I’ve been busy being a director for a while. Strangely enough it seems like full circle without the necessary return to a starting point. I was intending to be a director as early as undergraduate school, but was sidetracked by making a living as a stage manager and then falling in love with acting. Now, returning to directing, gives me a chance to exercise those other facilities. While stage managing I was able to watch a fair amount of prominent directors take a cast from first rehearsal to opening, including Garland Wright, Dan Sullivan, Robert Egan, Robert Allen Ackerman, Des McAnuff, and others in the opera world. It is fun to notice the cherry picked qualities of some of these role models show up in my rehearsal demeanor. Directing activates a whole different region of the brain. It’s not nearly as fun as the experiential rush you get from acting, which requires you to activate your mind and body, senses and emotions, and put them through imagined circumstances in such a way as to appear to live through fictitious events. Directing is sitting in the house and watching. Sure, you read the play in advance, make myriad choices about what the production will look like, focus on, emphasize, etc. Then there is the first part of rehearsal where you are educating the cast about the decisions made and trying to get everyone on the same page. But quickly it passes and you are relegated to observer, stewarding the story, honing clarity, helping moments as you can. And the playing is left to others, those magical folk, without whom the Theatre would not exist, the actor.