hesitant speech, slumped posture, lack of eye contact, closed off physical positions, quick gestures. High status behaviors include: direct address, stillness in the body (particularly the head), upright posture, physical openness, and easy but limited gestures. The easiest behaviors to identify are the status ones and tens, since the actors play many of the possible behaviors from one category and not from another. However, if a person is not lowest or highest, the actor uses a mixture of behaviors: more high status and fewer low status behaviors are combined for statuses seven through nine; more low status and fewer high status behaviors for statuses two through four. Once the actors become familiar with the concept, they can

develop more nuanced options from their own observations of status behavior in everyday life.

Finally, once the numbers are determined and their corresponding behaviors identified and played, I guide students to appreciate that what they are actually doing is producing Haltungen.

Because the status behaviors they display for the characters are largely unconscious or ingrained for the actors themselves, the social motives underlying them may be obscured.

I lead the actors to question what societal constraints produced the status behaviors and changes, revealing these behaviors as Haltungen. The social consciousness that accompanies this connection in turn leads to appreciation and realization of Gestus and what a figure’s Haltung tells the audience about the world of the play.

The actors create more complex performances when they analyze through a combination of the two theories, which I now identify as status/ Haltung. As an example of how this combined analysis works, I recount a process in rehearsal of Scene 11 of Mother Courage. The dialogue indicates that the Farm Family initially plays low status to the soldiers who invade their farm; low status postures and subservient speech might allow them to escape unscathed. But the actor playing the Young Farmer notes that his figure refuses to play along. He defies the intruders—taunts them even with a bayonet to his throat. He plays a higher status to defy them because if he shows them the path to the nearby town of Halle, the soldiers will sack it. A soldier threatens that if the Young Soldier won’t help them, they will slaughter the family ox. Suddenly the Young Farmer backs down; he doesn’t even hesitate. His status drops immediately and he agrees to take them to Halle. What does this status change tell the student actors about the Haltung and overall Gestus? The ox is more important to the whole family than their individual lives. During the long war, their cattle are the only possessions of any value, and the Young Farmer’s brave (and higher status) resolve disappears in order to ensure the survival of the family in the face of economic realities.

The actors’ analyses of a section later in the scene, when the soldiers leave, benefited again from use of the status/Haltung formula. When left alone with Courage’s daughter Kattrin, who has been watching all this as an innocent bystander, the father and mother then see themselves as productive citizens, on a level with the soldiers, who they try to thwart.

Meanwhile they treat Kattrin, who is mute, as a lower status figure. No longer threatened, the farmers rise in status. They spy on the soldiers and consider ways to help the town. The status/Haltung shifts show them as dynamic figures who display diverse, contradictory behaviors based changes in circumstances during the scene.

STATUS/HALTUNG IN SCRIPT ANALYSIS

In the following example, I illustrate how an analysis of status and Haltung combined reveals the Gestus in Scene 6 of Mother Courage. My analysis accompanies sections of dialogue below. During the scene, Courage asks the Chaplain to cut wood. He will do anything to avoid exerting himself, and instead stokes conflict between Courage and the Cook.

THE CHAPLAIN. Listen to me, Courage. It’s my obligation as your minister. It’s hardly likely you’ll meet up with that character again, and you know what character I mean, but that’s luck, not loss.

Here the Chaplain not so subtly raises himself—“your minister”—and lowers the Cook—“that character.”

MOTHER COURAGE. Seems nice enough to me. Who cares what you think?

Courage immediately lowers him by dismissing his opinion, so the Chaplain turns to criticizing the Cook’s pipe.

THE CHAPLAIN. …Take a look at that pipe, it exposes him, his personality.

MOTHER COURAGE. I’m looking at it.

THE CHAPLAIN. The stem of which has been half chewed through. As if a rat had attacked it. The gnawed-upon pipe of a boorish violent rat of a man, you can see it yourself if you haven’t lost your last lick of horse sense.

The Chaplain manages to insult both the Cook and Courage’s taste.

MOTHER COURAGE. You’re really going to town with that hatchet.

Courage dismisses his argument and points out the Chaplain’s ruse: he’s talking, not chopping.

THE CHAPLAIN. I’m not trained to do this, I’m trained to preach… I went to divinity school. My gifts, my abilities are squandered on physical activity. It’s an inappropriate application of God-given talents. Which is sinful…

The Chaplain lowers himself to get sympathy, but then raises himself by boasting of his education and his prowess at delivering sermons. He is too important to chop wood— and it’s literally a sin! Funnily enough, he uses a Yiddish word—fershtunkeneh, or “stinking,” to make his point.

….You never heard me preach. I can so intoxicate a battalion they think the enemy army’s a grazing flock of fat mutton. When I preach, a soldier’s life’s no more to him than an old fershtunkeneh footwrap he casts away as he marches off to glory. God gave me a mighty tongue.

When I preach people fall dumb and go blind.

MOTHER COURAGE. Jesus, that’s sort of terrifying.

She lowers his talent by suggesting that it leads to evil. The Chaplain then resorts to his trump card: he will get out of work by proposing marriage!

THE CHAPLAIN. Courage, I’ve been waiting for this opportunity to talk to you.

She then lowers him by reminding him that she’s trying to listen for the funeral dirge for the recently departed general.

MOTHER COURAGE. Maybe if we’re quiet we’ll hear more funeral music.

THE CHAPLAIN. Beneath your customarily brusque and businesslike manner you’re human, a woman, you need warmth.

He lowers her, calling her “human, a woman.”

This is not a successful wooing strategy, and Courage easily discourages it by reminding him he isn’t doing his job.

MOTHER COURAGE. I’m warm, and all it takes is a steady supply of chopped wood.

The Chaplain gets to the point.

THE CHAPLAIN. Kindling aside, Courage, shouldn’t we make our relationship a closer one? I mean, consider how the whirligig of war has whirled the two of us together.

He meanders around the question—an indirect, low status proposal. It doesn’t work, because she sees through him, but also it is just too low a gesture. The higher status Courage lowers him further by using his own words against him.

MOTHER COURAGE. I think we’ve whirled close as we’re ever going to get. I cook, you eat what I cook, you do this and that and when you feel like it you chop kindling.

The Cook makes a high status move towards her (in stage directions), and continues his seduction.

THE CHAPLAIN. You know perfectly well that when I use the word ‘close’ I don’t mean cooking or eating or kindling.

Courage lowers him by pretending that his high status move is scaring her.

MOTHER COURAGE. Don’t come at me waving that axe.

This lowers him completely so that he must protest by pathetically suggesting that he is higher.

THE CHAPLAIN. I’m not a figure of fun.

You make me a figure of fun. I’m a man with his dignity and I’m tendering you a considered, legitimate proposal. I’m proposing. Respond to my proposal!

After both “I’m tendering you a considered proposal” and “I’m proposing,” Courage does not respond, so he must repeat himself, showing his desperation. Demanding that someone marry you isn’t a good strategy, and Courage has the final word.

MOTHER COURAGE. Give it a rest, Pastor.

(66-68) The social Gestus of the scene is revealed by the way the Chaplain changes his Haltung when Courage (like many characters in the play) denigrates him and lowers his status. This has larger implications in terms of Gestus: the war is fought supposedly on religious grounds but the low status figure who represents religion is not taken seriously.

STATUS/HALTUNG AND ACTING STYLE

Working with status and Haltung requires a new way of understanding and playing behavior for an audience. I have found that Brecht’s acting style, particularly his efforts to make the familiar strange through actors’ quotations of and comments on behavior, can be readily reached by working through Johnstone’s status exercises.

When analyzing dramatic material for performance, my students are most familiar with a Method-based approach of dividing their scenes into beats based on psychological motives. As the noted acting teacher Uta Hagen explains in her book Respect for Acting, “The actions of human beings are governed, more than anything else, by what they want.”

These wants are defined as objectives that must be pursued. In the Stanislavsky-based method, “A beat begins under a given set of circumstances when an immediate objective sets in. It ends when that objective has succeeded or failed and new circumstances set in” (174, 175). At that point, the actor must seek further wants or objectives. The basis FALL 2017 | SDC JOURNAL PEER-REVIEWED SECTION

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for these changes is primarily psychological, founded on an actor’s assessment of an overall motive or super-objective for the character.

Based on this, the actor knows how a character will behave throughout the play.

Brecht, on the other hand, analyzes the moment to moment changes in Haltung based on new social situations, rather than psychological motives, because he wants spectators to see social influences on behavior. If the actor transforms himself into the person he plays based on psychological identification, he loses perspective—and so does the audience. The audience sees behavior consistent with the character’s individual psychology and this limits insight into the way socio-political situations affect him.

Accordingly, Brecht critiqued a Method-based

behavior through status/Haltung changes, their performances are governed by appreciation of external social circumstances rather than psychological identifications. Inevitably, when conscious of these social factors, actors point to them in selecting the behaviors to demonstrate and how to best replicate them.

This “pointing to” requires a step away from “transformation” and allows actors using this method to manifest complexities of Brecht’s acting style and its benefits, almost as a matter of course.

In addition to identification with internal, psychological factors, another issue with a Stanislavski-based approach to performing a play by Brecht, or a process informed by his theories, can be that the actor adds “organic” activities—ticks, and gestures to make a

not an undesigned, arbitrary one. Working in a method that combines analysis of status and Haltungen, an actor exhibits only those signs that tell the spectator specifically how the figure operates in a particular environment.

The performance is narrowed to its social essentials.

STATUS/HALTUNG AND THE “NOT…BUT”

The students also use status/Haltung to understand and play another important Brechtian concept: the “not…but.” In order to show the audience that the character makes choices that are not inevitable, Brecht asks the actor to imply the actions or choices that she does not make, as she performs the one she does. In Brecht’s “Short Description of a New Technique of Acting Which Produces an

FIG. 3 (Top Left) A tableau in rehearsal for Scene 8 of Mother Courage: Yvette (Tawny Westbrook) assumes higher status than her former lover, the Cook (Randall Rapstine). Mother Courage and the Chaplain look on. PHOTO Bill Gelber FIG. 4 (Bottom Left) The same moment from Scene 8 in performance, with Yvette's servant (Michael Moriearty) looking on. PHOTO Tif Holmes FIG. 5 An impossible choice: Courage bargains with Yvette to save her son. PHOTO Tif Holmes

approach to acting: “Instead of transforming himself before the spectator’s eyes, the actor appears already transformed, as a fact that is free of influences and therefore also apparently unable to be influenced—an entirely general, absolute and abstract person” (199). Brecht argued that actors should show the processes of “transformation” by commenting on or quoting the behavior they demonstrate.

Actors then show behaviors not as inevitable or “natural” outcomes, but as choices influenced by socio-political factors. Rather than empathizing with a character’s plight and blindly accepting what happens to them, both actor and audience can question the causes and efficacy of a figure’s choices; they notice contradictory behavior and consider the external causes for it. When actors analyze

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character more “real.” A person does not simply sit at a table reading—she scratches her ear, sighs heavily, or shifts uncomfortably.

Considering Johnstone’s definitions of high and low status behaviors, such organic signs inadvertently add a number of low status behaviors which counteract certain high status markers that the audience, consciously or unconsciously, analyzes for meaning in the performance. Brecht asserts that all behavior on the stage is analyzed for meaning, and suggests that actors control the signs and signals they offer an audience. Unlike the organic actor, who adds extra “natural” behaviors, the gestic actor understands that these extraneous movements are distracting from renderings of Haltung and thus, the main Gestus. Brecht looks to create an artistic reality ordered by socio-political influences,

Alienation Effect,” he describes a performer using this principle: “When he appears on the stage, besides what he actually is doing he will at all essential points discover, specify, imply what he is not doing; that is to say he will act in such a way that the alternative emerges as clearly as possible” (137). The actor plays the “not…but” by committing to one choice, while at the same time suggesting it is not the sole option. This complex idea can be illuminated by a status/Haltung change—showing figures who may want to react in a certain way, but realize that such a choice is not a viable option.

They might raise or lower their status in a way that the audience was not expecting. This element of surprise is useful: as the audience observes the tension between what is done and what is not, they are prompted to question an onstage world that dictates and precludes certain choices.

STATUS/HALTUNG AND STAGING

In addition to illuminating Brecht’s acting style, analysis of status/Haltung also contributes to methods of collaborative staging based in Brecht’s practices with designers. When Brecht worked with the Berliner Ensemble, he would hold Stelleprobe—“‘placement rehearsals.’

Actors were positioned onstage so as to make their relationships, in reflection of the Fabel, as clear as possible” (Barnett, “Undogmatic” 34).

These positions were based on the drawings of designers (for example Caspar Neher, who placed figures in particular arrangements to reveal the Gestus); actors would then test these tableaux in full dimension for the production team. Quoting actor Walter Benjamin, Carl Weber, former assistant to Brecht at the Berliner Ensemble, describes how these still pictures worked, as: … the ‘frozen frame’ in cinematography, when the action is arrested at the moment of a particular gesture: for instance, a mother raising an object in order to hurl it at her daughter, while the father is opening the window to call for help. ‘At this instant, a stranger appears at the door.

Tableau—as they used to say around 1900.

This means: the stranger is confronted with the [family’s] situation.’ A moment frozen in this manner would establish a quotable Gestus that invites speculation, provokes critical thinking, and may result in a specific conclusion which then would activate the spectator as to forming an attitude or opinion and thus influence his future behavior versus society. (44) The student actors and I follow these practices in class and rehearsal. We create frozen pictures to display Haltungen to one another for feedback and adjustment. In a purposeful variation on Brecht’s practices, with aims to inspire investment and aid learning, I suggest that actors (instead of designers) determine a Fabel for each scene. They then stage several frozen tableaux that reflect their analyses to test them for clarity with fellow actors.

Each picture has to communicate a Gestus, including status/Haltung to meet Brecht’s aim of revealing events as influenced by societal pressures (Fig. 3). The actors reflect status/ Haltung in tableaux through facial expressions and proximity of their bodies to each other.

A high status figure might encroach on the territory of others in order to dominate them; a low status figure might give a dominant figure a wide berth out of respect. Low status figures might hide behind the furniture as a means of protecting themselves, while high status figures might take up more space at a table to claim it as their own. Low status figures might huddle together for protection, while high status figures proudly stand alone.

These tableaux most often show up in final presentations or on stage in full production.

Later the students create Modelbücher, “model books” in English—detailed pictorial documents of the rehearsal process—using photos of arrangements and notes to clarify staging choices that illuminate Gestus and Fabel (Fig. 4).

STUDENT ACTOR OUTCOMES

The actors’ overall response to the connections between Brecht and Johnstone is very positive and productive. They observe that Johnstone’s exercises make Brecht’s ideas seem straightforward and practical, and correspond with how they themselves view the world. I would argue that use of status/Haltung in tandem has created a sort of Verfremdungseffekt in the way my student actors view both their processes of performing and ways of analyzing the world.

Brecht’s famous term could be applied to the epiphanies the students have had as they are introduced to and begin to practice these ideas, and see the world in new ways as a result. What they had taken for granted—their relationships, their reactions to others and to circumstances—become unfamiliar and “strange” when scrutinized through these lenses. They understand motivation and behaviors differently: as manufactured status strategies to deal with the societal situations they encounter.

Interestingly, actors sometimes have difficulty initially altering behaviors to play status/ Haltung differently than how they present such behaviors themselves. They have been using personal status strategies inculcated over many years to negotiate situations in their real lives. Actors are able to perform statuses differently, however, when they realize that such behavior is not predetermined or natural; even the ways they present themselves to the world are constructed, and therefore fluid and changeable. More importantly, once they become aware of status they can no longer ignore it; they begin to see it in their everyday lives. It is a new social paradigm that they can carry with them into life circumstances and future theatre projects.

Both students in class and actors in production share that they feel empowered by these methods of working. In rehearsal, actors appreciate the ability to contribute significantly to interpreting and staging the production.

The exercises allow actors to make their own choices rather than simply following those as imposed by a director. In class, the students find more complex ways of analyzing and performing scripts than in approaches used previously. Rather than seeing methods based on status/Haltung as limitations to their old ways of working, they appreciate their simplicity and work hard to discern the gestures and actions that tell the clearest story in social terms. The behaviors they select stand out because they are not surrounded

by other less meaningful activities (Fig. 5).

Importantly, work with status and Haltungen has helped student actors to imagine methods of achieving Brecht’s ultimate aim to improve society. When actors play status/Haltung, they reveal the power dynamics in the world around them so that audiences can turn a critical eye towards conditions that cause status hierarchies to be necessary, and where they find these unjust, perhaps then change them.

CONCLUSION

By melding the work of Brecht and Johnstone, I clarify important and complex ideas for student actors that they can then apply in new ways. I continue to use this approach directing and teaching, both in plays by Brecht and others. For example, in our Fall 2015 production of Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia, the cast and I used status/Haltung exercises to clarify relational dynamics underlying Stoppard’s intricate dialogue. As Arcadia was intellectually challenging material, we used frozen pictures to set up initial signs of status—clarifying relationships and revealing social meaning for the audience. Through the use of such approaches, my students have discovered a new appreciation for Bertolt Brecht’s methods, finding them current and useful today. Encouraged by actors’ understanding and enthusiasm, I will continue to research and offer new perspectives on the theatrical practices of Bertolt Brecht through the use of more contemporary, like-minded, directors like Johnstone.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Thanks to Texas Tech University’s School of Theatre and Dance and the J.T. and Margaret Talkington College of Visual and Performing Arts for producing Mother Courage and to the production team and performers for their work, particularly Kelsey Fisher-Waits for her fierce portrayal of Anna Fierling. Thanks to the readers and editors of the SDC Journal PRS for helpful feedback and editorial advice.

A NOTE ON STYLE

The editors have followed the stye recommendation of the MLA 8th edition, italicizing foreign words, and capitalizing German nouns. Following several major editors of Brecht’s work (although practices vary), the author uses the German words that Brecht appropriated, re-conceptualized, and/ or invented to term his key theories, and that do not translate easily to English, including: Haltung, Gestus and Fabel. English translations are provided in text for these terms. Other terms with more commonly used English translations, appear first in the translation with quotation marks and are then used without marks, italics, or capitalization through the remainder of the essay. Where there is variation in punctuation or spelling in direct quotations FALL 2017 | SDC JOURNAL PEER-REVIEWED SECTION

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translated or authored by others, we have preserved the spelling and style choices made for the original publication.

Conducted by Barbara Simonsen, Isabelle Reynaud, and Deborah Vlaeymans, the interviews were originally intended to inform a series of performing arts experiments.

To better understand the rehearsal process, each interview starts with a set of foundational questions: why they chose to work in theatre; how they ended up in theatre; what is their rehearsal process; what are the biggest problems in the process; and what is their dream or “utopian” rehearsal process? As the scope of the project grew, the interviewers recognized that their data had value beyond its original intent. The interviewers realized they were capturing evidence of “the process instead of the artistic results, and extracting knowledge from people about their best practical methods and concrete experiences of what they do best” (1).

WORKS CITED

Barnett, David. Brecht in Practice: Theatre, Theory and Performance. Bloomsbury, 2015.

---. “Undogmatic Marxism: Brecht Rehearses at the Berliner Ensemble.” Edinburgh German Yearbook 5: Brecht and the GDR: Politics, Culture, Posterity. Camden House, 2011, pp. 25-44.

Brecht, Bertolt. Brecht on Theatre. Edited by Steve Giles et. al. 3rd ed. Bloomsbury, 2015.

---. Mother Courage and Her Children.

Translated by Tony Kushner. Methuen Drama, 2009.

Hagen, Uta. Respect for Acting. Wiley Publishing, Inc., 1973.

Johnstone, Keith. Impro for Storytellers.

Routledge Theatre Arts Books, 1999.

---. Impro: Improvisation and the Theatre.

Methuen, 1979.

Weber, Carl. “Brecht’s Concept of Gestus and the American Performance Tradition.”

Brecht Sourcebook, edited by Carol Martin and Henry Bial, Routledge, 2000, pp. 4349.

BILL GELBER is an associate professor in the School of Theatre and Dance at Texas Tech University where he teaches acting, directing, theory, and period styles, including Shakespeare and his contemporaries. He has a Ph.D. in Theatre History from the University of Texas at Austin, where he studied with Oscar Brockett. He has been published in the Brecht Yearbook, Texas Theatre Journal, and Early Modern Literary Studies. His forthcoming book, Engaging with Brecht: Making Theatre in the 21st Century, is to be published by Bloomsbury Methuen Drama.

CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS Published quarterly by Stage Directors and Choreographers Society (SDC), the peerreviewed 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 The Art of Rehearsal: Conversations with Contemporary Theatre Makers Edited By Barbara Simonsen BLOOMSBURY, 2017; 264 PP. $31.95 PAPERBACK.

In the final interview of The Art of Rehearsal: Conversations with Contemporary Theatre Makers, Belgian director Wayn Traub laments, “I master what I do, but I can see that there are so many other ways of doing it, and I don’t know them yet” (240).

Traub articulates a desire often expressed by theatremakers: to somehow see the inner working (to look inside the mind) of directors whose work we admire. We wonder how this production came to be, where did it start, what was the process?

What could we learn given the opportunity to observe? Traub goes on to express a frustration that will be familiar to many directors: “I sometimes regret, when I see artists, directors that I think are brilliant, that I don’t have the chance to meet them.

It is so difficult, they are far away and you have to be famous yourself to get to meet them” (242). The eighteen interviews that comprise The Art of Rehearsal: Conversations with Contemporary Theatre Makers attempt to address Traub’s desire to learn how other directors work in the rehearsal room, to bridge the distance between directors.

The interviews included are primarily European directors, with only four from North America. While the editors acknowledge the lack of geographical diversity, the directors interviewed represent a variety of performance styles, including opera, dance, and ritual performance. Many of the directors note in their interviews how the style of their process has drastically changed over the evolution of their careers.

Because the questions remained nearly identical throughout the interviews, the book creates the feeling of the directors being in dialogue with one another, while also speaking on their own beliefs and practices. This inter-director conversation highlights examples of contrasting metamorphoses: for example, Annabel Arden, a founding member of Complicite, talks about moving towards working with text after years of devising on an idea or theme (18) while Eugenio Barba, of Odin Teatret, discusses moving away from starting with text (as he did in the beginning of his career) to starting with a theme (34).

Throughout the interviews, each director structures their rehearsal process differently. Some, like Soheil Parsa, adhere to a philosophy of “total openness. No preconceived ideas” (179). In contrast, the self-named “sneaky beast” Jan Fabre admits that he has “prepared everything in the smallest detail before entering the rehearsal hall, and at the same time I play very naive to the dancers and the actors, pretending that I don’t know anything” (100). Lastly, there is a surprising variety in fundamental feelings towards the rehearsal process.

They range from Jérôme Bel’s disdain, “... it’s awful. To repeat, to do it again. Not stimulating at all” (48) to Maxine Doyle’s exuberance, “...the most exciting part of the process happens in the rehearsal studio” (82).

The selected interviews do not focus on directors interpreting and staging established plays. Instead, the subjects were selected for their approaches to creating new works through devising, choreographing, or workshopping. With each interview, the reader becomes aware of different approaches to developing new works. The directors discuss rehearsal approaches ranging between improvised and premeditated, collaborative and dictated, and how their own rehearsal process falls along those spectrums.

Reading these accounts, theatre artists will be taught or reminded that there are as many processes for making theatre as there are theatre artists. While the interviews collectively argue against the idea of a rehearsal “blueprint,” emerging directing students and established directors alike will appreciate and learn from the book, especially how each of the interviewees defines the director’s role as establishing and then guiding the process of rehearsal.

The interviews are not objective overviews on the directors’ processes, nor does the book function as a practical handbook on directing. Instead, the interviews are the directors’ own thoughts on how they work. This focus can lead to a disconnect between what the interviewee describes and what the reader envisions. Despite each interview including the director’s bio and a link to their personal or company’s website, it would help the reader to have some knowledge of the director’s work before reading the interview. This context would allow readers to more easily visualize the director’s descriptions of their systems and methodologies.

Directors at every stage of their careers will recognize their own processes, fears, goals, and philosophies expressed within the interviews. Towards the end of the preface, Simonsen emphasizes that all of the artists interviewed “work in a way that they love” (7). In order to discourage readers from seeking a single approach to the rehearsal process, Simonsen points out that these eighteen artists “don’t pervert themselves to fit into a work method or a system that essentially doesn’t suit them or makes it impossible for them to thrive or create” (8).

In examining a diversity of artists’ practices, The Art of Rehearsal: Conversations with Contemporary Theatre Makers invites directors to consider these perspectives and seek their own unique approach to creating theatre.

ANNE G. LEVY UNIVERSITY OF ALABAMA

Peer-Reviewed Section Editors Thanks and Welcome The following transitions in the staff of the SDC Journal Peer-Reviewed Section (PRS) call for heartfelt thanks to outgoing editors and a warm welcome to those incoming. First, we offer huge thanks to Anne Fliotsos for her extraordinary contributions as an inaugural co-editor of the section from 2014–2017. Anne’s energy, expertise, and wisdom have shaped the mission and operation of the section invaluably. As Anne leaves this role, she is stepping in as Interim Chair of the Department of Theatre at Purdue University and is busy co-editing a new anthology with Dr. Gail Medford entitled New Directions in Teaching Theatre Arts (Palgrave Macmillan).

While Anne’s presence day to day will be sorely missed, we are grateful for her ongoing support on the PRS Advisory Board.

The PRS is pleased to welcome new co-editor David Callaghan, a founding member of the editorial board and peer reviewer. David is a professor and Chair of Theatre at the University of Montevallo, where he teaches acting, directing, musical theatre performance, and history. David has published on Judith Malina, The Living Theatre, and 1960s performance in The Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism, Theatre Symposium, Works and Days, American Theatre, and other publications. David directs plays and musicals at UM as well as freelances.

Continuing for another term, founding co-editor Ann M. Shanahan is an associate professor at Loyola University Chicago, where she teaches acting and theory, and directs for the main stage. Recent publications include essays in Performing the Family Dream House: Space, Ritual, and Images of Home (University of Iowa, 2018) and New Directions in Teaching Theatre Arts. Ann is editor for a volume on Meredith Monk, Robert Wilson, and Richard Foreman in a series entitled Great North American Theatre Directors for Bloomsbury Methuen (Jim Peck, Series Editor).

Book Review Editor from 2014–2017, Travis Malone turns his considerable energies and talents to a variety of projects and initiatives at Virginia Wesleyan University, where he is a professor and Chair of Theatre. We are deeply grateful to Travis, a member of the initial task force to create a peer-reviewed journal in directing, for his energy and enthusiasm in establishing mechanisms for reviewing books in the new section.

Kathleen M. McGeever transitions from her associate role to Book Review Editor. Also a member of the task force, Kathleen has been crucial in the formation of the PRS. Kathleen is a professor and Chair of Theatre at Northern Arizona University, where she teaches performance courses and directs for the main stage. Kathleen writes on Brian Friel and Martin McDonagh, among others; her essay on Harold Pinter appears in Cycnos Université de Nice Sophia Antipolis.

Emily A. Rollie will now serve as Associate Book Review Editor. Emily is an assistant professor at Central Washington University, where she directs and teaches BA, BFA, and MA students in theatre history, dramatic literature, theatre pedagogy, and acting. She is also a freelance director and is currently working on a book about Canadian women stage directors.

Last but by no means least, thanks must go to former Managing Editors Marella Martin Koch and Elizabeth Nelson (who continues to graphic design) for grace, collaborative savvy, and unrelenting commitment to excellent communication in the PRS and throughout the Journal, as well as to Kate Chisholm, who has filled this role with ease and skill for the last two issues.

We also gratefully acknowledge the generous work of the ongoing peer reviewers and advisors.

Please see the Call for Submissions on p. 48 and contact the new editors listed above to contribute an essay or book review to the PRS.

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SDC FOUNDATION FROM THE FOUNDATION DIRECTOR Here at the Foundation we are fond of saying that we offer opportunities and insights into a field where the career path is not well lit—and, given the nature of directing and choreographing, is often isolating.

One of the best ways we have found to demystify the career path is through our signature Observership program. In this issue, I’ve invited 2016–17 Observer Class member Ann Noling to share her reflections on her Observership with director and mentor Daniel Sullivan on the production of Lillian Hellman’s The Little Foxes on Broadway. In the article, we get an insider’s view of an early-career director honing her skills, articulating her personal vision, and testing her artistic ideas under the tutelage of a master director in his element—the rehearsal hall. It is not only a great read for those of you who might wonder how this whole Observership thing works, but also a powerful testament to the “journeyman” nature of our field, and the important impact of mentors.

In “From the Archives,” we revisit a 1962 lecture by Sir Tyrone Guthrie at New York City’s West Side YMCA titled, “The Job of the Director: To Chair the Proceedings,” reprinted from the Winter 1991 issue of The Journal.

Guthrie is famous, of course, for launching the Stratford Festival of Canada and founding the Guthrie Theater on this side of the globe.

The colloquialisms have changed, as have many of the differences between British and American theatre that Guthrie describes (even as the terms “director,” “producer,” and “manager” have persisted in their power to confuse), but many of the artistic challenges facing directors then, they also face now: engaging with playwrights, analyzing scripts, collaborating with actors and designers, setting the tone and making the perfect environment in the rehearsal hall conducive to the creative process—and yes, even (re-)interpreting Shakespeare in the face of heavy criticism.

There are some gems of wisdom in this “minimasterclass” from one of the giants of the 20th-century American theatre movement.

David Roberts Foundation Director

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My Observership with Dan Sullivan on The Little Foxes: A Reflection

BY ANN

NOLING

“

There was an important lesson for me as a young director in Dan’s approach and in how people responded to it: always ask for what you want, and when you can’t have it, be reasonable and make it work. But always ask, and don’t make it any easier for people to say no.

My Observership with Dan Sullivan has been a game changer for me in ways I think it may take me months and years to fully understand and articulate. I know without question that this process has made me a much stronger director and assistant. It showed me just how much I still had to learn when I stepped outside my limited experience of working on new plays OffBroadway. This was the first Broadway show I worked on and the first revival I had worked on in many years. I faced a steep learning curve, and the lessons and confidence I gained from rising to that challenge have been invaluable.

My hope with this Observership was that working with Dan—a director who has a reputation for being an actor’s director—on a revival, with the dual casting of Cynthia Nixon and Laura Linney, would allow me to focus on how to work with actors and designers after several years spent focusing on how to work with playwrights on new works. This proved to be completely true.

Dan is an incredible collaborator. He listens to his actors and designers, allows them the room they need to do their craft, but is still firm when he needs to stand up for a particular choice or decision. There was an important lesson for me as a young director in Dan’s approach and in how people responded to it: always ask for what you want, and when you can’t have it, be reasonable and make it work. But always ask, and don’t make it any easier for people to say no.

As I had hoped, the dual casting of Cynthia and Laura as Birdie and Regina gave me a great opportunity to see how Dan approached the same character with two different actors. From the beginning, Dan gave them permission to craft their own individual performances. He didn’t make a big deal about it, and he didn’t adjust his process too much (at least, not that I could see). We worked through big chunks of the play at a time, which meant that Laura and Cynthia were always there watching while the other was rehearsing. However, Dan allowed them each to do different blocking that made sense to the character choices they were making, and he made it clear that if design and technical aspects of the show had to change to accommodate their different performances, then that is what we would do. By the end, it was an impressive lesson in the collaborative nature of theatre. There was not a single part of the production that was completely the same between the two casts—the lighting, set, props, costumes, blocking, performances of the actors, backstage prep, and audience response all changed to varying degrees between the two casts.

Something I noticed about Dan’s approach to actor coaching that has really stuck with me is that he rarely gave general acting notes. Instead, he would give notes about specific lines

Laura Linney + Cynthia Nixon in The Little Foxes, directed by Daniel Sullivan PHOTO Joan Marcus

that would help get at the larger note—for example, instead of saying, “I think you need to be meaner in this scene,” he would give the note that a specific line needed to have more teeth. I’m still mulling over exactly how or why actors seem to hear Dan’s kind of note differently, but they do. It’s an approach I want to incorporate into my own work and continue exploring.

It was also a great lesson to watch Dan in previews. Because it wasn’t a new play, I could focus on how he fine-tuned the show instead of focusing on rewrites. Dan was not scared of making changes all the way through the preview process. Even in the last rehearsal before we froze the show, we changed the blocking for a significant moment and cut a line and sound cue. I know other directors who would hesitate to make major changes like this on the last day because they wouldn’t have the opportunity to try them out in performance and then adjust them further. Dan did, however, and the show was unquestionably stronger.

I have also learned a great deal about directing revivals, gaining a new understanding of the importance of considering a revival through both the lens of the period in which the playwright wrote the play and also the contemporary lens your audience will bring to it. Before beginning work on this production, I had been thinking about what The Little Foxes says about the period in which it is set and what it says about today to a contemporary audience, but I had not been thinking about it in the context of when it was written. Our conversations in the rehearsal room throughout the process helped me understand the importance of considering the perspective from which Lillian Hellman wrote the play in 1939.

As a result of this Observership, I would no longer categorically define myself solely as a new play director. I still have a deep passion and affinity for new play development and love the excitement of finding the play through readings, rehearsals, and rewrites. However, I have always envied my director friends who do devised work because of the opportunity they have to make director-driven work, even though devised work has never appealed to me—script work and textual

analysis are too intrinsic to my approach as a director. This Observership reminded me that with a revival, you still work from a script and start with a playwright, but the director is the primary storyteller of your production—he or she is responsible for finding the narrative throughline that is the driving force for the piece. New work has always appealed to me because the social-political ramifications of my work are very important to me as an artist, and I like the opportunity to tell new stories in new ways. Working on a show like The Little Foxes with timely political themes, however, reminded me that there is also a lot of opportunity for socio-political commentary with a well-chosen revival.

Dan talked through ideas and notes with me, listened to my opinions, and trusted me to give notes to the actors when he wasn’t at press performances. This trust and openness not only allowed me to learn more from him and his process but also helped me learn just how much I was capable of. I sincerely hope I am able to work with him again.

In addition to the lessons I learned from watching Dan’s approach, my Observership reminded me how much I can learn from working with seasoned professionals, as long as I am rigorous about searching out new experiences and challenges. It renewed in me a commitment to search out specific new opportunities that address gaps in my training.

I’ve been struggling to put into words how all the little things I learned from working with Dan added up. But I finally realized that this struggle is sort of the point. I don’t know all the ways this Observership will help and shape me moving forward. It has opened up so much to me—new techniques, new ideas, new collaborators, and new ways of identifying and understanding my own work. I don’t know yet what all these new things will lead to. But I know that this experience has given me these new opportunities as well as the confidence to pursue them and make the most of them. Working on this production was new and hard and challenging and stressful and stimulating and exciting, and I did it, and I did it well—and that experience is invaluable.

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THANK YOU TO ALL OF OUR MENTORS OVER THE YEARS Thank you, not just for the work that you do, but for the spirit in which you do it.

Thank you for fostering the imaginations of the next generation.

2016-2017 MENTORS MENTOR PROJECT OBSERVER

Kwame Kwei-Armah Twelfth Night Tyler Spicer

Emily Mann Bathing in the Moonlight Adriana Colon

Eric Ting Othello Camille Hayes

Robert O'Hara Bella Katie Lindsay

Spencer Liff Falsettos Jason Luks

Susan Stroman Little Dancer Angela Harris

Liesl Tommy Party People Christina Angeles & Jon Royal

Kathleen Marshall In Transit Rhonda Kohl (Traube Fellow)

Pam MacKinnon Amélie Seonjae Kim (Ockrent Fellow)

Carey Perloff A Thousand Splendid Suns Lyndsay Burch

Anne Bogart Lost in the Stars Leta Tremblay

Karen Azenberg Women in Jeopardy Jennifer Curfman

Christopher Windom Kid Victory Susan Toni

Mike Donahue The Moors Benita de Wit

Josh Prince Mrs. Miller Does Her Thing Jason Luks

Daniella Topol Intelligence Arianna Soloway

Josh Bergasse Charlie and the Chocolate Factory Natalie Malotke

Daniel Sullivan The Little Foxes Ann Noling

Marcia Milgrom Dodge Gypsy Patrick Strickland

Lear deBessonet Venus Alexis Devance

Art Manke The Monster-Builder Jess Shoemaker

Joe Calarco Jesus Christ Superstar Michael Witkes

Simon Godwin Measure for Measure Emma Went

Timothy Douglas Topdog/Underdog Nirvania Quesada

Daniel Aukin Fulfillment Center Julia Sears

APPLY NOW FOR FALL 2018 UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television Department of Theater B.A. THEATER MFA THEATER: Acting, Design, Directing, Playwriting PH.D. Theater and Performance Studies www.tft.ucla.edu Angela Lopez, MFA ‘17 in Directing Sonnets for an Old Century, Thesis Production

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SDCF FROM THE ARCHIVES

THE JOB OF THE DIRECTOR: TO CHAIR THE PROCEEDINGS

Sir Tyrone Guthrie What does a director do? As demonstrated in this issue’s feature, the answers to this question are rich and varied. Sir Tyrone Guthrie, director and founder of the Stratford Festival and the Guthrie Theater, reflected on a similar theme—the job of the director—in a lecture delivered in 1962 at the West Side YMCA in New York City. His lecture appeared in THE JOURNAL in 1991 and is reprinted here.

Robert Goodier + Tyrone Guthrie in 1953 PHOTO Peter Smith & Company c/o Stratford Festival

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INTRODUCTION I’m going to talk tonight about producing a play...well, directing a play. The terms are confusing. In Britain, we speak of the “producer” where you say the “director.” We don’t have a director. Where you say a “producer,” we say “manager” or “management.” But it really doesn’t matter. In neither case, director nor producer, does the term give the slightest indication of what the fellow is expected to do.

I’m going to divide the job into two parts. First of all, your dealings with the author and the script, which is preliminary.

Secondly, the dealings with the actors and the other technicians in the preparation of a play for rehearsal.

In point of fact, the director doesn’t meet the public very much at all. The public, of course, is the final arbiter of whether they go or stay home; and we often think they make the oddest decisions. But, by the time that’s happened, the work of the director is over; and the matter, although financially important, is in other respects comparatively negligible.

Producing the Play: Orthodox and Unorthodox Perhaps some of you may wonder how plays get on the stage. Indeed, I have often wondered myself. Of course, like everything else, there is no hard and fast rule. In London, the channels are more orthodox; and on the whole, I think the methods are more efficient.

In New York, it’s more unorthodox. It’s often wildly inefficient; but that has its own wild, strange charm and produces some excellent results. Now, I think this is largely a matter of economics. In New York, there’s much more money knocking about; and it is possible for a group of ten or twelve people, who are not any one of them wildly rich, to club together and to badger the life out of their friends and raise money and put on a play. It constantly happens that they do so and make all the mistakes that beginners make at everything.

You know, it’s like coming on and playing croquet for the first time. You just play terribly badly. A lot of these amateur managements make just about every possible mistake that you can make. They know nothing about it, and they make all the mistakes of ignorance and overexcitement and overenthusiasm.

But it performs one inestimable service: It means that no play, really no play can be nutty enough and boring enough and silly enough and wild enough not eventually to get on.

Now, I think that’s great. It does mean that there are some extraordinary evenings in the theatre; but also, that is the only way that interesting innovations can take place. Weird things happen. Suddenly, out of some weird group of people who know nothing about anything really, they produce something that is splendid and memorable and influences the theatre, possibly for generations.

In London, it’s all more proper and more orthodox. There are fewer managements, and most of them have been in the game not just for years but for generations. They know a very, very great deal about it, but they tend to

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know about it in a very stereotyped way.

Things certainly run on much more oiled wheels. It’s easier for everybody. Things happen more punctually. There’s far less screaming and hollering and cursing and anxiety and panic, but it’s also duller….

But…I didn’t come here to compare the New York to the London theatre. I’ve worked a lot in both, and I’m often asked what I think about it. It’s basically a silly question. The two things are so different, and the differences depend on such a complicated series of factors.

THE JOB OF THE DIRECTOR What I’m here to discuss is the job of the director. Even with different procedures and different contingents on the climate of the two theatres. Basically speaking, the thing is the same.

Choosing the Play First of all, you get sent a play. When you’re young, you die of excitement when somebody sends a play and asks would you consider producing it. You write back simply before you’ve opened to envelope to say, “Yes, of course, I think it’s the greatest play I’ve ever read. When do we start rehearsal?” When you get a little older, you get more choosy; because if you’re successful at all, you’re getting more scripts sent to you than you can deal with and you space your time out according to whatever you think is the best way of doing so.

Again, when you’re young, you’re sent a script and told by the management who sends it that the leading part will be played by Mr. X, the leading lady will be Miss Y, the designer will be Mr. Z, so on and so forth. You accept or refuse the package. As you get up in the world, you get a little bit more say in all that. When you’re a kind of a Methuselah like I am, you’re in a position where you don’t accept a package unless it’s a very nice one. You say, “Well I would like to be consulted about the choice of these people, and I think the best designer for this would not be Mr. W at all, but Mr. J.” Again, so forth and so on. But I think that is

precisely like any other business. As you get older and more experienced and people know you better, they entrust you with a little more responsibility. I think even for young directors, it’s not wise for management to force them into the package, because the director, and I shall come to this in the moment, under the manner of his dealing with his collaborators, has to be the chairman of the proceedings; and it’s rather easier to chair proceedings if you’ve packed the committee.

Reading the Play The first thing you have to deal with is the script itself. This may strike you as a very revolutionary statement. Certainly most of the directors I know would consider it such. It always seems to me the first thing to do with the script is to read it. Not once and again, but like the young lady of Spain, again and again and again and again and again...and again.

At some stage of the game, read it out loud, not necessarily to somebody but to your cat if you’ve got one. Reading the play aloud, in my experience, shows me all kinds of things you hadn’t found when you were reading the play to yourself.

Everybody reads a play differently. Now, this is why I think that a very, very great deal of dramatic criticism proceeds on a fallacy.

Dramatic criticism of the classics, certainly, is nearly always conducted on the assumption that there exists, probably in the mind of the critic, an ideal performance which completely realizes the intention of be it Shakespeare or Molière or Eugene O’Neill or whoever else; and what they see on the stage is judged in comparison with that imagined ideal performance.

Now, I think that is just nonsense, for the following reason: Every performance of a play, every contact with the play, is that person’s comment on it. If you read a play, if you read a novel, if you look at a picture, you may not be aware of it but what you’re seeing is only part of the author’s intention. You’re also seeing things the author never meant to put in. In other words, your contact with the work

Tyrone Guthrie leads a meeting for Hamlet at the Guthrie Theater, 1963. PHOTO c/o Guthrie Theater

I think the conscientious artist has no alternative but to take his courage in both hands, shut his eyes, hold his nose, jump in, and do it as best he knows.

of art is your personal comment upon it. You go and look, say, at the Mona Lisa in the Louvre; and you will see something quite different from what I’d see. I always think it would be a very amusing game to take a group of people who had never seen an important picture before, set them down in front of it for ten minutes, then take them away and say, “Write down what you saw in the fullest detail.”

You know as well as I do that what they wrote down would differ in the wildest and most extravagant respects—as wildly different as the police court evidence of the five or six people who see a motor accident and who all see something totally different. None of whom are probably lying. What you see in that picture is what it’s got to say to you. What I say is what it’s got to say to me. When you read a play, you get out of it what you can, which may be pretty little or a great deal more than the author put into it. But if you’re honest, that’s what your interpretation is going to be based on.

Interpreting the Script All my life in the theatre, I’ve been fairly severely criticized, much more in Britain than here—somewhat here and really punished in Britain—for what the critics have considered my impudence in daring to interpret

Shakespeare. What else can you do? If you’re asked to put a Shakespeare play upon the stage, you do two things. You either get the actors and try to make them help you to make it what you think Shakespeare was after, which clearly is not precisely what Shakespeare was after but the impression he’s made on you; or you put something on that is like some other Shakespearean production that you’ve admired. You warm up cold pudding, and cold second-hand pudding at that. Of the two, I would prefer to risk the impertinence of trying my own thing; and if it’s consistently bad enough, you won’t be asked to do it again.

Now, in the case of Shakespeare, you may say this is somewhat impertinent. To a degree, it is. There is a certain impertinence in relating yourself to a great master of anything and saying, “Well, now I’ve got to interpret you and it’s going to be done my way.” But Shakespeare isn’t here to defend himself, and what is the alternative? Of course, I’m not going to say that you don’t mug up in the books and read what the critics have said and read all these notes, most of which I’m sure you would agree are ineffably dreary—the dull scribblings of pompous, ponderous dullards who’ve been well-paid to be dull. But now and again, something good comes up.

Then, having read all that, having absorbed all that, you’ve got to get back to the fact that you read the text; and it makes on you an impression of such and such a kind. I think the conscientious artist has no alternative but to take his courage in both hands, shut his eyes, hold his nose, jump in, and do it as best he knows. Because the only other thing is just to do it the stock way, and there really is no other stock way. You just do what you remember of Walter Hampton’s production in mangy fur and purple velvet. I don’t think that’s any good. It’s not a service to Walter Hampton, to the public, to Shakespeare, or to anybody else.

Now, this may seem a little impertinent when it’s applied to Shakespeare; but I don’t think it is, because when you come to think of the nature of a play, it is not a thing in itself. The dramatist writes down the script; and with the deference due, which, in my opinion, is not a very high deference, to all the professors of literature in all the universities of the world for the last four hundred years, the printed script is not the end of the matter. It’s the beginning.

Finding the Author’s Intention The printed script bears no more relation to the author’s intention than the score of a symphony bears to the composer’s intention.

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symphony is merely the raw material waiting for a conductor and an orchestra to bring it to life. Similarly, the printed text in the play is the raw material of dramatic performance. It seems to be more, because any literate person can read the text, and very few literate people can read the score of a symphony. There isn’t one of us who can’t put on our specs and read, “To be or not to be, that is the question. Whether ‘tis nobler...” etc., etc., etc. So there then goes about the erroneous idea that the reading of the play is enough and that everybody by reading it can extract the full meat out of it.

Well, of course, they can’t. Many people can, and many people justifiably find the reading of a speech like that a more satisfactory experience than listening to it spoken by anybody. The best speaker of that speech that I ever heard is John Gielgud, who makes of it, I think, a matchless piece of music. It’s an operatic aria that in itself is a joy to the ear; but far more than that, he sets it in his context.

He apprehends, with his actor’s intelligence, that through what has gone before and what is to come and what is inside himself, this is a young man who is at his wit’s end, who is really out on the battlements of Elsinore in the dead of night saying, “Shall I take my own life, or shan’t I?”; and when, in a dramatic performance he speaks that, that’s absolutely clear.

But when you read it in the classroom, or when you read it to yourself, I don’t think most of us know enough about reading plays to supply all that imaginative context. Even if we can supply the facts of it, few of us are trained enough imaginatively, or in the techniques of the theatre, to be able to body forth the idea with the poignancy that a gifted actor can do.

and they have some sort of a shape. But there is no definitive shape. This is my point. The critics say, “Yes there is. Shakespeare intended the play to be just precisely so.” No one knows quite precisely how, and anything that doesn’t realize that is no good. I say, “No, if a play is any good, any act of it, any scene of it, any character of it can be interpreted fifteen different ways, each one as good as the other.

Or each one as bad as the other.” If you come to think of it, it must be so.

Handling the Author’s Stage Directions No playwright, except amateurs, of course...I’m always getting plays from amateurs which begin with eleven pages of stage direction which say, “Cynthia is an exquisitely pretty girl of nineteen and three quarters, she was born in May so and so, and she has blue eyes.”

They proceed to give bust, waist, and hip measurements, her shoe size, what she has for breakfast—an amateur psychoanalysis of her character. They proceed to do that for the rest of the characters in the play.

Then they describe in four pages the set, which is the ordinary, usual drawingroom comedy set with the usual mistakes made, like placing the windows at the back so that the brightest light is in the audience’s eyes; and so you go on from there. But that’s the amateur. The professional and the greater the professional, I think, the more terse his stage directions. Shakespeare’s stage directions are absolutely minimum. For two reasons: He knows that piles of stuff about what Cynthia had for breakfast on Tuesday last week and all that kind of rubbish is only inhibiting to the imaginations of the people who have got to interpret the play. It puts their backs up, it bores them, and it prevents them from thinking the thing freshly out for themselves.

Secondly, he knows very well that if the play is any good, it’s going to be performed in a thousand different contexts.

…if a play is any good, any act of it, any scene of it, any character of it can be interpreted fifteen different ways, each one as good as the other. Or each one as bad as the other.

Finding the Architecture of the Play In other words, it’s not at all an easy matter to read a play. It’s not a question of just reading the words. You’ve got to supply, which is something none of us to the end of our lives can do fully. You’ve got to supply the architecture of the scene, you’ve got to see where the climaxes are, how a scene builds to a certain point, which is the crisis of it, which leads on to the next thing, and so on and so forth; because a play is, in a way, a piece of architecture. Shakespearean plays are great complicated cathedrals, great echoing cathedrals filled with music; but the music itself is dependent upon the shape of the thing into which it is put. These scenes are all designed,

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lnterpreting Differently Hamlet, we have reason to suppose, was written for [Richard] Burbage, who was a big, fat man and a bit old for the part. But Hamlet can be played by a big man, a little man, a tenor, a bass, a manly man, an effeminate man, an aggressive man, a shy man. There are fifteen thousand ways of playing Hamlet.

All of them still add up and make the play interesting. Claudius is a little more limited,

because the script perfectly well tells us he is a bloat king, that he drinks a lot, that he smiles and smiles and is a villain. There are certain obligations on the players to conform to things in the text, but still it can be played in many, many dozens of ways. It is possible to cast Mr. A, B, C, D, E, F or G. On the casting of that and on the five or six other main parts, of course, depends the interpretation of the whole play.

If John Gielgud plays it with a certain group, it’s one thing. If Maurice Evans plays it with another group, the play becomes something totally different. The words are the same, the episodes are the same; but though both may be interesting, indeed, fascinating, the general impression on the audience will be totally different.

Any playwright who is setting out to do this thing seriously knows that the same thing holds true. You don’t just write that you think your play is going to be performed in the Longhurst Theatre by Ethel Barrymore, X, Y and Z and that it’s just going to be precisely so. Of course, it isn’t. If the play is any good, it’s going to be performed all over the world by countless different people in the part, countless different directors throwing in their two-cents worth. If you’re a playwright of any ambition at all, you hope that your play is going to go on until you’re dead, when theatrical fashions change, because theatrical fashions change just as fast as dress fashions.

The performance of a play that is given now, let us suppose a new play, is acclaimed as a great masterpiece. If it’s a great masterpiece... it surely won’t be, but let’s for fun suppose it is...the author, naturally, hopes that it will still be playing in “Oosbecketstan” in 2061, when you all know they’ll be in great beards, blowing horns, and carrying on in the maddest way.

The whole theatrical context will have changed.

Things will be done to that play that he could not possibly have envisioned; but if the play is any good, the meat of it will still be there.

The general philosophy of the play will come through. The trappings will be totally different.

Discovering the Author’s Subconscious Then, there’s another point. No author who’s any good, I’ve come to the conclusion, has the faintest idea, really, of what he’s written. This is my opinion, and it’s very hard to substantiate; but I haven’t arrived at it lightly. Anything that distinguishes it from journalism, that really gives it a bit of earth wisdom, has got in between the lines and over and above the conscious intention of the author.

I didn’t understand this at first. When I was much younger, I was very friendly with James Bridie, the Scottish dramatist. I don’t know if his work is familiar to anybody here. It’s not

as well-known on this continent as I think it should be. For years, he used to send me drafts of his plays as he was writing them and ask what I thought; and for years, I used to write back in very similar terms, you know, couched in this way or that way. The gist of the letter would be “Well, I think it’s immensely amusing, there are some great jokes that would make a cat laugh, there’s some wisdom and splendid things in it, but what’s it all about?” Always he would reply, “Well, I don’t know. I only wrote the thing.” I thought that was his sort of whimsical, ironical, Scot’s way of making a fool of me and saying, “Well, don’t you try to teach me my business.” But as the years passed, I learned he meant that in literal, sober fact. He considered anything that got in his plays that was any good had gotten in there without his knowing it. I’m pretty sure of that.

Take this present play that I’m working on, which is Gideon by Paddy Chayefksy. Now, I don’t want to sell it to you as the greatest play in the world. I think it’s an important play; but that’s not for me to say that it’s for you.

It’s beautifully written and has all Chayefsky’s uncanny skill of setting up a sentence so that the laugh comes at the right moment, setting the poignant moments against the laughs so that they enhance one another, and setting the important and weighty ideas in a sort of fluff of gay meringue so that they stick out like lighthouses in a stormy sea. It’s a very big advance on The Tenth Man in seriousness and in topic and in that kind of thing. On the conscious level, an enormous amount of artifice and know how has gone into the construction of this. But again and again and again and again, we come on things and the actors say the line in a certain way, and he says, “My God, that’s marvelous. I had no idea that was the way it was to be spoken.”

The collective thing of the group sheds light on the things he didn’t know were there.

They were in it all right, because they were in his unconscious. But what distinguishes the first rate from the merely journalistic is that it somehow carries this load of dynamite over and above the author’s subconscious.

Do you really believe that when Shakespeare sat down to write Hamlet he said to himself, “I’m going to create a character so interesting that six hundred years later, a public librarian will say that he is one of the three people whose biographies are in outstandingly greater demand than those of anybody else?” This was said to me in England during the war by a public librarian. The three people are, in order of preference: (1) Jesus Christ; (2) Napoleon Bonaparte; and pressing hard on the heels of Napoleon, (3) Hamlet. This figure is of surpassing interest to all of us down through the generations, around the world.

Well, do you think Shakespeare sat down and said, “Now, I’m going to write something that is the mind of every man, that is every young man or young woman in torture over a certain situation?” No author can write a great part without drawing enormously on his own experience. If you happen to be what Shakespeare was, a tremendous poet, the subconscious bubbles rather quickly into the conscious, creeps up in the lines, and very soon this young man was speaking the innermost thoughts and intuitions of the human race. But, he didn’t mean to.

Proclaiming the Right or Wrong Way Nor, is the thing set down in such a form that anybody can possibly have the impudence to say this is the definitive way of doing it. When you press people who take that point of view, really push them into a corner, you find that what they’ve got in mind is some performance that they saw when they were seventeen and were in a faint about, which left an immense impression. Well, you know, there is no great acting after one is eighteen years of age. Great acting is one’s memories of the great actors that one saw when one was very young and impressionable, and these people remember something as being wonderful. Well, when I was young it was the performances of Irving and Ellen Terry in Britain that were sort of the standards; and anything that departed from the way that Irving and Ellen Terry did the part was wrong. It wasn’t just different; it was wrong. They were right and it was wrong in the eyes of the senior critics.

I’ve noticed that it doesn’t just apply to Shakespeare. It goes all the way down the line.

There are certain ways of doing things which dramatic critics proclaim are right and are wrong. There is no right way of doing anything.

There are a million wrong ways, and some are wronger than others; but there is no right way.

Communicating with the Author Therefore, I think when you’re dealing with the script, one must not be humble. You must say, “This is what it seemed to mean to me.” If the author is there, that’s fine. You can discuss the things as they come along. I’m here to say that all the authors I’ve worked with, and I’ve worked with many live authors, have never been nuisances. If you ask them what they mean by something, they always say humbly, “Well, I’m not really quite sure that I know; but I think it’s something like this.” The only place Paddy Chayefsky is ever dogmatic about his plays is in certain, and nearly always quite little, ways of getting a laugh. He says, “I think it would be much funnier if he delayed the take, instead of just snapping back on the answer. If

he looked at the guy as if he didn’t understand and then gave the reply very mildly after the pause...” or something like that, little technical points like that, which is something he’s heard when he’s writing it. God knows that’s something he should know all about.

The ideal way of putting on the play is for the author himself to direct it, but authors are rarely good directors. They haven’t got what it takes, as a general rule, in the other department, which is dealing with the collaborators.

I hope I haven’t left the impudent impression that I think directors know more about authors’ scripts than the authors do themselves. Of course I don’t, I’m only saying that the author doesn’t know everything about his script and that the script itself is merely the raw material upon which a group of collaborators has got to work. It is not the finished article. That idea is merely the invention for the most basely materialistic reasons of literary professors.

I’m not going to go maundering on about the business with the script. There is a good deal to be said. There is no script, however good—I didn’t say this, Ezra Pound did—that isn’t the better for cutting. Everybody writes too long.

“The Sermon on the Mount” could take a bit of cutting.

THE COLLABORATOR’S DEPARTMENT Well, now then, on to the next thing. The Collaborator’s Department.

Casting the Play First of all, you’ve got to face it. You never get the people you want. If you’re casting a play, everybody goes for the leading parts with five or six leading actors who are hot at the time and with every management in the world, including the films, including the television, casting their crowns before them. In the case of the films and television, the crowns are much more heavily jewelled; and your chances of getting the top five are slender.

Then, there are a thousand reasons why you can’t get the people you want for the other parts. You can’t have Miss So and So because she used to be married to the leading man and “now she ain’t,” or you didn’t know it but the stage manager tells you that she’s drinking very heavily just now, or she’s gone away on vacation, or she’s making a film. The popular supposition is that actors’ lives are spent sitting at the telephone waiting for it to ring and that all of them say yes to any offer that is made to them. It’s not so. There are many thousands

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of actors like that at the bottom. But, alas and alack, so unfair is life. Those are not the people you want for the leading part.

Then, there is the further thing that the best actors are not always the best citizens. I won’t say that they’re the worst citizens, but the best citizens…the people who are never late, who never fluff a cue, who always know their lines, who are always helpful, tidy, sober, reliable, cooperative, and perfectly dear in every way usually have no talent. The converse is true.

The bundles of talent are nuisances. So, you can face it from the start. The collaboration will not be exactly what you’ve dreamed of.

Creating the Rehearsal Atmosphere Nevertheless, the first, in my opinion, the most important function that the director performs is creating a certain atmosphere at rehearsal. The first essential for that is to make the company feel that they are, in fact, a unit.

That’s much harder in New York than it is in London, because the theatre is so vast. The theatre here is almost the entire assemblage of professional talent from the whole continent.

There are literally tens of thousands of actors; and when a company is assembled, you know you probably won’t see any one of those people again for ten or fifteen years.

In London, it’s quite different. The market is smaller, we all know one another, everyone is on first name terms, most of them are godparents of the other one’s children, and all that kind of thing. It’s much more chummy and much more a family. The same thing goes for the relation with the staff. Oddly enough, in this democracy, the people who do the manual work are far more below the actors in the New York theatre than they are in London. In the London theatre, there will be old stagehands who’ve worked, and their fathers before them and their grandfathers before them, in the same theatre and with generations of actors.

And when they’re young kids, these old boys would have been kind of uncles and daddies to them. They’re not the lower classes at all. They’re respected and liked friends. The relations are infinitely more friendly and mutually supporting between them.

The New York theatre, not for any failing of the human thing but simply because it’s such a huge, great, overcompetitive, overbustling, moneymaking machine, has extraordinarily little of that kind of humanity. Therefore, it is harder for the director to do what I think is his first duty, which is to make everybody feel that they are part of a oneness, that the company is a unit, to create a morale in which everyone wants to do well, not just for their own selfadvantage but for the forwarding for the cause

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for which we are met. Allied to that, but not quite the same thing, it’s up to the director immensely to create the atmosphere of the rehearsal. A director who is unpunctual or who is lazy will never have good rehearsals.

It’s my experience that people have to feel like they must arrive on time and that it’s a duty for them to be punctual. Not because punctuality is in itself anything, but it’s a nuisance if the others are kept waiting. The proceedings have got to move at a certain speed. It’s up to the director to see that the people who have to wait about for a long time and then come on and say, “My lord, the carriage waits” and then bugger off and not say anything until the end of the play don’t have to wait for hours and hours to do that. They’re called, you can’t say precisely when but maybe twenty minutes before their turn comes, and allowed to go after it. It is little things like that which make an immense difference to the morale of rehearsal and to the humanness and the pleasantness of going on.

Helping the Actors Then, on a deeper level, it is the director’s business to deal with scenes in which people do often quite embarrassing things—playing love scenes with people they don’t find in the least sexually attractive, or, perhaps, even more embarrassing, playing love scenes with people they find overwhelmingly sexually attractive.

They make confessions. Show all sorts of strange things about themselves. It’s an odd paradox of the stage that as soon as you start pretending to do something and enlarge it to the scale that is necessary to make it carry to the back of a theatre, you not only portray what you pretend to do but you also portray yourself, your innermost self, in capital letters, in red ink, and underscored three times.

Homosexuality peeps out from the most butch men. With gentlemen who you know carry on like they’re great lechers, when they have to do some kind of a revealing scene, you see suddenly that inside all this facade of tweed and manliness is a terribly frightened little spinster lady.

And not only in the sexual department.

Sweet-faced spinster women, pillars of the Presbyterian Church, have to get up and show something; and suddenly you see that inside all this, there is a raging, voluptuous tigress.

Well, that’s not awfully funny. It can be very shaming to those who have to undergo it.

There is a sort of freemasonry of the stage that we accept that. That is why the stage is often accused of being too tolerant of irregularity.

It’s because we learn that that is what’s got to be taken—that people are not what they seem to be. That the world is just chock full of homosexual clergymen and kleptomaniac

ladies of the utmost respectability and all kinds of things like that.

Keeping the Balance in Rehearsals I think the important thing is the creation of the atmosphere at the rehearsal. The most single important thing about that is that it must not become a bore. I’m inclined to be pretty bored by the sort of rehearsals in which the directors go into long psychoanalytic huddles with certain members of the cast; and they whisper and whisper and whisper, and everybody else hangs about. As often as not, all that sort of talk doesn’t really show in the performance at all. If you want to do it, for God’s sake, yes, but not during rehearsal hours.

You go out and have a drink and do that in some dark corner.

Similarly, the scales have got to be held. The powerful and rich and important actors must not oppress the small-part people. I don’t think they’re apt to, but you have to watch that. Equally, the small-part people must not be allowed to bore and suck up to and vex the lives out of the big ones. Because in the desperate struggle, and again this applies particularly in New York, the small-part people with their way to make it have no option but to try to make contacts with people that they think are going to be useful; and they, therefore, become dreadful nuisances. The little people in the company very often feel that it’s necessary for their self-advantage to get to know the big people, and they rather push and hang around them and make themselves a nuisance in a not really very suitable way. Although it’s not really the director’s business, I think that as the chairman of the meeting you can protect them a bit from that. You can suggest to the young people that there are better ways of getting on.

Setting up a Framework for the Actors Well, then, it is not my view that the director is there to instruct actors how to do things.

You have to set up a framework in which they can work. It’s no use just saying, “Well, there’s the stage; and the door’s going to be there, dear; and the window’s there; and the staircase there and the sofa here. Now get on and act it.”

That’s not a help. Any actor…I’ve been an actor and I know…has got to be, to some extent, put into a framework. It’s much more helpful to be told, more or less, and started off with precise positions. If the director is wise, he will start that precisely; and he will say, “When you say the word ‘spit’ you stand up and walk over to the sofa, and when you say the word ‘teapot’ you sit down and begin pouring out the tea.”

If he’s awfully sensible, he will say, “Now this is only a preliminary thing. When you’ve done

it a few times, and if you want to change anything, let’s discuss it.” It’s not a hard and fast drill. There are certainly six ways in which it could be done. It’s a help, I think, always, if only because it saves time, if somebody blocks it out absolutely, autocratically at first, provided it is understood by everybody that no offense is going to be taken if they say, “I feel very uncomfortable here, do you mind if I cross later?”

Interpreting the Scenes I think that certain decisions have to be made by the director as to the general interpretation of the play and, inside that, the particular interpretation of a scene. Of course, again, a wise director is not autocratic about it. If somebody disagrees, they should certainly be entitled to say so. But not in front of everybody and not in such a way that it wastes the time of the whole gang. They say, “I’m not happy about this, can we discuss it?” You say, “Yes”; and at the end they say, “I quite disagree with you because, because, because....” If you’re sensible, you’ll listen very carefully; and probably they’re right.

In a scene, it must be arranged so that the climax comes at a certain point. Dialogue must be arranged, must to some extent be orchestrated, because the dialogue of a play is its music, upon which it lives. The pace of that music and the way one cue is given, one speech leads to another, is the music of the evening. Just as an orchestra cannot play a symphony without a conductor, for very obvious reasons, so a company cannot play a play without somebody who is going to regulate the music of the play and who says it’s going to get steadily louder, louder, faster, faster, faster, faster, faster, mounting to that point, pause, and then you start building

again. That’s a very obvious instance. There are many, many things that can be done with the music, but the pattern of it must be agreed beforehand. The actors must know the pattern into which they are expected to fit. Again, I don’t think this should be dogmatic. An actor could say, “Well, I think I could make that line much more effective if I didn’t have to gabble it, and if the climax would come a little bit earlier so that my line was the beginning of the....” You can see the sort of talk which is very easy to have.

Working with the Designers The director, of course, is responsible for the mise-en-scène. The designer designs; and if the director is sensible, he will let him design but only exercise a somewhat overall kind of control. No sensible director ays, “Oh, I couldn’t have the ribbons on that dress pink.

They must be blue.” But he does say, “Well, she’s got to get up some very steep stairs so there’s no use giving her a skirt that’s that tight. You better think again about that.” Or “she’s got to get through a narrow doorway, so there’s no use having a hat that sticks out to here.” Or “she’s got to be seen from the dress circle so there’s no use having a hat that does that.” Common sense stuff like that. But, overall, the style of the play, particularly a classical play, has got to be determined. The director, I think, has got to be the chairman of this; but if he’s wise, he won’t autocratically settle it. He will do it by discussion.

The designer with whom I’ve worked a very, very great deal, and with whom most of my classical productions have been done, is Tanya Moiseiwitsch. We’ve worked so much together that we’ve developed almost a sort of shorthand. We discuss things, and we have our own kind of abbreviations. We refer to other

things we have done and say, “It was a little like this, only not so black if this was dark black.”

Drawings are made on the back of envelopes and half sheets of paper in a very rough nature. We exchange these drawings; and the drawings give place in Tanya’s way of working, at a very early stage, before any finished drawings are done. Models, rough models, are cut out in cardboard; and the thing is set up so that you can see what is happening, not merely in the flat, but in two dimensions. If that is agreed, then the rough cardboard model gives way to a tidy one, which is painted. The dress sketches go through a similar thing. Very rough scribbles on the back of an envelope are replaced by samples of material, and then the samples of material are the basis for more careful painted drawings. I don’t think any director who is any good is taken in for very long by the elaborately finished drawings—you know, with sort of shaded backgrounds and immensely realistic imitations of textures and things, which many, particularly commercial, designers put in because they think that that only can get them the job.

In fact, the design should show just, without any frills at all, how the thing is made, what it’s going to be made of, and why it’s being made in that particular way.

CONCLUSION There’s plenty more that might be said, but I hope I’ve given you an indication of my attitude to this job and some of the things that the job embraces. Again, before I finish, may I say that if I’ve ever given a dogmatic impression I really think I’ve belied myself. It is never my intention, either off the stage or on it, to be dogmatic. Direct, yes. And without frills, yes. But not to the thinking that my point of view is right and nobody else knows anything.

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IN MEMORIAM March 23, 2016 – August 17, 2017 Edward Albee DIRECTOR Since 1974

Gordon Hunt DIRECTOR Since 1966

Bob Audy DIRECTOR/ CHOREOGRAPHER Since 1976

Frank Latson DIRECTOR Since 1994

Malcolm Black DIRECTOR Since 1977

REMEMBERING DANNY DANIELS SDC Founding Member Danny Daniels (aka Daniel Giagni, Jr.) died on July 2, 2017, at the age of 92. His 74-year career as a dancer, choreographer, and director began at the age of five and spanned stage, film, and television. He made his Broadway debut in Best Foot Forward, and went on to play leads in five other Broadway shows, including Billion Dollar Baby (Tony Nomination), Street Scene (Tony Nomination), and Make Mine Manhattan (Tony Nomination). With Morton Gould, he created the Tap Dance Concerto, which he performed through the U.S., Canada, and Europe.

His theatre choreography included 16 shows, among them Annie Get Your Gun, High Spirits, Ciao Rudy, 1491, and Wonderful Town. He received four Tony nominations for his choreography, winning in 1984 for The Tap Dance Kid. Daniels’ stage directing credits include a revival of Best Foot Forward, Stuff ‘n Nonsense, and Bermuda Avenue Triangle, and his eight film credits include choreography for Pennies from Heaven and Stepping Out. Daniels was a pioneer of television choreography in the 1950s. Through the decades, he choreographed seven TV series and more than 100 television shows for major stars such as Judy Garland, Perry Como, Bing Crosby, Danny Kaye, Gene Kelly, Mitzi Gaynor, and John Denver. He won an Emmy for the TV special Fabulous Fifties, which introduced Dick Van Dyke.

Dick Van Dyke Remembers Danny Daniels In 1958, I was in the cast of one of the last Broadway reviews. It starred Bert Lahr and Nancy Walker. Songs, dances, and sketches. It closed in two weeks.

There was a little sketch I did while they were changing scenery, about a guy who comes home totally drunk but snaps into cold soberness in front of his wife, only when she’s looking at him.

When she glances away, he collapses in a heap. When she turns back, he pops into sober again.

Danny Daniels was there one night, thank God!! He said, “You went from prone to standing up in one frame!”

Danny got into a special choreographing a dance for me, and suddenly I was a dancer. Which was odd because I hadn’t been one before. I ended up cast in Bye, Bye Birdie, for which I got a Tony. Danny never admitted it, but I knew he had put in a good word for me to Gower Champion.

Somehow he was always behind the scenes, recommending me, giving needed advice, kind of invisibly guiding my progress. None of it would have ever happened without him. He even made up a dance number for my quartet that we still use till this day. I owe him more than I can say.

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Michael Bogdanov DIRECTOR Since 2001 Dennis Cole DIRECTOR/ CHOREOGRAPHER Since 1969 Danny Daniels DIRECTOR/ CHOREOGRAPHER (FOUNDER) Since 1962 Gordon Davidson DIRECTOR Since 1969 Howard Davies DIRECTOR Since 1980 Jason Edwards DIRECTOR Since 1999 Zelda Fichandler DIRECTOR Since 1987

Rene Moreno DIRECTOR Since 2007 JoAnn Oakes DIRECTOR Since 2006 Michael Warren Powell DIRECTOR Since 1991 Daniel Schay DIRECTOR Since 1986 John Shearin DIRECTOR Since 1991 Sam Shepard DIRECTOR Since 1994 Ed Sherin DIRECTOR (FOUNDER) Since 1961 Robert Tucker DIRECTOR/ CHOREOGRAPHER Since 1978

Steven Hart DIRECTOR Since 1996

Alison C. Vesely DIRECTOR/ CHOREOGRAPHER Since 2004

Jack Hofsiss DIRECTOR Since 1976

Carl Weber DIRECTOR Since 1968

James Houghton DIRECTOR Since 1999

Margaret Whitton DIRECTOR Since 2004 Ron Wilson DIRECTOR Since 1996

REMEMBERING SAM SHEPARD

BY LORETTA

Sam Shepard changed the face of theatre. Forever. Through his mindbending and heartbreaking plays and prose, he bared his soul and swagger while traversing our primordial pasts. For five decades and change, Sam has been in pursuit of the mythic bones buried out back, of the visceral energy and emotional tension that makes us human. It’s hard to imagine a world without him.

Sam was Magic Theatre’s most beloved son (founder John Lion had the vision to offer him a decade-long artistic home in 1975) and it is here, at the end of the West, hanging off the San Francisco Bay that Sam wrote and premiered seven of his seminal works, including Buried Child, True West, and Fool for Love. His singular brand of muscularity was forever baked into the walls at Magic, demanding a ferocious, visceral primacy—which ignited a new play fever throughout the Bay and beyond.

His restless, rhythmic, imagistic dialogue made actors kill to speak his words aloud—to explore the space he left around the words. Sam and the great Robert Woodruff would alternate helming those early iconic productions; Sam would go on to direct seven of the 24 plays Magic would produce in its first 50 years.

Sam loved actors. When he spoke of frequent collaborators—Ed Harris, Kathy Baker, James Gammon, or Stephen Rea—it was with unabashed reverence. He knew firsthand the job straddled somewhere between the ridiculous and the holy, and he relished giving actors the space they needed to drop inside the language en route to their character. I think he never lost his belief in theatre being a visceral transaction—a chance to feel, to be transported—rather than an opportunity to deliver literal meaning.

GRECO

We forged a friendship over what would be, unthinkably, the last five years of his life. Slumped in Magic’s audience, legs dangling over the theatre seats in front of us, he argued vehemently with me over the ending of a play I was directing (not his); he remained eternally leery of anything resembling a pat ending. He attempted to explain the craft of hunting geese versus deer and encouraged me to read one of his favorite novels (I tried, unsuccessfully—the book, not the hunting).

Years later, over tea one afternoon in the East Village, he joyously recited Beckett and with misty eyes shared the humility he felt in making what would become Tongues with his dear friend, Joe Chaiken.

Sam refused to play wise sage; he remained beautifully broken from his first plays in ’64 to his last book of fiction published in 2017, combing the open road for visages of his lost father, the bygone West of his youth, and America’s forgotten promises.

I last saw Sam in Healdsburg just before he would head home to Kentucky in April.

A copy of his newly published work, A Particle of Dread, was waiting for me. Over cups of coffee, Sam and his astounding sisters, Sandy and Roxanne, shared with my partner and me photos of his cherished ranch, the horses he missed dearly, and the astounding beauty of that land. He confided he was working on yet another work of fiction; we discussed Diebenkorn’s work; he pondered the origin of the Beatles’ Blackbird. He dictated a dedication in honor of Magic’s fiftieth. Before gifting it to me, Sam asked to hear it out loud.

Roxanne read it back patiently several times, and with each pass, Sam listened intently, making small, careful revisions.

In spite of his declining health, he was profoundly himself. Curious.

Searching, like the rest of us. Making sure that as the words hit the air, they were right.

Loretta Greco is the Artistic Director of Magic Theatre in San Francisco.

Playwright, actor, screenwriter, and director Sam Shepard died on July 27, 2017, at the age of 73. His first New York plays, Cowboys and The Rock Garden, were produced by Theatre Genesis in 1963, and for several seasons he worked with Off-Off-Broadway theatre groups including La MaMa and Caffe Cino. Eleven of his plays won Obie Awards, including Chicago and Icarus’s Mother (1965); Red Cross and La Turista (1966); Forensic and the Navigators and Melodrama Play (1967); The Tooth of Crime (1972); Action (1974); Curse of the Starving Class (1976); and Buried Child (1979), for which he also was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. Fool for Love (1982) received the Obie for Best Play as well as for Direction. A Lie of the Mind (1985) won the New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award and the Outer Critics Circle Award for Outstanding New Play, and a 1996 revival of Buried Child on Broadway, directed by Gary Sinise, was nominated for a Tony Award. Kicking a Dead Horse (2007) and Ages of the Moon (2009) both premiered at the Abbey Theatre in Dublin. Shepard’s last play, A Particle of Dread, premiered in 2014 at Signature Theatre.

Shepard wrote the screenplays for Zabriskie Point; Wim Wenders’ Paris, Texas; and Robert Altman’s Fool for Love, a film version of his play. He wrote and directed the films Far North (1988) and Silent Tongue (1992). As an actor, he appeared in the films Days of Heaven, Resurrection, Raggedy Man, The Right Stuff, Frances, Country, Fool for Love, Crimes of the Heart, Baby Boom, Steel Magnolias, Bright Angel, Defenseless, Voyager, Thunderheart, Black Hawk Down, The Pelican Brief, Safe Passage, Hamlet and Don’t Come Knocking, and recently in the Netflix series Bloodline.

In 1986, Shepard was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters, which awarded him the Gold Medal for Drama in 1992. In 1994, he was inducted into the Theater Hall of Fame.

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THE SOCIETY PAGES SDC MEMBERS @ WORK + PLAY

Directors Lab West, made possible in part by support from SDC, kicked off its eight-day summer intensive on May 20 in Los Angeles, bringing emerging and mid-career stage directors and choreographers together with master artists to meet, exchange ideas, and inspire one another. On May 24, the SDC L.A. Steering Committee hosted a mixer to provide participants an opportunity to meet SDC Members who live and work in Los Angeles.

TOP

Directors Lab West 2017 participants PHOTO Martin Jago LEFT

Julie Petry PHOTO Martin Jago BOTTOM

The Directors Lab West Steering Committee PHOTO Martin Jago

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On May 21, Western Region Members got together for a Phoenix Members Meeting at Arizona Theatre Company, where they joined Western Regional Representative Casey Stangl and current Arizona Theatre Company Artistic Director David Ira Goldstein to discuss Union activities in the Western Region, meet and welcome incoming ATC Artistic Director David Ivers, and see the ATC production of Holmes & Watson by Jeffrey Hatcher, directed by Goldstein.

TOP

Phoenix Members BOTTOM

David Ira Goldstein, Casey Stangl + David Ivers

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A Joint Regional Meeting of the Dramatists Guild and SDC was held on June 4 in Seattle, where SDC Executive Director Laura Penn was featured in conversation with Dramatists Guild’s Seattle Regional Rep Duane Kelly and SDC Board Member Linda Hartzell. A reception followed the program.

The 2017 TCG National Conference welcomed more than 1,000 theatre practitioners to Portland, Ore., June 8–10, for peer connection, professional development, and inspiration from within and beyond the field. During the opening plenary, the Theatre Practitioner Award was presented to Linda Hartzell, Artistic Director Emerita of Seattle Children’s Theatre. On June 9, Chay Yew, Kevin Moriarty, and Snehal Desai served on a panel discussion on equity, diversity, and inclusion. The same evening, SDC hosted a festive cocktail party for Members, with a welcome from SDC Executive Board President Pam MacKinnon and Northwest Regional Representative Linda Hartzell, as well as Members Chris Coleman and Damaso Rodriguez.

BELOW RIGHT

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Pam MacKinnon, Timothy Douglas + Diane Rodriguez

Linda Hartzell receives the Theatre Practitioner Award PHOTO Jenny Graham

Chay Yew, Kevin Moriarty + Snehal Desai on the equity, diversity + inclusion panel

Braden Abraham, Vivienne Benesch + Tyler Dobrowsky

Carey Perloff, Chay Yew + Laura Penn

Joanie Schultz, Adam Immerwahr + Snehal Desai

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On June 9, SDC Executive Board Officers Pam MacKinnon, John Rando, Leigh Silverman, Oz Scott, and Michael Wilson launched the Tony Awards weekend with a Tony toast to Members nominated for their outstanding work in the 2016–2017 theatre season.

ABOVE

SDC Board Treasurer Michael Wilson, Ruben Santiago-Hudson (nominee, Best Direction of a Play), SDC Director of Contract Affairs Mauro Melleno + Christopher Ashley (winner, Best Direction of a Musical) MIDDLE LEFT

Bartlett Sher (nominee, Best Director of a Play) + Matthew Warchus (nominee, Best Direction of a Musical) MIDDLE RIGHT

Michael Greif (nominee, Best Direction of a Musical) + former SDC President Susan H. Schulman BOTTOM LEFT

Best Choreography nominees Denis Jones, Kelly Devine + Sam Pinkelton with Baayork Lee BOTTOM RIGHT

Baayork Lee (recipient of the Isabelle Stevenson Tony Award) + Daniel Sullivan (nominee, Best Director of a Play)

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June 23–25, Michael Mayer directed a workshop of Stilyagi, a new musical by Lisa Kron and Peter Lerman, in the Powerhouse Season, an annual partnership between New York Stage & Film and Vassar College to develop new work.

PHOTO

Buck Lewis

Directors Lab North, an offshoot of the Lincoln Center Theater Directors Lab, welcomed participants June 19–24, in Toronto, Canada, for six days of workshops, readings, rehearsals, investigations, discussions, and master classes with master directors from Canada and around the world.

Directors Lab North Co-founder + Artistic Director Evan Tsitsias with Chang Nai Wen, Annie Levy + Elizabeth Kirkland

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On July 17, SDC hosted a retirement party for longtime Director of Contract Affairs Mauro Melleno, who retired in August.

There was a great turnout, and all enjoyed the decorations—pictures of Mauro over the years—and the toasts made to Mauro and his accomplishments. Among the many achievements made by the Contract Affairs department during his almost 18-year tenure at SDC were development coverage across all jurisdictions, organizing of Boston’s NEAT theatres, coverage in LORT for Fight Choreographers, and increased pension contributions. He also led such negotiations as the Dinner Theatre Agreement, OMS, RMT, and CORST, and oversaw all Broadway and first-class touring employment contracts.

SDC is grateful to him for his many years of exceptional service and wishes him the very best for his retirement. He will be missed!

CENTER

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Mauro Melleno

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THANK YOU, MAURO CONGRATULATIONS TO THE NEW ASSOCIATE MEMBERS WHO HAVE JOINED UNDER

THE 2016 + 2017 SDC MFA GRADUATE STUDENT INITIATIVE

The initiative is aimed at building relationships between SDC and recent graduates—the future leaders of the American theatre.

2016

UNIVERSITY OF IOWA Marina Bergenstock | Ariel Francoeur Nina Morrison UCLA Brendan Hartnett | Darcie Crager

2017

BROOKLYN COLLEGE Tara Elliot COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY Ines Braun | Robin Alexander Eriksen Palina Jonsdottir | Rory McGregor

INDIANA UNIVERSITY Katie Horwitz UCLA Michelle Yujiao Gong | Angela Lopez UC SAN DIEGO Will Detlefsen

“In the moment that MFA directors enter the larger work force, it is our obligation, as those who oversaw their training, to help them to orientate and find colleagues in the field. I can think of no better way to accomplish this than by offering each graduate an SDC Associate Membership.” — ANNE BOGART For more information about SDC’s MFA Graduate Student Initiative, contact Member Services Coordinator Marisa Levy at MLevy@SDCweb.org.

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SDC FOUNDER JEROME ROBBINS 1918–1998 Director-Choreographer Jerome Robbins is world renowned for his work in theatre, ballet, movies, and television. His Broadway shows include On the Town, Billion Dollar Baby, High Button Shoes, West Side Story, The King and I, Gypsy, Peter Pan, Miss Liberty, Call Me Madam, and Fiddler on the Roof. His last Broadway production in 1989, Jerome Robbins’ Broadway, won six Tony Awards, including Best Musical and Best Director.

Among the more than 60 ballets he created are Fancy Free, Afternoon of a Faun, The Concert, Dances at a Gathering, In the Night, In G Major, Other Dances, Glass Pieces, and Ives, Songs, which are in the repertories of New York City Ballet and other major dance companies throughout the world.

His last ballets include A Suite of Dances created for Mikhail Baryshnikov (1994), 2 & 3 Part Inventions (1994), West Side Story Suite (1995), and Brandenburg (1996).

In addition to two Academy Awards for the film of West Side Story, Robbins received four Tony Awards, two Emmy Awards, the Directors Guild of America Award for Outstanding Directing, and the New York Drama Critics Circle Award. He was a 1981 Kennedy Center Honors Recipient and was awarded the Legion of Honour, the highest French order of merit for military and civil merits.

PHOTO Didier Olivre c/o the Jerome Robbins Foundation

“

What is worth striving for is difficult and challenging: to communicate a truly felt experience in as inventive and revealing way possible. For it isn’t only what one says, but how one says it that lifts a work from the ordinary.

”

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