SDC Journal Winter 2020

WINTER 2020

B R AT I

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CE

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60 LE

YE A RS

LLOYD RICHARDS Revealing the Truth of

Our Times and Our Lives

LATE-NIGHT MEETINGS...

Shepard Traube + the Founding of SDC

TRUE MENTORSHIP Emily Mann

+ JOANNE AKALAITIS JULIE ARENAL FRANK GALATI MARSHALL W. MASON HANA S. SHARIF

OFFICERS

Pam MacKinnon PRESIDENT

John Rando EXECUTIVE VICE PRESIDENT

Michael John Garcés FIRST VICE PRESIDENT

Michael Wilson TREASURER

Evan Yionoulis SECRETARY

Seret Scott SECOND VICE PRESIDENT

Leigh Silverman THIRD VICE PRESIDENT

EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR

Laura Penn COUNSEL

Ronald H. Shechtmann HONORARY ADVISORY COMMITTEE

Karen Azenberg Pamela Berlin Julianne Boyd Graciela Daniele Emily Mann Marshall W. Mason Ted Pappas Susan H. Schulman Oz Scott Daniel Sullivan Victoria Traube

SDC EXECUTIVE BOARD

SDC JOURNAL

MEMBERS OF BOARD

MANAGING EDITOR

WINTER 2020 CONTRIBUTORS

Kate Chisholm

JoAnne Akalaitis

Saheem Ali Christopher Ashley Melia Bensussen Walter Bobbie Anne Bogart Jo Bonney Mark Brokaw Rachel Chavkin Desdemona Chiang Liz Diamond Marcia Milgrom Dodge Sheldon Epps Liza Gennaro Joseph Haj Linda Hartzell Anne Kauffman Dan Knechtges Mark Lamos Kathleen Marshall Sharon Ott Lisa Portes Lonny Price Ruben Santiago-Hudson­ Bartlett Sher Casey Stangl Eric Ting Chay Yew

DIRECTOR

FEATURES EDITOR

Mary B. Robinson SDC DIRECTOR OF COMMUNICATIONS

Joyce Friedmann

Julie Arenal DIRECTOR + CHOREOGRAPHER

Frank Galati DIRECTOR

GRAPHIC DESIGNER

Leah C. Gardiner

Adam Hitt

DIRECTOR

EDITORIAL ADVISORY COMMITTEE

Jo Bonney Sheldon Epps Liza Gennaro Ann M. Shanahan Leigh Silverman Evan Yionoulis SDC JOURNAL PEER-REVIEWED SECTION EDITORIAL BOARD SDCJ-PRS CO-EDITORS

David Callaghan Ann M. Shanahan

Liza Gennaro DIRECTOR + CHOREOGRAPHER

Dan Knechtges DIRECTOR + CHOREOGRAPHER

Marshall W. Mason DIRECTOR

Lisa McNulty PRODUCING ARTISTIC DIRECTOR

Lonny Price DIRECTOR

Mary B. Robinson DIRECTOR

Hana S. Sharif

SDCJ-PRS BOOK REVIEW EDITOR

DIRECTOR

Kathleen M. McGeever

WINTER 2020 SDCJ-PRS CONTRIBUTORS

SDCJ-PRS ASSOCIATE BOOK REVIEW EDITOR

Artemis Preeshl

Emily A. Rollie SDCJ-PRS SENIOR ADVISORY COMMITTEE

Anne Bogart Anne Fliotsos Joan Herrington James Peck

SEMESTER AT SEA/COLORADO STATE UNIVERSITY

Rebecca Whitehurst NORTHERN ARIZONA UNIVERSITY

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

ISSN 2576-6899 © 2019 Stage Directors and Choreographers Society. All rights reserved. SDC JOURNAL is a registered trademark of SDC. SUBSCRIPTIONS + ADVERTISEMENTS Call 212.391.1070 or visit www.SDCweb.org.

Annual SDC Membership dues include a $5 allocation for a 1-year subscription to SDC JOURNAL. Non-Members may purchase an annual subscription for $36 (domestic), $72 (foreign); single copies cost $10 each (domestic), $20 (foreign). Purchase online at www.SDCweb.org.

POSTMASTER Send address changes to SDC JOURNAL, SDC, 321 W. 44th Street, Suite 804, New York, NY 10036.

PRINTED BY Sterling Printing

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SDC JOURNAL | WINTER 2020

WINTER CONTENTS Volume 8 | No. 1

FEATURES 16 Late-Night Meetings in Smoke-Filled Rooms SHEPARD TRAUBE + THE FOUNDING OF SDC BY

MARY B. ROBINSON

23 A Place Where Big Challenges Are

Attempted and the Unknown Is Braved AGNES DE MILLE’S CONGRESSIONAL TESTIMONY ON THE IMPORTANCE OF FEDERAL SUPPORT FOR THE ARTS INTRODUCED BY

DAN KNECHTGES

COVER 26

Revealing the Truth of Our Times and Our Lives EXCERPTS FROM SPEECHES BY LLOYD RICHARDS

INTRODUCED BY

LEAH C. GARDINER

35 Leading with Heart and Breaking Down

Doors: Emily Mann and True Mentorship AN SDC ROUNDTABLE WITH JADE KING CARROLL, REGINALD L. DOUGLAS + ADAM IMMERWAHR MODERATED BY LISA

McNULTY

43 Celebrating 60 Years of Unite. Empower. Protect.

What the Union Means to You

46

PEER-REVIEWED SECTION

Re-Feel: Reviving Anna Sokolow’s Trois Morceaux for Elon’s Posthumous Premiere BY

ARTEMIS PREESHL

Lloyd Richards at the Eugene O’Neill Theater Center PHOTO A. Vincent Scarano c/o Eugene O’Neill Theater Center COVER

Agnes de Mille in Rodeo, 1944 PHOTO Photofest WINTER 2020 | SDC JOURNAL

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5

FROM THE PRESIDENT

BY PAM MACKINNON

FROM THE EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR

BY LAURA PENN

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SDC Founders

9

IN YOUR WORDS

What I Learned...

BY JOANNE

AKALAITIS

Why I Made That Choice

BY HANA

Pre-Show/Post-Show

BY FRANK

11

Step Forward

BY JULIE

12

20 Questions

52

WITH

Observerships, Then and Now CONVERSATION WITH MARCIA MILGROM A

58

IN MEMORIAM

Remembering Martin Charnin

BY LIZA

Remembering Harold Prince

BY LONNY

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THE SOCIETY PAGES

GENNARO

PRICE

Sundance Institute | Luma Foundation Directors Retreat 2019 Summer Sling ATHE Conference Happy Hour

GALATI

Portland Happy Hour DirectorsLabChicago 2019

ARENAL

SDC Seattle Breakfast Atlanta Member Event Board Retreat

MARSHALL W. MASON

Andrew R. Ammerman Directing Award

SDCJ-PRS BOOK REVIEW

hysical Dramaturgy: P Perspectives from the Field

Hartford Member Night Out! Broadway Flea Market & Grand Auction

RACHEL BOWDITCH, JEFF CASAZZA + ANNETTE THORNTON REVIEW BY REBECCA WHITEHURST EDITED BY

SDC FOUNDATION

DODGE + BRITT BERKE

S. SHARIF

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TEDxBroadway 2019 SDC Staff Outing Toast to the Barrymores Variety Business of Broadway Breakfast SDC Screen-to-Screen SDC NYC Fight Night LA Member Night Out!

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SDC LEGACY

Aaron Frankel

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.

PHOTO

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SDC JOURNAL | WINTER 2020

Lloyd Richards c/o Scott Richards

FROM THE

PRESIDENT This is my final letter as SDC Board President. I have tasked myself with writing about the accomplishments that we achieved together over the last three years. It’s less of a snapshot and more of an unfolding tapestry, true to our three-part mission verbs: Unite.

Empower. Protect.

Engagement in Union activities has increased around the country.

There have been 61 Member events outside of New York City between January 2017 and September 2019. SDC joining the Department of Professional Employees puts us at the center of fellow entertainment union conversations and the ability to develop a legislative agenda.

SDC fight choreographers for the first time are covered under the LORT, Off-Broadway, and ANTC agreements. Over 10,000 days of development work has been covered in these last few years. With the New England Area Theatres, we now have a new multi-employer Collectively Bargained Agreement—the first in several decades. We have formed Boston and Seattle Steering Committees and have begun more on-the-ground work in London alongside our sister, the more nascent SDUK. SDC Associate Memberships are up 10 percent from 2018, driven by our newly but securely established relationships with higher education organizations nationwide. We have seen great progress on coverage for Broadway associate/ resident directors and choreographers; all general management offices, save one, have recognized these Members by filing a promulgated agreement when hiring.

I have had the profound pleasure to sit on a Board that is generous, smart, and working in the field on all contracts. To chair our monthly meetings is to get a precious glimpse of how folks maybe lead their rehearsal halls and design meetings: collaboratively, well prepared but also flexible, in conversation with each other. Forty-two percent of Board Members live outside the NYC/Tri-State area. To better handle the increased workload, we have added a Second and Third Vice President to the Executive Committee.

The diligent Contract Affairs Department has in the last three years secured over $1 million in underpayments to our Members and the funds. We have launched a Supplemental Benefits Task Force to solidify an Emergency Assistance Fund for our Members and their families.

SDC has updated its rights and responsibilities to address expectations for workplace conduct and implement intimacy choreography training for the Board. We also amended our bylaws to be ever more transparent about conflict-of-interest issues and Board service, making clear to Board Members and Members At-Large alike that we hold ourselves to the highest standards.

We celebrated together the 60th anniversary of the Union by holding up the choreographers among us, honoring Vicky Traube and co-founder Agnes de Mille. I got to introduce the First Lady of New York City the evening we honored Kenny Leon with the “Mr. Abbott” Award and sip tea the following year with Julie Taymor after her “Mr. Abbott” event. This coming season, we celebrate Joe Mantello. All in a fundraising effort for the SDC Foundation for artists coming up. I also feel very grateful to have given the President’s Award for long-standing exceptional service to SDC to Sheryl Kaller, Sharon Ott, and Robert Moss.

The Union is where we come together over the course of our careers, where ideas large and small get voiced and turned into action, if we are so inclined. We gather to build and better the field.

The Union is only as good as its Members and its staff, which is pretty damn good. I am excited to see what Evan Yionoulis, our new Board Prez, and the incomparable Laura Penn do next. Hear!

Hear! To my colleagues, collaborators, mentors, and mentees, it has been a great honor serving as your President. I hope to continue my Board service. No matter, I will continue to work hard to unite, empower, and protect.

In Solidarity,

Pam MacKinnon Executive Board President

WINTER 2020 | SDC JOURNAL

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FROM THE

EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR Hazard and hope. Meeting with hazard and hope. This is how Aaron Frankel remembered the “smoke-filled rooms” Margaret Webster wrote of when considering how the Union would take hold. As we enter the final months of the 60th anniversary year, this issue of the Journal is our attempt to capture the essence of the founding even as we give space to the future of SDC. And still, it’s a snapshot. An eloquent, informative, and compelling look at what has come before combined with inspiration for the future.

Member Mary B. Robinson signed on to serve as our guest features editor for this edition. She has masterfully captured the story of the founding by illuminating the vibrant and tenacious character that was Shepard Traube. Mary has excavated, sourced, and illuminated corners of our history new to many and has captured the suspense inherent in the fight for recognition. No story of the founding would be complete without Agnes de Mille, herein represented with her passionate appeal to Congress for federal funding for the arts. Then there is Lloyd Richards, who embodies the best of an artist, a director, an educator, a human being. For a decade, he served as the Union’s President, and his tenure paved the way for national expansion—of contracts (League of Resident Theatres (LORT) recognition in 1972) and of spirit. Interspersed, we have included the voices of Members from multiple generations.

Through the life force that is Emily Mann, we celebrate mentorship, which is inextricably bound in the fabric of the Union and the SDC Foundation. We have attempted to capture what Membership means and have curated columns that feature founders, current leaders, and esteemed artists from the ranks of the Membership that represent the breadth of our community, our collective. Through the sheer will and fortitude of a merry band of directors and choreographers, SDC stands tall as it enters its seventh decade.

PHOTO

Hervé Hôte

I smile when I think of how Shepard Traube and the founders would respond to Hana S. Sharif’s “the beauty of transitions is in the fracturing of complacency.” Just as some 164 men and women stepped forward 60 years ago to change the landscape for directors and choreographers, SDC has continually been in motion, not willing to accept the status quo, always using our influence and position to make a better way for our Members, the craft, and theatre writ large. From our origins on Broadway to national and increased international stature, today we are a community of 3,381 Members, growing, deepening, expanding, pushing the Union forward, fueled by strength, and hope, through the hazard, in order to Unite. Empower. Protect.

In Solidarity,

Laura Penn Executive Director

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“VICTORY IS NEAR…To make it lasting and meaningful, let us hope all members will help govern rather than simply being governed.”

– Ezra Stone, on the eve of the founding of SDC

SDC FOUNDERS Robert Allan Ackerman

Danny Daniels

Moss Hart

Albert E. Marre

Bill Ross

David Alexander

Marc Daniels

Joseph Hayes

Marshall W. Mason

Herbert Ross

Rod Alexander

Howard Da Silva

Robert Herget

Billy Matthews

Mark Rydell

Richard Altman

Jules Dassin

Ray Hinkley

Matt Mattox

Donald Saddler

Joseph Anthony

Harry Delmar

Hanya Holm

Nick Mayo

George Schaefer

William Ball

Agnes de Mille

Harry Horner

Guthrie McClintic

Dore Schary

Richard Barr

Reginald Denham

Jed Horner

Neil McKenzie

Alan Schneider

Herbert Berghof

Vincent Donehue

Norris Houghton

Gian Carlo Menotti

Mark Schoenberg

Valerie Bettis

Robert Downing

John Houseman

Burgess Meredith

Alex Segal

Peter Birch

Lyle Dye Jr.

Michael Howard

Frank Merlin

Ruthanna Boris

Lee A. Emmerich

Robert Joffrey

David Metcalf

Charles Bowden

John Fearnley

Garson Kanin

Worthington Miner

Harold Bromley

Cy Feuer

Mesrop Kasdikian

Loy Nilson

Peter Brook

Ernest O. Flatt

Elia Kazan

James Nygren

Perry Bruskin

Charles Forsythe

Gene Kelly

Sir Laurence Olivier

Abe Burrows

Bob Fosse

John Kennedy

Charles Olsen

Philip Burton

Robert Foster

Michael Kidd

John O’Shaughnessy

Bill Butler

Aaron Frankel

Jerome Kilty

Ruth Page

Henry Butler

Gene Frankel

Joseph Kramm

Arthur Penn

John Butler

Roy Franklin

Danya Krupska-Thurston

Daniel Petrie

Robert Cahlman

Burry Fredrick

Jack Landau

Stephen W. Porter

Carmen Capalbo

Charles Freeman

Joe Layton

Henry C. Potter

Ted Cappy

Jack Garfein

Robert Lewis

Stanley Prager

Madolin Cervantes

Peter Gennaro

Windsor Lewis

Otto Preminger

Ira Cirker

Ella Gerber

Monica Lind

David Pressman

Anthony Tudor

Marcella Cisney

John Gerstad

Albert Lipton

Jose Quintero

Frank Day Tuttle

Harold Clurman

Sir John Gielgud

Joshua Logan

Jack Ragotzy

Eugene Van Grona

Jack Cole

Gino Giglio

Sidney Lumet

Elmer Rice

Allen Waine

Fielder Cook

Peter Glenville

Alfred Lunt

Lloyd Richards

Margaret Webster

Frank A. Corsaro

Robert H. Gordon

Herbert Machiz

Cyril Ritchard

Onna White

Paul Crabtree

William Hammerstein

Joseph Mankiewicz

Martin Ritt

Arthur R. Williams

Hume Cronyn

John Hancock

Daniel Mann

Jerome Robbins

John C. Wilson

Tad Danielewski

Cedric Hardwicke

Delbert Mann

Hubert W. Rolling

Bretaigne Windust

Joshua Shelley Ed Sherin Burt Shevelove Herman Shumlin Elliot Silverstein Anna Sokolow Zachary Solov Edith Stephen John Stix Ezra Stone Irving Strouse Roger Sullivan Helen Tamiris Shepard Traube

WINTER 2020 | SDC JOURNAL

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IN YOUR WORDS What I Learned...

Why I Made That Choice Pre-Show / Post-Show Step Forward

WHAT I LEARNED…

BY JOANNE

AKALAITIS

20 Questions EXAMPLE: The Iphigenia Cycle by Euripedes — Twenty years ago at the Court Theatre in Chicago: the amazing, hardworking chorus had been rehearsing a complicated choreographed prologue for weeks. For quite a while, I was in love with it...until the doubts kicked in. Was it stylistically wrong for the piece? How could I have kept everyone drilling it for so long? And they all loved it, loved rehearsing it, and worse, their work was truly beautiful. When I announced to the chorus that I was cutting the dance, they were shocked (and, I suppose, mad), especially when I didn’t have a particularly compelling rationale for the cut except my instincts.

THE LIST...and what’s not on it.

Like most directors, I keep a to-do list: what to fix up in rehearsal. I start it during the first run-through; while I’m giving my assistant notes, I jot down my own, always on a sheet of yellow legal pad paper. I keep it close to the chest…I can’t seem to share its contents with my assistant, the actors, or designers. I suppose it is a kind of shorthand rehearsal sketch or diary, and it’s satisfying to cross things out when they get fixed. I don’t rewrite it and superstitiously keep it in a special pocket in my script binder.

I’ve learned that some items on the list need to stay put for quite a while because they seem insoluble, but after all these years, I am still amazed how much does get worked out.

What’s really scary is what I can’t put on the list because some things are so wrong that I don’t even know how to articulate them— lurking beneath the surface, a persistent itch, often as surreal scenarios in my dreams.

I’ve learned to be patient with that emotional itch (usually in the middle of the night), and wait it out for the moment when I can finally pinpoint the problem and gather the courage to say it out loud to another person (usually a designer buddy who often has been having the same doubts). Then I can breathe…for the moment.

Once it’s out of the bag, it can be painful to spring it in the rehearsal room, upsetting to actors or designers, a burden on schedule or budget, and personally humbling.

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The next blow: changing the simple colorful dresses that they had been wearing for weeks in rehearsal (which the costume designer Doey Lüthi and I had much discussed) to simple black dresses, at the suggestion of the set designer, Paul Steinberg. For a while, I was scared, resistant to black: “too clichéd,” “predictable.” And it was the same actors who were being asked to change something that had become very close to them.

I’ve learned to listen to designers: their observations on dramaturgy, acting, scene dynamics. Often I’m too busy, attached, resistant, and afraid to see that wrong “thing” that they spot when they sit in on rehearsal.

ANOTHER EXAMPLE: Bad News! I was there… — Last spring, at the Guthrie, Jennifer Tipton, the lighting designer, saw a runthrough with fresh eyes and told me that the section from The Persians was too short.

(What a surprise. Everything is always too long.) I immediately realized that she was right.

However, it meant frantically finding more text from Ellen McLaughlin’s translation that night in my Minneapolis hotel room and the next day laying it on the actors, who were already overwhelmed and anxious about being offbook in a very short rehearsal period. And yes, once again, it is the actors bearing the burden and brunt of those lurking, waiting-to-uncoil secret serpents not on the list.

FINAL EXAMPLE: The Rover by Aphra Behn — At the Guthrie a long time ago—a complicated show. Lots of ideas. Maybe too many. I was having bad dreams about George Tsypin’s gorgeous, enormous red China silk drop. I had a big to-do list on this

show, but not the drop. But there it was, terrifyingly vast and expensive and maybe a mistake. After a sleepless night, my stomach churning, I grabbed Jennifer in the morning, who concurred that it should be cut.

Fortified, I approached George, who listened very thoughtfully and said, “Let’s try it.”

There’s a great ending to this story: Gabriel Berry, ingenious costume designer, made Restoration collar ruffs and masks from the China silk for the section of the audience who sat on the stage. It looked like we planned it from the very beginning.

LAST THOUGHT: What I’ve learned is that some of those hazardous, buried, even subconscious items that can’t be written down are surprisingly simple and kick in at the last moment. In the last 15 minutes of tech before the first preview of The Rover at the Guthrie, after weeks of rehearsal, I saw that we must change the entrance of 30 actors from stage right to left. It was never on the list, but it was biding its time. My last words, yelled to the entire irritated company on stage, were, “I’m sorry, guys, please try to remember it tonight. Thanks. Have a great show!”

JOANNE AKALAITIS is a theatre director and writer. She is the winner of five Obie Awards for direction (and sustained achievement) and a Drama Desk Award. She is Co-Founder of Mabou Mines and former Artistic Director of The Public Theater. She has staged works by Euripides, Shakespeare, Strindberg, Janáček, Beckett, Jean Genet, Tennessee Williams, and Harold Pinter, in addition to her own work, at The Public, Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, New York City Opera, Goodman Theatre, Mark Taper Forum, Court Theatre, Opera Theatre of Saint Louis, Hartford Stage, New York Theater Workshop, and the Guthrie Theater.

She was an Artist-in-Residence at the Court Theatre in Chicago. Akalaitis was the Andrew Mellon Co-Chair of the first directing program at the Juilliard School, Chair of the Theater Program at Bard College, and the Denzel Washington Endowed Chair of the Theater at Fordham University. She is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, National Endowment for the Arts and Rockefeller Foundation grants, the Edwin Booth Award, and Pew Charitable Trusts National Theatre Artist Residency Program Grant.

E D A M I Y WH T

THA E OIC

CH BY

ARIF

HA

. SH NA S

Transitions are my specialty. It is no surprise that theatrical transitions come naturally to me, as my career is filled with moments of creative pivots, leaps of faith, and principled resolve. The beauty of transitions is in the fracturing of complacency. Sometimes the shifts are tiny, subtle gestures that cumulatively transform the trajectory of a character’s life. Other times the shifts are sudden, abrupt, and disconcerting, leaving the character on uncertain and unfamiliar ground. In either case, the story continues, the journey evolves, and the future is written.

I was seventeen when I produced and directed my first play. It featured 65 artists— actors, dancers, vocalists—and ran for five performances. Insanity, I know, but it was also the first glimpse at the possibilities of my future. At 19, I launched my first theatre company, Nasir Productions: a scrappy grassroots ensemble producing and devising work that illuminated the complex elemental truth of our lives. The first five years were exciting, crazy, and exhausting. Those who work in smaller, nimble companies know intimately how difficult it can be to stay afloat. How did multimillion-dollar regional theatres produce art? How were they securing funding and maximizing impact? I went into the regional theatre with the singular goal of stealing the master’s tools and taking them back to build a stronger, more streamlined independent theatre company. Pivot.

I joined the artistic staff of a large regional theatre, whose impact and practices were emblematic of the field: institutions missioned to serve a broad cross-section of constituents with classics, new work, education programs, and civic discourse. I was the only person of color on staff and the sole female curatorial voice in the artistic department.

This was before the handy catchphrases of multiculturalism, equity, and inclusion were part of our field’s paradigm. We were squarely in a world where “diversity” was limited to the one slot in February for black or brown work. It was the turn of the millennium and there were virtually no conversations about

Native American, Asian, or trans artists, and only marginal conversations about women on the mainstage. It was only in our new play development work that I found a safe haven to program art that looked like the world we inhabit. I found myself repeatedly explaining that diversity needed to extend beyond the actors on stage to include playwrights, directors, and the staff of the theatre. I constantly challenged the notion of tokenism in our programming, even as it stood unwavering in our institutional hiring practices.

“The beauty of transitions is in the fracturing of complacency.”

As an associate artistic director, you are often assigned a show to direct in a season. For my mainstage directorial debut, I was assigned a beautiful play about a rural black community written by a talented white woman that was the black “slot” for the season. As we dug into planning for the following year, I was once again assigned the only play in the season reflecting the African American experience, which was written by a different white woman playwright. I believed the pattern of producing culturally specific work repeatedly and solely through the lens of white artistry was a failure of our mission. This practice was so common and ingrained in the regional system that my articulation of the inequity and bias was shocking to the room full of talented, intelligent men. There was an intense series of conversations and debates that resulted in a mandate that I direct the show I’d been offered. I respectfully declined. Stalemate. I was willing to produce any play programmed by leadership, but I would not cosign and legitimize a choice that marginalized the wholistic representation of people of color on our stages with my name on the cover of the playbill. Principled Resolve.

I thought about the other moments through the years when I felt stifled by the weight of the isolationism, microaggressions, and a

profound lack of analysis…moments when I contemplated stepping away from the theatre and the field. It was the playwrights of color, in particular, who held my feet to the fire.

“Who will advocate for us if you go? And not just at your theatre—how many times do you pick up the phone and pitch our work to your colleagues? If you leave, they will not fill your role with someone who looks like you.” With my job and integrity on the line, I thought about all the artists I was holding space for as the only black AAD in a LORT theatre at the time. Leap of Faith.

I knew no matter the outcome of this artistic and philosophical stalemate, my story would continue, my journey would evolve, and the future would be written.

Ultimately, the artistic director changed the programming, and I directed my first August Wilson play, Gem of the Ocean. The journey was a profound reminder of James Baldwin’s words: “The world is before you and you need not take it or leave it as it was when you came in.”

There is a spiritual tax paid by artists who must act as the conscience of our institutions.

My deepest hope and faith are that the payment of that tax liberates the next generation of artists.

HANA S. SHARIF is a director, playwright, producer, and the Artistic Director of the Repertory Theatre of St. Louis. She has served as Associate Artistic Director at Baltimore Center Stage; Associate Artistic Director, Director of New Play Development, and Artistic Producer at Hartford Stage. Hana also served as co-founder and Artistic Director of Nasir Productions, which brings theatre to underserved communities. Hana is the recipient of the 2009–10 Aetna New Voices Fellowship and Theatre Communications Group (TCG) New Generations Fellowship.

She serves on the board of directors for TCG and The Sprott Foundation.

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PRE-SHOW / POST-SHOW WITH

FRANK GALATI

PROFESSOR EMERITUS, NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY

You’ve had a long, successful professional career as a director, writer, and actor—as well as a four-decade teaching career at Northwestern. How were you able to establish and maintain dual careers?

I was in graduate school at Northwestern, on scholarship. After completing the MA in Performance Studies, I joined the faculty of the fledgling University of South Florida.

This was in 1966. I was an instructor there in Tampa for two years, put in charge of adapting and directing literature for performance. In those days, teaching at a state institution granted an automatic draft deferment. So I didn’t have to move to Canada, as some of my friends did, to avoid going to Vietnam. The big surprise in all this was discovering how much I loved teaching.

I went back to Northwestern, completed my doctorate, and started looking for a job at some small college. But there were no jobs. I was on unemployment, pounding the pavement in Chicago, and since I had been mainly an actor in college, I went on a few auditions. The Chicago Theatre Renaissance was just getting started. William (Bill) Pullinsi, a very early pioneer in the “dinner theatre” movement, cast me in two shows, both British comedies. Bill also gave me my first professional directing job. Then, out of the blue, I was offered a teaching position at Northwestern. I took the job and was told that instead of publishing books and articles, I would be evaluated for promotion and tenure by working in the professional theatre while teaching full time. I was to be considered “a teaching artist.” I did this for many years, one foot in each camp. This was a very unusual arrangement in those days, but, again, the big surprise was not just that I loved my students but also that I learned from them, was nourished and inspired by them, and almost all my work in professional theatre had a gestation period in one of my classes. My students sustained me. I continued in this practice for 40 years.

How did you juggle everything?

Maintaining the routine was at times very difficult. There were times when three or four productions would be simultaneously spinning around each other while there were papers to grade, dissertations to advise,

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faculty meetings to attend, plus endless casting calls, production meetings, 10-out-of-12 techs. And to top it off, at Steppenwolf and the Goodman (where I did most of my directing), there was the usual challenge of several thousand intelligent subscribers and a handful of formidable critics.

But in this stormy mix there were so many connections to be made. All the modes of storytelling. Students learned how to structure a play by studying a short story.

Exploring all literary forms and modalities gives students and actors a sense of the secrets and delights of language itself. But my students were everything, and I was able to share my own experience in the trenches with them. I could warn them. I could cheer them on. I could help them see that they have the power to make great theatre. Northwestern has a fine reputation and has always attracted students with extraordinary talent.

What was one of your favorite classes that you taught? One of my favorite courses had the super-pretentious title of “Presentational Aesthetics.” Mary Zimmerman was in the class and did some of her earliest adapting and directing there.

I can still see the lunar image, a large white ball lit from within, floating across the stage in her final performance.

Of all the shows you’ve ever directed, which stand out as the most meaningful to you? Of all the professional shows I’ve worked on, The Grapes of Wrath and Ragtime would certainly be among the most meaningful. Both are about the bondage of blood. Both are about ordinary folks made heroic by their moral courage.

Both are about family.

If you could go back in time, which production of yours do you wish you could see again? If there is one production of mine over all these years that I would like to see again, it might be Kafka on the Shore, an eerie and erotic saga by Haruki Murakami loosely based on the Oedipus story [which Galati adapted and directed at Steppenwolf in 2008].

FRANK GALATI is a member of the Steppenwolf Theatre Company in Chicago and an Associate Artist at Asolo Rep in Sarasota, FL. He has received nine Joseph Jefferson Awards for his work in Chicago theatre and has directed at Asolo Rep, the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, Berkeley Rep, Mark Taper Forum, Long Wharf Theatre, Chicago Opera Theatre, San Francisco Opera, Dallas Opera, Chicago Lyric Opera, the Metropolitan Opera, the Stratford Festival in Canada, and the Roundabout Theatre in New York. For 20 years, he was an Associate Director at the Goodman Theatre in Chicago. He won two Tony Awards in 1990 for his adaptation and direction of the Steppenwolf production of The Grapes of Wrath on Broadway and was nominated again in 1998 for directing Ragtime. In 1989, Galati was nominated for an Academy Award for his screenplay (with Lawrence Kasdan) of The Accidental Tourist. In 2000, he was inducted into the American Academy of Arts & Sciences. He is a Professor Emeritus in the Department of Performance Studies at Northwestern University.

What excites you about theatre in America today? What excites me about the theatre in America today is that it has a wide national audience, it has a conscience, it still has healing and nourishing power, and it’s very often really funny.

What are you working on now?

Right now, I’m working on Knoxville, a musical adaptation of James Agee’s Pulitzer Prizewinning novel. Ahrens and Flaherty (Ragtime, Once on This Island, Anastasia) team up again to create a work of theatrical magic. This is a story that goes to the core of the American family. As if brought forth by the echoing hills of Tennessee, the score is a treasury of song.

We begin rehearsals in March and open in early April.

STEP FORWARD

BY JULIE

ARENAL

Dance is the purest expression of the spirit, and when put into a form, it is a way to make contact. There will always be dance in the world because it is part of human nature to “move.” The spirit of dance comes through most thrillingly when it has an element of spontaneity. From hip-hop to structured ballet to opera, I’ve always tried to get to the spontaneity inherent in the material I was working with.

When I choreographed the original Broadway production of Hair, I took that idea and used the people, the cast members—who were not dancers; they were just phenomenal singers and personalities— and I gave them a problem. I put on the music of Hair and I’d say, “Just do any movement. Just move.” So I would have them spontaneously dancing. Then I would go around and pick the movements I liked from each of the performers and say, “Just do that movement. Repeat it a thousand times.” I would do that with the whole cast, one by one. So everyone had one movement.

When I put them all together, I saw an incredible expression of vitality and energy and spirit that came through each one doing their own movements. Then I had them do it at half-time, then fast, and then at the normal time. That is where I got my movement for the show, and that’s why I think I got such incredible individuality and spontaneity from the cast members.

I did this for the big numbers that had a lot of dancing. When I wanted a spontaneous, crazy part, I had them doing each one of their movements, and I’d have some people do it in slow motion, and some people do it in fast time. And then I would have them switch. It looked totally chaotic, but it wasn’t. It was totally planned.

Of course, I used my choreographic skills to organize it all. I’d have them all do one movement that I thought would be appropriate for an individual song. And I’d say, “Do this for 10 bars or five bars, and then change to this movement.” And I used some movements of mine that everyone did in unison. I just figured out what I had to do. People do it now, but I think I was one of the first choreographers to do that, to use that technique, certainly on Broadway. That was my contribution.

Hair was my first show on Broadway and I just loved every moment of it. I was friends with the composer [Galt MacDermot], and I loved the music. I love the music now. I loved the melodies. And everything in his music is rhythm, so it made you want to dance.

The creators of the show, Gerry Ragni and James Rado, were brilliant. Every single song had a beat. Not an obvious beat, but a rhythm—you just couldn’t stand still!

The impact of Hair was so phenomenal. It exploded all over the world. Literally, because every country had Hair or had heard of Hair.

It was a show that went viral. It appealed to everybody at a certain point, and everyone knew about it. It was part of the world culture.

I did the show in lots of other places in Europe, in Sweden, Yugoslavia, and in America. And I would change the movements, because with each company, I used the same technique of getting the movement from the performers. I didn’t repeat movements, so in each place it had a different flavor.

I think you’re influenced by the times you live in. It was an incredible time, 1968. Everyone was doing work that was a little freer. Off-Broadway was doing work that was a little freer. After the success of Hair, choreography on Broadway got freer. I was just in the spirit of the time.

You have to approach each situation individually. With Hair, I got to go in blind, but I’m prepared by who I am and how I see the material.

You give me a show, and I will take it on. You give me a ballet—a ballet with a legitimate company, like the San Francisco Ballet or Ballet Hispanico—that’s a whole different world, but you can use my approach, in some ways, even with a ballet company. I did it in one section of a ballet I did called The Referee, with really great professional dancers in the San Francisco Ballet. I had them pick up their favorite combination of steps, and I put it together in one section at the end for about a minute. It was all ballet technique, but done individually to that music, and it produced an incredible little section of the ballet.

I don’t know what’s ahead. Movement is movement. I think anything is movement. You can take an arm gesture and make a dance out of it. That approach is being used everywhere. As I said, dancing is the purest expression of the spirit, so people relate to dancing. There will always be dance in the world.

JULIE ARENAL choreographed the original production of Hair on Broadway, as well as Indians and Boccaccio. She recreated productions of Hair in many US cities, as well as London and Brazil.

She won the highest award choreographing the show in Sweden and Belgrade. Films she has choreographed include Mistress, The Good Shepard, and Once Upon a Time in America, and she worked collaboratively on the PBS series American Family. Julie worked with Galt MacDermot’s music for the San Francisco Ballet, National Ballet of Cuba, and Ballet Hispanico. She’s the director/choreographer of New York Express, a hip-hop company commissioned by the Spoleto Festival, touring Italy, Japan, and China. She has choreographed throughout the country for most regional theatres and major opera companies. She is one of the founders of the East L.A. Classic Theatre.

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20

QUESTIONS WITH

MARSHALL W. MASON

Marshall W. Mason, who received a Tony Award for Lifetime Achievement in 2016, was President of SDC from 1983 to 1986. He cofounded Circle Repertory Company in 1969 and was its Artistic Director for 18 years. His work with Lanford Wilson is considered one of the most exemplary long-term collaborations between a director and playwright in American theatre. He also has directed extensively on Broadway. SDC Journal spoke with him about his service to SDC and his life in the theatre.

How and when did you start to direct, and what led to your joining SDC (or SSDC, as it was then called) in 1964 at the age of 24?

The first time I directed was Cat on a Hot Tin Roof at Northwestern when I was 19. I won an award for it, and I said, “Oh. Apparently I’m a director. I didn’t know that.” I continued to direct in college and at Eagles Mere summer theatre, and came to New York in 1961 at the age of 21 to be a director.

In 1962, I started to work Off-Off-Broadway at the Caffe Cino. I directed at the Cino for the next couple of years, and then I formed a professional production company called Northwestern Productions, made up of me and eight of my fellow classmates from Northwestern. We raised $35,000 to produce two plays Off-Broadway.

The first one was Little Eyolf by Henrik Ibsen, which I directed in March 1964. I must have been contacted by somebody from the Union, saying, “Okay, this is a professional contract. You have to join the Union.” And I said, “Oh, okay.” So it was for my first professional job in New York that I joined in 1964. I think I was the youngest Member of SDC at that time.

What were your impressions of the Union in those early years?

I was excited to be recognized as a professional. Even though it was called a

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society––that sounded fancy and exclusive and sort of nice. So it was flattering to know that I would have people, other directors, who would support me in any problems that I came across. But I don’t think I knew much about it when I joined.

Why did you decide to join the SDC Board in 1977 and later become President?

When I was asked to be on the Board, I was eager to accept it, because I believed very strongly in a Union. And I had had an experience after I joined SDC: I was directing David Storey’s The Farm at the Academy Festival Theater in Lake Forest, IL, in 1975, and I was required to join Equity because Equity at that point still had jurisdiction over summer theatre. I objected to it. I said, “I already belong to a director’s union, and I want my Union to represent me.” And they said, “Well, I’m sorry, but our jurisdiction is Equity at this point, and you’ve got to become a member.”

So I made the theatre pay my initiation fee, because I was joining under protest.

What were some of the initiatives that you worked on as an SDC Board Member?

I was the Chairman of the so-called CREDO Committee, which was tasked with coming up with a mission statement and revising the bylaws to bring them up to date. We were quickly becoming a national organization, computerizing, and maturing as a union. One of the things I felt very strongly about was communicating to the Membership the

importance of democratic elections. I thought it would encourage Members to be greater participants in the Union if they felt that they had a voice in it. I wanted them to know that they elected us and that we served them.

Prior to that, the nominating process was not very transparent and there was very little competition. So one of the changes was to make sure that the slate had more choices, allowing the Membership to choose which of the nominated candidates they wanted to vote for. Even if you were nominated one year and didn’t get in, you might be nominated another year and be elected. I think the Board has been really strengthened by this approach.

What were some of your priorities as the Union expanded its jurisdiction?

By the time I was on the Board, I’m pretty sure we had already taken over the summer theatres. We were constantly concerned about getting jurisdiction over all the professional directors and choreographers all over the country. But I was very mindful of having begun at the Caffe Cino and then La MaMa––on-the-job training was extremely important. And I wanted to make sure that young directors coming into the Union would still have the opportunity to do that kind of developmental work without the Union interfering and being an obstacle. We didn’t want to stifle innovation and people getting their early training from doing the work.

What were some of the most important changes you brought about as President, from 1983 to ’86?

When I took over as President, we got our 1-800 number so that Members could call in without needing to pay a long-distance fee. That invited nationwide interest in SDC that had not been there before. And with [Executive Secretary] Harrison Cromer as my companion, we went to Chicago, Seattle, Los Angeles, and Houston. I think we probably went to San Francisco as well. We spent a couple of days in each city. Not everything was so New York-centric anymore. The Union was finally moving into a national prominence that we did not have before.

I think we were able to break through some suspicion: “Why are these New Yorkers coming out here, and what is it they want from us?” We helped explain how the Union can be really useful to people. It was just a first step, really. And now we’re all over the place—we’re traveling all the time.

Did your role as Artistic Director of Circle Repertory Company ever affect your work at SDC—or vice versa?

The fact that I created Circle Rep gave me some experience in terms of running things.

I had to be responsible for a company that was getting larger budgets every year, and we had grants that had to be administered. I think it really informed me and helped me to understand what needed to be done when I joined the Board at SDC. What did you do after your time on the SDC Board?

I only served one term as President because I wanted to pursue a film career. I was trying to follow in the steps of my hero, Elia Kazan, who had of course been a very successful theatre director and then went on to film. So I was moving to Los Angeles, and I had to say, “Considering I’m not going to be here, I think we would be better if I just served one term, and we go ahead and elect someone new.”

York-centric––Shepard Traube and Mildred Traube were SDC’s Mom and Pop. The LORT movement hadn’t become as important yet as it subsequently did and is now. We really are now a national labor union. We’re extremely professional, and the rules are very clear.

You’ve also had a long relationship with the SDC Foundation. Why was the work of the Foundation important to you? What is your involvement with the Foundation today?

I remember one of the things that was most valuable about the Foundation was that they had a series of colloquiums at Downey’s Restaurant, and they would feature one of our big stars—like they’d have Mike Nichols come and talk to us. As a Member of the Union, you were invited and you could ask questions. It was intimate and really great, because the heroes of our industry were very generous in terms of participating in this SDCF program. That was the first time that I really began to see the importance of directors meeting and talking and trying to learn from each other.

One of the things that I was really keen to do as President was to build on the Union’s relationship to the artistic nature of our work, as opposed to just what the minimums were and what the health and pension would be, and so forth. I thought, we’re a Union of artists and we should try to encourage communication among our artists so that the Union could be a source for encouraging artistic growth, as well as working relationships and standards.

I started inviting people to my last dress rehearsal before previews at Circle Rep. I would invite all the directors from SDC who

wanted to see the show, and after the show I would meet with them and talk, and ask them questions—“What did you think about how I did this?” or, “Can you see a better solution than what I came up with?” And I found it very, very valuable. I wasn’t afraid of people telling me I should’ve done something differently. I thought that was an exciting thing to learn, so that you’re not operating always in a vacuum, but you really can talk to people who are knowledgeable and who have their own insights.

I’m a real fan of the Journal. I think it’s a great opportunity for us to do exactly the kind of things that I’m talking about: communicate with the Membership about things that are artistic as well as labor-related.

In addition to that, I have set up with the SDC Foundation a future program in which a substantial amount of money will go to honor the outstanding collaboration in each year.

I can’t release the money, though, until I die and don’t need it anymore!

You directed nearly all the original productions of Lanford Wilson’s plays. Can you talk about how you worked together?

I’m a big believer in collaboration. Lanford and I had such success with it, and I really found it amazing that playwrights and directors didn’t more often build on the relationships that they had established in going from one play to another. As I said, my hero was Kazan, and it was the collaboration between Tennessee Williams and Elia Kazan that really inspired me––and Lanford. When they worked together, it was always quite extraordinary. It was more than when they each worked separately.

I spent ten years teaching at Arizona State, and I continued to direct a lot commercially, both on and Off-Broadway, and at resident theatres. I would fly back to Arizona, teach on Monday, get on a plane, and go back to my job, wherever it was.

What do you think are the most significant ways that SDC has changed in the 30+ years since you were President?

The organization is just so professional now.

We have such fine leadership, not only on the Board but also our staff. These are people who know how to run a national organization that covers all kinds of different contracts.

When I joined the Union, it was basically Broadway and Off-Broadway. It was New

Marshall W. Mason + Lanford Wilson PHOTO Daniel Irvine WINTER 2020 | SDC JOURNAL

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Book of Days at Repertory Theatre of St. Louis, directed by Marshall W. Mason PHOTO Judy Andrews c/o Northwestern University Archives, Marshall W. Mason Papers

I think Lanford stuck with me because he believed he couldn’t get a better director who understood his work and collaborated and sympathized with his goals. And he knew that I wasn’t putting my ego in front of the work. I was trying to do his play and do it as well as I could. He very much appreciated that, and we built up trust over the years as a result. It’s a pattern that I really hope other people will emulate.

What are your thoughts on whether or how a director’s contributions to a new play can be protected?

I do feel that there will never be a general rule that will apply to all collaborations. Not every director contributes to an author’s work to the same degree. People often ask about my relationship to Lanford: how much did I have to do with the writing of the play?

It depends on the play. There were times I made a significant contribution. Other plays, I didn’t do anything other than just direct it.

The great majority of them certainly evolved and changed, and some of it was a result of what Lanford saw in production.

A director sometimes makes a huge contribution, and when he or she does, I think the author ought to acknowledge that and find some way to compensate the director for the contribution that he or she has made. Lanford arranged to give me a small percentage of his subsidiary royalties, on several plays. But I don’t think one size fits all.

It’s a moral issue as well as an artistic one, and it’s got to be solved on a person-toperson basis. But I do think, if you’ve got a good relationship with the playwright, he or she should understand the contribution

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Balm in Gilead at La MaMA ETC, directed by Marshall W. Mason PHOTO Frederick Eberstadt c/o Northwestern University Archives, Marshall W. Mason Papers

that you are making. It should be possible to work something out without having to go through the Dramatists Guild or SDC. Sometimes it doesn’t work out; I lost a couple of productions over this principle.

How do you think the craft of directing has changed over the years?

I think it is definitely becoming more collaborative. I know when I first started directing, the gold standard was George Abbott, who was extremely dictatorial. Also, along that same time came the wonderful Tyrone Guthrie, who was incredibly brilliant, but also very dictatorial––he had his vision. To a certain extent, it comes from the European model. The European director still is God over there. They are supreme creators and everybody bows down to them.

We have changed in America. In England too, and Australia, we’ve come to understand better and better that collaboration is important with actors, with choreographers, and with the playwright, and that we all are working to create something together. We’ve become more humane and more concerned about what people’s needs are, and I think all that’s very good.

What were some of your favorite experiences as a director? Do you have a favorite production?

I guess my most important production was As Is, the first play about AIDS, that won the 1985 Drama Desk Award for Best Play. But I’ve had such wonderful experiences, it’s hard to choose a favorite. Balm in Gilead could not have gone better. The Hot l Baltimore was a really remarkable experience, and I feel very proud of it. I loved my production of Book of

Days at the Signature. It took me three years to get it right.

In Angels Fall, Lanford and I achieved an organic, collaborative unity that was just breathtaking to experience. I feel strongly about that play because I feel it’s been neglected. I hope someday it’ll be rediscovered, because it’s a wonderful play.

I think my best work was on Long Day’s Journey into Night, at the Arizona Theatre Company. It was the high point of my artistic life.

What led you to write your two books, Creating Life on Stage, about a director’s approach to working with actors, and The Transcendent Years, about the Circle Repertory Company?

I wanted people to know what the nuts and bolts of working in a collaborative relationship looked like. It’s why I wrote Creating Life on Stage, because this approach has certainly worked for me in my career, and I think it will work for other people as well.

The Transcendent Years was really a lot of fun to write, for the most part––when I was describing the joyous times when the collaboration was working well. I’m awfully happy that that book is out there, because in my view, it’s a history of Off-Off-Broadway and the journey of Circle Rep. You are a Member of the Union's Honorary Advisory Committee and you’ve been a Tony voter for more than two decades.

What are your impressions of 30+ years of seeing shows on Broadway?

I think theatre has changed in many ways for the better over 30 years. When I first

Christopher Lloyd + Ja’Net Du Bois in The Hot l Baltimore at the Mark Taper Forum, directed by Marshall W. Mason PHOTO Steven Keull c/o Northwestern University Archives, Marshall W. Mason Papers

started working in New York, the theatre was all British––there were no American playwrights being done on Broadway. The golden age of musicals had passed––we had nobody but Sondheim, who is, of course, as good as they come.

But more recently––Urinetown was splendid, I thought, and The Band’s Visit––I just ate it up.

Not to mention Hamilton, which is the best thing I’ve ever seen on the stage. It set a bar higher than anything I’ve ever seen before in all the 30 years. So we’re definitely moving in the right direction.

What has excited you most about Off-Broadway and regional theatre over the years?

It is so thrilling that people don’t have to come to New York to see wonderful work on stage. They can see it locally, no matter where they live. When I started out, there were only three or four professional theatres out there in the country, and now there are hundreds, if not thousands. And then we have Off-Broadway, of course, and now we even have resident theatres on Broadway as well as Off-Broadway. All of that has been very good for the art in general. And for the continuity and for the development of new artists and of new plays, particularly.

I remember when I first started in New York, the New York Times kept saying, “Where are the new playwrights?” Because I came along just at the end of Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams, and except for Edward Albee, there really wasn’t anybody carrying the ball forward as dynamically as those great golden era people had done. I think Circle Rep was very helpful in terms of putting the playwright back on center stage, as it were.

Suddenly American plays became the whole thing and the British plays were much less important. So I think it’s been very healthy what’s happening Off-Broadway as well as with our resident theatres, and now we even have Off-Off-Broadway institutions, like Soho Rep, that are quite wonderful.

Do you have any advice or suggestions for our young Members and Associate Members?

Never lose sight of the artistic nature of your work. It’s really important to try to learn and get better. Learn from your mistakes, try things that haven’t been tried before, and reach ambitiously. Think beyond just the next job. Try to have a plan for your artistic life that you can adhere to while you continue to grow as an artist.

I also want to suggest to young directors that if they’re working on a project over time with a writer on a play, they should keep a diary of that, in contemporaneous fashion. Note the changes that they have worked together to create and the contributions that he or she as director has made to the script, to provide proof if needed.

Marshall W. Mason in front of the historical plaque commemorating Circle Rep PHOTO c/o Marshall W. Mason

What are your plans for the future?

I’m not going to direct anymore. I intended to finish my career as a director with a bookend production of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. But in 2006, I had an offer to direct The Goat, and I couldn’t resist. I’ve now turned my attention to writing. I’ve just written a novel. It’s called Come Forth and it’s about the biblical character Lazarus. I’ve got to find an agent who knows the fiction market, try to get somebody to publish my book.

Having written the two nonfictions, it was really fun to do a novel. I love writing. It’s a lot more fun than directing!

Do you have any advice for the younger Marshall Mason?

Always use the “W” so they won’t confuse you with Marsha Mason.

I think moving to Hollywood was a mistake.

I had a successful career in the theatre here and recognition as an artist and a really good life. My ambition led me to a dead end. I spent eight long dreadful years in Hollywood.

But I think I dodged a bullet. Hollywood can change you. If I had been successful in Hollywood and had started directing films, I’m not sure I would have been the kind of person that I really wanted to be.

I feel confident that the theatre provided me with the best opportunity to grow as an artist and to make a contribution to human understanding.

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LATE-NIGHT MEETINGS IN

SMOKE-FILLED

ROOMS Shepard Traube PHOTO c/o Victoria Traube

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SHEPARD TRAUBE AND THE FOUNDING OF SDC BY

MARY B. ROBINSON

“I wonder if it has ever occurred to you that the directors are the only group in the Broadway theatre who are unorganized.”

This query, the first sentence of a letter written in 1955 and sent to 40 directors, marks the first step toward the creation of what was to become the Stage Directors and Choreographers Society. But the enterprising writer of the letter, Shepard Traube, had recognized this lack several decades before.

In his 1936 book So You Want to Go Into the Theatre?, he informed the reader that, “If you come into the theatre as a director, you will be on your own, for better or worse.”

Speculating that the reason there was no directors’ union might be because there were too few working directors to make that practicable, he concluded that successful directors were able to look out for themselves.

“Quaintly enough, the director’s best protective weapon is his talent,” he wrote. “He performs a highly specialized kind of work in the theatre and can always walk out on a play should the producer fail to pay him. As a result, a director who has both ability and a reputation is not likely to suffer much abuse.”

But in the early 1940s, around the time Traube produced and directed the hugely successful Angel Street on Broadway (later made into the movie Gaslight), he concluded over a lunch with Elia Kazan that the time had come for directors to have a union.

It was well over a decade before he acted on this conviction. In the meantime, he made films for the Signal Corps during World War II and went out to Hollywood in the wake of his Angel Street success, working with producer Dore Schary and directing several movies.

Blacklisted in 1950 because of the publication Red Channels, which listed suspected Communists, he returned to New York to resume working in the more hospitable world of theatre. Among other productions, he directed a Broadway musical called The

Girl in the Pink Tights in the spring of 1954, collaborating with renowned choreographer Agnes de Mille.

“It was a great big turkey,” says his daughter Victoria (Vicky) Traube, who was eight years old at the time. “I loved it myself. I could sing you the score.”

Then, in February 1955, Traube contacted every director he knew, concluding his letter with an invitation to come to a meeting at his apartment to discuss the creation of a Stage Directors’ Guild––or to let him know that he could count on their membership.

What had prompted him to finally take the step he had discussed with Kazan nearly 15 years before? “My father was a very political person,” says Vicky. “The Girl in the Pink Tights was a very bruising experience, and it was wonderful for him to have this kind of really important project to work on. He really felt he was creating something.”

Not every response to Traube’s letter was positive. “I’m afraid you’d better count me out at the moment,” replied Moss Hart, the director of My Fair Lady. “I’m at work, and I also hate organizational meetings––I have them aplenty with the Dramatists Guild.”

“No, I no longer have that old zeal for organization,” wrote Hart’s writing partner, George S. Kaufman, who was a director as well as a playwright. “As to membership, I think I had better not commit myself. Let me kibitz for a while.”

Some were supportive, though reluctant.

“Although I am never very keen on unions, I suppose in these days they are necessary to overcome abuses,” conceded British actor and director Cyril Ritchard.

threaten producers with litigation repeatedly and was still owed thousands of dollars for fees and per-diem expenses that had never been paid. This future stalwart of SDC ended his letter by thanking Traube for the invitation, “and your unselfish efforts in behalf of our colleagues.”

A memo that Traube wrote shortly before the March 20 meeting debated the central question of whether the organization should be an actual trade union with the ability to bargain collectively and enforce minimum terms and conditions, or simply a community of directors along the lines of the playwrights’ Dramatists Guild. In the memo, Traube looked at the pros and cons, but argued in favor of the many benefits of forming a trade union––“unless,” he wrote, “the directors have psychological blocks about being identified with a union.” Clearly, some of them did.

“I think there was some trepidation,” says Vicky. “Totally not from him––he was proud to be a union organizer. I guess he thought some of his colleagues were too highfalutin.”

The meeting that was held on Sunday afternoon, March 20, 1955, in the Traubes’ duplex apartment on West 67th Street overlooking Central Park was attended by only four directors––Alan Schneider, John Stix, Ezra Stone, and John C. Wilson–– but it was still highly productive. A wideranging discussion began with an attempt to define the word “director” and went on to include billing, royalty payments, subsidiary rights, the dismissal of a director, and the director’s involvement in the casting and replacement of a star.

But many were excited by the step he was taking. “I will be coming back from the road on that day but you can certainly count on me as a most interested member,” wrote Elia Kazan.

“Yes, it has often occurred to me that directors ought to organize, but I’ve never done much about it,” said Alan Schneider, director of the first American production of Waiting for Godot. “You have a damn good idea, and you can count me in.”

“Hurray!” wrote stage and television director Ezra Stone.

“Five years ago I tried to stir some interest in this direction and met with little enthusiasm.” Stone went on to tell Traube that he’d had to WINTER 2020 | SDC JOURNAL

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a close friend of the Traube family, was brought on board as counsel. In January 1959, the group’s organizing efforts were announced to the world. “Through the Society,” the press release stated, “we intend to establish for all stage directors and choreographers a standard of dignity and security long enjoyed by our colleagues in every other craft of theatre.”

At 11:30 p.m. on February 9, 1959, in the Belasco Room at Sardi’s, the first general Membership meeting of the Society of Stage Directors (still its name) was called to order.

Thirty directors and choreographers were in attendance, and Shepard Traube began the meeting by reading letters and telegrams from fifty more who were unable to attend but expressed their wholehearted support.

Hanya Holm, Ezra Stone, Shepard Traube, Agnes de Mille + legal counsel Erwin Feldman witness as Judge Saul Streit (seated) signs the SSDC incorporation documents, April 24, 1959.

“This was the beginning of five years of unremitting effort,” said Traube in an interview with SDC Journal in 1982. “I got the tiger by the tail and just couldn’t let go.”

“It was a huge job. Like herding cats,” says Vicky about her father’s years of uncompensated work on behalf of SDC, while supporting his family by directing commercials for television. “Directors are really their own people. They were men––they were all men at the time––and they all had very strong opinions. Wrangling them must have been really something.”

Traube began holding informal meetings in the Belasco Room upstairs at Sardi’s at the after-theatre hour of 11:00 p.m.

Directors would show up, Traube said in the 1982 interview, “and we would discuss our needs and requirements, and our plans for organizing––because we weren’t quite sure how to proceed at that point.”

There may have been uncertainty as to how to move forward, but the directors quickly discovered the solidarity that comes from having a shared purpose, as well as the joy of being part of a larger community.

“I think some of the best talks I ever had were at those meetings,” Traube said. “The directors didn’t just discuss the theatre; they discussed economics in theatre, economics of living. It was a very full and complete canvas that we covered. It was also very rewarding, and we were excited.

“One night after a particularly enthusiastic meeting, six of us decided to go downstairs

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to the dining room and have a bit of supper,” Traube further recalled. “As we came in there was a stir in the restaurant, and we looked around, all puzzled to see what star had come in, and discovered that we had created the commotion. No one had ever seen six directors together before.”

Sometime between 1955 and 1958, Agnes de Mille approached him and suggested including choreographers in the future union.

At first he didn’t think it would be a good idea to join forces, “but then,” Traube said in the interview, “I thought, ‘What the hell? But we’ll call it the Society of Stage Directors.’

But she said, ‘Oh no, we’ll call it the Society of Stage Directors and Choreographers.’ It’s a clumsy name! But I didn’t get my way. I could have. But I’m not made that way.”

“That was the thing about my father,” says Vicky, “he could think something over and change his mind. You know, my father was an early feminist––he had two daughters–– and I’m sure that view is a large part of including the choreographers and including two powerful women [choreographer Hanya Holm as well as de Mille] among the founders.

“He had the greatest respect for her,” she says about her father’s work with de Mille, which had begun with their collaboration on The Girl in the Pink Tights. “They had been in the crucible together, because there’s nothing worse than a flop out of town.”

Events began to move more rapidly. In December 1958, lawyer Erwin Feldman,

After statements from Traube and Feldman, the meeting was open to the floor, and a variety of concerns and issues were raised in the free-flowing discussion that followed.

Directors generally felt that their fees were adequate, but they frequently weren’t able to collect all that they were owed from the producers. They wanted a union that could enforce their contracts, as well as standardize issues such as when a director’s work begins and what happens to it after a production opens. But choreographers felt that they were being taken advantage of at every turn.

Agnes de Mille, citing her own low fee of $1,500 for choreographing Oklahoma! with no royalties or subsidiary rights, advocated for a union that could fight for higher fees, minimum royalties, subsidiary rights, and ownership of choreography.

In addition to these bread-and-butter issues, the theatre artists attending this historic meeting recognized that organizing as a union gave them an invaluable chance to form a community of people who usually work in isolation from each other, and to serve a cause greater than their own individual careers. There was talk of establishing standards or a code of ethics for directors and choreographers, of organizing seminars for the benefit of younger Members, and of creating an apprentice system.

De Mille thought there was a need to clarify the relationship between directors and choreographers, stating that it was sometimes ambiguous to the point that they were “friendly enemies.” She suggested that the choreographers should meet privately to define their challenges among themselves before presenting them to the Society as a whole.

Director/playwright Marc Connelly made a motion to put into effect what Traube and de Mille had already discussed: that the

name of the organization should reflect all of the theatre artists who were a part of it.

A vote was taken, and that evening, the new union officially became the Society of Stage Directors and Choreographers.

Another motion was unanimously passed, stating that the Society of Stage Directors and Choreographers was in existence as of that day, February 9, 1959. Counsel Erwin Feldman was requested to take the necessary steps to incorporate the Society under the laws of New York State.

A nominating committee was appointed to form a slate of interim officers and Members of the Board of Trustees, and another committee was tasked with drawing up a constitution and bylaws.

The last order of business voted on was an assessment of $25 for each Member, in order to give the new Union some funds to proceed with its work. (A week later, the dues of only five Members had been deposited in SDC’s Chase Manhattan account. A notice with a deadline was sent out to everyone, along with an envelope.)

This first-ever Membership meeting ended at 1:15 a.m. Without a doubt, it ranks as the most productive hour and 45 minutes in SDC’s existence.

SDC celebrates its anniversary on April 24 (instead of February 9) because on that day in 1959, Judge Saul Streit, Presiding Justice of the New York State Supreme Court, signed the incorporation documents establishing SDC as an independent labor union. The iconic photograph of this event, familiar to many thousands of Members over the years, shows him surrounded by Hanya Holm, Ezra Stone, Shepard Traube, and Agnes de Mille, as well as counsel Erwin Feldman.

“I always say, when I talk about my father, that he co-founded the Union with Ezra and Agnes and Hanya,” says Vicky. “Definitely, it was a team effort.”

By that time, Traube had been named SDC’s first President, with de Mille and Holm as First and Second Vice President, respectively, and Stone as Secretary. Letters had also gone out from the nominating committee to a number of other directors and choreographers, asking them to convey their willingness to serve on the Board by circling or checking the appropriate words in a sentence at the bottom of the letter, which read: “I (will) (will not) be able to serve on the Board of Governors of the Society of Stage Directors and Choreographers.”

“Will nots” came back from Alan Schneider, and theatre and film director Sidney Lumet, among others, with handwritten notes expressing strong support but saying they were too busy; “wills” included choreographer Jerome Robbins, actor/director Hume Cronyn, and playwright/director Elmer Rice (author of The Adding Machine)—“if it doesn’t take too much time.”

One of the most thoughtful “will nots” came from one of the very few women directors in the new Union—Margaret Webster, who had staged a number of Shakespeare productions on Broadway, including the groundbreaking Othello with Paul Robeson in 1942. She had firsthand experience in getting a union off the ground: as a young actor in England, she had been a driving force behind the organization of British Actors Equity in the 1930s. Describing herself as “most honoured and flattered” to be asked to serve on the Board, she went on to decline, citing the fact that she was in London for the foreseeable future. “During this first formative period your meetings are likely to be intensive and all sorts of odd things will come up at odd times and there will be many smoke-filled rooms and you really MUST have people who are pretty constantly available,” she predicted. “Please could I just act as an unofficial consultant if and when anything arises on which you think my views would be of any use?”

It took three struggling years to put us in business…I sometimes had the feeling during that period that Shep pretty much had to run things out of his hip pocket. But I remember informal meetings in the office of our pro bono attorney, Erwin Feldman, a hearty, opinionated, kind man, who kept us in smooth waters.

In attendance at those meetings, one time or another, I remember Shep, bossy and worrisome, Agnes, quick and commanding, Joe Anthony, gentle and smart, Hume Cronyn, reasonable and witty, Elia Kazan, low-key but incisive and sometimes roughtalking, Howard da Silva, positive and generous, John O’Shaughnessy, quietly direct, Philip Burton, rational and civil, Bill Ross, serious and humorous, Hanya Holm, high-minded and warm-hearted, Danny Daniels, upbeat and scrappy…alas, I must be leaving out other good men and women true.

– AARON FRANKEL, Founder

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But unless SDC could gain recognition from the League of New York Theatres—the organization of Broadway producers— and get them to the table to negotiate a contract, the Society would be a union in name only. (There was also a plan to organize Off-Broadway, but only after there was a contract with directors’ and choreographers’ biggest employer.)

In the fall of 1959, Traube wrote a letter to the League, pointing out that SDC represented 90 percent of the directors and choreographers working on Broadway, and asking to fix a date to begin negotiating a contract. The League’s initial brief response said that due consideration would be given to his letter, “and we will advise you concerning the meeting you request.”

But two weeks later, the League’s lawyer slammed the door shut. Stating that “our investigation” had concluded that directors and choreographers were not employees, but instead were independent contractors, the law firm’s letter went on to say: “For this reason, we have advised our client that it is under no obligation to meet with, recognize or deal with your organization. Accordingly, the League has requested us to advise you that it has no intention of meeting with you for purposes of negotiation.”

For the next two years, Traube and his colleagues focused relentlessly on reversing this decision.

SDC petitioned the New York State Labor Relations Board for certification as a union.

The League countered by claiming that the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), not the state, had jurisdiction. Because the NLRB prohibited supervisors and managers from organizing (which the state did not), and

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since its ruling would preempt that of the state, the question of which Labor Relations Board had jurisdiction was consequential. It took an entire year for the NLRB to weigh in, while Traube and his colleagues sent telegrams and made phone calls, trying to light a fire under a slow-moving process.

When the decision finally came in early 1961, the NLRB’s claim of jurisdiction was a victory for the League.

Agnes de Mille wrote to Attorney General Robert Kennedy and the Secretary of Labor, protesting this decision. Making the point that directors in film, radio, and television had been permitted to unionize, she argued that “the failure to recognize our group appears a gross miscarriage of justice” and asked for a meeting with members of this new administration, which had shown a genuine interest in the arts. She also stated that the NLRB’s claim of jurisdiction “will materially affect the right of our organization to be recognized without entering into a work stoppage against the producers of the New York Theatre.”

De Mille’s prediction that a strike might become the Union’s only recourse came to fruition later that year. After several more attempts to gain recognition from the League and bring the producers to the bargaining table, the SDC Board concluded in their October meeting that it was time to use tactics of compulsion. For the first time, there was serious talk about authorizing a strike. A vote on this was deferred because there wasn’t a quorum present, and the momentous question became the focus of the November 30 Membership meeting. There was concern among the

Board Members that a strike would not be honored by the choreographers or the lessestablished directors.

But the Members of SDC rose to the challenge and declared themselves ready, even eager, to withhold their services until their Union was recognized. The decision was made at the Membership meeting to prepare strike pledge cards and circulate them to the Membership.

The following week, Members received in the mail a sheet of paper with the words “Strike!

Strike! Strike!” across the top, followed by this announcement:

TO ALL MEMBERS! In compliance with a vote at the General Membership Meeting held Thursday November 30th, your Executive Board met on December 6th and voted unanimously to take the following action: Effective May 30th, 1962, no director or choreographer will make his or her services available to any theatrical producer of a first-class production until the League of N.Y. Theatres has recognized the Society of Stage Directors and Choreographers.

Each of the undersigned members of the Executive Board was present and now calls on you to close ranks!

The 12 names that followed included Elia Kazan, Agnes de Mille, Harold Clurman, Robert (Bob) Fosse, and “Shepard Traube,

March 14, 1962, at 11:15 p.m. The notice announced the “electrifying results” of the strike action and the recognition by other theatrical unions, and went on to say, “The meeting on the night of March 14th is a rally.”

On a typewritten memo headed “Strike Rally Agenda,” Traube made handwritten talking points: “On Eve of Victory,”“Important Actions Tonight,” and “Identify Yourself.” The agenda spelled out the successes of the strike so far and identified the few remaining director and choreographer holdouts.

Shepard Traube, Victoria, Betsy + Mildred Traube, 1958 PHOTO Dana Wallace c/o Victoria Traube

President.” Below a dotted line was the request to “Sign and Return This Pledge Immediately!”

called Feuer to try to persuade him to sign the agreement with SDC––not as part of the League, but as an individual producer.

Ninety-five percent of SDC’s Membership signed the pledge, among them many highly sought-after directors and choreographers.

Besides recognizing the Union, the agreement stipulated that Feuer and Martin engage only SDC Members for a period of one year, and that they observe the minimum fees and royalties prescribed by the Society in its proposed minimum basic agreement. Feuer had no problem with that, and “we won the battle right then and there,” according to Traube.

United Scenic Artists sent SDC a telegram expressing its hope that the Union could resolve its problem with the League by May 30, but “if not, you can count on the full support of our union.” ATPAM, the Association of Theatrical Press Agents and Managers, sent a statement recalling their own struggles to be recognized by the League as a union two decades earlier.

“We understand and sympathize with the situation of the Society of Stage Directors and Choreographers,” the statement concluded.

And the Council of Actors Equity went a step further, adopting a statement that not only recognized SDC but also advised its own members to only engage in productions directed and choreographed by SDC Members. And it said that they “should not accept any assignment as a Director or Choreographer which has been denied to a member of the SSDC [the Union’s acronym at that time] for the reason of his or her affiliation with that body.”

In early 1962, director and choreographer Bob Fosse was approached by the producing team of Cy Feuer and Ernest H. Martin about mounting a new musical entitled Little Me for Broadway. He declined to sign a contract unless the producing team recognized SDC and signed their agreement.

Though prepared to stand firm, Fosse privately called Traube with his worry that he was going to lose the show. Traube reminded him, as he later put it, that “you’ve signed an oath in sacred blood to stick by the rest of the Society, and this is our first big test.” Traube then

“I remember hearing about that at dinner,” says Vicky. “That was a very big deal, and Fosse was very courageous. Somebody important had to step up. And people are always so afraid of losing a job.”

SDC had won an important battle, but the larger war wasn’t over: there was still no recognition of SDC by the League.

But having one producer on board gave SDC the ability to claim, in a memo about the strike to all established producers, that “several outstanding producers have already recognized the Society, including the distinguished producing firm of Feuer and Martin.” Other individual producers began to follow suit.

A terse note at this time from the League’s president Robert Whitehead to Traube gives a snapshot of the SDC-League standoff:

Dear Shep, It’s interesting to see you are moving so effectively with the new union.

Don’t press me. I have a number of problems.

Good luck, Bob A “Notice of Vital Strike Strategy Meeting” went out to all SDC Members, calling on them to come to the Belasco Room on

At the rally, Traube read a telegram from Ezra Stone (who was in Los Angeles at the time) which began “VICTORY IS NEAR” and went on to suggest that “to make it lasting and meaningful, let us hope all members will help govern rather than simply being governed.” The telegram concluded by referencing the thenearly space program in thanking “Bob Fosse, our first man shot into the Great White Way.” Counsel Erwin Feldman told the Members that he had learned that the main obstacle to getting the League to the negotiating table was the Union’s demand for subsidiary rights, which the producers absolutely refused to consider. The choreographers in particular had been pressing for these rights as a way to boost their very low fees and royalties.

Agnes de Mille, the de facto leader of the Union’s choreographers, announced that they had caucused before the meeting and voted to withdraw the demand, as a way to get the process moving forward.

Hoping that meant that negotiations could now begin, the Board met at 1:00 a.m., after the Membership meeting ended, to nominate Members to serve on the negotiating committee. Among them were Lloyd Richards, Elia Kazan, Harold Clurman, Philip Burton (adoptive father of Richard Burton), and Agnes de Mille.

A report to the Members in early May stated that “exploratory” meetings between SDC and the League had finally begun. “The talks have been amiable with a clear indication by both sides that there is a real desire to come to an eventual agreement on a minimum, basic contract.”

But in a preface to her fellow negotiator Philip Burton’s memoir, written a decade later, de Mille describes a scene in the “acrimonious and quarrelsome” negotiations: “I have always flattered myself that I could handle men in a sort of workmanlike, easily forgettable manner, but here they were giving away or keeping chunks of property, residuals, rights, credits, royalties, working prerogatives, power.

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once the show had opened. Royalties for both directors and choreographers were included in the contract, and if a producer fired a Member, he was still required to pay the full fee plus royalties to that Member as well as to his or her replacement. Directors and choreographers were required to return occasionally to see their show during its run and to rehearse replacement casts.

Agnes de Mille + Shepard Traube PHOTO c/o Victoria Traube

The most discussed provision was the prohibition on bringing up the subject of subsidiary rights for 20 years, which still struck many Members as ceding too much power to the League. But Agnes de Mille, one of the choreographers who had most wanted them, reminded the gathering that it was SDC’s insistence on subsidiary rights that had kept the League from coming to the negotiating table in the first place.

The vote to ratify the agreement was 33 for and six against.

‘Please don’t scream. It unnerves me.’ ‘What?’ said a famous producer. ‘You, a theatre woman? Unnerved by shouting?’”

She then describes how Burton decisively changed the tone of the negotiations with his “quiet voice, his unequivocal diction,” as he articulated the case of each side clearly and fostered a much calmer and more civil debate.

But the League producers remained afraid that the question of subsidiary rights would rear its head at subsequent negotiations, and requested a clause in the contract that would prohibit any discussion of these rights for a period of 20 years. At a Membership meeting held on June 12, there was great concern expressed about this clause––but also about the possibility that the producers might walk away from the table if SDC kept refusing to include it. Counsel Erwin Feldman pointed out that if the League signed any contract at all it would be a huge victory for the Union.

With reluctance, the clause was put into the agreement, and negotiations continued.

Two months later, SDC Members received a notice that was headed: “VICTORY! AND VITAL MEMBERSHIP MEETING!” It invited the entire Membership to a meeting at the Belasco Room at 5:00 p.m. on Monday, August 6, to ratify the agreement that had already been approved by SDC’s Board.

A director’s Broadway fee was set at a minimum of $2,000, and a choreographer’s at $1,500. Twenty-five percent of the fee was to be paid when the contract was signed and the balance in three weekly installments

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“Once we had our initial contract,” said Traube in 1982, “we knew and the League knew (it was one of the reasons they resisted us) that it was only going to be the beginning. Because with each annual negotiation we kept improving the terms and conditions for our Members.” *** The 60-year-old story of the founding of the Stage Directors and Choreographers Society seems at times to look ahead to the concerns and dynamics of SDC today. Some of the issues fought over back then, such as ownership of work and subsidiary rights, are still very much in the mix all these years later. The stress of negotiations is familiar to anyone who has ever sat across the table from a group of producers or managing directors, as are the painful compromises that must sometimes be made. And the kind of admiration that Agnes de Mille had for her colleague Philip Burton’s skills as a negotiator has been felt many times in the ensuing years, by directors and choreographers who see their dedicated peers in a new light as they work tirelessly on behalf of SDC. The early discussions of having an apprentice system as well as seminars for younger Members have found their way into the

formation and work of the SDC Foundation, whose programs today enrich the lives of theatre artists of every generation.

Even the notes from directors and choreographers who were too busy to serve on the board 60 years ago—but wanted to help however they could—haven’t changed appreciably; the occasional challenge of getting some Members to send in their dues and assessments hasn’t either.

Theatre artists no longer have “psychological blocks about being identified with a union”–– that has clearly evolved since the late 1950s, as has the propensity for holding late-night meetings in smoke-filled rooms.

But the strength that the Members of the young Union drew from each other, and the solidarity they discovered, is something their successors have felt for the last 60 years. An essential and deeply fulfilling aspect of SDC Membership is the chance to be a part of something larger than our own individual spheres of work.

As Shepard Traube said, it was “very rewarding, and we were excited.” It still is, and we still are.

And although SDC has had many heroes in its time, none quite rises to the level of its indefatigable founder, Shepard Traube, whose vision, generosity, and determination literally willed SDC into existence.

“Those of us who knew him were lucky,” wrote director Ed Sherin in an introduction to a 2009 reprinting of Traube’s book So You Want to Go Into the Theatre? “Those thousands of others who came after and are following in his footsteps have simply had a better life in the American Theatre because of Shepard Traube.”

This article was written with background information from a 1974 PhD dissertation entitled An Historical Study of the Society of Stage Directors and Choreographers through 1973, by Thomas Colley, Wayne State University, as well as correspondence from the SDC Archives from 1955 to 1962.

A Place Where Big Challenges Are Attempted and the Unknown Is B raved

Agnes de Mille’s Congressional Testimony on the Importance of Federal Support for the Arts INTRODUCED BY DAN KNECHTGES

PHOTO

Photofest

When I started out choreographing my first professional gig— a one-week summer stock show on Cape Cod—a seasoned director gave me Agnes de Mille’s Dance to the Piper. This was her first book, and it’s essentially about her struggle to be a dancer, a choreographer, and, most important, an artist. Like most people, I only knew Agnes de Mille as that choreographer of Oklahoma! and that she had a dramatic last name––she was, after all, Cecil B. DeMille’s niece. I did not realize

that she had a vibrant career as an author, advocate, and activist. I spent many nights, and days at the beach, reading her engrossing tome. The voicing of her inner thoughts about the struggle of becoming an artist gave voice to my budding inner thoughts and, I venture to say, the inner thoughts of all of us as artists. She had incredible stamina, grit, and determination. I soon became obsessed with her life and work.

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She was the first female director/choreographer on Broadway with Allegro in 1947 and was one of the most sought-after choreographers of the 1940s and 1950s. She not only did steps but also story to complement and deepen the tale others were telling. Her initial success on Broadway was Oklahoma! in 1943, and with it she got a taste of what it was like to be a gun for hire: in those days, there was no union or minimums for directors or choreographers, no copyrights to protect the work, and no guarantee of royalties. After the show became a phenomenon, with many of the reviews singling out her work as a big part of that success, she got a paltry $50 a week and her work was bought out by the producers. Her work was even included in the rental materials with no acknowledgment to her estate. She fought tooth and nail to get recognized for her work, and 20 years later, she was a founder, and a very vocal founder, of this outstanding Union, the Stage Directors and Choreographers Society––the same organization that successfully got all the notes and blocking removed from those exact same scripts many years later.

Through the years, on my quest for inspiration from her life, I came across several clips of Agnes advocating for the arts, battling censorship, and speaking so eloquently about dance. To now encounter this gem that you are about to read, delivered at a congressional hearing in the mid-1960s, before the establishment of the NEA, cemented even further for me what I came to understand so many years ago when I devoured her first book––that Agnes de Mille is one of the best writers on dance. Period.

In this speech, she covers ground that was very new. There was no NEA and very little private foundational support for the arts. She lays out perfectly the very real challenges that choreographers face, and in doing so, she explains what choreography is––something we struggle to do for the outside world to this very day.

Our Union and our understanding of what it means to fight for not only ourselves but also the collective is so powerfully conveyed in Agnes de Mille’s words. The seeds of her advocacy have grown into very tall trees that bear fruit all of us take sustenance from.

– DAN KNECHTGES

Agnes de Mille rehearsing Allegro, 1947 PHOTO New York Public Library for the Performing Arts

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Agnes de Mille’s Speech to Congress The life of the performing artist in America and of those creators who work with and depend on performing artists is harder than in any other country. Since earliest colonial history the performer has been considered frivolous, unnecessary if not downright suspect, and even today is viewed largely as a dispensable luxury. Now, Gentlemen, I know you do not hold this point of view or you would not be holding these hearings. However, I doubt if you are aware of all the hardships that beset an artist in this country. I will restrict my remarks to dancing because that is my field. They are, however, applicable to all.

There are certain forms of theatrical or performed art that cannot pay for themselves and have never in history been expected to–– symphonic music, for instance, grand opera, ballet, poetic or religious drama. These take years, sometimes lifetimes to compose and prepare. It takes a lifetime of practicing to ready an instrumentalist, a singer or a conductor. It requires about eight years of intensive study to produce a dancer capable of joining the chorus—the chorus, mind you, that is, private no grade—of any ranking company or any good Broadway show, and that is two and a half times the time required to train an airplane pilot. This training is paid for by the parents.

It is never supplied, as in Europe, by the State or any institutions.

It is not tax deductible. There are scholarships available but very few, in private institutions. It takes a good six more years of study and constant rehearsal to produce a leading soloist. None of these expenses is tax deductible. It takes about 15 to 20 years plus creative talent, which is always rare, to produce a choreographer.

Where do these artists, when produced, function? In ballet companies and the commercial theater, Broadway, TV and Hollywood. The ballet theaters for the most part exist as private charities on a hand-to-mouth basis, paying the dancers bare subsistence, and the choreographers paltry and insufficient sums. The companies enjoy intermittent and uncertain seasons and no guarantees. All but two, the New York City Center and the San Francisco Opera, survive by one-night bus tours coast to coast. (My own company played 126 cities in six months on a bus. Commandoes would be hard pressed to stand up under this.) These ballet companies are forced to play always under emergency conditions and face lengthy and unpredictable lay-offs. It is no accident that the Broadway vernacular for dancer is “gypsy”. One result is that only the very young, the green beginners, and the people who have no wish for home and family or permanency will continue in the business. The maturing artist, the young man or woman of 27, gets out––abandons the profession and his investment of time, money, and life efforts. Our ballet theaters cannot build up a personnel comparable to the European companies, of seasoned experts who lend tone and authority and dignity and example to the young. We get the dregs. We get the leftovers.

Another result is that the choreographer never has a stable group to work with. The company is composed of transients always looking for some place where they can make––not money of course––but possible wages, somewhere they can hang up their hats, their leotards or their papooses. One cannot compose great work on transients or beginners. One needs experts, time, peace of mind, known performance dates. One needs to be able to plan ahead. One needs the best professional requirements of our craft as a chemist does.

Let me remind you that choreography has to be done on live bodies. It cannot be done on paper. A poet or a painter needs only a sheet of paper and enough food to keep his hand moving—nothing else. He can starve to death immediately his piece is done and still achieve immortality. The choreographer needs space, some sort of accompaniment, and human bodies, and today these come very high, and he needs an audience, because the minute the dancers sit down the work is erased. Therefore it is imperative that the composition be mounted, be seen and transmitted to people. This takes organization and it takes an outlay of time and capital.

First-class training and creativity are not fostered by Broadway, TV and Hollywood, where there is neither time nor interest.

Broadway does not develop; it seizes and exploits. It is in the ballet rehearsal studios that the young talents are recognized, given standards, standards which are lasting and not purely box-office expediency.

Broadway has been good to me and I love it, but I learned my trade in lonely studios and in the recital halls. I came to Broadway with a technique and taste no business manager could shake or contaminate, although they tried.

But there must be some place where the absolutes are learned, where big challenges are attempted, where the unknown is braved, and that is not The Ed Sullivan Show. Every dancer, designer, composer, choreographer of note got his first training and chance in the non-commercial dance companies. The list is overwhelming. I won’t fatigue you with it for this is a matter of record. These nurseries are vital to our theater.

And so, I believe, are the great works the ballet companies alone are capable of producing and housing, but always with greater and greater difficulty: The fiendish union restrictions (not the dancers’ unions— they ask bare justice) but the craft unions, the cost of touring and the taxes.

Gentlemen, we are breaking the backs of our artists with taxes. The dancer’s training which can never stop until age and disability call a halt, is not deductible. The earnings of a good year cannot be put toward a bad year. A choreographer is a creative talent, and creativity cannot produce with mounting volume each season like an oil well. Sometimes even genius falters. This is human nature. Also luck plays a potent part in success. But the choreographer can never save to tide him over a period of bad luck or mistakes or a period of study of reevaluating or planning. If he wishes to use his earnings on a three-year project, spending

his own savings to pay the dancers and the studio space, he cannot. The taxes make this impossible. Choreographers would not ask for outside endowment if they could take care of themselves. They don’t want three cars in the garage; they want rehearsal time.

But they can’t have it—not in the United States—and so they go abroad.

Martha Graham is doing her next great work in Israel. She is being financed by a French National. She is filming her dances in Italy because it is financially possible and because the conditions are sympathetic and comfortable. (You know that Hollywood is currently asking for subsidy because all the good films are being made abroad.) Graham’s continuing career is entirely made possible by French money. She is one of our, not France’s, national treasures. May I remind you that Finland endowed the young Sibelius for life?

I have twice done jobs for other governments, the Mexican and the Philippine. I have been asked to go back to both places. I find I could make a comfortable career as an expatriate.

But my family is here and my roots are here.

I am an American. And I’ve made up my mind that if I never do the work I dream of doing, I will stay here—and, Gentlemen, I may never get to do it.

But others don’t feel so strongly this way and they’re leaving. They’re leaving for other countries, and for other fields here, the commercial fields. And what waits for them in the commercial fields? Well, possibly great success.

But no copyrights. Indeed no basic rights of any kind.

Crippling and punitive taxes.

The most wasteful and destructive insecurity in the world.

And very frequently, in spite of success, little money.

When I did Oklahoma! there was no precedent for a choreographer owning his own work as a composer does. I signed away the ownership rights of my dances to the producers. I was granted a royalty of $50.00 a week for a limited space of time and then nothing. This is the common plight of all commercial choreographers—and even when protected by individual contract, we cannot police our rights. It is hard for an individual without great resources or copyright to bring suit for plagiarism in Stockholm, Seattle, Sydney and Johannesburg. We need copyright, and for this purpose we need to be allowed to film our work, a process now blocked by union restrictions.

There are three ways you as legislators can help.

1. By correcting and clarifying the copyright laws.

2. By allowing a tax-spread.

3. By encouraging endowment— federal and state.

I daresay you’ve heard that suggestion before.

We are the only nation, not the only great nation but the only nation, without a national theater, a national opera, a national ballet, a national folk-dance theater, and if you say that it is difficult to go about planning this, let me assure you that the problem has been solved by every government in recorded history, and I do not think it is beyond us.

The situation is tragic because we are enormously gifted. As choreographers we have proved to be the most revolutionary and inspirational in this century, but they have proved this in [the] teeth of circumstance and at the cost of personal sacrifice and unexampled austerity of living.

Our dancers are the talk of the world, for strength, for brilliance, for sincerity and verve.

But their professional lives are short and their old age unprotected and perilous.

Our theatrical standards when they are permitted to function are unmatched, but they are seldom in the art theaters permitted to function.

We waste and scorn our talents. Not all of them are salvaged by appreciative and sensitive foreigners. Many go under.

Tragically many.

We forget and lose our great heritage of folk styles and choreographed pieces. We are wanton with our cultural treasure.

I am not asking for the conditions that will permit us a great lyric theater just in order to show the world, or more particularly Russia and Latin America, that we are spiritual as well as hep and mobile. I think public relations as prime reason for doing anything important are fraudulent and paltry, whether it’s buying more cars than we need or going to church unwillingly. I am interested in a great theater for my own well-being, my neighbors’, my children’s, for our well-being, for our sense of expansion and shared perception, for our joy, for our pride in ourselves as human beings.

This speech, held in the Agnes de Mille Papers at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, is printed with permission from heirs of Agnes de Mille.

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Revealing the Truth of Our Times and Our Lives EXCERPTS FROM SPEECHES

BY LLOYD RICHARDS

INTRODUCED BY LEAH C. GARDINER

Lloyd Richards Maggie Steber c/o Eugene O’Neill Theater Center PHOTO

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I was blessed with a family who

loved the arts. Although they were doctors, nurses, dentists, and entrepreneurs, none had taken the plunge to pursue the life of an artist. My parents did, however, instill in us the importance of having mentors in whatever field we pursued: “Much of what you learn in your early life will come from the knowledge elders have bestowed upon you—all of the patterns you work to keep and/or change will come from the wisdom they have shared, how they lived their lives. And as you reflect on them they will inevitably shape yours.” When I think of the legacy of Lloyd Richards, I think of him as an artistic elder who, indeed, helped steer and shape my craft. I set my sights on Yale Drama because of him. I studied and learned as much about his work as possible before I enrolled. I read whatever I could get my hands on while there. Though I never had the fortune of meeting him (he left Yale before I arrived), his “silent mentorship,” as I think of it, helped me learn how to move through the world as a female director of color working to shape a career I could be proud of.

BIOGRAPHICAL REFLECTIONS The following excerpts are from a biographical speech Richards gave at various institutions during the 1990s.

Despite all that my bio might suggest, when I look back, I am conscious of the fact that I have no right to be here.

Born in Canada shortly after the end of the first World War, of West Indian parents who had never been to the theatre or had any participating involvement in the arts, there was nothing in the circumstances of my birth or background that I could point to that might have warranted the projection that I might one day be here to share with you my observations garnered from my life in the theatre.

My father was a master carpenter, a blueprint man, who died when I was nine. My mother was what was called in those days a housewife, who, after my father’s death, worked in people’s kitchens and took in washing to raise her children.

When one as a young person aspires, one’s dreams are fed by the bits of reality that one can extend into fantasy. There were no bits of reality that provoked the fantasy that I might stand here one day as a Theatre Person.

In these papers from Richards, we learn about the dreams his mother had for both him and his siblings to become professionals, navigating their way through a segregated America in the late 1920s to receive a college degree in a respectable profession “visible and attainable with the black community.” As he fledged forward in uncertain terrain, he sowed the seeds of fantasy, encouraging his dreams, which proved too powerful for law but were just right for the theatre.

And so he landed—luckily for us—and became a trailblazer who broke down racial barriers and paved the way for others who looked like him to help redefine the landscape of the American Theatre. When he became the first black director nominated for a Tony in 1960, and then became the first black director to win that award in 1987, he proclaimed through his craft that he existed, the stories of his people existed, and that seeing the cultural complexities of our great nation can only make us better citizens of the world.

As we think today about what it was like for Mr. Richards to live the daily onslaught of segregation, never allowing those challenges to alter his course, we can learn valuable lessons as theatre practitioners today.

There were five of us. When my mother dreamed for us, she dreamed with a very practical consideration of the possible and the unreal. She believed that the goal of fantasy was security, and Rose Richards’ children were infected with that dream.

Work. By whatever way possible, get to college and get a profession. Become a doctor, the highest rung of professional attainment, or a lawyer, or a minister, a most respected position in the black community.

And if those three were not possible, then become a teacher or a social worker.

You see, we were growing up in the ’20s in America. We were growing up in a regimentally segregated society. *** The seeds of Theatre were planted, but the nurturing sun of possibility was too distant to be a nurturing factor. When the seeds of those dreams faced reality, practicality washed them away. There were possibly a few—but to a layman’s eye, and certainly to my mother’s eye, and even to my own—no black persons making a living in the theatre, to which we didn’t go because it wasn’t about us anyway. What did the Theatre know about us? How did it, in any way in its storytelling, tell our story?

In a speech on cultural diversity given in 1990 at La Jolla Playhouse, Mr. Richards talks passionately about how America’s cultural baggage, brought by “every group which has come here,” will be threatened if America and the American Theatre do not create and preserve a theatre “informed by interaction of many cultures.” That vision is based on lived experience. He was aware of how crucial it was—and is—for us to take responsibility as artists if we want to contribute in any real way to America’s cultural evolution.

I believe my silent mentor would be proud to know that in the 60th year of our Union’s formation, we are experiencing a renaissance in the American theatre. We are beginning to embrace “every group which has come here” and see the rewards on our stages today. Of course, we have more work to do, but our generation can happily say Lloyd Richards’s work was not in vain. May we continue to honor this legacy and strive to be—in Richards’s words—“people of the theatre” who are “part of the living memory of culture.”

– LEAH C. GARDINER

The maid and the butler never spoke their minds. They certainly never spoke mine.

“I did not know what tomorrow held or the future, but I had chosen a way of life. I had chosen to make a life in the Theatre. I never looked back.”

There were of course my two heroes, Paul Robeson and Canada Lee. But somehow those two sparrows didn’t herald a spring.

And so I continued, a pre-law student, right up until the day when majors were to be chosen and I had made no official choice. I permitted my lack of choice right up to the deadline—and beyond.

When delay could no longer be tolerated, I reminded myself of the one over-riding factor: security. What about security?

That was what education was about.

It was only then that I asked myself, “What is security?” Is security a job, property, holdings, money in the bank, all important things; or is security getting up in the morning and not counting the hours because you didn’t have a job but you had a way of life? I did not know what WINTER 2020 | SDC JOURNAL

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the Day arrived and approached us, a few white soldiers stood up and went over and sat in the Colored section. Others followed.

And some black soldiers began crossing into the formerly white sections. The lights soon went out and the film started.

I missed the big battles. I did not miss the skirmishes. I did not fight the Germans or the Japanese; I fought manifest bigotry. I learned more about freedom. I learned that bigotry usually wore a white face but I also affirmed that every white face did not conceal bigotry.

Lloyd Richards (middle row, right) with Paul Robeson (center) and Alpha Phi Alpha members at Wayne University, Detroit PHOTO c/o the Lloyd Richards Estate (Lloyd Richards Papers, Yale University)

tomorrow held or the future, but I had chosen a way of life. I had chosen to make a life in the Theatre.

I never looked back. I have never questioned that decision—for me. *** As a young black person in the world I grew up in, you knew the value of freedom. You were in the “Land of Freedom” but you didn’t possess it. As a black skin in a white world, you fought for freedom every day in so many ways, large and small. You could never hide or rest. You were a target—an always visible target. Knowing the value of freedom for yourself, you appreciated it for others. So when the atrocities of Hitler’s dream were revealed, there was a compulsion to become involved, putting aside, for the moment, the fact that freedom in the USA had not yet been won for all people—a fact that was notably demonstrated in the United States Army.

My older brother was drafted in the very first draft and spent the entire Second World War overseas. When my time approached, I volunteered for the Air Corps.

They had just started to accept Negroes for training. I believe we were Negroes then.

We had gone from coloreds to Negroes and would later progress to Black Americans and ultimately blacks. We, however, never eradicated the appellation Nigger, which seems to linger regardless of the current trend. I was accepted by the Air Corps for pilot or bombardier training. I was sent to Tuskegee, Alabama.

And so, while the battles went on in Europe and Africa and Asia and the South Pacific on the front lines to rid the world of tyranny,

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skirmishes went on in U.S. southern towns and northern cities and in England and Australia and wherever black soldiers were quartered, to retain what semblance of freedom and equality we had. When a friend and I sat toward the front of a bus, the driver drove off the highway to his home and brought out a shotgun to compel us to move to the rear.

A school buddy of mine in the tank corps, alerted to go overseas, had to drive his tank through the front door of a local post office in order to impress upon the local citizenry that he had the right to mail a special delivery letter.

I had already learned that the Arts had a powerful voice, that the Arts brought conscience and perspective to event. I was now learning things that my art should address. *** [Friends in New York City] taught me that the best place [for aspiring actors] to hang out for radio was the third floor at NBC. Directors usually passed through there going from one studio to another. And besides, you met some wonderful actors there who might give you a tip as to what was casting. But it was strange.

Everyone you talked to was looking over your shoulder. I was confused until I became aware that they were not rejecting me because they didn’t look me in the eye. They were looking to spot someone passing through who might make a difference to their career. I eventually learned how to do it too.

I did get a few shots on radio, sometimes provided by the couple of directors that I had gone to school with at Wayne U. who

When President Truman ordered all military bases desegregated, there were those on my Florida base who thought colored and white lavatories and drinking fountains should be retained as well as the Negro section in the base movie house.

The day after the order came down, my buddy Travis and I went to the base movie.

The movie hadn’t started. We noticed that the old seating patterns were being maintained—black soldiers were sitting in the rear section on the left. There was no balcony. We went to the center section and took seats in the middle. Before long, the house manager came and asked us to move to the “colored” section. We explained to him about the President’s order and of our intent to occupy those seats. The very large and partially crowded movie house was very quiet. The manager came back a couple of times with the same request, and received the same answer. The last time, he left announcing, for all the theatre to hear, that he was going to call the Officer of the Day. When the Officer of

Lloyd Richards in the U.S. Army Air Corps, 1945 PHOTO c/o the Lloyd Richards Estate (Lloyd Richards Papers, Yale University)

had made it. One director took me aside and told me, “Lloyd, you’re good, but I can’t use you. Your voice doesn’t sound ethnic so I could cast you as anything, but our show is beamed into the south and if our sponsors ever found out—well, it’s worth my job.” I thanked him for at least telling me.

How many other jobs was I not right for, for that reason, I’ll never know. But there were directors who did use me. One was a writerdirector for The Greatest Story Ever Told. He also later told me that I had been blacklisted during the McCarthy era. I worked that seldom I didn’t even know it. He continued to hire me. I did work on Helen Trent, Jungle Jim, and I even had a running part on Mr. Jolly’s Hotel for Pets.

I had been trained on Williams, Miller and Inge, O’Neill, Shaw, Shakespeare, Sheridan and Chekhov. But there was no place to perform them, for me. There was little or nothing on the library shelves that reflected my culture, my life, me. And if there were, there were few partners to work with. There were few parts for blacks on Broadway, and the maids or the handyman hardly reflected black culture or thinking. Few black writers were writing theatre.

But I did do theatre Off-Broadway, where the plays of protest were done, or at Equity Library [Theatre] where the Actors’ Union sponsored productions that showcased the talents of out-of-work actors. The casts were wonderful, packed with young talents who would later become big stars in theatre, film and television.

The work was exciting, but with the plays of protest we occasionally had to fight our way to the theatre, passing through neighborhoods who didn’t think that we should be there, or the occasional gang that might invade the theatre and start fights in the audience. Evidently, what we were doing had meaning, and challenged the deeply held bigoted convictions of some citizens. I eventually became a fairly well known Off-Broadway actor. *** A friend, who was the friend of the assistant to the President of Paramount Pictures, brought me to his attention. This did not result in a movie deal, but they were inaugurating an Executive Dining Room for top executives in the Paramount Building, right in the heart of the theatre district. They had hired an English chef, Pat, and they wanted one waiter. I was offered that position at Paramount. I took it. The hours were 12:00 till 3:00PM or less, depending on how much time it took me. I got paid; I got a meal. I could send

Lloyd Richards (left) working as a disc jockey in Detroit, 1947 PHOTO c/o the Lloyd Richards Estate (Lloyd Richards Papers, Yale University)

in a substitute if I were at an audition or otherwise unavailable. I could take home the leftovers.

We never knew how many executives would stop in on any day. We averaged around 10 or 12, sometimes more. The job was my own to manage. I carried a small blue satchel that became well known to my friends as Lloyd’s Blue Bag. They knew that there was food at my house. I by then had a small, very small apartment on the fringe of the theatre district. I could walk anywhere that I needed to go. Friday dinner at my place became an event. The menu could be anything from venison to ground sirloin, whatever had been deemed most appropriate for executives that week. My guests chipped in and provided the wine, purchased by the gallon jug from the liquor store two doors down. The owners were avid theatergoers and looked forward to seeing us all onstage someday. They occasionally invested.

Adolph Zukor—a legend, one of the founders of Paramount Pictures—used to lunch in the dining room regularly. He sat in the same chair at the long table every time: number 1 at the right of the head of the table. No one else ever sat there. There were no signs posted or memos sent. Everyone just seemed to know where he fit in the pecking order up or down the table.

It was an ideal job for an actor looking for work. I even held on to it when I had the running part on Mr. Jolly’s Hotel for Pets. I knew what it took to hang in, in this precarious

business, so I set rules of survival for myself.

One was that I live at the level of my last job, not my current one. This permitted me to save a little against the next time that I was at liberty, which would surely come.

I am told that in later years, Adolph Zukor once remarked, “You know that waiter who used to be here? He walked right out of here and directed a Broadway show.” We had never talked, beyond the menu and his wants. I don’t know that he knew my name. I became recognizable with success. *** Paul Mann, who when he directed me Off-Broadway had been impressed with my knowledge of technique, contacted me. He was starting a new studio, [and said] “Come teach with me and learn my system.” I assisted for years, [and] brought in many students— people who had worked with me and wanted to study with me.

It was there that I met the woman who was to become my wife. I encouraged her to come and study with us. She was a dancer with The King and I. It was there that I met Sidney Poitier. He was a very talented young actor who couldn’t afford the class. Paul gave him a scholarship.

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about what shows are casting or whatever is important for struggling actors to know in order to survive. It was at after-class one night that Sidney said to me—we were sharing a hot dog because neither of us could afford a whole one of our own—that if he ever did anything meaningful on Broadway, he would like me to direct it. I thanked him and responded in kind.

Shared fantasies that suit the mood and the moment but which no one really expects to come true or to be held to.

It was some years later that I got a call from Sidney. He had found a play that he wanted to act in on Broadway. The play was called A Raisin in the Sun and was written by a woman, Lorraine Hansberry. He could set it up for me to meet the producer, Philip Rose, and if we hit it off, Lorraine. I met Lorraine. We talked about O’Casey, Chekhov, Shakespeare, Paul Robeson, Shaw and other favorites we shared. We hit it off. I became the director. It was November 1956. ***

Lloyd Richards + Lorraine Hansberry at a party at Sardi’s for A Raisin in the Sun, 1959 PHOTO Gordon Parks/Getty Images

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My life in the theatre has been influenced by my concerns as a human being.

Those concerns have been directed by the coincidence of finding myself in a country that is perceived throughout the world to be a country where freedom and equality are championed and assured by a Constitution that does not acknowledge exceptions. And finding myself black and an exception. My life has been directed toward erasing those exceptions and making what I consider to be the finest basis for a country, anytime, anywhere; making those precepts true for all.

“My life in the theatre has been influenced by my concerns as a human being.”

I have enlisted some of the finest writers in history to assist me. The thoughts and writings from the past masters have been my ally. And I have sought and allied myself with such writers in my own time.

A playwright, for me, is a person who goes down the street and stops a stranger, [saying] “Whatever you’re doing tonight––don’t do it.

Come down to the theatre at such-and-such streets and pay $12.00 or $65.00, whatever.

Come in at 8:00 and take a seat for 2 or 3 hours. Watch and listen––because I have something to say that is more important than anything else you could be doing.”

A big order, but that is what a playwright expects of him or herself and what we expect of them. I have sought the best among them and tried to help their development. I have found and worked with many talented playwrights.

I have found and worked with live genius three times: Lorraine—Athol—August.

For me, they have held a mirror up to life and revealed the truth of our times and our lives.

They have made my work—my way of life— rich. And I am grateful.

LLOYD RICHARDS was born in Toronto in 1919 and grew up in Detroit. Despite the death of his father, which coincided with the dawn of the Great Depression, and his mother’s battle with a disease that left her blind two years later, he entered Wayne University (now Wayne State) intending to become a lawyer, but due to a love for the theatre contracted during high school when he was introduced to the works of Shakespeare, he became a speech major.

He joined the Army Air Corps in 1944 during World War II, earned his pilot wings at Tuskeegee, and was training to fly fighter planes when, to his great relief, the war ended. After the war, he acted in two semiprofessional theatres in Detroit that he had helped create, worked as a disc jockey on the radio, and was employed as a social worker for the Welfare Department. He moved to New York City in 1947, lived at the YMCA, and worked as an actor in radio, Off-Broadway, and eventually on Broadway.

In 1956, his friend and former student Sidney Poitier enlisted him to direct A Raisin in the Sun by Lorraine Hansberry. It went on to artistic and commercial success on Broadway, and Richards became the first African American nominated for the Tony Award for Best Director.

He was a founding Member of SDC in 1959, and its President from 1970 to 1980.

From 1968 until 1999 he headed the National Playwrights Conference (NPC) at the Eugene O’Neill Theatre Center, where he developed the work of John Guare, Derek Walcott, Wole Soyenka, Israel Horovitz, Wendy Wasserstein, Christopher Durang, David Henry Hwang, John Patrick Shanley, Lee Blessing, Doug Wright, and Adam Rapp, among hundreds of others.

In 1979, he was named Dean of the Yale School of Drama and the Artistic Director of Yale Repertory Theatre, where noted productions include three premieres of works by Athol Fugard. And, after selecting August Wilson’s Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom for the NPC in 1982, he went on to direct six new plays by Wilson while creating a vertically integrated developmental process that brought those plays from the O’Neill to Yale through a tour of three or four regional theatres, culminating in premiere commercial productions on Broadway. This process proved so successful that during the 1987–1988 season, four plays that he had either directed or produced were running on Broadway simultaneously.

Lloyd Richards won the Tony Award for Best Director for August Wilson’s Fences in 1987 and the National Medal of Arts in 1993. He died on June 29, 2006, his 87th birthday.

Diana Sands + Sidney Poitier in A Raisin in the Sun on Broadway, 1959 PHOTO Photofest

CULTURAL DIVERSITY IN THE AMERICAN THEATRE Richards delivered this speech at a conference held at UC San Diego in November 1990.

As I examined the title of this conference, “Cultural Diversity in the American Theatre,” and examined the definition of cultural diversity in the conference preparation materials, I found it states, in part, that “cultural diversity” reflects the complexity and beauty of individuals that comprise a multi-cultural society.

And I quote, “We perceive ourselves as a community of women and men from diverse racial, ethnic, and class backgrounds, national origins, religious and political beliefs, physical abilities and sexual orientations. We are a community dedicated to accepting each other and striving to learn from and about each other in an atmosphere of positive engagement and mutual respect. Cultural diversity is defined to include the history, society, and/ or culture of underprivileged groups in the United States, including, but not limited to, African, Asian, Chicano, Latino, and Native Americans. Members of traditionally underrepresented groups and persons of various nationalities who’ve recently come to the United States are also included in this definition of cultural diversity.”

Wow! I was struck by the thought.

Colleagues, in its purest, most hopeful, and most specific form, you have defined the United States of America. And as closely as it can be defined, you have defined the American theatre. Not the one that is perceived to be, but the one that is and should be. I would change

the title of this conference to “Cultural Diversity Is the American Theatre.”

For centuries, the American theatre has sought to define itself in terms of a Western culture it has admired and which is part of the legitimate heritage of many of the people who have come to and inhabit this country. But it’s not American.

It is part of the ethnic memory of a group, albeit the majority group, of people who have settled in this land, and its sensitivity, wisdom, and artistry will inform and become part of American theatre. But it is not American theatre.

William Shakespeare, as provocatively informative and thrilling as he may be, is not American theatre. Nor are Shaw, Sheridan, Ibsen, Molière, Chekhov. They are the wondrous manifestations of other societies whose wisdom and insights might inform, delight, and inspire us. But they are not American theatre. They are part of the cultural baggage that has been brought to America, as every group who has come here has brought with them cultural baggage. It is useful, but it remains that––baggage from someplace else. How comforting it is, how informative, how useful it is, it gives us an identity. We are someone. We are connected to a long and recognized history. But there comes a time when we must have the courage to bring that wisdom and that artistry to the table in the evolution of a new society, or WINTER 2020 | SDC JOURNAL

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there will be no American theatre informed by the interaction of many cultures, but the isolation and ghettoization of cultures feeding on their own past.

I speak not of assimilation, but respectful, mutual cultural interaction. The strongest and most difficult part of your definition of America, or “cultural diversity,” is the phrase “a community dedicated to accepting each other, and striving to learn from and about each other in an atmosphere of positive engagement.” How beautiful. How threatening. It is the ambition of American rhetoric and the continuing stumbling block in the path of full realization of the possibility of this country. Accepting each other. We witness what the failure to do that [has] done to others and what it has done to us. It was the Achilles heel of the British Empire.

I recall being in Africa in the mid-’60s, in a particular country, shortly after the achievement of independence. I was invited to a major theatre of the country to meet with their board who were earnest and sincere and who ran a major twelve-play season. It was a pure British expatriate theatre, a manifestation of exemplary colonialism in which the British moved their people and every aspect of their cultural life into a foreign land for the comfort of their own being and as a support of their identity and their values. A little London carved into the... and here my typist made a mistake.

She says, “...carved into the grain of another cultural space...” I’d originally said, “...carved into the groin...,” but I guess grain or groin, it’s the same thing. The questions asked did not surprise me. “Mr. Richards, there’s been a war and independence exists. Our doors are

now open to everyone. Why do our natives not come to our theatre?”

The answer was so obvious. But somehow was not so. “What have you done in your theatre that would cause them to return seventeen miles from where they are forced to live, in the middle of the night, with no public transportation, to sit in your theatre?

How would they see themselves reflected there? Or their concerns? Or would they even see themselves at all?” The British, secure in their arrogance and backed by the greatness of Shakespeare and the St. James version of the Bible, have always found difficulty in “striving to learn from and about each other.”

Until a year ago, I can recall standing in the middle of the Monolith—that monolith—the National Theatre in London, and wondering, “Where in this whole mass and activity am I reflected?” An opportunity missed. An empire lost. I recall traveling to theatres around this country observing the staff, checking the repertoire, and mingling with the audience.

And feeling very sad in my chosen profession.

Where, in that theatre, did I exist? It was not unlike London.

The validity of the conference that has been held here is that it addresses that question––a community dedicated to accepting each other and striving to learn. I came into the theatre close to fifty years ago because it was a space that could provide a place for my voice and my concerns. I could speak to the world with words and images and provoke imagination. And if there was exceptional artistry, people would come and listen. That brought me into the theatre, and it is that which still holds me there.

Lloyd Richards + August Wilson at the National Playwrights Conference c/o the Lloyd Richards Estate (Lloyd Richards Papers, Yale University)

PHOTO

Lloyd Richards + Athol Fugard PHOTO c/o the Lloyd Richards Estate (Lloyd Richards Papers, Yale University)

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Thirty some years ago I stood in the lobby of the Walnut Theatre in Philadelphia. We were in the first week of an out-of-town tryout for A Raisin in the Sun. We had no New York theatre and no place to go after that week if some miracle did not happen. We had a wonderful company and an excellent play in the process of development, but it could all end on Saturday night.

There were a few people in line at the ticket window. A small black woman approached and stood in line. I recognized her immediately. She carried a shopping bag in which I was sure she had a pair of comfortable working shoes, a few other articles, and room in the bag for leftovers from the family for which she had worked. My mother had carried such a bag. She was from the thousands of women who go out each morning and return weary each evening. She got to the window, and she asked for a ticket.

I heard her say, “Four dollars and eighty cents? But I can see Sidney Poitier around

the corner for ninety-five cents!” After much searching, she put up the four dollars and eighty cents and got her ticket.

She walked to go into the theatre, but the door was locked. The box office man called to her that she would have to come back at 8:30 to see the play. She seemed confused, so I walked up and explained to her that she would have to come back, that the play was not continuous like a film. She understood.

I took courage and asked the question that was nagging at me. “Why are you paying four dollars and eighty cents and coming back to see Sidney Poitier when you can see him around the corner for ninety-five cents?” She said, “Well, the word is going around in my community that there is something going on down here that concerns me. So I had to come and find out what it was all about.”

Her language was being spoken on the stage.

She was reflected on that stage. The mirror that we hold up to life included her image. Her concerns were being explored. And she would be there. That’s why I am in the theatre.

I sat in the back of the Huntington Theatre in Boston last week. We were in previews for August Wilson’s new play, Two Trains Running.

When the play ended and the curtain calls, I was giving a few last notes to my assistant, and an older gentleman walked up. He waited at our shoulder until we were finished and then he extended his hand. He said, “Thank you.” He said, “I’ve seen your work with Mr. Wilson...,” and he named each of the plays that we had brought to Boston. He said, “You have opened up and shared with me black life in this country, and we...,” he spoke for his wife who stood nodding beside him, “we are profoundly grateful.” I, too, was grateful. That is why I am in the theatre.

I had determined many years ago that if August Wilson was going to explore the black existence in America in every decade since the Civil War as honestly and as beautifully as he could, I would “he’p him!” I’d take our work and share it in every region possible and bring that history, that vitality, those cultural memories and resonances onto the stage to strengthen and to reveal. People are interested and, in some instances, hungry to experience the cultural diversity of this nation.

And we, from our various vantage points, must acknowledge, support, and share those wonders with them.

Even with preparation and explanation all will not be understood and comprehended. But something will. And if we come back again and again and again and again, maybe we’ll understand more, although I sometimes doubt it. I must say we did just open Two Trains Running in Boston where we’ve already

Laurence Fishburne + Al White in Two Trains Running on Broadway, 1992 PHOTO Photofest

done some of August’s works. Despite the fact that we were in the developmental process which had permitted us to turn the play around significantly and try very new things, the critics surprised me on one score.

I would have thought that by now they would have perceived the nature of August’s form, which stems from the deepest recesses of cultural memory. Storytelling. Hung on an existent, but sometimes subliminal plot.

“People are interested and, in some instances, hungry to experience the cultural diversity of this nation. And we, from our various vantage points, must acknowledge, support, and share those wonders with them.”

In their effort to appear knowledgeable about what they obviously did not understand, western cultural form expectations were imposed in judgment, and the problem of the play that we were working on was completely missed. Not strangely, the people—black and white—they got it. The critics somehow missed it. I wondered why. That does not stop the work—or the drive. Creating an American theatre based in cultural diversity will be hazardous, but our failure to try can be devastating.

We have all witnessed the wonder and the horror of the freedoms which have suddenly come to Eastern Europe. As Memphis says in Two Trains, “Freedom is heavy.” Suddenly, freedom has permitted one ethnic group to attempt to annihilate another in a grab for power and for property. That has been astonishing to view. Totalitarianism has held

these deep animosities in check. Freedom has unleashed them. It has unleashed the freedom to hate. The fault is that in the time of restraint, little effort was used to create a community dedicated to accepting.

I was in Lithuania in the midst of their recent troubles. Armenians were being attacked in various parts of Russia. Other ethnic minorities and Jews were being attacked.

Pogroms were openly spoken about in Leningrad. I asked a Lithuanian colleague, who also sat in their legislative body, what would happen to the Jews in Lithuania where so many atrocities had happened during World War II. He assured me, “Nothing. We have spent the time getting to know and to respect one another.” One wonders. One hopes. Will it last? The time must be spent.

The effort must be made. And the theatre is a venue.

Our record in this country is not clean, and the times are as fraught with leashed hate as they have ever been. Historically, we have seen the Dutch enslave free blacks in New Amsterdam, Africans pulled from their villages into hundreds of years of slavery, immigrant Irish and Poles abused, who in turn abused Jews and blacks, blacks attacking Koreans, unrecorded and unpunished lynchings, Asians put into slave labor. The country itself wrested––no, not wrested, stolen from its first occupants, out of different cultural perceptions of community, property, and land. Mexicans indentured, Japanese interned, the return of anti­semitism, and the memories of unfounded fears evoked to control the political process and retain power.

Oh, Harvey Gantt, “How sad a way to lose so gallant and courageous a fight.”

The processes described in your definition are sorely needed. To achieve them brings a possibility of a nation as yet untried and a fulfillment as yet unexperienced. I am proud of a production currently running in my theatre. I am particularly proud of this WINTER 2020 | SDC JOURNAL

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one because it had every possibility for failure and had failed at some theatres. It is Largo Desolato by Vaclav Havel. I wanted to share with my audience the personal pain, dilemma, and fear experienced by this man as he accepted, and was forced to accept, the responsibility for a struggle toward freedom. I wanted them to experience the fear and the absurdity that can be generated by a simple knock on the door. Or a strange word in a friend’s question.

ethnic memory of each of us and is informed by its wisdom, form, and artistry, and brings that to the context “now,” where we all dwell, and informs the now, which provokes and enriches us all. David Henry Hwang does that.

[David] Mamet does that. August Wilson does that. Many, many, many others do that. Storytellers exist so that the events of yesterday have meaning for tomorrow.

We were lucky. A close friend of Havel and a wonderful actor, Jan Triska, was engaged for the lead, and two other Eastern European actors were engaged. One of my staff directors, an Austrian who grew up with the post­-Hitler guilt syndrome, was assigned to direct. A wonderful, evocative set was developed. But would there be laughter? With the fear? A wonderful chemistry happened.

The Eastern European actors brought a deep perception and empathic reaction to the work. They understood the combination of terror and absurdity required. And yet, they had all escaped the terror and are in the process of acquiring American citizenship, so they also knew the culture and level of understanding of the people in our seats.

of our particular cultural heritage to the context of the here and the now. That is American theatre— theatre which reaches into the ethnic memory of each of us and is informed by its wisdom, form, and artistry.”

It’s a beautiful production. It contains everything I could have hoped for. But you experience fear. And laughter. In doing so, for me, it rattled memories of many of the productions that I’ve been in or directed, where freedom threatened is a driving force. As I look back, they are legend. They Shall Not Die. About the legal lynching of the Scottsboro boys, and during which we were attacked by a gang as we performed.

Stevedore. Longitude 49. La Careta, where one tries to live in a promised land that never lives up to its promise. The redemptive experience of directing the television production of Momoko Ike’s Gold Watch, the story of Japanese internment and of American shame.

And very much of Two Trains Running, the legacy of Martin Luther King, Jr., and Malcolm X, and many, many more.

If you are a member of an ethnic minority, you learn about freedom fast and are concerned about it all your life for everyone. If you have any form of ethnic definition, if you are visible in face or form, you live your life as a target. That is what, hopefully, we are all trying to change.

We are a theatre in search of a tradition and an identity. We will inform ourselves from that tradition and take courage from that identity.

But we must each bring the wonder of our particular cultural heritage to the context of the here and the now. That is American theatre—theatre which reaches into the

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“We must each bring the wonder

The value of the past is ultimately what it contributes to today. Despite the promulgation of the concept of a global village, we are far from it. More people are getting to go more places faster, and more cinema and television are available from various cultures, but this tends to create a homogenization of culture which permits us to believe that we understand without truly understanding. What we perceive is shallow, and therefore trivial. The consequence is less understanding and greater possibility for insult. We in America have been continually absolved of our need to learn a foreign language or in any respect to be dependent on translation. We foster English as the international language and thereby isolate ourselves from the niceties of language and the processes of thought of our world partners.

It is clear that education about other cultures at an early age is imperative. There is a point, early in a child’s life, when curiosity is insatiable and the capacity to absorb is limitless. If we wish our American world, our world, to change, this time in education must be used. If we wish our world to change, we must support every effort at cultural interaction. We must support our ethnically based companies and assist them to excellence in their own, not our, terms. Then share it with them.

We must invite and share with foreign companies as well. And we must tour and we must travel. We must exchange artists, so that we

can explore and experience together to a working, functioning understanding. We can enrich as well as improve our lives.

We are people of the theatre. We transmit condensed experience from generation to generation. We are part of the living memory of a culture. As Harold Clurman has said, “The purpose of the arts is to render us more human, more aware of the challenge of being men and women. We know too well these days how difficult it is to make whole persons of the beast in us. The artist is engaged in that effort. Let us all become artists unto ourselves. Let us think of all our lives as works of art. It is a prescription to heal many wounds.” “Only in one’s imagination does every truth find an effective and undeniable existence.” “Imagination, not invention, is the supreme master of the art of life.” “The great end of life is not knowledge, but action.” “The actuality of thought is life.” The thoughts of our thinking artists.

Vaclav Havel said, “Responsibility is the ability of man or his determination and fully accepted duty to answer for himself totally, once and for all, under any circumstances.”

That is our task. Thank you.

Lloyd Richards’s complete biographical speech and speech on cultural diversity are held in the Lloyd Richards Papers in the Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Yale University, and are printed in SDC Journal with permission from heirs of Lloyd Richards. Photos credited as courtesy of the Lloyd Richards Estate (Lloyd Richards Papers, Yale University) are also held in this collection.

Lloyd Richards with his Tony Award for Best Direction for Fences, 1987 PHOTO c/o the Lloyd Richards Estate (Lloyd Richards Papers, Yale University)

Emily Mann and True Mentorship AN SDC ROUNDTABLE MODERATED BY

Emily Mann PHOTO Matt Pilsner

LISA MCNULTY

Emily Mann, an award-winning director and playwright, is in her 30th and final season as Artistic Director and Resident Playwright at McCarter Theatre Center in Princeton, NJ. While at McCarter, she has directed nearly 50 productions of both classics and world premieres as well as 15 of her own plays/ adaptations. During her tenure, the theatre won the Tony Award for Outstanding Regional Theatre, and she was recently awarded the TCG Visionary Leadership Award and inducted into the American Theater Hall of Fame. In addition to Mann’s achievements as an artist and artistic leader, she has been an extraordinary mentor to new generations of theatre artists. As she prepares to leave her artistic home of 30 years, SDC Journal invited some of her mentees to reflect on Mann’s legacy.

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As a young director, Emily Mann always wished she’d had a mentor. “So many of my male colleagues did,” she says. “I always wished that someone had taken me under their wing.”

She did assist and learn from a number of directors early on. While she was still an undergraduate at Harvard, she assistant directed for Tony Richardson on Antony and Cleopatra with Vanessa Redgrave in London, and she credits Richardson with giving her very good advice, as well as a great learning experience in the room. She also observed directors during her time as a Bush Fellow in directing at the Guthrie—although when she first applied for the fellowship in the mid1970s, Artistic Director Michael Langham told her, “Women can’t direct professionally.” She was asked instead to join the apprentice acting company, but she insisted that she wanted to be in the directing program. He relented, and she went on to become the first woman to direct on the Guthrie mainstage, with her production of The Glass Menagerie in 1979.

Mann had a busy freelance playwriting and directing career in the 1980s, at such theatres as BAM, Hartford Stage, the Mark Taper Forum, Actors Theatre of Louisville, and the Goodman. But she wanted to serve the field in a way that she herself hadn’t had the opportunity to experience as a young director. “As I got older,” she says, “it became one of my personal missions to be

a mentor to others, and help them along and give them opportunities.”

When she became Artistic Director of the McCarter Theatre in Princeton in 1990, she created an internship for aspiring directors, taking on two each year for the entire season.

Now, nearly three decades later, 60 theatre artists have benefited from the program.

“As I got older, it became one of my personal missions to be a mentor to others, and help them along and give them opportunities.”

– EMILY MANN “I’m looking for people who have the eye, the ear, the heart, and the sensibility of artists,” she says. “I also try to get at least one a year who wants to become an artistic director down the line. I want to help nurture and generate the new generation of artistic leaders. I’m looking for diversity, because there are still fewer opportunities for women and people of color as directors in this country.

“I spend time with them, I watch them, I talk to them. I want to hear from them—I want to know what their dreams are. I want

to know what they’re learning during the year. I want to see their work as artists. The ones that I connect with strongly I get to know pretty well.”

As far as how she interacts with her assistants in rehearsal, Mann says, “I have a very open and collaborative room. I often will look around the room or at my table and say, ‘What do you think?’ I just love working that way, where you become one mind in the room and everyone is in support. I love the team.”

After they leave McCarter, she stays connected with many of her former interns and helps to get them opportunities to keep working and growing. Occasionally, they return to the McCarter as guest directors.

“I love it,” she says about having one of her former assistants in the director’s chair. “I just adore it. It feels so seamless.”

Mann says unequivocally that one of the most important things in her life at the McCarter has been her role as a mentor to others. “I care very much about the future of all talented young people in our field,” she says. “I’m proud of the young people who come out of here. Their values are right— their belief in what the theatre can be and do. I’m the daughter of two teachers, so I come by it honestly. It’s the same feeling, when they go out in the world and they make a difference.”

ABOUT THE PARTICIPANTS

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JADE KING CARROLL has directed over 50 productions and developed work around the country, including The Piano Lesson, Detroit ’67, and Intimate Apparel at McCarter Theatre, and Having Our Say at Long Wharf Theatre and Hartford Stage. She was presented the Paul Green Award from NTC and the August Wilson Estate, and the TCG New Generations/Future Leaders grant, where she served as an Artistic Associate for Second Stage.

ADAM IMMERWAHR’s work as a director has been seen around the country and internationally. He is currently the Artistic Director of Theater J, the nation’s premier Jewish theater. He served as the Associate Artistic Director at McCarter Theatre, and the Resident Director at Passage Theatre in Trenton, NJ.

REGINALD L. DOUGLAS has directed and developed plays and musicals at theatres around the country. He currently works as the Artistic Producer of City Theatre Company in Pittsburgh, PA, and serves on the Board of Directors of the National New Play Network.

LISA McNULTY is the Producing Artistic Director of WP Theater, the oldest and largest theatre in the country devoted to new work by women+. She was a producer at Manhattan Theatre Club for eight seasons, both on and OffBroadway, and was the Associate Producer at McCarter Theatre, where she had the great good fortune to produce for Emily Mann.

LISA McNULTY | All of us in this room today have long-reaching, deep ties to Emily Mann and her extraordinary life and career. So it feels like a real privilege to sit down together and talk about what she’s meant to each of us, and the ways in which her spirit and her career have informed each of ours.

I thought it would be good to start by talking about how each of us came to know Emily, and how you worked together.

JADE KING CARROLL | I actually can’t remember not knowing Emily. She and my father and Ntozake Shange started working together on a musical called Betsey Brown at the Public Theater when I was about four years old. She used to let me sit in on rehearsals—and I’d sit in the row behind or next to my dad and just observe.

At first, I fell in love with George Faison’s choreography and I thought I wanted to be a choreographer. I loved dance and I loved visual storytelling. Watching Emily, Ntozake, George, and my dad, I thought that was the norm of how theatre was created.

I fell in love with theatre that way. Then when Emily became Artistic Director at the McCarter, I was about 9 or 10 years old, and the first production she directed was The Glass Menagerie. I remember watching that production being completely mesmerized, and at intermission turning to my father and saying, “Oh my gosh, you can do it with just words.”

That’s when I realized I wanted to be a director and not a choreographer. And from that moment on, Emily left the doors open at McCarter and let me watch rehearsals and answered any questions I had. Through high school, as I was directing and assisting various productions, she was available and she took me seriously.

Through undergrad. Then right out of college I applied for the directing/producing internship at McCarter—it’s what I always wanted. I actually didn’t get it until a year later, because Emily didn’t think I was quite ready for it. Which I think was a lesson of her true mentorship. She never gave me any opportunity until I was fully prepared for it.

LISA | What about you, Reggie?

REGINALD L. DOUGLAS | Adam should go next, because on the family tree, he’s the next of the branches.

ADAM IMMERWAHR | Chronologically.

REGINALD | Chronologically.

ADAM | I had gotten to know Emily’s work as a playwright. I had gone to Brown University when Oskar Eustis was at Trinity

Jade King Carroll and her father Baikida Carroll watch as Emily Mann rehearses Betsey Brown at McCarter Theatre, 1991 PHOTO T. Charles Erickson

Rep and taught the dramaturgy class for Brown. We read Emily’s play Execution of Justice and studied her work together. When I graduated, I wanted to apply for the right directing/producing internship and at the time, McCarter was one of the few offered that bridged both areas.

I got to know Emily at that interview, and realized that that was where I wanted to be.

I assisted her that year on Miss Witherspoon

by Christopher Durang, the world premiere which then went to Playwrights Horizons.

That was Jade’s same year—we were cointerns together.

After that I left for about six weeks, and came back to McCarter briefly as a development staffer. Then Emily brought me on first to be the Producing Associate, then the Associate Producer, and eventually her Associate Artistic Director. That’s when I started directing regularly for McCarter on the mainstage. I also would occasionally jump in and be in the room with Emily again, because it was too great an opportunity to

pass up continuing to learn from her. So I was there for about a decade.

LISA | All right. Now next in the chronology…

REGINALD | I was also a McCarter directing and producing intern. Adam was at my interview because he was the Producing Associate at the time, so the family tree keeps going. Like Adam, I was looking for a program after college that bridged directing and producing. I really looked at leadership in the holistic way—not just “you’re a director” or “you’re a producer,” but “you can be someone who’s interested in shaping a story and shaping an organization.”

When I walked into the interview and was greeted by Emily and [then Producing Director] Mara Isaacs, I knew that this was a place I wanted to call home, and they were the kind of leaders I wanted to learn from and work with. My year at McCarter was life-changing, professionally and personally, because it crystallized why I wanted to make WINTER 2020 | SDC JOURNAL

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that she took to say, “You’re ready: let’s go.”

That’s an extraordinary thing. There are other directors out there who always see their former assistants as young and unqualified or will never take them seriously, because they met them when they were 21 or 22.

JADE | I remember when I was interviewing for Tracy Brigden when she was running City Theatre [Company in Pittsburgh], she told me that she wrote Emily a letter when she was in high school, because she saw a show and was so moved by it. And Emily responded, and they continued that penpal-ship for years. You look at Eisa Davis or you look at Loretta Greco…there are so many artists throughout the country that she has influenced in such a huge way.

(Clockwise) Emily Mann, Adam Immerwahr, Danai Gurira + Patience Tawengwa PHOTO Matt Pilsner

the theatre I wanted to make, and how I wanted to make it. I got to do new play development, directing, and line-producing, and witness an organizational culture shifting and shaping. In big and small ways, I got to watch Emily be the leader that we all know her to be.

The next generation of artists may be younger, but they’re still artists. And to give them respect, and to hear their voices and their opinions is crucial. To me, one of the most important things is to continue the conversation, to stay in touch and to follow their careers. It’s really gratifying.

LISA | I was her literary intern. I left to go be the literary manager at the institution I’m now the artistic director of, and then got a call a few years later to come back and produce.

We all have this kind of long trajectory with Emily—she’s someone who takes those mentorship ties really seriously. We’ve all had these decades-long connections with her, and it feels rare to me.

“It was a huge leap of faith that she took to say, ‘You’re ready: let’s go.’ That’s an extraordinary thing.”

Has that affected how you think about your responsibility to mentorship or people who assist you, based on Emily’s example?

REGINALD | One of the things that I find so profound in reflecting on Emily’s tenure and hearing your stories is that it wasn’t just making space at “the kids’ table.” Emily took you seriously as an artist and as a peer, and respected you. I think about that a lot in terms of interns and assistants. How do you respect them as the amazing emerging artists that they are? And meet them where they are and instill in them the same standards of success and excellence that you have for yourself? I never felt like I was less than, when working with Emily. I was treated with respect and with love by someone who saw potential, as opposed to lack. That’s had a really profound impact on how I think about mentorship now.

JADE | She always took our opinions seriously, which I now do with my assistants.

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– ADAM IMMERWAHR LISA | I think that when one has been running an institution for 30 years, relationships like these are how one continues to grow and be inspired. It always felt to me like a really reciprocal relationship.

ADAM | You know, I hear in Jade’s and Reggie’s responses this amazing thing that Emily did year after year—I got to watch her do it for 10 years—where she would bring an assistant director into the room, and pretty quickly turn to them and say, “Well, do you have thoughts about that scene that we just did? Email me tonight.” And the next day, they would experience her sitting with her notes and their email printed side by side, as she sifted through them and interpreted them—which was an incredible educational experience for the assistant.

It showed how seriously she takes the artists around her. When I first directed on the Matthews stage, which is the 1,100seat house, I had only directed in 200-seat theatres before. It was a huge leap of faith

LISA | What’s it like to be produced by Emily? Was there anything that surprised you as that relationship grew and changed?

JADE | Trust. The amount of trust. In the last show I directed for McCarter—I’ve done three now—I wanted to do this silent transition. It was for the final transition of the play where the world is ending outside, and I wanted to do it in complete silence. At first, Emily questioned this choice. But then we had a conversation and she said, “Okay, I see what you’re trying to do. Let’s do it.” She didn’t try and convince me to do it her way. Of course, she asked questions, but she really supports and champions my own artistic vision.

ADAM | Jade, I love what you said—“I see what you’re doing.” Because that is such a quintessential Emily phrase to use with a director, right? She comes in and she goes, “I get it, all right. I had questions about it before, now I see what you’re trying to do, and here are the things that are holding you back”—which is really exciting, right? To have someone start by aligning themselves with and understanding your artistic interpretation and vision as a director, and then saying “yes, and” to that is really exciting.

To me, the true genius of Emily Mann as a producer—outside of season selection and her own work as an artist—is that she has this ability to watch a run-through, to watch a rehearsal, and break it down to just the most essential note—the underneath-it-all note. That’s the thing that really has always excited me, to have someone not overwhelm with the little nitpicky stuff that is describing all the symptoms, and suggesting a bunch of potential cures for them, but not actually getting to the diagnosis. Whereas Emily comes and says, “Okay, I’ve got one thing, here’s your diagnosis. Here’s the thing that underlies all these symptoms.” It’s something I envy a lot about Emily as a producer—her ability to get to the essential heart of it.

JADE | She’s not proscriptive. She knows the questions to ask.

ADAM | Right.

LISA | A thing that’s been important to me is Emily’s strong value both as an artist and a producer for promoting the work of women and people of color.

ADAM | The thing that’s incredible about Emily’s curatorial voice is that it comes first and foremost from falling in love with the artist. For Emily, it’s not about “Here’s a bunch of boxes I need to check”; it’s truly about Emily saying, Regina Taylor: this is a voice that must be heard in some way. Dael Orlandersmith, Will Power, Danai Gurira, whoever it may be. Mary Zimmerman.

That is what has made so much of her programming so visionary—especially for Princeton, for central New Jersey—is that she has approached creating an inclusive theatre from the perspective of saying, “Who are the artists who are most charged? And now let’s find out what kind of art they want to make.”

Season-planning discussions with Emily are not about finding scripts, they’re about individual artists and what they are working on and excited about right now.

REGINALD | What Emily has done—I get very emotional about it—is saying yes to that, but also, nonnegotiably saying who’s sitting at the table and in the rooms and making the work that must reflect our world. Think about how you now as leaders are making work— real representation is nonnegotiable for us.

That’s the generation that she’s sparked—a

bunch of leaders and artists who believe that women and people of color’s voices, in all of their uniqueness and beauty and brilliance, are worth hearing and must be heard. And to lead that fight for 30 years—sometimes alone, I imagine—wow! And to keep fighting?

That’s the woman I’m so proud to call my mentor and my friend and my hero. It is all of the great artistry, yes, but also that vigor and stamina and determination to change the field through that work that inspires me.

JADE | When Emily programmed Betsey Brown by Ntozake Shange, Emily, and Baikida Carroll in 1990, I’m not sure she realized that McCarter had never had a black writer on their stage. She simply curated the best season. It wasn’t about, “Oh let me slot this in. What’s the black slot, what’s the Latino slot, what’s the…?” She said, “What’s the best play? What’s the best season?—and let me start there.” And I truly think, from being in Princeton since I was 10 to now at almost 40— LISA | Are you really almost 40? How can that be?

JADE | Yeah; 39 in September.

LISA | No! JADE | It’s all right. I’m proud of it. Emily has really changed the conversation in Princeton.

And she’s changed the political and racial climate of Central Jersey through her honest season planning: continually telling incredibly resonant stories by the best, most talented artists of the time.

LISA | And here’s the thing: I think that doesn’t happen without the kind of consciousness you were talking about, Reggie, and that’s the opposite of box checking. It’s really just about, what kind of environment do I want to create? What kind of space do I want to be in? What is the world that I live in and how is that reflected on stage?

REGINALD | I think the other thing that I’ve been so awestruck by during Emily’s tenure, which I got to witness in my year at McCarter, was how she genuinely has impact in the community. She’s not just putting ideas on the stage and working in the rehearsal room, but she’s out on the front lines, in the meetings, at the town halls, at the churches, building genuine relationships.

I assistant directed on Having Our Say. And here’s a legendary white director, working on a play about two extraordinary black women with two extraordinary black actresses, and I watched Emily let that story and those actresses be the star of the show.

Let them be the ones that the community needs to meet and see, and then make sure that the audience was reflective of the story on stage. That to me is another hallmark of her leadership. And these values weren’t just living in the artistic department alone.

Emily was in the thick of community engagement, marketing, development. That helps shape culture.

Yvette Freeman + Lizan Mitchell in Having Our Say: The Delany Sisters’ First 100 Years, written + directed by Emily Mann PHOTO T. Charles Erickson WINTER 2020 | SDC JOURNAL

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ADAM | There’s also a sense of ethics.

Emily always surrounded herself with these incredibly strong leaders who instilled in those around them a sense of how to be an ethical theatre toward your artists, your audience, your staff. And that was for me the biggest mentorship I got from her in artistic direction—a sense of values and ethics of how we can do this work, which is often so cutthroat and sometimes so slimy. How to do it in a way that brings your best attempt at genuine goodness and healing and positivity and collegiality, so that you can create an atmosphere where greater art is being created.

Emily set the bar for that constantly by saying, “Well, wait, that’s not how we do this,” or “No, this is how this should be set up,” or “That isn’t good enough.” A lot of that was executed by Emily, but a lot of it was a choice to surround herself with people like [former Director of New Play Development] Janice Paran and Mara Isaacs, who were really overseeing that side of the organization in such incredibly brilliant ways.

LISA | I think that’s how you end up with collaborative partners for decades and decades, right? Because you’re a stand-up human being, as well as a brilliant artist. I think about that a lot, the idea of valuesbased leadership. I think if you’re as clear in your values as Emily is, and everybody is clear on shared values, then all decisions flow from those values.

ADAM | It’s funny because Emily would often not see these as the rare values that they actually are. So you could be in a conversation and she would say, “Well, of course this is what we do. How could anyone do it any other way?” She just lives and breathes them.

Nilo Cruz + Emily Mann PHOTO Matt Pilsner

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LISA | How does Emily live in your head?

Where do you find her popping up when you’re in a rehearsal, or where do you see her in your work?

“How do you create culture in a

room that is specifically, uniquely you—and all parts of you? The strength and the empathy together, and the joy—that can be how you make work as a leader.”

– REGINALD L. DOUGLAS JADE | I feel like I’ve been in the room with her so long I’m able to ask myself the same questions that she would ask me. I give those notes to myself.

LISA | So what are the questions?

JADE | The more emotional questions about scene work are the ones that pop into my head. Also, dramaturgically, when I’m working with a new writer, I think of her. I also think of Janice Paran and Mara Isaacs, and how they would come together and talk about what was working and what wasn’t, and how to have the conversation to ask the questions, not give the answers. That’s something that I aim to do.

REGINALD | I think we all struggle sometimes to get to the three things that matter the most—the core big three. For me, I feel Emily “whispering”: “Always let it begin and finish with positivity and praise, and make sure that you’re leading with love.”

Which leads to my second, which is not being scared to be vulnerable. I got to witness a vulnerable and compassionate leader, someone who’s not scared to go, “Oh!” in the middle of the rehearsal because they were so moved by the work that’s happening.

ADAM | That was a really good Emily impression just now.

REGINALD | I think a lot about not being ashamed of being emotional. Even while leading the room. In Emily, I saw someone lead with their heart, and I think about that a lot in the work I make.

JADE | And not being fearful of your strength at the same time.

REGINALD | Yes! And the third is a little silly. When I was working with her, she started every rehearsal with yoga, and I now start rehearsal with a dance party. So the gift I received was, how do you create culture in a room that is specifically, uniquely you—and all parts of you? The strength and the empathy together, and the joy—that can be how you make work as a leader.

ADAM | I watched many years of Emily leading yoga, and it was so clear how valuable it was to her company to bring them together. But it was also clear how Emily herself needed that 20 minutes of yoga so that she could be ready to really dig into a rehearsal. I love that you’ve adapted that, Reg. REGINALD | We only dance on the first day.

We don’t dance every day.

ADAM | The thing that I took away the most from watching Emily is that she works in longer chunks than I had ever seen any director work in. By which I mean, from very early on she will say, “Let’s just start the scene, I’ll stop and start you,” and then let the actors go for 20 minutes, sometimes more. She’ll watch 20 minutes of the scene and then pull everyone together and give some thoughts and feedback, and then work again maybe 25 minutes. There’s trust in letting the artists discover and develop through that process.

I wouldn’t say it’s a light-handed directorial approach, because I don’t feel like Emily in any way has a light-handed approach, but it’s very gentle.

For me, it was a real eye-opener. Emily has a trust in actors that allows her to achieve a depth in her productions, which I think is truly her greatest skill as a director—the subtext she can mine, the layers she can uncover. She could just have two people sitting at a table and find such depth and power in it. I think

she does it by letting people work in this way, by trusting people to work in long periods before she steps in—before she interrupts the magic of two actors or three actors and inserts the voice of a director.

And yet, when she does insert that voice, it is a strong voice. It still redirects, takes them in a new direction. But she lets them explore fully. I feel that responsibility every time I direct. I go, “Wait a second, I’m going to hold it. I’m going to ‘Emily Mann’ this, and we’ll keep going before I offer anything so I can take it all in.” Jade, I’m sure you’ve experienced that too.

JADE | Absolutely, and I think one of the things that I respect so much about her is that she listens. She listens to every artist in the room, every designer, every actor.

She listens, and then she can mold from that idea—from her vision, but also from those ideas.

Watching her give actor notes one-on-one, going out to dinner—it’s not a notes session.

It’s a conversation, and she’s listening. She’s listening to the people she’s working with to see how they feel, because it’s a profession of emotion. I learned that from her, because I’ve assisted a lot of people and not everybody listens. A lot of people talk first.

LISA | Totally. She’s also the stealthiest note-giver ever. You don’t even see it coming. You’re like, “Is that a note?” “No, no, we were just having a chat.” No, there was a note in there.

JADE | Exactly. That was just dinner.

LISA | We’ve been talking a lot about the things you’ve learned and the things you’ve taken forward. In what ways are you really different from Emily as a director? Because I love that she celebrates those differences.

She has been a significant mentor for each of you, and yet freed you to be entirely who you are as artists.

ADAM | One of the things that’s remarkable about Emily is she wants to go into the room and build the thing with the actors right then and there. And I don’t know if this is true, but I believe that when she’s reading the script, she’s understanding it, she’s imagining it in some way, but she might not be quite imagining it on the stage yet. She doesn’t do that until she’s actually in the room with her actors. And we’ve all experienced her sitting in rehearsal and mouthing their lines along with them from where she sits, because she’s so invested in their emotional journeys that she can’t help but empathize with each moment of the play.

I feel like I come into a rehearsal having done a different kind of prep work and done a version of imagining what it will be like on the stage—with flexibility for it to change. I think my work is preplanned in a different way. So that would be a big difference between me and Emily. Because for her, I think more is built right then and there in the room.

JADE | Some of the plays we choose to direct differ. I know that there are some plays and some writers that excite me that don’t excite her and vice versa. That’s probably the biggest difference.

“She listens to every artist in the room, every designer, every actor.”

– JADE KING CARROLL REGINALD | Something I’ve always admired about Emily—she is able to be fully present in the rehearsal room, and not thinking about the cell phone and the emails and the meeting that comes next. I can feel like I’m in two places at once. I’m in awe of someone who is able to run the McCarter Theatre and still be fully invested in the smallest detail of the play in that moment in the rehearsal room.

LISA | Is there one project of Emily’s—as a writer, as a director, or both—that you think of as particularly striking, or is the one you always think about?

I always come back to Anna in the Tropics.

That process with Nilo [Cruz], that production, and the development process bring out so much of what matters to me about Emily: her deep presence, her deep humanity, and her openness to process and story and deep, emotional storytelling.

REGINALD | Reading Execution of Justice.

The imagination and courage and audacity of this artist to take on that story [about the assassinations of San Francisco Mayor George Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk] floors me. That play is one of the landmarks for me when I think about Emily as an artist and about the kind of person she is. That she’s someone who can take our history in all of its horribleness and find light and joy and humanity without sacrificing the truth.

ADAM | For me, it’s a pair of plays that share some similar qualities: Edward Albee’s Me, Myself and I, and her production of The Birthday Party. Both absurdist at their core, yet with a realistic sheen on top of them. I think they brought out Emily at her absolute best, finding a level of nuance in the actors’ performances that kept you on the edge of

Stephanie Roth Haberle + Julio Monge in Phaedra Backwards, directed by Emily Mann PHOTO T. Charles Erickson

your seat the entire time. It reminded me of what has always been my favorite part of her work, which is her incredible attention to subtextual detail, and her ability to lift it just high enough that the audience can read it without ever feeling slammed by it in any way.

JADE | I’ve seen over 35 productions that Emily’s directed. And I’ve read and/or seen all of the plays she’s written or adapted. I don’t know that just one stands out. I do know which ones made an impact on my life.

Betsey Brown formed who I am as an artist and I cannot wait to direct it. I think it is brilliant. And working on A Streetcar Named Desire as associate director was amazing and I learned so much. I thought she did an absolutely beautiful job.

I think Phaedra Backwards was one that blew me away because it was so brave and out there and so visually stunning, and I was riveted. I didn’t understand all of it, but I was okay with that. I remember watching The Mai and the end, with her just going into the water and the cello and— LISA | Oh, I think I might have to add The Mai on my list, too.

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JADE | Miss Julie might have been my favorite. I remember reading it in college after seeing Emily’s production and realizing, “Oh, it’s not Kristin’s story, and Jean isn’t black?” I thought that’s the way the story was written, because that’s the way Emily told it, and it made so much sense. There are so many of her plays that I can still see the moments, I can still feel the feelings, and it makes me want to keep going.

REGINALD | We’ve named Pinter, Shange, Marina Carr, Nilo Cruz…I’m blown away by the vast range of work that Emily has worked on as an artist. There are no limits on it, you know? The artistry goes where the story needs it to, where she needs the story to go, where she as an artist needs to go and wants to go. And I think it’s why we can all feel like we are our own artists, because part of her impact was “You can do anything.”

JADE | Yeah. You can do anything.

LISA | So, we’re having this conversation in an exciting moment of transition for Emily.

She’s had these 30 years of service and mentorship and leadership, and now she is stepping away from the institution she’s run for 30 years and claiming new space for herself as an artist. At this moment in the field, when we’re having a lot of change in the leadership landscape of the American theatre, she’s set the stage for what’s next. I feel very excited about all the people who’ve seen what a leader can be through Emily’s eyes. Who is the next Emily Mann? What does that look like?

JADE | It’s kind of like asking who’s the next Zelda Fichandler. There’s only one Emily Mann. I think she’s inspired so many people to be their own artists that she hasn’t asked anybody to emulate her.

JADE | And we’re seeing it.

REGINALD | And we’re seeing it. Emily has set the stage by breaking down doors, and we get to stand on her shoulders now.

LISA | I feel that because of change makers like Emily, we are looking at a new generation of artistic leaders that look very different than they did 30 years ago, and I give her so much credit for that. When I say, “Who’s the next Emily Mann?” I think, “Who are the people that she has really made space for?” And I feel very excited for that change.

“Emily has set the stage by breaking down doors, and we get to stand on her shoulders now.”

– REGINALD L. DOUGLAS REGINALD | I’m very grateful. There is this idea of if you can’t see it, you can’t believe it.

And I think a whole generation of artists and audiences and board members and founders got to witness a bold, visionary female leader for 30 years. And so you have to hope, and I have to believe, that the fears that have kept other people out of those leadership seats are hopefully subsiding because of the work that Emily has done, the legacy she leaves.

LISA | I spend a lot of time thinking about women and female-identified artists in my job, and how we are socialized to serve. There is no question that Emily has served all of us, and I would ask each of you what you want or hope for Emily now, in this time of taking space for herself without these other concerns.

JADE | I want her to keep writing. I want to see what she writes next. I want to see more

of her directing work, and I’m happy that she’ll be able to spend more time with her grandson and family. She gets to do more things for herself now.

ADAM | I want to see her take on the kinds of plays she would never have assigned herself. I want to see what happens when someone comes to Emily and says, “Here’s a project you might not have thought of yourself directing, but I can see you directing it.” She thrives on having multiple projects and keeping occupied. So I hope she’s filled with projects—writing, directing, of every sort.

REGINALD | I think her voice as a playwright has always been urgent. And I hate to say everyone’s favorite catchphrase, but “in times like these,” I do think that there are some important and interesting stories about the world we’re living in, and could live in, that I’d be really intrigued to read and hear Emily’s response to.

Selfishly, I want her to be a part of training the next generation of leaders. So I hope that she remains an active mentor and leader in our field. Like, go write a book! Start a podcast! So that this other generation of 20-year-olds can get access.

JADE | I don’t think she’s ever going to stop doing that. I really don’t.

LISA | I feel really excited for the ways she’ll be working with all of us in the future.

And I just hope for her that she and [her partner] Gary will clock more hours in that hot tub in the backyard. And just have more time and more people and more collaborations—and just more.

JADE | More breath.

LISA | Yes. More yoga. And all the things.

LISA | Except that she came at a time when women weren’t seen as artistic leaders.

JADE | They weren’t; she was the first woman to direct on the Guthrie mainstage, the first woman on so many stages. The career she had before her career at McCarter was amazing. Annulla, Still Life, Execution of Justice…And she’s got such an exciting next chapter coming.

REGINALD | I would posit that when Emily was the first, she was always thinking about who was going to be second, third, fourth, and 25th. So I feel like this is the chance to reap the harvest of all those hard-fought victories. To be able now to look at a field that is pushing toward change in so many ways. Age, gender, race…

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Gloria – A Life by Emily Mann, originally directed by Diane Paulus + restaged for McCarter by Emily Mann PHOTO T. Charles Erickson

CELEBRATING

60 YEARS – of –

UNITE. EMPOWER. PROTECT. What the Union Means to You

TOM MOORE

MARGARET BOOKER

ART MANKE

SHIRLEY JO FINNEY

DIRECTOR MEMBER SINCE 1972

DIRECTOR MEMBER SINCE 1975

DIRECTOR MEMBER SINCE 1992

At the beginning of my career, when I was offered a big musical, I HAD to join SSDC, and, as I recall, the producers paid the initiation. I naively knew nothing about the importance this Union would have in my life. Of course, now I’ve had a full career to experience the value of our Union and witness its profound effect on each of us, from setting minimums that keep all of us safe and secure in fees, health, and pensions to protecting our rights and our work, and keeping us out of the fray—thus allowing our artistic lives to thrive. But most important may be the (sometimes silent) “S” in our name, because for all our strength and power protecting our place in the theatre world, we are also a “Society.” As we have to “lead,” directing is often a lonely profession, and we seldom have a chance to see our fellow directors at work. But our Society makes us all one, and I am very grateful.

In 1975, when few women were working as professional directors in American theatre, SDC provided me with credentials and camaraderie.

My first job at a professional theatre in Seattle barely covered my babysitting expenses, so I joined the Union to earn a living wage (which I did!). On the East Coast, SDC surrounded me with a wonderful working environment and a community of exceptionally talented directors who not only acted as a terrific support system providing great feedback but also became great friends. Today, SDCF offers Observerships and grants for emerging and mid-level directors—an important experience-based program, a real apprenticeship. In a word, SDC does the work a Union should do in supporting its Members.

DIRECTOR + CHOREOGRAPHER MEMBER SINCE 1989 About 30 years ago, I joined as an Associate of SDC because I needed help negotiating a contract for a small musical I had directed and choreographed that kept moving to larger and larger venues, and eventually enjoyed a lengthy commercial run. Thanks to the wise counsel I received, I was able to secure right of first refusal, weekly royalties, and other protections that I knew nothing about at the time.

Later, when I joined as a Full Member, I found that the SDC brand allowed me access to projects and theatres that I had only dreamed of before.

Today, I am grateful for all that the Union has provided to me personally throughout my career, and for all that it does to advance the profession and the craft of directing.

I have been directing for over 30 years. I officially joined the Society of Stage Directors and Choreographers in the early ’90s. I did not know of the Union when I made my transition from an actress to director. I had no mentor, I had no idea what to ask for in salary, my rights, and how to protect my work. The Union helped me do that. I don’t remember how I was introduced to the Union, but what I do remember was the conversation on the phone. I explained my history and what I needed when negotiating for myself as a fledgling director.

The Union representative explained my rights as a director and sent me sample contract guidelines. That encounter empowered me. The day I finally joined the Union, I knew that I was a part of a community that protected me and my creative contributions.

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a working artist. The SDC League Health Fund has been critical to sustaining my total health so that I could show up to work each day as an artist who was being cared for—mind, body, and spirit. There are many wonderful organizations that, importantly, focus on the health of the field; for me, SDC’s greatest successes remain with its unrelenting focus in caring for the individual. Unique, powerful, vital.

KENNETH ROBERSON DIRECTOR + CHOREOGRAPHER MEMBER SINCE 1997 From the first day I joined I felt the sense of security that comes from a union that cares. With my first contract, I immediately realized Membership in the Union stood for something.

Said something about me as a serious artist. I was legitimized. Belonged to a community of artists whose talents continue to shape important and innovative theatrical works. Decades later, I am satisfied that our Union is still working hard for my creative rights, keeping in step with the new ways that productions are being developed, and making certain that my creative input is supported and valued.

JEREMY B. COHEN DIRECT0R MEMBER SINCE 2000 SDC has helped create a holistic infrastructure for my life as a director—of course in myriad ways in my career over the past 20+ years, but also equally importantly: as

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PETER FLYNN DIRECTOR MEMBER SINCE 2000 About 20 years ago, André De Shields stopped me in the hall to ask what I was working on.

When I replied I was directing a play, he immediately asked, “Are you an SSDC Member?” and gave me the office number.

Joining the Union meant not only would I be taken seriously, but I was now to take my own work seriously. Since then, I have always known there is a team of peers to protect, advocate, and support me on every job. It is also a very collaborative community— relying on me as much as I rely on them. One-on-one, with the Board and staff—I have received guidance, candor, and care that has genuinely helped shape my career. Thanks, André, for pointing me in the right direction.

MARIA TORRES DIRECTOR + CHOREOGRAPHER MEMBER SINCE 2000 Joining the Union opened up theatrical opportunities and taught me about the business aspects of the entertainment industry. It legitimized my theatrical profession and gave me the information I needed at the time to build my career. [Director of Member Services] Barbara Wolkoff was instrumental in the early part of my career and still is to this day. The Union means a lot me. It is an organization that stands for unity and proper representation in the theatrical realm. As a director/ choreographer, I have access to the tools I need to grow.

CARL FORSMAN DIRECTOR MEMBER SINCE 2001 I started Keen Company, the Off-Off- and then Off-Broadway nonprofit theatre company I founded, in 2000. I wanted to do “sincere plays,” by which I meant works that believed in the goodness of humanity. The idea seemed so farfetched at the time, I thought I was leaving the theatre. I thought I’d do plays with my friends and my family would come see them.

When our second play, Conor

McPherson’s The Good Thief starring Brian d’Arcy James transferred commercially OffBroadway, I got to join SDC. It meant I wasn’t leaving the theatre after all but joining it.

Ever since, no membership has meant more to me, symbolically or logistically, in remaining a part of this field. Now, as a professor at the University of North Carolina School of the Arts, I get to bring the next generation of young directors into contact with their dream of joining this small, brave cadre.

NICOLE A. WATSON DIRECTOR MEMBER SINCE 2008 I became a director after many years of teaching, and I really did not know what I was doing.

Having SDC as a resource when I was just starting out was invaluable. When I joined SDC, I remember feeling that it was a milestone in my getting to know and work in this field.

After going without medical insurance for several years, knowing that I could be eligible for insurance through the Union was important to me. Being in SDC provided opportunities to meet other directors that I admired and respected, and I am thrilled to have so many wonderful colleagues creating work across the country.

gave me confidence, and I feel I am a Member of a great organization of women and men. Thank you for protecting me as a director and helping me move into another aspect of this creative field of the arts.

BETH LOPES DIRECTOR MEMBER SINCE 2012

CHRISTY MONTOUR-LARSON DIRECTOR MEMBER SINCE 2009 In 2009, after several years directing in small professional theatres, I received an offer from Kent Thompson, Producing Artistic Director of the Denver Center for the Performing Arts, to direct Well

by Lisa Kron. After I jumped around my kitchen that I had just been hired to direct my first LORT production, I sat down and filled out my application to join SDC. It had been a dream of mine for years. My mother worked for the National Labor Relations Board and she instilled in me the importance of unions.

Being a Member of the Union meant I wasn’t alone anymore.

Now, I have rights. I have safety and protection. I have camaraderie with colleagues all over the country. And I have the gold stamp of my profession. My acceptance into SDC was truly one of the proudest moments of my life.

Joining SDC as an Associate Member meant that I had found community. Having just completed graduate school and a move to an unfamiliar city, I discovered that the Union allowed me to quickly meet many new colleagues. Directing can sometimes be a lonely field, and it was a real advantage to have this community at the beginning of my professional life. And then, years later, joining as a Full Member meant that I was committing wholly to my directing career. I had been hesitant about taking the leap, worried about what a life exclusively as a director would mean. With the support and guidance of the SDC staff and my local Union representatives, I could see that life more clearly—and assuredly take the next step. I’m extremely grateful to SDC for giving me an engaging community and helping to build my identity as a professional artist.

should. Yet for me, belonging to the Union means, ironically, being knit into the flip side of theatre—safeguards and protection. Joining SDC was the first step my theatre partner advised me to take before signing my first contract. Years later, it was the first step I recommended to an assistant director before hiring him. A Union that provides backup for contract negotiations when needed, access to health insurance and other benefits, fellowships, internships, livestreams, webinars, workshops, an emergency fund, an uplifting web of colleagues, and a 60-year history of empowering each other? That’s exactly the kind of real-world safety net that has given me the courage to plunge dangerously into building imagined worlds on stages from Las Vegas to London.

RAJA FEATHER KELLY DIRECTOR + CHOREOGRAPHER MEMBER SINCE 2018 In most cases, you don’t know you need a union until you need the union. You scramble for information, call everyone you know, and are feverishly looking for information to protect, justify, or save you.

This is most cases, but not mine. SDC introduced itself to me, explaining to me what the community of resources it had to offer and why aligning myself with SDC would be important to my career, a responsible choice for goals and health, and even a fun addition to my political and social life. And it has been just that! And I am real grateful.

MARSHA MASON DIRECTOR MEMBER SINCE 2014

RUTH PE PALILEO DIRECTOR MEMBER SINCE 2013 As directors, we talk about “taking risks on stage” and the “danger” woven into the best performances. And so we

Joining the Union was a very special moment for me. I had started directing in the 1980s Off-Broadway and also in television but hadn’t had the opportunity to join SDC at that time. Having gone back to directing under the mantle of my SDC Union made me feel proud, mature, and worthy of the title, “Director.”

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SDC JOURNAL PEER-REVIEWED SECTION

Issues of how to approach reconstructing and/or reviving a classic work are ever complex, raising questions of how much fidelity to original text, staging, score, etc. should be maintained by creative and producing teams. In this essay, director and choreographer Artemis Preeshl engages her personal exploration and ultimate choices in reviving dances by legendary choreographer Anna Sokolow with a public performance for a new audience at Elon University.

INTRODUCED + EDITED BY

DAVID CALLAGHAN + ANN M. SHANAHAN

Re-Feel: Reviving Anna Sokolow’s Trois Morceaux for Elon’s Posthumous Premiere

BY ARTEMIS

PREESHL, SEMESTER AT SEA/COLORADO STATE UNIVERSITY

Anna Sokolow (1910–2000) was a rare spirit whose keen insight made human nature evident through movement. As brief as my months working with Anna Sokolow were, I appreciated her ability to elicit emotion through gesture, posture, and traveling phrases without sentimentality. Her choreography spoke volumes without the necessity of words. In her formative years, Anna Sokolow performed Rite of Spring (1930) with Martha Graham (Kosstrin, 2011, 250, f. 217).

As co-founder of The Actors Studio and faculty at the Neighborhood Playhouse, she pioneered movement training for actors. Over the next 70 years, Anna Sokolow integrated dance and acting in modern and Broadway choreography to incisively inform socially conscious themes. In 1989, the year before I met Anna Sokolow, Herbert Berghof discussed her work in an interview with Larry Warren: Anna is the only teacher of movement I have found who fully understands that movement carries us, just as words propel us, to the destination—the object of attention we wish to lead the audience to. She knows…that the verbal and physical lives of the actor must be combined. (1998, 223-4) Anna Sokolow sought to uncover the essence of humanness through her intuitive approaches to dance, acting, and choreography. She revealed the underlying nature of character through images of posture and gesture. Anna Sokolow transcended psychology by connecting personal experience to social relationships. By animating interpersonal actions, Sokolow illuminated human nature. She deftly interwove individual concerns into the larger societal themes of her work, which inspired empathy in her audiences. Sokolow’s uncanny skills at sussing out the underlying motivations of dancers and subtexts for actors’ movement brought the stylistic influences of American theatrical and cinematic realism to the dance world.

When Anna Sokolow passed away on March 29, 2000, she left a legacy of dances that spanned decades of twentieth-century modern dance. Eighteen years later, human innovation and technology breathed new life into Sokolow’s choreography, enabling Elon University to posthumously premiere Trois Morceaux (www.elon. edu/e-net/Article/159657). In 1990, American Dance Repertory

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Theater hired me to perform in a repertory concert that included Doris Humphrey’s The Shakers (1930) and Soaring (1920), as well as new dances by Anna Sokolow and Maida Withers at the Danny Kaye Playhouse. American Dance Repertory Theater, co-directed by Eleanor King, a former Humphrey dancer, and Mino Nicholas, revived dances by Doris Humphrey, Charles Weidman, and Eleanor King.

In Dance On, Mr. Nicholas (1990) aimed to reawaken “abstraction… of eternal…dance” that makes “a universal statement on man and mankind and humanity.” Works of contemporary choreographers complimented early modern dances. Although financial issues caused cancellation of American Dance Repertory Theater’s repertory concert at Danny Kaye Playhouse, Elon University hired me to reconstruct and teach Anna Sokolow’s Trois Morceaux to dance majors in this posthumous premiere.

AMERICAN REPERTORY DANCE THEATER In July 1990, dancers from the American Repertory Dance Theater began to rehearse Humphrey’s The Shakers and Soaring, reconstructed by Mino Nicholas, at the Mary Anthony Studio in New York’s Greenwich Village, where Anna Sokolow had taught choreography classes. Sokolow choreographed Quartets 1 and 2 and the Duet to Rachmaninoff’s Opus 23, Preludes 5, 6, and 7 and Maida Withers choreographed Still Rush for American Repertory Dance Theater. Sokolow cast me in Quartets 1 and 2; I observed choreography and rehearsals of her Duet for Trois Morceaux.

Because Sokolow danced with Martha Graham from 1929 to 1938, I studied Graham technique with Mary Anthony, Bertram Ross, and teachers at the Martha Graham, Erik, Hawkins, and José Limón Studios. By experiencing techniques with those who had danced with these modern dance originators, I deepened my engagement with choreography by Doris Humphrey, Maida Withers, and Anna Sokolow.

Had it not been for Maida Withers and Elon University, Sokolow’s dances might have been lost forever. After the American Repertory Dance Theater concert was cancelled, Maida Withers invited the dancers to premiere her new dance, Still Rush, with the Maida

Withers Dance Construction Company (MWDCCo) at Dance Place in Washington, D.C. in 1991. (See Still Rush http://maidadance. com/timeline/.) Withers was “inspired by the likes of” Anna Halprin and John Cage, also drawing on influences by Merce Cunningham, Erick Hawkins, Alwin Nikolais, and Mary Wigman to create her own dance style, all of which led her to become “part of the modern dance revolution that created post-modernism in dance in America” (2017). In rehearsals for the Maida Withers Dance Construction Company concert, Withers provided rehearsal space and equipment to record and preserve Sokolow’s Quartets 1 and 2 and the Duet. In January 1991, I gave the video recording of Quartets 1 and 2 and the Duet to Anna Sokolow. Miss Sokolow never premiered these dances in her lifetime.

‘Now’” (1982), Anna Sokolow asserted, “My first aim is to free the actor from his self-consciousness…to be simple, honest, human” and advised:

In Fall 2017, I discovered footage of Anna Sokolow’s dances on my VHS tapes from the 1990s. Professors Fred Rubeck and Lauren Kearns, the chair and future chair of the Department of Performing Arts at Elon University, encouraged me to contact the Anna Sokolow Foundation. In a telephone call on September 13, 2017, Lorry May, Executive Director of the Anna Sokolow Foundation, noted that Anna Sokolow had only choreographed solos and trios to Rachmaninoff.

Anna Sokolow’s Trois Morceaux recalled the “simple elegance and restrained sensuality” of her Preludes from 1984 (Sokolow Dance Theatre 2018). After Lorry May authenticated these dances, the Anna Sokolow Foundation granted rights to Elon University to reconstruct and premiere Trois Morceaux in 2018. As a result of this posthumous premiere, Anna Sokolow’s work can continue to inform the fields of dance and acting and shape dance and actor training.

Anna Sokolow had the ability to create meaning from a glance, touch, or a simple shift in focus. The Jewish Virtual Library describes Anna Sokolow’s work, Rooms (1955), as “powerful portrayal of the terrifying loneliness that afflicts even people living in the closest proximity to each other” (2019). Yet, Trois Morceaux created a companionability among dancers that replaced my pleasant smile with honest, moment-to-moment interaction in real time. Thus, the dancers in Anna Sokolow’s Trois Morceaux intuitively connected in a way that revealed compassionate friendship, jockeying for status, and perceived leadership and followership through posture, traveling phrases, and gesture.

ACTING AND DANCING Anna Sokolow’s approach to framing abstract dance within a social context complimented my fascination with non-verbal communication. Anna Sokolow developed her honest, open communication while on the faculty with Martha Graham and her composer Louis Horst at the Neighborhood Playhouse in 1928 (neighborhoodplayhouse.org, 2019). She eschewed the notion that dance should only be performed with a pleasant smile. The need for eye contact with other performers took precedence over facial expression in her dances. Her non-linear narrative drew on flexibility, strength, and the ability to make emotional connections in order to convey stories in movement.

Anna Sokolow worked with the most innovative dance and theatre organizations of her time. She offered classes for the influential Group Theatre during her membership in the Martha Graham Dance Company ( jewishvirtuallibrary.org, 2019). Furthermore, Sokolow’s focus on the artists’ reaction in the moment to the behavior of other artists anticipated the action-reaction approach to acting of influential colleagues such as Sanford Meisner. After the Group Theatre disbanded in 1941, Sokolow co-founded The Actors Studio with Elia Kazan, Cheryl Crawford, and Robert Lewis in 1947. According to the Jewish Virtual Library, “Miss Sokolow worked with Elia Kazan,” director of the award-winning On the Waterfront (1954), starring Marlon Brando, and developed her “vocabulary of movement… in working on Lyric Suite” (1953) set to Alban Berg’s atonal string quartet. Her influential work with Kazan positioned Sokolow at the nexus of realistic acting in America’s Golden Age of Cinema.

Anna Sokolow determined which movements best expressed her message, like sorting the wheat from the chaff through repetition of dance moments. She distilled interpersonal communication by shaping through the closer approximations of the time, space, and energy that embodied nonverbal actions conveying her dramatic intent. In Aaron Cohen’s New York Times article, “Anna Sokolow Is

• Don’t make it look planned.

• There’s a big difference between pantomime and an inner motivation to feel and do something.

• No, that’s too nice—my work is never pretty.

• What you must work on is the inner reason why you do these things.

• Look for a dramatic impulse rather than a rigid mirroring of the music.

Anna Sokolow’s interdisciplinary approaches to dance and theatre led to very authentic performances. Consequently, she preferred “to work with people who can dance and act rather than dancers who act or actors who dance” (Cohen, 1982). Some dancers found it difficult to work with Anna Sokolow’s interdisciplinary emphasis because dancers and actors tended to train separately. However, because of my foundations in both dance and acting, my aesthetic aligned with her approaches. In addition to the study of Graham and HumphreyLimón “Fall-and-Recovery” techniques, I studied Stanislavski-based acting techniques. When Professor Rosalind Pearson cast me as Miles in her dance, The Turn of the Screw, based on Henry James’s ghost story of 1898, I synthesized dancing and acting to portray a 10-yearold Victorian boy at The Ohio State University. Subsequently, John M. Wilson mentored me in his non-narrative approach to dance and drama at the University of Arizona. I came to value “gestus,” a gesture that sums up the essence of a character. In his article on “Brecht in Practice,” David Barnett clarified the meaning of this theatrical concept: “the body signifies a relationship between individual and society. This kind of physicalized Gestus helps the audience to contextualize the figure on stage and to suggest that what the figures are doing and how they behave owes something to their position in society” (n.p.). When Sokolow directed Bertolt Brecht’s libretto of the Seven Deadly Sins for Netherlands Dance Theatre in 1967, she delineated character in keeping with his concept of gestus (Warren, 2012, 276). In Hijikata Tatsumi and Ohno Kazuo, Sondra Fraleigh and Tamah Nakamura likened Hijikata Tatsumi’s use of violence to that of dramatist Antonin Artaud: “the violence it takes to demonstrate the cruelty of society as a conformist collective” (2017, xi). Although Sokolow may have been aware of Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty, even as demanding and assertive as she was as a choreographer, it is unlikely that she subscribed to Artaud’s cruelty. In French, “cruauté” can mean to make another suffer, but LaRousse Dictionary (2019) also defines “cruauté” in the literary sense as “ferocity” and “rigor,” which is more akin to Sokolow’s demands for high quality. From my experience, Anna Sokolow did not induce suffering for its own sake. Instead, Sokolow shared her commitment to unflinching honesty in communication— unadorned and unembellished. The starkness of Anna Sokolow’s choreography created a kind of beauty that was a deep dive into the communicative capacities of dance and theatre.

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shared leadership that ebbed and flowed personally and poetically.

We joined together and splintered into factions. Who led and who followed shifted. Like a flock of birds, we congregated and navigated directional changes as a group. We developed what Peter Friederici described as: “veer[ing] at the same moment…and rearranging their group into an hourglass shape with shocking swiftness…as ‘natural telepathy’ or a ‘group soul’ [that] is transfused thought, thought transference—collective thinking practically” (2009; n.p.). Anna Sokolow’s uncanny ability to meld our minds to unified goal through choreographic flocking and birding teased out shifting alliances among group members. As we sought to preserve Trois Morceaux in preparation for the premiere of Maida Withers’s Still Rush with the Maida Withers Dance Construction Company, roles and pairings in Anna Sokolow’s choreography shaped our interactions. This was Anna Sokolow’s genius: making daily experiences into a microcosm of reality on stage. In the final tableaux of Quartet 1, the dancers knit into a knot of friends who had become closer than ever before.

The harmony that exudes from Quartet 1 in Trois Morceaux differed from the tension that exists among dancers and actors in her other works. In this way, Quartet 1 in Trois Morceaux sheds a new light on relational development in Anna Sokolow’s later works.

Duet: Rachmaninoff ’s Opus 23, Prelude 6 FIG. 1

FIG. 1.

Elon University dancers in Quartet 1 of Trois Morceaux Jennifer Guy

PHOTO

CHOREOGRAPHY Quartet 1: Rachmaninoff ’s Opus 23, Prelude 5 Anna Sokolow’s repetition created a form that ultimately infused her vision. As a former Graham dancer, Anna Sokolow valued form, but not for its own sake. According to Joseph Mazo, Martha Graham said, “If you have no form, after a certain length of time you become inarticulate. Your training only gives you freedom” (157).

For Anna Sokolow, the structure emerged from keen observation of interpersonal interaction. When Anna began to choreograph the first Quartet, she asked us to jump. As we jumped, and jumped, and jumped, we faced toward and away from the women in this Quartet. Dancers had to fully commit to each moment in her work.

Sokolow’s approach reminded me of Ralph Lemon’s Les Noces (1987) at The Ohio State University, in which I realized that repetition led to greater physical and emotional freedom. He asked each woman to cling to a man as if she would die if he put her down. Ralph Lemon gave the opposite instruction to the men. These life-anddeath stakes prepared me to trust Sokolow’s insistence that we jump without hesitation. Our looks toward and away from each other, and inclinations to approach or back away from other dancers, heightened our intuition and perceptions of how our interactions affected each other and informed our relationships. As Sokolow shaped choreography in the first Quartet, she integrated our personal movement styles and simple gestures into relational nuances.

Eventually, our visual conversation through movement deepened our engagement. In the first blush of new friendship, we jumped for joy, literally, in the unity of togetherness. Sometimes gradually, sometimes abruptly, we discovered that we differed in the ways in which we responded to the same stimuli. When we turned toward each other and traveled in different directions in canon, our unity frayed. Facings that were neither cardinal nor diagonal were one of the unique aspects of the two Quartets in Troix Morceaux. This in-between spacing created and expressed a relational state of being betwixt and between things. Space and time revealed collaboration and

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I saw Anna Sokolow’s Duet in Trois Morceaux as a perfect gem that traced the progression from love at first sight to union and dissolution. The partners listened to each other exquisitely. At first, each person in the pair took a different number of syncopated, tentative steps. This hesitation suggested testing the waters. When they walked toward each other simultaneously, the lovers’ hearts seemed to beat in time. Anna Sokolow’s subtlety was a joy to watch.

The pair’s movements mirrored the gradual expansion of feelings that led to physical closeness. The symmetry gave the impression of being on the same page. However, as the lovers faced each other, their opposing viewpoints foretold a rift that led to parting.

Who was to blame for the break-up? In the video of the American Repertory Dance Theater, the lovers slipped through each other’s fingers. The man turned and walked away. Yet, the woman repeatedly turned back as if yearning to stay together. Neither had the courage, humility, nor drive to resolve differences that hindered a potential reunion. The Duet of Trois Morceaux revealed the life cycle of an intimate relationship in microcosm.

FIG. 2

Elon University dancers share a breath together in the Duet of Trois Morceaux PHOTO Jennifer Guy FIG. 2.

Quartet 2: Rachmaninoff ’s Opus 23, Prelude 7

with fleeting relationships that often exist primarily in the virtual realm, Quartet 2 speaks meaningfully to the resilience of human relationships over time. The dancers in Sokolow’s Trois Morceaux modeled how to air grievances civilly and move toward a resolution that allows individuals and factions to re-approach each other.

Instead of cutting ties, the dancers bound themselves to each other to stay together no matter what.

As I contemplated reconstruction of her work, I was struck by the 90 years of the 20th century through which Anna Sokolow had lived. When someone such as Sokolow—who saw, heard, and experienced so many aspects of life—can create a work that expresses belief in the human capacity to live alongside and learn from each other, ask for, receive, and grant forgiveness for offenses and still remain in relationship—that is an inspiration that I felt should be shared with the world.

RECONSTRUCTION FIG. 3

Two Elon University dancers intersect in chaîné turns in Quartet 2 of Trois Morceaux PHOTO Jennifer Guy FIG. 3.

Furtive glances sparked interactions in the beginning of Quartet 2. Our eyes betrayed our feelings without sentimentality. Anna Sokolow’s no-nonsense approach to choreography stripped human relationship down to its core. Despite our close proximity, we faced different directions. Our bodies revealed unspoken thoughts. Consequently, the social fabric of the dance consisted of the interweaving of intentional gestures of the head, arms, hands, eyes, and legs supported by the shaping of the torso. The extreme and prolonged arching in canon in Quartet 2 required all of the endurance and persistence that a worthwhile life goal requires. We conformed to, and opposed, each other in barely perceptible slow motion. When we ran to distant points on stage, our gathering and scattering as a group echoed the contact and strengthening of relationships that morph at different times in our lives. However, the dancers neither discussed the meaning of our interactions nor interpreted the gestural language. Although some people might be unnerved by this underlying tension, I thrived on these soul-baring interactions because the movement and looks reflected an honest truthfulness that transcended the social mask that people often wear in society. Our eye contact, gesture, posture, and locomotion through space brought us to a place where we could harmoniously and wordlessly disagree and assert our diverse viewpoints. We rediscovered the joy that first brought us together, which we expressed by nearly incessant jumping, with a warm and open heart. When I played back the tape, literally, and looked at the dance that I learned from Anna Sokolow, I re-felt the warm flush of commitment to the greater good of the whole. Our collective humanity aligned with Anna Sokolow’s raw beauty of sincere compassion that transcended any challenge that life had to offer.

However, the ending of Quartet 2 in Trois Morceaux is perhaps neater than other Sokolow dances. Anna Sokolow had commented, “My works never have real endings...They just stop and fade out, because I don’t believe there is any final solution to the problems of today. All I can do is provoke the audience into an awareness of them” ( jewishvirtuallibrary.org, 2018). While the lovers in the Duet parted in a quiet, tragic way, the dancers’ enduring relationships maintained and even deepened from Quartet 1 to Quartet 2.

Quartet 2 of Trois Morceaux demonstrated maturity in relational growth. The dancers in these Quartets never gave up on each other from the first to the second dance. In today’s society, replete

The high quality of dance training and congeniality of interpersonal relationships at Elon University inspired me to engage with these dancers to preserve the legacy of Anna Sokolow and pass on her methods and humane message to the next generation of dancers.

As I cast Trois Morceaux as a Visiting Assistant Professor in Theatre at Elon University, I sought to mirror Anna Sokolow’s intuitive approach with the original American Repertory Dance Theater dancers.

Thus, Elon dancers and understudies were cast according to the movement quality and interactions based on the recorded Quartets and Duet. The Quartets required interpersonal soft skills. Although Marie Pelletier, the tallest dancer, set herself apart in a remote and diffused way, she was the only dancer in the Quartet who reached toward the audience. Cassandra Tumasz, the tallest student dancer, performed Marie Pelletier’s role, with Eliana Sakin as understudy.

Renee Maccioli, an exceedingly feminine dancer, mastered the subtle épaulement with an unselfconscious delicacy as she gathered the group back together. Olivia James performed Renee Maccioli’s feminine role, replete with this subtle épaulement, with Lilly Herrin as understudy. I led the group, broke away from group members, and hesitantly rejoined the group, and interwove the group in a knot around me. Alyssa Vacca performed my role as she balanced leadership with followership, with Samantha Berger as understudy.

Debra Noble held back slightly even as she wielded influence to unify the group. Her ability to see the landscape of interpersonal relationships from afar and take decisive, yet subtle, action made her role pivotal. Sarah McNamee performed Debra Noble’s cohesive role, with Hannah Feldheus as understudy. The Duet required a soft spot for the other and a strong backbone. Duane Ellis was bold and respectful, kind and cavalier. Maxwell O’Connell performed Duane Ellis’s role with suppleness and passion. Lisa Bleyer made her own choices and yielded; when her partner left, she reluctantly faced solitude. Rylie Cute performed Lisa Bleyer’s role with expressivity and grace, with Hannah West as understudy. Elon’s dancers brought these qualities to life and imprinted their own personal stamp on the roles in the posthumous premiere of Trois Morceaux.

Reconstruction took full investiture to capture the time, space, and energy of each moment of eye contact, gesture, and postural shift.

Who looked at whom? What could be inferred from the timing of the looks? Who led and who followed in the impulsive initiation of canonic location frequently changed. Since Trois Morceaux had been choreographed at the Mary Anthony Studio and not yet set on a proscenium stage, Sokolow had not choreographed transitions between Quartet 1 and the Duet. Instead of a blackout between dances, one Elon dancer remained in silhouette as the other three dancers in Quartet 1 ran to different corners off stage. Then, Olivia James rose up on one foot, twisted and arched her body in an WINTER 2020 | SDC JOURNAL PEER-REVIEWED SECTION

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épaulement, and ran off alone. This exit against the backlit scrim implied a connection between Quartet 1 and the Duet. Further, because the number of choreographed steps on the video did not cover the distance from the wings of the proscenium to center stage, I crafted an 8-count phrase for Maxwell O’Connell and Rylie Cute in which they saw one another for the first time and fell in love at first sight. As a dancer who trained extensively at The Ohio State University’s Dance Notation Bureau Extension and the Laban/ Bartenieff Institute of Movement Studies in New York, I honored Anna Sokolow’s style as I devised steps that shared antiphonal phrasing to support this unexpected, tender meeting. These entrances and exits reflected the simplicity and elegance of Anna Sokolow’s dances in this posthumous reconstruction of Trois Morceaux.

The music proved most elusive. After an extensive search, I had only found one of the performance versions of the three Rachmaninoff Preludes that Anna had originally selected. To reconstruct the dance, I played the music of the Preludes on video as the dancers learned the dances at the professional rate of one minute per hour. Then, I introduced Idil Biret’s performance of Rachmaninoff’s Opus 23, Preludes 5, 6, and 7 and occasionally referenced the dances on video.

Biret’s expressive interpretation of the Preludes varied in tempo and dynamics, which seemed appropriate to the inherent expressivity of Anna Sokolow’s work. However, this pianist highlighted different accents in the musical phrases and sped up passages that ebbed away in intervals that differed slightly from the versions of the Preludes that Anna Sokolow had selected. In the beginning of Quartet 1, Idil Biret suddenly accelerated in an unpredictable way in measures three and four. Like gradually speeding up a musical recording in a tap class as tap dancers’ speed and skills increase, I counted aloud to retrain the dancers’ response to the musical stimulus. The Elon dancers adapted to cues to land on the center of the downbeat in accelerating measures. However, the intention shifted, too, which underscored that first flush of excitement with effervescent, ebullient emotion.

The effect of Quartet 1 reflected what Gerald Arpino, artistic director of the Joffrey Ballet, described on Anna Sokolow’s 85th birthday as: “pure joy and spirit of dance” ( jewishvirtuallibrary.org, 2019). In this reconstruction of Trois Morceaux, I reflected actions of the dancers on the video and encouraged Elon dancers to interpret movements naturally according to their own personal styles.

The Elon dancers were excited and gratified to premiere Trois Morceaux. It was a thrill that Lorry May, the Executive Director of the Sokolow Foundation, saw them perform and talked with them after the show. As a result, the Elon dancers embodied an aspect of the dance history that they were studying. I was astonished by the young dancers’ commitment to the dance, expressed by their willingness to spend personal time perfecting their roles individually and as a group.

In some ways, the commitment of the Elon dancers to this dance resembled the sense of purpose of the original cast of Trois Morceaux.

Even when the concert had been canceled, we banded together to revive and rehearse to preserve Miss Sokolow’s choreography. I trust that the way in which the original dancers modeled respect for preservation of Trois Morceaux, including licensing and rights due to choreographers, inspires the Elon dancers and other dance students today to act as standard bearers of copyright in their lives as artists.

After the close of the 2018 Spring Dance Concert, Lorry May, a principal dancer in Anna Sokolow’s work for decades, discussed dancing with Anna Sokolow and in her repertory with Assistant Professor Matt Pardo’s Dance History class at Elon University on March 12, 2018. Professor Pardo dances with Lucinda Childs. In this dance history discussion with Lorry May, I realized that my limited experience with Anna Sokolow led to rehearsal practices that Lorry May does not use. Granted, there is a difference in being an original dancer reconstructing a work in which one has performed a role

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many times and a dancer who had learned, but not performed a new dance, decades ago. This resulted in some of the rehearsal differences.

Instead of modeling the choreography on original dancers, Lorry May allowed dancers on whom she was setting the work to “fill in the character.” Moreover, according to Lorry May, Anna worked from the beginning without moving on until the movement was right in her eyes, my process of teaching of the piece as a whole and adding details later was not in keeping with Sokolow’s approach to choreography. Additionally, Lorry May commented on style, noting that the dancers in the Quartets 1 and 2 lifted their chests in a manner redolent of the Sokolow style, but the partners in the Duet could have lifted their chests to a greater extent. As a reconstructor, I coached the release of the breath to soften their chests, especially in the rond de jambe passages in which the dancers arched and rounded their backs in unison. However, because the lifting of a dancer’s chest represents an important postural baseline in Anna Sokolow’s choreography, I incorporated Lorry May’s stylistic note of lifted chests into my future reconstructions of Trois Morceaux. Lorry May considered the Quartets as complete works, but she thought that the Duet was “unfinished” because of its symmetry and simplicity. Consequently, May suggested development of the Duet in Anna Sokolow’s style. Further, May informed Professor Pardo’s Dance History class, Sokolow did not drill movements; in Anna Sokolow’s choreography, “There is no such thing as marking” (2018). I had allowed dancers to mark, that is, not fully execute the dance steps, during reconstruction of jumping phrases and the transition from the first musical version of the Preludes that I could not locate to the Idil Biret’s performance. Finally, neither Anna Sokolow nor Lorry May used video in reconstruction. I had not been aware of this prior to reconstruction. Having videotaped two rehearsals so the dancers could privately compare their performances to the two different versions of piano score, I allowed the dancers to see their dancing in the first version to adjust timing and better perform the new musical phrasing in Idil Biret’s rendition of the Preludes. However, I did promote the dancers’ ownership of the movement and encouraged them to make what Lorry May called, “tiny changes to get what you want.” As a result, the Elon dancers were empowered to fulfill Anna Sokolow’s Trois Morceaux for the posthumous premiere. Having considered both methods of reconstruction, choreographers today tend to break down movements into specifics that are taught in larger sequences. Sokolow’s approach is a holistic one that focuses on how interpersonal interactions manifest moment to moment. In hindsight, I would have embraced Sokolow’s approach to reconstruction to heighten theatricality.

It was such a privilege to reconstruct Anna Sokolow’s work with talented and committed dancers. Everyone involved showed respect for Trois Morceaux, but these young women were not precious about the reconstruction. They dared to ask clarifying questions about the movement, intention, and relationships, thereby strengthening the interactions. The Elon dancers took initiative to practice outside of rehearsal in order to ensure the accuracy of the choreography and infuse the dances with individualized expression. The results of the reconstruction were indeed satisfying to the dancers, the understudies, and me. Interestingly, the harmony and gentleness of the dancers’ interaction was jarring to one audience member who was familiar with Anna Sokolow’s works. Unlike some of Sokolow’s works, such as Rooms, that created a sense of tension among the dancers, Trois Morceaux had its own particular quality that differs from her other works. Perhaps the harmony resulted from what was lost in the years between the creation of Trois Morceaux and the reconstruction of this dance for its posthumous premiere. I prefer to think that the original creation of Trois Morceaux represents a unique moment in time that allowed dancers, actors, choreographers, directors, and acting teachers to plumb the depths of Anna Sokolow’s mastery of acting.

FIG. 4

FIG. 4. Elon

University dancers repair relationships in Trois Morceaux PHOTO Jennifer Guy

CONCLUSION The acting in Trois Morceaux allowed me to reconstruct and teach Trois Morceaux quickly, which encouraged the dancers to realize that they were capable of posthumously premiering the work of a renowned choreographer whom they had never met. In the auditions, I emphasized the need for the dancers to take exquisite care of each other in this process. Indeed, they did. As they interpreted the roles of individual dancers, they brought their personalities and personal movement styles to Sokolow’s choreography in a way that enriched the quality of interpersonal communication. Anna Sokolow’s work fermented connections between the dancers. In his tribute to Sokolow, Gerald Arpino attributed his longevity in dance to pioneers such as Anna Sokolow who “showed [him] the deep commitment and intense humanism that dance is capable of expressing” ( jewishvirtuallibrary. org, 2019). The Elon dancers in the posthumous premiere of Trois Morceaux, and the American Dance Repertory Theater dancers who preserved Miss Sokolow’s dances in 1990, forged physical and emotional bonds through the choreographic and reconstruction processes that transcended Trois Morceaux and embodied the grit, determination, and fierce love that Sokolow shared with the world.

Looking back on Anna Sokolow’s body of work, I see how she brought early Stanislavski’s teachings into the dance world. As Lorry May suggested, it would be helpful to reconsider the symmetry of the Duet before the next reconstruction of Trois Morceaux. The precision of her choreography and unique use of facings lend themselves to study of dance notation. By setting, notating, and checking the score of Trois Morceaux to preserve her legacy, Sokolow’s tender and compassionate side could shine through. I hope that the dancers and understudies cherish their brilliant execution and close relationships built through reconstruction of Trois Morceaux in their lives as dancers.

Anna Sokolow’s impact in theatre, dance, and film has been underestimated for many years, yet she taught movement to dancers and actors from the founding moments of the Neighborhood Playhouse, the Group Theatre, and The Actors Studio. Having danced with Martha Graham for eight years, Anna Sokolow found a way to carry the idea of action and reaction from dance to actor training, which Sanford Meisner incorporated into his teaching style. She was a friend of Elia Kazan, who was instrumental in creating realism in American cinema. As director of Bertolt Brecht’s libretto, Seven Deadly Sins, she honored the playwright’s frank relationship with the audience. Anna Sokolow skillfully informed non-verbal interpersonal interaction in generation upon generation of theatre and dance artists.

Reconstructing Trois Morceaux offers a lens through which artists and audiences alike may view Anna Sokolow anew as one of the most influential artists of the 20th century.

WORKS CITED

“Anna Sokolow.” (2019). Jewish Virtual Library. American Israel Cooperative Enterprise. Accessed September 3, 2019. http:// jewishvirtuallibrary.org/anna-sokolow.

Annasokolow.org (2019). “About Anna.” Accessed August 21, 2019. https://www.annasokolow.org/about-anna.

Arpino, Gerald. (2019/1995). In “Anna Sokolow.” (2019). Jewish Virtual Library. American Israel Cooperative Enterprise. Accessed September 3, 2019. http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/annasokolow.

Barnett, David. (2017) “Gestus.” Brecht in Practice. Webpage. Accessed April 7, 2018.

Chladek, J. (Director). (1990). Dance On: Mino Nicholas. [Video file].

Retrieved April 9. 2018, from https://search.alexanderstreet.com Interview and production by Billie Mahoney; performance by Billie Mahoney and Mino Nicholas. Kansas City, MO: Dance On Video.

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Cohen, Aaron. (1982). Anna Sokolow Is ‘Now’. Archives. The New York Times. Accessed April 6, 2018. https://www.nytimes. com/1982/04/25/arts/anna-sokolow-is-now.html.

Elon University. Department of Performing Arts. www.elon.edu/u/ academics/arts-and-sciences/performing-arts/). Accessed April 7, 2018.

Elon University. “Echoes Spring Dance Concert to Feature Innovative, Original Performances.” http://www.elon.edu/u/academics/artsand-sciences/performing-arts/). Accessed April 7, 2018.

Hess, John P. (February 17, 2017). The Origins of Acting and “The Method: The American Method Acting.” Filmakeriq.com. https:// filmmakeriq.com/lessons/the-american-method/, 2018.

Fraleigh, Sondra and Tamah Nakamura. (2017). Hijikata Tatsumi and Ohno Kazuo. Oxon, U.K.: Routledge. Accessed August 21, 2019.

Friederici, Peter (2009, March-April). “How a Flock of Birds Can Fly and Move Together.” Audubon.org. Accessed April 7, 2018. http:// www.audubon.org/content/peter-friederici.

Jewish Virtual Library. (2019). “Anna Sokolow 1910-2000.” Accessed August 21, 2019. https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/annasokolow.

Kosstrin, Hannah Joy. (2001). Honest Bodies: Jewishness, Radicalism, and Modernism in Anna Sokolow’s Choreography from 1927-1961. PDF. (Unpublished doctoral dissertation.

Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio. Accessed August 21, 2019. https://etd.ohiolink.edu/!etd.send_ file?accession=osu1300761075&disposition.

LaRousse Dictionary (2019) “Cruauté.” Accessed September 3, 2019. https://www.larousse.fr/dictionnaires/francais/ cruaut%C3%A9/20747 “Maida Withers.” George Washington University.edu. Accessed April 6, 2018. https://home.gwu.edu/~withers/maidawithers.html.

Maidadance. Still Rush. http://maidadance.com/timeline. Accessed April 7, 2018.

May, Lorry. Interview in Dance History Class at Elon University. 12 March 2018.

May, Lorry. Telephone conversation. 13 September 2017.

Mazo, Joseph. (1977). Prime Movers: The Makers of Modern Dance in America New York NY: William Morrow.

Neighborhoodplayhouse.org. (2019). “About/Our History.” Accessed August 21, 2019. http://neighborhoodplayhouse.org/about/ourhistory.

Sokolow Dance Theatre. (2018). “What’s going on?” Accessed April 7, 2018. https://sokolowtheatredance.org/categories/year/2018.

Withers, Maida. Letter. 9 March 2016.

Warren, Larry. (1998). Anna Sokolow. Amsterdam, The Netherlands: Harwood Academic Publishers.

ARTEMIS PREESHL has taught theatre in Australia, Eastern Europe, Hollywood, South India, and North and South America since 2003.

A three-time Fulbrighter in India and Pakistan, she choreographed more than 75 dances and directed 78 plays, including the musicals West Side Story and Anything Goes. Dr. Preeshl wrote and directed the Kollywood musical Pancha Ratna, which received Honorable Mention in Best World Cinema at Hollywood’s DIY Festival, and films based on Kate Chopin’s stories: Dr. Chevalier’s Lie, Inacheve, and Ripe Figs, which won Best Short Film at the Raleigh Film Festival. She teaches theatre and this season directs Abigail: 1702 at the University of West Georgia. Routledge published her books Shakespeare and Commedia dell’arte: Play by Play in 2017 and Reframing Acting in the Digital Age: Nimbly Scaling Actor Training in the Academy in 2019. Ed.D. MFA Drama, MA Dance, SDC, SAGAFTRA, AEA, Alliance of Women Directors; Associate Teacher of Fitzmaurice Voicework® and Laban Movement Analyst.

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SDCJ-PRS BOOK REVIEW Physical Dramaturgy: Perspectives from the Field Edited by Rachel Bowditch, Jeff Casazza, and Annette Thornton ROUTLEDGE, 2018.

232 PP. $44.95 PAPERBACK. Physical Dramaturgy: Perspectives from the Field is a response to the shifting demands of post dramatic theatre. Today’s more interdisciplinary productions call for a more comprehensive role of the dramaturg where kinesthetic and embodied understanding supplement traditional intellectual and literary research. At the 2011 national conference of the Association for Theatre in Higher Education (ATHE), the Association of Theatre Movement Educators (ATME) put forth the question: What is physical dramaturgy?

Subsequent ATHE sessions led to a call for chapter abstracts, which ultimately led to this collection of essays.

Physical Dramaturgy offers new ways to approach theatrical worlds by integrating movement analysis and physical theatre pedagogies into traditional dramaturgical methods. The editors—Rachel Bowditch, Jeff Casazza, and Annette Thornton—have selected chapters from a diverse range of movement specialists, pedagogues, and artistic directors whose work exemplifies various aspects of physical dramaturgy. The editors argue that current shifts in the global theatrical landscape toward transdisciplinary performance require new forms of dramaturgy that incorporate visceral and somatic elements.

The book is divided into four parts: I. Historical styles and case studies from the Greeks to contemporary theatre, II. Inner landscapes: dramaturgy from within, III. Acts of translation: physical dramaturgy in the rehearsal room, IV. Physical dramaturgy in the devising process. Containing four to six chapters each, these sections reveal new theoretical and practical approaches to body and text. In a unified organizational approach, the editors asked each author to define physical dramaturgy, describe a specific project or case study, and share effective exercises used during the process.

In Part I, Chapter One, “Embodying Greek period style,” Chaya Gordon-Bland reveals her process of physical dramaturgy used during rehearsals of Euripides’ Medea. She asserts that to ensure the audience’s intelligence, imagination, and emotion, the actors must corporally understand and express the dramaturgical research. After a week of research and style exercises, the ensemble begins to work toward physically expressing the history and sensibilities of Greek period style specifically.

Deborah Robertson’s chapter on period styles outlines the benefits of combining Lloyd Williamson Technique with Michael Chekhov’s psychophysical approach. While the Chekhov work aids in the creation of atmosphere for character and era, Williamson Technique focuses on the physical aspects of communication.

The aim is to free the actor from contemporary mannerisms and establish visceral connections with the historical relationships and circumstances of a play.

Rounding out Part I of the book are Sara Romersberger’s “Festina Lente and Sprezzatura in action,” Sarah A. Barker’s “Shakespeare’s

text in the body of the character in The Winter’s Tale,” and Judith Chaffee’s “Understanding the world of the play through period movement.” These practitioners offer methods to help actors embody codes of behavior for a particular period.

In Part II, “Inner landscapes,” the authors explore dramaturgy from within the body revealing vibrant parallels between text-based and movement-based theatremakers. In “Dramaturgy as litany,” Liz Lerman argues that embodiment is dramaturgical because it leads to comprehension. She ventures a definition of physical dramaturgy: “how space and proximity become emotional, how pattern becomes story, how gesture reveals the imagination, how video and bodies on stage become dialogue, how narrative is revealed, layer after the layer, just like skin and muscle and bone” (75). Like the authors of Part I, Lerman views dramaturgy as research, shaping and inquiry that supports decision-making and ultimately the audience’s experience.

In “A dramaturgy of embodiment,” Erika Berland reveals her unique technique to support character development, physical scoring, and embodiment in performance. By investigating our direct experience of the body—through breath, touch, movement, visualization, and sound—we can more easily bypass habitual patterns of response.

This frees the actor to respond in new and unexpected ways.

Kevin Inouye’s chapter dives into the augmented body. How does a performer integrate the various external elements of character, such as Cyrano’s nose and sword, or Bottom’s donkey ears? Inouye argues that the physical dramaturg—in collaboration with designers—is the best conductor of such external elements. The actor must undergo a course of movement research in order to become physically habituated to an object and endow it with meaning.

Part II concludes with Heather Harpham’s chapter, “Mining the imagination.” Harpham asserts that Ruth Zaporah’s Action Theater™ is a powerful tool for the physical dramaturg. Merging the creative impulses of both movement and language, this training methodology and performance form begins with the body as the “primary generative engine for narrative content” (99). Harpham includes a sampling of Action Theater exercises that help actors create spontaneous, physicalized narratives.

Jeff Casazza kicks off Part III’s exploration of physical dramaturgy in the rehearsal room. In first leading his artists through physical training and exploration, Casazza aims to have actors physically connect to their character, each other, and the stories they are telling. Casazza asserts that this physical dramaturgy not only enhances the staging process, but also has a profound, visceral effect on the audience.

Part III includes several other insightful essays. In “Lit from within” Kali Quinn and Jules Odendahl-James write about non-traditional casting in Chekhovian realism through physical dramaturgy. Matt Saltzberg looks at Iphigenia and Other Daughters in his chapter titled “The alchemy of re-composing history.” In “Quadruple threat musical theatre,” Annette Thornton adds the physical dramaturg to the traditional constellation of director, music director, and choreographer.

In “Kinetic analysis and gesture mapping,” Terry Glaser describes replacing table work with Michael Chekhov based exercises. Glaser writes that the actors’ initial contact with the play-world should be physical, not intellectual. As part of this embodied work, and to generate blocking organically, actors create a “gesture map,” or physical image, of important moments in their character’s life during the arc of the play.

Part IV focuses on physical dramaturgy in the devising process and begins with Daniella Vinitski Mooney’s interview with Quinn Bauriedel of Pig Iron Theatre. Rachel Bowditch then continues the discussion in her chapter, “Devising ‘madness’.” Bowditch uses physical dramaturgy to create an embodied, somatic, and movement-based blueprint for the devising process.

In “The phenomenon of silence,” Annette Thornton interviews mime artist and theatre maker Bill Bowers. For Bowers, physical dramaturgy “seeks to explore and exhaust the realm of meaning triggered by moving bodies, as well as by the various materials and ideas that populate a creation process” (196). The interview concludes with Bowers’ thoughts on how the study of mime is a good example of physical dramaturgy, as it demands the responsibility of establishing both the ‘textual’ story of the character and the physical story of the world.

In the following two chapters, Mooney explores the work of GAle GAtes et al., and Bowditch interviews Moisés Kaufman. Both pieces reveal how invigorating physical dramaturgy is for performers and creators. The anthology concludes with Joan Schirle’s chapter, “Physical dramaturgy: Reflections for the actor, director, designer, and deviser.” Schirle writes that in her own practice physical dramaturgy “simply acknowledges the world as it is” where growth and tension are governed by the spatial environment (219).

With a straightforward style and coherent structure, this unprecedented anthology provides valuable insight into how embodied research can be used in both scripted and devised works.

The predominant conclusion is that performers and audiences benefit from a rehearsal process that interweaves traditional intellectual dramaturgy with structured, physical exploration. The result is a refreshing dive into a more holistic role for the dramaturg, and a timely call to action for theatre practitioners—directors and choreographers in particular. Readers will enjoy the diverse range of authors and array of exercises presented. Furthermore, this collection of first-hand perspectives from the field is a valuable addition to the burgeoning dialogue around interdisciplinary practices.

REBECCA WHITEHURST NORTHERN ARIZONA UNIVERSITY

CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS Published quarterly by Stage Directors and Choreographers Society (SDC), the Peer-Reviewed Section of SDC JOURNAL serves directors and choreographers working in the profession and in institutions of higher learning. SDC’s mission is to give voice to an empowered collective of directors and choreographers working in all jurisdictions and venues across the country, encourage advocacy, and highlight artistic achievement. SDC JOURNAL seeks essays with accessible language that focus on practice and practical application and that exemplify the sorts of fruitful intersections that can occur between the academic/scholarly and the profession/craft. For more information, visit: http://sdcweb.org/sdc-journal/sdc-journal-peer-review/

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SDC FOUNDATION

Marcia Milgrom Dodge Britt Berke

OBSERVERSHIPS, THEN AND NOW

A CONVERSATION WITH MARCIA MILGROM DODGE + BRITT BERKE Since the early 1980s, SDC Foundation has been placing early-career directors and choreographers as Observers on Broadway, Off-Broadway, and regional productions.

This program is the very heart of what SDC Foundation offers the field: a paid Observership to learn from the masters of a generation through door-opening opportunities. In celebration of SDC’s 60th anniversary, the Foundation wanted to take an introspective look at the longevity of this program and what it’s meant to our Members. In August 2019, we asked Marcia Milgrom Dodge to sit down with Britt Berke for a discussion of their respective experiences as SDCF Observers. Dodge is not only a 40-year SDC Member and former Executive Board Member of 12 years, but also one of SDCF’s first Observers, on the 1981 Broadway production of The Little Prince and the Aviator. Berke worked as an Observer last season with Lileana BlainCruz on Fabulation, or the Re-Education of Undine at Signature Theatre in New York.

Together, they share their memories of finally getting into the “room where it happens,” what it means to be prudent in gaining a collaborator’s trust, and the alternating pleasure and peril in a Post-it note.

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MARCIA MILGROM DODGE | So, we’ve both been Observers.

BRITT BERKE | Yes, we have.

MARCIA | Tell me what you just did.

BRITT | I had the amazing opportunity to observe Fabulation, or the Re-Education of Undine, by Lynn Nottage. Lileana BlainCruz was the director. We did it at Signature Theatre this past year, and it was exceptional.

It was a fantastic room for me to be in as a pretty recent college graduate. It was my first Off-Broadway production that I ever worked on. And you were also an Observer?

MARCIA | I was!

BRITT | Tell me everything.

MARCIA | Quite a while ago, I was an Observer in the 1981/82 Broadway season, on a musical adaptation of The Little Prince called The Little Prince and the Aviator. It was written by Hugh Wheeler, Don Black, and John Barry. The director that was my mentor was Robert Kalfin, and the choreographer was Danya Krupska, and they were both fired during the process. They were replaced by director Jerry Adler and choreographer

Billy Wilson. And I just remember somebody turning to me and saying, “Who are you?”

I said—at that time, we were SSDC—I said, “I’m the SSDC Observer.” They said, “What does that mean?” I said, “Well, I’m basically here to do whatever you need.” They said, “Come with me.” I remember going into the basement of the Alvin Theatre, which is now the Neil Simon Theatre, and putting the show on three-by-five cards, every scene on three-by-five cards, and Jerry and I kind of reshuffled the show. During previews, we would post running orders.

BRITT | Wow. MARCIA | It was wild. I kept a journal, which I’m in the process of trying to locate in a big storage room on the Upper West Side. But it was an incredible experience.

Anthony Rapp was the Little Prince. Michael York was the Aviator, Toni. Ellen Greene was the Rose; David Purdham and Janet Eilber were in it. Janet was a principal dancer of Martha Graham. So it was like a confluence— conflagration, more likely—of amazing artists, and it all went wrong and we never opened.

BRITT | You never opened?!

MARCIA | We closed before we opened.

BRITT | What was your reaction to that as an Observer on the process?

MARCIA | It didn’t come as a surprise to me.

Came as a surprise to me only in the money spent and they wouldn’t get to the opening night…It just was impossible. Unforeseeable and insurmountable obstacles.

BRITT | What had your career been like up until the Observership? Was this a shock to you, working in the Broadway world?

MARCIA | Yes. This was 1981. I came to New York in ’77, right after I graduated from Michigan. I started reading Backstage and looking for ads that said, “Choreographer, TBD.” So anytime there was a show that had a choreographer TBD, I sent my résumé, because I was hot off being sort of a busy choreographer during my college years. In ’81/’82, I don’t think I had done any significant regional work. My regional career took off a few years later, in the mid-’80s. I walked into this Union and said, “I'd like to join the Union Bob Fosse founded!” It was a very different process back then. I literally took the elevator up to the 31st floor, 1501 [Broadway, SDC’s former office location], walked in, said, “I just choreographed three shows in summer stock, I’d like to join the Union.” They said, “Here, give us this money, and you’re in.”

This is my 40th year as a Member.

BRITT | Congratulations!

MARCIA | Thank you.

BRITT | Was the Observership program in place then? Or was SDCF figuring out what it was?

MARCIA | I think they were figuring it out; I think I might have been the first Observer.

BRITT | How did you fit yourself into the space? Do you remember your first day of rehearsal?

MARCIA | Yeah, coffee. I did a lot of coffee.

And hanging out with the ensemble when they weren’t in the room. And I would sit in Danya’s room a lot. Just to watch what the process was.

BRITT | Was that amazing, working with Danya?

MARCIA | It was interesting because it wasn’t what you imagine as a traditional Broadway musical. I think The Little Prince and the Aviator, artistically, would be fascinating to reimagine now. She was doing almost an Asian-inspired, flying behavior with dancers. The dancers who flew...I remember this whole sort of ballet, where

the dancers were being lifted and floating in the air, and all of the guys that were doing the lifting were wearing blacks, which seems like a very Eastern methodology of staging.

I didn’t quite understand it in the story, the narrative of the story. I would flip-flop between Bob’s [Robert Kalfin’s] room and Danya’s room. And then we actually made it to the theatre. And the next day, I came to work, and there was a new team.

Now my experience with Observers is as a Mentor; I like to get them in the room as soon as possible. As early as casting, if they’re available, so that they can have the true experience of—soup to nuts, as my mother would say—start to finish of the process of putting on a show.

Talk about your experience with Fabulation.

BRITT | On the first day of rehearsal, Lileana addressed the room and the entire Signature staff, everyone who was working on Fabulation. She thanked Signature Theatre for “letting her work with her heroes.” And I was just standing there, thinking, “It’s insane that she’s saying this because that’s how I feel right now.”

MARCIA | That’s how you feel.

BRITT | I felt like, “Thank you, SDCF and Signature Theatre, for letting me be in a room with Lileana Blain-Cruz and Lynn Nottage! This is impossible.” It’s kind of this overwhelming feeling. Lileana is just full of joy and life and jubilance. And she’s incredibly intelligent. That was something that I really latched on to. As a young director, I had been struggling with how to balance being enthusiastic and being vulnerable with being respected and hardworking and bringing the work back to a really sincere place. And Lileana just knows how to do that.

MARCIA | Did your relationship begin on the first day of rehearsal?

BRITT | She had an assistant director, Nia Witherspoon, who’s brilliant, and is also a Playwright-in-Residence and lecturer [at UMass]. So half the week she would be teaching and half the week she would be at rehearsal. It kind of became, if she wasn’t there, I would take on her assistant director responsibilities, which was really amazing.

MARCIA | Which included?

BRITT | Which included a vast range of things, but ended up building into taking tech and acting notes for Lileana, which I would then type up and email to her before they were distributed to the actors.

MARCIA | Did she change the way the note was written?

BRITT | Sometimes. That became my favorite part of the process.

MARCIA | That was a big learning curve for you?

BRITT | Huge.

MARCIA | On how to take the notes.

BRITT | Absolutely. I would write Lileana’s notes in the way I thought was the most articulate and convenient. And then I would come in the next day and see what she had kept and what she had changed and handed to the actors. It was this fantastic crash course that I was really thankful for. And it started the exact same way that your experience did, where I would say, “I’ll do anything!”

MARCIA | Anything?!

BRITT | “What can I do? Can I get you a seltzer? Can I even get your lunch for you?”

And everyone was very respectful. I have my notebook right here that has all my notes. I brought it with me. There’s a Post-it note in here where Lileana wrote to me, “Please take notes of anything that’s confusing to you, or you have questions about.”

MARCIA | That happened on what day in the process?

BRITT | Day 14, of a six-week process.

MARCIA | Oh, my God. Six weeks?

BRITT | Six weeks, and then we went into previews.

MARCIA | I don’t get six weeks anymore.

BRITT | I know!

MARCIA | How bold were you about giving your critical thoughts?

BRITT | I was intimidated at first. But we grew to a point where I could offer a thought and Lileana might say, “That’s a really good note.”

And I didn't feel like she was just being polite.

Because although she’s a wonderful person, she’s not going to say something just to make you feel like you did okay.

MARCIA | Right.

BRITT | I felt like I was learning quickly. And she gave me a lot of confidence to push harder. Did you also have that experience, where there was a defining moment?

MARCIA | I had no conversations with Robert Kalfin or Danya Krupska. Then, when Jerry and Billy came in…as I said, Jerry and I went WINTER 2020 | SDC JOURNAL FOUNDATION SECTION

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and put the show on three-by-five cards. He would check in with me about what I thought, and I thought the whole thing was insane.

I basically just said whatever he needed to hear. I think in the process of developing a trust, I knew this was going to be over before it started. But your situation was very different, because you are now cultivating a relationship with the director who will be a mentor beyond the Observership. That, I think, is the most important thing that Observers should know: if they do it right, that first one is major, in terms of you gaining knowledge as a protégé and learning skills from a very particular person who has a very particular way of directing.

Beyond the stipend and the relationship, what else did you think you were going to get out of being an Observer? What were you hoping for?

BRITT | Understanding how to bring my personality and my disposition into the process while still doing really challenging, deep work. During table work, Lileana was so great about letting conversations wander.

We would get into really heavy topics, because Fabulation is a comedy and it’s also about class and race and what it means to be present in certain ways. And she would guide us into these really dense theoretical conversations. But then she was also able to say, “Oh, this line is so funny, you guys!” That was really special. She starts rehearsal with a dance circle, that’s how she does the warmup. She created this ideal environment where everyone is having a great time, but then it can immediately snap into “We’re doing the work and we’re respecting each other.”

When I had my interview with Lileana for the Observership, I had researched so much of her work, and I was specifically interested in her attitude toward making art and her very warm rehearsal room energy. And I was so passionate about the theatre she had created and the things I knew about her style.

So I was very vocal about that during our interview, about learning how to be a young director and a young female director, and learning how to navigate the power dynamics in a rehearsal process. I knew she knew how to do it, and I was really excited to learn that from her.

MARCIA | Right.

BRITT | Are there lessons you learned during your own Observership that now, while you’re mentoring, you’re thinking about or keeping in mind in how you’re interacting with the Observers?

MARCIA | The biggest thing I learned—and it wasn’t on this Observership, but it was when

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I was an associate for somebody, more midcareer—was understanding what the word “prudent” meant. Do you know the definition of “prudent”?

BRITT | I want to hear your definition of the word “prudent.”

MARCIA | My definition is “keep your mouth shut.” Even if you think you know the answer.

Unless someone asks you for the answer, don’t share it. But the Webster’s definition is “skill and good judgment in the use of resources or caution or circumspection as to danger or risk.” When confronted by your mentor, you have to know the difference between being their cheerleader and questioning their choices. If you’re not prudent, if you start questioning their choices early in the relationship, you’re going to have a really messed-up time. If you’re their cheerleader, and you’re able to anticipate, and really take the temperature of the room and see how the room functions with that person in charge, and you start to understand the dynamics in place, then you will be given more responsibility.

BRITT | Absolutely. A friend recently asked me about the difference between directing and assistant directing. I find a lot of value in assisting, whether it’s someone who wants a lot of help or someone who doesn’t want any help, because either way, that’s how you learn as a director. That’s how you resource techniques. That’s how you learn how you want to be and how you don’t want to be and what directing can mean to different people. I was really curious about your process with that, because you’ve had this whole trajectory. In your experience, what are the main differences between a director and assistant director?

MARCIA | I would say the director is the one who’s responsible for everything that happens in the room, good and bad. And the assistant is there to help the director, support the director, help them get to their results, with the most care and support.

But I think that sometimes assistants are judging. I’m guilty of it, too. I see it when I’m interviewing somebody. I’m like, “We’re not going to be a good fit,” because I already can see that choices are going to be questioned. I can’t have you in the room if you’re going to constantly question my choices. It doesn’t mean that my choices shouldn’t be questioned. It just means this relationship isn’t designed for that. I have questions from my designers, my actors, my producers; I get questions from a lot of different places. I want to make sure that my toolbox of being able to generate good choices and make a beautiful product are not being questioned by my inner circle.

BRITT | Right, absolutely.

MARCIA | And I do believe that shoving that seltzer just when she needs it is part of understanding the room and understanding what is going to make your director do their best work. So, on some level, it could be straight-up cheerleading; another level could be a little bit of being mum, and knowing when to say, “You know what, you might want to go the bathroom now, because you’re going to head into this meeting.” So it may seem coarse or, I don’t know, impolite. But we need our helpers to help us. And sometimes in the areas that we’re not necessarily conscious of, because we’re so focused on the text, or this particular scene we’re wrestling with that day, or actors are having some kind of issue—there are so many things to be navigating. Or you get a Post-it that says, “Call your set designer ASAP.” And you’re like, “Oh, no, what’s the matter? We put the doors on wrong, they’re not going to open in, they’re going to open out?!” Every minute, you’re putting out a little fire. If the person that’s there to keep you buoyed up is doing their job, you can do yours even better.

BRITT | Right, just keeping tabs on the little things.

MARCIA | Yeah, keeping tabs and really becoming a radar to everything.

BRITT | That’s how I explained the Observership to people. Because it’s funny— you start working in theatre, and people who don’t work in theatre are like, “What are you doing for work?” “I’m Observing.”

MARCIA | Yeah, it’s an interesting word.

BRITT | Observing with a capital “O.” It’s a weird world to live in. I would explain to people, “I try to supplement whatever the director needs.” If there’s something in the room that can be done, I try to do it. That might mean scampering around the theatre to make sure that all the sight lines are working. Or, for example, we were trying to get this one comedic line to land during tech, and I mentioned to Lileana in passing, “What if we tried having him really enunciate it?”

And then the actor tried it, and it worked. And Lileana got on the God mic to say, “That was Britt, everyone. Just so you know, that was a Britt thing.” And when my mom came to see the show, the actors came up to my mom and said, “That line was because of Britt.” They were so generous and supportive.

MARCIA | You had permission from Lileana to offer the idea.

BRITT | Exactly.

MARCIA | It was prudent.

Britt Berke, Lileana Blain-Cruz + Nia Witherspoon at Fabulation opening night at Signature Theatre PHOTO Jennifer Broski

BRITT | It was prudent. Yes. Thank you!

MARCIA | I think the goal for me, in finding Observers, is finding potential assistants in people that you want to continue working with. And I think that happened for you, yeah?

BRITT | I hope so. I very much hope so. A few weeks after the Observership, Lileana emailed me about taking line notes for Marys Seacole.

And of course I said, “I would love to.”

MARCIA | Absolutely.

Marcia Milgrom Dodge, Anthony Dodge, Natasha Dodge + SDC Observer Josie Bray at opening night of Ragtime on Broadway, 2009 PHOTO Robert Petkoff

BRITT | That will be really exciting. I’m a production assistant or whatever anyone needs me to be.

MARCIA | Great. How did you get that?

BRITT | I had the extreme privilege of working on the María Irene Fornés marathon at the Public Theater last summer.

MARCIA | Beautiful.

BRITT | I was really fortunate and very honored. And JoAnne Akalaitis managed that entire marathon. I was very nervous.

MARCIA | “Whatever you need.”

BRITT | Truly, whatever you need. And the Observership taught me how to do that.

MARCIA | It gave you confidence.

BRITT | It gave me confidence! And it gave me this perspective: theatre is really hard to make and people want your help. My mom always told me, “Always look for work.” Even if you feel like you’re being annoying and asking, “Can I help with this?” too much.

People are always going to say, “Yes,” pretty much. That’s what’s exciting.

MARCIA | Yeah. My dad was a salesman. He used to go, “TELL ’EM WHO YOU ARE!” I had a good kick in the pants that way.

BRITT | “Thank you so much for thinking of me.” It’s just the small things, contributing to a really magnificent show in even a small way. I was honored that she even thought of me, even just to take her line notes. That is what it’s about. I really believe in the power of mentorship, the value of finding people who you admire, who in turn will admire you and support you. I feel like a lot of my career— especially because I went to Barnard—has been about finding mentors in professors and in directors. And then letting that relationship inform what I do and how I interact with actors.

MARCIA | She spotted you.

BRITT | It gave me this confidence to say, “I will just be in the room and help you if you want.” People actually really respond to that.

MARCIA | We’re doing it up at the Cape Playhouse. And then I’m doing Mary Poppins, which is enormous! Well, this has been delightful.

MARCIA | There’s an art to that. So what’s next?

MARCIA | Absolutely.

BRITT | Thank you so much for everything.

BRITT | JoAnne already has an assistant director and a production manager. And they both called me to ask, “What are you doing on this production?” And I told them, “I don’t know, you tell me.”

MARCIA | I wish you so much success. It looks like you’re on a great path.

BRITT | I’m about to work on a project with JoAnne Akalaitis.

MARCIA | Wow.

BRITT | Really, through a mentor, I connected with her again, and I told her, “It was such an honor to work with you last summer. This summer, I heard you’re doing this project, it sounds exceptional. I’m really interested in what you’re doing.” But this is sort of a thing that I don’t know if I would have done before— MARCIA | —before the Observership.

BRITT | What’s next for you? What’s your next project?

MARCIA | I start rehearsals in about a week on a summer stock production of Deathtrap

by Ira Levin. One of my favorite mysteries.

BRITT | That’s exciting.

This interview was edited and condensed by Rebecca Hewett.

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REMEMBERING MARTIN CHARNIN

BY LIZA

My earliest memory of Martin Charnin is from 1977 during the Broadway tryouts of Annie. I had traveled to Washington, DC, to visit my father, Peter Gennaro, and after seeing the show, I sat in on the post-show note session. Martin, surrounded by a cast of adults, children, and a dog, delivered his notes at performance level, sounding every bit the native New Yorker he was but with perfectly articulated diction. As he would tell me with great pride years later, it was his precise pronunciation that landed him the opportunity to sing the lead vocal in West Side Story’s “Gee, Officer Krupke.” Addressing the Annie cast in his signature “Jets” blue jeans and jean jacket, his shaggy, jet-black hair skimming the top of blue-tinted eyeglasses, he was a tall, imposing figure both physically and in his directorial style. And yet, for all his bravado, he was surprisingly self-aware and able to turn his terrific sense of humor on himself. Never a dancer, he loved to tell me how during West Side Story rehearsals, Jerome Robbins had delivered him to my father and demanded, “Take Marty in the alley and teach him how to walk.”

I first worked with Martin when I assisted my father on the transformation of Annie 2 into Annie Warbucks. Martin was fascinating to observe. His script was a perfectly organized specimen of tabs and precisely folded pages, his notes were meticulously written in a distinct bold print with a Pentel Sign Pen, his staging sketches were little masterpieces of angles and arrows, and his hand-sewn,

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appliqué-covered denim jackets were works of art. And then, of course, there were his lyrics—witty, human, heartfelt, and smart, they were a joy to hear.

MARTIN CHARNIN is perhaps best known for conceiving, directing, and writing the lyrics for the hit Broadway musical Annie. He died on July 6, 2019, at the age of 84.

His wealth of show-biz experience heightened the level of every room he entered. Working with him on multiple touring companies of Annie, I always marveled at his ability to find new qualities in the show. His creativity extended to his emails, which were poetic little gems, and he even made the task of casting yet another company of Annie fun by encouraging the creative team to place bets on which song from the musical theatre canon we would hear most on a given audition day.

Born in New York City, Charnin began his career as an actor and played a Jet in the original Broadway production and tour of West Side Story. He then began writing music and lyrics for Off-Broadway and cabaret, and his first Broadway musical as a lyricist was Hot Spot in 1963. In the 1970s, he worked in television, where he conceived, produced, wrote, and directed several variety specials, earning him three Emmy Awards.

As age caught up with him, he would walk haltingly into the rehearsal room, sometimes on a cane, always with a coffee from Starbucks and a bagel with cream cheese.

He’d sit down, watch rehearsal while he ate, and then start directing. He insisted that the actors speak every word as written, no paraphrasing escaped his detection, there would be no color red anywhere on the stage with the exception of Annie’s final dress and the child cast as Annie would play the role with no sentimentality. It wasn’t until I worked with him on the show that I understood his attraction to the Little Orphan Annie comic strip. After all his years in theatre with its many ups and downs, he was like Annie— tough, resilient, a survivor, and an optimist.

Unapologetically himself, Martin was unique and an artist. The world is less bright without him. He will be missed.

He made his Broadway directing debut in 1973 with the revue Nash at Nine. A few years later, he was creator, lyricist, and director of Annie, which premiered at the Goodspeed Opera House in 1976 then transferred to Broadway, where it ran for 2,377 performances. For Annie, he won Drama Desk Awards for Outstanding Director and Outstanding Lyrics, as well as the Tony Award for Best Original Score.

Following the success of Annie, Charnin wrote lyrics for, and directed, a wide variety of shows and revues on Broadway and directed many companies of Annie in the US and abroad. He also directed the 20th anniversary production on Broadway, the 30th anniversary production that toured the US in 2004, and the 2014 national tour.

REMEMBERING HAROLD PRINCE

BY LONNY

The legendary director and producer Harold Prince died on July 31. I had met Hal when I was 15, and one way or another, he had been in my life for over 40 years. When Laura Penn asked me to write something for the Journal, I didn’t quite know how to cohesively synthesize what he meant to me personally and professionally, so if this rambles…I guess a simple way of saying it is, Hal Prince made all of my dreams come true. Now I know that seems like a hyperbolic statement, but actually, it’s true.

I first saw his work on the occasion of my 11th birthday, when some seriously confused ticket broker (remember those?) suggested to my parents a new show that had opened that week that was supposed to be terrific for kids. So my grandmother and I went to see a Saturday matinee of Company. I realize now how insanely inappropriate that was for an 11-year-old, and yet it changed the course of my life. I became obsessed with all things Hal Prince/Stephen Sondheim; Craig Lucas once wrote that if he could have dated Company, Follies, and A Little Night Music, he would have, and I share his sentiments. I spent my weekends at the Performing Arts Library reading everything I could about Hal and Steve, and when I turned 15, I wrote Hal a letter (as I read he as a young man had done to George Abbott). What seemed like a day later I received one from him suggesting I come to his office and have a chat. His office was then, and remained until he died, at Rockefeller Plaza, and I guess he must have seen a bit of himself in me, and he “hired”

PRICE

me (at no pay—I would have happily paid him) to come into the office after school (Performing Arts High School was five blocks away at the time) and do whatever. I also worked there the summer he was preparing Pacific Overtures. For a kid who, say, wants to be an astronaut, it was pretty much like being asked to fly to the moon. I felt nothing short of high being in the office, stuffing group sales envelopes, or keeping the scripts up to date. Just being around the only world I ever wanted to be a part of was beyond all measure. And Hal knew it would be. Access, to feel a part of the professional theatre, and to have a tacit acknowledgement that says “you belong here with us”—nothing will ever mean that much again.

like the same man wrote them), constantly challenging an audience to go where it never had before, to discover musicals as an art form capable of great breadth. Making what was then a form that mainly wanted to entertain something more (which is not to say Hal’s shows weren’t entertaining, it’s just how one defines entertainment). Because of the variety of styles, watching his shows was an exhilarating education. Hal traveled all around the world and borrowed techniques from everywhere and brought them to the Broadway theatre, and because he was lucky enough to have been a wildly successful producer, he could pretty much do what he liked—a luxury I don’t think any of us have in this time.

Pacific Overtures was a tricky show, and I got to witness all the changes he and his collaborators were making before they went out of town and then into previews in New York. There was never any panic; the men just started making adjustments, and by the time the show opened in New York, it was unlike anything Broadway had (or has) ever seen. And that is what made a Prince show so extraordinary—each of them was like nothing you’d ever seen on Broadway: the German expressionism of Cabaret, the plotless Company and Fellini-esque Follies, A Little Night Music’s waltz-only score, the Kabuki/Noh theatre inspiration for Pacific Overtures, the Grand Guignol of Sweeney Todd, the almost documentary/Brechtian style of Evita. Each show didn’t look or feel the same (and with Steve’s scores, didn’t ever feel

Somewhere around 1980, he asked me to do a reading and then hired me to be one of the leads in Merrily We Roll Along. He and Steve had just come off of Sweeney Todd, their crowning achievement. Merrily was a difficult show that didn’t go out of town, and after the first preview, the word spread fast it wasn’t going well. Watching Hal (and his collaborators) roll up their sleeves and methodically address every issue without panic or temperament (as they had done in Pacific Overtures) was, again, the lesson.

Hal must have felt humiliated with people walking out, rotten things written in the columns about the new work, but he never let it show in front of his actors or collaborators.

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included his 15-year-old daughter, Daisy. On the closing night, Hal came into my dressing room and said, “I’m sorry I didn’t give you a hit. I wanted to. I think I gave you a good show, but I didn’t give you a hit.” That he was worried about me on that night, and apologized, still staggers me.

The next seven years that followed were not successful ones for Hal, and whatever one thinks of the quality of those particular shows, they were full of ideas and always had something on their minds. I was with him and his family for several of the opening nights in that period, and though Hal was upset at the reception, he always seemed to care more about his collaborators and how they were doing. He took the glory when the shows were hits, and he took the blame when they were not. I never heard him say, “if I had a better score,” or “the book wasn’t good enough.” Never. He took responsibility.

Through all of his success, he always remained a man who didn’t delegate the unpleasant tasks of directing. When I was putting together Best Worst Thing That Ever Could Have Happened (my documentary on Merrily), in the footage we found of the auditions, after some kid’s callback (the young man had come in from LA), Hal left the room, but they kept his microphone up.

You could hear him telling the young man that he wasn’t going to be in the show, but that he was terrific, to keep working on his voice, and that he was sure there would be another time when they’d work together.

He could have easily sent out an assistant to give the bad news, but he didn’t. “I’ve made a terrible mistake, it’s all wrong” was how he addressed the actors in Merrily the first time he saw the costumes on stage, and he instead put us all in t-shirts and sweatshirts. He took full responsibility. He then proceeded to hire Merrily’s costume designer, Judy Dolan, countless times after that experience. I know he believed in her talent; I also know he felt he owed her, and he paid the debt. In his letters at the Lincoln Center Library, there is correspondence where he turns down a frequent designer collaborator by saying he didn’t think he was right, or even, in another, he explained another designer was moving to New York and needed the job. He told the truth even if it hurt to hear it. And I think that comes down to having respect for everyone. The short answer to what I leaned from Hal is simply respect—he treated everyone the same—the stage doorman, Angela Lansbury, the second assistant stage manager, and me. He always made you feel like you were important, necessary to the process, and no one was more important than anyone else.

We all needed each other.

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When I first started directing, I’d see Hal, who was in rehearsal with something, and he’d ask how my show was coming along. He was probably putting up the ninth national of Phantom, and my show was in the basement of a supermarket where you could hear the shopping carts rolling on top of the actor’s heads, but he made me feel we were the same. We were both putting on shows.

Hal was my George Abbott, and since Mr. Abbott died at 107(!!!), I kind of assumed Hal would always be here. As his daughter Daisy put it, “He wasn’t the dying kind.” The truth is, he produced, directed, or produced and directed every important musical since the mid-’50s, and if he didn’t direct or produce them, his influence was all over them. Quite a legacy. I was lucky to be in his orbit for many of those years, and you bet I am grateful. The last time I saw him, we had lunch in his office and I told him what I was up to—a revival of a show he hated, and two new shows whose ideas he loved.

As he was on his way out of the office for an appointment, he told me to tell his assistant about the “terrific” work I was doing. In the Playbill of my next show, I dedicate my work to him. But the truth is, it goes way beyond this one show. He was, and remains, my inspiration to be a director at all.

HAROLD PRINCE was a director and producer who made a major contribution to Broadway musicals in America over a career that spanned more than 50 years.

Harold Prince + Lonny Price

He received 10 Drama Desk Awards as Outstanding Director and 21 Tony Awards for Best Direction, Best Producer, Best Musical, and Lifetime Achievement. He was a Kennedy Center Honoree in 1994 and recipient of the National Medal of Arts in 2000.

Born in New York City in 1928, Prince began his professional career in 1950 as an assistant stage manager to George Abbott.

He soon went on to co-produce several musicals, including The Pajama Game, Damn Yankees, and West Side Story, before producing his own musicals. His Fiddler on the Roof enjoyed a record-breaking run of over 3,000 performances.

In the early 1960s, Prince also began to take on the role of director. Many of the most popular musicals of the following decades were created under his direction, including Cabaret, Sweeney Todd, Evita, and The Phantom of the Opera. He is known for being an innovator and, with Stephen Sondheim, was a pioneer in the development of the “concept musical,” beginning with Company in 1970.

His other major Broadway directing credits (many of which he also produced) include: She Loves Me; “It’s a Bird...It’s a Plane...It’s Superman”; Zorba; Follies; A Little Night Music; The Visit; Candide; Pacific Overtures; On the Twentieth Century; Merrily We Roll Along; A Doll’s Life; Grind; Kiss of the Spider Woman; Show Boat; Parade; Lovemusik; and Prince of Broadway.

THE SOCIETY PAGES SDC MEMBERS @ WORK + PLAY

For their 2019 Sundance Institute | Luma Foundation Directors Retreat, the Sundance Institute Theatre Program hosted SDC Members Steven Cosson, Anne Kauffman, and Hana S. Sharif; international artist Omar Abusaada; filmmaker Laura Poitras; and SDC Executive Director Laura Penn in Arles, France, August 1–12.

Hana S. Sharif, Omar Abusaada, Anne Kauffman, Laura Penn, Steve Cosson, Ruthie Doyle, Laura Poitras, Harrison Thompson + Christopher Hibma ABOVE

ABOVE

Hana S. Sharif + Anne Kauffman

Laura Poitras + Steve Cosson

August 15–18, Brooklyn College hosted the 2019 Summer Sling, a stage combat workshop led by J. David Brimmer and Lewis Shaw, and attended by staff members Kristy Cummings and Barbara Wolkoff. It included classes taught by the Society of American Fight Directors (SAFD) on eight weapon disciplines for the stage, unique and specialized experimentation with period fighting styles, and master classes in advanced physical acting techniques.

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SDC Members enjoyed a late-night Happy Hour at the ATHE Conference in Orlando, FL, on August 10.

Miriam Mills, David Callaghan, Ann M. Shanahan + Omiyẹmi Artisia Green

SDC Foundation Executive Director Rebecca Hewitt, Emily A. Rollie, Chelsea Pace + Shawna Mefferd Kelty

ABOVE

ABOVE

On August 12, Members and nonMember directors and choreographers gathered at Portland Center Stage for a Portland Happy Hour hosted by Adriana Baer, Dámaso Rodríguez, and Marissa Wolf. Attendees shared some social time and Members spread the word about the Union and the benefits of joining.

At the DirectorsLabChicago 2019: In the Room, held August 18–24, Chay Yew led a discussion entitled “Your Room” and SDC Director of Member Services Barbara Wolkoff led an introduction to the Union.

ABOVE Chay

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Yew, Barbara Wolkoff + Wm. Bullion

SDC JOURNAL | WINTER 2020

Puget Sound directors and choreographers woke up early on August 19 to meet for an SDC Seattle Breakfast and discussion regarding working in academia. row: Kaytlin McIntyre, Desdemona Chiang, Kathryn Van Meter, Sarah Butts, Wilson Milam, Pamela Turpen, Valerie Curtis-Newton, Wind Woods, Tom Smith, Jane Jones. Front row: Amanda Friou, Katjana Vadeboncoeur (standing); Timothy McCuen Piggee, John Vreeke + Tim Bond (seated).

Attended but not pictured: Sheila Daniels, Sara Freeman, Linda Hartzell, Karen Lund, Victor Pappas + R. Hamilton Wright ABOVE Back

Also on August 19, at an Atlanta Member Event moderated by SDC Regional Presence Committee Member Kate Warner, attendees joined Alliance Theatre Artistic Director Susan V. Booth, former SDC Executive Board Member Oz Scott, and SDC Executive Board Member Seret Scott for a conversation on the craft of directing and working in Atlanta.

Will Power, Karen Robinson, Richard Garner, Lydia Fort, Kate Warner, Oz Scott, Seret Scott, Susan V. Booth + David de Vries LEFT

On September 8, Executive Board Members gathered on the SDC rooftop on the eve of the Board Retreat for cocktails and theatre talk.

ABOVE Evan

Yionoulis, Melia Bensussen, Casey Stangl, Pam MacKinnon + Laura Penn

Molly Smith, Seema Sueko + Nataki Garrett

Oregon Shakespeare Festival Artistic Director Nataki Garrett received Arena Stage’s inaugural Andrew R. Ammerman Directing Award, a new award for midcareer female directors, on September 18.

Laura Penn, Dan Knechtges + Marcia Milgrom Dodge

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Sheila Hickey Garvey, KJ Sanchez, Melia Bensussen + Gina Kaufmann

Gilbert McCauley + Kristen van Ginhoven

Melia Bensussen + Russell Garrett

On September 21, Melia Bensussen, Artistic Director of Hartford Stage Company, hosted a Hartford-area Member Night Out! and performance of Quixote Nuevo, directed by KJ Sanchez.

Actress Scottie Thompson, Jonathan Cerullo + Laura Penn

Raffle winner Sara La Flam

Rent jacket auction winner Kan Pinheiro

Theatre enthusiasts stood four-deep to purchase the fantastic memorabilia SDC had to offer at the Broadway Flea Market & Grand Auction on September 22. Our volunteers had a blast and raised over $11,000 to help fund Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS. One of the biddable experiences offered at SDC’s Broadway Flea Market table was a “Chat and Chew”: on October 8, an aspiring director, an aspiring actor, and a few theatre fans enjoyed coffee and a conversation with SDC Executive Board Member and Tony winner Rachel Chavkin.

Rachel Chavkin (center) with winners Theresa Piliero, Anna Stenberg, Sam LiVigni + Judi LiVigni

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Shakina Nayfack

Sammi Cannold

David S. Leong

Shakina Nayfack, Sammi Cannold, and David S. Leong were featured speakers at TEDxBroadway 2019 “What’s the BEST Broadway Can Be?” at New World Stages on September 24. PHOTOS Glen DiCrocco c/o TEDxBroadway

SDC Members joined Theatre Philadelphia and Director’s Gathering’s Toast to the Barrymores at InterAct Theatre in Philadelphia on September 30.

ABOVE Philadelphia

theatremakers and Barrymore nominees, including Jill Harrison (far left) + Blanka Zizka (6th from the right, in striped shirt).

The rain could not stop the staff from picking apples and sampling the delicious cider in the Hudson Valley for an SDC Staff Outing on October 3.

Sonya Tayeh

Diane Paulus

Claire Warden

Rob Rokicki, Barbara Pasternack + Stephen Brackett PHOTO Dolly Faibyshev for Variety

Variety celebrated its second Business of Broadway Breakfast, with Thomas Schumacher, Diane Paulus, and Diablo Cody on October 7, where they announced Variety’s 10 Broadway Players to Watch list, which included Stephen Brackett, Robert O’Hara, Sonya Tayeh, and Claire Warden.

PHOTOS

Andrew Morales for Variety

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In an October 7 SDC Screen-to-Screen, Rebecca Taichman met with students from across the country to discuss staging Indecent, in a video conference moderated by Sarah Lunnie. Participating schools were Central Washington University, Kansas State University, South Suburban College, York College of PA, and University of Northern Iowa.

Kristy Cummings, Geoffrey Kent, Robert Westley + Thomas Schall

Rebecca Taichman + Sarah Lunnie

At an LA-area Member Night Out! on October 15, Members mixed and mingled and enjoyed On Beckett, conceived, directed, and performed by Bill Irwin at the CTG/Kirk Douglas Theatre in Culver City, CA.

Neel Keller, Nancy Keystone + Art Manke

BT McNicholl, Allison Bibicoff, Michele Lynch + Richard Israel

On October 14, the Fight Steering Committee held an SDC NYC Fight Night meeting for Members, Associate Members, and interested fight colleagues to discuss the Union’s recent successes in securing coverage for Member fight choreographers in the Off-Broadway and Association of Non-Profit Theatre Companies NYC Agreements.

Committee Chair Geoffrey Kent, Committee Members Thomas Schall and Robert Westley, and the Contract Affairs staff shared the details of this new coverage as well as updates on the progress of the Fight Choreography Initiative to date.

Bill Irwin + Elina de Santos

CORRECTION: In the Fall 2019 Society Pages on page 62, the bottom photo caption should have read, “Susan Stroman, Jeff Whiting + Tucker Johann.”

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Aaron Frankel taught generations of theatre students in the crafts of directing, acting, and writing, helping shape the New York theatre scene for more than 60 years.

A native New Yorker, Frankel began his career in theatre during World War II, when he joined the US Army and worked as a stage manager for soldier shows. After the war, Frankel continued working as a stage manager before transitioning into directing.

He went on to direct over 100 musicals and plays, in addition to collaborating as a writer both on and Off-Broadway.

His Broadway directorial debut was Viva Madison Avenue! in 1960.

Frankel taught directing and acting at numerous institutions, including Columbia University, HB Studio, and The New School.

He was a Fulbright Scholar in French theatre and a visiting professor at Carnegie Mellon University, Boston University, University of Washington, Brigham Young University, University of Iowa, and Brooklyn College. He is the author of Writing the Broadway Musical, a reference guide for book and song writers that many consider to be an industry staple.

A Founding Member of SDC, Frankel served as the Chairman and President of SDC Foundation. In this capacity, he presented the first two Annual “Mr. Abbott” Awards for Lifetime Achievement in the Theatre to Harold Prince (1985) and Bob Fosse (1986).

I too was one of that small band of directors and choreographers meeting with hazard and hope to establish a Union.

SDC LEGACY AARON FRANKEL 1921–2018

PHOTO

Walter McBride

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SDC MEMBERS + ASSOCIATES continued... Tim

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