SDC Journal Spring 2015

JOURNAL SPRING 2015

A PIONEER ON STAGE + OFF

AGNES DE MILLE A PERFECT STORYTELLER

JEROME ROBBINS INTERVIEWS WITH

EVAN CABNET RACHEL CHAVKIN SHAUN PEKNIC ROBERT WILSON + MORE

STARTING FROM A PLACE OF REALITY

KATHLEEN MARSHALL SPRING 2015 | SDC JOURNAL

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CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS | PEER REVIEWS Published quarterly by SDC, the new peer-reviewed section of SDC Journal serves directors and choreographers working in the profession and in institutions of higher learning. We seek essays that exemplify the sorts of fruitful intersections that can occur between the academic/scholarly and the profession/craft.

Examples of these types of articles include: • Writing as a scholar about directorial or choreographic practice (by oneself or another); practice-based research.

• Traditional scholarship that inspires creative work (original practices, historical context, theory).

• Dramaturgical material from a production or piece that might be of interest to other directors or choreographers, such as topic-specific research or elements of process related to script formulation, adaptation or devising.

• Approaches to training, teaching and/or mentoring the transitions between undergraduate, M.F.A. or Ph.D. training and the profession.

• Continuing education/training for directors and choreographers.

• Scholarship about sociological dynamics of the profession— such as diversity and equity in hiring, rates of compensation and benefits, representation and unions, intellectual property rights, etc.

• Professional-academic partnerships (eg. academic institutions with professional theatre partnerships, residencies, or guest artists programs): What are best practices? How might we further build connections?

• Scholarship on innovations in the field—such as new approaches to collaboration, casting, staging, ensemblebuilding and use of technology—as these impact professional work and/or teaching in higher education.

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. To that end, we seek essays with accessible language that focus on practice and practical application.

Submission requirements: • Essays: approx. 4,500 words (inclusive). Shorter essays will also be considered.

• Double-spaced document in MS Word with no identifying author information.

• Separate cover sheet with author name, affiliation, and full contact information.

• Style: MLA parenthetical citations; endnotes should be kept to a minimum.

• Separate files for illustrations with placement of illustration and caption indicated in document. Photos are encouraged but not required.

• No simultaneous submissions will be accepted.

Submissions will be acknowledged within one week and distributed to two readers to be blind-refereed. Response time is approximately three months. Criteria for evaluation includes: the strength of argument, clarity of methodology, use of evidence, quality of writing, originality of thought, contribution to the field, and timeliness of subject matter.

Please send submissions or queries electronically to both co-editors: Anne Fliotsos, PhD, Professor of Theatre, Purdue University | Fliotsos@purdue.edu Ann M. Shanahan, MFA, Associate Professor of Theatre, Loyola University Chicago ashanah@luc.edu

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SDC JOURNAL

| SPRING 2015

SDC EXECUTIVE BOARD

Susan H. Schulman PRESIDENT

John Rando EXECUTIVE VICE PRESIDENT

Leigh Silverman VICE PRESIDENT

Oz Scott SECRETARY

Ethan McSweeny TREASURER

HONORARY ADVISORY COMMITTEE

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

Ronald H. Shechtman EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR

Laura Penn

MEMBERS OF BOARD

Julie Arenal Christopher Ashley Anne Bogart Mark Brokaw Joe Calarco Larry Carpenter Marcia Milgrom Dodge Sheldon Epps Michael John Garcés Christopher Gattelli Liza Gennaro Wendy C. Goldberg Linda Hartzell Anne Kauffman Dan Knechtges Mark Lamos Paul Lazarus Pam MacKinnon Meredith McDonough Robert Moss Robert O’Hara Sharon Ott Lonny Price Seret Scott Bartlett Sher Casey Stangl Michael Wilson Chay Yew Evan Yionoulis

SDC JOURNAL

Published by SDC | Spring 2015 | Volume 3 | No. 4 FEATURES EDITOR

Elizabeth Bennett ART DIRECTOR/DESIGNER

Elizabeth Nelson

CONTRIBUTORS

May Adrales DIRECTOR

Megan E. Carter SDC FOUNDATION DIRECTOR

EDITORIAL COMMITTEE

Walter Bobbie Sheldon Epps Graciela Daniele Liza Gennaro Thomas Kail Robert O'Hara Leigh Silverman Evan Yionoulis

Olivia Clement WRITER

Ethan Heard DIRECTOR

Sari Ketter DIRECTOR

Sarna Lapine DIRECTOR

Ethan McSweeny DIRECTOR

Erin B. Mee DIRECTOR

Kent Nicholson DIRECTOR

Ben Pesner WRITER

Mary B. Robinson DIRECTOR

Brant Russell DIRECTOR

David Ruttura DIRECTOR

Seret Scott DIRECTOR

Megan Wrappe SDC JOURNAL INTERN

SDC JOURNAL is published quarterly by Stage Directors and Choreographers Society, located at 321 W. 44th Street, Suite 804, NY, NY 10036. 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 $24 (domestic), $48 (foreign); single copies cost $7 each (domestic), $14 (foreign). Purchase online at www.

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

PRINTED BY Sterling Printing

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SPRING CONTENTS Volume 3 | No. 4

40 34

FEATURES

26 COVER

14 Becoming a Narrative

EVAN CABNET, RACHEL CHAVKIN +

BY

Personal accounts from the Associate

Director of War Horse + the Resident Director of The Phantom of the Opera.

BY SARNA LAPINE + DAVID RUTTURA

from a Place of Reality

Marshall discusses choreographing + directing revivals.

MARY B. ROBINSON

20 Life on the Road

A PERFECT STORYTELLER

Starting

Seventeen years after his death, Robbins's choreography can still be enjoyed thanks to its preservation

by The Robbins Foundation.

AN INTERVIEW WITH KATHLEEN MARSHALL

SHAUN PEKNIC speak with MARY B. ROBINSON about their non-linear paths since college.

40 Jerome Robbins

BY

KENT NICHOLSON

34 Agnes de Mille

A PIONEER ON STAGE + OFF Choreographer + activist de Mille lobbied for copyright protection of choreography.

BY

BY

ELIZABETH BENNETT

46 FROM THE ARCHIVES SPEAKING A

THOUGHT IN THE WORLD PART I: GARLAND WRIGHT ON THE MISANTHROPE

A detailed study of Wright's thoughts + writings while directing The Misanthrope.

BEN PESNER

BY

SARI KETTER + ERIN B. MEE SPRING 2015 | SDC JOURNAL

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5

FROM THE TREASURER

BY ETHAN

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MCSWEENY

THIS PAGE

Board, staff + construction at The Plant in January 2015

FROM THE EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR

BY LAURA

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IN YOUR WORDS

hat I Learned...

W May Adrales CURATED BY SERET SCOTT

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hy I Cast That Actor W Ethan Heard

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BACKSTAGE

PENN

Marlène Whitney,

Properties Master

10 IN PRINT + MEDIA Robert Wilson: An Artist Beyond Definition

BY OLIVIA

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CLEMENT

IN RESIDENCE

Juliette Carrillo: Sundance Luma Foundation Directors Retreat

BY OLIVIA CLEMENT

19 SDC FOUNDATION Letter from the Director

BY MEGAN

E. CARTER

53 THE SOCIETY PAGES

LA/West Coast Membership Meeting

"Director as Creator" DCN

Diane Rodriguez + National Council on the Arts

Farewell Lena Abrams

Contract Affairs DCN

SDC + DG in Conversation

E-Waste Drive

THE CAFÉ IN MARCH 2015

One-on-One with Anne Bogart + Lear deBessonet Design Presentation + Donald Saddler Kathleen Marshall | 1 Kathleen Marshall in rehearsal for Living on Love PHOTOS Walter McBride | 2 Garland Wright in the Guthrie dressing room | 3 Jerome Robbins coaches Damian Woetzel in his ballet Fancy Free PHOTO c/o Costas Cacaroukas | 4 Agnes de Mille during SSDC's 1959 incorporation signing COVER

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SDC JOURNAL

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4 | SPRING 2015

RAW SPACE IN OCTOBER 2014

FROM THE TREASURER I haven’t always been this way, but since I became SDC’s Treasurer I’ve become something of a numbers guy.

What I’ve come to learn is that, just like text on a page, numbers tell a story.

In 2009, the year I was elected, SDC had 1,918 active Full Members and 494 Associates. But times were tough as theatres across the country reeled from the economic downturn affecting the entire nation and between 2008 and 2009 contract filing dropped by 10 percent.

By 2014, the most recent complete year for which we have statistics, the story those numbers tell is a compelling one about our continued growth as a union in the face of the downturn and the gradual rebound of our industry. As of December, we are now 2,033 dues-paying Members strong (that’s 6 percent growth since ’09 for those of you reaching for a calculator). After the 10 percent drop in contract filing, the last five years have seen us rebuild by a little over 3.5 percent, stabilizing at a relatively healthy and predictable new normal. As a result of our advocacy and outreach on the national stage, the number of Associate Members has increased to 769, or more than 56 percent – a number that affirms SDC’s role as a leader for the next generation of stage directors and choreographers as they emerge to forge careers in the field.

Why does that matter? Because, on some basic level, statistics = standards just as much as knowledge = power.

Here is an example: beginning last fall, our director colleagues in England undertook the early stages of launching ETHAN MCSWEENY since 1998

an association to represent them. The newly minted Stage Directors UK (SDUK) is now already 900 members strong.

SDUK determined that the very first thing it needed to accomplish was to compile statistics on the range of contracts its directors received. Their information was compiled into a report that is available online, and I encourage you to check it out (www.stagedirectorsuk.com). Beyond the specific details, one gets a compelling narrative of what our world would be like if we were each forced to go it alone without the power of our Union and the minimum terms guaranteed us by our collectively bargained agreements and decades of stewardship.

As a reader of SDC Journal, you are likely aware that spring 2015 will see a pair of watershed transitions for SDC that are the culmination of multiple years of planning and effort by Board and staff alike: the relocation of our offices and the technological transformation of our database and website.

We’ve labeled these converging events “Capacity Building,” as they combine to break new ground in both our physical and digital presence and herald the everwidening national profile that began with our 50th Anniversary rebranding in 2009.

The IT conversion will bring us into the 21st century, updating a nearly 20-yearold system that was designed and implemented in a pre-cloud era. Among other things, the new system will: • Expand Member access, allowing SDC Members to check contract status, pay dues, and interface from a variety of platforms 24/7 • Increase our sophistication in data management, enabling us to more quickly understand and analyze industry trends and enforce our contracts • Create new online forums and platforms for directors and choreographers to communicate directly with each other As visual artists, we understand the importance of design. Although our new space will be a bit more compact, the opportunity to redesign it allows us to more effectively represent the current structure of our staff and bring our brand to vibrant new life. We are going to look like the polished national player in the theatre community that we know ourselves to be. Among these improvements will be:

• An office space that embodies a union of artists that is dynamic, creative, and collaborative • A professional environment for our hardworking staff that physically reflects their team-based structure and our values as an organization; while space will be more concentrated, staff will be more collaborative than ever before • New communication and video conferencing infrastructure that will allow us to better serve and respond to our growing national organization, especially an energized and enlarged Executive Board that calls in from all corners of the country (and sometimes the globe) • A communal kitchen area where Members can drop by, meet, grab a coffee, charge up a device, or just unwind in an environment slightly removed from the hurly-burly of Times Square While both the relocation and computer conversion represent long-term investments for which we have been preparing for some time, as the final numbers started to come in this fall it became clear to the Executive Board that the one-time costs associated with the dual transitions were going to require additional funds. Accordingly, the Board approved a motion to send to the Full Members a one-year, onetime Special Assessment for Relocation and Technology.

At the November Annual Membership Meeting, that motion was ratified by a wide margin of Members both in the room and online, a fitting demonstration of the collective responsibility we feel not just toward our Union but also to each other.

Just as a courageous group of directors and choreographers joined together over 50 years ago to create our Union, in 2015 the Membership is going to pay it forward for the next generation.

And that’s a number you can take to the bank.

In solidarity,

Ethan McSweeny Executive Board Treasurer

SPRING 2015 | SDC JOURNAL

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March 1962 telegram from Donald Saddler to Agnes de Mille regarding a Member Meeting after Bob Fosse's successful stand against Little Me producers in 1962 c/o SDC Archives

FROM THE EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR SDC has been at 1501 Broadway for 40+ years. Can you imagine what’s in the back room filing cabinet? Or those storage boxes on the very top of those shelves? Who is brave enough, or curious enough, to look in the back of that closet? For months we have been carefully sorting, sending items to long-term storage, donating, determining what we all can (or can’t) live without.

The other day while organizing some files from the early years, I found a pile of handwritten notes. They weren’t attributed to anyone’s hand, but they were dated: 1965. It appeared to be minutes from a meeting. Perhaps a Board meeting or an early Foundation meeting. The question raised was all too familiar: “What does a director do?” I read, and reread, much of the text, faded or in a scrawl not easy to decipher. I tried to piece together the question and answer, hoping the author and those around the table had found the answer and we could claim victory! But alas—either they had not found the perfect phrase or set of sentences to answer the question posed, or with the passing of time the narrative was lost in the creases of the yellowed lined paper.

In my time at SDC, I have come to understand that maybe you have to be one of the lucky people who has witnessed a director working in all their various moments and settings. The auditions, retreats with writers, meetings with producers, preliminary design sessions, final design presentations to the shops, production meetings, first rehearsals, techs, notes after first preview, more meetings with writers, understudying rehearsals, vetting marketing materials, attending Board meetings, cocktail parties, observing life go on around them, seeking moments of truth, etc., etc.

Last month I was in Seattle for the first ever public conversation co-produced by regional representatives for SDC and the Dramatists Guild: Linda Hartzell for SDC and Duane

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SDC JOURNAL

| SPRING 2015

Kelly, the Seattle regional representative for the DG. Executive Director Ralph Sevush and I engaged in a lively discussion moderated by Todd London, covering a lot of territory. We focused on the work we have been doing to bring the organizations closer, aligning our resources when possible to bring strength to our collective endeavors. We talked about challenges for directors and writers, how they are different, how they are similar, about where we agreed and where we agreed to disagree, often on critical issues. We talked about progress on moving the dialogue concerning collaboration agreements forward.

It was great—“and” what really struck me was how often I found myself saying “and.”

Yes, “and.” Given the nature of the Dramatists Guild, the conversation gravitated toward the collaboration between director and author in the development of new work. While crucially important to the field and the lives of our collective Members, I realized that—although a very significant part of your work—it really is only part of what you do, and SDC Journal exists to represent that full spectrum as best we can, quarter by quarter.

In the last issue we tried a new editorial concept. Our editorial committee has guided SDC Journal staff toward a series of articles that are loosely linked—a suite, if you will. In the last issue it was interviews with Richard Foreman, Peter Brook, and Martha Clarke, three of our most prolific auteur Members.

This month you have a suite from leaders in musical theatre focused on revivals, preservation, and replication; SDC Members whose careers have, among many other things, ensured that the great dance musicals are preserved and revived for generations to come. Kathleen Marshall’s work on revivals has brought classic American musicals to life with a deep respect that infuses the material with contemporary appeal. We explore the legendary Jerome Robbins through his estate and the Robbins Foundation, which is often referred to as the leader in preservation for stage choreography. And then there's Agnes de Mille, one of the most significant forces in American musical theatre. Instrumental in SDC’s founding, she was an advocate and an activist for theatre and individual artists. She was tenacious, and we are the beneficiaries of her uncompromising character.

There is an amazing file, tucked away in the back room and barely hanging together by a thread that is labeled “AGNES de MILLE.” From the looks of its contents, she wrote on a regular basis to Shepard Traube and officers of the newly formed SSDC from all around the world. She wrote of art and commerce. She was passionately committed to expanding property rights to include choreographers explicitly. And she was successful in Congress at the negotiating table and on the stage. Of course, she eventually became the first woman president of SDC “and” I can see her sitting alongside the men—Traube, Robbins, Marre, Stone, among others—and they were the beneficiaries of her company, I am sure.

There is also a Bob Fosse file, a Gower Champion file, and a Donald Saddler file.

In November of last year, Donald passed away peacefully at the Lillian Booth Actors Home of The Actors Fund in Englewood, New Jersey. They took great care of Donald in his final years. (We love the Actors Fund.)

It was Kathleen Marshall who first introduced me to Donald when I arrived at SDC. He was slated to receive the “Mr. Abbott” Award that year, and he had performed in the 2001 Broadway revival of Follies with the marvelous Marge Champion, which Kathleen Marshall choreographed. He was spirited, involved—as you can see from the Western Union telegram above—and most excited to watch the careers of a new generation of choreographers emerging on the scene. Donald had been a dancer before his career as a choreographer took flight, just like Kathleen Marshall, Agnes de Mille, and Jerome Robbins, and just like all our SDC Members, he was an original.

Laura Penn, Executive Director

PETER BROOK since 1959 GOWER CHAMPION d.1980 MARGE CHAMPION since 1988 MARTHA CLARKE since 2002 AGNES DE MILLE d.1993 RICHARD FOREMAN since 1976 BOB FOSSE d.1987 LINDA HARTZELL since 2000 ALBERT MARRE d.2012 KATHLEEN MARSHALL since 1994 JEROME ROBBINS d.1998 DONALD SADDLER d.2014 EZRA STONE d.1994 SHEPARD TRAUBE d.1983

WHAT I LEARNED… MAY ADRALES CURATED BY SERET SCOTT BY

In 2003 I directed a very cold informal reading—the kind of reading where you haven’t even set the casting. I just asked a few good, imaginative actors to come in to read the play. After the read, the writer and I began a discussion when, suddenly, one of the actresses burst into tears. She explained through tears, “I’m sorry…I didn’t give a good read…I was just shocked when you had me read the lead.

I had just assumed that I was the unnamed character, ‘Woman.’ Since I’m Latina…”

That moment I understood how deep the trenches of racism were. It was hard enough to see how little diversity there is on mainstream American stages. But it was heartbreaking to realize how much she internalized that racism. She simply didn’t believe she had a place in that mainstream.

IN YOUR WORDS What I Learned...

Why I Cast That Actor Backstage Members In Print + Media In Residence

8 CONTRIBUTE If you wish to contribute to IN YOUR WORDS, would like to respond to any of the articles, opinions, or views expressed in SDC Journal, or have an idea for an article, please email Letters@SDCweb.org. Include your full name, city + state.

With renewed determination, I expanded that definition of the mainstream in my own projects. I went to theatre and supported works that strived to expand that definition of the mainstream. And the more I expanded my circles, the more rich and expansive the world became. I became a better artist.

That moment inspired me to continually question what barriers I had internalized in my life—my gender, my race, my Southern-ness, and my education. I had set the limits to my success based on my own internalization of non-equality. How can I change the “face” of success in my mind? How can I challenge others to do the same? I know from this event that it only takes one person to think a little outside the norm.

May Adrales is a freelance director based in NYC and has helmed world premieres at LCT3, Williamstown Theatre Festival, The Goodman Theatre, Humana Festival, Milwaukee Rep, and Two River Theater Company. She has directed at Signature Theatre, Pioneer Theater, Portland Center Stage, Partial Comfort Productions, and Syracuse Stage. She is a Drama League Directing Fellow, Women’s Project Lab Director, SoHo Rep. Writers/Directors Lab and NYTW directing fellow, and a recipient of the TCG New Generations grant, Denham Fellowship, and Paul Green Directing Award. She received her MFA at the Yale School of Drama, where she also serves on the faculty. www.mayadrales.net

PHOTOS

c/o May Adrales

We regret that we are unable to respond to every letter.

MAY ADRALES since 2010 | SERET SCOTT since 1989

SPRING 2015 | SDC JOURNAL

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The show was Sondheim and Wheeler’s A Little Night Music at Berkshire Theatre Festival.

Kate Baldwin and Graham Rowat had already signed up as Charlotte and Carl-Magnus; Gregg Edelman was on board as Fredrik, and Penny Fuller had just accepted Madame Armfeldt.

We were in auditions for the younger leads, and we’d probably seen about 15 Annes. Or should I say “ingénues”? There’d been some lovely singing and serviceable reading, but most of the young women we’d seen so far were playing a type more than a character.

They were presenting an idea of a flighty girl, not a flesh-and-blood person in a new and confusing marriage. By the third day of auditions, I wanted more and more to find someone who surprised me and helped me see Anne in an unexpected light. And “soon”!

Then Phillipa Soo walked in the door. Well, actually, she was standing in the doorway talking to our choreographer, and I was coming down the hall. We shook hands, and it sounds cliché, but I instantly sensed she was special. She exuded ease. Unlike most of the other candidates for Anne that we had seen, Pippa wore no heels and no makeup. She didn’t need to “put on” Anne. She just was.

wit in the writing. After she finished reading the hair-brushing scene with Petra, I suggested she relish the danger of confiding in her friend more. Pippa listened to my feedback with calm curiosity. Then she paused for a moment. I remember wondering if I had made myself clear. But before I could add anything, she plunged into the scene again with renewed gusto. Whereas she had sat quite still the first time through the scene, this time Anne burst out of her chair, owning the space, using the mirror on a nearby column to evaluate herself: “It’s a good body, isn’t it?” (When an actor uses the architecture of the room, it tells me she’s present and ready to play.)

Suddenly the comedy in the scene sparkled.

WHY I CAST THAT ACTOR

ETHAN HEARD On casting Phillipa Soo in A Little Night Music

Pippa’s adjustment did more than satisfy me; it intrigued me. What else was she capable of?

I couldn’t wait to see her play opposite Kate Baldwin and Gregg Edelman. I looked forward to what she would teach me about Anne.

Ethan Heard is the Co-Artistic Director of Heartbeat Opera (heartbeatopera. org). ethanheard.com

I must confess: I didn’t see Natasha, Pierre, and the Great Comet of 1812 (a big mistake, I know). So this was my first time seeing Pippa perform. Her audition was brief—maybe 12 minutes—and because of our schedule, we only saw her once, but I remember the whole thing vividly. She sang flawlessly. Her shimmering tone and light touch were thrilling. Whereas other actors seemed focused on proving their vocal strength, Pippa simply sang—meaning it, moment by moment. Reading the sides, she ennobled Anne rather than judging or belittling her. Here was an actor who wanted to reveal Anne’s humanity, not make fun of her.

Within seconds, it was clear that Pippa could embody Anne’s beauty and naiveté. Those qualities seemed to come effortlessly to her. I wondered, though, if Pippa was funny enough. In the song and sides, she seemed to gravitate toward Anne’s suffering. I needed to know if Pippa could maintain the gravitas of Anne’s situation while activating the

Phillipa Soo as Anne in A Little Night Music PHOTO Reid Thompson

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SDC JOURNAL

| SPRING 2015

ETHAN HEARD since 2013

How did you get your start as the property master at Asolo Rep? I worked in the movie industry in Montreal, and I quickly realized I was better behind the camera than before the camera. At that time I was also doing aerial photography with a friend of mine. We flew to Sarasota, and I just decided to stay. I got married and had a kid, and I completely disconnected from the movie industry. When my daughter was old enough to go to school, I decided to look into local theatre. I worked at the Sarasota Opera for three years, first as a stage carpenter and then as prop coordinator. The woman who was at the Asolo before me needed some help on A Tale of Two Cities, a big production directed by Michael Donald Edwards (the AD) that went to Broadway.

I worked with her for four weeks, and the next season she didn’t want to return. I ended up getting the job. This is my seventh season at the Asolo.

In your current job at Asolo Rep, what is your daily routine like?

BACKSTAGE WITH PROPERTIES MASTER

MARLÈNE WHITNEY

If we have a show in rehearsal, the first thing I do in the morning is look at the notes from rehearsal.

Before they start rehearsal at noon, I try to clear all the notes that were in the rehearsal report from the night before. Then, because we have three shows in rehearsal, there are still props that need to be built or acquired. Once we get into tech, we open three shows in three weeks. We are in tech for 21 days straight. You get to the theatre, do your notes from 8 a.m. to noon, sit through the tech process, and then it starts again. It’s pretty demanding, but it’s rewarding as well. The directors we have are spectacular people to work with.

They understand and are with you throughout the whole process. It’s a family at the Asolo. It’s so demanding that if you didn’t have the right people to work with, I don’t think you could survive.

The Koski Center is one of the largest scenic production facilities in Florida. What is it like working in such a large, busy environment?

You don’t realize you’re such a big machine until you hear it from the outside because for us it’s business as usual. So it’s really rewarding, especially when we get outside jobs. We have other theatres that do not have the facility that we have, but they want to open a show in New York. They say can you do this, can you build those props, can you build this set?

So that’s when I think it really hits home. We also build the sets and props for the Sarasota Opera. We just built a big show for the Sarasota Ballet. That’s when you say, “I guess we are good at what we do.”

How do you approach each production?

How do you collaborate with the director and the members of the design team?

MICHAEL DONALD EDWARDS since 1998

We have returning set designers and directors, so there is really a personalized aspect. You know this person, you know how this person works, you know what he or she likes and his or her sense of humor. I have to figure out that person, especially the sense of humor, and then the relationship is

so much easier. It can be very taxing, the hours, the demands, and the time frame, so you have to have a good attitude. Working in props requires such detail, and directors often change their mind. At the end, you have to figure out what they want and give it to them with a smile. You have to be a people pleaser to work in props.

What has been the most challenging production you have worked on at Asolo? Why was it challenging?

Every production has its challenging parts.

Sometimes you have to build a prop from scratch that needs to do something that in real life it wouldn’t do. A Tale of Two Cities was challenging because of the set. There were big see-through stairs, and there was not a place to hang a picture frame, but they wanted a whole wall of picture frames. So what we did is build a steel structure and ran all the picture frames through fishing line. Sometimes you have to create something in order to make the design happen.

You mentioned you did aerial photography while in Montreal and then decided to stay in Sarasota. Can you describe this experience?

When I was in Montreal, I worked with this man who had this little, home-built plane. He would fly to Florida, take aerial photography of houses, fly back to Montreal, process the pictures, then drive back to Florida and sell the aerial picture door to door. I worked with him for three winters.

Sometimes it was scary because he had to fly low, 300–500 feet. If you don’t have enough speed, the plane shakes, and you might hit the ground. The first time I didn’t know what was happening; the plane was shaking like crazy. When it happened a second time, I said, that’s it, it’s not worth my life.

What is one thing you would like directors to know about the work of props masters?

I would like the director to know we can’t defy gravity. There are the laws of physics we have to abide by. It’s theatre; it’s not a movie. There are things that cannot happen. The directors know what they want and are going to voice it to you.

Sometimes it’s hard to tell them no. As the props master, I try to make things happen, but they also have to accept that some things are not possible.

Marlène Marotte Whitney graduated from Université du Québec à Montréal with a degree in performing arts. After creating a new and avant-garde theatre troupe, la “Troupe du Mil’lieux,” in which she was performing, Marlène started working behind the scenes in the movie industry as an on-set dresser.

Being adventurous in photography, she decided to leave Quebec for the U.S. on a single-engine plane doing aerial photography. After flying all over Florida, she fell in love with Sarasota and landed for good.

She then started a career as the Property Coordinator for the Sarasota Opera Association. Marlène is now grateful to work with Asolo Rep, which she considers one of the most compelling live theatres hosting the greatest artistic staff in the country.

SPRING 2015 | SDC JOURNAL

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IN PRINT + MEDIA

ROBERT WILSON AN ARTIST BEYOND DEFINITION

BY OLIVIA

CLEMENT

Robert Wilson is an artist in many senses of the word; he has worked in theatre, photography, video, Polaroid, drawings, sculpture, architecture, and furniture design.

Neither his creative work nor his unique style of theatre, which is at the intersection of opera and visual art and defies any strict genre, can be compartmentalized. The New York Times lauded Wilson as “the towering figure of avant-garde theatre,” and for the past four decades he has been recognized as one of the most versatile and visionary creators of the international stage and art worlds. In the summer of 2014, Wilson’s “Video Portraits of Lady Gaga” was exhibited at the Watermill Center on Long Island. In considering this exhibition and other recent visual arts projects, it is interesting to examine how his creative work outside of the theatre is influenced by his career as a stage director and vice versa.

While known as a director of highly acclaimed theatrical pieces performed around the world, Wilson has always maintained firm roots in the fine arts. His drawings, paintings, videos, and sculptures have been exhibited internationally in hundreds of solo and group showings. In 1993 he was awarded the Golden Lion for sculpture at the Venice Biennale. A decade later he was presented with the National Design Award for Lifetime Achievement in a ceremony at the White House; the following year he won the prestigious Commandeur des Arts et des Lettres award in France. His work has appeared at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris; the Contemporary Arts Museum in Houston; and the Instituto de Valencia de Arte Moderno. Wilson has created original installations for the Guggenheim Museum, the Galeries Lafayette, Berlin’s Neue Nationalgalerie, Museum Boijmans-van Beuningen in Rotterdam, London’s Clink Street Vaults, and the Museum Villa Stuck in Munich.

“Video Portraits of Lady Gaga” premiered in 2013 as part of Wilson’s exhibition, “Living Rooms,” at the Louvre in Paris. They featured the pop singer in a series of poses and costumes that referenced famous paintings in the museum. It marked the first time the Louvre had collaborated so closely with a contemporary artist, inviting Wilson to be guest curator. The theme of the exhibition reflected his wish to infuse the museum with the spirit of the Watermill Center, which integrates performing arts practice with

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resources from the humanities, research from the sciences, and inspiration from the visual arts.

Wilson has been working in the medium of video portraits since the early 1970s. His earlier video works were 130-second episodes that he envisioned could be seen in a multitude of ways: on a wristwatch, at a bus stop, on an airplane, or broadcast on late-night television.

In Jakub Jahn’s short film about the history of the portraits, Wilson says they were intended to be seen as “kind of like a fire that’s in the fireplace. A window in the room that you can look out and see something.”

Over the following decade, these videos were shown in various eclectic locations including during soccer games in Switzerland, in museums in Paris, and in subways in Japan. In 2004 Wilson began working with high-definition video and embarked on what has officially become his Video Portraits Project: an ongoing series of more than 50 subjects to date, ranging from unknown people to animals to celebrities. His more famous video portraits have featured Johnny Depp, Sean Penn, Winona Ryder, Brad Pitt, and Salma Hayek, among others. Wilson has described the collection as “A family album of people of our time.” The works have toured the globe continuously since 2007 in museums, galleries, and public spaces. In 2012, a selection was exhibited in Times Square as part of a public art program.

Also known as VOOM portraits, the video portraits are slow-moving shots that play with the viewer’s perception of time and duration.

The medium is high-definition video, but the form blurs time-based cinematography with the frozen moment of still photography, the result being an image that resembles a photograph but on closer inspection reveals something altogether unique. The portraits convey a complex theatrical language through Wilson’s incorporation of a number of creative elements such as lighting, costume, makeup, choreography, gesture, text, voice, set design, and narrative. The project’s producer, Matthew Shattuck, describes the medium as “a living work of art,” and says that the portraits are mostly about “stillness, which is what Bob Wilson’s theatre is all about.” The artist himself confirms this; in an interview with the Lisbon Consortium, he explains that the “video portraits are really an extension of what I’ve been doing in the theatre.”

ROBERT WILSON since 1986

OPPOSITE MAIN

Video Portraits of Lady Gaga exhibited at the Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac in Paris, France in fall 2013 by Robert Wilson OPPOSITE BOTTOM

Illycaffè coffee cups co-designed + curated by Robert Wilson LEFT

Lady Gaga, 2013 video portrait by Robert Wilson

‘OK.’ So this is homage to that.” In addition to the design, Wilson was also asked to direct an ambitious performance art spectacle for the launch of the cups, set in the back garden of Milan’s Triennale Design Museum. The event featured eccentric live performances by 20 artists selected from Watermill’s International Summer Arts Program.

While the Lady Gaga video portraits were exhibited in New York, Wilson was invited to show his work as part of the “Image-Makers” exhibition in Tokyo. In line with Wilson’s philosophy that classification is unnecessary for creation, the intention of “ImageMakers” is to go beyond the boundaries of disciplines and break down the barriers between fields. The exhibition featured the works of great image-makers such as Jean-Paul Goude, Jun Miyake, David Lynch, Noritaka Tatehana, and Photographer Hal. Their works included photographs, drawings, video installations, and kinetic sculptures and were connected to the worlds of theatre, fashion, performance, design, and cinema.

Soon after the opening of “Image-Makers,” Wilson was asked by Illycaffè to co-design and curate a new coffee cup collection. The Italian coffee company has a history of collaborating with distinguished artists, having previously worked with Marina Abramovic, Anish Kapoor, and Jeff Koons, among others. Wilson’s design featured the word “OK” repeatedly scrawled across the surface of the cup. Speaking with architect Matteo Thun, Wilson explained how this artistic decision was again influenced by his work in the theatre: “My first play that actually had words only had two—‘um’ and

The Watermill Center is an interdisciplinary laboratory for the arts and humanities founded by Robert Wilson in 1992; it is what he has called his “most ambitious project” yet. As well as being a museum, the center fosters research in the arts of the stage and provides a unique environment for emerging artists to create and explore theatre and all its related art forms. Every summer, 60–100 artists from around the world gather at Watermill for five weeks of intense creative exploration and artistic development. Watermill supports projects that integrate different genres and art forms; in reflecting the founder’s approach to creative work, it encourages artists to break from traditional forms of representation.

Robert Wilson’s work as a stage director is undoubtedly remarkable. His shows are impressive, mesmerizing, and complex; they have been performed in the most prestigious theatres around the globe, and he continues to collaborate with world-renowned artists.

Perhaps what makes him truly influential, however, is his ability to create in a multitude of artistic fields. Susan Sontag said of Wilson’s work, “It has the signature of a major artistic creation. I can’t think of any body of work as large or as influential.” His willingness to bring a theatrical language to the worlds of visual art and vice versa has allowed him to carve a unique and distinguished career path. Through the Watermill Center, he hopes to provide a similar education to promising emerging artists, allowing for a whole new approach to the creation of theatre and the fine arts.

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focusing on environmental issues, human rights, education, and culture in the broadest sense. It will soon open a new creative campus in Arles designed by renowned architect Frank Gehry. While Sundance is internationally recognized for its film festival, the Institute also supports numerous stage projects through its Theatre Program.

IN RESIDENCE

JULIETTE CARRILLO SUNDANCE LUMA FOUNDATION DIRECTORS RETREAT BY

OLIVIA CLEMENT Los Angeles-based Juliette Carrillo is an award-winning writer and director for both stage and screen, perhaps best known for developing new works. While the Artistic Associate at South Coast Repertory Theatre for seven years, she directed regularly in their season along with running the Hispanic Playwright’s Project. She has directed and continues to direct critically acclaimed productions across the country. Her skillful staging of Lydia by Octavio Solis put Carrillo in the sights of Philip Himberg, the Artistic Director of the Sundance Institute’s Theatre Program. Himberg contacted her with an “out of the blue” invitation to attend the Sundance LUMA Foundation Directors Retreat in the south of France, which she enthusiastically accepted.

When Carrillo talks about her time at the retreat, she uses words like “magical,” “profound,” and “incredible.” Last August, she was one of six directors invited to participate in the 12-day residency based in picturesque Arles, France. The retreat, which celebrated its second year in 2014, is jointly hosted by the LUMA Foundation and the Sundance Institute.

LUMA was created in 2004 to promote and support challenging artistic projects while

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Under the supervision of Himberg, Producing Director Christopher Hibma, and Program Associate Anne Kauffman, the retreat in Arles is the only theatre director-centered residency of its kind. In 2014, the participants included Carrillo, Mark Brokaw, Ralph B. Peña, Leigh Silverman, and Les Waters. Carrillo had not formally applied for the retreat, though she had heard of it. “I definitely wasn’t looking to apply. I didn’t know what the process was,” she says. Earlier in the year, she had applied to the Sundance Institute for the chance to workshop the development of her play, Plumas Negras, and while that particular project was not selected, she believes that her application is what put her back on Himberg’s radar.

According to Sundance, the concept of the retreat grew out of a need expressed by directors for an immersive forum in which to exchange ideas and best practices with peers, review and discuss new work, and participate in intensive discussions led by experienced arts professionals. “The Directors Retreat offers a truly rare opportunity for theatre directors to focus inward; to investigate, research, and plan new projects; and to reinvigorate their creative spirits,” says Himberg. “This also comprises a unique experience for these stage artists to be in dialogue with their peers and to engage in rigorous conversation about the contemporary field.”

To ignite this kind of “rigorous conversation,” retreat participants were asked before their arrival to send in questions covering topics they felt were important and relevant to the world of stage directing. Their days would be free to spend how they chose, but the directors would come together at meal times and be encouraged to engage in significant discussion.

Carrillo says that the atmosphere was very casual. “At one point we talked about making the discussions a little bit more formalized and creating a structure that would give us an opportunity to talk about some of the bigger issues, but it was voted down to do that; we just decided to have it be more free-form.”

Carrillo recalls a number of different topics being addressed, with emphasis on the future.

“Most of the people there were in their forties and fifties, so we’re all at a certain point in our careers where we’ve come to a place where we feel established,” she says. “We’re asking, ‘What’s next?’ and we’re asking

‘How do we sustain this work?’ It’s not easy to sustain work as a theatre director, so that was a big question on everybody’s mind.”

They discussed practical things, such as prep processes, and swapped craft-based tips and advice. Other topics included the movement of new directors and how that “shifted our placement in the field—the excitement and the fear of that, too,” says Carrillo.

“We talked about our fears a lot, which is interesting and good, I think. Very healthy.”

It wasn’t really about finding any definitive solutions, she says, but that simply “having the opportunity to talk was comforting.”

The retreat was a unique opportunity to forge lasting dialogues between Carrillo and her peers. “Ultimately, I think it was about creating relationships. Creating a tribe where a tribe doesn’t exist. As directors, we are all very isolated, and so just to have a sense of how we’re connected and to discuss that—it provided an opportunity for us to just be and talk. That was the underlying purpose of the whole thing.” This felt all the more important for Carrillo because, being a West Coast-based director, she hadn’t had the chance to meet or see many of the other directors’ productions, which were mostly in New York. She initiated one-on-one discussions with each director to learn about their artistic backgrounds. “I’d ask, ‘What are you proud of? Show me some pictures. I want to hear about your work.’” She found these private exchanges to be beneficial.

One particularly memorable discussion took place when the entire group was invited one evening to dine at a local restaurant in the French countryside. “The food comes from the farm; it’s an incredible restaurant, and it’s simple and romantic and beautiful,” Carrillo recalls. “It was one of the most profound nights that we had. We talked about why we got into directing. It’s a very simple question, and I’m sure all of us have answered it many times, but for some reason—there was something about the context of being in France; this particular group of people in this restaurant at this time where that question had a really intense resonance…I felt like we all went much deeper than we all normally would have gone with that question. I certainly did. Often you can be asked a question many times, and your answer will be different depending on who asked the question and in the context of it being asked. I felt like, because of that context and us all being directors and us never having the opportunity to be together, it just produced a certain intimacy that was really profound.”

The group shared deeply personal and intimate stories throughout the evening. “We ended up talking about our families and how we grew up. I talked about my father. He was a painter and—it had never occurred to me until that moment—it felt like I was carrying

his legacy as an artist. I kind of knew that, but it was hitting me on a deep level that I was not only carrying his legacy but his life choice, his path, and also even his aesthetic.

That was new for me. It was a magical night. It really got to the essence of why we’re doing what we’re doing. What was the trigger? What was it that took us down that path? It was beautiful hearing these stories.”

When asked if anybody in the group shared common ground for choosing to pursue directing, Carrillo says, “There were some similarities in talking about feeling a little bit like the outsider. I feel like we all have a little bit of that.

Finding some kind of solace in the storytelling. I would say that was probably a theme.”

LEFT TO RIGHT

Anne Kauffman, Mark Brokaw, Leigh Silverman, Les Waters, Juliette Carrillo, Christopher Hibma + Ralph B. Peña

During the retreat, the directors made various field Juliette Carrillo speaking to trips throughout the region, Philip Himberg visiting salt mines, a nature conservancy, and the nearby PHOTOS Hervé Hôte Vincent Van Gogh museum. ©2014 Sundance Institute Aside from these excursions, they spent much of their time working on projects of their choosing, and Carrillo took advantage of this luxury to work on her play, Plumas Negras. The play was originally developed and staged by the Cornerstone Theater Company, an organization in Los Angeles that collaborates with numerous communities in creating original work. Carrillo was excited by the prospect of taking the play further.

While in Arles, she continued to work on its development and asked other participants for feedback. “It was so great and needed. And scenes I was so out of love to get those notes in that context,” she says. with found new life. I saw characters from a different perspective, and it allowed me to Carrillo appreciates the time she spent working listen to them in a new way. I left Arles with in a different setting. “What’s valuable about a new draft, and that was really satisfying.” being away from your home environment or even a theatre environment—another kind of home—is that we see ourselves differently.

Who am I outside of this world I’ve created for myself?” she asks. “It allows time to reach inside in a deeper way. So Arles was really an opportune place to work on a script. It gave me time to throw the work up in the air and see where it lands without the expectations of others or even myself. I cut scenes I thought I was tremendously attached to

The open space and the luxury of time at the retreat provided a new and invigorating freedom for Carrillo and the other directors, something that she now reflects on: “Open space is dream space. It’s ‘space out’ time. I used to really judge myself for being one of those daydreamers, but I eventually realized that it was my livelihood! It’s what makes me a good artist! Sundance endorsed that part of myself. It was like saying, you want to dream?

MARK BROKAW since 1991 | JULIETTE CARRILLO since 2005 PHILIP HIMBERG since 2001 | ANNE KAUFFMAN since 2005 | LEIGH SILVERMAN since 2001 | LES WATERS since 1987

Please, go DREAM! It was tremendously liberating.”

Carrillo sees herself now moving toward a future of writing and directing. “I’ve really been feeling that, as a director, I’m ready for a new challenge,” she says. “The challenge for me right now is: how do I be a writer/director?

I’ve really started to hunger for that, using both sides of my brain in that way.” She feels that her background as a director, after working with so many talented playwrights, has shaped her as a writer. “I’ve had such fantastic teachers.

Watching them work has been my education as a writer.”

Playwright Octavio Solis, whom she has collaborated with numerous times, became her writing coach and mentor.

She is also working on the development of her screenplay SuperChicas, which she plans to direct. Carrillo has written and directed award-winning short films and was selected by the American Film Institute for its highly esteemed directing workshop for women.

While excited about her future in writing and directing both for the stage and screen, Carrillo remains passionate about directing new theatre projects. “I still want to direct other people’s work. I’ve been reading some really fantastic, inspiring new plays lately,” she says. “It’s so much about working in the trenches with a writer in creating the play. A lot of the process of doing theatre work—but particularly new plays—is about listening to what the story wants to be. It’s such a mysterious process because it’s so much bigger than the writer or the director or the actors. I feel like the play has its own voice, so our job is to listen to that voice and see what it has to say.”

Carrillo enjoys wearing several hats at once in theatre, film, writing, and directing. “I love it all,” she explains. “I think I need to be able to pull in all these different directions.

They all feed each other.” Now, more than six months after her experience in Arles, Carrillo is energized and excited about the future and the projects it will bring.

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BECOMING A NARRATIVE THREE DIRECTORS TALK ABOUT THEIR NON-LINEAR PATHS SINCE COLLEGE

BY MARY

F

or 18 years, I taught undergraduates at Playwrights Horizons Theater School, a branch of New York University, running the directing program there for 15 of those years. Spring 2014 was my final semester, and though I’ll miss getting to know a new group of aspiring directors every fall, I do have 18 years’ worth of former students from my time there. Many have gone on to other related (and unrelated) professions as teachers, speech and physical therapists, authors, social workers, and entrepreneurs. Many are working in other aspects of theatre as casting directors, producers, designers, playwrights, and actors.

Many who are still in their twenties are directing experimental theatre, assisting established directors, running small theatre companies, or getting their MFA in directing. And some are recently joined Members of SDC, wrestling with the many challenges we all encounter as young directors and throughout our careers.

This winter, I caught up with my former students Evan Cabnet, Rachel Chavkin, and Shaun Peknic, all now working directors in their thirties. We talked about their individual paths since college, the work that they’re currently engaged in, and how they manage to balance their personal lives with a life in the theatre.

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B. ROBINSON

EVAN CABNET graduated from NYU in spring 2000, and his directing projects while there included Ubu Roi and Woyzeck.

He has directed new plays by Donald Margulies, Theresa Rebeck, Christopher Shinn, and David West Read at Long Wharf Theatre, Atlantic Theater Company, Primary Stages, Roundabout, and LCT3. He will be directing an adaptation of Thérèse Raquin with Keira Knightley at the Roundabout on Broadway in fall 2015.

I remember when I graduated from college, I felt that nobody could tell me how to go about becoming a director.

How did you get started?

Right out of school, I thought I was going to be some sort of auteur. I was going to be Richard Foreman. Because I was stage managing for him. I did that for four years.

And then I would go to

Williamstown in the summer as a directing intern. I would have to save up as a stage manager all year to be able to pay for myself to go up there.

And this is how you supported yourself, as a stage manager?

You didn’t do survival jobs?

The survival jobs came later. I was a late bloomer for temping. I would go to Williamstown and assist Scott Ellis or Michael Greif or Nicky Martin. But then I would also do my own projects there, which were these incredibly weird––my sort of letting off steam for having spent eight months sitting next to Richard Foreman doing his crazy thing.

I would write my own stuff.

The turning point happened when I did a play up there and one of the chorus people in this huge play that I had written about alchemy was this

actor, Liz Meriwether, who now has created and writes New Girl, the television show. She asked if I’d be interested in reading this play of hers. And I read it, and I thought it was incredible. We wound up at Ars Nova, and before you knew it, we had a production of it. And that was the first time I had gotten a taste of new play development, which was something that was new to me. That was the first time I’d been in the room working with a writer. And I liked it because I felt useful. You know, it wasn’t just, “I’ve got an idea, and everybody just do my idea.”

Through that, I wound up in the fold at Ars Nova, and that was right when they started the Ars Nova writers group, which now is a pretty formal and structured and prestigious thing. But when we started it, it was whoever happened to be in the building––it was like a pizza party once a month, and people would bring in stuff. But that group was Beau Willimon, who’s done House of Cards, and Annie Baker, Liz Meriwether, Liz Flahive, Lin-Manuel Miranda––this was right before In the Heights. And then I think the next year Amy Herzog was in it. It was a pretty impressive roster. There was not really an application process––now there is––but that first year it was just whoever was there. That was how I began to get a sense of new play development, which is the thing I’ve been doing the most of for a very long time.

I was doing the reading thing and the workshop thing, and I was developing a lot of stuff that would then go on to production without me. That happened more times than I can count. And there are a lot of––I won’t name names––a lot of not insignificant plays that are in the world that I helped along in their paths. And now I’m sure I’m working on plays that there’s some other director that’s worked on forever, and I don’t even know. And that’s just how it is. It took a long time to learn that that’s just how it’s going to be, for a minute.

So there were two things that changed that.

The first was there was this opportunity at the Long Wharf to direct Shipwrecked by Donald Margulies. The reason why they were looking for a young director in particular was that Lisa Peterson had already been slated to direct the New York premiere.

So no one who was established would want to do it?

That’s right. So who would be willing to direct this play in New Haven that was neither the world premiere, which was at South Coast, nor the New York premiere? And the answer was me.

EVAN CABNET since 2008 | RACHEL CHAVKIN since 2010 SCOTT ELLIS since 1991 | RICHARD FOREMAN since 1976 MICHAEL GREIF since 1987 | NICHOLAS MARTIN d.2014 SHAUN PEKNIC since 2013 | LISA PETERSON since 1992 THERESA REBECK since 2014 | MARY B. ROBINSON since 1984

How old were you at the time?

I turned 30 while I was up there. But Donald lives up there, he teaches up there. And he was working on Time Stands Still at the time, so we would just hang out, and he would tell me about that process. He’s so great, and he’s been such an incredible friend and mentor to me. You know, I find that the people that I look up to or value the most—at the end of the day it has less to do with their work; it has more to do with “How does one live? How does one have a family? How does one stay sane?

How does one stay financially stable?” Those are the things that keep me up at night more than “Am I good?” or “What is my aesthetic?”

So the Long Wharf was one thing; the other thing that happened was I was working on this new play by Bekah Brunstetter at Ars Nova, and we did a reading at the Atlantic. And it seemed like they needed a play pretty quickly, and they pulled the trigger. And so it wasn’t even a question of who the director would be––it was, “These two people came in, they did the reading, they’re going to do the play.”

So I sort of punched through, and that was a mixed blessing. I was making, what, $8,000 a year directing, and so then it’s like, “Well, I can’t stage manage anymore, right? Because I’m a director. I had a play at the Atlantic Theater Company, I can’t stage manage for you.” And also assisting is complicated. So you’re in this kind of limbo.

So how did you make a living?

I temped for a while. I answered phones at Polo Ralph Lauren, the switchboard. That was rough. And I was working in a storeroom in a basement on 33rd Street near Macy’s for a while. I had the worst jobs. So, you know, the twenties are tough going. If there is a case to be made for graduate school, it’s that those 10 years are tough going anyway.

And the thing that I’ve been doing for a long time––I teach. I tutor. Even with some kind of heavyweight projects in the pipeline, I don’t for a moment think that that’s not in my future, too. There will be a moment where I have a few months to kill and, you know, the mortgage won’t wait. And my kids will have to eat those three months.

So I know that I’ll be teaching again.

When did you decide to start a family? How does your personal life fit into your work?

It was a terrifying decision. And it still is––that doesn’t go away. I met my wife [Rocio Galarza] when we were both interns at the 52nd Street Project. And she was there because she was studying under the sociologist who had written the book that the project was based on. So she was not there through theatre channels

but was rather there through academic ones.

There’s a story about early on in our relationship, when she was just starting to work for Sesame Street and I was working on a play that was sort of a Fringe-y thing––it was difficult, and I was having a really tough time with it. But my wife was on a trip to Kosovo for work. And I’ll never forget: she came back, and I was a mess. And she took out her computer, and she showed me all of these pictures of these children in this refugee camp in Kosovo.

And she didn’t hit the nail on the head in terms of the correlation; she was kind enough to let me connect the dots on my own. But it was really helpful. It’s been wonderful to make a life with someone who is not a part of this because I think I’m the type of person who could very easily be all consumed. We get home, and I talk about my day, and she talks about her day, and then life goes on.

And then, as far as kids go, it was really Donald Margulies who said, “You’re never ready.

There’s never the right time and there’s never the right moment and you never have enough money and you never are settled in enough.”

So we bit the bullet, and we had my daughter four years ago when I was 32. And then I was 34 when my son was born. My wife, of course, is on a salary, so if we have a child and our expenses increase by x, that means that I just have to make x, I have to make up the difference. Which is a little terrifying, because as things fluctuate, when you’re freelancing for so long, it’s just like, I just want to get the best job, I want to do good work, I want to work at this institution––whatever. But then it becomes: uh-oh. Then all of a sudden there’s a number on the table, and it’s like, well, you have to generate x amount of dollars.

How has having kids changed your work?

I think that it’s made my work way better was the thing that I was not expecting. I’m far more proud of the work that I have done in the four years since I’ve become a parent than in the decade before that. By far. You just have more of an even keel. But it’s also—99 percent of parenting young children is patience, right? So then, all of a sudden, you just become a more patient person. A lot of it is just empathy. I think you just become more aware of others. I think to have children in your life kind of gets you out of yourself. I think you listen better, you’re more attentive, both to the actors but also to the characters. You just have more empathy for the people that you’re watching. I think my productions have probably presented themselves as more compassionate, maybe.

So that’s been a big shift, and I’m so grateful for it. I think, before you have kids, you’re just worried: “How am I going to do this?

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are those questions. But no one ever thinks, “What am I going to gain creatively?”

a show that ended up becoming this piece, Faster. Which is really like the Ur TEAM show.

You went to Columbia three years out of NYU…

What do you see yourself doing in 10 years?

I don’t think I would have said at the time, “I really want to run a company.” I didn’t form the TEAM properly until really two-and-a-half years out of college. What I did know at the time was that the Wooster Group, Elevator Repair Service, the SITI Company, Théâtre de Complicite––the works that I was seeing that really lit me up were all works that were being made by experimental ensembles in America and internationally. I knew right off the bat that I was interested in an ongoing relationship with a group of artists and making my own work. All of those things.

I actually tried to drop out a couple of times in fall 2005 and got advice from a whole bunch of friends, including Anne Bogart, who was a close mentor by that point. Anne finally said, “You’re being silly––if you want your master’s, get it and use every assignment I give you to work on what you want to do.”

So I ended up doing exactly that: I developed two TEAM shows, using and twisting Anne’s assignments in order to work on them.

I don’t know what will happen. It’s a particularly fertile moment––I’m grateful for that. But I think about The Performers, the play I did on Broadway two years ago, and I just remember thinking, “Well, I’m going to do this and everything’s going to change.” And then I was back in a cubicle in the basement tutoring just a couple of weeks later. “Broadway Evan”––no, not really. And so even if you have something coming down the pike that you think is “The Thing,” odds are it’s the other way around.

Right, because it’s so non-linear, isn’t it?

The ones you think are going to change your trajectory usually don’t, and the ones that you don’t think about all that much turn out to be the watershed moments in one way or the other. When you’re young, every little good thing that happens to you is like, “Well, this is the moment!” Or every little bad thing. And I think it takes a long time to understand that it’s cumulative.

As a student, RACHEL CHAVKIN, who graduated from NYU in 2002, directed her own compilation of the writings of beat poets entitled Howl. She’s the Artistic Director of the TEAM and has directed all of its devised work including RoosevElvis and Mission Drift.

She’s also directed new plays at Yale Rep, New York Theatre Workshop (Obie Award for Three Pianos), and Ars Nova (Obie Award, Drama Desk and Lucille Lortel nominations for Natasha, Pierre, and the Great Comet of 1812).

What were your short- and long-term aspirations on graduating from NYU? You know, the narrative that forms in retrospect is always so clean.

Immediately after school, I got a group of friends together, and we began making something. I was working at Barnes & Noble through college and continued working there full-time after school, and it was there I began realizing that I was much more interested in books than I was in plays. That’s how I ended up doing Howl. But it was understanding that which made me go, “Oh, I’m…”—I would not have used the word “devising” at the time (I don’t know that I knew that word), but that was my primary interest. And so we began squatting in NYU rehearsal studios in the summer when they were open and then again over the Christmas break, and doing whatever small fundraising we could, and taking my earnings from Barnes & Noble and renting space and doing a two-night workshop of

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Getting to make my own work I found electric, and to make work that was saturated in politics and movement––really athletic movement. I knew that I was interested in dance and movement as much as language, and probably a whole lot more than story, at that time. I was much more interested in ideas than narrative. And so all of that was sort of around wanting to make my own work.

How did you develop a technique for doing this kind of work? Did you just make it up or base it on people you’d observed?

Just made it up. I think probably the most influential technique, or I’ll say practices, that we used came from a Chuck Mee workshop that Jessica Almasy, one of the TEAM performer/writers, and I took, where he just gave us all a bunch of writing assignments.

And the other huge place I formed my process was training with Marleen [Pennison, teacher of Creating Original Work at Playwrights Horizons Theater School]. Marleen very purposefully left you at sea. The only assignment was to be interesting alone on stage for 10 minutes, and she never told you where to start or how to proceed. There was no teaching of technique­­–– that would have been actually antithetical to everything that she was teaching, which is that you have to develop your own problemsolving methods. And, from her class, what I learned about myself was that I needed to give myself really clear assignments to constantly be manufacturing material. And that is how the TEAM functions now––there is no one way that we make other than the fundamental agreement that, on any given day in rehearsal, we will generate material. And then, at some point, when we have to put it up in front of an audience, we will have a conversation about how to shape and synthesize that material.

And is this more time-consuming as a way to work?

Absolutely. It’s aggressively inefficient.

And it’s expensive because as we get older no one can work for free.

Why did you want to drop out?

The TEAM had been the Cinderella story of the Edinburgh Fringe Festival that summer, and we’d won this award and were beginning to tour, and I was like, “I want to do that.” And I think I’m always skeptical of structure and so was rearing against being back in school and back in a program and not wanting to commit to time up at 116th Street versus time below 14th Street. I never spiritually committed to being on that campus in the way that I think grad school can be this beautiful laboratory space.

You’ve always struck me as somebody who has so many projects going at once. How does that work for you?

I really thrive when I intersperse gigs where I’m an interpreter, with gigs where I’m a generator.

I can be a generator on several projects at a time, but I find the interpretive gigs take up an entirely different part of my brain.

How would you describe that?

Well, the generating part is the authorial part.

The interpretive part is like problem solving.

It’s why I couldn’t ever do one or the other strictly because I love the service that I feel like I’m doing for writers and composers who are trying to put something into the world. But I think I would feel like I wasn’t doing enough in the world if I wasn’t also making work. That said, I also find the division between generative and interpretive work to be overstated.

And when did you start doing the interpretive work––new plays, working with writers? You were saying that right out of school it wasn’t what you wanted to do.

It was around 2008, when we were finishing making Architecting. The TEAM had been around for a few years by that point, and I had been the primary one carrying the administrative burden of keeping the company going. I was always tending the TEAM’s house.

My company was certainly present, especially on the fundraising and marketing fronts, but a couple of the actors had vanished for periods of time. And of course they weren’t ANNE BOGART since 1990

vanishing; they were going off to do other awesome projects, but to me, because I didn’t have an individual professional life, I had gotten my own feelings confused with the alleged feelings of “the company.” I felt the “company” was hurt by someone going off to work on something else when, in fact, I was projecting my angst and really just needed help administratively. I realized that I was in an unhappy and unhealthy place.

So I did the Women’s Project Lab. I began getting to know the playwrights at Columbia while I was finishing there, who I hadn’t really known. I wouldn’t say I woke to it in time to really make as much of the program as I could have, knowing the relationships that so many of my colleagues have left grad school with—that is, strong writer–director pairs—but it was a start. And I began seeing new plays, getting to know that community. And slowly I just began trying to put out into the world, even by simply talking to people at parties, that I was interested in that. And then I did the Soho Rep Writer/Director Lab in 2010 and got to know a bunch of amazing writers that way, and began just steeping myself in the new play process. And Dave Malloy and I met around that time through the experimental downtown scene. I asked him to work with me and a writer on a new musical up at Vassar in fall 2009, and then he asked me to be a part of Three Pianos. So I just began to get to do work outside the TEAM. And then I was like, “Oh my God, I’m really into this.”

And then a couple of years later, Great Comet came along, and it was ecstatic for me. I mean, obviously the reception of the show, and just how beautiful the show was, but also...having a company is glorious, and it can also be oppressive at times because you all know each other so well. The TEAM is a truly collaborative ensemble––most of our decisions are made by consensus. And when you’re young or insecure, this lack of role delineation can be really unnerving. So I walked into the Comet room and was both treated like the boss and hugely supported

by Ars Nova as producers. It was like, “Oh my God, this is great!” And now that I’m further from that experience, which in many ways felt like my first real freelance gig, I can see, “Oh, it’s not like the TEAM didn’t respect me, it’s just a different structure.” But yeah, it felt great to just be the boss and no one questioned that.

That goes back a bit to the generative-versusinterpretive halves of my career, because when I’m working as an interpretive artist now, it’s always with outside producers, meaning it’s less stressful on that very logistical front.

You’ve been married for three and a half years now. Is the traveling difficult?

ANDY GOLDBERG since 1999

I was on the road 10 months in 2014. And it was difficult. I mean, we’ve handled it, we’ve hacked it, we do FaceTime, he’s come and visited, I’ve taken excuses to come home for 48 hours from over 6 hours away.

We’re both really hardy in that sense and thrive on our alone time. But yeah, it’s been hard also. And so I’m very happy that my next year is largely New York based.

Does Jake [Heinrichs, Chavkin’s husband] ever work on shows that you’re doing?

He’s a member of the TEAM, and he’s been our lighting designer for almost every work that we’ve made. He is the most handy and generous...although, actually, the only times we fight is when he’s lighting designing for me.

And do you want a family someday?

I’ve always 100 percent wanted kids up until a couple years ago. And it just happens that currently I’m in a present where I don’t know for certain that I want a baby. As I was doing Great Comet, I was like, “Fuck, I really love my life right now.” And Jake similarly is out and about. We’re late-night birds and constantly going out. And so we’re thinking heavily about that and a lot of other stuff. So T.B.D. You’re only 34. What do you envision doing in the future?

I feel a very distinct dissatisfaction with the time that I’ve had to commit in the past year or 18 months to being a citizen and a neighbor and a member of my Crown Heights community and a member of my larger New York City community. So I’m trying to address that this year as I continue to wrap my brain around this next professional phase.

And I plan to just keep making. I was just talking to a director who is probably one step earlier than me in terms of career development, and she was asking about getting “the call” for gigs. And of the many shows I’ve worked on this year, in reading form or workshop form, or the few productions I’ve done, I made the majority of those jobs for myself or in close concert with other artists (versus waiting for an artistic director to ring) either by saying I wanted to work on something or by being with the TEAM or through relationships with writers who are saying, “Let’s make something.”

SHAUN PEKNIC, who directed A Streetcar Named Desire while at NYU and graduated in 2004, was the Resident Director of the musical Once from spring 2012 until its recent closing.

He kept the Broadway production of the show in shape, travels with the tour of the show, and has overseen sit-down productions of it in London and Toronto. He teaches directing at Playwrights Horizons Theater School.

Can you talk about how you got the job at Once?

Of course, this story now has a narrative that, looking back, makes sense. At the time, it made no sense and was a bunch of randomly connected events.

Early in my twenties, I did a whole bunch of self-producing. I formed an informal theatre company with a group of students that were a part of my graduating class at NYU. Because no one’s going to take a chance on you when you’re 22 years old––people are barely going to take a chance on you as an adult or as a proven artist. I spent most of my twenties doing survival jobs, waiting tables, assistant teaching, whatever I could cobble together.

And then, in my late twenties, I didn’t want to self-produce anymore. And I got to a point where I was like, “I need to work full-time in the business.” I needed it for myself, to keep going. I took a job with a touring circus for a year, which was a job through someone who knew someone who was looking for someone, and they particularly wanted––I was doing three people’s jobs––someone who could be a stage manager, who also understood lighting design, and also be sort of a rehearsal director. And so for a season I did that, and we would go out for three weeks at a time and then come home for a week.

And this was when you were how old?

I’m 32 now, so I was 26. In a lot of ways it was a major job for me. I would never do it again in a million years. But it’s been an important piece of my career, oddly. And then I got back into town after that season was completed, knowing I did not want to go out with that job again, and I had nothing lined up––no theatre work at all. And I was looking for classes to take because I thought, “If I can’t be working, then I can at least be educating myself in some way.” I took a free workshop for acting Shakespeare that I found on a listserv that I was a part of––it was for something called the Shakespeare Gym, and it was run by a guy called Andy Goldberg, who is just a brilliant teacher and artist. And I took this two-hour class, and I fell in love with what he had to say about Shakespeare and about acting. So I wound up signing up for a semester in his class and went back to restaurant work part-time as well and teaching part-time. My 30th birthday was approaching in the distance, and I had set this timeline for myself of “I need to see if I can make something happen before I turn 30.

Or else I don’t know if I can keep doing this.”

So during that time I found that I really liked working with young writers. I started to connect more and more with a community of downtown writers and theatre companies. I also said, “I want to start folding musicals into SPRING 2015 | SDC JOURNAL

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what I’m doing.” That was a very conscious decision, that I started seeking out musical projects. The interest in musical theatre has been there since I was a little child. I felt like Broadway and commercial theatre became a bad word in the phase of my life when I was at NYU. And I think directing a musical always scared me because I didn’t have a dance background and not really a musical background. I always felt a little bit like I wouldn’t understand how to direct a musical.

And then Andy Goldberg called me and said, “My friend John Tiffany is looking for an associate, and I’d like to put your name in for this job.” I went in to interview for the job at Once, and I did not get the job––they first hired someone else. I think because Andy and John Tiffany were so friendly with each other I was given a good priority in the interview process. And I’m pretty sure it came down to me and one other person. But I had no experience in commercial theatre, no experience in Broadway, and this other person did. And when I got a phone call from the executive producer, he said, “We know this other person, and we don’t know you.” But he also said, “We don’t know what the run of the show will be, we don’t know where it will go.

There may be opportunities in the future.”

And I was very diligent for several months.

I would send them an email once a month saying, “This is what I’m working on”––trying to find the balance of not being too present or annoying while keeping myself on their radar.

Because I thought, “If they do need someone, I don’t want to be forgotten at that point.”

Really, they didn’t know what was going to happen with the show until the Tonys. I think there was a thought from the beginning: “If this little show doesn’t win a Tony Award, we’re going to close up shop.” And then it swept the Tony Awards that year. And so the job went from being, “Maybe this will be someone that we kind of need to have around” to––John was like, “I want a full-time resident director on this production keeping an eye on things.”

So their needs changed, and they needed someone who could really devote the time to it?

Right. And as far as I understand, this person was not interested in being a full-time resident director. It’s been a full-time job. And, for me, it’s been the perfect full-time job.

But, you know, it’s a lesson that careers are made out of relationships. You find these people, and you don’t necessarily grab onto them as mentors, but I think the life of theatre is about relationships, and it’s about people who are a few steps ahead saying, “I want to take a chance on you.” Someone has to take a

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chance on you at some point in this business.

And that’s what is confusing, because once someone does take a chance on you, you think, “OK, now I’m set!” But, in fact, that kind of has to keep happening, you know?

What was it like, directing actors who had been doing the show since its beginnings at ART? I learned that I had to wade very slowly into the water with them. They were this family. I didn’t just come in and say, “I got notes for you, I know what’s supposed to happen!” These people were telling a very beautiful story very well, and so I just started showing up and being around.

Gaining their trust.

That’s what it was. That’s the most important thing. To this day I take a very soft approach in noting the show. I don’t do formal sit-down note sessions, and I sometimes keep notes for weeks. Being an associate or a resident is not about telling the actor what they’re doing right or wrong. It’s about making sure the story stays on track. And sometimes that means giving a note, and sometimes it means holding a note. John said at one point, “The right note at the wrong time is still the wrong note.” It was such a succinct way of putting it. It doesn’t matter that you think you know what something should be. What matters is that the artist can hear it and is receptive to it. Because, ultimately, they have to stand on the stage and do the show.

I’d never been more nervous directing than the first understudy rehearsal, when John Tiffany came in to observe. And, of course, nothing that’s coming out of my mouth is interesting, and I’m like “bwahbwahbwah”; my tongue felt big, and I thought, “Wait, how do I do this?”

But there’s a few moments that stand out.

There was one question I asked the actor who was understudying the Girl. It was a simple question about why she was doing something, what she was hoping to gain from an action that she was taking. And John Tiffany quickly chimed in and said, “That’s a great question–– why are you doing that?” And I was like, “OK! I asked one good question.” John made me feel like I was part of the process. Even though this was his vision and his creation and all of that, I was being invited as an artist into the room as well. And I feel like that’s what I’m constantly doing on this show. Reinvestigating.

tours and the international productions.

But people say, “What’s next?” and I keep saying, “This was the most unexpected thing in the world for me, and so will the next one be.” And in the meantime, I’ll do everything that I know how to do, but I can’t control when the great script will come my way or the next job will come my way.

I want to work with great artists and great writers. For the last few years, I’ve been directing week in and week out, and I know that it has changed me for the better. I would love to be able to assist John on something from the ground up because I didn’t get to be in a full rehearsal process with him. I didn’t take the assistant route straight out of school, and now I feel this desire to get back to apprenticeship. Being in a room with someone who’s at the top of his game has made me desire that more.

What about graduate school?

I thought a lot about it around the time I was going through this crisis of “What am I going to do next? And will I be able to get a fulltime job?” I thought, “Well, graduate school is an option.” And I thought, “If I do go to grad school, I’d like to go to the West Coast. I’d like to go to UCSD or somewhere.” I’ve been here my whole life. I thought, “It’ll be an opportunity to do something different.” And then I met my partner, Mike [Crocker], and I thought, “Well, now I’m not going to go to California.”

I knew that I wanted to be here with him.

Can you talk about how you balance your personal life with life in the theatre?

It’s one of the hardest things about it, especially with traveling. When I was a little boy, I remember sitting in my bed and dreaming that I would make theatre one day and that I would travel around the world doing it. And I am right now. That came flooding back to me at one point. But––now I have a fiancé and dogs and a home, and it’s tricky. We make it work. But it takes a lot of diligence, it takes making sure that we speak––when I’m traveling, we find the set times to do it. And it means when I am home and we’re together that we really take advantage of what we have to stay connected so that when I’m off in the middle of something we hold onto that. But it is the hardest part of it. I think just surviving in life, surviving in New York City—my partnership is a huge part of that.

What do you want to do next now that you’ll have more time when Once closes? What kind of work?

I’ll have some part-time work with Once for the next couple of years because of the

JOHN TIFFANY since 2011

COMING UP AT SDCF

SDC FOUNDATION FROM THE DIRECTOR

OBSERVERSHIP PROGRAM ACCEPTING APPLICATIONS Looking to jump-start your life as a professional director or choreographer?

Interested in expanding the skills you need to better your career? SDCF provides early- and mid-career directors and choreographers 25 paid opportunities to observe the work of master directors and choreographers as they create productions on Broadway and Off-Broadway and at leading regional theatres across the country. Applications for the 2015–2016 season due May 22, 2015. To learn more information, please visit http://sdcfoundation. org/opportunities/observerships/.

DENHAM FELLOWSHIP APPLICATIONS

Dear Readers, As the Foundation gears up for the next season, I’m taking a moment to reflect on the importance of what we do. SDCF aims to support the work of directors and choreographers at each twist and turn of their artistic journeys—from facilitating a launch pad into the field with the Observer Program to providing a well-paid opportunity at a university with the Guest Artist Initiative to recognizing and celebrating the often unsung work of established directors and choreographers outside of NYC with the Fichandler Award.

SDCF’s goals of Access, Connectivity, and Legacy are at the root of all the programming we offer.

Speaking with 2015 Observer Samantha Godfrey, I was struck by the long-lasting impact of our programs when she talked about her experience: “What I have gained from this process will live on to inform my future approaches to my own work and next assistant directorial process…I am grateful to the SDC Foundation for the opportunity to sit at Mary B. Robinson’s table. I realize all processes will differ, but what a great one to begin my Membership with SDC.” 2014 Fichandler Award winner Joseph Haj’s new appointment to the Guthrie Theatre in Minneapolis thrilled us, and we were inspired by his words, which spoke so eloquently to SDCF’s core values, upon receiving his award: “There is no greater gift an artist—maybe a human being—can be given than to be believed in. There is nothing more sacred or more ludicrous to do with one’s life than to become a theatre artist. We make it much harder for ourselves by taking insufficient care of one another. Hoarding our gifts won’t protect us from irrelevance. The best artists I know are continually giving them away, if for no other reason than that they know those gifts were given to them and that they don’t own them. Ours remains an apprenticeship game.

The craft is passed on. We learn to be good by being in the room with people who are better.”

A recent One-on-One Conversation with Anne Bogart, who has worked with a company of actors for 20-plus years, and Lear deBessonet, who makes epic, gigantic-cast productions that mix professional artists with community artists, reminded me, in no uncertain terms, about the power of collaboration and community and the commitment and work ethic required to make living art. A DCN in February about preparation for rehearsal with May Adrales, Anne Kauffman, and Lonny Price became a hilarious, passionate ode to mindfulness— they talked about working with the space you have, committing to the actors in the room, allowing a play to live and breathe by learning from each moment in rehearsal.

All of these experiences drive home for me why SDCF exists—to shine a light on directors and choreographers; to bring them into a room together to share their stories, obstacles, and accomplishments; and to give them a hand along their often solitary, always complex career paths. It is my great privilege to guide SDCF into a new season of these opportunities, and I can’t wait to see what the future will bring.

With admiration,

Megan E. Carter Director

ABOVE

Lear deBessonet + Anne Bogart MAY ADRALES since 2010 ANNE BOGART since 1990 LEAR DEBESSONET since 2007 JOSEPH HAJ since 2004 ANNE KAUFFMAN since 2005 LONNY PRICE since 1992 MARY B. ROBINSON since 1984

Applications to SDCF’s Denham Fellowship will be available online on June 19. The Denham is an annual Fellowship opportunity open to women directors to further develop their directing skills by providing $2,500 in financial support for a particular project.

For more information and application guidelines, please visit http://sdcfoundation. org/opportunities/fellowships/.

As a 501(c)3 organization separate from the Union, Stage Directors and Choreographers Foundation relies on donations from individuals to fuel our programs and develop and promote the creativity and craft of stage directors and choreographers. For as little as $10 a month, you can help us tell the story of what directors and choreographers contribute to the art form. http://sdcfoundation.org/get-involved/donate/

SDCF PROGRAMMING in 2014–2015 is made possible in part by the National Endowment for the Arts; the New York State Council on the Arts, with the support of Governor Andrew Cuomo and the New York State Legislature; public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council; the Kurt Weill Foundation for Music; IATSE; Local One IATSE; Pryor Cashman, LLP; Theatrical Teamsters, Local 817; Theatrical Wardrobe Union, Local 764; Treasurers and Ticket Sellers Union, Local 751; Stage Directors and Choreographers Society; and many generous individuals.

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LIFE ON THE ROAD SARNA LAPINE + DAVID RUTTURA BY

PHOTO

Matthew Murphy

PHOTO

Cherie Tay

EDITED BY ELIZABETH

BENNETT

Life on the road as a company member with a Broadway tour sounds like an enticing experience in national and international travel, a constant whirl of new places and audience members, and the security of not having to worry about where your next gig is coming from. But as SDC Journal learned over the past year, it’s not as glamorous as it might seem. From the national tours of War Horse and Cameron Mackintosh’s Spectacular New Production of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s The Phantom of the Opera, Associate Director Sarna Lapine and Resident Director David Ruttura recorded their experiences of rehearsing and maintaining productions on the road. Over the course of five months, they shared their thoughts with the Journal about the functions they fulfill, what it means to “maintain” a show, and how they each recharge personally and creatively.

In 2005, Sarna Lapine moved from Seattle to New York to work as assistant director on Bartlett Sher’s production of The Light in the Piazza at Lincoln Center Theater. That experience led to a series of positions supporting Sher on the Broadway revivals of Awake and Sing! and South Pacific, followed by positions as resident director on the first national tour of South Pacific and director on the second national tour. As that tour drew to a close in 2012, NETWorks Presentations called her about being associate director for the North American tour of the National Theatre’s War Horse.

“

Traveling through the country is so thrilling / Standing out

in front on opening nights / Smiling as you watch the benches filling / And see your billing up there in lights.”

IRVING BERLIN

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War Horse toured North America for two and a half years, concluding with a run in Japan during August 2014.

During the last four months of the tour, Sarna checked in with SDC Journal through reports from the road.

MARIANNE ELLIOTT since 2003 | SARNA LAPINE since 2011 | DAVID RUTTURA since 2012 BIJAN SHEIBANI since 2012 | BARTLETT SHER since 1996 | GARLAND WRIGHT d.1998

MEET SARNA The summer of my freshman year at University of Rochester I sent myself on a 50-day summer leadership course with the Colorado Outward Bound School. Having always been adventurous as well as athletic, I was drawn to an integrated approach to experiential learning. That course—which entailed operating at my physical and mental limits by whitewater rafting on the Green River, rock climbing in Wyoming, and mountaineering in the snow-covered Colorado Rockies—irrevocably changed my life. When I returned to Rochester in the fall, I could no longer see myself learning exclusively in a classroom. I transferred to the University of Washington in Seattle and pursued climbing and mountaineering as extracurricular activities until I was able to work as an Outward Bound instructor.

After I graduated, I worked as an English teacher and led an outdoor program at a private school. This led to jobs in Seattle at nonprofit organizations, including Powerful Voices, where I ran an education program for girls in juvenile detention, and volunteer work mentoring at Reel Grrls, a nonprofit media arts and leadership program where women and girls take leadership in creating media as well as work behind and in front of the camera. On one of their filmmaking retreats, I realized that the best way to lead was by example. If I were working with girls and trying to empower them, I had to develop my own leadership potential.

In Seattle, theatre came back into my life in a way it hadn’t since I was growing up in Connecticut. My parents had encouraged my interest in theatre, and I attended an arts-oriented elementary school, but I was very shy and had horrible stage fright. As much as I loved acting, dancing, and visual art, I did not love performing in front of an audience. It wasn’t until later in life that I was introduced to the possibility of being involved in productions as someone other than a performer. I always loved writing and literature and interpreting literature and thinking critically about it. Then, through filmmaking, I discovered the ways in which directing involves so much reading, research, critical analysis, and interpretation as well as visual research and design. Directing also had the added benefit of being threedimensional, physical, and collaborative across disciplines. I realized that was where I belonged and it is the thing I absolutely love to do.

TOP + MIDDLE

Sarna in rehearsal in Houston

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© Brinkhoff/Mögenburg

Amy Maguire, an incredible leader at Arts Corps in Seattle, recommended me to Laura Penn, who was the Managing Director of Intiman Theatre at the time. Laura gave me my first job in the theatre. When the opportunity arose to work at a theatre, I immediately felt at home in the midst of a very busy production season. At Intiman, I met the Artistic Director, Bart Sher, and when I realized that directing was what I wanted to do, I sought his advice. He said he had found great mentors, such as Garland Wright, and he encouraged me to find a mentor and work as an assistant director. He also suggested there were skills I already had—the discipline, instinct, passion, and preparation that are all required to lead a climbing expedition—that would translate to directing. He suggested that I should attend a lot of theatre, read, and continue to develop myself as an interesting person.

Months later, Bart offered me a chance to work as his assistant in New York on The Light in the Piazza. After Piazza opened, I was accepted into the MFA film program at Columbia University’s School of the Arts.

I continued to assist Bart on other shows and worked as his associate director on Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown—based on one of my favorite films. After Women on the Verge… opened and I directed the second South Pacific tour, I received a call from NETWorks Presentations about being the associate director on the national tour of War Horse.

War Horse is a unique theatrical event and a very big show. Both the original West End and Broadway productions were co-directed

by Marianne Elliott and Tom Morris. Now the National Theatre of Great Britain was producing its very first tour of it, and it hired British director Bijan Sheibani as well as Adrian Kohler and Basil Jones (puppet design, fabrication, and direction) from South Africa. It was SPRING 2015 | SDC JOURNAL

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a truly international team with additional creatives from various War Horse productions (West End, Lincoln Center, and Toronto).

Embarking on War Horse was a true adventure as well as a deep exercise in collaboration. I had never worked on a show with puppetry before, and I was so grateful for the opportunity to work on this beautiful show based on Michael Morpurgo’s book for children, which was adapted for the stage by Nick Stafford in association with Handspring Puppet Company. I loved working with Bijan, Basil, Adrian, and designer Rae Smith (sets, costumes, and drawings), who was able to join us for much of rehearsal and tech. It was clear how invested all these artists were in the show. Doing something for the first time is exciting because there is no road map, and we all really had to discover—and contribute— to how this show was going to tour.

In the first year, we had two full weeks of puppetry school led by Basil and Adrian and the associate puppetry director, Matt Acheson. After the rest of the cast joined us, we had five weeks of rehearsal in New York, and we teched the show in Boise, Idaho.

Marianne Elliott came to Boise, and it was a thrill to meet her. We moved the production to the Ahmanson in Los Angeles and had a mini tech, previews, and then our official opening. We have basically been on the road ever since: San Francisco, Nashville, Calgary, Sioux Falls, Salt Lake City...Having spent nearly a decade planning my life around climbing expeditions, I am still drawn to the nomadic aspects of life of the road. I love arriving in a new city and walking the area we are staying in before heading to the theatre.

My primary responsibility as the associate director is to maintain the original artistic vision of the show’s directors and creative team as well as rehearse understudies and cast replacements. Every show has its own unique requirements and rhythms. War Horse is ensemble driven. It is a very physical show. In addition to the puppetry, actors play several different roles, and there are numerous costume changes. The puppeteers are in horse teams of three, and these teams rotate every performance. This means constant change for the cast and crew. Most of the actors understudy various roles, so War Horse requires near-constant rehearsal, which can be especially exhausting on the road.

I was with the company full-time through opening, and now I come out on the road about once a month to check up on things.

I usually come out on a Wednesday when we’re in a new city. I see the show that night and have Thursday and Friday to rehearse.

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Rehearsals are usually from one to five in the afternoon. In the evenings, I watch the show and give company notes the following day. It can be intense. There are often lots of people to check in with. I coordinate my visits with Matt Acheson as well as additional members of the creative team: Greg Pliska (music director), Tom Schall (fight director), Adrienne Kapstein and Lake Simons (movement associates) as well as any visiting producers or creatives from the UK. A demand of War Horse is that actors are constantly shifting into different tracks, so every performance requires heightened attentiveness from show to show—rarely is it exactly the same night after night. One of my biggest challenges is how to embrace the constant change as a positive element and use it to encourage actors to be very awake in the present moment. In spite of all the preparation, there are many inthe-moment variables that one has to be prepared to respond to quickly, and it requires a kind of resourcefulness and flexibility.

LATE MAY 2014

REFLECTIONS ON HOUSTON In early April—which marked our two-year anniversary on the road—I flew out to Omaha. I had been noticing that the running times on the show reports were getting longer. I wanted to see where the air was in certain scenes—to address it specifically so as not to generally speed up the first act and risk losing some of the more poignant moments within the family scenes.

The narrative structure of War Horse is interesting. The first act takes place in a rural farm community in Devon, England, and focuses on a young man, his relationship to his parents, and the introduction of a foal that transforms into a full-grown horse on stage. The ensemble members create the sense of daily village life. But Act Two is dramatically different, suddenly thrust into the horrors of World War I and introducing new characters with German accents as well as a new, full-grown horse. The worlds feel at such extreme opposites. I think the theatrical version of War Horse accomplishes something Morpurgo does in his book: it shows the devastating destruction of not only human life but also, as a result of the technological advances in warfare, the destruction of nature.

After seeing the show in Omaha, I asked our movement associate, Lake Simons, a Lecoq-based theatre artist and puppeteer, to catch up on the road with us once the show moved to Houston. In the early rehearsal stages of the tour, she led a “states of tension” exercise: the cast wordlessly responds to an

imagined level of tension as she calls it out.

In rehearsal in Texas, Lake was able to get the company to reconnect to the circumstances of war and reenergize the physical landscape, which also served to tighten the pacing.

I try maintaining the bigger picture: what’s best for the show, and the group, as a whole? I want to encourage growth and excellence in the work as well as healthy backstage interactions.

But a company is like any family or community, and different people have different thresholds.

Resentments, fatigue, and conflicts do arise and can be a challenge in rehearsal, which I have to navigate to keep things moving toward our common goal: optimal performance.

JUNE

REFLECTIONS ON WINNIPEG Winnipeg is the last North American stop on tour. The company is fatigued, and some people are getting sick as we all prepare for major transition. We will have a month-long layoff before our last stop on the tour: Japan! I am focused on what we need to do before the very limited rehearsal going into Japan. Winnipeg is also a chance to see the producers, Seth Wenig and Tim Levy, again. Karen Spahn, the lighting associate, is here, too. We watch the show together and look at the lighting focus that can be cleaned up for Japan.

After opening night in Winnipeg, the producers throw a small party at a restaurant near the theatre. Some of the company members are emotional, having the realization that the tour is coming to an end. The layoff will be a chance for many people to return home, although some are without permanent residence while on the road.

It will be a chance for everyone to rest.

August–September: Reflections on Tokyo During the hiatus, I learned that one of our company members is having some serious health issues. If we lose a company member for a brief period of time on the road, we have vacation swings who can come out and fill in depending on the duration of the absence. But in Japan we won’t have that option: there are very strict rules about visas and who can work, so we are unable to bring any swings. This becomes a very difficult and stressful period of decision making. It’s the kind of moment where you feel like a real family and witness difficult circumstances bringing out the best in people.

In some sense, Winnipeg felt like the official end of the tour, so Japan seems like an incredible coda. The company is well rested after the hiatus and everyone is excited to be here. The show is at Theatre Orb, part of the Shibuya Hikarie complex, on the 11th floor of

THOMAS SCHALL since 2014

a shopping mall. The floor-to-ceiling windows in the lobby overlook the chaos of Shibuya Crossing, a massive pedestrian intersection in the heart of Tokyo’s shopping district.

Shortly after we arrive, we gather in the lobby before heading into the theatre. We only have about five hours to rehearse. The Japanese crew is outstanding and knows the show backward and forward before we even arrive.

Everyone is respectful and adoring of the piece and the company. One of our fun press events prior to performance entailed the horse teams visiting real horses at a Tokyo racetrack. The real horses didn’t know what to make of the horse puppets at first, but the puppeteers were very convincing, and pretty soon the real horses interacted with them as if they were actual horses. It was remarkable to see.

The evening we open, there is a beautiful Shinto Buddhist ceremony conducted in the theatre. All the cast, crew, and producers attended. While a Shinto priest performed it, the ceremony is not considered religious; rather, it’s about clearing the performance space of all chaos and anxiety so we are able to enter the theatre with a sense of focus and calm. It was also a fantastic way to bring together the Japanese crew and the U.S. company.

October: After the Tour’s Close Audiences loved the show. They wrote letters to the cast. It was a wonderful bonding experience for this company, which had been through a lot together over two-anda-half years. It was great recognition to go out with that much audience gratitude—the best thing any of us could have hoped for.

I left Japan after the first week of performances, and I began my post-War Horse life. I flew to Colorado to direct a new play, Hope and Gravity, by Michael Hollinger, at Creede Repertory Theatre. The day after my show opened at Creede, War Horse closed in Tokyo. It was the best time I’ve ever had on Facebook, watching as the company posted photos of an endless curtain call, with the audience on its feet, applauding wildly and not leaving the building even after the actors left the stage. Eventually the company returned to the stage in bathrobes to a much-deserved extended standing ovation.

I’ve been on the road a lot over the past five years, either traveling at least once a month to check on a touring show or directing regional productions. Getting work requires a lot of hustle—and a lot of being away from home.

Having an understanding partner helps.

I think my Outward Bound training prepared me well for a life in the theatre. The founder

believed learning could occur anywhere and should encompass the development of one’s character as well as one’s intellect. I’ve always thought of being an assistant, resident, or associate director as a unique professional apprenticeship. No matter how many times I assistant direct, I always learn something.

Every show is its own adventure. Assisting is an invaluable aspect of my education because it places me in a leadership position while still allowing for growth and learning and providing me with guidance and mentorship from very seasoned artists and producers.

I am in the process of transitioning from working as a professional associate director into helming my own projects. It isn’t the clearest or easiest transition. It requires a kind of boldness. It takes time and patience and entails compassion toward myself as I watch some projects that I’ve already spent years developing stumble and new projects arise. Now feels like an exciting time.

In the summer of 2013, David Ruttura joined the national tour of Cameron Mackintosh’s Spectacular New Production of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s The Phantom of the Opera. As the Resident Director, David Ruttura travels with the company to maintain the vision of director Laurence Connor, encourage the cast members to grow in the roles, and create a theatrical experience unlike any other that audience members have seen before. Ruttura is a veteran as both resident and assistant director, and his previous Broadway credits include work on Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark (with Philip Wm. McKinley), Irving Berlin’s White Christmas (directed by Walter Bobbie), and the 2011 revival of Follies (directed by Eric Schaeffer and choreographed by Warren Carlyle). When SDC Journal began speaking with him in June 2014, Ruttura was amid a long sit-down in Boston, contemplating an upcoming vacation and the changes that might take place as the two-year-long tour reached the milestone of one year on the road.

MEET DAVID JUNE 2014 BOSTON

I was really lucky: the community where I grew up on Long Island had a great theatre program. Everybody did it. I acted in shows but ultimately found that I was more interested working as a stage manager and designer.

Our high school theatre department was incredible. We did eight shows a year, three of which were directed by the head of the department, and the other five were all run by the students. To direct the student-run plays

you had to take a directing class. The head of the program taught staging as architecture: if you saw a scene in a particular way, you would stage it using vertical or horizontal lines, or place characters in certain spots according to what status or emotion you wanted to convey. It’s all very logical and gave me a great foundation for creating stage pictures.

If I’m ever stuck, I still often think back on how we would tackle the problem back then.

We fancied ourselves artists and were overly intense about creating theatre. I was a bit of an extracurricular nerd and was involved in the volunteer center and student government, played in the band, and was president of the drama club. I always had a great support system around me, especially from my parents.

I don’t remember an “aha” moment when I thought, “Oh, I’m going to be a director.” I wanted to have my hands in every aspect of theatre, and directing became the natural fit.

I’ve been fortunate: I started assistant directing a year out of college and have never stopped.

An SDC Observership actually got my foot in the door. I observed Walter Bobbie on White Christmas, which later turned into a five-yearlong associate job. I have found directors to be particularly supportive of young people, and that’s likely because they all seem to have had a mentor themselves—that person who gave them a chance. I think SDC fosters the idea of mentorship, and that’s essential in this career path. No one wants to hire a young director who they don’t know. But when someone like Walter Bobbie says, “Dave is the real deal, Dave is talented. I’ve worked with him, he has developed shows with me,” that means something and it’s helpful.

In addition to my incredible directing mentors, I have been really lucky to call Tom Schumacher from Disney Theatrical a mentor.

I interned with Disney when I was in college.

They held weekly symposia where we met with people in different departments to ask questions. One day was with Tom. There’s no one more candid, and he can be surprisingly critical of his own shows. At 19 years old, I asked a question about how certain dance numbers felt dropped into Aida and The Lion King: were these creative decisions or the result of producerial pressures? I was wrong in my assumptions, but Tom loved the brazenness of my question. Afterward, he found me in the mailroom and sent me out with the assignment to see and review Dance of the Vampires. I did, and it was scathing, too long, and specific. He brought me in and we talked and talked. He came to see my undergraduate thesis at Fordham University and everything I’ve directed since, and he always wants to meet afterward

WALTER BOBBIE since 1993 | WARREN CARLYLE since 2000 | LAURENCE CONNOR since 2010 | PHILIP WILLIAM MCKINLEY since 1991 | ERIC SCHAEFFER since 1996

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TOP + MIDDLE

David on Phantom set PHOTOS Matthew Murphy

to talk about it. Tom loves discussing process, often saying, “That moment didn’t work; why did you make that choice?” He continues to give me advice as I navigate this industry’s tricky waters. It has been enormously valuable in teaching me to always be my own biggest critic.

It seems that there are three tiers for assistant directors. It’s very easy to think of them as the same, but they’re not. There’s the assistant to the director, which is basically a personal assistant. Then there’s a fuzzy line between associate directors and assistant directors. In either of those positions, a person can still act as the director’s personal assistant but generally has a relationship with directors in which they rely on you in a much more creative and managerial way. As an associate, you’re involved in the complete creative process: you go to production meetings and feel comfortable voicing an opinion; you have conceptual conversations with your boss; you set scenes; you give notes. You’re a partner with the director, and you’re someone the team can go to who has the authority to make certain decisions. A resident director manages the day-to-day creative life of an already set and running show.

There are no set parameters for salaries for associate and resident directors, so negotiating a salary or fee can be tricky, and that’s why you should have an agent. I have a really great agent—Seth Glewen at Gersh—who negotiates contracts for me. Seth helps me to not destroy relationships with general managers when I’m screaming about low offers. He very simply says, “Stop taking it so personally, it’s not personal, it’s about money.” He gives me the courage to say, “No.” When I was just 22, I would do the same job for a quarter of the money. Now I try to set my minimums against what the stage managers are being paid. Sometimes it works out, sometimes it doesn’t.

I’ve been working on the national tour of The Phantom of the Opera since October 2013. In light of the 25th anniversary of the original production, producer Cameron Mackintosh wanted to create a version for the next generation of theatergoers—one that would make use of technological advances and reflect the shifting sensibility of the audience. The set has been completely redesigned, and the staging and choreography have been re-thought. This affords us an opportunity to explore who the characters are through a 21st-century lens. Our director, Laurence Connor, has created a production that is more cinematic, darker, grittier, and ultimately more human. A person who might not have been wooed by the romanticism of the original will find a clear and grounded story that draws the audience into the backstage life and the mysteries of what lurks in the shadows. It’s an exciting reinvention of a beloved story.

As the resident director on tour, I live here, on the ground, every day, dealing with the day-to-day. My coworkers are my friends and family, for better or worse. The management company asks me to not watch the show more than four times a week to help me keep a fresh perspective. But the reality is that if someone is out sick, I’m going to want to see their understudy. If we have new cast members, I want to watch more to help shape their performances, so I often watch the show five or six times a week.

We generally rehearse two or three times a week. The nice thing about the show—and Cameron Mackintosh shows in general—is that the creative team maintains a presence. This past week we had notes with Seth Sklar-Heyn, our associate director. Next week, Scott Ambler, the choreographer, and Nina Goldman, his associate, are coming out. John Rigby, our music supervisor, will be with them as well. That week will be full of rehearsals with fixes and tweaks from fresh eyes. No matter what, being around the show as much as I am, you can develop tunnel vision.

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Cooper Grodin + Julia Udine in Spectacular New Production of The Phantom of The Opera PHOTO Matthew Murphy

SCOTT AMBLER since 2013 | SETH SKLAR-HEYN Assoc. since 2011

One of the wonderful things about this production’s creative team is the flexibility I have working with the actors who understudy or replace roles. We have three different actresses playing Christine, the female lead. They are each extremely talented but very different. We focus on building their individual Christine but work hard to make sure they’re telling the same story.

I try to draw out the best version of the story based on each individual’s strengths.

The actresses are all giving their best work because it’s their work. I never say, “Just say it like this.” The conversation gives the actor ownership of the role, which helps make it more personal and ultimately creates a better and more honest performance.

JULY 2014 MILWAUKEE

I have come back to the show after a week on vacation in Egypt. Going to a place like that makes you really grateful for what you have.

The poverty there is extreme, while we’re here floating with our big tour, going out for dinner, and earning production contract salaries. You lose perspective on how the other half of the world lives. It was great for me to reset and be inside a completely different culture.

The economy is really depressed. We went to the pyramids in Giza—one of the seven wonders of the ancient world—and there was just no one there. Lots of tour guides to take you on camel rides, but no tourists.

As a result, everybody’s really desperate for your money; they need you to spend. Despite this, the populace is remarkably hopeful and upbeat, considering they’re still amid a revolution. It doesn’t feel like a war-torn country, but you see remnants of it. The Egyptian Museum—which has the largest collection of ancient Egyptian artwork and relics—is surrounded by barbed wire and tanks. During the revolution, one of the first places the extremist rioters attacked was the museum because they wanted to destroy any Western influence, specifically the tourism industry. There are tanks spread out all over Cairo. It’s sort of daunting and reminded me of Penn Station during the early days following September 11. Everywhere you go there are police with machine guns.

AUGUST 2014 DALLAS

We have had a busy time here in Dallas because we’re putting someone new into the role of Reyer. It’s a substantial feature role and a delicious character. When I’m rehearsing only one person, that actor is probably getting

more one-on-one attention than the person who originated the role. I start the first day with table work to talk about director Laurence Connor’s ideas—interspersed with my ideas—about both the big picture and about the individual character. We go from there.

There’s usually a two-to-three-hour vocal rehearsal with the music director to go over the music. The process can be overwhelming, and everyone tries to be aware of that.

When we get the actor up on his feet on the second or third day, we review everything we talked about and start teaching the blocking.

I use a software program called Stage Write [see Fall 2013 Issue, “Capturing Creativity,” for our story on Jeff Whiting and his app, Stage Write] that is an easy way to make blocking charts. Each move is color-coded, numbered, and dropped onto specific lines in the script.

When on our feet, I play all the other parts with the actor and someone at the piano.

I’m a terrible actor, but I have the show’s rhythms in my body, and I think it’s useful to have someone to play against. We’ll have at least three days of rehearsal together before we go into an onstage spacing rehearsal with understudies. Finally, we’ll do a put-in rehearsal before he begins performances in Oklahoma City at the end of this month.

The process is like peeling an onion, or building an onion: you keep adding layers.

The put-in rehearsal is the last layer, where we add in costumes and the full company.

In October, we’ll reach the one-year point in the tour. Everyone’s contracts are up at the same time, and typically people start to leave. We don’t know the specifics yet, but we can anticipate that there will be several cast changes, so we’re looking ahead to create an appropriate rehearsal schedule and book rehearsal space.

I am loving Dallas. We’re here for another week, and it will be hard to leave. The city has great food and feels very cosmopolitan.

The audience here loves the show. We broke the record for weekly grosses in this theatre. We’ve been staying at a Sheraton that has a huge convention center. Last week, there was a child abuse awareness conference, so FBI agents, cops, and firemen were running around, drinking beer. Now there’s an anime conference with people dressed as cartoon characters. It’s really funny. We’re all looking forward to what next week’s conference will bring.

loud. When we were in Appleton, Wisconsin, they were particularly subdued, which made me nervous that they weren’t enjoying the show; I wondered if there was something wrong. But then the curtain call came and they stood immediately. After a while, you realize you can’t control the response and you can’t change the course of the show based on that.

October 2014: New York: Year Two Begins A year after I began the Phantom tour, I’m back in New York for two full weeks of rehearsal.

Nine cast members have decided to move on, so we’re replacing the three main characters, three supporting roles, and three ensemble members. Two cast members got stolen from us and are moving into the Broadway cast! I think our cast is excited to have new energy in the building. I’m happy to be working with people who have new approaches and are bringing their particular talents to the roles.

There are new opportunities for me to finesse and play with particular aspects as we go.

At a certain point with maintaining a show, you run out of things to say. You’ve explored every nook and cranny of a performance.

Bringing fresh people in reinvigorates the show and forces you to explore the little details that you take for granted.

These two weeks in New York are a blessing, and I am grateful to the producers for extra rehearsal time. We will rejoin the company in New Orleans, where we’ll start putting it all together. No one is going to want to rehearse in New Orleans—not even me—but we have to. We move on to Fort Lauderdale around Thanksgiving, where we’ll continue to rehearse and they’ll start to trail, which is following the people they’re replacing backstage during a performance. Then they’ll do a full run-through with orchestra—which is like a final dress rehearsal—and start the first week of their preview performances on Tuesday, which is followed four days later by their official opening on a Friday night.

I am staying on for another year, and I feel really good about that. It’s funny: I don’t miss New York. I gave up my apartment in August 2013 in anticipation of this tour, so, for the first time, I don’t have a base in the city. I miss parts of New York, like going to shows and being connected to a cultural center. I miss my friends. But I don’t miss walking through Times Square, as I have done for so many years now. I’m excited about the challenges the new year and new cast members bring.

It’s interesting to see how the audience response shifts regionally. The Midwest was quiet. Dallas has been really boisterous and

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Is there anything that director/choreographer KATHLEEN MARSHALL can’t do? In seasons past, Marshall has directed and choreographed revivals of some of the greatest musicals of Broadway’s Golden Age including Wonderful Town, Kiss Me Kate, and her Tony Awardwinning productions of The Pajama Game and Anything Goes. Marshall’s work on interpreting the classics is known for preserving the spirit of the originals that so many audience members know and love while using her own carefully researched and considered approach to imbibe the material with fresh perspective. New projects that hit the boards during the past two theatre seasons included the world premiere of Diner, a musical stage adaptation of Barry Levinson’s much-loved film; a reimagined musical version of the story of spunky heroine Molly Brown; and a Broadway play written by her Nice Work If You Can Get It collaborator, Joe DiPietro.

Just after opening Diner at Signature Theatre in Virginia, Ms. Marshall spoke with Kent Nicholson, known for his own work helming musicals at regional theatres around the country while also working as Director of Musical Theater at Playwrights Horizons. During their conversation, Ms. Marshall reflected happily on a childhood full of musical theatre; her trajectory as a performer, choreographer, and director; and the importance of lessons learned from watching the masters.

STARTING FROM A PLACE OF REALITY

BY KENT

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NICHOLSON

KATHLEEN MARSHALL since 1994 | KENT NICHOLSON since 2006

Walter McBride PHOTO SPRING 2015 | SDC JOURNAL

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KENT NICHOLSON | Do you remember the first musical that you saw, and how was that experience for you in terms of getting you involved in the theatre?

KATHLEEN MARSHALL | My family is from Pittsburgh, and my parents were great theatre fans and took us to see absolutely everything.

I think I saw my first Shakespeare play when I was five or six and my first opera around that same time. We saw musicals, too. They had tons of cast albums. My parents are from Boston, and in the summer we would drive from Pittsburgh to Boston, and we started a tradition of stopping in New York to see a show and then continuing on to Boston or home to Pittsburgh. The first Broadway production that my parents took us to was the Gypsy revival with Angela Lansbury.

Growing up, we thought all songs came from [musical theatre]. There would be a song on the radio and my brother, sister, and I would say, “Well, what’s that song from?” And my parents would say that it’s just a song. We thought all songs were supposed to have some kind of story context.

watch the other shows rehearsing. It was after that that I started taking dance lessons; I think it was from that experience of seeing the dancers and seeing shows being put together that really sparked my interest. I didn’t start taking dance until I was about 13 years old.

KENT | Who became your greatest influences as a choreographer as you transitioned into that?

KATHLEEN | Back in Pittsburgh, Mario Melodia was our ballet and jazz dance teacher.

Lenora Nemetz was a real influence. She is a Pittsburgher who has all kinds of New York credits. She replaced Chita Rivera in the original production of Chicago and recently played Mazeppa in the Gypsy revival. But at that time she was in Pittsburgh, starring in all these shows and choreographing some of them. We got to watch her work.

And then I think it’s a combination of choreographers that you’ve never met that you’ve admired: Bob Fosse, Michael Kidd, and Agnes de Mille. And I’m lucky that, as an assistant choreographer and then as a choreographer, I got this wonderful apprenticeship observing other choreographers and directors working. I got to

assistant choreographers before we started choreographing or directing on our own.

KENT | As you were beginning to choreograph your own shows, did you always have in the back of your mind that one day you would be directing as well?

KATHLEEN | I think so. I first started directing on my own when I was Artistic Director at Encores!, where I’d already choreographed several shows. We were going to do Babes in Arms, and I’d gone to several directors who were not available, weren’t interested, or didn’t think they had a way into the show.

I remember going in to Judith Daykin, who was the Executive Director of City Center at the time, and Rob Fisher, and saying, “I think I know a way into this show. I think I have a handle on how to do this. So I think I want to take this on myself.” So actually, [in] my first directing job, I hired myself.

KENT | That’s a good way to do it.

KATHLEEN | My brother and I talked about this a lot. As the choreographer, you have a lot of the same sort of duties as a director in terms of shaping the material

“

I love research. I love becoming a temporary expert on whatever show I’m working on, learning about the music, movement, and style of the day.

So, we were fans before we ever participated in any way—took lessons or did shows.

We were musical theatre fans first.

KENT | You started as a performer and slowly moved toward choreography. How did you then get involved in performing?

KATHLEEN | We performed in school productions. We had a wonderful elementary school teacher who, when we were in elementary school, put on operettas by Gilbert and Sullivan and also musicals like Oliver and Fiddler on the Roof. And then we all auditioned—my brother Rob, my sister Maura, and me—for Pittsburgh Civic Light Opera’s production of The Sound of Music.

We saw the audition in the paper and said we wanted to go down. My parents said, “You have no training. You’re just kids who dance around the living room and do school shows. But we’ll take you down there.” And we all got in, cast as the von Trapp kids.

It was the last show of the season, and they brought the kids in periodically through the summer to rehearse. On our breaks, we would

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assist my brother on shows that were directed

by Hal Prince, Scott Ellis, Jack O’Brien, and Blake Edwards. I got to really observe and see how shows are put together and how directors talked to writers and designers and ran a production meeting, a tech, a rehearsal, and all of that. I assisted my brother; Rob Ashford assisted me. My brother assisted Graciela Daniele, who had assisted Bob Fosse. It’s an apprenticeship art in that way.

KENT | Was there a kind of “aha” moment when you started the transition into directing?

Or was that something that just seemed more like a fluid, natural progression?

KATHLEEN | I think it was sort of gradual.

Most directors and choreographers I know have made the same progression. Directors come at it from all different angles. They are directors who were actors or writers. Hal Prince was a producer and a stage manager before he became a director. Some people only wanted to ever be directors, but almost every director or choreographer I know had the same pattern, which is that we were all performers.

Then a lot of us became dance captains or

and working with actors and working with designers. But the full responsibility, the final decision, rests with somebody else.

Then, when you step up, you realize, “Oh, those final decisions come to me and those tough calls and those tough conversations are on me.”

As the choreographer, you can sit at the back of the house and go, “Hm, I hope somebody’s going to do something about that costume,” or “Oh, that performance is way over-the-top.”

And then you realize, “Oh, I’m the director. I’m the person who has to deal with those things.”

KENT | When you approach a show as a choreographer, do you conduct research?

KATHLEEN | Oh, yeah. Especially since most of the shows I’ve done have been a specific period in our time and place. I love research.

I love becoming a temporary expert on whatever show I’m working on, learning about the music, movement, and style of the day. I used to spend hours and hours at the Lincoln Center performing arts library looking at—let’s say, when I did Kiss Me

Sutton Foster + company in Anything Goes at Roundabout Theatre Company in New York Joan Marcus PHOTO

Kate—looking at swing dancing and other period dancing of the time or renting movies.

Now it’s all on the Internet. You just go onto YouTube. I don’t have to go to the library anymore, and we can just show it to the actors. I mean, even with Diner, I pulled up old American Bandstand excerpts and Elvis Presley movies and things like that to show everybody the social dancing and commercials of the time just to put them in the time and place and the behavior and the style.

KENT | How does that differ when you take on a show as director/choreographer?

Is it pretty much the same process, or are there different things that you focus on when you’re directing as well?

KATHLEEN | I think it’s a lot of the same process. Although, with directing, you’re so much more involved early on in shaping the whole script that you just work more directly with the writers. I feel like, with directing, so much of your work is done before you even walk into rehearsal: how you’ve shaped the material, the work with the designers, the casting. You’ve already made so many major decisions before you even walk in the room.

ROB ASHFORD since 2000 | GRACIELA DANIELE since 1976 AGNES DE MILLE d.1993 | SCOTT ELLIS since 1991 | BOB FOSSE d.1987 | MICHAEL KIDD d.2007 | JACK O’BRIEN since 1969 HAL PRINCE since 1963

KENT | What about when you’re doing a revival such as The Pajama Game or Anything Goes, where the writer is not necessarily around?

KATHLEEN | With Anything Goes, we did have John Weidman and Tim Crouse, who had done the adaptation for the Lincoln Center version, and which we based the Roundabout production on. They still did some more work on the book for us. We changed the finale, added a reprise of “I Get a Kick Out of You” and a reprise of an encore of “You’re the Top” and things that didn’t exist in that Lincoln Center version.

from a place of reality: what’s going on and who these people are and what do they want and why do they behave the way they do. I think the comedy will land better if these are real people that we care about. So, with both Anything Goes and The Pajama Game, we did a lot of table work to figure out all the relationships before we even got up on our feet.

KENT | How do you deal with the imprint of the original production? Or do you try to not deal with the imprint of the original production?

KENT | So that was my next question: even when you’re doing a revival, do you try to wrap your head around it as if it were a new play?

KATHLEEN | With Anything Goes, I’d done an early-’60s version in summer stock, so I knew that version, and I’d seen the Lincoln Center version. And even though it was 25 years later, people still had great affection for that Lincoln Center production. I kept thinking, “How can we give people the show they think they know and love but also continually surprise them?” So that was fun, especially in terms of the design and the staging, to find things that would be a surprise that nobody expected, little delights along the way.

KATHLEEN | I think so. You have to figure out who those characters are and why they behave the way they do—especially when you’re doing something that really is a comedy. I like starting

But I also think with a show that’s as strong as Anything Goes you also have to just do it as best you can and not screw it up. And to find the right tone, too.

I think it’s important—even when you’re doing a revival, even if it’s based on something that was a successful production—you still need to approach it like a new show and say, “Okay, exactly what’s going on in this scene?

Why is this song here? Is this song the right song? Does it unfold in the right way?”

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I think one of the things that was important is that we got this amazing cast. We got people who take their comedy seriously. It can become broad because it has its elements of farce to it, but you never want it to become campy.

KENT | What about with something like The Pajama Game, where the original choreographer was Bob Fosse and there’s such a unique, identifiable style with the show? What’s your relationship to that legacy when you take on a show like that?

KATHLEEN | It’s daunting. Then, when I did the research and started looking at the 1950s jazz style and you see that the ’50s style of jazz was turned-in, knocked knees, tucked elbows, bent wrists and a tucked chin that a lot of people were doing. Fosse took it and crystallized it into something that was really, really unique in his own style.

But looking at that research, I thought, “Well, this kind of beatnik-y jazz is not just Fosse.

Other people are doing this, too.” It gave me the permission to think, “I can do that. I can sort of drag my feet and tuck my elbows.” Even though a lot of people think of that as Fosse, it’s more than Fosse. It’s of its era and of its time.

’50s but are a little distasteful now. There was kind of a lecherous married union president who was hitting on all the girls, and I think the only girl that responded to him was kind of a round girl. With the permission of the estate, we changed that and made the union president somebody who still lives with his mother and is unsuccessful with women. The one who finally responds to him is the shy girl and the tomboyish girl. So it’s sort of the same story— but not. A lot of humor and tastes change, and you have to make sure when you’re doing a revival that a modern audience has the same experience that the original audience had but that makes sense for our sensibility today.

KENT | Let’s talk a little bit about your television work. How were the experiences of doing Once Upon a Mattress and the choreography in The Music Man? What kinds of things are different when you’re dealing with that medium as opposed to live stage?

KATHLEEN | Well, of course, in television and film, you can work 360 degrees and you can do jump cuts. Always on stage, you’re trying to figure out, especially in choreography, “How am I going to get from this section to that section, from the girls to the guys or from this

KATHLEEN | The good thing is that musical films—whether it’s TV or features—have to be rehearsed. Some films are just blocked and shot on the same day. For the musical elements, you have to prerecord the vocals, and you have to rehearse the choreography ahead of time. So, a lot of times, the director of photography would come into the rehearsals with the director and talk through shots even as you were choreographing it. They would even film rehearsals with already syncing some camera angles.

It’s such a different medium because you decide what the audience sees as opposed to a theatre, where you can focus it in a certain way, but the audience can decide what to look at.

KENT | Did you find that visual control freeing?

Or was that more daunting? Or just different?

KATHLEEN | It was certainly daunting, and then you realize we can see what they want to see. But the nervousness…especially when you’ve got a big production number and you only have a day or two to film it. That’s always nerve-racking because you can’t recreate that, especially if you have a big number with 40 dancers and you’re going

“

Even when you’re doing a revival, even if it’s based on something that was a successful production—you still need to approach it like a new show...

One thing we knew for sure was that “Steam Heat” was going to be a trio with a girl and two guys in bowler hats. Then we took it to another level by deconstructing it a little bit and, as the number went on, they lost their hats, they lost their jackets, they got a little sexier and more masculine and feminine, as opposed to just the masculine silhouette, just to give it a little extra. It’s what you expect, but something a little different.

KENT | So there’s a nod to the original and to the legacy of it but still trying to, as you pointed out earlier, make sure that the audience remains surprised.

KATHLEEN | Yes. I remember reading the original reviews of The Pajama Game, and they said how delightful it was and funny, sexy, and sort of a wonderfully paced George Abbott show. But then you realize that, for a modern audience, our pace is different now.

And there were some aspects of the original show that might have been funny back in the

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to that?” Sometimes the transitions in film can be different. It can be continuous, or you can jump cut or move to something else without having to physically get there in the same way.

The camera can become part of the choreography, and you can turn upstage, and then the camera can follow you and catch you. It’s very freeing in that way. I think the challenge is that the one element you don’t get in film and television is an audience.

You’re working on your own. Films have more of a process because they do previews and you can re‑edit or sometimes even reshoot, but you certainly don’t get that process in television. You are putting it together on your own instincts. That’s the one element I think I really missed: getting a chance to see it in front of an audience and hear how they respond and then adjust again after that.

KENT | Did you find yourself being involved in the editing process, or were you—as you thought about being a choreographer for it—live editing in your mind?

to get one day or two days to film that.

KENT | Just thinking a little philosophically, do you feel that there are any classic musicals that audiences are yearning to see or engage with? I guess I’m asking what is it about classic musicals that make people attached to them, other than nostalgia?

KATHLEEN | I think, when it comes down to it, people want story. They want real characters and real story. And I think that there are characters that they can identify with, relate to, or root for. A lot of those classical musicals treat their characters very seriously, even if they’re comedies or maybe they’re a mix of drama and comedy, like a classic R&H show. But they are real people in whatever world they’re in.

I think people like that. Even with modern technology, a story of real people and then a beautiful melody at the right time is still magical. I think there will always be a craving for that. There’s still something magical and

GEORGE ABBOTT d.1995

"Hernando's Hideway" in The Pajama Game at Roundabout Theatre Company in New York PHOTO

Joan Marcus

LEFT + RIGHT

Kelli O'Hara + Harry Connick, Jr. in The Pajama Game at Roundabout Theatre Company in New York PHOTO

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Rehearsal for Living on Love PHOTO Walter McBride

transporting when a character can’t say what they think anymore; they have to sing it.

KENT | Let’s talk about your recent project, Diner, for just a second because I think that element is very clear in that piece. It focuses on a story, takes its characters very seriously, and there are those transportive moments when you burst into song.

Are you finding that audiences respond similarly to the modern American musical that operates in those same terms as they do with the Rodgers and Hammerstein?

KATHLEEN | It’s funny; our Diner cast has talked about that. There are six main guys and three main women, and there’s a lot of plot to cover, in a way. I talked to the cast about trusting that the audience will go along for the ride, but they need the time to get to know you.

So, let the audience get to know you; let it unfold. Don’t push—especially the first act or the first half of the first act. Let them get to know you and care about you so that, if things then unfold, they’re involved.

By the time the plot unfolds in the second act, there are sometimes gasps or cheers.

They’re really on board because now they’ve gotten to know these characters.

KENT | Is there a way you found to help the audience find the focus for each of the characters? How did you approach that?

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KATHLEEN | I think what’s unusual about Diner is that Barry Levinson’s writing is so naturalistic.

It feels spontaneous, and there’s a little bit of looseness in the script. The characters are so distinct in the writing, and you have to let them be those vivid, unique characters.

for. Even if there’s an antihero, like Sweeney Todd, we’re still rooting for him to succeed.

How that happens is through what they say and what they do and not just their behavior.

So I think stage requires characters to be more active than they have to be in film.

KENT | I often wonder about the focus on character, and I think this is also partially a choreographic question. It seems to me that one thing film can do really well is give you a point of view of a character and that, as you alluded to earlier about the differences between choreographing for film and TV and for stage, you can’t always tell the audience where to look on stage. Do you find characters undergo transformations in that kind of way, where the focus of whose narrative you’re following changes a little bit—or where the audience maybe starts following something that you hadn’t intended them to as you’re developing the pieces?

KENT | That’s interesting. I’ve never thought about it quite that way.

KATHLEEN | Yes. In a film, you can see him looking at her, and then you can see her looking at him, and you can imagine what their whole relationship is, and you can forgive a lot. I think it’s interesting, especially when you have characters who maybe behave badly, but we forgive them on film because we have the close-up, and we can see those big, sad eyes, or we know he feels sorry, or we know she feels badly about what she’s done.

It’s different on stage. We need people to root

When you’re starting work on a show, as you’re doing your preparation, do you find that the choreography comes first and sets the tone, or do you find yourself working more as a director first and setting tone with things like set and lighting? Or do you visualize a movement world first?

KATHLEEN | I feel like you kind of spiral in from the outside to the center of a show.

You don’t know what it is, but you might have a general concept about the style of it or a general concept about the design of it or the movement and then, as you read the script and as you start casting and start working with designers and doing research or whatever, you start spiraling in on it gradually until you get to the center. But then everything informs everything else.

With Diner, there was a design concept that we had these side towers to kind of look industrial, almost like metal fire escapes, because we knew there were a lot of scenes

“

As the choreographer, you can sit at the back of the house and go, 'Hm, I hope somebody’s going to do something about that costume,' or 'Oh, that performance is way over-the-top.'

And then you realize, 'Oh, I’m the director. I’m the person who has to deal with those things.'

that were happening at the same time or phone calls or vignettes. We needed to be able to get quickly from the focus on one person to another or one team to another. So that became part of the staging concept—that we’d be able to isolate somebody up here, and then something else is being set up downstairs, and we'd quickly go back and forth and not be sharing the same space at the same time.

But I think also Diner was an interesting show in terms of choreography because we have a couple of stylized moments when things happen in a way that is slightly surreal or stylized. The dialogue is so natural and spontaneous that we had to find a way that the movement for the guys did the same thing. And there are times when we felt that it feels too artificial or stage-y.

KENT | Were you trying to find ways of turning some of the social dance that you researched into that more naturalized vocabulary, or did you have to come up with something completely different for those moments?

KATHLEEN | That was the fun thing—to think how we could get their youthful energy and their masculine energy but in a way that feels like it’s still them and that doesn’t feel like they turn into the dancing chorus.

I think that every show has its own style.

West Side Story starts off with dance, and

it’s like, okay, they enter dancing, so that’s the way that story’s going to unfold. All the characters are going to dance. In that way, your job, especially as the choreographer, is to serve the show and not serve yourselves and not insert dance where it doesn’t belong.

KENT | Interesting. One of the things that SDC is eager to explore is the idea of mentorship.

Are there any young artists who are coming up who you have an eye on or who you feel like are covering some new ground in this way?

KATHLEEN | I’m so proud of Marc Bruni, who has been my associate director on I think every Broadway show I’ve done. Now he’s out on his own; he just directed Beautiful and did a great job with The Explorers Club off-Broadway, and there are other things in development. I’m just so thrilled for him that he’s kicking off in that way.

It’s wonderful that there are opportunities for new voices to be heard. But I also think it’s like any art: it’s important to know the history. To have some knowledge of what traditional musicals have been and what groundbreaking musicals have accomplished.

bring somebody on? Obviously you developed a very strong relationship with Marc, but if it’s somebody new, what responsibility do you feel toward giving them [guidance]?

KATHLEEN | I think it’s important for people to observe the process. I think it’s important to allow people in to the process because I feel like that’s how I learned. I got to see Hal Prince, Jack O’Brien, Susan H. Schulman, Scott Ellis, and Michael Blakemore at work and see how they did it. It’s important to give people the opportunity to see what goes on in the room.

Even if you’re a performer in theatre, you often don’t know what’s happening on the other side of the table or on the other side of the proscenium because, as you should be, you’re just involved in your performance.

KENT | Is there anything that had surprised you about where your career has gone so far?

KATHLEEN | I’m thrilled that I’m going to be actually directing a play this spring, which I didn’t expect, and I mean I’m thrilled that I get to do what I do with the caliber of people I get to work with, both on stage and off.

KENT | Thinking about Marc, because he has assisted you for so many shows, thinking about that legacy and how mentorship works, how do you view that responsibility when you

MICHAEL BLAKEMORE since 1968 | MARC BRUNI since 2008 | SUSAN H. SCHULMAN since 1981

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AGNES DE MILLE A PIONEER ON STAGE AND OFF

BY BEN

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PESNER

As the original choreographer for Oklahoma! and Carousel, Agnes de Mille earned heaps of acclaim and secured a place of honor in the history of the Broadway musical.

What she didn’t receive was ownership of her work. She never achieved a financial return consummate with the impact her Broadway choreography made on the musical theatre nor with the revenue her shows generated for their producers and authors.

De Mille returned to work with Rodgers and Hammerstein on their next show, Carousel (1945), which was another hit, and again on Allegro (1947), which was not. She staged the book for Allegro in addition to creating the dances and achieved a notable milestone in becoming the first woman to supervise a major Broadway musical as both director and choreographer. In their final collaboration together, Rodgers and Hammerstein hired de Mille to adapt her dances when they produced the movie version of Oklahoma!

Instead, she got angry—and set about changing the ground rules that governed the business end of show business. She did this not just for herself but for her brother and sister choreographers as well.

Though Allegro was a disappointment to all of its creators, de Mille had by then become a mainstay on Broadway and in the dance world. She received many accolades and honors over her long career, including a Tony Award for her work on Brigadoon (1947). She wrote numerous books, appeared frequently on television, and toured the country extensively to perform and lecture on dance.

This is the story of an artist who channeled her outrage into activism. She successfully lobbied Congress to extend copyright protection to choreography and helped establish SDC. It’s a story of reconciliation with an organization that once seemed indifferent to her cause, which eventually came to champion—and document—her groundbreaking work. l

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In her 1958 memoir, And Promenade Home (one of several she would pen throughout her lengthy career), de Mille wrote in considerable detail about her financial relationship with Oklahoma!: “When I signed my contract for Oklahoma! I was unknown on Broadway. I had neither union nor precedent to help me. I made what terms I could. They were not good…I cite them because they represent the common lot of any beginner in the business, then and now.”

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Agnes de Mille was born in 1905 to a family with deep roots in the theatre. Both her father and grandfather were playwrights, and her celebrated uncle, Cecil B. DeMille (who changed the capitalization of the family name), became synonymous with big-budget Hollywood epics. Agnes was a relatively unknown choreographer and dancer when she became a charter member of the American Ballet Theatre in 1940. Though she remained associated with the company for the rest of her career, a piece she created for the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo to music by Aaron Copland became her greatest early triumph. Rodeo debuted at the Metropolitan Opera House on October 16, 1942, with de Mille herself dancing the lead role. It received 22 curtain calls.

Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II were in the audience that night. They were scouting for a choreographer to work on a show they were writing for the Theatre Guild, a musical adaptation of Green Grow the Lilacs, a play about cowboys and farmers in the Oklahoma Territory. They signed de Mille, and Oklahoma! opened on Broadway the following year. The musical was a box-office dynamo and established Rodgers and Hammerstein as the most successful partnership in Broadway history. Never before had a Broadway musical so thoroughly integrated music and dance into the storytelling or used choreography to tell the story in so sophisticated a manner.

This was due in no small part to de Mille’s famous 15-minute dance sequence at the end of Act I. The ballet probes hidden feelings and desires, and is regarded as the first “dream ballet” in the Broadway musical canon.

AGNES DE MILLE d.1993

Like other up-and-coming choreographers, the young de Mille entered into contracts that today would be considered substandard.

The deals she signed with the Theatre Guild were typical of the era and she had received the going rate, plus small royalties or none at all, and maintained no ownership stake in the dances she created. The exception was Brigadoon, for which she began collecting royalties after threatening a lawsuit in 1963, 16 years after its premiere. Later, she achieved more and more success on Broadway and in the ballet world and found herself in a position to negotiate better deals, though, according to her biographer Carol Easton, she complained that her best contracts were for her least successful shows, which generated hardly any income.

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Agnes de Mille c/o SDC archives

ABOVE A de Mille dancer in "Money Isn't Everything?" from Allegro in 1947 c/o Rodgers + Hammerstein OPPOSITE Lawrence Langer, Richard Rodgers, Agnes de Mille + Oscar Hammerstein in rehearsal for Allegro c/o Billy Rose Theatre Division, The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, Astor, Lenox + Tilden Foundations

Oklahoma! became an economic juggernaut, playing on national tour more or less continuously through 1954. There were also productions in London and across the globe, and a successful Hollywood adaptation. Yet the deal de Mille initially received from the Theatre Guild yielded her a pittance in relation to the show’s huge financial success. “I signed for $1,500 cash and no royalties,” she wrote.

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the Guild granted me $50 a week.” de Mille asked for an increase to $75 per week, but the Guild’s Lawrence Langer refused, citing his obligation to the show’s backers. De Mille reported that Langer’s concern for the backers bore fruit; by 1953, an investment of $1,500 in the show would have returned $50,000.

De Mille eventually received a small royalty for the U.S. touring company but had to sign away other rights. “There were no rights and royalties for any of the stockcompany or summer-opera performances of [Oklahoma!],” she wrote in And Promenade Home. “But my dances, or a version of them, are nearly always reproduced.”

By the mid-1950s, Rodgers and Hammerstein had bought out the Theatre Guild, purchasing the rights to the three shows de Mille had collaborated on. The authors assumed control of the musicals and all the work that went into them, including de Mille’s choreography, which they now owned.

De Mille’s relationship with Rodgers and Hammerstein had begun well. She was particularly close to Hammerstein, whom she turned to as a “big brother” on many occasions. “The relationship grew to be one of the joys of my life,” she wrote. But then, in de Mille’s account, barriers arose between the authors’ ambitions and the interests of their collaborators. She didn’t mention Rodgers and Hammerstein by name in her memoir, but it’s not hard to guess to whom she was referring: “Many authors and composers consider the plays the uncomplicated creation of their own imaginations and they buy the services of choreographers, designers, orchestrators outright, sometimes with authorship credit as well, as though these were services like plumbing or upholstery.”

Fifteen years after their premieres, Oklahoma! and Carousel were generating huge profits for the Rodgers and Hammerstein partnership, which was then a global producing empire.

But what of the collaborator who, by her calculation, was responsible for “twenty-six minutes’ worth [of stage time], dramatic and lyric invention not specified or even suggested in the original script” of Oklahoma!? And who had created a lengthy Act II ballet for Carousel that “entailed a real job of dramatic invention, close to playwriting”? de Mille began to direct her anger at the authors. In her view, the choreographer who had played an integral role in creating the material was left out in the cold with little recognition of her contribution and even less compensation for her work.

What’s more, as she wrote in And Promenade Home, she saw her choreography being widely replicated without any reward for its creator:

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During the last fifteen years, many managers—in point of truth, too many and in all countries—have hit on the scheme of engaging dancers to reproduce whatever choreography they have been performing. By this means, all legitimate choreographic royalties are avoided…

There is sometimes, not always, legal sanction for this. The ethics seem undeviatingly clear. Dancers, who are more frequently loyal than not, loyal to the point of starvation, will nor easily lend themselves to this practice. Alas—there are some who will…The choreographer is glued immobile as a fly in a web and must watch his own pupils and assistants, suborned to steal his ideas and livelihood.

De Mille began publicly airing her grievances to showcase the conditions her fellow choreographers, all except a few marquee names, were bound to struggle against.

“Choreography has become, in short, a desperate profession,” she wrote. She knew what was needed: “The answer is plainly copyright and unionization.”

De Mille set out to achieve both. She joined other artists in establishing the Society of Stage Directors and Choreographers (now SDC) in 1959 and led the successful fight to apply the legal principle of copyright to choreography. l

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Modern dance legend Hanya Holm was the first choreographer to successfully receive copyright protection for her dances in the U.S. She used Labanotation to record her work on the 1948 Cole Porter musical Kiss Me, Kate and submitted the documentation to the U.S. Copyright Office on microfilm. In 1952, she received notice that the work had been registered as a “dramatic-musical composition.”

This changed the playing field for choreographers. Before then, it was unclear whether choreography was eligible for copyright protection. In fact, previous attempts to protect work had failed. But this was only a partial victory; the next step would be to convince Congress to update the federal copyright laws to specifically include choreography.

It’s hard to understate the significance of copyright for artists because it protects the creator of a work of art against its unauthorized exploitation. It furnishes the copyright holder with the exclusive right to control its reproduction, sale, distribution, and—this is especially important for dance—performance.

Copyright guarantees the potential for an artist to generate income from his or her work (the disruptive changes wrought in the “Internet Age” notwithstanding). Our founding fathers considered the concept of safeguarding intellectual property rights so fundamental that they enshrined it in the Constitution.

Language that has come to be called the “Copyright Clause” authorizes Congress to “promote the Progress of Science and the useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writing and Discoveries.”

Early copyright legislation enacted by Congress, however, applied only to printed matter. During the 19th century, Congress gradually expanded the laws to cover other categories including musical compositions, paintings, and more, but choreographers were left without protection. In a history of copyright law and dance, Nicholas Arcomano points to an 1892 lawsuit involving Loie Fuller, one of the groundbreaking “mothers” of American modern dance, as an example of the inadequate protection provided by the laws of the time. Fuller sued another dancer, Minnie Bemis, for the unauthorized performance of her innovative “Serpentine Dance.” Despite having registered a detailed description of her choreography with the U.S. Copyright Office, Fuller lost the suit. The court ruled that “a stage dance illustrating the poetry of motion by a series of graceful movements combined with an attractive arrangement of drapery, lights, and shadows, but telling no story, portraying no character and depicting no emotion is not a dramatic composition within the meaning of the Copyright Act.” The registration of Holm’s work on Kiss Me, Kate was therefore a significant step forward.

Still, the U.S. Copyright Office insisted that to be registered for a copyright, a ballet had to “tell a story, develop a character or express a theme or emotion by means of specific dance movements and physical actions.”

You might be able to copyright a narrative ballet, but not the foxtrot or the Lindy. A choreographer would have to characterize the dance as a dramatic work to receive the benefits of copyright, and abstract pieces that didn’t tell a story of some kind were left out in the cold. Choreography would have to be recorded in some tangible medium to receive protection, but Labanotation was a difficult and costly process, and filming was both expensive and impractical.

Furthermore, by considering Holm’s work a “dramatic-musical composition,” the U.S. Copyright Office was squeezing a square peg into a round hole. It still didn’t consider choreography eligible for copyright in its own right but only as part of another published work (in this case, a musical).

HANYA HOLM d.1992

That’s where matters stood in the late 1950s.

Choreographers and other artists, de Mille prominent among them, urged Congress to expand and update the law. That would take nearly two decades, but stirrings of change were in the air. The Senate Judiciary Committee instructed the U.S. Copyright Office to study the question of copyright for choreography.

The office sought input from interested parties and produced a report in 1959. de Mille contributed a forceful, passionate essay to the study. One excerpt reads: Choreography is neither drama nor storytelling. It is a separate art. It is an arrangement in time-space, using human bodies as its unit of design. It may or may not be dramatic or tell a story. In the same way that some music tells a story, or fits a “program,” some dances tell stories—but the greater part of music does not, and the greater part of dancing does not.

Originality consists in the arrangements of steps and gestures in patterns; the story may or may not be unique.

I think further there is no profit in trying to define art or creative choreography as opposed to ballroom or folk steps in respect to their difficulty, simplicity or familiarity. The exact problems pertain to music. There is in both fields an enormous body of inherited material, some simple and most familiar; in music a melody or composition can be copyrighted if [a certain number of] bars of music are unique and can be proven to be so. In this way arrangements or transcriptions of folk material can be copyrighted as original with the composer. In the same manner, all inherited folk steps, classic ballet technique, basic tap devices, are public domain. But their combination, good or bad, can be deemed to be original.

It is not the province of the law to judge whether a dance, even the most trite and commercial, has creative original value. No one could think the majority of tunes of tin-pan alley creative achievements. Such as they are, however, they can be protected. The protection is based on a time measurement—not more than eight bars can be duplicated without infringing authorship rights.

An equivalent measurement could be worked out for choreography. I see no reason why the inventor of special ballroom steps or patterns cannot avail himself of these rights if he so chooses.

Eventually all good creations, in whole or in part, go into public domain.

But that does not mean that the choreographer alone of all creators

should not reap while he lives the rewards of his talents and efforts.

It may seem baffling in retrospect, but de Mille’s position was controversial. Among those who felt differently was New York City Ballet co-founder Lincoln Kirstein, who wrote to the committee in direct response to de Mille: Agnes de Mille [in And Promenade Home] makes her complaints against commercial exploitation of work…

However, [this] does not pertain to the dance, but to her rights as a director of dancing, similar to a director of stage action, for which she could have obtained royalties, had she thought of it at the time, or had her reputation, before Oklahoma! was first produced warranted her commanding such a contract, which it did not. At the present, any commercial choreographer, like de Mille, is guaranteed a weekly percentage of the gross of a show, if they can convince the producer they are worth it; this has nothing to do with the protection of the actual steps, which are not useful to anybody else, except out of context.

De Mille was well aware that achieving copyright protection was only half the battle, along with achieving unionization. Still, she argued that copyright protection was an equally essential tool in protecting the work of a choreographer from its unauthorized replication. Because the original choreographer did not typically own her own work and because it wasn’t protected by copyright, choreographers lacked the legal basis to control who could restage their work and under what circumstances as well as to prevent unauthorized reproduction of their dances.

It would be necessary to “fix” a work of choreography and record it in some tangible medium to achieve a copyright. This was preposterous to Kirstein. “Even ballet masters forget their own works within a few years,” he wrote to the committee. “A ballet, or choreographic composition, is very often altered from season to season, sometimes radically, and although the name remains the same, the choreographer will utilize changes in the cast, new dancers to their advantage.

Hence, it can hardly be established in a court of law what is the real original piece…

If [the choreographer] can’t recall it, it’s unlikely anyone else can in its integrity.”

De Mille herself pointed out that choreography is a fluid form. Like many of her peers, she continually adapted her work to fit the circumstances of a particular event. This presented a challenge that still exists for choreographers, but de Mille was confident

that the underlying principle was sound: that choreography was worthy of copyright protection in its own right, on par with literature and painting. In her letter to the committee, she reported that the only two means of making a tangible recording of a choreographer’s work are Labanotation and films. The latter she described as “extremely perishable.” She went on to remark: The making of films is at present blocked by various union requirements; but, with the formation of the Choreographers’ Society, we have confidence that these difficulties can be compromised and resolved. In any case, they should have no bearing on the formulating of a law. Give us some chance to protect our basic rights and we will settle all other difficulties ourselves.

That’s exactly what came to pass. A union, de Mille argued, could negotiate a standard agreement guaranteeing fair minimum standards for all choreographers. It could address how to record the dance by making arrangements with producers and other theatrical unions. Since no existing union would agree to represent choreographers, she and her colleagues joined together to form the Society of Stage Directors and Choreographers, now SDC. De Mille served as its president from 1965 to 1967 and was then the only female head of a national labor union. SDC would eventually negotiate standard contracts and better provisions to protect choreographers (and directors) working in the theatre.

Finally, Congress passed an expansion of the copyright law that specifically embraced choreography. The Copyright Act of 1976 holds that “[c]opyright protection subsists…in original works of authorship fixed in any tangible medium of expression, now known or later developed, from which they can be perceived, reproduced, or otherwise communicated, either directly or with the aid of a machine or device. Works of authorship include… pantomimes and choreographic works.”

A sea change had occurred for choreographers, thanks in no small part to the eloquence and tenacity of Agnes de Mille. l

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Despite the passage of time, de Mille remained unhappy with Rodgers and Hammerstein.

“De Mille was angry at them, and had been for years,” Rodgers and Hammerstein Organization (R & H) President Ted Chapin said during a recent conversation. They owned the dances she created for Oklahoma! and Carousel. The shows were produced many, many times across the globe each

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year, often featuring her choreography (or a version of it). But her contributions to the musicals, which she regarded as authorial, generated little credit and no royalties.

The authors’ heirs had brought Chapin on board to manage their theatrical properties.

Early on, he made an effort to rebuild relationships with the surviving artists who had collaborated with Rodgers and Hammerstein over the years. This meant mending fences where needed. In the case of de Mille, serious repairs were in order.

The thaw began when David Gockley, then general director of the Houston Grand Opera, was preparing a production of Carousel for its 1989–90 season. Chapin put him in touch with de Mille, who by then was in her mid-eighties. She had survived several health crises, including a devastating stroke a decade earlier, but she had recovered enough to write five books and create several new dances. With de Mille’s consent, Gockley engaged well-known répétiteur and frequent de Mille collaborator Gemze de Lappe to restage her original choreography.

Chapin had experienced de Mille’s dances before, but Houston was different. “I had never seen them so extraordinarily well performed,” he wrote. “They were a revelation. I realized their uniqueness: every step, every move was totally character-driven.” A lightbulb went off.

“I understood completely what de Mille was talking about in terms of her choreography coming out the drama of the show,” Chapin told me. “Her dances told pieces of the story that hadn’t been told in any other way in the show.” Chapin realized that what de Mille had

long been saying was absolutely true: “There was a certain amount of authorship in her contribution.” He set out on a twopronged mission: to make amends with de Mille and to enlist her participation in ensuring that her work would be preserved for future generations.

He wrote to de Mille and soon received an invitation for tea at her home in Greenwich Village. “She was a very, very tough customer,” said Chapin, “but I was there on a peace mission. I proposed that R & H give her what she had always wanted, which was an ongoing royalty. In exchange, she would document the dances for us for future generations.”

De Mille hadn’t been able to document her work; perhaps R & H could. Chapin’s idea was to make an instructional video that would guide choreographers and directors working on future productions of the shows.

De Mille consented, and a suitable opportunity soon arose. The Nashville Opera was about to stage Carousel, with de Lappe again recreating de Mille’s choreography. R & H arranged to videotape the dances, which were performed by members of the Nashville Ballet. De Mille agreed to watch the tape and give her comments on camera.

The result is The Dances of Rodgers & Hammerstein’s “Carousel,” a 90-minute video that provides “hands-on help with steps, attitude, and technique” for anyone staging Carousel using the show’s original choreography. The video captures the musical numbers as performed by the Nashville troupe to piano accompaniment on a bare stage.

There is no singing and almost no dialogue.

Later, at a Manhattan rehearsal studio, de Mille gave notes on the Nashville performance on video. She spoke of the motivation behind specific gestures and their roots in the characters and the script.

She expounded on many aspects of the dances, from the position of the dancers’ limbs to how they should breathe. She even critiqued the costumes. De Lappe was on hand to demonstrate specific steps, with an assist from dancer Michael Phillips.

While it’s not a measure-by-measure documentation of every step, the video captured the essence of de Mille’s work, along with a plethora of details, directly from the last surviving member of the show’s creative team.

In the video, a particularly delicious moment comes when de Mille recoiled at the ending of “June Is Busting Out All Over.”

The number culminated in a series of steps that, in retrospect, needed adjustment.

“Let’s fix it!” she said. And she did, on camera, guiding de Lappe and Phillips to craft a new sequence to end the number.

According to Chapin, de Mille was pleased with the video and looked forward to collaborating on a companion piece about Oklahoma!

Unfortunately, she died in October 1993, shortly after the video was completed.

R & H produced The Dances of Rodgers & Hammerstein’s “Oklahoma!” in 2009. De Lappe guided the viewer, giving casting, costume, and staging tips while introducing clips of her own restaging for the North Carolina School of the Arts. She narrated archival footage of the dream ballet and other numbers from the original production. The video also includes clips from the Oklahoma! film for which de Mille adapted her original choreography,

TIMELINE 1789 The U.S. Constitution’s Copyright Clause (Article 1, Section 8, Clause 8) empowers Congress to grant rights and protections to authors and artists.

1790 Congress enacts the Copyright Act of 1790. The law protects only maps, charts, and books but is gradually expanded over the next century.

1892 Loie Fuller sues another dancer for the unauthorized performance of her “Serpentine Dance.” Fuller loses when courts find that the Copyright Act does not protect choreography.

1905 Agnes George de Mille is born in New York City.

1909 The Copyright Act of 1909 extends protections for many works of art but does not cover dance.

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1928 The invention of Labanotation creates a system to permanently document choreography for the first time.

1943 With choreography by Agnes de Mille, Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Oklahoma! opens on Broadway. The show is subsequently produced across the globe and tours the U.S. continuously for the next decade.

1945 Rodgers and Hammerstein work with de Mille for a second time on Carousel.

1947 De Mille directs and choreographs Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Allegro, which is a Broadway flop, and Lerner and Loewe’s Brigadoon, which earns her a Tony Award.®

GEMZE DE LAPPE since 1969

tailoring it to suit the requirements of the camera and the talents of the dancers she cast. The footage also shows de Mille talking about her work in master classes, interviews, and television documentaries.

Taken together, the two videos provide a remarkable look at an artist and her work.

They are full of insight on how to recreate de Mille’s dances—or, more accurately, detailed tips for adapting the choreography to the specific skills and talents of the performers while maintaining the integrity of the work.

In the Carousel video, the late Mary Rodgers said, “To do Carousel without the de Mille dances is kind of like reading a great book with one of the characters missing.”

Without them, Rodgers warned, you can’t stage a “true” production of Carousel.

This turns out to be more of an advisory note than a precondition for producing either show. “The de Mille dances are available, but we don’t make them a requirement,” Chapin told me. “We have long coordinated with people who worked with Agnes, and with Jerome Robbins in the case of The King and I, through the years, and hopefully they will keep passing it along to another generation.” R & H is working on another video that captures Robbins’s choreography for The King and I. However, Chapin added, “We don’t have enough people readily available who can put up the dances as they were originally staged.” For that reason, R & H offers the de Mille choreography for Oklahoma! and Carousel as an option for producers who license the shows at no additional cost. “I don’t want to dictate how it’s done,” said Chapin, “but I want to provide the best tools possible so that producers can do the best production possible.”

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As part of the rapprochement with de Mille, R & H carved out a new financial arrangement for the choreographer based on the same terms she had eventually negotiated for Brigadoon. “We sign royalty checks every quarter to the Agnes de Mille estate,” Chapin said. “I’m glad that I could play a little part in documenting what she did for Rodgers and Hammerstein so that she didn’t die angry about that.” In addition to the royalties for de Mille and the videos documenting her work, Chapin pointed to another dividend that accrued from her dispute with the authors. “If out of it came her anger, which led to SDC being formed, and copyright for dances, then everyone benefits.”

As for de Mille’s artistic legacy, perhaps it’s best to let de Lappe have the final word. On R & H’s Oklahoma! video, she remarked: “When people tell me Agnes’s work is old-fashioned, I know it’s not. It’s just that nobody knows how to do it. When young actors and dancers really see this choreography and really see the motivation behind every step and gesture, they’re fascinated by it and very excited to do it. I have found they are very hungry for learning how to incorporate acting into dance, and they really work at it. Agnes de Mille put literature, poetry, storytelling, and human relationships into dance in a very theatrical and commercial way. It was high art, but when it is done correctly, the general public always likes it…We need to have faith in these masters of the musical theatre. You just have to know how to do the dances with honesty and integrity, and then they stand up forever.”

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1952 Hanya Holm becomes the first choreographer to secure an American copyright for her dances in Kiss Me, Kate.

1955 The film version of Oklahoma! features de Mille’s dances, which she reinterpreted from the stage for the camera.

1959 The Copyright Office solicits comments about protection for choreography from de Mille and others. The Society of Stage Directors and Choreographers is founded.

1962 The League of New York Theatres recognizes the Society of Stage Directors and Choreographers (now SDC) as a bargaining agent. The union successfully negotiates an agreement covering direction and choreography on Broadway.

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Agnes de Mille wrote several memoirs, with And Promenade Home (Little, Brown; 1958) covering the time leading up to and immediately following her collaborations with Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein.

A biography, No Intermissions: The Life of Ages de Mille by Carol Easton (Little, Brown; 1996), provides another perspective on her career.

De Mille’s letter to the U.S. Copyright Office is available at http://copyright.gov/history/ studies/study28.pdf as part of a lengthy 1959 study for the Senate Judiciary Committee.

The copyright.gov website contains useful information for anyone who creates works of art and has questions about protecting them.

An article from the January 11, 1981 issue of the New York Times (“The Copyright Law and Dance” by Nicholas Arcomano) provides an extensive but easy-to-read overview of the history of copyright law and choreography in the U.S. “How Graham v. Graham Shocked Artists into Legal Awareness” by Sofi Sinozich (Columbia Undergraduate Law Review, Fall 2012) analyzes litigation related to the estate of Martha Graham and the copyright issues that arose after her death. The article gives an in-depth contemporary and historical overview of the legal issues surrounding copyright law and choreography. http://blogs.cuit. columbia.edu/culr/2012/11/28/horeography Finally, the two DVDs created by the Rodgers and Hammerstein Organization are essential resources for anyone studying de Mille’s work: The Dances of Rodgers & Hammerstein’s “Carousel” (1993) and The Dances of Rodgers & Hammerstein’s “Oklahoma!” (2009).

1963 De Mille begins receiving royalties for her work on Brigadoon.

1976 The Copyright Act of 1976 grants full copyright protection to works of dance.

1993 Shortly before her death, de Mille collaborates with the Rodgers and Hammerstein Organization on a video documenting her dances for Carousel and begins receiving royalties for Carousel and Oklahoma!

2009 The Rodgers and Hammerstein Organization creates a video documenting de Mille’s choreography for Oklahoma!

BOTTOM LEFT + RIGHT

Allegro in 1947 c/o Rodgers and Hammerstein JEROME ROBBINS d.1998

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JEROME ROBBINS

A PERFECT STORYTELLER

BY ELIZABETH

BENNETT

“Do you really think you’re going to do something better than Jerome Robbins?”

That was the question posed by legendary entertainment lawyer Floria Lasky to a choreographer who proposed a hybrid production melding Jerome Robbins’s original choreography with new dances for an iconic Broadway show. That question faces any director and/or choreographer taking on a production originally directed and choreographed

by Robbins, whose choreography has, for many, become the signature look of particular shows. What would West Side Story be without the finger-snapping advances of the gang members in the opening? Or Fiddler on the Roof without the bottle dance?

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Jerome Robbins in his ballet "Circus Polka" OPPOSITE

Mikhail Baryshnikov in the dress rehearsal for Jerome Robbins's Four Seasons PHOTOS

c/o Costas Cacaroukas HEADSHOT BY

Jesse Gerstein

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Luckily, thousands of audience members each year can still experience Robbins’s lyrical, exuberant choreographic work. You may have seen Broadway, West End, and professional productions of West Side Story and Fiddler on the Roof, whose programs bear a title page including a complicated credit line: “Original production directed and choreographed by Jerome Robbins.” If that’s the case, you could sit back in your seat and watch the magic happen, knowing that the production you saw bore the imprint of the show’s original creator.

Seventeen years after Robbins’s death, the beauty of his stage work is still available for directors and choreographers who want to replicate the movement of the original productions. As one of the busiest choreographers working worldwide in the fields of ballet, musical theatre, and film for more than four decades, Robbins exhausted himself to keep pace. Unable to be present for every production, Robbins grew concerned about the impermanence of his art and the lack of a written record for future generations. Though he videotaped rehearsals of ballets, very little of Robbins’s theatre work had been captured on film or video. A number of dances were recalled, notated, and filmed through the process of assembling Robbins’s former dancers and assistants to put together Jerome Robbins’ Broadway, a celebration of his musical theatre work that ran on Broadway from 1989–1990 JEROME ROBBINS d.1998

and earned multiple Tony Awards, including Best Musical.

The Jerome Robbins Foundation and the Robbins Rights Trust are not the one-stop shopping solution to a production’s needs; licensing for other shows on which Robbins was a director, choreographer, or collaborator are handled through other entities. Music Theatre International (MTI) handles licenses for professional, high school, and middle school productions of West Side and Fiddler as well as shows such as Peter Pan, A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, and The Pajama Game; The King and I is licensed through Rodgers & Hammerstein (R&H) and if you’re seeking Mama Rose and her chorines in Gypsy, TamsWitmark is where you’ll head.

At MTI, the choreographic director’s guide is included as part of the standard rehearsal materials that go out for every booking of Fiddler. A separate license is required for Robbins’s West Side choreography to be replicated.

Eventually, written notation for two of his greatest works— West Side and Fiddler—was created by dancers from the original productions (many of whom had become his rehearsal assistants) through conversations with original cast members and what could be pieced together from the few celluloid captures. The result: a choreographic director’s guide made available as part of the license issued for professional productions. Each guide includes descriptions of the movements—measure for measure—for each character, and it breaks down the tableaux created by Robbins for each song. The specificity and complexity of the guides is artwork in and of itself.

The preservation of Robbins’s work is made possible in part by the legal arrangements created by Floria Lasky; it involves a complex relationship between the Jerome Robbins Foundation and the Robbins Rights Trust. Robbins created the foundation in 1958 to support theatre and dance artists and their works. The Trust was established in 1999 after Robbins’s death to license and preserve his ballets and stage work, but the foundation owns a portion of the copyrights.

Christopher Pennington, the Executive Director for the Robbins Rights Trust and the Treasurer of the Jerome Robbins Foundation, describes Robbins’s concern that the copyright would be split into too many shares if left to people rather than to an entity. By entrusting the copyrights to the Trust, Robbins ensured that the foundation would be the beneficiary of the licenses. The trustees at the Robbins Rights Trust are those who certainly can speak to Robbins’s work and his legacy, including the choreographer’s longtime financial adviser, Allen Greenberg, and Ellen Sorrin, who serves as Director of the George Balanchine Trust and Managing Director of the New York Choreographic Institute.

The Robbins Rights Trust handles primarily “first class” productions headed for Broadway and the West End. Requests—which Mr. JOEY MCKNEELY since 1992

Pennington describes with a balance of surprise and delight as “far more frequent than we ever thought they would be”—are vetted on a case-by-case basis by the owners and authors of the shows in question. To grant a license for a production, quality and viability are considered before decisions are made. Mr. Pennington notes that the conversations are congenial and decisions are almost always unanimous. As 2015 rolled in, Mr. Pennington was looking forward to conversations with producer Jeffrey Richards, who is bringing a revival of Fiddler on the Roof to Broadway in the fall. The production will be directed by Bartlett Sher and choreographed by Israeli-born contemporary dance artist Hofesh Shechter.

“Representing the shows that Jerome Robbins conceived, co-conceived, and cocreated is something that we are very proud to do,” remarks MTI President Drew Cohen. “We consider it a privilege. At MTI, we take our responsibility to his legacy very seriously. Beyond Jerome Robbins being a brilliant choreographer, he was just a brilliant creative mind.” Part of the legacy protection in which both the Robbins Rights Trust, and Cohen are engaged results in replication of Robbins’s choreography, and sometimes it means seeing choreographers tell the stories of iconic works in fresh ways. Other times it means saying “no.” Cohen recalls a request that MTI turned down from a producer who wanted to stage West Side Story, replicating Robbins’s choreography, on ice.

Preserving the spirit and choreography of Robbins is something that performer/ choreographer/director Joey McKneely takes seriously as well. Mr. McKneely was cast in the legendary Broadway flop Carrie when, realizing he wouldn’t have a job for much longer, he went with friends to an audition for a new show being put together by Robbins.

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West Side Story directed/choreographed by Joey McKneely at La Scala

OPPOSITE

West Side Story choreographed by Joshua Bergasse at Barrington Stage Company

BELOW RIGHT

Joshua Bergasse, Chita Rivera + Alan Johnson celebrating the 50th anniversary reunion for Gypsy

At the time, the young dancer didn’t know who Jerome Robbins was. After just one audition, Robbins cast McKneely in Jerome Robbins’ Broadway as part of the very small “skeleton crew” that rehearsed for two to four weeks to reconstruct previously lost dance numbers. The full production then undertook an unprecedented six-month rehearsal process, paid for by the Shubert Organization.

“I call it my college,” McKneely says with pride. “I sat in the room every day with Jerry, watching all of those numbers develop from nothing. Every week or two, we were given a new number to learn. One week it was the West Side Story Suite, then it was The King and I, then High Button Shoes.…So every week I’d get this education: we had to learn about the show, where it came from, what the history was. But the learning was really about character. I’d never experienced that.”

“As a dancer, absorbing that was my education for understanding the power of Jerome Robbins and his mastery of choreography.

And because of me just sitting and watching, I absorbed things that I didn’t know I was absorbing until I was given West Side Story to do.”

Because Jerome Robbins’ Broadway did not follow a conventional “book” for a musical, Robbins focused on McKneely to create a through line in the dance sequence known

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as the West Side Story Suite. McKneely recognizes now what an honor it was to be singled out for so many solo features, particularly since he was asked to reflect the characters’ many emotional shifts.

“What I learned from the show, just from doing the excerpts, was the power of choreography to tell every aspect of West Side Story,” McKneely recalls. “Anybody can learn the steps. But it’s the feeling—the emotional feeling—that I can bring to West Side.”

In 2000, McKneely was asked to direct and choreograph West Side at that pinnacle of performing houses: La Scala in Milan. Although by that point McKneely had become a popular choreographer with Broadway credits such as The Life and Smokey Joe’s Café, he had not yet directed a production of the size required for La Scala—nor one with the kind of history and emotional weight that West Side Story carried for him. But Robbins himself had felt McKneely’s talent worthy of the responsibility: he had placed McKneely on a list of potential choreographers for future West Side productions. And now the time had come.

“La Scala was looking to bring a new vitality to West Side Story. The same people had been doing it for 25 years, and they just wanted a fresh take,” McKneely remembers. “I got a call one day saying, ‘Okay, the director is no longer with the show, we’d like you to direct it.’ I have

a funny feeling Jerry and Lenny [composer Leonard Bernstein] were pulling strings up in heaven. Somebody was pulling strings because it was literally handed to me, thrust upon me.

All I could think was ‘Don’t muck it up.’”

For that production, McKneely drew on his experiences of the segments he had learned from Robbins. But he still faced the daunting task of assembling a full production of choreography for the show. “I think with any reproduction of somebody’s choreography, you are not that person,” McKneely reflects.

“It’s your responsibility to uphold the integrity of the original choreography. You did not create the original choreography; I was not there in 1957. All I have is my education of West Side Story, which came directly from Jerry and was pretty impressive, but I only had the suite of dances I knew. For what I did not know I had to go to resources like the movie, a video of the 1980 revival that starred Debbie Allen, and subsequent other little clips of things like the original cast appearing on ‘The Ed Sullivan Show.’ There was Alan Johnson, who was integral in creating the choreography guide. There was all this lingo DEBBIE ALLEN since 1988 | ALAN JOHNSON since 1973

of ‘5-6-7-8, left foot turn out here’ that was like the blueprint. I had to piece all those things together, and it had to make sense to me as a dancer and a choreographer.”

Since then, McKneely has been entrusted with many productions of West Side Story. That experience included replicating Robbins’s choreography for the 2009 Broadway revival directed by the show’s book writer, Arthur Laurents. That production brought him yet another experience of working with a master as well as an encounter with an interpretation of the piece that called for a grittier, darker, 21st-century drama that called for less ballet while still re-creating Robbins’s original choreography. McKneely is proud of that production, of introducing a new generation to Robbins’s synthesis of story and character. “To me, theatre is about the evolution,” McKneely says as he reflects on that production as well as those ahead.

“We don’t want to live in a museum.”

McKneely feels proud and honored to pass what he learned on to the next generation of those who will care for West Side Story. “I always describe myself as the torchbearer,” he says. “I feel it’s my duty to infuse the next generation with the integrity that West Side Story is capable of.”

“I change the lives of the kids that do my West Side Story. I push them as Jerome Robbins pushed me. Jerry was capable of it, and I saw how it changed me. It inspired me to become a choreographer. I’d never JOSHUA BERGASSE since 2001 | ARTHUR LAURENTS d.2011

felt like that kind of dancing ever in my life. I make sure that these kids understand the power of what that choreography can do. The process is hard for West Side Story because I make them feel things they’re not ready to feel. And then they’re acting, and they say, ‘My god, I see the world in a different way now.’ So, I’m passing it on.”

“West Side Story is just such an important piece. I grew up watching the movie, and it was so important to me. So, when I was dancing it, I felt like a part of history. You feel like you’re reaching back to when that was created—that perfect mixture of storytelling through dance, acting, and the libretto.

And the music, that stunning score!”

Joshua Bergasse, choreographer for the recent Broadway revival of On the Town, is one to whom the Robbins legacy is also being handed down. Bergasse’s initial guide through the complexity of Robbins’s approach was Alan Johnson, a West Side Story veteran who started out as an understudy with the original cast and went on to play several parts in that production and the role of A-Rab in a 1960 revival. It was Johnson who created the show’s choreographic director’s guide. Johnson directed the national tour of West Side Story in which Bergasse had his first Actors’ Equity job.

Bergasse learned much about West Side Story from performing in Johnson’s production and then from assisting him. He remembers well the creation of the choreography guide.

“Alan wanted it to be thorough and he wanted it to be correct. What was really interesting was, as he was doing it, he would remember things that he had forgotten over the years,” Bergasse recalls of his mentor. “In the first couple of productions we did together, we did a certain step one way. Then, as he was writing the notation book, Alan remembered something, and we would change the way we would do the step. He would say, “Oh, I just remembered Jerry changed it to this…” He had been doing it for so long, and it was great to see him find new joy in it, new discoveries.”

“When I first auditioned for the show,” Bergasse recalls, “I didn’t think I would get it. And I thought if I got it I probably wouldn’t take it because I was still living at home and I didn’t know if I would go on tour. When I went in to audition, I thought of it as a free dance class to learn the original Robbins choreography— to learn it from somebody who learned it from Robbins. That was the biggest thing in the world to me; I didn’t care about the job. I just wanted to be in the room, learning that choreography from Alan Johnson.”

After Johnson retired, Bergasse began choreographing his own productions of West Side Story. It’s a job he loves—in part because of his feelings about the show but also because he honors the legacy of which he is now a part. “You have to honor the storytelling.

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move as the characters are written. You can understand what they’re feeling, what their intentions are, what they are like, what they don’t like—by their bodies. To me, that’s what Jerry is. He’s a perfect storyteller.

There’s always a sense of humanity.”

Bergasse has never felt limited or imposed on by replicating Robbins’s choreography.

“I actually find myself inspired every time I do it,” he says. “I’m so familiar with West Side and with a lot of Jerry’s ballets. I know his style. I use that—the storytelling and the steps and the feeling that I get from that—in my own choreography. I constantly say to myself, ‘What would Jerry do?’”

The way that many newcomers find their way into theatre and dance is by learning from master teachers. Among the thousands of artists who worked with Jerome Robbins are those who worked with him multiple times and who formed a record of his works that was passed on only by the actions of the experience.

At the Robbins Rights Trust, Christopher Pennington, Allen Greenberg, and Ellen Sorrin are actively working to put together an archive recording all of the elements used in Robbins’s ballets, and the original performers and rehearsal masters are an important part of the process. Robbins’s musical theatre works are, in Pennington’s words, “taken care of to the extent that they can be.” With choreographers eager and working to hand the lessons down, audiences will continue to enjoy Robbins’s vision for decades to come.

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SAMPLE

Director's Book - Musical Staging for Fiddler on the Roof c/o The Robbins Rights Trust Reprinted with permission c/o Music Theatre International

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FROM THE ARCHIVES

SPEAKING A THOUGHT IN THE WORLD PART I GARLAND WRIGHT ON THE MISANTHROPE

BY SARI

KETTER + ERIN B. MEE

“There is no more powerful thing in the world than having a thought and then speaking that thought…” Garland Wright said to the acting company of the Guthrie Theater, where he was Artistic Director from 1986 to 1995. Wright spoke through the medium of theatre, which he used, unabashedly, as a tool to change the world. For Wright, theatre was “like the priesthood—one gives one’s life to something that is greater than oneself.” Nothing, no thought, no word, was insignificant. This belief in the importance of ideas and in the speech that articulated those ideas formed the basis of Garland Wright’s process in all the work he did, from the most classical to the most contemporary. Though he passed away in 1998, he still has much to teach us about how to embrace, embody, and stage ideas. In this twopart article, we share a taste of Garland Wright’s rehearsal process by using a small selection of his words from two of his iconic productions: The Misanthrope1 (in Part I) and Richard III2 (in Part II). The two parts have different structures, each emphasizing different aspects of his process. Together they provide a detailed and in-depth view of his ways of working.

Célimène + Alceste

IN REHEARSAL WITH GARLAND WRIGHT MOLIÈRE’S THE MISANTHROPE While some directors choose to start rehearsals with a mostly blank slate, what happened in rehearsals with Wright was shaped by his vision from the very first day.

Although he started with a strong vision, he loved and cultivated the actors’ creative work.

It’s not a play about the Revolution, per se, but related to it—to the giant upheaval going on at the same time within the lives and society of the play’s characters.

It is a play about a group of people who experience something as momentous as a revolution…It is a play about the class of people the Revolution tried to erase—the aristocracy. It is a play about the damage that people do to each other. It is a political play.4 He painted the play’s central character, the misanthrope Alceste, as a “tormented Park Avenue Liberal” who is rich and donates to charities, but “he is wrestling with the discrepancy between his world of privilege and the world that he professes to believe in.

He is tempted to leave his world behind, but he is tied to it and is in love with someone in that world. Through the play, he discovers he cannot have it all ways— his life, his love and to fix the world.

For Wright, rehearsal is a process of choice making: In the rehearsal, the actor and director together choose what elements are required to bring the play to life in performance…it is a time for refining these choices. Some of these choices are predetermined, and others are discoveries made during the rehearsal process…A phrase I use to describe the arena for choice-making in any rehearsal period is ‘building the corral.’ I consider it my responsibility in the early stages of rehearsal to construct a metaphoric ‘fence.’

This fence marks the boundaries of possibilities…Though this can be perceived as placing limitations upon the actor’s choices, it is more healthily seen as a very specific arena within which the actor has complete freedom to roam about and explore.3 “If you think you don’t have choices or you are limited by production rules or existing physical elements, just remember, there are an infinite number of choices on the head of a pin that will communicate the meaning.” (G.W.) The first rehearsal of any play directed by Garland Wright was an event. It was a celebration of the beginning of the work. He always made an extensive presentation, including why the play was chosen, the particular text and translation, meanings, his approach as well as his music and sound choices. All designers attended to make their presentations.

Following is a short selection of Wright’s remarks on the first rehearsal day of The Misanthrope, in which he introduced the company to the world that the production would inhabit. He laid out why he was taking a play written in 1666, the beginning of the Age of Enlightenment, and setting it in 1792, the eve of the French Revolution:

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Célimène kneeling

In tandem with the designers, Wright presented the look of the play: The set is on the second floor of a house.

It is full of windows, like a Bloomingdale’s showroom. The lives inside this space are on exhibition to the outside world, but it is also, eventually, a tomb. We’re not changing rooms for different scenes, just décor. This is an abstract statement—I think each room in the house looks like the main room. The clothes have period lines but with a modern interpretation— the Palladium, limo crowd, outrageous fashion, reflecting a society about being noticed.

“Garland was an accomplished painter, he thought like a designer, in pictures. He became a director, but always had a designer’s visual sensibility…Garland created a world on the stage that was so detailed—a world where you almost couldn’t behave in any other way than the way you did—which was the way he wanted you to behave!” (Daniel Davis, Actor— “Alceste,” The Misanthrope, both productions) The context is this: in September 1792 King Louis XIV was confined. In January 1793, he was beheaded. 1792 was the first year the guillotine was used.

The play progresses in one day in the late summer of 1792. It is during the attacks on the palace of King Louis XIV and the riots leading up to the September massacres. Over the course of the play, the sound of the violence outside will go from far away to very near to the house.

The impact of his setting the play in this time period was very powerful: Ultimately, the world of the play takes its shape when someone late in the play throws a pebble at Célimène’s window and she begins to realize that she is being observed. At the end of the play, the windows are all broken by rocks which have been thrown through, and they actually violate her house and destroy it and her. The final image of the play is her pulling a silk curtain across the stage, which she does often, whenever she needs to close the world out. Standing there with her bouquet of roses, she feels the heat of the spotlight on her. She realizes that her ultimate destiny is to be the butt of a joke in a Molière play. […]

Most of my productions have a parallel theatrical imagery going on, an imagery about the theater. (Wright, 1984)

SARI KETTER since 1982 | GARLAND WRIGHT d.1998

“I have a confession to make. There was a time when I thought Molière was a bit of a bore. I am ashamed to admit it in light of my subsequent love affair with his plays…Then, a number of years ago, I was asked to direct The Imaginary Invalid at Arena Stage. I reluctantly agreed, intuitively knowing that all discoveries are made by attempting, not by assuming, and sure enough, I fell in love. In Molière, I found a writer whom I now feel is one of the most profound in the theater, a man at once astonishingly thoughtful and utterly instinctive, outrageously funny but deeply serious, irrational yet intellectual, a fool and a genius.

A paradox, surely, but more than that—a mirror reflecting itself to infinity…”5 (G.W.) Wright adored Molière and often said, “There is a mirror-effect I find in all great writing—wherein a play contains not only one truth, but that truth’s opposite—its reflection. Much as a mirror shows us our own face in reverse—in the mirror we learn not only ourselves but our own opposite…”

TEXT + TABLE WORK THE FOUNDATION

Talking about the process of text and table work is a bit like that old parable “The Blind Men and the Elephant.” A group of people are brought together with their own opinions and assumptions. They are blind in the sense that they do not yet know “what the animal is” that they have been asked to touch and define. How does one bring the animal into focus for all? It is the “Wiseman” in the parable who does this and who also always has the “Whole” in focus.

Garland Wright was simply and profoundly a gentle giant in laying out the framework to understand the play, the animal in the parable. It was in a seemingly casual way that was, in reality, anything but casual. And by the end of the table work, which would span anywhere from three to five eight-hour rehearsal days, depending upon the play, everyone in the room had a shared foundation. “‘Meticulous’ is an understatement of Garland preparing the text for rehearsals… he never left anything in others’ hands without first, after very careful consideration, making a decision about it.” (Michael Lupu, Dramaturg—The Guthrie Theater) Wright stated: Table work enables everyone to get on an equal footing before the actors are required to ‘stand up.’ It is safe to say that the director enters the first rehearsal with much more information than the actors.

The director has been working (usually for a long time) on text, with designers and

dramaturgs and has made many decisions prior to the first reading…So, at the table, the director must share all the thinking that has gone into the choices made thus far. The director must clarify and defend the production ideas in relationship to the text and the design…While at the table, the actor can begin to make connections between the text and the designs…and about what is being attempted in this production.

The majority of the table work, obviously, is about the text or dramaturgy. It is characterized chiefly by the act of sitting down: disengaging the body for a moment and giving principal focus to the brain. As the actors read the scenes, information is brought to bear which helps everyone understand the scenes in the same way…

Most importantly, each actor needs to know what information his character has access to and what information his character is ignorant of…such subjective writing of subtext has usually been carefully thought out by the director. […]

It follows that, for me, early rehearsals are simple expressions of what the characters are doing in any particular scene…

“Language has great power. Words are important to me and I cherish those writers who feel as I do.” (G.W.) Wright was brilliant with language. At all times throughout the process he was aware of how to keep the ear active, for all listeners on and off the stage. He orchestrated the language with the touch of a genius conductor.

For The Misanthrope, Wright chose the verse translation by Richard Wilbur. Here are some of his comments related to the language, sense, and vocal quality: “Be aware of the words sounding like rhyme.

Whether we punch or bury the rhyme varies with the punctuation, but what’s important is to carry the thought, not the rhyme. […]

Only use the rhyme when it is a punch line, a payoff (i.e., the audience guesses the rhyme). […] Be careful of the couplets: rhyme sometimes causes you to emphasize wrong words. Ignore your brain’s impulse to be aware of rhyme. […] Make sense of the lines by putting them together as long thoughts, not chopped up thoughts. Ask, ‘Where is the thought?’ […] Remember, these folks speak this way all the time—these characters are not rhyming. […] Regarding vocal quality in this kind of writing—when you drag out words, it creates a fatigue in you and in intention— keep it simple and just say it. […] Low pitches equal the effect of irony and commenting on something. Higher pitches will equal a SPRING 2015 | SDC JOURNAL

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Alceste + Celimene

Alceste running

lighter, casual touch, a real question, etc. Note where to suspend at the end of a line, but be careful not to let the suspension become a period. […] Energize the words to get what you want. […] This is not a melodrama—if you push it, it becomes less important. It is not a send-up. It is strong, but it has a lightness.”

“Hear, rather than Listen—better said, Hear as well as Listen. Hear and Listen are two different terms.” (G.W.) “I call upon Garland’s wisdom so often in rehearsals and classes. […] It’s his thinking, that it is okay, as an actor and

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artist, to think of yourself like a doctor and your commitment and work ethic has to match that.” (Julie Boyd, Actor—“Eliante,” The Misanthrope, Guthrie Theater) These are some of Wright’s comments during text and table work about establishing, setting, and supporting the world of the play: “This is a play about people that are looking for something, some think they have found it, some haven’t. It relates to the period of the French Revolution when society was so unconnected and had to be destroyed. […]

The form of the play is very civilized and rich, however, what they do to each other is the

exact opposite. The play is a tragedy of a society. It is about destruction, the desire to destroy that which hurts us, for many reasons, like love, hate, anger, fear. The stakes in this play are extremely high. There’s possibility of great danger. […] There are many rules in this society. It is a mannered age. Words are couched. The truth of what they say is often covered. There are secrets upon secrets. They hurt each other with the words. It is a battle of wits under the guise of friendship. Do not though underestimate the depth of their anger. […] There’s no fear by these people regarding the revolution—anger maybe, but not fear.

They are still in their own worlds. […] In terms of the design, I loathe plays that have lots of hankies and fans and little fingers. That said, you are dressed just like those people. Think of the clothes as what these people wear to be seen. Remember, the room of the set, living in a display window. Look at these people when they are dressed to the hilt, in their elaborate wigs, with make-up, powder and perfume— now, think about what these people looked like when all that was taken away, bearing in mind that they didn’t bathe often, or wash the elaborate clothes; the wigs suffocated their hair, there were skin diseases, they didn’t go to dentists and the perfume was a necessity.”

"I believe that a study of Molière leads directly to a study of us: To say from our stage that it’s time to think about what the consequences are of being self-obsessed. That what we do in the world has some consequence. That what one does in the world is important. To scream to all, things are wrong. You need to get to a

“Question the assumptions you are making in the text you speak. Really take note of and think about what is and/or could be public versus private, and what the consequences might be if something is public and not private. […] Do not assume that that other character will be in the room when you enter. You know it because it is written in the text, but the character doesn’t necessarily know it. Try thinking through the scene not expecting that other character to be there.”

Célimène at her dressing table

The work at the table is a start toward learning a deep knowledge of the characters and their relationships that can be acted upon. Wright began with general notes on the characters in the play, grouping them by where they fit into that society (the aristocracy, the justice representatives from the court, and the servants). He then went on to give more detailed character notes.

This served right away to establish the world in terms of character and to set forth overall beliefs and relationships of the characters.

Alceste + Arsinoe

“I remember one time we were traveling together—we got on the airplane and there was this one child who was swinging a foot in a particular way, over and over and over. I noticed Garland staring profoundly at the child’s swinging foot. I watched him watching and I realized, I’m going to see this on the stage at some point. It was an ‘aha’ moment for me as to how he observed the world…He was so engaged and complicated, and that’s what showed up in the work.”

(Cynthia Mayeda, Friend and Colleague) In the text/table work, the character’s behavior begins to reveal itself:

place where you can change your mind, then the possibility of change exists (i.e., The Work matters—it is not just another Play)." (G.W.) Text and table work is a way to pursue deep text analysis of each scene. These are just a few of his comments about the opening scene in The Misanthrope: “It’s a trap that Alceste sets up for himself: he wants to be alone, but he doesn’t want to be alone. […] The crisis at the beginning of the play has to be taken very seriously by Philinte or the basis for Alceste is not valid— and we might think he is just a crank. […] As often happens throughout the play, at the end of the scene the characters finally get to a real conversation, and it’s interrupted.”

The table work is a way of reviewing “what am I saying and specificity” for the actor: “You must be very specific about telling him what you’re telling him and why— you must know every moment. […] Find, specifically, the opposites in the play and in the actions (which will reveal themselves as we work). For now, look for the opposites, which may seem concealed, in your text. […]

Note to all: if you don’t have a picture of all these characters you are speaking about in your mind, and if it is not very specific, then we won’t hear the conversation.”

Work at the table is about questioning assumptions or non-assumptions about the text:

“On the behavior—it may be extreme. My tendency is to go for behavior that happens in life, not in a play. In life there are no ‘transitions.’ […] A note on the behavior as you seek it out: these people are nobility, therefore they don’t have to be genteel. Real nobles can behave very badly and get away with it. They are not mimicking. It’s behavior on the edge. It’s the behavior used when no other behavior has worked. […] Behaviorally, private matters stay private when all are in the room. The making public of certain private matters is what leads to destruction in the end.

However, the private matters and agendas are still underneath, so the air is electric with what is covered. It is private gossip, unlike today where we’re in a world of public gossip. […] In the design presentation, you saw the sketches of your clothes. For now I’ll just say this, regarding ‘Period Style and Behavior’: Clothes determine behavior. People do the same things they’ve always done, they just have different constraints on them. Whenever anyone says, ‘Oh, you’re not doing the play in Molière style,’ I get nervous, I don’t know SPRING 2015 | SDC JOURNAL

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Eliante + Philinte, Chess Scene

what to say. I wouldn’t know how to direct a play in, for example, ‘Molière style’—behavior is behavior! (This doesn’t mean students don’t need to learn conventions in a particular period.) But people move the way they do because of the clothes they wear. […] Just a heads up regarding behavior: at that time, there was no psychology or analysis or explanations for behavior. Since they had no access to explain feelings, they just felt them and acted upon them. So, if the behavior feels melodramatic, it isn’t, it’s just real and valid, from needs, even if they’re buried.”

Wright was also brilliant at using text and table work to gauge how each actor works physically, mentally, psychologically, and philosophically; to gauge how the acting company may work together and to start to shape that process; to ask questions and to get the actors to ask questions; and, most importantly, to start to make the actors (without them necessarily knowing it) into an ensemble. His process was always thrilling to be in the room with, and it was in his consciousness throughout the project.

“I loved that Garland loved ‘space’—empty space—it didn’t scare him. He never started with designers by saying, ‘What is the architecture needed for this play?’ He started with the body, voice and text. […] I think of it as being in the presence of a mind at work rather than a process. […] Being in the presence of Garland Wright was like being in a force-field.” (Doug Stein, Scenic Designer)

WRIGHT ON REHEARSALS Accrual is the most important element of a profitable rehearsal period. Each rehearsal must add to what has gone before.

Learning to hold onto discoveries which are valid (and over time, developing and deepening them) and discarding those which are irrelevant to the production at hand is the fundamental step in developing an effective rehearsal technique…Accrual is dependent upon homework, by both the actor and director…It is an ongoing process that builds upon what was previously discovered…Rehearsal is and must be both a deeply subjective and a highly technical exploration. It is instinctive on the one hand and intellectual on the other. The gut must be free to express, the spirit free to play and improvise. But the mind must be fully awake to the process…

“There was so much trust on both sides— director and actor—actor and director…When with a director, I look for, and am conscious of, the times when you can build: each bringing in your own work…With Garland, we each brought in, we each responded, added, subtracted, added, built upon—and somehow together we arrived at ‘the Place.’ Those were very special times, I was very lucky to be part of that work.” (Byron Jennings, Actor—“Richard” in Richard III, Guthrie Theater; “Don Juan” in Molière’s Don Juan, Denver Center)

ON RUN-THROUGHS + PREVIEWS Wright outlined run-throughs and previews this way:

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Run-throughs begin to show how the work on individual scenes fit together as a whole. For the actor, this is a good time to begin to see the full arc of the character’s emotional journey, and how to economically dispense the physical energy which will be required over the course of the play…This is the time for the actor to adjust his energies from introspective to extroverted.

For the director, run-throughs begin to show what parts of the mise en scène still need shaping and which ones can now be ‘frozen.’ The careful business of overall rhythm and orchestration (which things need to be brought out more and which need to be stressed less) must be tended to now…At this stage of rehearsal, more preparation, not less, on the part of the director is called for…

Previews are a time to test the work against an audience’s response. One can learn from an audience what is clear and unclear, places where the audience gets ahead of the actors…One begins to sense the flow and ebb of energy between the stage and the house, and one learns how to modulate the performance to enhance the audience’s experience…The production’s energy, which has flowed inward toward itself during rehearsals, must be re-routed to flow outwards toward the audience.”

“My experience with Garland on The Misanthrope was seminal and stamped in my mind, heart, and soul…Garland carefully thought it all out and followed through on it all. Nothing, textual or design-wise, rang false

for the actor. […] You know how sometimes, too often, the design, once you get to techs, fights you, or doesn’t seem to support you? This was not true with Garland. The design was organic with the play—you couldn’t separate the play from the design. Everything helped you as an actor, and enhanced your emotional truth.” (Caroline Lagerfelt, Actor—“Célimène,” The Misanthrope, Guthrie Theater)

Celimene + Arsinoe, Sculpture Scene

The structure of The Misanthrope, where many actors are off stage for long periods, presented a challenge that Wright addressed with the actors during run-throughs: “Your off stage life (where you’ve been and why and what happened) is not clear enough. Note how each character enters in Act 1, then they come back to resolve themselves in Act 2. […] If you’re off stage and not living the life of what’s happening on stage, you won’t be able to just plug into the work on stage. It requires a great amount of focus and energy so that there’s electricity in the air that the audience can feel.

It is the difference between being backstage, listening and excited about what’s on stage, versus playing cards. It needs an inner stillness when you’re off stage. It can’t be marked, it must aspire to perfection every time.”

“I’ve never had a director as profoundly genius.

He was a full Mind/Heart Director…he shared direction to the deepest level, emotional experiences that we all share.” (Brenda Wehle, Actor—“Arsinoe,” The Misanthrope; “Elizabeth,” Richard III, Guthrie Theater) Wright was always re-enforcing the unpredictability in the world of this play: “The playing of this production can go one of two ways: surface and dull, or dangerous and exciting and tense. Don’t settle into comfort of playing. You don’t know the amount of energy it takes to play these characters. We need to create the energy and power behind what isn’t said, what’s behind the lines. […] The stakes are still not high enough. I’ve raised the stakes by lowering the formality and melodrama of the acting so it’s more like life.”

And regarding the final scene in particular: “It needs the energy of where you have been prior to this scene. Don’t know ahead of time that this is the final scene and that you are losing. Always be aware of the

depth of what happens, the importance of events outside, and the war going on inside the house—though civilized.

Your moves relate to a chess game.”

After one of the final previews, Garland said privately: “They just have to own it. It means what I mean, now they have to own what it means. They are starting to think in tempo now, and starting to just have their subtext rather than thinking their subtext.”

“I never want to hear again, ‘It isn’t brain surgery, it’s just a play’—it isn’t ‘just a play’—it is a way to affect and change the world.” (G.W.) “I don’t know how to do it without talking about ideas. If I didn’t, or if directors don’t, then it is the actors’ responsibility to question moments and ideas. I know many actors are afraid to pursue the intellectual, and indeed, the intellect can get in the way of ‘doing it, of making choices’—but, if we don’t follow the ‘ideas,’ as I have seen at times, we may find that the choices in each scene are so varied that when put all together, it can be a mess, that no one understands. […] We have a responsibility as artists to make a statement and it all must mean something. But the approach is straightforward to me. I’ve had those thoughts and I don’t think about them anymore, now I think about doing the play, like any play. […] The process is to translate the intellectual ideas into behavior—we need to discuss ideas—but the problem for actors is always translating the intellectualizing into something they can act. It’s a matter

of sifting and working through, until you come up with choices that are hard to say no to. The director side of me set this piece when I set it and conceptualized the idea, this is the large arc. The actor side of me is possessed with the actors’ behavior in the play, and then the movement of and in the play. […] What is so difficult about acting and what actors sometimes don’t understand is that there’s more to it than just ‘making choices.’ That after you make a choice, you also have to take responsibility for that choice and the consequences of that choice. Most importantly, that your choice may be fine for you but it may also say something totally wrong about another character in the play, or the meaning of the piece itself. Thus, it may say something that makes the audience think a totally wrong thought. […] The interesting thing about some actors is that they rehearse their choices, and don’t use rehearsals to find and reject choices. They make a preliminary choice, then work it. This means there is no risk. Rehearsals are for making, rejecting, and exploring choices—as many choices as possible so that, hopefully, one will learn as much about the play and the character’s life in the play that, when questioned, the actor can answer any question about a choice that was made. […] What people don’t understand about me is that I’m not directing them in terms of right versus wrong but rather on the basis only of what I see them do at the moment I see it. I am sparked with a thought—well, why don’t you try this? I’m not a director who speaks in reference to what one should do as right or wrong. (Now, if this were summer stock, I’d say make a choice and learn it—but it’s not summer stock!)”

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Alceste, Philinte + Oronte “He was a brilliant director—his ideas were extraordinary and so interesting and the way he worked with people was inspired.” (Michael Kahn, Artistic Director—Shakespeare Theatre) Garland’s attention to detail in meaning, design, and acting was impeccable, as was his attention to the bigger, global picture of the piece. He was unafraid, yet afraid.

He was truly artful in the craft of making theatre, but far beyond that as well. He was brilliantly visual and imagistic as well as eminently textual and language oriented.

Garland spoke from a personal place. Because of this, his work was powerful and is still talked about as life-affecting. Garland spoke through the work. If he didn’t believe in the work, and therefore couldn’t speak through the work, he didn’t engage in the work.

It was exhilarating to speak with artists who had worked with Garland. I was particularly struck by the words of one actor who played a small role in The Misanthrope at Seattle Repertory Theatre: "A remarkable aspect of Garland Wright’s work had nothing to do with the merits of the productions themselves. Rather, it was all about process, specifically how Garland

used rehearsal time with the actors and what that interaction seemed to be.

Garland spent the first few rehearsals laying out for the cast all the work that preceded their arrival: the conceptual work, the research, and the designs he and his team had developed.

He went farther than most in painting the specific world that this particular production would inhabit. And then, unlike most, he would set that aside, nearby for reference but over there, against the wall, slightly out of focus.

And for the next four weeks, he would encourage the actors in gentle ways to play, explore, make choices, and mistakes; to discover, get frustrated, draw, and redraw while he coached, suggested, egged on, or just sat by for a bit.

Somehow, and because the moments happened incrementally in a way you were unable to put your finger on, the actors would build characterizations of their own invention, fully inhabited because they were their creations, that, in hindsight, fit so elegantly, so seamlessly into that very world Garland had laid out for us just weeks ago. How we had circled back around, now as a fully realized ensemble, we did not know. Because the actors had invested

in the creation, because they had ownership over their characters, the playing of the play was always joyful thing." (Dennis Fox, Actor) SARI KETTER is a freelance stage director, coach, and adjunct instructor of directing, and recently relocated to NYC. She was Garland Wright’s assistant/associate from 1983 until he passed away in 1998. www.sariketter.com | ERIN B. MEE is a freelance stage director, scholar, and professor of dramatic literature at NYU. She was a directing intern at the Guthrie Theater in 1988 and Resident Director from 1989–1991. www.erinbmee.com REFERENCES Wright, Garland. 1984. Interview with Mark Bly. Theater 15:2.

1 Garland Wright’s production of The Misanthrope at the Guthrie Theater is available for viewing at the Lincoln Center Library Film Archives.

2 Wright directed two productions of The Misanthrope, one in 1984 at the Seattle Repertory Theatre and one in 1987 at the Guthrie Theater. He directed Richard III at the Guthrie Theater in 1988.

3 From a document by Garland Wright.

4 Unless otherwise noted, all quotations of Wright in The Misanthrope rehearsal are taken from Sari Ketter’s rehearsal notes, which were written verbatim.

5 Quoted from a speech of Wright’s in 1988.

6 Quoted from a speech of Wright’s in 1997.

“Our work is mysterious—it is magical, by magicians—much of it is scientific, but really it isn’t…There is no more powerful thing than having a thought and no more important thing on Earth than transmitting a thought—and then speak—I hope you will continue to realize that what you do is not trivial and it requires great talent and commitment.

You think acting is about life. I think that acting is about magic. The stage is an altar, a metaphoric place of sacrifice.

It is a magic place.”6 (G.W.) 52

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MICHAEL KAHN since 1966

THE SOCIETY PAGES SDC MEMBERS @ WORK + PLAY

TOP LEFT

On December 15, 2014, SDC Members + Associates gathered for the LA/West Coast Membership Meeting at the new Actors’ Equity Building in North Hollywood. The meeting focused on upcoming negotiations + activities specific to the LA area.

TOP RIGHT

Drew Barr + Matt August LEFT

Also on December 15, 2014, SDC Foundation hosted a DCN called "Director as Creator" with SDC Member Lisa Peterson, who discussed a director’s role in creating new work, citing examples from An Iliad + The Good Book. SDCF Director Megan Carter moderated.

RIGHT

In January 2015, President Obama appointed SDC Member Diane Rodriguez to the National Council on the Arts, which advises the Chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) on agency policies and programs. Rodriguez is the Artistic Director for Center Theatre Group.

On January 12, 2015, SDC hosted an intimate gathering of Board, staff + Members to bid farewell to Lena Abrams, SDC’s longtime administrative assistant.

Ms. Abrams retired on February 3, 2015.

Ms. Lena left a note for the Membership: I have enjoyed and will cherish my 16 ½ years of meeting such a varied group of SDC Members and non-Members, with one important thing in common: The Love of Theatre…If you don’t know, I never end with goodbye; it’s ‘take care!’ Remember, I’m only retiring from the office, not the Theatre!

Lonny Price, Lena Abrams + John Rando BOTTOM

On January 20, 2015, SDCF + SDC held a DCN focused on contracts for directors + choreographers. Deputy Director of Contract Affairs Randy Anderson + Director of Contract Affairs Mauro Melleno led the discussion.

MATT AUGUST since 2002 | DREW BARR since 2002 JOSHUA BERGASSE since 2001 | ANNE BOGART since 1990 BILL CASTELLINO since 1990 | LEAR DEBESSONET since 2008 LINDA HARTZELL since 2000 | MATT LENZ since 2005 ETHAN MCSWEENY since 1998 | LISA PETERSON since 1992 LONNY PRICE since 1992 | JOHN RANDO since 1995 DIANE RODRIGUEZ since 2002 | SHEA SULLIVAN since 2001

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On January 25, 2015, SDC + the Dramatists Guild (DG) hosted a joint event called SDC + DG in Conversation. Executive Director Laura Penn + DG’s Executive Director of Business Affairs Ralph Sevush led the discussion moderated by Todd London, Executive Director of the University of Washington School of Drama. The discussion focused on challenging the relationships btween SDC and DG. The event was held at Seattle Children’s Theatre where Northwest Regional Rep. Linda Hartzell is Artistic Director.

RIGHT

Todd London, Laura Penn, Ralph Sevrush, Linda Hartzell + Duane Kelly MIDDLE

On February 4, 2015, the Broadway Green Alliance hosted an E-Waste Drive in New York City. SDC staff jumped on the opportunity to toss a number of items in preparation for the upcoming office move.

As of January 1, 2015, it is illegal to throw away e-waste with regular garbage in NYC. BOTTOM LEFT

On February 6, 2015, the SDC Foundation hosted a One-on-One Conversation with Members Anne Bogart + Lear deBessonet at Opera Center of America in New York City. The two directors, who are leading the field in diversifying theatre, discussed ensemble work + artistic processes.

BOTTOM RIGHT

On February 12, 2015, Members Joshua Bergasse, Bill Castellino, Matt Lenz, Ethan McSweeny + Shea Sullivan were invited to hear SDC’s interior designer, Suzanne Stait, give a design presentation for the reception area in the new office space.

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| SPRING 2015

Tony Award winner and Founding Member Donald Saddler was best known as a Broadway director and choreographer.

But he started his career as a dancer in his home state of California. Born in Van Nuys, Saddler began studying dance after a childhood bout with scarlet fever. He soon started spending his afternoons on the MGM Studios lot, where he danced in the choruses of famous movie musicals such as The Great Ziegfeld, Broadway Melody of 1938, Babes in Arms, and The Wizard of Oz. Saddler was also an original and founding member of the American Ballet Theatre, appearing in several of their productions before serving overseas during World War II. Upon returning to the States, Saddler gave up ballet for Broadway and received his first choreography assignment for Wonderful Town in 1953, which earned him his first Tony Award. Saddler went on to earn another Tony for the 1971 revival of No, No, Nanette; he was also a Tony nominee for On Your Toes and the 1973 revival of Much Ado About Nothing.

DONALD SADDLER 1918-2014

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PHOTO Maurice

Seymour

Just as we take popular dancing seriously today, it was taken equally seriously by the people who danced it then—each show is like taking a journey to another time and SPRING place.

2015 | ” SDC JOURNAL 55

SDC MEMBERS + ASSOCIATES...Dana Lewis · Irene Lewis · J. Barry Lewis

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