Directors Lab Questionnaire

Describe three projects that interest you artistically: the three projects you would ideally like to direct over the next couple of years. What are the plays? Where would you like to do them? How would you approach them? Who would be your artistic collaborators? We circulate these descriptions to the other Lab members as part of your artistic profile. Please type! Write as much as you want.

PROJECT #1:

Family Drama

I long to find that writer who's got the next August Osage County or Buried Child in her: that sprawling, fantastical, piercingly cruel and solidly human family saga. Red meat for theatregoers who eschew well done. Ideally I would accidentally stumble upon this creature in play form and then meet its author. We would assemble some great performers who can sink their canines into it, and give it a read. "How did that feel?" would be my first question to her. "Is it doing what you want?” I would ask her to give it another pass taking what you can from the reading. And while you're at it, "write a few of those outrageous scenes you couldn't quite fit in—those odd, unkempt ideas still floating nearby." While she was off working I would grab a designer or two and begin with a bunch of “what if's.” What if there was a world that felt like 80-grit sandpaper? What if the world was only three colors? What if Magritte lived in Kansas? When the script came back from its go-round with its creator, I would take it gingerly in hand and begin a careful process of trying to realize, in full 3D and living color, with a pulse, nay a beating heart, fleshed out and boned, warts and all, those beautiful, painful ideas the author has conjured. She would never leave my side so I can make sure her intentions are being honored. Actors would be encouraged to do that thing only they can do, breathe life into words, animate thought. And then, if all goes well, we stand back, the author, the primary artist, and myself with my happy band of interpreters, artisans and facilitators, proud collaborators in the effort to realize the imaginings of one.

PROJECT #2:

Opera based on O’Neill’s Dynamo

I spent many years in the world of opera working with some of the best singers and conductors of our time and have a great respect for the marriage of text and music in all its forms. Eugene O'Neill's play Dynamo, a play about technology and man, cries out to me to be adapted into a work that would resemble a cross between Street Scene by Kurt Weill, Langston Hughes and Elmer Rice, and The Black Rider by Robert Wilson and Tom Waits. If some massive malformation or symphonic mutation comes to mind, then that’s good. That’s about where I would want to go. Recently I worked with a young composer on a production of Medea, producing atonal, a cappella pieces for the choral odes. That collaboration was one of the more fulfilling of my directing life. Taking Dynamo and reimagining it with a more contemporary bent (as technology and its inherent dangers have altered since) and staging it in a grand, self-consciously theatrical way, playing heavily with design elements of scale while marrying it to serious music of a contemporary composer would be a thrill and a challenge. I would stage it at BAM's Opera House because why not. I would grab my fellow UCSD alum Neil Patel to design sets, and my dear friend James F. Ingals to do the lights because I've never been able to work with them on a scale like that. I would beg Susan Hilferty to design the costumes, trying to hide my long-time crush. But for a composer… At this point I am not at all sure where to turn. One of my hopes in applying to the lab is that connections may be made which would lead in short order to meeting that person, or many persons who had a good amount of potential projects that fit what I have in mind.

PROJECT #3:

Shakespeare

Always, always and more. In as much as directing is an interpretive art, there is nothing more ripe for reinterpretation than Shakespeare, therefore Shakespeare challenges the director like little else. Put that alongside my affinity for the language well spoken and I am in hog heaven when working on his cannon. As an actor I have done many of Shakespeare's plays, sometimes returning to the same role two and three times. There seems to be no end to the amount of exploration one can employ and the depths one can delve down to. To pick which to direct first is like selecting one puppy from many. You can't help wanting them all. Having directed Othello and The Tempest, I would love to return to them but not quite yet. Of the more oft done plays I suppose, gun to my head to chose only one, I would want to tackle A Winters Tale next. The court scene in Act III is one of the most harrowing scenes there is. Brutal and raw and unyielding. How to realize that scene? And of course, does a statue come to life? Is it magic? Or a miracle? Or has Hermione been squirreled away in a shed for 16 years, fed by Polina and waiting for a repentant Leontes? And what to do about the bear, as in exit pursued by? By the way, dear reader, since you are nearly a captive audience, I'll take this opportunity to tell you that “exit pursued by a bear” is my second favorite Shakespearean stage direction. My first comes from Henry V and is simply “enter the French Army.” But I digress. Since I believe that A Winters Tale's main theme or concern is the idea of Christian repentance and forgiveness and what that concept meant to an Elizabethan audience I would start with that idea and with the text. Shakespeare's ripe for interpretation as I've stated, yes. But as far as I am concerned, concept has to be rooted in the text, justified in the text, illuminated by the text. I would want designers with spare and simple esthetics. I almost always use sound as a major design component when working on Shakespeare and A Winters Tale begs for song and composition. And also actors, dear actors. Speak the speech I pray you, trippingly on the tongue. I'm afraid I have a low tolerance for mangled verse or emPHAsis on the wrong syLAble. Trained actors it needs must be. Hog heaven I tell you, hog heaven.

1.What is a play or musical you wish you had directed the premiere of? Who worked on it originally? Do you know anything about how it went from page to the stage?

I'm having a difficult time with this question. King Lear? Am I allowed to teleport back to the 15^th century? As far as page to stage, Bill wrote it, passed out “sides” to all the fella's (sorry, no dames) took a small part for himself to save a little money and away they went sans director. The Cherry Orchard? Konstantin rehearsed the damn thing for nine months, five days a week. By the time it opened it was pretty darn specific, no surprise there. Ah, wait! This puts a smile on my face. Sweeny Todd. Hal Prince, Stephen Sondheim, Hugh Wheeler, Eugene Lee, Ken Billington, Lansbury, Cariou, Garber! What a swirling stew of talent. I know nothing about the process but my imagination can't but help thinking it must have been something. More recently, La Bête with Mark Rylance or Jerusalem with Mark Rylance or the next thing with Mark Rylance, or One Man Two Guvnors by Richard Bean. I don't know if I've answered the question other than to say, a lot, there's an awful lot I wish I had directed the premiere of.

2. Have you ever worked on the first production of a new play? If so, what was the process and what went well and what didn’t go so well? If you could go back and re-do things and suddenly had the control to do so, what would you change?

I staged the first production of a play called Pluperfect Love about Abelard & Heloise a number of years back. It was not the first new production I had worked on but it was the first at the helm. It was an odd piece, quirky and non-linear, grappling with the qualities of love through time. If I had a chance to repeat the experience I would find a way to afford a longer development process, or at least a chance for myself and the playwright to experiment for a few more weeks in some kind of extended rehearsal process. With that approach we might have been able to focus the piece a bit further, drawing out more of what the playwright was exploring and leaving behind unnecessary sidebars. Having said that I cannot really think of a time that I've heard anyone say that they had a sufficiency of time. We all seem to want more. I will freely admit that working on new plays sometimes leaves me on the horns of a dilemma. Gone is the freedom to shake your fists and curse the long dead playwright for leaving you a mess because he or she is in the room. Not only that, but I and my colleagues main task becomes to serve the writer, helping him realize the best possible production of his play at this time. The dilemma is how to go about that. My natural inclination is to nurture. Coaxing the writer to realize the play they are trying to express not necessarily what I want them to express, often two distinct things. On the other hand I have been in the room when Joe Papp watched a dress rehearsal of a new play he had not yet seen. His first note was to cut the first three scenes. And I've heard stories of Elia Kazan's requests for major revisions of Cat On A Hot Tin Roof, some that Tennessee later put back. To what extent do we directors remind ourselves that it is their play, not ours. If we keep insisting that their play do what we want it to do, shouldn't we at some point write our own? I believe we directors should line up alongside doctors when taking the Hippocratic Oath, “first, do no harm.”

3. How do actors fit in to the process? Any observations good or bad about how actors have contributed to the success of a new play? Please be specific.

My first response to this question was, “really?” My second is that perhaps we should rephrase the question since the role of the director as we have come to understand it here and now is only about 100 years in the making while the role of the actor is as old as mankind. We should better ask, "How do directors fit into the process?" for that is much less clear.

4. You have $5000 and a 50’x50’rehearsal room open from 8am-midnight for one week. What would you do with this? Be specific and please think big - you can change the course of history - What? Who? How?

Quick! Change the world! I love it. If only I could. Interestingly the first thing that caught my imagination was the room, nice and large. The second thing was the admonition to think big. What I have yet to think about and have little relationship with is the money. I don't know what that says. As Grotowski did I would use 95% of the one week you have given me in the company of actors, a musician or two and a designer. I would create a laboratory based on my Suzuki movement training in which all the actors would be accomplished. We would import five yards of topsoil and spread it on the floor. No set, no props, lighting would be natural or practical. We would stay in the room the entire 168 hours. Eating, sleeping, rehearsing and cleaning around the clock. We would tell the story, with the immediacy of the actor and his body about Jesus' trip to India. During the missing years of Jesus' twenties you see, he traveled on a spiritual quest to India, having heard of the teachings of Siddhārtha which had been spreading throughout the region for 500 years. It was there that he encountered the Four Noble Truths and The Eightfold Path to Enlightenment and for nearly ten years practiced the meditation of mindfulness and the development of loving compassion. He then returned to his native people, the Jews, and tried to teach them, in parables they could understand, what he had learned. And then the Clergy and the Romans crucified him. We would invite a small audience to see this work on the final evening. They would be asked to leave all their belongings in an adjoining room, changing into identical robes before entering the candle-lit performance space. We would hope to achieve this:

Theatre - through the actor's technique, his art in which the living organism strives for higher motives - provides an opportunity for what could be called integration, the discarding of masks, the revealing of the real substance: a totality of physical and mental reactions. (Grotowski's Statement Of Principles)

One On One Oh Boy!

Occasionally I pay attention to these mailings I get from a place called One On One.  Its among several outfits here in New York that have set themselves up in the last two decades or so.  There mission is to host a forum for aspiring actors to meet and audition with casting professionals, and of course, as all businesses do, to make money.  Casting peeps get paid to be there, the actors pay. At first the casting industry was shy about this crossover into a seemingly shady world of pay-to-be-seen. But over time they have, almost to a peep, dropped their aversion to the syphoning off of cold hard cash from the young, the hopeful, the unrepresented masses that New York attracts to its theatrical shores.  Once casting directors, agents and managers had paved the way, in came the directors. Just like anybody else they too can sniff out a revenue stream.  Why not?  All you have to do is nail your shingle on a door frame declaring yourself a director, wrangle a few credits from the world of indie films or off off broadway or assist someone with a recognizable name, and you can fund your trip to the world cup in 2014 on the dreams of the aspiring. Recently an email notice informed me that the playwrights are now in on the game.  Sign up!  Pay your money and shake hands with a real live playwright! 

Its beginning to strain credulity.  Casting people can, theoretically, further your career.  Directors can in most instances, offer you employment.  But playwrights?  They can write a role for you, sure.  They can recommend you to the producer or director or both.  But the power to hire was almost entirely beaten out of them by the emergence of the director post WWII.  So what are we to think?  That actors need to begin to pay for social connections which may, however tenuously, lead to a job someday?  Where does this leave us by logical extension? Who else feels they have something so valuable to offer a room full of wanna-be's that its ethical to pocket a couple hundred bucks an hour for the privilege of being met.  

Some of this is mitigated by purchasing a class.  Casting directors do have valuable feedback regarding the audition process, no doubt.  Directors as well. Agents, not so much. But by and large thats where it ends.  None of these people should be attempting to teach acting in any meaningful way.  They can actually be doing much more harm than good, and that is truly unethical.  Plastic surgeons get sued when you pay them money to help, and they make a mess of your nose.  There are many many directors out there who should be sued for malpractice when engaged in attempting to teach acting.  So buyer beware.  If you feel you need to pay money to meet these people at least have the good sense to protect yourself from harm.

Affirmative Action

All men are created equal.  Most enlightened people are 'down' with that.  But shift the operative word from equal to created and then contemplate the moment just after the second breath of the wee newborn, when all the inequities of circumstance are visited upon it.  The Supreme Court is revisiting Affirmative Action in Fisher v. University of Texas.  This liberals opinion?  Affirmative action at the University level is way to little way to late.

See Here

A New Friend

I hadn't thought I'd be rooting through the dustbin of my own opinions, pulling out the folder labeled SPIELBERG and blowing the dust away.  But after reading Thomas Frank's short piece in Harper's magazine I was doing just that, simply to compare.  I had silenced my complaints about Spielberg's work around about 1998 when that damn private's ass was, at long last, saved.  No one wanted to hear my caterwauling that everything Spielberg touched sloughed off all ambiguity.  That he could ring complexity out of the human condition like a laundress rings moisture out of a turtleneck.  I had 'put a cork in it' as suggested by some and resigned myself to a very silent minority.  And here's the tough part.  Lincoln, although problematic in these self same ways, was very enjoyable to me.  That was in very large part due to watching the preposterously talented Daniel Day Lewis ply his ample craft.  But Frank has reawakened my nearly 15 year old file of complaints with his, "Stephen Spielberg, that Michelangelo of the trite" and, "[Lincoln is] like other Spielberg productions, it drops you into a world where all the great moral judgements have been made for you already". Read the article. I can't do it any justice here.