Art Matters: In Praise of the American Regional Theatre

BY BEN BARNES

Recently, I sat in the gallery of an RTE (Ireland’s national broadcaster) sound studio as the sitzprobe for my production of MADAMA BUTTERFLY was conducted by maestro Tim Robinson with our crack cast and the national symphony. This is always a joyful moment for the director. The time-pressurized rigors of the “stage and piano” tech and the “stage and orchestras” lie imminently ahead, but in those moments, the responsibility lies completely with the conductor and the director can sit back, as if at a private concert, and let that gorgeous music, played and sung with consummate skill and feeling, thrill anew and come blazingly to life after the piano reduction of the rehearsal room. In a tea break between acts, I spoke to Tim about how uplifting I found it all, and he said, “Well, having such skilled players and singers makes my job easy.” This is how I feel about American actors, who consistently bear out for me the axiom that a director can only be as good as the actors they are working with.

In recent years, I have been privileged to work with Sandy Robbins’ company, the REP (Resident Ensemble Players), which—like PlayMakers Rep at the University of North Carolina or ART at Harvard—has a strong association with the University of Delaware. There, in recent seasons, I have directed productions of JUNO AND THE PAYCOCK, WAITING FOR GODOT, THE SEAFARER, and THE CRUCIBLE.

Michael Gotch, Steve Pelinski + David Anthony Smith in THE SEAFARER at The REP, Delaware, directed by Ben Barnes

PHOTO Evan Krape

The company comprises a permanent ensemble supplemented by freelance actors hired in from around the country, and a salient feature is that many of these actors were trained by Robbins in the well-loved PTTP training program at the University of Delaware, which was founded in Milwaukee in 1976 and moved east in 1988. Sandy Robbins is an inspiring Artistic Director and teacher/mentor (recently honored with the John Houseman Award for his services to the American theatre) and attracted back to his company highly regarded regional theatre actors who trained with him and made their names around the country. These include Steve Pelinski (Guthrie Theater), Elizabeth Heflin (Alley Theatre), Lee Ernst (Milwaukee Rep), and Kathleen Pirkl Tague. It has been my great pleasure to work with these and other highly skilled members of the Robbins company and associated artists who are engaged for individual shows and seasons. I can say, hand on heart, that as a director, having these acting forces combined with first-rate stage management, the very best of technical resources, and unrivaled scenic, costume, and prop departments have allowed me to do, under the most supportive conditions, some of my best work in the theatre in recent years. From Sandy Robbins and his Associate Artistic Director, Sandy Ernst, down through the organization, “no” is not a word in the REP’s lexicon.

The REP is not unique in the American theatre landscape. I know this not just from hearsay but also from direct personal experience. (I had, for instance, six great seasons at Milwaukee Rep under the inspired artistic direction of Joseph Hanreddy.) But it epitomizes all that is best in the American theatre and offers me, as a director, actors who prepare meticulously for every role, are fully focused and highly skilled, and, once they trust the director in question, are fully committed to delivering on their vision for the play in rehearsal.

You might argue that all this is, or should be, axiomatic, but I have found in places like New York, Chicago, Toronto, London, and even Dublin that actors are pulled in many different directions—a filming day here, an audition there, a voice-over almost anywhere—so that the focus of those precious rehearsal hours (usually 120 in the room) can often be diluted to their detriment. There is something laboratory-like working in a great regional theatre with consummate professionals dedicated to a shared vision and a collegiate commitment to ensemble playing.

In addition, like it or not, the fact that the viability of theatre production in larger cities like New York, London, and Chicago is dependent on “star names” that can go above the title results, more often than not, in outcomes that are artistically less coherent, satisfying, successful, and impactful. And, conversely, when productions from theatres like Steppenwolf or the British National Theatre or my own theatre, the Abbey Theatre (e.g., DANCING AT LUGHNASA) come to New York with intact ensembles, the results are often thrilling. In late fall 2019, I was in Delaware for casting and design meetings, and it coincided with the REP’s season opener, AUGUST: OSAGE COUNTY, directed by Jackson Gay. To come back to my opening simile, it was like watching a great orchestra at the height of its game. There wasn’t a note out of place. Decrying, as I do, recent trends in the Irish theatre away from text-based drama, this production simply renewed my faith in theatre and its power to move.

For a foreign, English-speaking director, the American regional theatre offers the following to me: artistic freedom; support for, and fidelity to, the vision I bring, from everyone associated with the theatre I am working in (all hands, sometimes 100-plus people, show up on the first day of rehearsal for the director and design presentations); acting talent to die for; and the unwavering support from above and below. Therefore, it is not fanciful to say, from my experience at least, that the American theatre, in its regional manifestations, is a true director’s theatre.

I am, of course, grateful for all this and, curiously, humbled by it. Too often when you combine the role of artistic director and director, as I have done throughout my career, you easily lose sight of the joy of the rehearsal room, of the totally absorbing pursuit of the devil in the detail, or, to appropriate Wilde, the unrelenting in full pursuit of the unattainable. The politics and the personalities, the deadlines and the budgets, the public-facing encounters, the media scrutiny all serve to distract from, to even dilute, that energizing, kinetic transaction in “the room” that is at the heart of the best theatremaking. A former artistic director of the British National Theatre once told me that he forewent breaks from the rehearsal room to avoid being hijacked if he stepped outside—after I’d told him that I was once so assaulted by urgent matters requiring my attention on a tea break in the Abbey corridor that I literally forgot which play we were rehearsing for the first five minutes back in the room.

THE CRUCIBLE at the REP, Delaware, directed by Ben Barnes

PHOTO Evan Krape

But when, in my American rehearsal room, I am quietly reminded by my stage manager to pay attention to an overlooked sightline, or asked by a carpenter to adjudicate on the precise tilt of an anti-raked bed in the opening scene of THE CRUCIBLE, or watch an actor in his sixties try to scale a high wall to escape the increasingly vociferous lunacies of Lucky in WAITING FOR GODOT; or when an incomparable props master like Jim Guy lines a drawer with just the right personal period bric-a-brac even though only the actor playing Arkady in A MONTH IN THE COUNTRY will see it, or the father of American sound designers, Michael Bodeen, finesses a sound cue, caresses it even; or when Matt Richards, already knowing where the light will fall when we move to the theatre, asks that an actor come two steps downstage in order to be in it—to experience all this is to be reminded of the joy of what we do, the collective care and expertise that goes into it, the building of detail upon detail to achieve something that is at once architectural and evanescent. It is to be brought back again by my American colleagues to the joy of theatre and to experience afresh something that for the quiet creators is a credo and for the audience of lovingly created theatre is a feeling that, in spite of all, art matters.

If there is a caveat, a postscript, a quibble, it is this: why, beyond the few celebrated exceptions, is the regional theatre so invisible to the national media and the producing elites in the larger cities? The theatre I have been writing about here at the neck of the Delaware isthmus is 40 minutes from Philadelphia, an hour from Washington, DC, and less than two hours by Amtrak from New York. But for all the attention it receives from these places, it might as well be on Mars. The loss, I would argue, is theirs.

Ben Barnes is an Irish theatre and opera director, and former Artistic Director of the Abbey Theatre, Ireland’s national theatre.