How to Read a Play: Script Analysis for Directors [1 ed.] 0415748224, 9780415748223

Citation preview

H o w t o Re a d a P l a y

How to Read a Play provides a broad range of tools and methods for reading a play text, exploring a series of possible approaches for those who hope to bring it to life on the stage. The work done before the first rehearsal, preliminary reading, or even before the cast has met can be crucial to the success of a production. How to Read a Play provides essential guidance on how to analyze, understand, and interpret a play for performance. The book is divided into four sections: • lessons from the past, detailing approaches from Aristotle through to Stanislavski and Brecht and establishing the models and methods that underpin much of directors’ work today; • a survey of current practices, including interviews and observation of practical work; this section is divided according to the director’s tasks: digging into the script, preparing for design and casting, and gearing up to rehearse; • reading a play without a script, considering the analysis of nontraditional plays and texts, and offering guidance on devising work; and • a workbook of play analysis, outlining exercises based on the survey of current practices and designed as a practical guide to analyzing a chosen text. The goal of How to Read a Play is to get students to dig deeply into the text for meaning and author intent and for what will work on stage. Having come to understand and experiment with a range of models, readers will be equipped to create their own brand of analysis. Damon Kiely is a professional director and writer and professor of directing and acting for DePaul University’s Theatre School.

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How t o Re a d a P l a y

Script Analysis for Directors

Damon Kiely

First published 2016 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2016 Damon Kiely The right of Damon Kiely to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Kiely, Damon. How to read a play : script analysis for directors / Damon Kiely.   pages cm   Includes bibliographical references.   1. Drama – Explication. 2. Theater – Production and direction. I. Title.   PN1707.K53 2016  792.02´33–dc23                 2015031448 ISBN: 978-0-415-74822-3 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-415-74823-0 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-315-64264-2 (ebk) Typeset in Sabon by HWA Text and Data Management, London

To my mother, who always told me I could do anything, even when I probably couldn’t. To my father, who inspires me every day to be a better teacher, writer, artist, dad, and human being.

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Contents

List of Figures viii Foreword ix Acknowledgments xii 1 Introduction

1

2 Lessons from the Past

3

3 Survey of Current Practices

32

4 Reading a Play without a Script

107

5 Workbook Chapter

137

Appendices 163 List of Interviews 182 Biographies of Interviewees 185 Bibliography 199 Index 201

Fig ure s

Our Town by Thornton Wilder 13 Medea by Euripides 17 Oklahoma! by Rodgers and Hammerstein 21 A Streetcar Named Desire by Tennessee Williams 38 A Streetcar Named Desire by Tennessee Williams 39 Freytag Models for Star Wars and A Streetcar Named Desire 47 Our Town by Thornton Wilder 55 Our Town by Thornton Wilder 56 Our Town by Thornton Wilder 64 Goldfish by John Kolvenbach 67 A Streetcar Named Desire by Tennessee Williams 86 Stop Hitting Yourself by Rude Mechs 119 500 Clown Frankenstein by 500 Clown 126 129 Architecting by the TEAM

Forewo rd Anne Bogart

I love reading, and yet I am usually anxious at the prospect of reading a play. I tend to put off opening a script for as long as I can because it requires from me such different tools than reading a novel, a poem, an essay, or a biography. Plays are not intended to be read in solitude, and plays ask for an inordinate investment of my patience and imagination. Essentially, a novel, a poem, an essay, or a biography embodies the words contained within its covers and is brought to life by the reader’s imagination, but a play, also within its covers, ultimately exists to point at something else and it requires a team of diverse talents to animate it successfully. A novel exists for its own sake. A play needs a creative team to animate it in time and space. In plays, the exposition and actions are mostly expressed through dialogue, and I must translate the dialogue while reading into mental images that include physical actions that reflect character and relationships, atmosphere, gestures, groupings, shadows, light, color, shapes, movement, facial expressions, noise and silences, sound effects, and much more. I must imagine the voices including timbre, tone, timing, and inflections. I am required to imagine a four dimensionality that is only alluded to on the page. Consequently, I find plays exceedingly difficult to read alone. And yet, as a theater director, I must regularly sit in a quiet place and read new and old plays. I read because I love the work of a particular playwright and I am eager to have access to new worlds they have imagined. I read because I love the theater and believe in its transformative power, and this is often how I find my next project. I regularly depend upon others to point me in the direction of new plays to read. I depend upon my colleagues and upon the field at large to keep me in touch with fresh innovations and ideas.

x Foreword

By its nature, the subject of the theater is social systems: how people and communities do or do not get along. A play generally begins when something in the community goes awry. The drama results from a group’s shared search for restored equilibrium from a state of social instability. Oedipus kills his father and sleeps with his mother, causing havoc in the house of Atreus. Romeo and Juliet bear the brunt of their respective families’ feuds. Linda Loman tries desperately to hold her husband and disintegrating family together. Hamm, Clove, Nag, and Nell try to go on living together in what seems to be a post-apocalyptic, de-populated world. From a state of imbalance, a group of individuals attempt to reestablish stability. On the surface, all great plays tell simple stories but are, simultaneously, complex and multi-dimensional. This paradox is key to an audience’s enjoyment of theater. I read a play not to understand it but to stand under it, to stand in its shade. In reading it to myself, I hope to gain access to the play’s inherent mystery. In the best case, the mystery is gradually unleashed throughout the course of reading the play. I look for plays that can work this magic. Playwright Charles L. Mee Jr. proposes that what distinguishes Shakespeare from lesser playwrights is that the reader’s journey in Shakespeare is away from rather than toward understanding. With many plays, the trajectory is the opposite of what Mee suggests; the reader begins with the sense that each character is strange and unknowable and, by the end, has gained a familiarity with each. In contrast, at the beginning of a Shakespeare play, the characters feel familiar and knowable to the reader and, by the end, they have become complex and unknowable. In this spirit, I read a play hoping to be increasingly disoriented and intrigued. I want the process of reading the play to trigger associations and provoke ever more questions rather than ever more answers. The physicist Werner Heisenberg suggested that what artists and scientists share in common is one hand that firmly grasps the particular while the other reaches toward the unknown. In practical terms, perhaps this suggests that a successful artist must be able to do nothing less than join the temporal (one hand closed upon the particular) with the eternal (one hand reaching toward the ineffable). This is particularly tricky in the domain of theater because the playwright must attempt to accomplish this feat via dialogue. Perhaps in the theater the plotline and characters are the temporal and the personal associations and feelings unleashed by the play in its audience are the eternal.

Foreword xi

As a solitary reader of a play, I must first find my own place in it. Where do I fit in and then where will the audience locate itself in relation to the production? I must figure this out because the audience’s placement, both literally and figuratively, matters a great deal in performance. The task of the director, the actors, and the designers is to translate the words on the page into actions in time and space. This is a vast and multifaceted undertaking. In performance, plays operate like music. A play communicates not only through plotline and dialogue but through the musicality of sound, light, action, gesture, and tempi. The actors choose actions and interactions in relation to the words and attempt to remain acutely present within the rush of the time set aside for the occasion. Finally, the audience is dropped into the middle of this complex situation already under way where the fictional social system of the drama and the real social system of the actors meet. The audience, like me as the initial reader, must be able to find its own place in the event. Damon Kiely has written a book that is readable and helpful to everyone faced with the very particular challenges of reading plays. Clearly driven by his own curiosity, Kiely examines how talented theater professionals throughout history have found success and true gratification in reading scripts.

Acknowl e dg m e n t s

Many thanks to my editor, Ben Piggott, who believed in this book from the beginning and tirelessly led a first-time author through every twist and turn of the process. This book could not have been possible without the backing of DePaul University: The school and, specifically, the theatre department supported me with an academic leave, research support, and administrative help. I have to thank my kids, Isabella and Finn, who put up with a closed office door on many a summer day so I could bang out draft after draft. Thanks to all the directors who sat down with me to share their insights on play reading and analysis and to the theatre companies and photographers who allowed me to use their lovely photographs. I am grateful to all my early readers, including Josh Sobel, Marti Lyons, Kimberly Senior, Joanie Schultz, Rachel Walshe, Arnold Aronson, and Julie Dubiner. I cannot thank my students enough for their tireless work assisting on this project, especially Andrew Peters, Lavina Jadhwani, and Michael Osinski. Big thanks to Anne Bogart, who not only gave a great interview and wrote an excellent foreword but helped me keep the book title I wanted and encouraged me at every step. Finally, everyone reading this book should thank my talented and generous wife, Jennifer Tanaka, for editing every page and tirelessly guiding me toward clarity and specificity.

Ch a p t e r 1

Intro d uct i on

When I first started directing, I avoided reading the script for weeks, sometimes months. I found any number of reasons to put off digging into the first scene. I feared I would not have any ideas—or worse, that my ideas would be boring and stupid. Eventually, I found ways to trick myself into turning the first page. I’m not studying the play, I’d say, I’m just making a list of scenes. No analysis here—just figuring out what props we’ll need on the first day. Once I started reading, ideas flooded in, and I started rehearsal preparation in earnest. When I began teaching graduate directors for The Theatre School at DePaul University, I realized my students were just as lost. One director might burn passionately about a play but could not articulate why. Another jumped to a cool idea but realized it did not make sense with the actual dialogue. I needed techniques to teach. I scoured directing books and tried out exercises in class. I challenged students to write essays on why they wanted to direct the play, then urged them to clarify their arguments. What is the play about? How will it work on stage? What ideas and questions are you bringing to collaborators? I discovered that no one book or method worked for every director—or for every play. Different types of scripts opened up through varied techniques. If a student were tackling a Chekhov play, she or he should know every character’s life story backward and forward. Greeks? Best to identify the crucial dramatic moments—inciting incident, turning point, climax. Shakespeare’s plays demanded that directors examine every comma, each semicolon, all the periods. Students developed personal touchstone methods of analysis. One director could not begin until he had listed every decision the

2 Introduction

main character makes, another dreamt on the sensorial world of the play, and a third really could not get going until she wrote a summary of every scene. I decided to write a book that uncovers many ways to read a play but challenges directors to find their own paths. First, I picked out directors and critics from history who influenced the way we read plays now. There are thousands of directors to choose from: I focused on six who helped shape the reader I am today. In each case I ask: How did they read plays? Why? What are the key lessons? What is still useful? I also wanted to find out how successful professional directors read plays now. Are there trends? Is it all just instinct? I interviewed more than forty directors including Broadway hot-shots, heads of prestigious schools, titans of the field, and mad scientists of performance. Whether talking to the hottest director of the moment or an artist toiling in the shadows, I always heard something inspiring that made me want to chuck my whole process and try what they did. Some theatre artists do not direct plays but instead devise them, creating new works based on improvisation in the rehearsal room. I wondered: If you don’t start with a play, what do you start with? Do these directors and creators read something before they begin? What do they analyze? When? Finally, I took my research and turned it into a workbook. The final chapter has twenty-one ideas on how to read a play. I don’t recommend trying them all on one production—you’d never get to rehearsal. Try out the exercises that fire your imagination, or use the ones I provide as a basis to create your own. The point of this book is for you to hold up your own ideas against working directors and giants from the past. And to find your own way. At one point, this book was titled Text Analysis for Directors. The more I interviewed directors and researched the topic, the less I liked the name. Directors don’t just analyze texts: They read plays. As Anne Bogart eloquently states in her foreword, a play is not a novel—consumed in private. A play is interpreted by a group of people and then performed for an audience. The words on the page, the text that makes up a script, are only a guide. They are not the entire play. So what are plays? Why do we read them? How do we read them? Let’s start at the beginning.

Ch a p t e r 2

Le ss ons f rom t h e Pas t

I worked on scores of plays before I read Aristotle or Stanislavski. Studying philosophy at the University of Chicago and squeezing in theatre rehearsals on evenings and weekends, I came to theatre as a pastime. I acted, designed lights, and directed plays without a solid historical background. I improvised my way through rehearsals, teaching myself through trial and error. Many ideas I stumbled upon were first introduced thousands of years ago. I always tried to identify the beginning, middle, and end of a play just as Aristotle did in ancient Greece. When I reminded an actor about his or her character’s back history, I unconsciously echoed Konstantin Stanislavski’s search for theatrical truth in Russia in the 1920s. When I searched for the rhythm of a piece, I instinctively channeled Vsevolod Meyerhold. Tired of hacking away on my own, I went to Columbia University in New York for an MFA degree in directing. I studied Russian theorists, German critics, and American experimentalists—trying out new ideas in the rehearsal room. When I moved to Chicago to run an ensemble-based theatre company, I delved more deeply into the American realist tradition. Teaching directors at DePaul inspired me to wrestle with the great directors of the last 2,000 years—so I could ground students in lessons from history. Now I ask my students to read with a critical lens. The great directors and critics of the past were working in a specific time period, working on a specific problem. Some ideas or methods maintain their potency across centuries and cultures, and some do not. You need to hold up your own beliefs about plays against those of the masters in order to develop your own philosophy and aesthetic. A comprehensive history of text analysis would overwhelm this book’s purpose. Instead, I focus on seven influential thinkers,

4  Lessons from the Past

quickly laying out the historical context in which they worked and parsing their most important ideas on play reading. Most of these theatre giants are directors, but our first one never worked in a theatre. He just figured he knew a little bit about everything.

A ristotle By the time Aristotle wrote up his notes on tragedy, he had already set the Greek philosophical world on fire. In 366 bc, when just seventeen years old, Aristotle moved to Athens to study with Plato, and as an investigative team, they delved deeply into philosophy, politics, and natural science. Aristotle worked for Alexander the Great and eventually set up his own school writing about physics, metaphysics, poetry, theatre, music, logic, rhetoric, politics, government, ethics, biology, and zoology. That’s only a partial list. One hundred years earlier, playwrights competed for first prize at the Festival of Dionysus. At this raucous and sacred annual event, bulls were sacrificed, revelers danced and drank, and the gods were praised. Thousands of spectators packed the amphitheater for three full days, as each of three playwrights presented a trilogy of tragedies. Over a span of fifty years, writers battled for prizes and established their artistic priorities. Aeschylus delved into the moral plight of heroes, Sophocles clashed opposing moral viewpoints, and Euripides explored the messy human interactions of families. These three seminal tragedians encouraged fledgling Greek democrats to face tensions in their growing society—and along the way invented Western drama. Aristotle never attended the festival in its heyday and found most theatre performances vulgar but believed he could judge a play’s excellence by reading it. He had held seminars on theatre and considered Oedipus Rex by Sophocles the ideal tragedy. Although he never finished his book on theatre, Aristotle’s class notes on tragedy were posthumously published as The Poetics. This passage haunts college freshmen worldwide: Tragedy is an imitation of an action that is admirable, complete and possesses magnitude; in language made pleasurable, each of its species separated in different parts; performed by actors,

Lessons from the Past  5

not through narration, effecting through pity and fear the purification of such emotions.1 It is worth noting that Aristotle is specifically speaking about tragedy but, over time, his description has been applied to plays in general. I use this definition all the time—so let’s look at a few of his terms.

I m itation Just as children enjoy play-acting and mimicking their elders, people love seeing a likeness of life on stage, but we should remember that imitation does not mean depicting life as it is, but as it could be. A song can imitate an emotion. The chorus of statesmen in Oedipus Rex dispenses wisdom through chanting and rhythmic movement— not a representation of life but a likeness of the chorus’s effect on society.

A c tion What is the main character striving toward? A plot consists of a series of actions that the main character takes on his or her mission. In Oedipus Rex, Oedipus tries to uncover who caused the plague. The play revolves around his relentless quest for the truth. For Aristotle—actions matter, not words.

C o mplete Radically, Aristotle advises that plots should have a beginning, middle, and end that flow logically. One decision dominoes into the next, tipping over the next event: These triggers must be necessary and probable. Why does Oedipus gouge out his eyes? He found out he slept with his mother. Why did that happen? Because he goaded a messenger to give him information.

E f f ecting T hrough Pi t y a nd Fea r For Aristotle, a great tragedy pulls the audience into the story of the protagonist. When he or she experiences something terrible, we feel sorry. When the main character cowers, we are scared. Pity and fear engender empathy in the viewers.

6  Lessons from the Past

T he Purif ication of Such Emot ions ( Als o Kn own a s Ca t ha rsis) Scholars have debated this complex idea for centuries. At its heart is the question: Why purify emotions such as pity and fear? One theory draws from Aristotle’s guidebook on morality titled Nichomachean Ethics. He argues against indulging in emotions such as fear, anger, confidence and desire. “Having these feelings at the times, about the right things, towards the right people, for the right end…is proper to virtue.”2 If audiences feel pity and fear for the protagonist, then at the climactic moment, they will hopefully experience catharsis—purge their excess emotions—and possibly become better citizens. Aristotle was categorizing a specific kind of theatre—calling out what worked best for Greek tragedy. But how can we use this definition today? Tennessee Williams’s 1947 drama, A Streetcar Named Desire, follows a structural pattern similar to that of Oedipus Rex, so let’s analyze it using some of Aristotle’s precepts. The play begins as Blanche DuBois arrives on her sister Stella’s doorstep seeking refuge and ends with her being carted away to a mental hospital. How do we arrive at this conclusion? Through a series of necessary and probable logical steps from beginning to end. Blanche seeks refuge but antagonizes her brother-in-law, Stanley. Stanley turns against Blanche, spurring Stella to defend her, and so on and so on. [See Workbook Chapter: Exercise #20, Aristotelian Analysis] To understand the characters better, start with Aristotle’s maxim: People are what they do, not what they say. What is Blanche’s main action? She’s striving toward a new home. How does she seek refuge? She flirts with Stanley, manipulates Stella, and lies to a suitor. The plot teaches us about Blanche’s desperation. Hopefully, we recognize her actions as imitations of life, pity her, empathize with her fears, and feel an emotional response at the end of the play. Sarah Kane’s 4.48 Psychosis bursts with poetic language about depression and suicide but contains no character names, no setting, and no plot. People have performed it with one actor or with twenty. An early passage sets the tone: I am sad I feel that the future is hopeless and that things cannot improve

Robert Woodruff on Studying Greek Theatre When I met with international directing star Robert Woodruff at his apartment on New York City’s Upper West Side, he was not sure he wanted me to turn on my tape recorder. Two hours later—after a free-ranging discussion about text analysis, directing, adaptation, and working internationally—he was showing me a video of his scalding production of Medea performed in Israel, eager for more conversation. Woodruff’s decades-long career includes premiering Sam Shepard’s early work, explosive reworkings of classic plays for regional theatres, and international collaborations. I had the great fortune to watch him teach a class on Greek Theatre at Yale University, and I asked him how he closely reads scenes: RW: You’re asking: What is it about? What is this scene about? What is this speech about? What is the relationship about? Why do people speak for 40 lines? What’s the necessity of speaking for 40 lines? And then laying bare the mechanics of the writing. So this is repetition. Why is it repetition? Have they run out of ideas? So in a way, not covering up the flaws, but what is the writer exposing, as opposed to saying it’s a flaw in the writing. DK: Either they speak for 40 lines or they speak for one line in a rapid back and forth. RW: Yeah, the stichomythia, and that’s interesting, too. DK: And like you said, not seeing it as a flaw, but seeing it as a… RW: It’s an amazing form, right? What’s interesting is that you look at it on the page and say: I wanna do that play. People talk endlessly, then it’s one line, one line, one line. I like both those ideas. The radicalness of the change is astonishing. And then you’re looking at the play in relationship to the moment we’re living in, and you’re looking at it from a distance—those two things at the same time. The psychology is unbelievable in its veracity in the moment, but also the cultural distance is amazing. If you rest on one or the other, you’re defeating it. So I think you want the alien and you want the familiar both. It’s how to get that into the work.

8  Lessons from the Past

I am bored and dissatisfied with everything I am a complete failure as a person I am guilty, I am being punished I would like to kill myself3 Can Aristotle guide us here? Looking for a protagonist and a driving dramatic action, even if you cannot find one, will help you understand the play better. If plot does not drive the play, what does? Perhaps theme or language? Regardless, the play has a beginning, middle, and end. The language changes over the course of the script. Why has Kane’s play resonated? Because people recognize within the language a searing likeness of a deeply depressed soul. It does not recreate a slice of life, but it does imitate human truths. Two thousand years ago, Aristotle tried to define what makes a play work. At the turn of the twentieth century, Konstantin Stanislavski searched for a better method to work on plays.

Konstantin S tanislavski In his gauzy memoir published in 1924, My Life in Art, Stanislavski laments his inability to match the feats of famous actors of the late nineteenth century. When he did have a momentary triumph, he was not sure why and could not reliably repeat it. Luckily for us, as the scion of one of Russia’s wealthiest families, Stanislavski did not need to work for a living. Instead, he spent his life delving deeply into theatrical research. His parents took him to the ballet, the symphony, and the opera and even built a little auditorium just for him on the estate. He founded a couple of small amateur theatre groups to investigate his ideas. In his memoir, he describes the fitful progress toward the “feeling of true measure.”4 How can an actor create actual, truthful emotions, not hackneyed recreations of old performances? Stanislavski complained that theatre makers in late nineteenthcentury Russia clung to clichés. Companies would acquire stock set pieces and costumes and reuse them for all productions. Lead actors hung onto roles for decades, eventually passing along their methods of acting when they bequeathed the part to up-and-comers. Everything followed conventions—based on already determined ideas about the plays.

Lessons from the Past  9

In 1897, Stanislavski teamed up with Vladimir NemirovichDanchenko, an award-winning playwright and producer, and created the Moscow Art Theatre. According to Stanislavski’s journals, he sat down with Danchenko for a conversation about a new way of making art at two in the afternoon, and they did not rise until eight the next morning. In My Life in Art he remembers one major point they agreed upon: “The most important thing was that all the other theatres practiced conventionalized theatrical truth, and we wanted another, a real artistic, scenic truth.”5 For decades, the incisive minds at the Moscow Art Theatre wiped out old traditions. No longer would veteran actors teach apprentices how to play Hamlet. Instead, directors combed through the script looking for meaning, preparing for long table sessions, during which actors would discuss and debate every line in the script. Gone were slapdash run-throughs designed to highlight an acting star, replaced by months-long rehearsals where the ensemble polished every moment to perfection. Throughout it all, Stanislavski ran rehearsals, taught workshops, wrote up theories, and searched for what he called a grammar of acting. After thirty years of teaching and writing, Stanislavski published his findings in Russia and America. Norman and Elizabeth Hapgood released English versions in three parts. An Actor Prepares, dealing primarily with the psychology and emotion of acting, came out in 1938. The second, Building a Character, about the physical work of the actor, did not come out until 1955. In 1961, they published Creating a Role, which promised practical applications from the first two books. In 2008, Jean Benedetti published a new translation in one volume titled An Actor’s Work. Benedetti contends that Stanislavski intended to publish his theories in one book, fearing that without the physical aspects of his teaching, followers would reduce his system to a psychological method. In An Actor’s Work, Stanislavski outlines major categories of text analysis. Let’s break a few down.

G i v en C ircumst a nces Producers and actors before Stanislavski used the facts of the text to build characters and research settings, but An Actor’s Work argues that given circumstances are the basis for all truthful acting.

10  Lessons from the Past

A given circumstance is something we know is true from the play. It is a fact. Some facts from Shakespeare’s Hamlet: Hamlet is a prince; Hamlet lives in Denmark; Hamlet’s father died mysteriously; and Hamlet’s mother married his uncle. Stanislavski suggests actors turn each fact into an if. An actor playing Hamlet needs to ask himself a series of questions. If I were a prince; If I lived in Denmark; If my father died mysteriously; and If my mother married my uncle. Armed with this information, when my father’s ghost tells me his brother murdered him, how should I react? Stanislavski believes the word if can magically unlock truthful acting. Complex plays contain a huge number of ifs created by the writer that justify lines of behavior by the characters. From An Actor’s Work: The author says: if the action takes place in such and such a period, in such and such a country, in such and such a place or house, if such and such people live there, with such and such a cast of mind, with such and such ideas and feelings, if they come into conflict in such and such circumstances, and so on.6 As a director or actor, first read the play and establish all the facts of the play. Then figure out what don’t you know? Writers do not spell out every bit of character history; they leave space for actors and directors to create. Take this opportunity to use your imagination to plug gaps in between scenes—to fill in missing links in the plot. Stanislavski encourages dream work: The director complements the author’s ideas with his own ‘ifs’ and says: if there were such and such relationships among the characters, if their particular habits were such and such, if they lived in such a setting and so on, how would the actor react if he were placed in these circumstances?7

Lessons from the Past  11

Directors and actors should ask themselves basic questions for every moment in the play: “who, when, where, why, for what reason, how.”8 At times, directors will not find answers through reading but must conduct research. Maps, books, and photographs supplement this work. What did Denmark look like? How cold were castles? People do not live generally; they live specifically. [See Workbook Chapter: Exercise #4, Given Circumstances] Once the actors have a clear grasp of the given circumstances, and have images running like a movie in their head for every moment, Stanislavski commands them to take action.

A c tion Not unlike our friend Aristotle, Stanislavski asks, What do you want? What is happening? What does a character need most? What is he or she doing to get it? Stanislavski clearly defines how to use action in preparing a scene. Most of the actors Stanislavski encountered in his youth performed, or indicated: showing the audience passions and emotions. Actors imitated what they’d seen their elders do, copying a copy of a copy. In Stanislavski’s system, actors carry out actions: They live in the moment. “Stage action must be inwardly well-founded, in proper, logical sequence and possible in the real world.”9 So Hamlet’s dead dad tells him some shocking news? What does he do next? Implore him for more details? Demand the ghost prove he’s not evil? Scold him for leaving? To begin work on a script, Stanislavski suggests taking a bird’seye view of the entire plot by asking, What decisions move the story forward? Between those decisions are the major bits of the play. Next, break those major bits into smaller parts and then again into smaller segments, down to the smallest bits of action. American acting teachers, who possibly misheard bits or beads in a heavy Russian accent, popularized the idea of beats. A beat, or bit, is a section of the play where one character wants something specific. Hamlet wants the truth overall, but in a scene with Ophelia, he may want her to betray her father. For each small logical bit, Stanislavski encourages actors to figure out the task. What must Hamlet do to get what he wants? Next, name the bit with a verb. Why verbs? Nouns and adjectives merely describe states of being and lead to overacting. Verbs lead to action, acting, and presence. Better to say Hamlet rebukes Claudius than

12  Lessons from the Past

Hamlet is enraged. If Hamlet knows he needs to be sad, that’s a recipe for indicating emotions. If Hamlet tries to drag Horatio into his misery, that could make for a compelling scene. [See Workbook Chapter: Exercise #16, Scenic Objectives] Bits, tasks, and actions are important for rehearsal, but actors must enact the entire play every night. To make sense of the entire script, Stanislavski suggests finding the supertask.

S u per tas k What does the main character want above all else? What does every task lead toward? The supertask. It makes a whole out of the bits. Stanislavski argues that figuring out the supertask of the main character reveals the play’s theme or purpose. Choose a supertask in line with the writer’s thoughts, and it will evoke a genuine response in all the actors. In An Actor’s Work, he shows how different supertasks for the play Hamlet will produce different interpretations of the play. If you call it, I want to honor my father’s memory you push it towards family drama. If you have the title I want to understand the secrets of existence you get a mystical tragedy in which a man, once he has glanced beyond the threshold of life, cannot go on living until he has answered the questions of the meaning of existence. Some people want to see a second Messiah in Hamlet who must clean the world of all that is base, sword in hand. The Supertask, I want to save mankind gives the tragedy even greater breadth and depth.10 Actors should define their performance in relation to the supertask of the play. It is likely that some characters will oppose the supertask. If Hamlet wants to honor his father’s memory, Claudius wants to keep him buried. If Hamlet tries to understand the secrets of the universe, Claudius would likely focus on the here and now. “We need this constant clash. It produces struggle, oppositions, strife, a whole series of corresponding problems and ways of resolving them.”11 I relate the search for a supertask to Aristotle’s ideas of action and completeness. For each scene I ask, What does the main character want? Can you identify a pattern? A goal that links them all together?

Our Town by Thornton Wilder Directed by Damon Kiely for The Theatre School at DePaul University Photo Credit: Michael Brosilow

Padraic Lillis on Finding the Conflict I’ve known Padraic Lillis for decades, ever since we shared a cheap, barely furnished apartment in snowy Portland, Maine as directing interns for Portland Stage Company. Lillis has directed off Broadway, published plays, helped run the LAByrinth Theatre Company, and taught actors, writers, and directors all over the country. He founded his own theatre company, The Farm, expressly to develop new plays and emerging artists. I asked him about reading plays, and he mentioned that he often relies on the foundational work he learned at SUNY New Paltz. His analysis reminds me of Stanislavski’s work on the supertask and conflict. Fundamentally, there is a very simple three-step text analysis formula. The first one is X versus Y, and that is What is the conflict of the play? For Death of a Salesman, it might be the American dream versus harsh reality. You want to make sure that you do not use something like love because it is too generic and too broad and no one can define what love is. So if you cannot define what love is, what’s the opposite of it? Then the second line, How is the main character in an active struggle with those two ideas? For example, Willy Loman is trying to keep his harsh reality at bay while holding on to the American dream. He is trying to keep the American dream alive by suppressing the harsh reality. If you find the right one, every character is in struggle with that conflict: Biff is trying to let go of the American dream so he can confront the harsh reality. He wants to let go of the dream so he can exit out of the harsh reality into a real relationship with his father. Every character is in line. My favorite is Stanley, the waiter in that play. He says, It’s a dog’s life, Mr. Loman. That guy’s job as the waiter is to keep the American dream alive for every customer, while he is well aware of what the harsh reality is. That is why he is able to pick Willy off the floor. The third line, With one sentence, using one or both of your X versus Ys, why do we have to do the play today for this audience? If we do not redefine the American dream, it is going to kill us. If we do not look at the harsh reality that is surrounding the working-class salesmen, we are going to ask them to kill themselves by living up to impossible expectations.

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When I directed Thornton Wilder’s experimental drama Our Town, I found the structure somewhat mystifying. The first act shows a typical day in a small town, the second act hones in on the marriage of Emily and George, and the last act shows Emily coming to her own grave, having died in childbirth. What links all this together? Using Stanislavski’s method of breaking the play into bits and looking for actions, I discovered an overall understanding of the play. In the first act, Emily implores her mother to tell her she’s special; in the second, she cajoles George into declaring she’s important; and in the final act, she resists giving in to the obscurity of death. Over and over Emily claims uniqueness, resisting the truth that, in the face of eternity, her life does not mean that much. Finally, Emily says goodbye to her old life and sinks into the anonymity of death. Figuring out Emily’s supertask helped me discover my overall theme for the production: the life of the town versus the life of the stars. Stanislavski’s most rebellious student would say I was going backward.

Vse volod Meyerhold The son of a stingy vodka distiller and a music-loving matron, Meyerhold agitated against the status quo. He had to repeat a grade three times in high school, changed his religion and first name at the age of twenty-one, and dropped out of law school after seeing Stanislavski play Othello. He joined the Moscow Art Theatre and, through the early 1900s, Meyerhold triumphed as an actor and director. Stanislavski believed in him so much that he put Meyerhold in charge of his own studio—a place for the young rebel to try out new ideas. Meyerhold insisted his mentor missed the essence of how to read plays. In an early essay, he dings Stanislavski, the king of naturalism, for obsessing over details. The naturalistic director subjects all the separate parts of the work to analysis and fails to gain a picture of the whole. He is carried away by the filigree work of applying finishing touches to various scenes, the gratifying products of his creative imagination, absolute pearls of verisimilitude; in consequence he destroys the balance of the whole.12

16  Lessons from the Past

Meyerhold despised the attempt to recreate realistic settings in the theatre. Sweeping the stage clear of naturalistic props and furniture, he fashioned sets from platforms, circles, ramps, and flags. Actors wearing tunics or jumpsuits moved in a stylized manner, performed circus tricks, or created caricatures. Rhythm, color, and movement revealed the underlying ideas of the script— the themes pulsing beneath the surface. He championed what he called the grotesque: the exaggeration of ugly characteristics to reveal a deeper human truth. To start work on a play, says Meyerhold, you must find the concept—the container for the entire play. Themes first, details later. In a 1910 magazine article, he makes his case: Before you let your fantasy run free, before you begin putting things together, you must narrow your fantasy: the greatest danger for a director is to yield to caprice. You are responsible for your own self-restraint, for the organization of a plan. To do this you have to spend a certain amount of time groping around on various possible paths before you have the right to say: Now I am able to begin constructing.13 Don Juan by Molière played as a grotesque carnival show with half-masks. Meyerhold constrained Henrik Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler to a narrow strip of stage in front of an abstract painting. Meyerhold would find his concept through many readings of the play, compiling dramaturgical research on the time period and the author, and studying artwork connected to the themes of the script. He looked at the entire play rather than the individual bits and moments—the opposite of Stanislavski’s method. His mentor considered directors interpreters of texts; Meyerhold pioneered the role of the director as auteur. A true experimenter, Meyerhold changed his own theories year after year—trying out mechanized movement, large spectacles, grotesque slapstick, and agitprop theatricals. In 1926, Meyerhold brought many of his ideas together in his production of The Government Inspector by Nikolai Gogol. Meyerhold knew Gogol hated the first production of the play in 1826—by playing it for broad comedy, producers missed the biting satire. Meyerhold scoured all of Gogol’s plays and stories looking for a through-line. His revelation: The Government Inspector should play as a dream-like grotesque whirlwind—sending up and critiquing government corruption.

Medea by Euripides Directed by Damon Kiely for The Theatre School at DePaul University L–R: Christopher Allen, John Babbo, Roman Harris MacDonald, Kristin Ellis Photo Credit: Michael Brosilow

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On the first day of rehearsal, he told all the actors to read Gogol’s other plays and short stories for hints on how to build their performances. This approach makes it possible for the actors to base all their movements, all their actions on the other works of Gogol, rather than study the conventions of the theatre of Gogol’s day. By re-reading Gogol’s works…they will give him a firm foundation which will determine his stance, his gait, his mode of dress, and so on…14 Meyerhold adapted the script to better serve his impression of Gogol’s original intentions. He inserted non-speaking characters from other works by Gogol. He plucked a constantly laughing charwoman from a short story and plunked her into the middle of the action. He pinched a German doctor from another story and had him interrupt the Mayor throughout the first scene. Everything served the grotesque vision that Meyerhold had for the play—a darkly comic satire of Russian political corruption. He cut the script into fifteen vignettes, playing each with different rhythms, moods, and themes. Each vignette started on a small platform stage wheeled out from the back with the actors frozen in a tableau. With each pass, he could bring out another idea of Gogol’s. The consummate auteur, Meyerhold reverse-engineered the story to suit his concept. He did not interpret the play; he authored the theatrical event. I have found Meyerhold’s approach inspiring but daunting—I have never felt comfortable putting my own ideas above the playwright’s. In one misguided attempt, I conceived of a production of Medea that would feature extensive use of projections and live video feeds, before digging deeply into the play. I found myself making excuses for people to shoot a scene or even turn the camera on themselves. One argument scene turned into a Jerry Springer– style knockdown episode, which entertained audiences, but I never threaded the video idea into the heart of the play. On the other hand, Meyerhold’s belief in the power of rhythm and movement charges my work, especially when I am working on children’s theatre. When I tell the story visually, the audience perks up; when I rely just on word play—kids start squirming. I wrote an adaptation of The Tempest for DePaul’s theatre for a young-audiences series—focusing on the theme of parenting. As I

Lessons from the Past  19

examined each scene, I asked myself, What rhythm would tell the story here? Can I use movement rather than words? How does this scene relate to the main theme? Stanislavski’s other star pupil would suggest that a combination of methods works best. He strived to create a theatrical world, full of rhythm and color, based in truthful human action.

Y e v geny Vakhtangov Like Meyerhold, Yevgeny Vakhtangov rebelled against his father’s bourgeois ways. In 1904, at the age of twenty-one, Vakhtangov asked his dad for a small loan to fund a fledgling theatre troupe he had founded. When his dad denigrated his aspirations as vulgar, the young rebel staged his play at a circus tent opposite his father’s tobacco factory, distributing 100 free tickets to the workers.15 As a young man, Vakhtangov joined the Moscow Art Theatre, thrived as an actor, and earned the right to found his own studio. In the early teens and twenties, he created productions that were grounded in Stanislavski’s techniques of action but infused with Meyerhold’s ideas of rhythm, performance, and the grotesque. In describing Meyerhold and Stanislavski to his students, Vakhtangov praised their artistry while pointing out their limitations. Stanislavski created emotional truth but choked plays of their theatricality and magic. Meyerhold revealed plays’ themes through the grotesque, but his plays lacked humanity. In an address to his students in 1922, Vakhtangov compares the master directors to chefs cooking quail. Stanislavski prepares the quail like a home cook; the food tastes authentic but lacks the theatricality and excitement of restaurant service. Meyerhold disposed of truth altogether, that is he kept the dish, kept the recipe, but instead of cooking quail, he cooked paper. The result was a cardboard feeling. As Meyerhold was a master, he served it artistically, restaurant-style, but it was uneatable.16 Vakhtangov’s third way would have us eat delicious quail but know we are eating it in a restaurant. We should know we are in a theatre, we should sense the virtuosity of the performers, but the truth must underpin all choices.

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He drilled his students in Stanislavski’s lessons. Vakhtangov insisted they comprehend the plot according to the facts, search for truthful action, and flesh out relationships. A group of actors takes the structure, reveals the tasks, or, to put it differently, they undress the play, determine its main action, draw the red line of the through action, reach the super task, or the what for behind the play.17 Actors must seek truth through givens and action, but Vakhtangov insists that Stanislavski denies the artistry of theatre makers by demanding naturalistic recreations of everyday life. He believes the script should inspire theatre artists to create a fantastic realism: “Naturalism in theatre should not exist, and neither should realism. Only fantastic realism should exist. Rightly discovered theatrical means give an author true life onstage.”18 For a production of August Strindberg’s Erik XIV, the courtiers and bureaucrats were played as automatons and the proletariat as realistic—a poetic device to show the diseased mind of the king. In The Dybbuk, he led each actor toward creating a gestural leitmotif, a repeated physical gesture that expressed the character’s essence. Critics lauded Vakhtangov’s productions; as with an expressionist painter who filled his landscapes with bright garish colors, the fantasies served a greater truth. Vakhtangov created his masterpiece in 1922 with Princess Turandot by Friedrich Schiller, based on the commedia-inspired play by Carlo Gozzi. At first he rejected the play as too frivolous—a fairy tale about riddles and princesses set in a mythical ancient China. Through discussions with his troupe, he finally came to the essential reasons for the production—improvisation and hope. His assistant Nikolai Gorchakov detailed the long rehearsal process in his book The Vakhtangov School of Stage Art. He captured the firebrand director exhorting his company: What do our spectators want today?…Something they see around them all the time? The inspiring fight to rebuild the country after the devastation of the Civil War? Someone has yet to write about it. Today, the audience wants to see their future, too. They’re dreaming about it. But the playwrights haven’t written anything about it either. We have fairy tales, however—dreams of what people will be when they purify

Lessons from the Past  21

Oklahoma! by Rodgers and Hammerstein Directed by Damon Kiely for American Theater Company L–R: Katie Jeep, Casey Campbell, Matthew Brumlow Photo Credit: Johnny Knight

themselves, when they overcome the evil forces. Let’s dream about that in Turandot.19 Vakhtangov envisioned a prologue to drive the point home. As the spectators arrived, the entire company would start on stage conducting a class behind a curtain. Then four masked performers would enter the audience, announcing themselves as comedians who had traveled over centuries from sunny Italy to snowy Moscow. Discovering they were in the theatre, they decided to create an impromptu performance. They parted the curtain, met the actors, pulled out a trunk of costumes and props—and Turandot would begin. The ensemble filled the production with theatrical touches; an actor would totally invest in a monologue and shed real tears,

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which were caught in a bowl by another actor who came to the edge of the stage to show the audience. Actors working off of a meticulously choreographic plan performed as if completely making up their dialogue and actions on the spot. The masked performers watched with glee, commenting on the action and helping to move the scenery. Vakhtangov raced against death to make his masterpiece, fighting cancer during nightly rehearsals. Moscow Art Theatre members attended the final dress while he convalesced at home. At the first intermission, Stanislavski telephoned Vakhtangov to praise him. At the second intermission, Stanislavski insisted the show take a pause so he could visit Vakhtangov in person. Finally the show finished, and Stanislavski addressed the company: “In the twenty three year history of the Moscow Art Theatre such victories were few. You found what many theatre companies sought in vain”20 Vakhtangov died shortly after Turandot opened, never having seen his masterful blending of Stanislavski and Meyerhold’s methods. Vakhtangov inspired my 2002 stripped-down production of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s enduring classic Oklahoma! The musical follows cowboy Curly’s attempts to woo farm girl Laurey and protect her from hired hand Judd. At the end of the first act, Laurey falls asleep and has a dream ballet wherein she wordlessly struggles with her feelings for the two men. I loved the idea of storytelling through movement but found the idea of the ballet slightly out of context. What did a farm girl on the plains of the Oklahoma Territory in 1906 know about ballet? Instead, my design team and actors created a vaudeville nightmare. Laurey was swept into a frontier tent show, forced to do complicated cakewalks, take part in a burlesque act, and officiate over a knife-throwing contest. Finally, in a bit of actual magic, Curly transformed into Judd instantly and forced Laurey to marry him. Following Vakhtangov’s ideas of fantastic realism, as Laurey tried to keep up in the dream, she truly experienced fear and horror. The vaudeville nightmare underscored my understanding of what Oklahoma! was about—people trying to figure out what it means to be American on the edge of the prairie. Bertolt Brecht would applaud my showmanship as well as my attention to period details. Most likely, though, he’d encourage my class-consciousness and bemoan the dangers of narrative theatre.

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B ertolt B recht Bertolt Brecht flirted with danger from the beginning of his career in Germany as a writer and director in the 1920s and 1930s. He set himself against both the corrupt Weimar Republic and the rising Nazi hoodlums. Brecht clamped down on his ever-present cigar and asserted that German workers needed art that awakened their revolutionary fervor. Following his hero Karl Marx, author of Das Kapital, Brecht called for upheaval. Brecht rejected capitalism because a small minority of the population, the owners, exploited the vast majority, the laborers. Brecht set out to write and direct plays that would teach people to see exploitation everywhere and inspire rebellion. He took aim at Aristotelian theatre. Brecht argued that narrative-driven theatre lulled audiences to sleep and failed to illuminate social injustices inherent in stories. Spectators were simply swept along by their feelings. The key: teach audiences critical skills, to lean away from the play and judge the characters. Why does the hero suffer? Not because of some internal character flaw—it is because society has stacked the deck for the rich and powerful! Brecht declared he would write and direct epic theatre. This form frustrates easy narratives through a variety of techniques: projected scene titles, actors speaking about themselves in the third person, reading stage directions aloud: anything to make the audience think critically about the play. In a note to a friend written in 1936, Brecht lays out the difference between narrative and epic theatre: The dramatic theatre’s spectator says: Yes, I have felt like that too—Just like me—It’s only natural—It’ll never change—The sufferings of this man appall me, because they are inescapable— That’s great art; it all seems the most obvious thing in the world—I weep when they weep, I laugh when they laugh. The epic theatre’s spectator says: I’d have never have thought it—That’s not the way—That’s extraordinary, hardly believable—It’s got to stop—The sufferings of this man appall me, because they are unnecessary—That’s great art: nothing obvious in it—I laugh when they weep, I weep when they laugh.21

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Brecht imagined a theatre full of people drinking whiskey and smoking cigars, learning about the evils of capitalism. When Brecht read a play, he judged it primarily on its ability to distance the audiences from the situation so they could think clearly. He might create an empathetic situation on stage but then quickly break it. He entertained his audiences—he loved fun theatre—but also wanted to teach lessons. How do you create epic theatre? Start with a critical first read, says Brecht. In notes he wrote on the phases of production, he outlines his process: Find out what socially valuable insights and impulses the play offers. Boil the story down to half a sheet of paper. Then divide it into separate episodes establishing the nodal points i.e. the important events that carry the story a stage further. Then examine the relationship of the episodes, their construction. Think of ways and means to make the story easily narrated and to bring out its social significance.22 As Hitler took power in 1933, Brecht fled Germany but did not stop throwing political grenades. While in exile in Europe and the United States, he wrote a series of plays lambasting capitalism, government tyranny, and human greed, including The Caucasian Chalk Circle, Galileo, and Mother Courage. In Mother Courage, Brecht told the story of a woman trying to survive the seventeenthcentury maelstrom of the Thirty Years War. In epic fashion, the play smashed together contradictory episodes, one showing Courage selling goods to the army, followed by a song about prostitution, followed by a comic scene between soldiers. In a short essay on theatrical principles, Brecht argues for paradoxes in theatre: The story then unreels in a contradictory manner; the individual scenes retain their own meaning; they yield (and stimulate) a wealth of ideas; and their sum, the story, unfolds authentically without any cheap all-pervading idealization (one word leading to another) or directing of subordinate, purely functional component parts to an ending in which everything is resolved.23 Brecht recommends treating each episode like its own play, giving each a simple title like a newspaper headline. The title must include the social point:

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The canteen woman Anna Fierling, known as Mother Courage, loses a son. Mother Courage manages to save her daughter, likewise her covered cart, but her honest son is killed. Mother Courage sings the song of the grand capitulation. In production, Brecht often announced scene titles with placards or simple projections so the audience would not miss the political gesture. As they did not have to track the plot, they could focus on theme. By announcing the point of a scene ahead of time, Brecht short-circuited empathy and engaged a different part of the spectator: the critical eye. Brecht ran rehearsals in a systematic fashion. After analysis came discussions of the setting, followed by casting, rehearsals at the table, and setting the movement of the actors. Just as costumes and props were introduced, Brecht called for what he named checking rehearsals. A check to see whether the play’s socially valuable insights and impulses are getting across, whether the story is being fully and elegantly told, and whether the nodal points correspond. It is now a matter of probing, inspecting, polishing.24 Brecht encouraged checking the show against the initial analysis. He knew that during the process of making a play, directors are inevitably drawn to entertainment—which is fine when used for a higher purpose. Theatre should be fun, but it must educate and inspire. I follow Brecht’s craft more than his politics. I have always instinctually broken plays into episodes, examining each one for its scenic import. I create what I call a director’s breakdown that outlines events, summarizes the story, lays out important design elements, and asks initial questions. [See Appendix 4 and Workbook Chapter: Exercise #9, The Director Breakdown] I will sometimes pass those notes along to my design team so they have a sense of my initial thoughts. I always sketch out what Brecht calls the nodal points—the important events that carry the story a stage further. I make a list of around twenty-four crucial moments in the play that tell the story. Do the narrative and heart of the play come across? Then late in the game, I check that list against run-throughs of the play—are

26  Lessons from the Past

the moments landing? Is the story being told at these nodes? [See Workbook Chapter: Exercise #10, The Moment Chain] The most influential theatre troupe in the United States had a social consciousness but was more inspired by Stanislavski than Brecht. The revolution started just before the market crash of 1929.

T he G roup T heatre and H arold C lurman Stanislavski toured the Moscow Art Theatre to New York in 1923 and 1924, showing off famous productions of Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard and The Three Sisters. The tour caused a seismic shift in American theatre. The productions played in Russian, but theatre artists could sense actors breathing with actual life and true emotions. Characters painted with minute levels of psychological detail astounded them. At the same time, Richard Boleslawski, a Moscow Art Theatre student who immigrated to New York, started giving lectures on Stanislavski’s system. His first students included Lee Strasberg, Harold Clurman, and Cheryl Crawford, who were inspired to create their own Americanized versions of the system, calling it the Method.25 In 1931, they founded The Group Theatre and set out to create a new standard of American realism. As the leading New York theatre company of the 1930s, they tried to inspire Americans disillusioned by the market crash and ensuing Great Depression. The Group Theatre conducted summer retreats, trying to invent a new grammar of acting based on what they understood of Stanislavski’s work. Actors would improvise scenes based on famous paintings, recall details from their own lives to bring up past emotions, and play physical theatre games. In his memoir about The Group, The Fervent Years, founder Harold Clurman recalled their goals: The aim of the system is to enable the actor to use himself more consciously as an instrument for the attainment of truth on the stage…We were not satisfied with most of even the best previous productions, which seemed to us to show more competent stagecraft than humanity or authenticity of feeling.26 The artists who worked regularly with The Group helped to establish an American Stanislavski method. Elia Kazan, Harold

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Clurman, Sanford Meisner, and Stella Adler produced landmark plays in the American realist tradition. The Group’s productions of working-class plays by Clifford Odets galvanized theatergoers. Kazan and others started the Actors Studio in 1947, which taught the Method to actors, a theatrical pedagogy that would spread throughout the United States. In some ways, the performance of Marlon Brando in Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire, directed by Kazan for stage and screen, foretold the direction of American acting for decades to come. Brando seemed to disappear into the role of Stanley Kowalski, a coarse factory worker. Seething with desires, holding nothing back, when he threw himself to the ground and screamed for his wife, “Stelllaaaa,” he inspired generations of sweaty, impassioned performances. Harold Clurman’s seminal 1970 book, On Directing, outlines a system for directors based on The Group Theatre’s understanding of Stanislavski. Clurman encouraged directors to look for what he called the spine of the play. A spine is closely related to Stanislavski’s supertask—It’s an action that encapsulates the theme of the play. In On Directing, he outlines how to find and then articulate the spine: To begin active direction a formulation in the simplest terms must be found to state what general action motivates the play, of what fundamental drama or conflict the script’s plot and people are the instruments. What behavioral struggle or effort is being represented? It is best, though perhaps not altogether essential, that the answer should be expressed as an active verb: for drama (and acting) are based on doing, on action.27 When Clurman directed O’Neill’s Desire Under the Elms, he identified the spine as to possess the farm. This spine allowed him to pull together various strands in the play and create a dramatic whole. Every character wants to own the farm; the question is how they are going to get it. Creating a connection for each character to the spine of the play creates conflict—and dramatic tension. In On Directing, Clurman suggests directors create a working script, or score. On a piece of paper facing the script, the director creates three columns, following the scene line by line. In the first column write the action: What does the character want to do? Always expressed in active verbs. Ophelia does not act wounded, she protects her dignity. In the second column, the director writes

Robert Falls on Preparing his Score Seeing Robert Falls’s punk-rock-inspired production of Hamlet in high school propelled me toward a life of theatre. His muscular production made the Danish prince relevant to me; I laughed, cried, and gasped in astonishment. I had the great luck to assist him on his production of Chekhov’s Three Sisters in 1995 and have seen dozens of his productions at his home-base the Goodman Theatre and on Broadway. I asked him how he prepares his scripts. I have to admit that the term text analysis was not something I was trained in. I wasn’t. Other than Harold Clurman, which is pretty good in terms of intentions and a sense of larger actions, and the spine of the play. I’ve always organized the play around French scenes. The basic sense of a play gets broken down with who comes on or who goes off. But at some point I discovered this concept of explosions: when something happens to the characters such that the play could not continue without that explosion … where the play could not continue unless that sequence took place. They would be scattered throughout the play. And they could be little explosions or big explosions. I do literally finally take a script, start marking it out, and start making notes on it, carrying that script around with me. And that usually happens six months prior to actually doing the play. Breaking the script down into French scenes, but also this thing I call explosions, trying to identify those. And then marking the intentions of the characters within the content of the scene. Which is classic Stanislavski—that every single person on stage has something that he or she wants from somebody else. And I’ve always found it helpful, putting a name to an act, putting a name to a scene, putting a name to the sort of subdivisions of the scene to help me understand what the scene is about. I’m getting ready to go into the rehearsal room, and so I’m trying to organize the text, essentially in order to be able to communicate with actors and to know how I want to set action into motion.

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the manner in which the basic action is carried out. Does Ophelia protect her dignity with sad reproof or with forceful abandon? In the third column, Clurman suggests writing down physical activity that accompanies the action. Does Ophelia slap Hamlet’s hand away? Pull him close? This third column may also have notes on lighting, sound, tempo—anything that affects the production’s physical life.28 Clurman writes that character actions should change only if they are completed or interrupted. What happens when Ophelia gets what she wants from Hamlet? Or her father walks into the room? Clurman insists that directors create a score only as a plan for beginning collaborations with designers and actors. Directors do not work alone, and preparations are useful only if they help an actor to unlock a performance. As someone who has directed many American classics in Chicago, I find On Directing invaluable. Clurman suggests a simple nononsense way to pick scripts apart. He translates the acting work of Stanislavski into a practical guide for directors. He focuses on action and conflict but also on the adaptations that make staging more recognizably human. What would Clurman do if presented with an abstract piece with no characters or setting, such as Sarah Kane’s 4.48 Psychosis? The play consists of twenty-four loosely related sections, varying in style from poetic rants to mundane banter to just lists of numbers. I imagine he would still look for the play’s spine. Whoever is speaking has an intense desire to be understood, or else they would not talk so much. At 4.48 when desperation visits I shall hang myself to the sound of my lover’s breathing I do not want to die

I have become so depressed by the fact of my mortality that I have decided to commit suicide I do not want to live

I am jealous of my sleeping lover and covet his induced unconsciousness.29

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Is the spine to destroy happiness? To torment content souls? To beg for relief? I also believe Clurman would encourage directors to look for action within the abstract text. Whom is the speaker talking to? What do they want? Are they getting it? Clurman would argue that putting action behind each line gives it life. On Directing contains the lesson I heard most often during my interviews: prepare deeply but then prime yourself to adapt in service of true collaboration with designers and actors.

T he L essons of the Past When I sat down with Robert Falls, artistic director of the Goodman Theatre, he surprised me by admitting he has used Clurman’s score and spine method for years. He still dutifully marks out his script, looking for actions and physical activities. More recently, he has flung himself into the study of Stanislavski’s late experiments with physical theatre. Falls and many of the directors I interviewed are Aristotelian, even if they deny being students of the Greek master. Aristotle’s rules are even more pervasive in movies and television. One plot point follows from another. The narrative sports a coherent beginning, middle, and end. Often, a hero hurtles toward a catastrophe. Audiences have been brought up watching and reading stories that make sense. Some directors, such as Chay Yew, artistic director of Victory Gardens Theater in Chicago, actively reject all the rules. As a playwright and director of new plays, Yew believes one mold should not confine all plays; each script contains its own DNA. As he reads a play, Yew says he tries to discover the script’s unique structure. Like Stanislavski, he believes directors should study scripts like artifacts. But history is only a guide: How do directors analyze scripts today? What lessons from the past do they follow or reject? What inspiration can we draw from their search for meaning? I sat down with more than forty directors to find out.

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N otes 1 Aristotle, Poetics, translated by Malcolm Heath (London: Penguin Books, 1996), 10. 2 Aristotle, Nichomachean Ethics, translated by Terence Irwin (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing, 1999), 24. 3 Sarah Kane, 4.48 Psychosis (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2000), 4. 4 Konstantin Stanislavski, My Life in Art, translated by J. J. Robbins (1924. Reprint, New York: Routledge/Theatre Arts Books, 1996), 467. 5 Stanislavski, My Life in Art, 330. 6 Konstantin Stanislavski, An Actor’s Work, translated and edited by Jean Benedetti (Oxon: Routledge, 2008), 49–50. 7 Stanislavski, An Actor’s Work, 49–50. 8 Stanislavski, An Actor’s Work, 83. 9 Stanislavski, An Actor’s Work, 48. 10 Stanislavski, An Actor’s Work, 310. 11 Stanislavski, An Actor’s Work, 318. 12 Vsevolod Meyerhold, Meyerhold on Theatre, translated and edited by Edward Braun (New York: Hill and Wang, 1969), 28. 13 Vsevolod Meyerhold, quoted in Meyerhold at Work, edited by Paul Schmidt, translations by Paul Schmidt, Ilya Levin, and Vern McGee (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1980), 93. 14 Meyerhold, quoted in Meyerhold at Work, 221. 15 Nick Worrall, Modernism to Realism on the Soviet Stage (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 81. 16 Yevgeny Vakhtangov, The Vakhtangov Sourcebook, translated and edited by Andrei Malaev-Babel (New York: Routledge, 2011), 152. 17 Vakhtangov, 90. 18 Vakhtangov, 338. 19 Yevgeny Vakhtangov, quoted in The Vakhtangov School of Stage Art by Nikolai Gorchakov, translated by G. Ivanov-Mumjiev (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1960), 100. 20 Malaev-Babel, 306. 21 Bertolt Brecht, Brecht on Theatre: The Development of an Aesthetic, edited and translated by John Willett (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1957. Reprint: New York, Hill and Wang, 1964), 71. 22 Brecht, 240–41. 23 Brecht, 279. 24 Brecht, 241. 25 Sharon Marie Carnicke, Stanislavsky in Focus: An Acting Master for the Twenty-first Century (Oxon: Routledge, 1998. Reprint: Routledge, 2009), 42. 26 Harold Clurman, The Fervent Years: The Story of the Group Theatre and the Thirties (New York: Knopf, 1945. Reprint: New York, First Harvest, 1975), 43. 27 Harold Clurman, On Directing (New York: Macmillan Publishing, 1972), 28. 28 Clurman, 83–84. 29 Kane, 4.

Chapter 3

S urve y of C u rre n t Pr a c t i c es

A director is faced with words on a page. Eventually they will live and breathe in front of an audience for a couple of hours. Where to start? I’ve spent years looking for answers to that question. I interviewed more than forty prominent directors, asking each how they read plays and prepare to collaborate with designers, casting directors, and actors. Some generate pages of analytical paperwork; others simply read the play over and over. I’ve bolded the first instance of the directors I’ve interviewed and put short biographies on pages 185–198. I studied scores of directing books, homing in on script analysis and preparation. These authors, pitching to students of the craft, uniformly stress detailed written analysis. Over the last decade, I enlisted students for my research; assigning pages and pages of analytical exercises in order to testdrive theories gleaned from Stanislavski, Aristotle, and Brecht. I’ll admit that I’ve been searching for the magical formula or alchemical incantation that would transform marks in a script into thrilling theatrical productions. I didn’t find one principle, but instead many to choose from. I based this chapter’s workflow on my interviews. A director reads a script first to see whether it sparks any interest. The next step is hiring people to work on the show, typically designers first. Usually directors will formulate some sense of the sensorial world of the play before they populate it with actors. Finally, directors prepare for rehearsals with their cast. Here’s the workflow:

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D igging into the S cript on Your O wn • Reading the play for the first time –– Is there a best way to first encounter a play? Is it by reading alone? Or hearing aloud? Can a first read be dangerous? • Moving past first impressions –– After a first read, how can you learn more about the play and steep yourself in the details? What are the juiciest techniques for unpacking dense texts? • Going beyond the words on the page –– Can you learn everything from reading the play alone? Do you need to turn to outside sources for inspiration?

P reparing for D esign M eetings and Casting S essions • Sharing your read on the play –– What must you know to feel confident talking about the play with collaborators? What is your hook into the story? • Discovering the world of the play –– How can you best describe the sensorial universe? What does it look like or feel like? What words can you use to communicate with designers? • Getting to know the characters –– What are some tools to help better understand characters and prepare for auditions?

G earing up for R ehearsing with Actors • Grasping the given circumstances –– How can you distinguish between an undisputed fact about a past event and a distracting opinion? What are some methods to track givens? • Mapping the action –– How can you figure out the conflict in a scene? What is an event, and why should you delay it? • Grappling with the language –– How does language determine how the play looks, feels, and sounds? What can you learn from word choice, punctuation, and rhythm?

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Using this workflow, directors move from the big picture to the small details. They wrestle with the entire play first and slowly drill down to specific moments. They try to understand the play through an alchemical process of intuition, close study, and structural processing. First, they have to read the play. What happens when you pick up a script for the first time?

D igging into the S cript on Your O wn I’m riding the train in Chicago, reading Arthur Miller’s tragedy, A View from the Bridge, sucked into the story of Eddie, a longshoreman who develops romantic feelings for his niece. I hit the scene where a drunken Eddie angrily confronts his niece and her new boyfriend. My heart races. My chest tightens. I’m suddenly aware of the other passengers, and I have to put the book down. I need to push Eddie away. I carried those feelings of panic and claustrophobia into design meetings. The translation: audience members should feel trapped with each other, uncomfortably witnessing Eddie’s transgressions. My designers agreed that the play would work best with audiences on three sides of the action. Problem was, all our seats were fixed on one side of the theatre. Luckily, I was also the artistic director, and I proposed a solution: Let’s rip out the seats and move them. I felt so strongly about that first read that I rearranged my own theatre to help audiences feel the same thing I did. In his 2001 book, Thinking Like a Director, Michael Bloom extols the virtue of a first read: For a director, no reading of a play is as important as the first, because the experience will most closely mirror that of the average audience. The narrative will unfold in surprising ways, and if the director is drawn to the play, much of its intended impact will be revealed. In rehearsals, when I am puzzled by a scene, I try to recall what it made me feel when I first read it.1 Plays wash over audiences. People sit down, experience the play in real time, then leave. Unlike with a novel, they can’t put a play down and think about it or turn back a few pages. There’s no DVR on a live performance. When a director reads a play for the first

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time, it’s possible to think like an audience member. [See Workbook Chapter: Exercise #1, The First Read] Les Waters, the artistic director of Actors Theatre of Louisville, swears by his initial encounter. As a director who has worked primarily on new plays, he savors his first chance to sit down with a new script. Usually what happens is that I can visualize five pieces of the show. It’s instant. Often these moments actually appear in the show, not that I force them into existence. But typically some kind of instantaneous visual flash happens. Waters says that though he may not even grasp what the images mean or whether they are connected, he knows they are important. He doesn’t walk into the first design meeting insisting on recreating these moments, but they are informative. These spontaneous visuals let him know the play is worth investigating further. Waters says that if he doesn’t have those first flashes, the play is probably not right for him. Soho Rep’s former artistic director Daniel Aukin agrees. He doesn’t have to understand what’s happening in the play, but he must be intrigued. He recalls the first time he read Amy Herzog’s 4000 Miles, a closely observed drama without an obvious dramatic structure. I wasn’t sure what it was about actually when I first read it, but I felt sort of haunted by it days later, and I just felt like, I’m not actually sure what’s going on here all the way, but I’m fascinated. And I felt like something very personal was getting worked out in the writing. And that’s a lot for me. Aukin sensed that Herzog had skin in the game, that the story was personal, so he instantly felt drawn in. He became personally invested in telling her story. Aukin says that when everything goes to hell in rehearsal—he basically assumes that at some point he will feel despair—he returns to that initial spark of connection to keep him going. Aukin has directed scripts he wasn’t right for. A major regional theatre once offered him a production of a modern classic play that he loved. He wasn’t sure he had the right sensibility for the project but agreed despite misgiving. As he moved through design and

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rehearsal, he felt that his choices were compromised. At the end, he looked at his show and didn’t like what he saw—admiration for the material wasn’t enough fuel. I started sweating on the train, under the spell of A View from the Bridge, because I had skin in the game. At the time, I juggled running a small theatre with the pressures of parenthood. As a newish dad of a beautiful baby girl, I understood Eddie’s obsession. I wouldn’t resort to violence to protect my daughter, but I feared facing the moment she started dating. But should you always trust your first instincts? Can a first read lead you astray?

Re s is ting the Seduct ion of a First Re a d In her 2008 book, The Director’s Craft, visionary director Katie Mitchell warns against falling in love too quickly. When your pulse quickens and you start to sweat a bit while reading a play, Mitchell cautions that your passions may overtake your reason. Love can blind. You may feel excited and, as a result, you will not always read the text very carefully or slowly. Instead, your eye slides and skids over the words, every now and again concentrating on a section you particularly like. You jump over the sections that don’t immediately interest you. “I’ll sort them out later,” you say to yourself. If you were to direct the play on the basis of these early readings, the performance would reflect your unsteady excitement and be uneven.2 When she read The Oresteia trilogy of Greek plays, she fell in love with Iphigenia, deeply moved when King Agamemnon’s daughter sacrificed herself. Mitchell now realizes that Iphigenia’s sacrifice is the engine of the first play but isn’t featured in the second. The death of Iphigenia barely matters in the third play. When she directed the trilogy, Mitchell focused on Iphigenia’s story to the detriment of everything else. She even invented an Iphigenia ghost who wandered around aimlessly. As the long evening of three Greek plays wore on, she observed the audience checking out. She believes they could sense her lack of focus and blames her fevered first read. I have certainly fallen into this trap, cooking up ideas about plays before I’ve even read them. I loved Robert Falls’s production of Arthur Miller’s tragedy, Death of a Salesman, on Broadway. He

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and his set designer, Mark Wendland, put the rooms of the Loman family home on platforms, continually moving them closer to and farther away from the audience. Falls shifted the house around the stage, able to expand or contract the size of rooms based on the psychological needs of the moment. The set literally revolved around Willy Loman, the lead character. I loved the effect and decided to try it with A Streetcar Named Desire before I’d even reread Tennessee Williams’s classic drama. Why couldn’t the apartment set revolve around the lead character, Blanche DuBois? One spectacular moment seemed to justify the effort. In the production, we’d expanded the apartment to its largest size as Blanche recounted the horrible story of walking in on her first husband having sex with a man. The script called for a loud train sound and, at that moment, the set crashed in on Blanche, trapping her physically as well as mentally. But in many other moments, the set didn’t work at all. So much of the script hinges on Blanche and her sister and brother-in-law not being able to escape one another’s presence. When Blanche complained about her sister’s tiny apartment, the jumbo set didn’t make sense at all. The set was flashy and fun, but it released the requisite psychological pressure too often. Compare my misstep with David Cromer’s incisive read of Streetcar. During my interview with the New York–based Broadway director and MacArthur grant winner, he revealed what he’d discovered after several careful passes through the script: The apartment is tiny, and the whole argument of the play is it’s a two-person apartment. Everything happens because it’s a two-person apartment with three people living in it, and two of those people like to fuck. So it’s all territorial. He noticed that in the original Broadway production, the street outside the apartment figured prominently, but he assumed they just needed to fill a huge theatre with scenery. Cromer was working in an intimate 150-seat house so he and his set designer, Collette Pollard, were able to craft a cramped two-room apartment surrounded by the audience. When I saw the play, I felt like I was in the room with everyone; I experienced the central dramatic conflict viscerally. So, should you trust a first read or not? Kenny Leon, a Tony Award–winning director, has a unique idea on first impressions. He reads the play five times before he decides anything.

A Streetcar Named Desire by Tennessee Williams Directed by David Cromer for Writers Theatre L-R: Matthew Hawkins, Natasha Lowe Photo Credit: Michael Brosilow

A Streetcar Named Desire by Tennessee Williams Directed by Damon Kiely for The Theatre School at DePaul University L-R: Lucy Sandy, Megan Kohl, Jonathan Kitt Photo Credit: John Bridges

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Just reading it, reading it, reading it, reading it, until it sticks in my head. You know? And then after I read it those five times, then I’ll probably go back and look at, technically, how I would approach it. What’s the world it lives in? How does it move to me? What are the universal metaphors in it? What are the big visual images that come to mind? But first I’m gonna read it five times without making any assessment at all. I think my Streetcar problem stemmed from not actually rereading the play—or at least not reading like a first-time viewer. I’d seen the movie version and read the play when I was in high school. I figured I knew the play, but actually I based decisions on old ideas—other people’s ideas. For directors of new plays, a first read can mislead for other reasons: The script keeps changing. Reading a play that continues to evolve presents challenges and opportunities. Tracking a Shifting Target Director Leigh Silverman, who specializes in new plays, knows not to make too much of a first read because everything will change anyway. For over a decade, she’s helmed premieres for the Public Theater, Signature Theatre, and on Broadway. I will be given plays before they’re finished. Before there’s an Act Two. Before there’s a last scene. So you know, my job is frequently to try and fill in the missing pieces. A theater might commit to doing a show, and the writer’s saying, I know I want to shake up Act Two or I want to cut that character. I’m trying to design a production and cohere a vision with my designers around a moving target. Silverman reads differently than directors of classics. She doesn’t interpret the words on the page, trying to figure out what story to tell. She shepherds a process with the writer. Her analysis, her interpretation of the play, is by necessity a compromise. There are times when the writer is very clear about what they want, and at the same time you’re very clear, but those ideas are in opposition. Sometimes those are the best collaborations because you’re like, Oh I see it going this way, and someone

Richard Foreman on Reading a Play Quickly I worked for Foreman for more than five years in the late 1990s and consider him one of my mentors. Every time I sit with him, he encourages me to follow my own artistic path rather than mindlessly pursuing some received notions of success. Foreman is the grandfather of the downtown New York avant-garde, having written and directed more than fifty of his own plays over five decades. He has won multiple Obies, a MacArthur “Genius” Fellowship, and countless other awards. We’d been talking for more than an hour in his Soho loft when he finally asked what my book was about. I told him it was called How to Read a Play. RF: How should a director read a play before going into rehearsal? Fast. Just thumb through it fast to get a vague idea of the atmosphere, just get the perfume of it. Because that’s the most important thing, the thing you’re gonna want to recapture in the end anyway. If you read inch by inch, trying to read carefully, you lose a sense of the whole gestalt. Just read it fast. This relates a little to something that I noticed years and years ago. When I was going to the theater, I always used to walk out of all the big hits and say, Oh, it’s terrible, terrible, terrible. And then the next day I would think back on the play that I’d seen and think, Well, it has a certain atmosphere. I realized the people who liked it, who liked these terrible plays and terrible productions, were not watching moment by moment with intensity, as I think I was. But they were sort of looking at it in the same loose way that I was remembering it the next day. And those are two very different experiences. And I think that reading a play can decide if you’re gonna direct it. At first you should just get that loose, sloppy, fast perfume of the play. DK: And by doing it sloppily and just sort of roughly, that way, you leave yourself options until you find the right one? RF: Yes, yes, then your unconscious is able to work, and it stews there. I think it’s really important not to have premature closures.

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else says, Oh I see it going this way, and then you have to fight it out. Typically, she works on new plays during development workshops— rehearsal processes with actors that focus on rewriting the play rather than creating a final performance. She and the writer listen to the script aloud over and over, trying to figure out what form the play wants to take. Silverman can’t read the play in private because the play comes together only through conversations with the writer. So perhaps, like Silverman, a director hears a script aloud. Or reads it in private, scribbling notes furiously. Or the director rereads a play that she’s seen a hundred times. First impressions only go so far. You have to understand the play on a deeper level. But how?

Mov ing Pas t First I mpressions Michael Kahn, the artistic director of the Shakespeare Theatre in Washington, DC insists that preparation is simple: Just read and reread the play. Don’t take notes but instead read the play repeatedly until you truly fathom what is going on. Kahn reads the entire play for story first, then reads the first scene until he completely grasps it before moving on to the next scene. He won’t touch the third until he’s understood the second. But what does understanding the scene mean? First off, if it’s Shakespeare, literally what are people saying? What do the words actually mean? Next, the question is why is the scene necessary? Why is it in the play? Why is this character in the play at this moment? I’m also looking to see what the character truly wants in the scene. If Kahn puts a play down for a while and comes back to it, he will start reading from the beginning of the play and work his way through again. Even if he thinks he’s figured out the first two scenes, he won’t leap into scene three. He always goes back to the beginning of the play and reads through to where he feels insecure. He reads the play the way an audience will experience it—in order. As he rereads, he pushes any ideas that pop up into the background. His goal is to first figure out what the playwright meant before leaping into interpretation. Kahn guards against first, second, and even third impressions:

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I tell directors to be dumb. We’re all smart and Oh my god, I think that, or Yes that’s pink, or, That’s purple, and Oh yeah that’s this and that’s that. You’re not going to lose those ideas. But why don’t you get in the heart of the play first? Not everyone is as exacting about how they read and reread the play, but all directors talk about understanding the play on a deeper level the more they go through it. Some talk about letting the play infect them through many readings. Les Waters reads his scripts obsessively. Two or three months before rehearsal, he will read the entire play every other day. Often he takes scads of notes on the pages he’s studying. Some days he has to force himself to read the script. Sometimes on the tenth reading, he finds the play even more bewildering. I think, I haven’t understood a word of this. I can’t remember what I’ve read. Sometimes I’m panicked: Oh my god, why am I such a halfwit? Any other director would understand this. What I am trying to do is learn the script as a score, trying to get the script in the actual bones and muscles of my body. A month before rehearsal starts, he puts the script away. He does this in order to be in the same place as the actors—hearing it for the first time at the initial reading. If he doesn’t stop studying his script, he knows he will obsessively control every moment. Another way of rereading a play is to make many passes through a script, each time with a different focus. Changing the Reading Glasses Brian Kulick, former artistic director of Classic Stage Company, compares reading a classic play to studying the Torah. To uncover different possible interpretations, he reads through a script with different lenses, or reading glasses, if you like. He learned this method as a youth in Jewish religion classes. The hermeneutics for studying the Torah are based on an idea called Paradise. If you were to spell it in English, it’d be PRDS, because we don’t have vowels. And each of those letters, PRDS, is a different interpretive mode. So P is a plain reading. R is a more allegorical reading. D is a creative reading. And the last,

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S, is a more experimental or mystical reading. And so what the rabbis try to teach young Jewish kids is that a great work like the Torah contains all of these readings. Kulick suggests reading great plays in the same manner—through different lenses. Each letter is an interpretive rung on a ladder of meaning; climb each rung, and you reach the PRDS or paradise of text—its fullest meaning. P stands for Peshat, the Hebrew word for plain reading. With the plain reading, the director attempts to figure out what the author meant literally and to understand the meaning of words in their original context. In Shakespeare’s The Tempest, Caliban, one of wizard Prospero’s servants, is variously described as puppy-headed, a mooncalf, and a freckled whelp. This could lead to a very complicated costume design if the director doesn’t employ the rigor of a plain reading. In Shakespeare’s day, puppy-headed meant ugly, mooncalf implied deformed, and whelp described Caliban’s bastard birth to a noxious woman. Also crucial to research: English colonialist views on “savage” places such as Bermuda, Africa, and Ireland. Using the allegorical lens, or R for Remez, directors might discover that Shakespeare chronicles humankind’s struggle between mercy and vengeance in The Tempest. Wizard Prospero has two servants: Ariel, a spirit of the air, who advises mercy toward his enemies; and Caliban, a slave of the earth, who plots bloody revenge. Like Prospero, all people must choose between their spiritual nature and their human desires. D stands for Derash, the creative or analogous reading, which compels readers to look for contemporary parallels. Directors might interpret Prospero’s using the island’s natural resources and people as an analogy for the spread of globalization. The Tempest could play as a cautionary tale about imperialism. To understand the mystical reading, S or Sod, Kulick explains that scholars believe some texts hide information found only through non-rational and non-linear methods. He explains: For the rabbis, Sod has three basic modalities: 1 The domain of the eye: forget what the words mean and just look at their shapes and what they suggest—the changing patterns of white to black 2 The domain of the ear: hear sounds qua sounds—not as meaning but as tones and vibrations that affect the ear

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3 The domain of the mouth: how the tongue hits against your teeth when you say a certain word. The tongue can be read as the soul of Israel and the teeth that suddenly block its passage is Egypt—so that the actual physical production of sound can have meaning. In terms of The Tempest, you could look for meaning hidden in the white space around words. Just like in music, the silences are as important as the notes. In the final scene of The Tempest, Prospero confronts his brother Antonio for usurping his dukedom. Not only does Antonio refuse to answer the charges, he stays silent for the rest of the play. What does that mean? What is Shakespeare saying about human guilt and forgiveness? Each of these lenses demands peering closely at the script, looking for potential hints to meaning. Another way to move past first impressions is to pull back and look at the whole. Ma pping the Architecture of the Play Imagine reading this exchange in A Streetcar Named Desire: Blanche meets her brother-in-law, and he takes off his sweaty shirt and questions her about her first marriage. Blanche panics and collapses. Why? One way to understand that moment is to pull back and see how it fits into the overall structure of the play. In the mid-1800s, the German dramatist Gustav Freytag outlined one method for understanding play construction: the dramatic pyramid. Basing his ideas loosely on Aristotle, Freytag devised a framework to divide plays into five sections with three crises. 1 Introduction (exposition) –– First crisis (inciting incident) 2 Rising action 3 Climax (turning point) –– Second crisis 4 Falling action (return) –– Third crisis 5 Catastrophe (denouement or resolution) The dramatic pyramid permeates many script- and screenplaywriting classes, even if the teacher has never heard of Freytag. Hollywood movies follow this same structure: An evil empire

Derrick Sanders on What Can’t Be Said Sanders worked extensively with legendary writer August Wilson for many years until the playwright’s death in 2005. He continues to direct Wilson’s plays, winning awards for his muscular and insightful productions. He also develops new plays, directing throughout the country and in his hometown of Chicago. A fulltime professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago, Sanders gave me many insights into play preparation during our discussion, but I was struck by the similarity between his comments on the spirituality of what can’t be said and Brian Kulick’s explanation of the Jewish idea of a mystical reading. When I read a play first, I go, Huh, I let the themes and message of the play wash over me. And then, inevitably, I have a bunch of questions. I may ask the playwright only a few essential ones. The rest I need to gestate as I navigate the play in rehearsals. I’m really intrigued by writers and their choice of words. Have you ever heard the quote, Music is about the notes that you don’t play? I’m always interested in interactions between people and what they choose not to say. And why do they choose to say these words. Of all the words in the English language, why did they go that route? Because they easily could’ve taken this in another direction; they could’ve chosen to turn here, or turn here. So I’m really looking for what the play is telling me by what the playwright doesn’t say. What the play can’t say. This gets a little spiritual, I guess. Whatever message comes from the universe that allows a playwright to say what he wants to say or what is given to him to tell other people, writers can only translate so much of it. They try to get as close as possible to what they believe. Take Moses and the Ten Commandments, it’s like... Thou shalt not kill. There’s not a lot of stuff written there. It’s a clear directive, but there are also many other implications. So, I’m always looking for how I can help writers with the limitation of their instrument, how I can hear what they’re really trying to say, because words and communication are limited.

Survey of Current Practices  47 Star Wars Turning Point

Second Crisis Obi-Wan killed during rescue attempt

Rising Action Luke tries to rescue Princess Leia

Exposition An evil empire chokes the galaxy

First Crisis Luke’s adoptive parents killed

Falling Action Rebels plan to destroy Death Star

Third Crisis Luke uses the Force to destroy Desth Star

Resolution Empire retreats, rebels party

A Streetcar Named Desire Turning Point

Rising Action Blanche tries to pry Stella away from Stanley

Exposition Blanche arrives at her sister’s doorstep, penniless

First Crisis Stanley asks Blanche about her husband

Second Crisis Stanley imples he knows about Blanche’s sordid past

Falling Action Blanche tries to escape with a suitor

Third Crisis Stanley rapes Blanche

Resolution Blanche taken to mental institution

Freytag Models for Star Wars and A Streetcar Named Desire

chokes the galaxy; Luke Skywalker receives a message that someone named Princess Leia needs help; spurred by the death of his adoptive parents, he joins Obi-Wan Kenobi and the rebellion; Luke rescues the princess but Obi-Wan dies at Darth Vader’s hands; Luke uses the Force and blows up the Death Star. Using this method, I decided that when Stanley inquires into Blanche’s sordid past, he’s kicking off the first crisis. Blanche wants to keep her troubled history secret because she’s ashamed; if her recent misdeeds come to light, her sister might abandon her. She spends the rest of the play trying to hide her past and forge a new future.

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Chay Yew, the artistic director of Victory Gardens Theater in Chicago, argues that the Freytag and Aristotelian models don’t serve every play. Yew has developed new work for many decades, and he knows that many writers expressly reject the strictures of Aristotle. They are creating their own map: “I don’t think there’s one template you can give to all plays. Basically every play has its own clues and its own structure. You have to read it over and over again, and then you understand the DNA.” Yew believes the next step is just to ask a lot of questions about the storytelling, making sure the play stays true to itself. Not true to some perfect idea of storytelling but generally following its own idiosyncratic rules—its own dramaturgy. If a play has been told in chronological order then, at the last second, reverts to a flashback— Is that intentional or just sloppy storytelling? As he works with the writer, Yew is able to compare drafts, each time asking the question: Is the dramaturgy consistent? Regardless of the type of play, comparing drafts helps directors to move past first impressions. With each pass through a different edition, directors learn more about the playwright’s intentions— and how they changed. Reading the Many Texts No matter what he’s directing, Charles Newell, the artistic director of Court Theatre in Chicago, will always look at more than one draft. His obsession with comparative reading started when Newell assisted the legendary director Garland Wright at the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis. He was tasked with looking at the various versions of whatever Shakespeare play they were working on. The Bard’s masterpieces have been published in many versions over centuries. Even during his own lifetime, unscrupulous businessmen published pirated renditions of his scripts. In 1623, two of Shakespeare’s contemporaries collected thirty-six of his plays in what scholars call the First Folio. Scholars have also found oneoff copies in smaller quarto versions. Modern publishers compare every edition they can find, trying to create an authoritative script. When he spread all the versions out, Newell was like a kid in a candy shop: What I got excited about was looking at seven or eight versions of the text with all of their notations and references, as well as

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my Shakespeare dictionary and the pronouncing dictionary. I was this Shakespeare geek. I would go through the text and at every word that had any notation, I would write on the page the definition and all the notes. Comparing word choice isn’t just for geeks—it creates meaning. Take a moment from Shakespeare’s late romance, The Tempest. In Act Four, the wizard Prospero conjures an astonishing display of spirits and music for his daughter, Miranda, and her new fiancé, Ferdinand. Prospero’s future son-in-law exclaims, Let me live here ever! So rare a wondered father and a wise Makes this place paradise.3 In a complete works of Shakespeare published in 1709, the editor, Nicholas Rowe, substituted wife for wise. He reasoned Ferdinand would acknowledge Miranda in the moment and that Elizabethan Fs looked very similar to Ss. Over centuries, editors have peered through microscopes at various editions of the script to determine whether Ferdinand was sucking up to his adopted dad or flirting with his new girlfriend.4 Newell compares drafts no matter what play he’s directing. He has performed detailed examinations on work by Tennessee Williams, Edward Albee, and other canonical authors. In some cases, the only difference between versions is formatting or punctuation but, in Williams’s The Glass Menagerie, the ending of the play varies widely in different editions. [See Workbook Chapter: Exercise #3, Different Editions Comparison] When directing Our Town by Thornton Wilder, I discovered huge differences between the current version authorized for performance and the first printing. In Wilder’s first edition, in a scene before Emily’s marriage to George Gibbs, his parents argue whether to let the two teenagers wed. The couple talks frankly about sex. Doc Gibb can’t imagine his young son getting married; Mrs. Gibb says she doesn’t want George to become one of those farm hands rolling into town on a Friday night looking for fun. She doesn’t think George will be content holding hands with Emily for too long. The current authorized version cuts this scene entirely. While in rehearsal, I had both versions at hand. At times the actors would perform scenes from the first edition. While I knew we could

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not use the material, reading the scenes informed our thinking. It helped us understand what couldn’t be said aloud. Charles Newell argues that comparing where the author put the comma or the period teaches directors something about the project. With plays in the public domain, Newell can assemble the script he wants from the various editions. For plays under copyright, he works with the publishers to determine which version he will put into production. Then he goes one step further to pull the play closer: He retypes the entire script himself. Getting Physical with the Play Since the beginning of his career, Newell has retyped the rehearsal script rather than photocopying a published version. He prefers specific fonts, paragraph spacing, and stage direction style. Also, he says providing a unique script makes actors feel special. Even though recently he has delegated the typing of the first draft to an intern, Newell still obsessively checks every comma and semicolon. I do this too, especially with classic American plays, in order to strip away unnecessary clutter that editors have inserted and I create my own format. How much white space do actors need to take notes? Should stage directions intrude on the dialogue or fade into the background? I will typically strip out as many stage directions as possible: I don’t need Tennessee Williams to tell my actors that Blanche retorts icily; I’d rather discover these things in rehearsal. In order to pull the play closer to himself, Daniel Aukin writes the play out longhand. He doesn’t always have time for this step, but when he does, he says he knows the play in his bones. I find it very very boring and very helpful. I just find that if you have the time to be with the text without making choices, it can be revelatory. Just taking the pressure off of me and trying to swim with it. Now it doesn’t stop me taking notes sometimes as I’m doing that when ideas come up, but I’m not putting any pressure on myself. The physical act of writing longhand affects Aukin. He avoids pre-judging the play or analyzing it too carefully. He’s looking for a way to simply breathe with the play.

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BJ Jones, artistic director of Northlight Theatre in Skokie, Illinois, gets physical with his script by reading the play aloud at home. He does this several times before having meetings with designers or casting directors. Jones worked as an actor before he started directing plays and finds that saying the words aloud solidifies his understanding of the script. He spends three or four hours at a stretch reading each character. He’s not exactly doing the part, but he reads with the rhythm of the language. “Certain lines will sink in and then I’ll go back—it’s very labor intensive. I wish I could be more efficient, but I can’t.” He’ll read one character’s speeches for a while, then another. “I force myself into knowing what’s important to the characters.” He feels what they feel and thinks what they think. He believes that by tuning into what the characters want, he figures out the main conflict of the play and discovers ultimately what the play is about for him. A director reads a play many times, perhaps speaking it aloud or typing out a new version. Possibly she or he has compared the structure of the play to classic texts or pored over several editions. Now it’s time to go beyond the script into research—both structured and impulsive.

G o in g b ey on d t he Words on t he Pa g e In his 2009 book, Script Analysis, scholar and teacher James Thomas encourages directors to research their play through a series of questions from the general to the specific:5 • When was the play written? • When is the play set? (Is it the same time period as when it was written?) • Where does the play take place? • What are the places in the play? The buildings? The geography? • What kind of society do the characters inhabit in terms of power dynamics, social standards, and economics? • What occupations do the characters hold? • Do the characters have a love for the arts or spirituality? Religion? David Chambers, a professor of directing at Yale University, encourages his students to look into the relevant facts of a show

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but also warns against going down rabbit holes. He told me about one student who went overboard working on The Cherry Orchard. At the beginning of Chekhov’s masterpiece, Lovey, the owner of the estate, arrives by train after living in Paris for many years. Chambers’s student really hit the books and traced the history of railroads in Russia: I said, You know, this is never gonna enter your play. That’s a waste of time. It’s not a waste of time to try to figure out how long it would take to get from Paris to wherever we are. And what was Paris to Russians at that time? Why did she go to Paris and not Budapest? It feels like she was living a kind of bohemian life there. What was going on there? So that kind of stuff is the world of the play, but it’s the world of the play that the characters inhabit. When I give instructions to dramaturgs about what to research, I think about the actors: What do they need to know in order to truly inhabit the world? Usually I ask my dramaturgs to start by compiling a glossary, which covers any term that the actors might not understand. Next, I ask for background research on any place mentioned in the play, any historical event, and any social custom that is different from ours. Exploring the author’s life can also reveal meaning. While researching A Streetcar Named Desire I discovered that Tennessee Williams’s sister was institutionalized. As I read the play, I could sense his personal stakes in Blanche’s mental illness and flights of fancy. As a young man, Williams met people at his menial jobs that biographers believe were models for characters Stanley and Mitch. Williams lived on a lovely Southern estate but, at the age of eight, moved to a small apartment in St. Louis, Missouri. These details don’t explain A Streetcar Named Desire, but they do point to a possible explanation for Williams’s original impulse to write the play. Chay Yew remembers directing Our Town for Oregon Shakespeare Festival, and something nagged him about the script. Born in Singapore, Yew was surprised to find Chinese influences in Wilder’s play. So I did some research on Thornton Wilder and realized he had spent some time with his missionary parents in China and seen Beijing opera…So when I realized it was Chinese opera, the

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roots of it, I realized I don’t need certain things. I don’t need the trellises, I don’t need the ladders. All I had was tables and chairs. When Yew reread Wilder’s script, he could clearly see influences from Chinese opera’s presentational stripped-down form. Our Town calls for almost no props—the actors mime everything from milk bottles to baseball gloves—and is guided by a stage manager who relates directly to the audience. Yew even noted connections between the small town in New England nestled in the mountains and rural Chinese villages. Wilder once described Our Town as the life of the village measured against the life of the stars. When I directed the show for DePaul, I must have repeated that phrase hundreds of times as I worked with designers, actors, and even the marketing department. We filled the ceiling with old light bulbs, turning them on at the final moment of the play as the characters dream about their small place in the universe. Robert Falls, the artistic director of the Goodman Theatre, thinks about shows he will direct for a long time before he commits to his own ideas: Understanding the world of the play, trying to get at the history of the play, the context of the play, the world of the play, as specifically as possible, as well as understanding the circumstances with which the play was created and quite often the history of the play in performance, is something I have always always done. Then I match up the history of the play in performance, as much as I read about it, or in terms of the productions I’ve seen, with my own interpretation. Eventually, Falls has his own instincts on how to interpret the characters and the setting, but first he wants to know how others solved the same problems. Sometimes reading about past productions can prove daunting at first. Studying Past Productions When I prepared to direct Our Town at DePaul, at first I found it intimidating to even approach the play because David Cromer had

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recently directed a celebrated production. His version had moved to New York from Chicago and run for well more than a year, garnering many awards. The production inspired audiences on many levels, but the coup de theatre that most people talked about was the memory scene in Act Three. Emily has died but suddenly realizes she can go back and relive her twelfth birthday. Cromer’s production was extremely spare: actors in modern dress, no ladders, just tables and chairs, no dialects. At the moment Emily went into her memory, a curtain was pulled aside to reveal a detailed replica of a 1901 New England kitchen. Emily’s mother, dressed in period clothing and speaking with a New Hampshire accent, cooked real bacon the audience could smell. The moment knocked me out because it brought home Wilder’s point—when we’re living life we’re moving too fast to appreciate it. When Cromer highlighted a sliver of Emily’s boring old life, it was achingly exquisite. When I discussed this moment with my design team, one of my student designers said, “That’s cool! Why can’t we do that?” I explained that we’d have to come up with our own idea. We homed in on sound design. Wilder imagines a few sound cues to help fill in the imaginative void as actors mime feeding chickens or walking a milk horse. In our production, we overloaded on sound cues— adding in the sounds of batter whisking, eggs cracking, and back doors squeaking. When Emily returned to her twelfth birthday in our performance, we went to stark silence, stripping away everything except the people on stage. In a way we did the opposite of Cromer’s celebrated move. In our production, Emily could remember only how beautiful her mother looked, how happy her father sounded, and how fast it all flew past her. Visionary director and author Anne Bogart voraciously reads anything she can get her hands on related to upcoming productions. As she prepared for The Trojan Women by Euripides, she found a huge discrepancy between her historical research and the way the lead characters had been typically portrayed. Bogart noticed the Trojan women were often costumed in filthy rags, heads shaved. And they were always screaming. It didn’t make sense to her: Look at it historically. Troy was the highest-cultured place, and the Trojan horse was brought in the night before. They were having a party; they were dressed in fabulous gowns. They’re

Our Town by Thornton Wilder Directed by David Cromer for The Hypocrites Photo Credit: Courtney O’Neill

Our Town by Thornton Wilder Directed by Damon Kiely for The Theatre School at DePaul University Photo Credit: Michael Brosilow

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not torn and shmutzy. Maybe a little burned at the bottom. And maybe somebody came along and dragged out some of the furniture that didn’t get wrecked in the Greek attack. And these women are kept with some of their fine furniture in their evening gowns. And they’re not screaming. They’re educated, in the way that when you’re in a big crisis, you don’t scream. You try to articulate what is this world becoming? She wouldn’t have arrived at her hunch to depict the women of Troy as educated, sophisticated elites if she hadn’t seen pictures of women in rags and held them up against her own historical research. As she says in this book’s foreword, Bogart puts off reading plays because to do it correctly demands incredible time and imagination. For her, truly reading the play means imagining each moment, each line of dialogue. She delays this onerous task by reading gargantuan amounts of material around the play. She studies rigorously but often finds her best ideas arrive by indirect routes. Following Impulsive Research Bogart will go to a library and pile up reference books related to her project. After an intense study session, she lets her interests guide her to other areas. Maybe she looks at a book on the New York club scene or other unrelated topics. Then she sits down and takes a nap. When she wakes up—quite often the idea she needs appears. In an interview, she talked about the role of the subconscious in creation: It’s like something that Leonard Bernstein said: I could probably sit down and write you a symphony in a day. It wouldn’t be any good. It won’t be any good unless I have a process of sleeping, and going through it, and letting it work in my unconscious, and then coming back. Bogart fills scores of notebooks with ideas for staging. She will read critical essays about the playwright and the script. She will read anything tangentially related. She admittedly does too much research on the play because she believes media guru Marshall McLuhan’s slogan: Information overload equals pattern recognition. She’s also trying to unlock a play’s many meanings rather than lock it down to one. She isn’t trying to figure out what the play means but instead what questions it raises.

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Months before directing a show, Les Waters follows his impulses by creating an image board. Before he got into theatre, he studied art history and still collects postcards and photography books. Before meeting with designers, he tacks hundreds of images onto a bulletin board in his office. He described a wall he made for a new play by Charles Mee: I don’t try to analyze what they’ve got to do with the play. I think there are about one hundred images up now and another fifty to go. I’m looking at one now and I’m surprised by this: There are lots of images of men falling. There’s a man falling down stairs, there’s some Robert Longo pictures of men falling backwards, there’s somebody falling off a trapeze…When I was making it yesterday, I wasn’t aware of that. When I’m prepping, I will alternate between studying the script and looking at images. Waters won’t necessarily bring the images to design meetings. He just looks at them and notices similarities, letting his instincts guide him. He rearranges the images on the board for months without analyzing his actions rationally. The creation of the board is the analysis. Rachel Chavkin, the artistic director of a New York experimental ensemble called the TEAM, uses the New York Public Library Picture Collection in the same way. The collection contains thousands of photos and drawings sorted by types in folders. Chavkin prepares a list of enticing words; some based on historical oddities in the play, others just clues in a treasure hunt for inspiration. You walk up to the librarian and you’re like, How do I find pictures of Russia in 1900? And they write down, You should look at this folder, which is Moscow 1900, but you might also look at Bolsheviks and early uprising... And then you just begin going sideways and that’s actually where the real piece happens. By sideways she means intuition—creating without having a plan. As a young director in New York, I visited this same picture collection often. As I prepped a production of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, I rummaged for images of the shipwreck that opens the play. Shipwrecks led to coastlines, coastlines to piers, and

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piers to a lonely image of a man looking out to sea. That picture helped me understand that the play ached with the same loneliness I’d experienced myself in New York. I ended up setting the play in Manhattan in the jazzy 1920s era, using an aging wharf as the central location. If a director has taken the time to understand the structure of the play, done historical research, or let intuitions wander, is she or he ready to begin collaborating? He or she has some hunches, or perhaps some very strong ideas, or at least some questions. How can the director prepare to speak them aloud?

P reparing for D esign M eetings and Casting S essions The methods I’ve introduced so far help directors to understand their plays up to a point. As they prepare to collaborate with designers, casting directors, and publicity departments, they start the move from general to specific. Directors work to inspire others. Prep work to this point can help directors to figure out their read on the play: What does it mean to you? What is your take on it? How does it speak to you? What sparks your interest? If you have a hook into the play, some sort of hunch, how can you use it to inspire others?

S har in g You r Rea d on t he Pl a y Gregory Lehane teaches both graduate and undergraduate directing at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. Lehane’s had a long career in directing both for theatre and for film and knows that communicating ideas to collaborators takes practice: The ability to decide what you mean is sometimes challenging for someone with a lot of experience. So for students, I keep trying to make the director say—with increasing specificity— what are your ideas about the text? How will you enflesh the text? Always with an eye towards the goal, which is to put it on stage in front of people. It makes sense to be able to talk in metaphor, that’s important. But how does a metaphor lead to the light cue?

Mark Wing-Davey on the Art of the Close Read Mark Wing-Davey is currently the chair of graduate acting at New York University. I vividly remember moments and images from his visceral production of Mad Forest by Caryl Churchill at New York Theatre Workshop in 1991. I was lucky enough to assistant-direct him on a production of 36 Views by Naomi Iizuka at Berkeley Repertory Theatre in 2001. He taught me about the importance of identifying and delaying dramatic events. After a wide-ranging interview, he sent me his artistic statement that he used as part of his arts professor review at NYU. Wing-Davey read English at Cambridge University and was a disciple of the close reading ethos: Literature should be studied as a self-contained, selfreferential literary object. We focused intently on the words on the page, dissecting texts for the interplay of form and idea, word and word, gleaning meaning, subtlety of interpretation, all without muddying our thinking with imagined biographies of fictional characters, or even contexts of creation. I still have a strong preference for character revealed by action rather than a predetermining factor in behavior. I’ve seen many an early character choice wander into the nonsensical “but my character wouldn’t do that” cul-de-sac and unravel. Equally, in this post–word processor age, it’s important to recognize the mechanism that gets the words to us as we read a scene. Almost everything we see in a script today directly stems from a mark originally made by the writer: not simply the words but the arrangement of the text, the italics, the capitals, the bold type, the lack of punctuation, the periods. At the start, we may need to decode it, not simply for meaning but to understand the playwright’s particular textual quiddities. I equate the reading of a modern script to the reading of music and encourage the actors to at least begin by obeying the playwright’s textual score. Stage directions are fascinating, partly for what they betray about the economic context in which they were written. Who are they for at bottom? Are they for potential producers, or is the author guaranteed a production? Are they descriptions of the world of the play or the world of the theatre? How confident is the writer in the realization of his or her vision? I am drawn to writers whose stage directions are spare.

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William Ball, in his 1984 book A Sense of Direction, says directors should try answering a series of questions that describe the general beauty of the play. [See Workbook Chapter: Exercise #2, The General Beauty] The director must champion the play at all times to all sorts of different people. Why must it be seen? What about it fires the imagination? A director has to be a missionary…He has to feel that civilization will be enhanced and society will be enriched if the message of the play is revealed. He has to feel that the play is a tool to awaken people to values that he personally feels are important.6 In launching a production, you are marshaling many people and resources around a huge project. At many points during the process, you might feel confused—this is natural. Knowing why you started in the first place can shine a light through the fog. When Brian Kulick reads a script, he figures out why the play is personally important but also why others will care. Why should an audience bother with a four-hundred-year-old play? I have to first ask myself, why does this play speak to me? Is it just speaking to me? Or is it speaking to me and going to radiate beyond me? And then the question is, why? And the why always seems to be twofold. Because I deal with plays in the past. There’s something in the past that rhymes with us right now. Kulick points out that Shakespeare wrote just after a terrible civil war in England, but since Queen Elizabeth had no male heirs, people worried a new conflict would break out. Similarly we live in an age of uncertainty: nuclear war on one side of our history and the possible environmental destruction of the planet on the other. When Kulick and his team stay focused on what he calls the rhyme between the past and present his productions flourish. When he forgets, they become fuzzy. Curt Columbus, the artistic director of Trinity Repertory Company in Providence, Rhode Island, walks into the first meeting with the words that he hopes audience members will repeat to him in the lobby. He knew that Cabaret had been a success when a handful of audience members said they understood he was talking about gay marriage—even though there’s nothing about same-sex

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unions in the musical. Columbus believes that because he walked into the first meeting with marriage equality on his mind—that idea was threaded throughout the production. Columbus likens directors to discussion leaders for a book club. A great discussion leader will guide a compelling chat about a novel because he or she has a unique viewpoint. Everyone’s read the book, but the leader points out facets that no one else noticed. Ultimately the whole job of the director is to be the curator of the event that helps you read what’s going on in the play. In my humble opinion, that’s the job of a director. And when you do that well, then your audience is able to enter into and experience the play in a way that they would not have done on their own, sitting in a room, reading it at home. As the artistic director of a major regional theatre, Columbus matches directors and plays every season. When choosing his slate, he asks, Which director will have the right instincts to open up the play for an audience in a new way? What does the director think the play is about? Who’s the right book club leader? Les Waters knows that his hook into a play will come in the form of a question. As he reads a script for the first time, he writes down a series of queries. They bleed down the page: What is this about? What does this line mean? He then searches for an all-encompassing question, one that occupies the center of the play. He will return to this big issue often during design meetings and rehearsals, but it’s not important that he answer the question. In fact he says it’s probably better if he doesn’t: I don’t want to see a production that tells me what the play is about. I’m more interested, as a director, in trying to identify what question drives the play. When I see a production and the question is answered, I say, Well no shit Sherlock. The production is inert. When he directed Our Town at Actors Theatre of Louisville, the question was How do we get everyone in the same space thinking about the same thing? This led to a modern dress production, as a way to get the audience and the actors in the same room together. The entire cast sat on stage most of the play, reacting to the action. At one point in the performance, the character of the stage manager

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asked the audience, Can you remember the first time you were in love? And then just stopped the play cold. The actors on stage thought about the question, and the stage manager didn’t say his next line until he truly believed the audience had tried to remember their first love affair. For at least a moment, everyone was present in the same moment, in the same room. Anne Bogart similarly believes questions are more important than answers in preparation for design meetings or rehearsals. She says you have to earn the right to walk into a rehearsal room. You need to spend months reading and studying, and she challenges herself to have 150 ideas for every moment in the play. She opens up possibilities instead of shutting them down. She believes studying the play should humble the reader: I’d like to think that you can read a play to make it smaller or to let it be bigger…I wanna feel like a little girl in front of a massive Expressionist painting. I wanna open it up so it’s uncontrollable. And so my research, and the reading of the play, is to allow it to be untamable…How do you actually unleash it, as opposed to pin it down? A director might walk into a first meeting with a big question, or a series of questions, or a few words, or thoughts about the play’s general beauty. Another way to fire the imagination of designers at an initial gathering is to discuss the play’s final moments. Decoding the End of the Play Broadway director Kimberly Senior knows that beginnings of plays are seductive—how will it launch? What’s the first image? How do we draw audiences in? Senior is much more interested in the ending—what will the audience leave with? She’s a master with the last five minutes of a play. When she directed Hedda Gabler, she knew she had to put together a play that ends with a suicide. All the casting and design elements had to build to the moment the gun goes off: I start with the end of the play, and how do we earn the final moment of the play. Going forward there is a myriad of possibilities of what could happen. Going backwards there’s actually only one set of events.

Our Town by Thornton Wilder Directed by Les Waters for Actors Theatre of Louisville Center: Bruce McKenzie Photo Credit: Bill Brymer

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At the first design meeting for Hedda Gabler, Senior knew two things: She wanted Hedda to actually play the piano and then shoot herself on stage, rather than slink off to another room. The design process built around that moment. Where does the piano need to live? What kind of gun does she use? If piano playing followed by a gunshot are the final sounds of the play, should music play elsewhere? Playwright and director Robert O’Hara looks to the end of the script to find what he calls the crime at the heart of the play. He believes that every good script has a transgression at its core. When he directed Katori Hall’s play Mountaintop, he knew the question of the play was whether Martin Luther King Jr. would cheat on his wife with a young woman in a hotel room. He wanted the audience to root for King to commit adultery: You indict the audience. In fact, they are titillated by watching to see if King is going to fuck her. And that titillation can be used against them. So I call it indicting the audience. I find out how I’m going to indict the audience and make them a part of the crime of the play. At the end of the play, the audience realizes that the young woman is actually an angel sent to earth to transport King to the other side. Now the audience is implicated—They wanted King and the woman to sleep together. O’Hara asserts that implicating the audience pulls them into a production in a visceral way. They can’t remain unaffected. O’Hara made sure the designers, producers, casting directors, and actors understood his read on the play. O’Hara told his designers to create a small, cramped hotel room so that the two actors would brush past each other constantly. He insisted to his casting director that King and the woman must have sexual chemistry. He used the crime of the play as an organizing principle. When I directed John Kolvenbach’s family drama, Goldfish, I knew I had to land the final moment. The play tells the story of Albert, a young man heading off to college, only to have his future put in jeopardy when his dad gambles away his tuition money. He tries to escape, but when thugs beat up his dad over gambling debts, Albert gives up his future and moves back home. At the final moment of the play, his father realizes he must give Albert

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permission to leave, regardless of how much it hurts. He opens the door, commands his son to exit, and says, “Resist me.” I knew that to make the play work we had to break the audience’s heart at that very moment. How? Some practical issues: Where is the door? Is it in a place that everyone can see well? Is it in a power spot? Emotional: Do we care about this relationship? Does the dad have redeeming qualities? Is it hard for the son to leave? Visual: Make sure we never see the son leave that door throughout the play. Delay that event until the last possible moment. These were the priorities I listed when I walked into my first meeting with designers. I knew the final moment connected to the story I wanted to tell about legacy and parenting. But what does that mean? The story I wanted to tell? Can a play tell more than one story? Telling Your Version of the Narrative Charles Newell asserts that a story is more than plot. It’s not the events but the interpretation of the events that is important to an audience. What is the story that I as the director, as the leader of the artistic process, want to tell? What’s the emotional journey we want to go on? What will an audience feel and connect to, and have an empathetic connection with the actor in the live experience? What can the play tap into using the uniqueness of its narrative? Jessica Thebus, the head of directing at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, teaches directors to figure out the story of the play from their point of view. In a sequence of director/designer collaboration classes, students team up to create short presentations on the story of a play. They are interrogated during these sessions because they aren’t allowed to start designing the play right away but instead must convey their version of what is at the heart of the story. Thebus mentions that sometimes students will go off the rails too quickly. They become wrapped up in their own notions and lose sight of the actual play. One student had a concept of setting As You Like It in a coal mine. The director had lost hold of the essentials of the story—the play is set in the forest of Arden and, although it can be theatricalized many ways, that’s crucial.

Goldfish by John Kolvenbach Directed by Damon Kiely for Route 66 Theatre L-R: Alex Stage, Francis Guinan Photo Credit: Rob Zalas

Michael Halberstam on Finding the Dysfunction Michael Halberstam was one of my biggest champions when I was running a small theatre company in Chicago. He encouraged me to always invest in my actors because it would pay dividends. This philosophy has certainly worked wonders for Halberstam as he has built up Writers Theatre of Glencoe over the last twenty years. Started in a fifty-seat room in the back of a bookstore, Writers is poised to open a multimillion-dollar theatre complex designed by the internationally famous architect Jeanne Gang. While it’s a simple notion, Halberstam’s idea that the best plays reveal our own personal dysfunctions is one I return to often: An actress was trying to over-sentimentalize a confrontation scene, and I said, “Take all that sentiment out. Just read this more directly. Ask for what you want but without apologizing for it.” She said, “How is that conducive to a good relationship?” I then took time to point out that part of the nature of good drama was that characters in plays rarely behaved in manners conducive to good relationships. Were plays to celebrate function, the theatre would be a very uninteresting and un-dramatic art form. She read the scene without apology and sentiment, and we achieved dramatic tension immediately. I hasten to add that she was brilliant in the production. She had made the mistake of identifying too personally with her character and had become engaged in the process of trying to fix her behavior. There is something magnificent about watching somebody articulate their deepest and most personal self-involved flaws to another person and then promote an agenda that is so selfinvolved that it blinds them to the ramifications of what it is they’re doing and saying. So when you’re reading the play, you have to look for the dysfunction and then, to some degree, you have to be able to articulate that dysfunction when you get up in front of people on the first day of rehearsal. You have to understand the core of that behavior, and you have to understand your own capacity for it so that you don’t judge it. I often see actors and directors trying to demonstrate that they are not to be identified with the actions of the characters

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in a play. Look how awful these people are! they seem to be saying.  In order to find truth, we must find an intersection between ourselves and the dysfunction of the characters we are portraying within the play in order to manifest it on stage. You just have to create circumstance that creates credible interaction and, in order to do that, you have to go interior. If you don’t read plays personally and find  your own way in, then you create an aren’t other people crazy? production that can end up being condescending at best and uninteresting at worst. 

There are a million stories in one text, but if you pop off the text right away, you’re going to end up in the coal mine without knowing what’s going on. So you’ve got to take the long walk out to the material, know what’s on the page. And there are still a million stories and you can still find your own issue, it just has to be rooted in the true thing, rather than a pretend thing that you’re in love with. Thebus had a clear point of view on her own production of As You Like It for Oregon Shakespeare. She read the play many times and discovered that, for her, it was the story of Rosalind growing up. “She goes into Arden a brave girl, and she ends up a woman. And that’s what marriage is.” Then she noticed that it was a comingof-age story for many of the characters in the play: Orlando, Celia, Oliver. So the next question became, If all the characters grow up in the forest, what is the forest of Arden? Through discussions with her designers and dramaturgs, she realized the mothers were absent. There were uncles but no mothers. So as a team they decided that the female ancestors would create Arden. They started the play with a dumb show telling the story of the babies Rosalind, Orlando, and Celia and the death of the mothers. Then as the play progressed, these female ancestors created the forest. They would make the sun rise and set and occasionally give characters what they needed for their journey to adulthood. Thebus still dealt with the basic facts of the play; it’s set in a forest, a young woman falls in love, people are transformed. But

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she was able to highlight specific moments in the play to tell a complicated and inspiring story of a young motherless girl learning to become a woman. When she engaged her designers for the first time, she told them the story of the play from her own personal vantage point—and this sparked creativity. Once a director develops some idea of what the play is about or at least knows the crucial questions he or she wants to ask, they start to figure out what it will look and sound like. How can a director inspire the creation of a fictional universe?

Dis cov er in g t he World of t he Pl a y Elinor Fuchs, renowned dramaturg, critic, and author, believes that people often limit their imagination when it comes to scripts. They jump to characters, dialogue, and action—which narrows their understanding of the play. Before readers ask what the people in the play are doing, Fuchs encourages them to first imagine the world the people live in. Her 2004 hand grenade of an essay, “EF’s Visit to a Small Planet: Some Questions to Ask a Play,” offers rigorous analytical tools. She assumes that there are no accidents in creating the universe of a play. If something exists in the world, the playwright put it there for a reason. If it is absent, likewise. She suggests that readers take everything that exists in the play and form it into a ball— squint your eyes and peer at your planet. Literally imagine all the people, all the places, all the moments in the script: “Make the ball small enough that you can see the entire planet, not so small that you lose detail, and not so large that detail overwhelms the whole.”7 Still squinting, ask yourself questions about space. What do you see? Is it manmade or natural? What is time like? Does time skip around? How is it measured? What is the climate like? Are there storms? Fuchs goes on to ask well more than 100 questions ranging from the social dynamics of the planet to the way people are dressed. From language to the way people are grouped to mood and tone. When I teach Fuchs’s method, I find students quickly zoom in to the human level. It’s hard for them to pull back far enough to see the entire planet. I encourage rigor so they have a chance of understanding the world on its own terms. If you examine only

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characters, you risk collapsing the strange world of the play into our own recognizable one. [See Workbook Chapter: Exercise #7, The World of the Play] If you squint at the world of Shakespeare’s The Tempest, you see that it is composed of a rough-hewn island with a few man-made structures. This planet compresses time; events seem to happen only between 2:00 and 6:00 p.m. Storms rage, and the weather changes dramatically from moment to moment, typically through magic. Music and noises continuously fill the air: the lyrical songs of spirits, the horrible groans of mourning, and the frightening yelps of monsters. Obie Award–winning director Anne Kauffman also thinks about the universe of the play as a container. She often directs new plays with multiple locations and has to figure out some theatrical world to frame ten to twenty scenes. Before a first design meeting, Kauffman will do a thumbnail sketch of the play. For every scene, she’ll create a very basic title and then list the events of the scene: Very simply, what are the characters doing? By creating thumbnails, she secures a bird’s-eye view or sense of perspective. Then she tries to find a metaphor for the play, something to contain all the thumbnails. Now she’s armed to go into design meetings. For me that’s where my pre-production work actually happens, in my design meetings. Trying to figure out space. Trying to figure out what the space represents. You know, because theatre is an art form of metaphor, right? It’s a metaphor, it’s not realism. I have to understand the space in which I’m working, its significance where the action of the play is concerned—and its meaning thematically. That’s very very important to me. I’m rudderless if I don’t have the envelope for the play. When she worked on the premiere of Smokefall by Noah Haidle at South Coast Repertory, she told the designers that she saw a staircase rising to nowhere. Haidle’s play has been compared to Our Town, a lyrical meditation on death and fate. In Kauffman’s imagination, when people went up the stairs, they disappeared or faded away. Kauffman’s designers fashioned a monochromatic set so the background disappeared, allowing her staircase to come to the fore. When she directed it again at the Goodman Theatre, she had a different team and a new design, but the staircase remained

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at the center. The metaphor of people walking off into nowhere helped to contain the play for Kauffman. Kauffman starts to figure out the physical world of the play by taking the long view—seeing the entire world at once. When she has that view, she’s ready to talk to designers. But what about going the other direction? From the smallest details to the big picture? Building a World from the Given Circu mstances Stanislavski taught us the importance of using specific given circumstances to help create truthful performances [See Lessons from the Past pages 9–11]. I find knowing the givens backward and forward helps me to collaborate with actors, casting directors, and designers. If I know the facts of the play, then I can start to make choices or guide meaningful discussions. We’ll come back to givens in the casting process and in the rehearsal section, but first let’s focus on the physical world. In her book, The Director’s Craft, Katie Mitchell has a very thorough method for cataloging given circumstances, which I now teach to my students. She suggests reading a play very slowly and focusing first on events that happened before the play began and on places that exist. Mitchell suggests creating two lists: facts and questions. A fact is anything that you know happened in the past or that undeniably exists. Questions are anything that you don’t understand. [See Workbook Chapter: Exercise #4, Given Circumstances] Leave opinions out, or turn them into questions. Stella and Stanley live in a two-room apartment on the first floor. This is an incontrovertible fact and, some would say, the most important one in the whole play. The apartment is dirty and depressing. This isn’t a fact. This is Blanche’s opinion, and what is it based on? Her experiences at Belle Reve? Her long hot journey to New Orleans? Her desire to put Stella under her thumb? We are now in the realm of choices. How small is the apartment? What condition is it in? This is a question you can try to answer through research, close reading, design, and rehearsal. If the apartment is absolutely horrifying, then Blanche seems more reasonable when she berates Stella. If it’s relatively clean—this says something about Blanche’s standards.

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Some more facts and questions about the apartment in A Streetcar Named Desire: There are two floors; Stanley and Stella live on the first floor. There is a kitchen table with a bare light bulb hanging over it. There is a bathroom. There is a front door. Where does the fold-up bed store during the day? Where do they do their laundry? Next, Mitchell suggests conducting photo research of actual places. How do apartments in New Orleans row houses actually look? David Cromer and his designers did this for his production of Streetcar at Writers Theatre: What’s interesting about Streetcar is, we think—possibly because of the movie—that it sort of looks like they’re on Bourbon Street. But where the address is—it’s actually these little row houses. It’s actually these little wooden houses…and it looks like a neighborhood. After doing photo research, Mitchell suggests drawing ground plans. Where would you place the furniture in a small row house? Just draw it out. She recommends showing this sketch to the set designer. You aren’t deciding what the set will look like, but you’re imagining the play happening in a real place. What about a play such as Sarah Kane’s 4.48 Psychosis? Is there any point in listing out facts and questions? I’d argue yes. By grappling with given circumstances, you know what must be in the production and what is up for discussion. Some facts and questions from 4.48 Psychosis: There are one or more speakers. The speaker(s) has dreams. The speaker(s) has a lover and a brother. The speaker(s) has trouble sleeping. How many speakers are there? Do they know each other? How? Where does the play take place? Has the speaker contemplated suicide? How seriously?

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In this case, a director and his or her collaborators will have to create most of the given circumstances themselves. Some they will figure out in design meetings and some in rehearsal. More is left to interpretation. When Michael Kahn directed Shakespeare’s Henry IV Parts I & II at the Shakespeare Theatre in Washington, DC, he and his team created given circumstances through the introduction of props. Kahn wanted to make the play as human as possible to pull people into Prince Hal’s transformation from drunken black sheep into valiant leader. As is typical in Shakespeare’s plays, most scenes don’t need any props. Kahn thought that by adding a specific piece of furniture to each scene, he could add context to the play. “I wanted to know who’s poor, who’s rich, who’s a family, who’s whatever. But it’s one piece per scene—it’s a coffin, it’s a table, it’s a bed...” By doing this, he could focus in on relationships. When I saw the production, his idea landed elegantly. In the first scene with Falstaff, he revealed the famous drunkard asleep in bed. Prince Hal burst into his bedroom, woke him, and playfully chastised Falstaff for being a reprobate. Often, this scene is played in a tavern, but by setting it in a private room—Falstaff ’s bedroom— their relationship launched in a personal way. For the first scene between Hal and his father, King Henry IV, Kahn placed the scene at a family dinner. Henry is eating with his other sons when Hal enters, obviously late. Hal starts the scene with yet another mistake. The king dismisses everyone, and he and Hal have a difficult heart-to-heart. When staged as a family dinner, the scene brings the father and son dynamic to the fore and becomes more human, as Kahn intended. Kahn is quick to point out that he doesn’t know all the answers when he sits down with his designers. In this case, he asked for key pieces of furniture for a few scenes but, for others, he didn’t. He had some hunches and figured out the rest in meetings with his designers. For many directors, this is the best way to discover the world of the play—through conversation. Analyzing the Script in Collaboration with Designers Robert O’Hara has a strong feeling about preparation for production meetings; he doesn’t like to do much at all. He says he’s not a set or

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costume designer, and he purposefully doesn’t try to figure out too much ahead of time: I may have a thought or an instinct or some sort of question, but I’m not there to dictate, This is how we’re going to do the show. I am much more excited to see, Oh, that’s what you thought? Interesting. Oh we could do that? I’m much more interested in what everyone else is bringing to the table. O’Hara trusts that when he sees something, he will know whether it’s in line with his hunches about the play. He knows the question at the heart of the play; does the set help or hinder that investigation? How do the costumes help indict the audience in the crime of the play? Lisa Portes, the head of directing at The Theatre School at DePaul, sees her work with costume designers as a form of character analysis. She may know why she’s doing the play and how she wants to affect the audience, but she doesn’t know exactly what people are wearing. It’s those discussions that actually lead me to a deeper understanding of the character. When the costume designer shows up and the person’s all in blue and you’re like, No, it’s not blue. And then you have to figure out why it’s not blue. So you have to get beyond your intuition in order to articulate it to the costume designer. When directors see a sketch of a set or a costume and instinctively know it isn’t complete or is slightly off, that’s the moment for discussion. Often, directors don’t know why, but they trust the impulse. Then through dialogue with the designer, they unpack what felt askew and, by process of elimination, the right direction to head next. I find that I can’t have those meaningful conversations until I’ve done some sort of design prep work on paper. I need to know my given circumstances so that I can react to a costume design. I like to figure out the general world of the play so that I have a basis for reacting to lighting research. I have at times sketched out ground plans based on given circumstances. For me, the effort of putting everything down on paper is crucial. Once directors start to work with designers, typically the next step is preparing for casting. If you can imagine the world—who are the people in it?

Scott Ellis on the Virtues of Indecision Ellis is the associate artistic director of the Roundabout Theatre Company and has been successfully directing plays and musicals on and off Broadway for more than two decades. He’s a proud alumnus of The Theatre School at DePaul University in Chicago, having been challenged by some of the same faculty I work with day to day. In our wide-ranging conversation, he always made it clear that while he rigorously prepares his scripts, his best discoveries come in rehearsal. When I talked with him, he was preparing for a Broadway production of Elephant Man with Bradley Cooper. I asked him about artistic hunches—both those that work out and those that go astray: I feel you can sometimes trace back to a moment when you made a turn. You made a right turn. And sometimes that right turn is probably not the correct turn. Now sometimes, very slowly, you can get back on track, but a lot of times you made the right instead of the left turn, and it took you someplace else. In my gut I know some productions I’ve done, I look back and go, like, Oh shit, that was the wrong decision. I made a right there, I should have stayed on course or made a left. I’m more successful when I don’t settle in right away. I just keep going over it in my head: Is this right? Let’s try that. Sometimes I come right back to my first hunch. But I tend to keep mixing myself up with my own insecurities: Is this right? Is this the right way? And a lot of times that will help me get back to the answer. Even on Elephant Man, we must’ve gone through four major sets before we settled on the one. And some of them were really interesting. And I walked away and I thought, That’s interesting. And then I’d come back to it and go, Eh, I don’t know. It might be too big of a statement. And I might say, You know what, this is why I don’t like this, or This is why I’m not sure the play is going to work with this concept. I will never dismiss it completely because I’m thinking, Maybe there is something here. But I’ll live with it for a while then come back and say, I can’t make this work in my head. But I do know when I see it, in my gut: That’s it. That’s it.

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G ettin g to Know t he Cha ra ct ers When Brian Kulick produced Hamlet at Classic Stage Company, he and his designers hadn’t made too many decisions as he decided whom to cast in the lead role. As he considered three different actors, he realized each would determine the play’s meaning. One actor would have made the play a more philosophical journey. One actor would have pulled at the heartstrings and made you cry at the end. Kulick finally went with someone he’d had a long-standing relationship with, Michael Cumpsty. Kulick said Cumpsty probably resembled Richard Burbage, the actor Shakespeare wrote for, “a much more robust physical revenger.” With this rampaging avenger at the helm, Hamlet became a cancer cell eating away at the rotten state of Denmark or an antibody fighting an infection at the heart of the royal court. Kulick asked his designers how the battle would manifest itself in the set and the clothing. They decided to create a clean slate, a white box, that Hamlet could destroy every night: So the idea was that this very pristine clean white box, by the end of it, should be defaced, should be destroyed, should have feces on it, should have blood, that you go from this very pristine thing to this destroyed thing. The designers created a set out of white paper and costumed everyone but Hamlet in white at the top. By the end of the show, everyone wore black, and the entire set had been ripped apart and destroyed. Hamlet the revenger ripped through the rotten state of Denmark. The cancer cell image infected rehearsals as well. Kulick talked to the rest of the cast about Hamlet being a disease. Actors needed to decide when they caught the cold or the flu. What happened to Ophelia or Gertrude when they were infected? This idea unified the company. Kulick decided on an actor and, in making that choice, determined the direction of the show. If he’d cast a philosophical or a psychological actor, the set, the costumes, and the rehearsal would have been very different. Seminal play analyst David Ball agrees with Kulick’s reasoning on Hamlet. Ball points out the obvious: Hamlet doesn’t exist, nor do any characters in any play. The nature of a character on stage is

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dependent on the person playing the part. Published in 1983, Ball’s widely influential book Backwards and Forwards defines the idea of character bones: The playwright must leave most of the character blank to accommodate the nature of the actor. This is one reason novels are longer than plays: novels need no gaps for actors. So there is more of Ahab than of Oedipus; in fact, there is more Miss Marple than Oedipus. Scripts contain bones, not people.8 The actor puts flesh on the skeleton provided by the script. Ball lines up with Aristotle and says that the bones are determined by what the characters do rather than what they say. He suggests directors first list the obvious things about a character. To begin compiling the bones for Blanche DuBois: Blanche is thirty years old. She’s from the South. She teaches high school English. She was married to a man who turned out to be homosexual and killed himself. Now Ball urges directors to closely read the script and list everything the character does or has done in the past. What do characters want? What is in their way? How do they overcome that obstacle? [See Workbook Chapter: Exercise #12, Character Bones] Blanche lies to her sister about not knowing where liquor is kept. Blanche gives all the legal papers about Belle Reve to Stanley. Blanche keeps the lights low and avoids Mitch’s sexual advances. I list all the bones of a character and then see what picture emerges. What one character says about another can often mislead. Stella says Blanche is flighty, but is she? Blanche stayed in Belle Reve trying to keep the estate afloat while Stella left town to find happiness. Stanley calls Blanche a shark and implies she’s lewd. But what do we know about her relationship with sex? David Cromer doesn’t understand why Blanche is often portrayed as a nymphomaniac humping the furniture. In the play itself, she makes only one sexual advance—toward a young newspaper sales boy—but then she stops herself.

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What we found out that made sense was that sex was actually more complicated for her than she likes to fuck and she wanted to fuck. Because she’d have fucked Mitch if she just wanted to fuck, you know what I mean? She’d have fucked Stanley long before if she just wanted to fuck. But she’s trying desperately to be an English teacher from Laurel, Mississippi. Blanche had a horrible experience many years before the play begins when she caught her young husband having sex with another man. She drinks too much and sometimes turns to sex as an escape. By looking deeply into the bones of the character, Cromer and his actors were able to avoid the clichés that had crept into characterizations of Blanche over the years. Brushing away Past Interpretations of Characters Kimberly Senior swept away years of clichés to uncover the heart of Hedda Gabler, Henrik Ibsen’s seminal drama. In an acting class many years ago, she was playing Thea, one of Hedda’s old school friends, and hated everything about the script. She still bristles at the memory. She thought to herself, I can’t even say their names. They drive me nuts. Why would anyone want to do this play? Why is this play in the classical canon? And that opened up the investigation for me, when I asked that question. Why is this play in the canon? Why is this play famous? Why is this play referred to? What is it about? And so then I read it with a fresh eye and thought, I think I’m playing this role wrong. In Ibsen’s drama, Hedda and her scholar husband return from their honeymoon to a new house, and she quickly ensnares old friends and colleagues in domestic intrigue. Senior saw two productions back to back that she thought portrayed Hedda as a master manipulator pulling the strings on a bunch of dumb puppets. It just felt wrong—clichés passed down from past productions. The bones of Hedda point to a different person than the catty, domineering stereotype. Senior believes Hedda is a person who hasn’t made many choices up to now and is afraid of life and not sure what to do next. She makes a lot of impulsive choices in the

Kenny Leon on Casting Denzel Washington in A Raisin in the Sun Leon has won many awards for directing, including the Tony Award for his recent production of Lorraine Hansberry’s explosive drama, A Raisin in the Sun. He has directed this work two other times: on Broadway in the 1990s and for television. The third time around Leon cast film star Denzel Washington in the lead role of frustrated livery driver Walter Younger. By casting Washington, who is older than the character as originally written, Leon believes he gave the play more immediacy. So if Lorraine Hansberry were writing the play today, I think Walter Lee would be older. When you make Walter Lee older, then you make that last dream more desperate. You make that dream the only dream, you know what I mean? If you’re thirty years old and you’re playing around in America today, you think, Oh, well, you know, he’s just a thirty-year-old, he’s a knucklehead, and okay, it didn’t work out. He’ll get another chance five years from now. I wanted it to be, no… this is the only chance he’s going to have. And that’s in the text, you know. The only chance he’s going to have. It made the dream bigger and made it more immediate, and it made it more desperate. And so, it made the story more emotional, more important, more real. So even if Denzel wasn’t doing that role, I could never imagine doing that play again and not doing it with a cat who was slightly older. It just wakes the play up. When I cast Walter Lee’s son, Travis, I’m saying, I want a kid where the people see the man in Travis as opposed to the boy. I want someone that they can see, Oh, that’s a fourteen-year-old kid walking in a Miami neighborhood or a Florida neighborhood and stand your ground. So I cast a kid a little older and a little smarter who can really push Walter Lee. So he was pushing his dad. So you can take the one line in the play, for instance, when Travis says, You drunk, Daddy? Usually that’s just a throwaway, funny line, you know. This time, I wanted the kid to really ask the question. Are you drunk, Daddy? Because that has a lot to do with our dreams and our possibilities. And I wanted us to see that that kid could be a productive citizen in America in the next generation.

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show, but they aren’t typical. There’s no history of her destroying people’s lives or causing havoc in the past: just the opposite. Senior mused on the play for twenty years, occasionally reading about a production or seeing another version. She read more than a dozen translations, looking for one that didn’t treat the character as a young tyrannical bombshell. Senior fell in love with Nicholas Ruddall’s 2012 translation of the Norwegian classic. All of this before she even knew she would direct the play: I wasn’t actively pitching the show. What happened was that I worked with my long-term friend Kate Fry, and sometimes what I do is sit there in rehearsals and cast the actors in other plays. And I was like, that’s who my Hedda is. Fry is in her early forties, beautiful but not in a conventional way. She’s most known for being a strong, smart, human actor. When an artistic director asked Senior what show she wanted to do next year, she said Hedda Gabler but only with Kate Fry. Finally, Senior could tell the story of a vulnerable woman trying to figure out the next step in her life—combatting smart, capable adversaries. Senior similarly had to knock away centuries of ideas about the supporting characters. Hedda’s old school chum, Thea, is typically played as a simpering shy person, only because that’s how Hedda describes her and treats her. But, Senior points out, She’s a survivor, she’s of a different class than all of the other characters, and so Thea’s worked hard. She’s had sex with a bunch of different men to get what she needs, to survive, and she’s gonna do it again. Another way to work with the bones of the character is to create a simple biography—looking back to your lists of given circumstances. Composing Character Histories Take your lists of facts and questions about the play and group them by character. Simply turn the given circumstances into a story about the character’s past. Employ rigor at first, don’t invent anything, and just use what’s in the play. I find it helpful to match these histories against a very basic timeline of historical events. Stanley was a child of the Depression

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but then spent his formative years in the service during World War II. Now, as a young husband, he’s part of the post-war boom in America. Blanche lived through the crumbling of the old South. She’s only two or three generations removed from the Civil War. It’s likely that Belle Reve was a former slave plantation. [See Appendix 1 for biographies on three main characters in Streetcar.] This analysis won’t give you a complete version of the person’s biography but will lead to questions. Did Stanley go to high school? College? How about Blanche? How did Blanche start teaching English? How did Stella and Stanley meet? Where? But shouldn’t you just leave this work to the actors? Does creating your own detailed biography imply a lack of trust? Meredith McDonough, associate artistic director at Actors Theatre of Louisville, has a middle ground. She assumes actors will do their homework, but she does her own as well. Then, in rehearsal, they can compare notes—but only on the givens from the script, not on general impressions. She uses Blanche in Streetcar as an example: I would say for me the thing I find most interesting is that this is someone that we know to be a faulty source. So then the question I ask about character is, Which of these stories do I think she’s lying about? It’s what I teach now here, because I find especially with young artists, so much of what they do is they accept what their characters are saying at face value. Sometime she discovers in rehearsal that professional actors fall into the same trap; if someone says it, it must be true. McDonough’s methods are in line with the journalism adage: If your mother says she loves you, check it out. Like Senior and Cromer, she’s guarding against actors falling into stereotypes or playing the general sense of a person. I believe there are three strong reasons to do detailed work on character. First, if you understand a character’s past, that knowledge can speed up work in the rehearsal room because you can guide actors toward choices supported in the text. Second, character work unlocks design meetings, because you lean toward clothes the characters would wear, props they would use, or places where they would live. Most important, though, detailed character work helps to guide casting choices.

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Priming for Auditions After doing some sort of biography and making a list of the bones, I write up a character description for the casting director. A selection of character descriptions composes what is called a breakdown, and it helps casting directors to bring in the right sort of people to the audition. These breakdowns need broad enough guidelines to bring in a wide net but narrow enough to exclude actors who just aren’t right. They should include identifiers such as age, gender, and race, if it’s important, but also qualitative descriptors. Anne Kauffman writes about the spirit and demeanor of the person, but sometimes, depending on the play, “a little bit of what the character has to go through, so if there’s a transformation that happens, if there’s something that feels integral to the character, I’ll include that.” In auditions, she tests actors to see whether they can embody the change. I often like to figure out the one thing the character must have that I can’t teach. For example, I can’t teach the actor playing Stanley self-confidence. He just has to have it. Mitch must be decent. Stella must be sensual. Blanche is intelligent. These basic traits can’t be brought out in rehearsal—at least not in the typical short process directors have these days. The qualities must be present in the actors before they walk through the door. At the same time, you are preparing lists of actors to come in, you have to choose sides, or short sections of the script, for actors to read from. These sides should expose the heart of the character and help you figure out whether the actor can do what you need. Lisa Portes sees choosing sides as a decisive act; up to this moment, the possibilities are endless, and the meaning of the play is open. To choose the correct audition material, she has to wrestle with the characters and pick something that will “reveal the soul of the actor in relationship to the soul of the character.” She remembers preparing to cast This Is Modern Art by Kevin Coval and Idris Goodwin for Steppenwolf Theatre. She picked three sides, one each for the main character and his two buddies. The three guys. One of the characters had been rewritten and he’s much more linguistic and poetic. Right? So I knew I could pick this new monologue that revealed his contemplativeness, his intelligence, and his linguistic acuity. And then, the other character is the comic guy. So happily I picked a monologue

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that sort of reveals him. But the main character doesn’t have any real monologues, the only monologues he has are to the audience in a way that narrates the story. So I had to then find a scene that would show his leadership, his ability to rally a room past resistance, his charisma, and his determination. By picking sides, she’s chosen what she thinks is essential about the character. Choosing sides reveals a deep truth about directorial analysis; it’s all about closing doors and trying to close them as late as possible. In the beginning, a play can mean many things, but as you start to put a concrete form on the show—what does it look like, who will be in it—you are closing doors on other possibilities. Directors have both anxiety and excitement about making these decisions. Directors don’t typically walk into auditions with a crystal clear image of who they are looking for but, instead, a fuzzy set of priorities. But what happens when an actor comes in and upends your views on the play? Using Auditions to Test Your Read on the Play Michael John Garcés has learned a lot about casting from his time as artistic director of Cornerstone Theater Company. Cornerstone’s mission is to create new plays with and about local communities. Professional writers and actors interview community members, asking what issues matter to them. Cornerstone artists create an original script from those interviews and hire a mix of professional actors and non-professional community members. Recently the company made a new play about northeast Los Angeles, which included a fractious scene about the neighborhood council. Very few adults from the community came to the audition, so the creators cast a bunch of six-year-olds as the council members. Audiences loved the choice and agreed that the casting of children had nailed an essential aspect of the meetings. Garcés tries to bring this inclusive spirit into his audition room when he’s working outside of Cornerstone as a freelance director. He’s become suspect of the typical audition process. In the professional world a lot of the times, we’re like, I read the play and Willy Loman is this, I need to find this. And we audition as many people who are conceivably close to this as we want and we find the person we think will give us this.

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And that’s one way to do casting, and it can work well. But the other way to do casting, is to see who walks into the room, and how do I maximize that. So it becomes a vastly different production than might otherwise have been done and it’s not the production in your head, but—if I was I was going to direct the production in my head, why don’t I just write a fucking novel and be done with it? Garcés hopes actors will surprise him in auditions, to have his own analysis of the play turned upside down. I had this experience when I auditioned actors for A Streetcar Named Desire at DePaul. The fiercest, rawest actor who came in for Stanley was African American, certainly not the Polack described by Tennessee Williams. I also saw great African American actors for the couple who live upstairs from Stella and Stanley. An African American actress captured the required sensuality of Blanche’s sister Stella. Hands down, the best Mitch and Blanche were two Caucasian actors. I saw an opportunity to highlight the class differences in the play— through the lens of race. The story we came upon in the rehearsal room was that Blanche was white, her sister Stella was African American, and Stella had fled Belle Reve to an all-black neighborhood in New Orleans. This wasn’t the story I’d set out to tell, but it didn’t invalidate the analysis I’d done. Blanche still held the higher status. She still looked down on Stanley as a brute. Mitch could easily play the role of Blanche’s savior. Would every twist and turn of the story make sense? What happened to each scene when actors were of different races? I wouldn’t know until I got in the rehearsal room. As I started researching this book, I thought directors completed all their analyses before meeting with designers or casting actors. I’ve learned the process is much more fluid. A director reads the play and learns some things about it, brings those ideas to designers, and learns more through discussions. Ideas born in design meetings come to bear in auditions, and discoveries from casting sessions feed back into design. If a director is lucky, after he or she casts the play, there is time to think about the scenes before rehearsing them with actors. The director can look over the design, think about the world of the play, and imagine the actors on stage. What’s the specific work on events, action, and language that helps directors to walk confidently into the first day of rehearsal?

A Streetcar Named Desire by Tennessee Williams Directed by Damon Kiely for The Theatre School at DePaul University L-R: Lucy Sandy, Megan Kohl, Jonathan Kitt Photo Credit: John Bridges

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G earing up for R ehearsing with Actors I’m more confident walking into rehearsal if I’ve dug into each scene, trying to understand the story on a beat-by-beat basis. This doesn’t mean I determine how each scene will look or play—I want to leave room for collaboration and discovery in rehearsal with actors. But the better I know each scene, the more I’m able to focus on what’s in front of me or answer actors’ questions easily. My first step is to return to my list of facts and questions, to the given circumstances, as a way to ground my scene work.

G r a s pin g the Gi ven Circumst a nces Jon Jory ran Actors Theatre of Louisville for many years and teaches theatre at the University of Washington. He has written a couple of no-nonsense books titled Tips, one for actors and one for directors that was published in 2002. He explains how knowing the facts of the play can help directors in rehearsal: An enormous part of a director’s job is to remind the actors of the circumstances, and that means not only the circumstances that surround the scene but those that impact the moment. Out of the circumstances the director finds not only the behavior but the blocking. List them, keep them near at hand, review them. They are the most powerful arrow in the director’s quiver. Almost any acting problem can be assisted by them. The director doesn’t need to know the answer, the circumstances will usually provoke it.9 If you’ve followed Katie Mitchell’s method for cataloging given circumstances, you have a long list of facts and questions about the play. [See Workbook Chapter: Exercise #4, Given Circumstances] You’ve already used them to prepare for design meetings. Before casting, you studied the givens to help you find the right actors. Now look at your list again, this time to see how given circumstances affect behavior within scenes. In basic psychological terms: How does the past determine the present? At this point, you probably still have many unanswered questions. I look over my list of questions and then divide it up between my dramaturg, my assistant director, and myself. Anything researchrelated I ask my dramaturg to tackle. What training would an

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English teacher in Laurel, Mississippi have? Anything that is about timeline or related biographies I assign to my assistant. What years did Stanley and Mitch serve in WWII? How long have they known each other? Anything that’s completely interpretive I leave for myself. Why did Stella leave Belle Reve? Why didn’t Stella tell Blanche she was pregnant? I like to play detective, working my way from the obvious to the obscure. What was Belle Reve like? Blanche tells us that the family ancestral home was once large but has shrunk in size as parts were sold off to pay debts. Williams’s text implies that the family has owned Belle Reve for hundreds of years, suggesting that it was once a slave plantation. We can assume that, at one point, Blanche’s and Stella’s family was wealthy but lost its fortune steadily after the Civil War. Some directors believe this work is best done in collaboration with actors. Curt Columbus says that part of the house style at Trinity Rep is to spend a week at the table, interrogating character histories and given circumstances. I will often work with actors to create maps of spaces in the play or timelines of events. Some directors will take these timelines and put them up on the walls of the rehearsal room. As Leigh Silverman says, “Surround yourself with information.” Robert Falls, artistic director of the Goodman Theatre, believes that when actors understand their shared histories, they bring a sense of play to their scenes. In the early days of rehearsal: I do ask the actors to be working on a character history based on what they’ve learned in the text. Working together to create relationships prior to getting on our feet. So that if you’re dealing with siblings, they have created for themselves a shared relationship that has a lot of specifics that are drawn from the text. He might even have actors improvise past shared moments from their history. In a rehearsal for Streetcar, you could have the sisters improvise the day that Stella left home. If nothing else, they should probably have a shared image of Stella’s goodbye. Was it tearful? Did Stella storm off? Did she just slip out the back? You have a sense of what happened in the past. Now let’s look at the present. What’s happening?

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Summarizing What Happens When Daniel Aukin teaches text analysis at The New School, he asks his students to simply summarize what happens in each scene. This is harder than it sounds; it’s easy to jump straight to choices before understanding the basics. If I took his class and used the first scene between Blanche and Stella in Streetcar, I might say, Blanche enters her sister’s apartment for the first time. Stella shows Blanche a picture of her husband, Stanley. Blanche informs Stella that their ancestral home Belle Reve was lost. These statements don’t imply strategy—rather just the facts of what happens. I often list these statements in what I call a director breakdown: a table where I list the scene, the number of pages, and the plot summary. [See Workbook Chapter: Exercise #9, The Director Breakdown] I might also include props needed and perhaps some questions, but I try to keep it simple. Aukin says that once you know what is happening in a scene, you have to dig deeper to figure out character motivations behind the actions. In some ways—what’s really happening? Even if all you do is that first thing, you’ve already illuminated for yourself, either as an actor or as a director, that everything else is choice. It’s trying to understand what’s the skeleton of the thing that is going to be there no matter what. And it illuminates the territory in which choice can occur and will want to occur. When Stella shows Blanche the photograph of Stanley, what is actually going on? Is she bragging about her husband? Is she establishing the pecking order? Is she clarifying who her new family is? In many plays, what’s being said isn’t important; the subtext, what’s implied or inferred, drives the play. Aukin says listing what’s happening helps you to figure out what is open for debate in rehearsal. Anne Kauffman follows a similar method. As mentioned earlier, her first step in analysis is to make a thumbnail sketch of the entire play. She titles each scene, then figures out literally, what are people doing? She doesn’t qualify it but simply states it. This process jumpstarts her conversations with designers, but it also helps her to avoid making qualitative decisions too quickly.

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When you sit alone for a long period of time, you can go down paths that may be unproductive or tangents you can become quite attached to. I have found that if I become attached to these paths or tangents before rehearsal and they end up being irrelevant, I spend a lot of time and energy mourning those choices; I become blind—my peripheral vision, one of the greatest assets a director has, no longer works. Kauffman used to do a lot more specific preproduction: choosing instances of blocking, or crafting moments in her head. After much heartbreak, she often discovered that in the room with actors, these ideas didn’t make sense. Now she trusts that if she walks into rehearsal knowing what happens, she will figure out with her actors how it happens. I agree with Kauffman’s suggestion and call it my Post-it-note theory of directing. Take a Post-it-note. Write “Who. What. Where. When. Why.” Now write “How” and cross it out. Asking actors about the basic facts of the situation typically will activate a scene: Who are you talking to? What just happened? What do you want? Where are you? When is it in the day? Why are you doing what you’re doing? It stops actors asking themselves, How do I sound? How will I do this? How do I look? Why don’t I know what I’m doing? Why a Post-it-note? Because it’s small, and you can move it whenever you start a new scene. As you start to turn questions into facts, whether through research, close reading, or improvisation, they become a part of the given circumstances. What your set looks like, whom you cast in the play, these are all new facts to read. Reading a play is not the same as just analyzing the text. You have to read all of the elements as they come together to make your play world. Chay Yew directed Our Town for Oregon Shakespeare Festival with a multiracial cast, including an Indian American woman as Emily. When he worked on the scene where George asks her for help with his homework, he asked the actress to go back to her own childhood: Bring yourself to this place. Do you remember what it was like being an Indian girl in a white school? You’re the smart girl. And this jock, whom you like, never looks at you, and when he wants something, it’s answers to homework. And the second thing is, if you were Emily today, you would be a CEO. You will never leave that town. You will never climb those mountains. You never will.

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It led to a moment where, rather than being the nice girl next door, Emily erupted at George. The accumulation of givens created the moment. We know from the text that George is good at sports and Emily is good at school. We know from research that in that time period, women would most likely stay at home to raise children. And from Yew’s casting, we have the extra given circumstance that Emily is from a minority that is stereotypically good at schoolwork. This allowed Yew to find a moment that made more sense to his point of view on the story of the play, but he rooted it in the evidence of the text. Plays take place in the present, but directors understand that a character’s past influences how he or she behaves now. By summarizing what happened and figuring out how it affects what happens, you can identify the crucial story nodes of the play: the events.

M a ppin g the Act i on Charles Newell spends a lot of his preparation time looking for dramatic events. First, he breaks the play into what’s called French scenes: Every entrance and exit demarcates a new French scene. Then Newell identifies the event for each section: Even if you find out you’re totally wrong, I find it incredibly useful as a place to start. And what do we mean by the event? What happens as a result of this encounter, and can only happen as a result of this scene, and has to result as a result of this scene in order for the play to move forward. It helps you not get too far ahead, in terms of the sequence of the play, because if you have the event happen too early, then the play is over before the play is over. What is the event of the first scene between Stella and Blanche? When Blanche reveals that their family home, Belle Reve, has been lost and then tears into Stella—accusing her of abandoning her family. If Blanche doesn’t reveal this information, the play can’t progress. Following Newell’s advice, Blanche should delay the event of accusing Stella until the last possible moment. This builds suspense. An event is a moment where something changes for everyone on stage. These are the turning points in the script, or the moments of no return. Figuring out where they occur can help to structure

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the action of scenes. When events occur, the tempo typically shifts, motion occurs. These are moments to frame change. [See Workbook Chapter: Exercise #15, Events] Longer French scenes often have more than one turning point. Identifying them takes practice—every new topic of conversation doesn’t signal a major dramatic shift. An event typically happens when a significant discovery is made or when one character wins an argument or when a character doesn’t get what he or she wants and radically shifts intentions. Now that you’ve identified the events of the play, what do you do with them? Step one is to pull back and look at them as a group. What do they tell you about how the story unfolds? Does one event seem to lead to another? In his book Backwards and Forwards, David Ball encourages directors to look at the events of the play backward. By analyzing the events backward, you understand how the dominoes were stacked—and why they had to fall in the way they did. Examining events backwards ensures you will have no gaps in your comprehension of the script. When you discover an event you cannot connect to a previous event, you know there is a problem for either reader or writer to solve.10 Looking at the very end of A Streetcar Named Desire: Why does Blanche leave at the end of the play?   Because the doctor takes off his hat and is kind to her. Why does the doctor take off his hat?   Because the nurse was wrestling Blanche to the ground. Why was the nurse wrestling Blanche to the ground?   Because Blanche freaked out. Why did Blanche freak out?   Because Stanley stormed into the room. Why did Stanley storm into the room? Ball encourages directors to keep going backward right up to the moment Blanche arrives on Stella’s doorstep, breathless and desperate. By identifying the key events of the play and charting them backward, you not only know what happens, you know why. Once I know where the events are, I like to look between to better understand the dramatic action and conflict.

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Charting Conflict on Stage Brian Kulick teaches his first-year MFA directing students at Columbia University in New York to home in on conflict. Kulick helps his directors divide up their script into units: sections of the play where two characters fight over something. A unit of action is a basic struggle, and you want to know in a particular unit, who won that unit? Who won that struggle? So a unit doesn’t end until somebody wins, or it’s stalemated, or something interrupts it. The important thing here is, if you stay true to that model, you start to understand the escalation. In the first scene of The Tempest between Prospero and one of his magical servants, Ariel, the spirit wants freedom from service, but the wizard needs him for just one more day. First Prospero cajoles and Ariel wheedles; then Prospero commands and Ariel stonewalls; next Prospero shames but Ariel begs; and finally Prospero threatens and Ariel capitulates. The action and conflict escalate until someone has to give in. A change in the topic of conversation doesn’t necessarily mean the unit is over. It just may mean the character is trying a new tactic to secure what he or she wants. This is what is called a beat shift. Beats are the smallest building blocks of action: the cells of the play. Jon Jory says, “The beat is to acting and directing what the paragraph is to writing. The beat changes when the subject changes.”11 This is where moment-to-moment acting happens. In each beat, one character wants something that’s in conflict with another character. They have actions or objectives. I want him to return my love. I want her to recognize I don’t love her. Actors will try different tactics to achieve their objectives. I’ll flatter him. I’ll berate her. When the objective doesn’t work, the character changes tactics. Gregory Lehane instructs his students at Carnegie Mellon to think about action in physical terms. In a romantic scene between a man and a woman, Lehane would encourage his directors to think dramatically rather than intellectually. Don’t settle for something bland, such as He’s trying to seduce her. Instead: He’s unbuttoning her blouse. That might not be literally what’s happening but that’s the action. If you can articulate the action in hotter, more dramatic terms, then you might be inspired,

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staging wise, scenography wise, lighting wise. It would be great if I decided that the action is, He’s unbuttoning her blouse. And the audience is looking at two people in Edwardian clothes, standing and talking to each other, and they think, Oh my god, he’s unbuttoning her blouse. Even if he’s not literally undoing buttons. Should you map out the action and chart every beat for the entire play before rehearsal? If it helps you to unlock the secrets of the play, yes. If it turns you into a dictator in the rehearsal room, no. David Esbjornson, award-winning director and chair of the Rutgers Theatre Department, believes figuring out too much ahead of time can potentially stifle creativity. If you lock in too many opinions before the beginning of rehearsal, you might not be open to what actors offer in the moment. Unless you believe that your point of view and your thinking is superior to everybody else’s, it’s probably a good idea to facilitate an openness that allows for collective thinking. Because more than likely you’ll get a better result than if you sit in your room and figure it all out... It’s not just about letting everything happen. It’s about selecting the things that make sense. Because you can’t go down rabbit holes every time somebody has an impulse. Perhaps you don’t want to break down the entire play but instead to beat out a scene that isn’t working or is particularly tricky. I would argue mapping the action of a play is like doing pushups. Do it until it’s second nature. Take a few plays, dig into them beat by beat, and see what you learn. If the structure of the play is the bones, the units the muscles, and beats the cells, what about the molecules: the words in the play?

G r applin g wit h t he L a ngua ge This may seem obvious, but the first step is to make sure you understand all the words in the script. This is most important in classic plays, especially Shakespeare, but it can apply to any script. Charles Newell started his career obsessing over the definition of words. He always spread several versions of Shakespeare out on

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his desk, as well as a dictionary and other sources: “I built up this muscle, which was about…okay, there’s the word on the page, how do I dig into it and have an interpretive, have an emotional, have an intellectual response to what’s there?” Newell looks at words that jump out at him and asks himself, What do they mean? Is there more than one meaning? Why does that character use that word rather than this word? Michael Kahn has become fascinated with word choice. He reads and rereads his script obsessively. When he directed Henry IV a decade ago, he reveled in the large sweeps of action, but when he tackled the play recently, his focus had shifted: I think twelve years ago I wasn’t quite paying attention to a close reading of the text. I knew the text but I’m very different now about asking myself as I’m reading, What is that? Why is that there? Wait a minute why do you say that? Why do you say that word instead of something else? What does that word actually mean? You can’t obsess over every one of the thousands of words in a play, but you can look for patterns. What words are used over and over? And how do their meanings change? Brian Kulick tells a compelling story about the word bear in The Winter’s Tale, Shakespeare’s late romance: The first time you hear the word bear it is in terms of physical weight: bear the boy away. But then there is the famous stage direction exit pursued by bear where bear becomes a ferocious animal. Then later in the play bear is used in terms of a burden or guilt that Leontes feels. And finally, gloriously, at the end of the play the word bear is used in the productive sense of bearing fruit and goodness. You can track the existential arc of Leontes and the play through when and how the word bear is used. It gives you a snapshot of where the play is in its unfolding. What about when words are absent? What does that say? At Yale, MFA directors are urged to look at word usage throughout a script. Professor David Chambers points out, The word God almost never appears in Romeo and Juliet. It’s spoken a few times by the Nurse and Juliet, but almost never by

Anne Kauffman on New Plays and Language Kauffman has won many directing awards including the prestigious Obie Award and the Alan Schneider Directing Award. She’s primarily known for helping idiosyncratic writers realize theatrical visions on stage. I met her when she was helming Noah Haidle’s Smokefall for the Goodman Theatre. Since she often works on plays where language and word play are the focus, I asked her how she combs through a script looking for clues to realize the world of the play. There’s a lot of writers now who I work with who don’t write in verse, but they break up lines. They write a few words and then hit the hard return so it looks a little bit like poetry on the page. And that’s an example of a textual clue that begins to unlock the world of the play. I have a friend who’s a Broadway producer. And he said to me, The difference between Broadway and downtown is that you guys don’t have resources, so language becomes the thing you have to exploit whereas we have production values. And I absolutely concur. It was a kind of revelation to me when he said that. Many playwrights I work with—for instance writers like Anne Washburn or Jenny Schwartz—create language that is so specific that it actually creates the theatrical world; these writers dictate a world that we know is other than what we experience as real. The language creates the world rather than the world having an impact on the language. Theater is the place where language should create the world, a world that isn’t necessarily realistic, since theater is the realm of metaphor. When somebody refers to a play as theatrical, I think what they mean is that what’s on stage is an expression of reality, not reality itself. And the language of the play is responsible for manufacturing that expression. People are afraid of the idea of artificiality in the theater. I think it’s what theater does best. Artificiality doesn’t mean inauthentic; I think artificiality in the theater is the gateway to authenticity.

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the men in the play. What’s that about? And how many times does the word money, or some synonym, appear? Has money become God? Even the Friar, he’s out there messing with drugs, he’s not talking about God, he’s put God in hallucinogens. So it seems this is a godless world. How do you activate that? What does that mean? Is that why love can’t survive in this world of violence and hatred? Playwrights are careful with word choice, especially when they repeat words or phrases, but they also sculpt characters with language. Hearing the Character ’s Language What language does a character employ? How do characters differ from one another in the words they use? Are they deliberate with language? Freewheeling? Does a character use abstract or concrete language? Abstract language might indicate a person who is hiding her or his intentions. Are their words formal or informal? Do they use long Latinate words or short English ones? Language choice can indicate education, background, history, and intention. Leigh Silverman homes in on language when working on new plays. She scans for patterns and then asks her playwright questions: This character speaks in long-winded paragraphs. Is that because this person is a giant blowhard? Is it because they are nervous that someone’s going to interrupt them? Is it coming from insecurity? And then a writer will say, Oh, maybe it’s this, or I don’t know, let’s see, let’s try a couple different things, or they’ll say, Oh my god I just literally didn’t punctuate it. I think that’s part of the excavation process of directing. When a character switches from one type of language to another can reveal a change in circumstances or intentions. When Blanche first meets with her sister, Stella, she’s full of the flowery language of an English teacher. She’s also probably hiding behind her complicated phrases. I won’t be looked at in this merciless glare! Oh, I’m not going to be hypocritical, I’m going to be honestly critical about it! Only Poe! Only Mr. Edgar Allen Poe!—could do it justice! 12

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When she erupts emotionally about the loss of Belle Reve and the horror of the last ten years, she reverts to simpler, direct, emotional language: I, I, I took the blows in my face and my body! All of those deaths! You didn’t dream, but I saw! Saw! Saw! Yes, accuse me! Sit there and stare at me, thinking I let the place go! I let the place go? Where were you! In bed with your— Polack!13 Throughout A Streetcar Named Desire, Tennessee Williams uses language and word choice to separate characters. Blanche herself comments on the language of the French Quarter. When she hears the upstairs neighbor call his wife a “Rutting Hunk,” she quips, “I must jot that down in my notebook. Ha-ha! I’m compiling a notebook of quaint little words and phrases I’ve picked up here.”14 Blanche, like any artist and scholar, understands that a culture is created through word choice and colloquialisms. Charting Word Play The origin of dialogue can be found in Greek theatre. The first plays were all monologues and choruses, until Aeschylus introduced a second actor on stage. This led to the first dialogue in Western theatre. One type of dialogue is stichomythia: These are passages where two characters go back and forth with single lines of dialogue. In Sophocles’s Antigone, King Creon argues with his son, Haemon, over the fate of his fiancée, Antigone. Haemon says that the rest of the city believes Antigone is a hero, not a traitor. Creon asks why that matters. CREON HAEMON CREON HAEMON CREON HAEMON CREON HAEMON

Am I to rule this land as I wish or according to others? The city does not belong to one man alone. Does not the city belong to he who rules? You would be the perfect ruler for an empty desert. He might be fighting as a woman’s ally! Are you a woman?—because it’s your side I’m on. How? By attacking your father? You are vicious! I see it’s not just matter of law that you’re wrong about.15

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This rapid-fire exchange goes on for thirty more lines before Haemon explodes, “You want to speak but will not listen.” They go around and around about whether Haemon is a traitor because he won’t back his dad’s draconian rules. Creon eventually explodes as well, ordering that Antigone be dragged out and executed on the spot. Scholar Simon Goldhill, in his incisive 2007 book How to Stage Greek Tragedy Today, clearly describes the purpose of stichomythia. It is an economical way of dramatizing the breakdown of communication into conflicting positions. Tragedy is a genre of conflict: not only conflict between people or between ideas, but also conflict about what words mean. Characters repeatedly use the same words in different senses. They argue over what words to use, and they use them as weapons against each other.16 Looking back to the exchange between Creon and Haemon, they use language to stake out their positions. Creon argues that as a ruler, he makes the decisions, but Haemon says a ruler has to listen to the people. Creon says that Haemon must be allied with a woman, but Haemon says that in that case Creon must be a woman, because he’s on his side. Creon says Haemon can’t be on his side because he’s attacking him and is vicious. Analyze the language in modern plays: Are characters arguing over the meaning of words? Whoever wins defines reality and therefore controls it. Plays chart conflict, action, and obstacle; dialogue is the artillery in the battle. The morning after a knockdown physical fight between Stanley and Stella, Blanche berates Stella for returning to her husband. She can’t believe that her sister finds living with a brute like Stanley acceptable, given that they were both raised in genteel surroundings. Blanche says she’ll laugh if Stella claims she and Stanley have an electric connection. Stella counters with some vivid imagery: STELLA

But there are things that happen between a man and a woman in the dark—that sort of make everything else seem—unimportant. (pause) BLANCHE What you are talking about is brutal desire—just— Desire!—the name of that rattle-trap streetcar that bangs through the Quarter, up one old narrow street and down another...

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STELLA Haven’t you ever ridden on that streetcar? BLANCHE It brought me here—Where I’m not wanted and where I’m ashamed to be...17 Stella starts by intimating that sex between her and Stanley makes any other problems fade into the background. Making love is beautiful. Blanche degrades Stella’s beautiful image by calling it desire: pure animal connection between people. Stella won’t accept that desire is dirty and calls Blanche out on that definition, but Blanche redefines it again and names sex as something that can ruin people. One character wants something from another, so he or she lobs an argument; the other character counters it with something new; and so on. This back-and-forth is the key to living in the moment on stage. Deconstructing Speeches and Rhetoric Greek plays are also known for their long rhetorical speeches. After a bout of dialogue back and forth, one character or another will rip off a huge speech. Ancient Greece worked as an oral society, and people often listened to long speeches, complicated stories, and rhetoric. The assembly held up to six thousand citizens, and anyone could give a speech in favor of a point of law or custom. They used only their voices and words to persuade a big crowd. The law courts were also ruled by argument. Two defendants would stand in front of an amateur jury with no judge to deliver a final verdict. They were allowed equal time to make their points or interrogate each other. The double-barreled speech, two people locked in combat, is a feature of many Greek plays. Monologues aren’t used lightly. They take up large amounts of theatrical time, so if a writer has decided to give a character a long speech, it must signify something important. In the scene between Blanche and Stella the morning after the big fight, Blanche tries to convince Stella to leave with her. Blanche steadily denigrates her brother-in-law, telling her sister that living with such a brute is degrading. Stella tries to end the argument by saying she is in love with Stanley. Desperate to connect with her sister, Blanche tears off a long tirade about Stella’s husband: He acts like an animal, has an animal’s habits! Eats like one, moves like one, talks like one! There’s even something—subhuman—something not quite to the stage of humanity yet! Yes,

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something—ape-like about him, like one of those pictures I’ve seen in—anthropological studies! Thousands and thousands of years have passed him right by, and there he is—Stanley Kowalski—survivor of the Stone Age! Bearing the raw meat home from the kill in the jungle! And you—you here—waiting for him! Maybe he’ll strike you or maybe grunt and kiss you! That is, if kisses have been discovered yet! Night falls and the other apes gather! There in the front of the cave, all grunting like him, and swilling and gnawing and hulking! His poker night!—you call it—this party of apes! Somebody growls—some creature snatches at something—the fight is on! God! Maybe we are a long way from being made in God’s image, but Stella—my sister—there has been some progress since then! Such things as art—as poetry and music—such kinds of new light have come into the world since then! In some kinds of people some tenderer feelings have had some little beginning! That we have got to make grow! And cling to, and hold as our flag! In this dark march toward whatever it is we’re approaching...Don’t—don’t hang back with the brutes!18 Not only is it the end of the argument, it’s the end of the first act. As a theatrical touch, unknown to the two sisters, Williams has Stanley eavesdropping just outside. If we think of this speech in the Greek fashion, we can look now at the words Blanche is using rather than the emotions behind them. She’s a skillful orator using many of the tools of rhetoric. • Antithesis: a figure of speech where opposite ideas are compared There’s even something—sub-human—something not quite to the stage of humanity yet! / There has been some progress since then! Such things as art—as poetry and music—such kinds of new light have come into the world since then / Don’t—don’t hang back with the brutes! • Repetition: using the same word or phrase over and over He acts like an animal, has an animal’s habits! Eats like one, moves like one, talks like one! • Assonance: repetition of vowel sounds that are close to rhyming There in the front of the cave, all grunting like him, and swilling and gnawing and hulking! • Consonance: repeating the same consonant sound Don’t—don’t hang back with the brutes!

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When I work with acting students on a speech like this, I’ll ask them to underline the six most important sentences in the speech—the ones that tell the simple story. In this case I’d choose: 1 There’s even something—sub-human—something not quite to the stage of humanity yet! 2 Thousands and thousands of years have passed him right by, and there he is—Stanley Kowalski—survivor of the Stone Age! 3 Maybe he’ll strike you or maybe grunt and kiss you! 4 God! 5 Maybe we are a long way from being made in God’s image, but Stella—my sister—there has been some progress since then! 6 In this dark march toward whatever it is we’re approaching... Don’t—don’t hang back with the brutes! In this manner, actors are able to find the main through-line of the argument, and everything else is supporting the case. Blanche creates a compelling picture of the apes around the fire at night, but the main point is to convince her sister that Stanley is not worthy of her attention. Like any good speaker, she has a strong introduction that is clearly linked to her conclusion. Another way to learn about Blanche’s speech is through studying the punctuation. Using Punctuation as a Key to Meaning Brian Kulick teaches his students that Elizabethans such as Shakespeare didn’t use punctuation for grammar but rather to indicate emphasis and speaking patterns. Different marks imply different rhythms. A comma is a blink, a semicolon is a half-breath, a period is a full stop, a dash is a quickening. Many Shakespeare texts are repunctuated by editors for grammar and sense rather than emphasis in speaking which leads to a propensity of semicolons (half stops) that slows down the language. This is a problem. When you look at actual Quarto and Folio versions they are lightly punctuated. The same is true with the handwritten scene from Thomas Moore that is believed to be in Shakespeare’s hand.

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Kulick suggests that when the original Folio or Quarto texts are studied, you can find the score that Shakespeare intended. Most modern writers also use punctuation and sometimes even spacing on the page to indicate rhythm. Tennessee Williams was famous for expressive use of punctuation. In looking at Blanche’s long speech about Stanley, you may notice that all sentences, twenty-one of them, end in exclamation points. Blanche is burning to tell Stella this information. It’s also full of dashes, places where Blanche interrupts herself with strong ideas. Sentences aren’t too long; she’s blurting many ideas out. Her lovely one-word sentence, God! comes after her long tirade about Stanley being subhuman. Then she transitions into a section about beauty. Finally, she has her one ellipsis in the piece, where she’s searching for the right word or perhaps lost for a second. In this dark march toward whatever it is we’re approaching...Don’t—don’t hang back with the brutes! I would ask actors to strictly follow this punctuation when reading the speech aloud for the first time, to see what they can learn from the rhythm. [See Appendices 6 and 7 for marked-up versions of Blanche’s speech and a speech from The Tempest] Kim Rubinstein tries to infect her MFA directing and acting students at University of California, San Diego with her love of language. She studies punctuation to figure out not just rhythm but character, conflict, and action. She often will speak scripts aloud, paying the most attention to punctuation and how characters use language. She points out that in Tony Kushner’s epic Angels in America, the character Joe speaks with a lot of ellipses. Joe is a closeted gay Mormon. He’s struggling to find his words, or hiding what he thinks, or possibly even hiding from what he feels. There’s a lot of agitation before language comes. Then he meets an openly gay man, Louis, and his language flows. “Truth comes out. He speaks in these beautiful sentences,” Rubinstein says. Just by looking at punctuation, she discovered a major change in behavior and action. Rubinstein developed a system where actors and directors walk the punctuation. She has them walk in a straight line while speaking; when they hit a period they can stop moving, then move again on the next sentence. But if they hit a comma they make a turn. When they hit an exclamation point, they jump up; a colon is a leap forward in thought; a semicolon, a twist. They experience the language viscerally. She uses a speech from Sam Shepard as an example.

Kim Rubinstein on Punctuation Walks Rubinstein has directed plays and taught theatre all over the country. Currently, she’s on faculty at the University of California, San Diego and continues to direct regionally. The associate artistic director for Long Wharf Theatre from 2003 to 2007, she has taught at Northwestern University, University of Chicago, and many other schools. Equally comfortable directing new plays or classics, Rubinstein finds her way into scripts through the language and punctuation. The language, the music of the language—this is why punctuation is so important to me. Because to me each text— particularly really great text—is like a musical score. And I have learned to read them as dramatic text scores in a way. I started this because I was given a play that I didn’t really love—Misalliance by George Bernard Shaw. My first image of doing Misalliance was to dress everybody like George Bernard Shaw because they all basically talk his speech. I was reading the script and I was listening to a piano concerto at the time. And all of a sudden it was like A Beautiful Mind, that movie, when all those numbers come to him. All of a sudden the punctuation just leapt off the page because Shaw, his punctuation is insane. One sentence—there’ll be three ellipses, two exclamation points, dashes. And I was like, What the hell’s going on here? Then I stood up and I started reading it aloud and walking the punctuation. I started to make up these different movements for the punctuation. And all of a sudden the score really—I could hear it. And so now when I do plays, I try to read them aloud because my particular intellect is very kinesthetic. So I understand things physically. I can catch a connection when my body’s moving with it, and then my thoughts start to connect really clearly. A colon is like a leap in a thought. Colons sometimes can be about making a list. But I’m talking to you: Oh and then I have this other idea. It’s like based on the same thought except it’s: Oh I just had this other thought. Or: Oh shit I forgot this thing. It’s like a leap in thought. A semicolon is a twist in thought. I’m talking to you about something, and then; Oh maybe it’s this. So there’s a way in which it actually shifts, but it’s still the same sentence. It’s like a gear shift.

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Sam Shepard is mostly periods and exclamation points and commas. Which spins you around—like if there are a lot of commas in a row, to me there’s a spin of a thought that you haven’t completed it, but you’ve kind of taken a turn. He’ll have a monologue where one person will speak the whole thing and it’s all commas and periods. So to walk it you’re literally in a tornado. And you’re spinning. Rubinstein is trying to break down the barriers between the words on the page and the visceral imagination of the director. She believes plays hold many mysteries that aren’t obvious on a first read. You have to wrestle the play to the ground and make it reveal its secrets.

F inding Your O wn Way through the S cript Surprisingly, many directors, about half, don’t write anything down. They read and reread the play but trust that their best discoveries will stay with them as they move forward. Some were slightly sheepish, saying they probably should write something down. Others were adamant; declaring that committing an idea to paper cements it and messes up their collaboration with designers and actors. I find that writing everything down helps me keep track of what I’ve learned. I keep all of my analyses in different documents and will periodically review them before going into a meeting or a rehearsal. Should you follow the workflow in this chapter? If it works for you. Perhaps you’d like to go the other direction. Start with the minute details of language and try to understand moment by moment why characters make decisions. Then extrapolate from action to who the people are in the play, and then figure out the design. Finally, see what the overall world looks like, and discover the themes of the play. Perhaps it depends on the play you are working on. If you are working on a classic Greek tragedy, it makes sense to chart out the structure of the developing plot. If you’re directing a characterdense script by Chekhov, it will pay dividends to study the given circumstances deeply. For a brand-new play that’s constantly shifting, it’s wise to have a thumbnail sketch of what happens in each scene handy.

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Regardless, like the directors in this chapter, you’ll need to read the script, make some decisions, and hire collaborators. At least that’s the case for a traditional rehearsal process. I also interviewed directors and companies who don’t start with a script— people who create their plays through some sort of improvisation or experimentation. Companies such as Elevator Repair Service in New York City and Rude Mechs in Austin, Texas start with their ensemble first; they work with ideas and themes; they create action before they know their lines. Dialogue is added much later. Interviewing these experimental artists made me wonder: If you don’t start with a script, how do you read a play?

N otes 1 Michael Bloom, Thinking Like a Director, a Practical Handbook (New York, NY: Faber and Faber, 2001), 17. 2 Katie Mitchell, The Director’s Craft: A Handbook for the Theatre (New York, NY: Routledge, 2009), 3. 3 William Shakespeare, The Tempest (London: Bloomsbury Arden Shakespeare, 2011), e-book, Act IV lines 123–125. 4 Virginia Mason Vaughn and Alden T. Vaughn, eds., The Tempest by William Shakespeare (London: Bloomsbury Arden Shakespeare, 2011), e-book introduction. 5 James Thomas, Script Analysis for Actors, Directors, and Designers (Burlington, MA: Focal Press, 2009), 38–60. 6 William Ball, A Sense of Direction (Hollywood, CA: Quite Specific Media Group Ltd., 1984), 24 7 Elinor Fuchs, “EF’s Visit to a Small Planet: Some Questions to Ask a Play,” Theater 34 (2004): 6. 8 David Ball, Backwards and Forwards: A Technical Manual for Reading Plays (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1983), 61. 9 Jon Jory, Tips: Ideas for Directors (Hanover, NH: Smith and Kraus, 2002), 18. 10 D. Ball, 16. 11 Jory, 19. 12 Williams, Tennessee, A Streetcar Named Desire (1947. Reprint, New York: Book-of-the-Month Club, Inc, 1994), 110. 13 Williams, 119–120. 14 Williams, 185–186. 15 Sophocles, Antigone, translated by Ruth Fainlight and Robert J Littman (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009), 166. 16 Simon Goldhill, How to Stage Greek Tragedy Today (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 2007), 96. 17 Williams, 179. 18 Williams, 181.

Ch a p t e r 4

Re ading a P l ay w ithout a Scri p t

Rude Mechs is a theatre group out of Austin, TX led by five co-artistic directors. They’re known as devisers—artists who don’t start with a script but create plays through discussion and experimentation in rehearsal. A recent show I saw contained raucous dance numbers, a heartbreaking torch song on materialism, and moments where actors confessed actual crimes they had committed. I talked process in an old-fashioned online chat room with four of the five co-artistic directors: Thomas Graves, Lana Lesley, Kirk Lynn, and Shawn Sides. The chat is a bit chaotic at first—there are more emoticons than actual conversation for a while, conversation loops start and restart several times. Lynn says it’s just like how they rehearse, and Sides says he’s crazy. Finally, I cut through the chatter: Damon: If in a more traditional process, a director reads a play and figures some things out like, what it’s about and the feel of it and who should be in it and how to work on scenes— Shawn: Then they’re doing it backwards. I think we should all think first about what to make work about and what’s the feel of it and who is in it— Lana: All at the same time— Shawn: And then comes the more concrete parts of the play like text. This is a bit of a shock: that we’re all doing it backward. If they don’t start with a text, what do they start with? Can these artists even answer the question how do you read a play? I interviewed the creative forces behind a half-dozen companies to see what non-traditional theatre makers could offer in the quest to better understand analysis.

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It’s hard to generalize about process when you are talking about devising: the act of creating the play in the rehearsal room. The work of Tectonic Theater Project, Rude Mechs, Elevator Repair Service, Lucky Plush, SITI Company, the TEAM, and 500 Clown differs greatly, but typically these companies start with some ideas and perhaps some source material and hope they come out with a production on the other side. Some of the companies end up creating a very tight script that is followed every night; others continue to change performances day by day. I did find some common questions about how these companies read plays before and during rehearsal.

W hat D o You S tart with ? If a traditional director starts by reading a script, what launches the process for these artists? How do you ignite a play off ideas, ensemble, or improvisations?

W hat A re You A nalyzing ? What are you studying as you continue to create a piece? What do you continue to read as you devise your work?

W hat I s a P lay ? If a play isn’t the same as a script, then what is a play? What is essential to make theatre? The more I talked to these artists, the more I was impressed with their ability to create plays in the rehearsal room with little or no structure to guide them. It just seemed to take insane amounts of courage to trust that through improvisations, conversations, experimentations, and rehearsals they could create enough material worth seeing by an audience. Just as directors of traditional plays stand on the shoulders of giants, so too, these devisers come from a long line of experimentalists. They follow in the footsteps of Meyerhold, Brecht, and other auteurs—They see themselves as authors of theatrical experiences

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rather than interpreters of scripts. I would argue that they owe even more to radical thinker Antonin Artaud and his followers.

L essons from the Past: Experimental T heatre E dition World War I and a Brea k from Rea l i ty After World War I, many people felt confused about making art in the wake of machine guns and mustard gas. European culture, they insisted, led to horrific wars; art based on that same culture was barbaric. They rejected history as a false narrative about the world; safe fiction was even worse. Human existence was confusing and random, so art should follow suit. In the 1920s in Paris, young Antonin Artaud, an actor, poet, and playwright, decried what he called literary theatre—theatre that only bowed down to words and text. In 1938, Artaud’s collection of essays, The Theatre and Its Double, tossed a bomb into the rational theatre-making establishments: In any case, and I hasten to say it at once, a theatre which subordinates the mise-en-scene and production, i.e. everything in itself that is specifically theatrical, to the text, is a theatre of idiots, madmen, inverts, grammarians, grocers, antipoets, and positivists.1 Artaud argued that language can affect audiences viscerally—but only if the words are used as sounds, without meaning. Don’t read plays; instead, read myths and create physical pieces that confront audiences. Don’t perform in theatres—Make work in an open space, and surround the spectators with performers. In 1935, when he staged Les Cenci, his adaptation of Percy Shelley’s graphic tragedy about incest and parricide, Artaud bombarded the audience from all sides. Speakers throughout the theatre assaulted spectators with bells and wind noise, characters whirled in surreal fashion, and brutal murders were shoved in the audience’s faces. It ran only seventeen performances.2 Because he suffered from drug addiction and schizophrenia throughout his life, Artaud failed to complete many of his projects, but he showed the way for many post-war experimental directors.

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J e rz y Gr otowski D ema nds a Holy T h e a tre In Poland after World War II, Jerzy Grotowski wondered how to make art in a country scarred by Nazi brutality. As a young man, he traveled to Russia to learn about the techniques of Stanislavski, Meyerhold, and Vakhtangov. He returned to Poland and, in the late 1950s, founded his company, 13 Row Theatre, which he developed into a theatrical laboratory. He and his actors sought a new acting process, one where plays set up a confrontation between actor and the audience. They came to advocate poor theatre: stripping away lights, sound, sets, props, and even costumes. Grotowski admired Stanislavski’s rigorous experimentation and focus on the actor. Stanislavski asked the key methodological questions: What is theatre? What is action? What makes theatre alive? Grotowski studied Stanislavski’s last experiment, the method of physical action, where actors worked out analysis on their feet instead of at the table. Grotowski acknowledged his debt to Artaud’s vision. In a 1967 magazine article, Grotowski asserted that the theatre was entering the world of Artaud—his ideas provided a road map. And when, one fine day, we discover that the essence of theatre is found neither in the narration of an event, nor in the discussion of a hypothesis with an audience, nor in the representation of life as it appears from outside, nor even in a vision—but that the theatre is an act carried out here and now in the actors’ organisms, in front of other men, when we discover that theatrical reality is instantaneous, not an illustration of life but something linked to life only by analogy, when we realize all this, then we ask ourselves the question: wasn’t Artaud talking about this and nothing else.3 Grotowski’s theatre creations followed Artaud’s game plan: Shows were based on old texts or myths, rehearsed for many months, and performed for a very limited audience. Like Meyerhold, Grotowski saw himself as an auteur, who could rearrange texts and rewrite them to reveal the message buried in the original. He performed Acropolis, Stanisław Wyspiański’s 1904 fable on religion, as a poetic meditation on the Holocaust. He rewrote Marlowe’s Faust, rearranging the scenes and inviting audiences to sit at long tables enjoying Faust’s last supper. During a 1967 interview, when asked about the role of text in his work, he replied,

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It is not the core of the problem. The core is the encounter. The text is an artistic reality existing in the objective sense. Now, if the text is sufficiently old and if it has preserved all its force for today—in other words, if this text contains certain concentrations of human experiences, representations, illusions, myths and truths which are still actual for us today—then, the text becomes a message which we receive from previous generations.4 When Grotowski read a play, he didn’t just analyze the words in the script. He tried to envision the entire performance including chanting, myth, songs, dance, mime, and physical toil. He rejects many of his predecessors’ most basic tenets. He’s not interested in Aristotle’s ideas of imitation or catharsis. He doesn’t care about plot or suspense. He’s not concerned in making theatre that reflects the world around him. Artaud and Grotowski would arouse companies all over the world. In the United States, his ideas inspired the creation of The Living Theatre and The Open Theatre. For these groups, the performer’s relationship to the audience was more important than any spoken text. They both experimented with collective creation, environmental staging, political theatre, and improvisation to create content and enliven performances. In turn, these companies laid the groundwork for Richard Schechner’s Performance Group, its offshoot The Wooster Group, Mabou Mines, and many others. These artists challenged the idea of what it means to work on a play because they didn’t start with a set script. Many rejected narrative and drama. So if story, plot, and characters aren’t unifying forces, what is? For thousands of years, theatre was synonymous with drama. So what do plays look like without it? Are these plays? What are directors reading in preparation? I sat down with some of America’s leading devisers to find out.

W hat D o You S tart with ? Moisés Kaufman created the Tectonic Theater Project in 1991 because he wasn’t happy working in the traditional theatre. The model by which we work in the American theatre is that a playwright spends twenty years in a room, and we all have an image of what that room is like, right? Cobwebs and empty

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vodka bottles. And she comes out of that room with a play after twenty years. She gives it to a director, and then, three weeks of rehearsal and one week of tech later, you have a production. To me, when you articulate the model in those terms, it is clear that the model has severe limitations. The problems are multiple. If a writer creates everything out of dialogue and text—what happens to the “theatrical”? Where are the theatrical opportunities that involve music or lights or costumes or sets? Sometimes writers can image these moments in their dusty room—but why not start the process by creating “theatrical” moments? Kaufman and Tectonic Theater created moment work as a process of creating plays starting by using all elements of theatre right away— thus creating theatrical narratives. In moment work, actors can use any and all theatrical elements: emotion, movement, shape, sound, light, costume. Kauffman describes a possible moment that would be created in a workshop. A woman in a beautiful wedding dress stands in the middle of the room. A man in a tuxedo walks up to her and throws a glass of tomato juice all over her dress. This moment is created first, it exists in space. It’s both dramatic and theatrical. Now it’s up to the writer to react to the moment and write to it, rather than the other way around. Kauffman suggest the line could be “By the way, I think your mother is on the phone for you.”5 In this way, Kaufman is proposing an exploration of the narrative potential of all the elements of the stage. Leigh Fondakowski joined Tectonic in 1995. She describes how moments are put together and pulled apart and eventually make a play. As with any devising work, most of the work created in the rehearsal room is thrown out but, from the beginning, collaborators create with a theatrical sense of time and space. We start with text and lights and sound and video. So we have all the designers in the room from the beginning. And we begin to actually explore theatrical language in form alongside the text. So we don’t decide what the text is going to be, or how it’s going to live on stage until we do that exploration. So we’re actually simultaneously discovering the theatrical event and the play. The way two people interact physically, or the shape of someone’s dress, or the sound that actors make—these become necessary elements in telling the story. Without them, the story wouldn’t exist.

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Fondakowski argues that most written plays deny the form of theatre entirely because they aren’t imagined with all the theatrical tools in mind—they don’t take advantage of lights, sound, movement, silences—or the audience’s imagination. She believes strongly that every theatre piece must ask the question: why is this different from a summer movie, or a sitcom, or a novel? What makes it work in the theatre? If you were to search your mind for the moments that you’ve been moved in the theatre, when you’ve walked out of the theatre and you’ll never forget that moment for your whole life. I can think of five off the top of my head right now. It’s rare that they have anything to do with text. The moments that stick with us are little moments of the turn of an actor’s head, or the pitch of someone’s voice, or how the light illuminated a couple at a certain time. People who devise plays believe these moments can be found only in the rehearsal room. Why not start with those moments, rather than a set script? As a director who sometimes writes plays, I’ve learned the hard way that what I dream up doesn’t always work on stage. I adapted Thieves Like Us, a Depression-era novel by Edward Anderson about bank robbers, into a play for the House Theatre of Chicago. I struggled with a section in which the main couple tries to hide from the law. Even though I’d heard the play aloud many times and staged a workshop, I could not figure out why the section lacked tension. During previews, I cut five extraneous characters and pages of dialogue. I didn’t understand what worked until I saw it in front of an audience. I couldn’t imagine it on the page. Perhaps I would have had better luck if I’d started with an acting ensemble—rather than in my dusty spider-filled room.

S t art with the Ensemble John Collins, the artistic director of Elevator Repair Service (ERS), has been putting his ensemble of artists first for almost twenty-five years. The New York–based experimental troupe creates theatre pieces based on a wide range of subject matter and source material, combining slapstick comedy, intense design, and their quirky style of choreography. Their productions include staging every word of The Great Gatsby, building a play based on Supreme Court oral

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Rachel Chavkin of the TEAM on Giving Her Ensemble Prompts to Create Material The TEAM is a Brooklyn-based ensemble dedicated to creating new work about the experience of living in America today. The company devises plays based on rigorous research of source texts, combined with original staging and writing. I spoke to the founding artistic director, Rachel Chavkin, who says that part of her job is to propose germs of ideas to the company and then to continually create prompts to generate original material. I was curious about what a prompt or assignment would sound like. At the time, Chavkin was working on a piece investigating outrage: How do we do outrage in a theatrical environment, i.e. that is repeatable? How do we get at the concept of talking about outrage with a generation that may not feel outrage? And we’re frankly not even sure outrage is the correct word. And so I’ve just come up with a list of prompts that help us try to figure this shit out. So, let’s assume we have the right to be outraged; let’s assume it’s our duty. Outrage is a muscle and, for those of you who have been taught not to be angry, it may actually hurt at first. • So the first assignment is to design a program for building outrage in yourself or someone else. • Name all of the ways you’ve been taught to not be angry. • Name all the people you’ve been taught to forgive. This is the role of character in this scene. Yes, I’m asking you to use yourself and your own voice and thoughts to maybe fake something and ask you to feel something you maybe don’t. Assume that we can build this in ourselves and that it’s a good thing. • When have you been most outraged in your life? Tell a personal story. • Teach outrage. Teach how it lives in your body physically. Teach what it makes you, say, swear or what it does to your voice on a physical level.

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• Teach me something I should be outraged about. Take the time and prep to rant about something. • Make a fuck list. Like fuck blank, fuck blank... Now we’ve actually gone through a few processes with these prompts and realized how problematic the word outrage is, and that really protest is what we’re talking about. The clarification of that one word has ended up bringing a whole new focus to the project.

arguments, and performing a version of The Bacchae featuring a stainless steel thermos with glue-on eyes as a major character. They follow the model of many theatre companies that devise work: they hold several four- to six-week workshops over a twoyear period. They will occasionally show the work to get feedback and then go back into rehearsal, using what they learned to revise the piece. They show the project again and then head back to work. Decisions about staging or script or design are made on their feet. It’s playwriting as a collaborative project. Collins argues that when plays are rehearsed in a more traditional manner, the script is first in line. For ERS, the artists always come first, even if the project involves a text that is already written. With Gatz, the company didn’t start out to stage every word from The Great Gatsby. Collins assumed they would adapt the book for the stage— based on ensemble suggestions. The impetus for their projects always comes from the artists who will make the thing audiences will see. It’s just a question of: Who is doing this? So if creating a piece of theatre is an action that happens, then the doer of that action is primary in a way, because you can’t do something and then decide who did it. If ERS interpreted published plays, they would execute someone else’s vision—recreate something from the past. ERS creates plays in the here-and-now to perform in the here-and-now. A play is in a sense a plan, and Collins rejects plans. He insists his best moments come from accidents—unplanned moments in rehearsal that uncover hidden meaning in the material.

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Rude Mechs also believes actors are creators; their programs typically have the byline created by Rude Mechs. Their process starts with the five artistic directors finding consensus around an idea through discussion. Workshops and rehearsals involve all the company members offering suggestions. As they approach performances, actors may focus more on embodying their roles, and a writer will focus on the text and the director on staging, but still everyone is an equal collaborator. Lana Lesley is primarily a performer within the company, but she feels the term actor is misunderstood: The perception is often that it’s just Say what I wrote and move where I say and that is not the case. We give each other permission to lead each other and we give each other room to boss each other around in our leadership roles and so we all have moments of writing and directing and performing and designing. Ensemble member Kirk Lynn is credited with writing their most recent show, Stop Hitting Yourself—but he didn’t write all the text himself. Shawn Sides is listed as director in the program—but the actors had as much to do with staging as anyone else. The ensemble comes first. You could say these companies are reading their ensembles before they create a piece of theatre. For some devisers, a strong idea is more important than the ensemble. It’s the key driver.

S tar t with an I dea Kristin Marting is an Obie Award–winning director and the founding artistic director of HERE Arts Center in New York City. The idea for Marting’s 2015 multimedia piece Trade Practices came about when she and her longtime set designer, David Morris, were talking about the economic crisis of 2008. They didn’t understand why the economy crashed around them, and they decided to make a piece to investigate the problems of the marketplace. As they created their play, they wanted to make sure audiences truly grappled with economic questions. Marting and Morris conducted a preliminary workshop with actors and writers where they did everything from singing songs from Mary Poppins to conducting economic exercises. They decided

Rude Mechs on Our Town When I saw Stop Hitting Yourself at Lincoln Center, I was charmed by Rude Mechs’s sensibility. They told a modern fairy tale with style and heart, including big dance numbers, torch songs from the soul, and real-time confessionals. I had drinks with a few of the Mechs after the show, and they invited me down to Austin to have some beer, eat queso, and make art. I was able to track down four of the five co-artistic directors—Thomas Graves, Lana Lesley, Kirk Lynn, and Shawn Sides—for an interview, but it was hard to get everyone in one place, so we met via an old-time chat room program. I’ve edited out the many emoticons that started our conversation. I kept trying to home in on what was fixed and what was movable in their process. DK: So if I’m directing Our Town, and I keep coming back to Our Town as the “decider,” or Thornton Wilder as the decider. In your case...what is the decider? LL: Define decider. KL: I think you are lying to yourself... Oh, I know that Our Town needs X, but really you are just using your gut. DK: I’m happy to be told I’m lying to myself. KL: Or rationalizing—how would you know? DK: Well, yes but certain characters are going to say certain things in the same order, and Emily will always die. KL: Maybe not. SS: Always? KL: Yeah yeah, what if in this production she lives! My mom would love it! DK: I can’t change the text. LL: Right. The play is written. It’s already been created. Rude Mechs isn’t a part of that play. DK: So is there something that is at the heart of Stop Hitting Yourself that doesn’t change? Or is it all open to change? LL: It is all open to change—even the premise. KL: It is open to change. SS: It all gets thrown out four times—more—we throw out well over half of what we make. KL: There is a consensus and a goal and a focus on work that is shared and doesn’t change in your sense of the word change. TG: The commitment is to one another—not to a single piece of the work. KL: But the text and the action and the music and the lights: it all can change.

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to center their evening around a fictional currency company and create a living market place. Audiences would receive money at the beginning of the evening to spend on different plays within the market: the more people attended a particular play, the more its value rose, and the more it would cost to attend. Marting wanted to tap into the DIY vibe of this current generation of audiences. You choose what you want your experience to be and you need to feel satisfied that you made the right choice, that you followed the correct trajectory to experience what you wanted to experience. And so you have responsibility for your own experience. And I think that’s the participatory culture that’s happening right now, it’s not about we’re telling them what to think before showing them; it’s about their uncovering themselves. The creation of the piece took years of effort because although the original impulse stayed the same, the method of execution changed repeatedly. When they hired a group of playwrights, the storylines changed. After a new play workshop, some actors fit the story, others had to leave. After staging part of the play for an audience, they realized they needed to alter how the exchange worked. Each step of the way they harnessed their original impulse—how can we make a play where people truly experience the complexities of the marketplace? How can audiences grapple with the economy the same way we did in 2008? Rude Mechs start with a strong idea but then change focus again and again. Stop Hitting Yourself, created by Rude Mechs in 2014, is a fable for adults about a wild man who leaves his forest dwelling and tries to advance his environmental causes by mixing with rich and powerful socialites. It draws from 1930s movie melodramas, Busby Berkeley choreography, and self-help books and features a huge queso cheese fountain. When I saw it, I was entertained by the huge tapdance numbers, a torch song that made me question my life choices, and a twisted Pygmalion story at its center. How did they develop this show about altruism? Where did they start? Back in the chat room with the Mechs, I keep asking questions about original concepts and how ideas develop. Notions come from everywhere about how Stop Hitting Yourself got made. At first, members thought about creating a series based on Boccaccio’s medieval classic, The Decameron. They started working on a play

Stop Hitting Yourself Created by Rude Mechs for LCT3/Lincoln Center Theater Photo Credit: Erin Baiano

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about revolution, but it ended up being too unwieldy. It was election season, and some politicians were quoting libertarian firebrand Ayn Rand, so her ideas came into the room. They started talking about the notion of creating a permanent public good. At the same time, they were working on a version of Shakespeare’s Timon of Athens, which included great banquet scenes. Kirk: Did banquet lead to Timon or vice versa? Thomas: We all did a generative writing exercise where we made a list of all the things that would be at the best party ever and every single person wrote QUESO FOUNTAIN Damon: AH HA! Shawn: I think Timon came first. Money came before Timon. So Decameron—Money—Timon—Banquet—Charity Ball/ Queen Lana: (I did not write Queso fountain) Shawn: But truthfully I have no idea how the ideas evolve. It is too hard to keep up. In 2010, I became obsessed with adapting a Nancy Drew novel for DePaul University’s youth theatre series: I’d always been a fan of the feisty redheaded detective and thought young audiences would connect with her pluck. I started rereading the novels but immediately balked—these books involved car chases, fights, and myriad characters—how would it work on the stage? Finally, I had a flash: we could perform the play as a sort of live radio drama. Characters would use old-time radio Foley apparatuses to make sounds, and actors would play more than one character and speak directly to the audience. We refined the concept over workshops, staged readings, and test runs for children. The form of the play changed, I added and dropped text constantly, but the main idea stayed the same. The form of the play stayed as imaginative as the young detective herself. I wasn’t just reading Nancy Drew novels as the source material; I was reading my experience of them as a child. That was the impetus for the piece. People who devise plays have to start with a strong idea, or an event, or a form. Something to launch a thousand ships; sometimes it’s just a burning question.

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S t art with a Quest i on Anne Bogart is one of the creators of The Viewpoints technique for teaching theatrical movement and creating actor-improvised content. She cofounded the SITI Company in 1992 to further develop The Viewpoints and make plays. SITI has worked on new plays by Charles Mee but has also devised pieces based on the life and work of Anton Chekhov, quantum physics, and technology. Many of the company’s devised pieces start with just pages and pages of inquiry on a subject. Then company members gather and try to create a theatrical piece based on the research. But how? Bogart’s a child of the navy and a self-proclaimed lover of process. We talked about devising and her seminal project about communication, The Medium. You need an anchor, you need a structure, and you need a question. I actually start with a question. All great plays, it doesn’t matter if they’re Greek plays, or whatever you’re trying to devise by, it starts with a question. And the question has to be qualitative. So my question for The Medium was who are we becoming vis-à-vis the advances in technology? How is it affecting our relationships? How is it affecting the way we live and die? She then assembled hundreds of pages of material from many sources around this question. She kept coming back to the work of Marshall McLuhan, who pioneered writing about technology and television and how it shapes our lives. She realized that McLuhan’s story should anchor the show. The title of the piece, The Medium, comes from McLuhan’s famous phrase The medium is the message. Finally, she needed a structure. Reading and talking with collaborators led her to put two pieces of research together. McLuhan was a horrible writer but a great speaker; toward the end of his life, he suffered a stroke, destroying his ability to talk. McLuhan loved television and obsessed over remotes. So in a flash, Bogart decided the play would happen at the moment of his stroke, and he would have a remote control, which would allow him to blaze through different kinds of television programs, all composed of his writings or writings on technology. When I saw The Medium in 1992, it predated the explosion of the Internet but seemed to be constructed of hyperlinks—kinetic images and ideas colliding to a steady beat. Until I studied with

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Bogart at Columbia University, I just assumed the company created through some sort of magical intuition. I didn’t know they had a process in place. ERS artistic director Collins says his ensemble walks into each workshop without any plan. The company creates a new way of working for each play: exhausting, but fruitful. The work is always specific. In the early 2000s, Collins drew inspiration from visual artist James Tyrell, who works almost completely with light—his works often take place in dark rooms where you can barely see anything. The experience of trying to make out what is in the room with you is the point of the artwork. Collins suggested ERS create a play in the dark. They started workshops without much else to go on. When they went into rehearsal one actor was reading a book by William James about religious testimonials. Ensemble members read the testimonials aloud in a dark room. They began to feel like ghost stories, which led to research into horror movies. The company developed a lot of material that created psychic tension: physical movements, sounds, and lighting cues. As a last stroke, they remembered that James’s brother Henry wrote a famous ghost story, The Turn of the Screw. They inserted that story line into the structure they had already created, and Room Tone was born. As a starting point, Collins had only a question: Can we make a theatre piece that exists mostly in the dark? But what was he evaluating along the way? What was he reading as his source material?

W hat A re You A nalyzing ? In 1998, a young gay man named Matthew Shepard was murdered in Laramie, Wyoming. The violent nature of the crime outraged the gay community. Moisés Kaufman asked his company: can theatre do anything at this moment? Can theatre have a voice in this time of crisis? A small group from Tectonic Theater Project boldly flew out to Laramie to interview people about Matthew Shepard. They brought back transcripts and wondered how to make a play out of the raw material. Later they returned to Laramie and attended the trial of one of the perpetrators and realized that they needed to create a play out of the whole experience. Leigh Fondakowski became the lead writer on what emerged as The Laramie Project:

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We all had this moment of, Oh, we have the opportunity to track this town through this whole event, not just the shock of Matthew’s death but the whole event. And so that’s when we decided that the play was going to be the story of Laramie. It wasn’t going to be the story of Matthew; it was going to be the story of Laramie. The project evolved from a desire to tell the untold story in a theatrical way. As they experimented in rehearsal with the transcripts, they discovered that the process of the interviews should be part of the play. The actors played the people they interviewed, but they also played themselves. They would directly address the audience at times, adding their own perspective. The way they discovered that the material helped to create the form of the play. Moisés Kaufman knows his best work has come from the research process. His play 33 Variations came from the question: why did Beethoven, at the end of his life, when he was at the height of his powers, choose to work on an insignificant little waltz? Kaufman flew to Bonn to research Beethoven’s life and work and, as he investigated, saw that he could incorporate his own methods of research into the play. He worked with ensemble members to create moments around his research, and characters emerged. One of Kaufman’s first hits was Gross Indecency: The Three Trials of Oscar Wilde. Obsessed with making Wilde’s trial a theatrical event, he brought casebooks into rehearsal and enlisted company members to improvise moments around their research. For Kaufman, the method of creation influences the final script: If you go into the town of Laramie and talk to people, that’s one kind of play. If you bring trial transcripts into rehearsal and attempt to reconstruct a trial, that’s another kind of play. If you go to Bonn, Germany to look at original manuscripts of Beethoven, a different kind of play emerges. I think that in my work, I always try to put the process of construction into the fabric of the play. So in Gross Indecency you saw a company of actors dealing with books as they figure out a story. In The Laramie Project you saw a company of actors go into Laramie as they tried to figure out the story. In 33 Variations you see the character of the professor go into Bonn to try to figure out what happened.

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Several years ago, I started writing The Revel, an adaptation of Euripides’s bloody Greek tragedy, The Bacchae, set in 1930s Appalachia. The original play follows the god Dionysus punishing a town for not worshipping him fully. I searched for an American equivalent to the Bacchae, a group of female worshippers who ecstatically pray to Dionysus. I realized that I feel most religious when listening to old-time gospel music—so I put that question at the center of my play: will audiences feel religious ecstasy during a performance? The process of figuring that out became the heart of the show. I worked with a composer, and we wrote lyrics together. As we wrote these old-time infused gospel hymns, we created the religion for the production. We embedded the process of hymn writing into the construction of the play. The music became the motor of the play, driving the story forward. The search for a motor, or an engine, or a prime driver helps to organize ongoing analysis for some theatre companies.

Analy z e the Mot or 500 Clown is a theatre company based in Chicago. Started in the early 1990s by Adrian Danzig, Paul Kalina, and David Engel, the group explores physical risk. 500 Clown soon brought on Molly Brennan and Leslie Buxbaum and spent years building dangerous situations into their shows—lots of bodily contact, people falling from extreme heights, crazy props like exploding chastity belts. These moments of true risk were undeniable, and they pulled audiences and performers into the same present moment. Their pieces required years of development, including some unfocused and chaotic public showings. I sat down with two of the creative forces, Adrian Danzig and Leslie Buxbaum Danzig to discuss their recollections of how pieces were born. As an example, the company performed 500 Clown Frankenstein many times before figuring out what drove the piece. Danzig and Buxbaum recall that in the early version, they were doing a sort of séance, asking the question, Who is Frankenstein? They would go into performances not knowing much, improvising a lot. LBD:

But meanwhile, people would remember back to those shows and be like, Oh they were a lot of fun. They were crazy fun. You’re dealing with really skilled performers,

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AD: LBD: AD:

there’s an entertainment value that delivers. But you know it’s not a show yet. You go onstage and you know you have to save the show. Because there is no show. There’s no show and everybody knows it. So that’s the energy you’re going onstage with. It’s really productive.

So they might create sequences that audiences loved, without an internal logic. A clown challenges another to a fight with a chair, and the scene turns into a slapstick brawl. Funny—but what does it have to do with Frankenstein? After each showing, they would debrief—what worked? What didn’t? What was this piece they were trying to create? What would link all the improvisations together? Eventually they figured out that the motor of the piece was the question, How do you make a monster? Buxbaum remembers the clarifying moment: It was like, Oh well of course, it’s this now. Everything starts to get elegant; all the choices serve the development of that question. Because then you can make sure that every moment of the show is in some way speaking to that or setting that up. Until you land on that, it’s chaos: some things work, some things don’t work, you never quite know, rhythm is off, things seem like red herrings because they are. For Buxbaum, this question became the driving purpose of the piece: turning one performer, Paul Kalina, into a monster. Something that would actually scare an audience. The other clowns would badger him, frustrating him, and he would start to truly lose his temper. At that moment, the other clowns skillfully incited the audience into attacking Kalina—encouraging them to throw paper at him or yell at him, practically inciting a riot. At one performance, an audience member pushed Kalina down the stairs. 500 Clown had succeeded in making a monster: both out of Kalina and the audience. Rachel Chavkin is the artistic director of the TEAM, a Brooklynbased ensemble dedicated to creating new work about the experience of living in America today. Recent hits include RoosevElvis, a piece about gender and appetite, in which two female performers channel the spirits of Teddy Roosevelt and Elvis Presley.

500 Clown Frankenstein Created by 500 Clown, L-R: Adrian Danzig, Paul Kalina, Molly Brennan Photo Credit: Michael Brosilow

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Chavkin describes a process similar to that of 500 Clown in which the TEAM might work with material for years without knowing how to make theatrical sense of it. In the mid-2000s, the company was obsessed with Reconstruction and had been working for two years with Gone with the Wind, Margaret Mitchell’s Civil War novel turned mega-hit movie. I asked what it meant for the TEAM to “work with” Gone with the Wind: It means that we were staging scenes from the novel. But we also created this whole narrative around present-day Hollywood trying to make a politically acceptable remake of Gone with the Wind. Characters argued as to whether that meant acknowledging the full historical context in which the novel was written or trying to remove it entirely. A producer character even suggested casting P. Diddy as Rhett Butler. Ultimately the whole Hollywood project crumbled because the book is so complicated. Layers of politics and point of view that is not really acknowledged as such. There are scenes in the book that I think are intended to be quite loving but instead read as potentially even more racist, because the African American characters are described as children or animals. During the process, the company stumbled upon Naomi Klein’s incendiary book, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. Klein makes the argument that global corporations are guilty of disaster capitalism—the rapid-fire corporate reengineering of societies still reeling from shock such as wars or hurricanes. Chavkin found an echo between Klein’s arguments and those of Rhett Butler. Chavkin details a moment between Butler and Scarlett O’Hara: Scarlett asks, Have you so much money, Captain Butler? And he basically says, Yes, there’s two times to make money in society. One is the upbuilding of society and one is in the destruction. Slow money on the upbuild and fast money on the destruction. And thinking about Rhett and Scarlett as these two totally quintessential fucking gnarly American heroes who are just out to survive the crumbling of their way of life, that really rung. When the company read The Shock Doctrine, they realized the work should focus on New Orleans post-Hurricane Katrina, which is not where they began. They started looking at Reconstruction more broadly. They had created a character that was part of a major family

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of architects but, for a long time, they didn’t know what her role was. The book helped them to figure out that she was exploiting Hurricane Katrina. They smashed together material from Gone with the Wind, moved their architect to New Orleans, and started to really make a piece about American greed—Architecting. Aristotle and Stanislavski would argue that the motor for great plays is action and conflict. John Collins questions that assumption. He admits that when people come to the theatre, they are looking for a beginning, middle, and end. That theatre is, no matter what, linear because it starts at a certain time, something happens, and then it’s over. But Collins argues that the progression from beginning to middle to end doesn’t have to involve action, conflict, or a psychological crisis. He points to ERS’s recent piece, Arguendo, based on Supreme Court oral arguments: Sometimes it’s musical. Sometimes it’s a rhythmic progression. The audience has to feel like they’re going somewhere, and something’s gonna happen, and then it’s gonna end. And so, for example, with Arguendo, there’s not a narrative in quite the same way built into the argument itself, there’s an overall narrative to the case, the argument, and then the decision. But in a piece like this, what I become more concerned with is just the kind of musical or physical process that the audience goes through. What’s the energy level of the thing? Every show has its own arc, and arc is a little more general than narrative. Typically, ERS doesn’t start with plays, with pieces that are written for the stage. Because ERS members have always wondered what is theatrical? What works on stage and what doesn’t? They’ve been asking the basic question: What is a play?

W hat I s a P lay ? Moisés Kaufman and Leigh Fondakowski believe that the process of creating plays is broken. They blame play readings. Theatre companies will often hold a reading to decide whether they want to do a play. They might just read it around the table or invite an audience to see actors reading the script at music stands. To succeed, playwrights and directors have to work toward an event that is basically literary. It’s about

Architecting Coproduced by the TEAM and the National Theatre of Scotland Photo Credit: Yi Zhao

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the words. If the stage directions are read at all, they are hard to imagine. The only thing the audience experiences is the dialogue. Kaufman believes this is a problem: When you have a generation of writers who are being trained to write for table readings, then what they must rely on in order to make those play readings work are mostly conflict and character. Of course we understand they are very important to any kind of drama, but what about “Theatricality”? What about training writers to write for the full theatricality of the stage? Fondakowski had a troubling experience recently when she started developing SPILL, a play based on the BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill. She based the script on interviews with survivors, and the first act detailed the complications that led to the disaster. At the end of Act One, the rig blows up—and at every reading, the audiences were riveted. In the complicated sequence, characters jumped in and out of narration and went back and forth in time, but audiences followed them effortlessly to the thrilling conclusion of the act. After years of readings Fondakowski finally got into rehearsal and was floored: It became obvious right away when we were staging that it wasn’t going to work. We’d be standing there and say, Oh my god, this isn’t working. The shock of it, even after all these years. The sequence always worked in readings. People were on the edge of their seats for that sequence. When watching actors perform the sequence on stage, audiences were quickly confused, and the piece lost momentum. Fondakowski was fooled by her own words, her own dialogue. She believes she could have avoided this mistake if she’d started the process with actors on their feet performing rather than at a table reading. If she’d started with design elements, perhaps she would have noticed her misstep earlier. John Collins makes the case that every design element is in fact present in the rehearsal room from the beginning, whether you think it is or do not. You are dealing with architecture. There are lights in the room. People are wearing clothing. These all affect his view of what he’s seeing, so why not acknowledge it? Many times, he’ll start working on a show with actors and become attached to the chairs in the room or the way the walls are laid out. He gives these dimensions to his set designer, to work within those limitations.

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Collins believes that sound designers especially need to attend rehearsals from the beginning. Sound is in fact present from day one—if there is no sound, as a director Collins becomes attuned to just the actors talking and can’t bring in music later. I see sound designers go through this all the time. They come in late, they talk to the director ahead of time, director spends weeks in rehearsal getting used to hearing just the actors and not much else, sound designer shows up for tech, they go, Yeah yeah, I like all those ideas, let’s try them, and then they say, Turn it down, turn it down. You listen to the sound design, you hear very low music, you hear little effects, and you hear sound that goes on in between the scenes. And that’s because of course, the director’s sound design was done before the sound designer got there. In more traditional theatre work, much of the theatrical creation is imagined before it is all put together. A director and team of designers talk about the world of the play and envision how it will work when all the design elements come together. The director has a sense of the characters, holds auditions, and imagines how actors will work as an ensemble. Traditional play analysis entails visualizing how a play will work in time and space. Devisers analyze their plays on their feet in the rehearsal room. In a sense they privilege experience over imagination.

A Play is Made w it h People For Adrian Danzig, the motivation to create 500 Clown came from acting in too many shows where performances consisted of recreating something rather than creating something. He was sick of theatre that to him was dead rather than live. People are doing something that they did in rehearsal because they did it in rehearsal, as opposed to doing something which is a transaction with the audience. We thought: Let’s make an actors theatre, let’s actually do live theatre. What you have in live theatre is this ability for the actor to be the interpreter of the moment and to negotiate the moment with the audience. Danzig holds that the transaction between audience and performers is the core of why he makes theatre. That presence, the

LUCKY PLUSH on Finding the Form and the Content for The Queue I’ve known Leslie Buxbaum Danzig for decades as a clown, a director, and a producer. She also throws a mean brunch, which is where I met Julia Rhoads, the founder and artistic director of Lucky Plush, a dance-theatre company based in Chicago. I’ve seen two pieces by Buxbaum and Rhoads, both marvels of seamless integration of heartfelt storytelling, highly choreographed dance, intricate design, and actor presence. The Queue was a hilarious caper piece set in an airport. At its center was a stylized movement section featuring people waiting for their bags to come through security. I asked how they ended up setting the piece in an airport. JR:

The thing about airports is that they have a kind of movement motor. Early on we talked about how every moment in the show would be choreographed, even if the audience didn’t realize that it was. Whether you’re looking at the complex patterns of people moving through an airport in a stylized Busby Berkeley sort of way, or experiencing the heightened tension of removing shoes, belts, and laptops at the conveyor belt in security as a kind of slapstick routine, there’s a distinct movement motor throughout. LBD: I think one of the interesting things in a devising process is a lot of it relies on a very intuitive, spontaneous writing process. And I think what is challenging, in a great/hard/ everything way: there’s no right show you’re going to make. For Julia the place she got to intuitively, where she’d get hugely in the zone, was around questions of form and motor. JR: Yes, when we got into the details of choreography on the security section of the piece, it was painful. LBD: It’s a very complicated counting structure. JR: It was painful for the performers because they had to execute complex gestures and movements while maintaining a casual tone of dialogue, but I knew we had to push through to create this very rich and layered movement motor. Ultimately it became one of the sections in the show that we respond to the most.

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LBD: It’s a process of unlocking the vocabulary of the whole piece. There’s an interesting arc in the process of being lost and getting found. The ensemble is so dutifully, rigorously, tirelessly doing the work of figuring out what’s in the director’s head by trying what she’s proposing; then there’s a moment where they start leading, where suddenly the power shifts and where it clicks for the performers. These ah ha! moments where they’re like, Oh my god, I get what we’re in now. It’s like the moment when the play lands on the table and everybody has access to it.

acknowledgment that everyone is in the same room, breathing the same air, is something only theatre can do as an art form. Danzig argues that if you are going to make truly live theatre, then build the performances around the specific idiosyncrasies of the actual people in the show. 500 Clown director Leslie Buxbaum Danzig agrees that the specific personalities of the ensemble drive devised work, but she also finds it daunting: I imagine when playwrights are sitting alone writing a play they’re facing their demons, they’re going into dark places. They’re digging deep and they’re reckoning with themselves and it’s a vulnerable, raw process. In the 500 Clown devising process, that raw process of using the dark stuff is what’s actually happening in the room. And everybody somehow knows, You go there and then the material gets generated from the real circumstances of that. It’s an emotionally challenging room. There’s a thrilling section in 500 Clown Frankenstein, in which Molly Brennan’s clown starts to play many different characters such as a storyteller or a pirate. It’s a brilliant moment of clowning but, in Buxbaum’s recollection, it came out of Brennan’s realizing that if Danzig played the doctor and the other clown Kalina embodied the monster, she was going to be left out. In Buxbaum’s memory of the moment, Brennan the performer was tapping into her anxiety about not being assigned a clear role, which led to delicious moments where

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her clown was anxious and disrupted the performance in order to solve the problem. The more she disrupted the show, the angrier Kalina actually got, transforming him into Frankenstein’s monster. The material of the piece is in fact the three performers. Their eccentric take on the world. Their motors. Their desires. They are what is being read and analyzed in the making of the production. The audiences see fictionalized versions of their personalities writ large.

I s Any thing in Front of a n Audienc e a P l a y ? Many artists who devise are interested in failure. According to Adrian Danzig, 500 Clown was originally called Theatre F because the artists involved wanted to explore failure and risk. They didn’t want to make plays that worked; they created expectation for one experience but delivered something else. Danzig says they would do a show called 500 Clown Macbeth and give some nod to the play, but then the clowns would take the play apart. It would actively fail in front of the audience. At some point they’re like, This is not Macbeth and then ten minutes later they’re like, Oh my god this is more Macbeth than I’ve ever seen. And so it’s that, that’s what became the way we made work in general. We allowed the clowns to derail the thing to the place where people are like, This is a little too near chaos for me and not at all what was promised. Of course, Danzig would say, if you thought you were actually going to see 500 clowns producing Macbeth, well that’s on you. That obviously wasn’t going to happen. But by creating failures on stage, again it’s a chance to make the experience more live for spectators. Audiences are invited to grapple with their own dashed expectations and instead come to terms with what they are actually watching. ERS obsessed over failure from the outset as well. Members staged things that audiences might think were accidents—the show actually falling apart. They were interested in mistakes as fertile ground for discovery. Collins recalls an early experiment: Like with Cab Legs, for example, we wanted to see if we could do something that, in some ways, just wasn’t performance at all.

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Just people sitting on stage barely talking to each other. What would that produce, to try to push past some line—that this is theatre and this is not? It would still end up being theatre, and that was part of the result of the experiment. Collins believes that since he’s eventually going to perform in front of an audience, then whatever he creates is a form of theatre. He and others are challenging the very idea of a play. Must a play have a clear narrative? Not necessarily. Does it need text? Nope. Should it have a recognizable structure? Maybe not. Perhaps all these devisers are following in the footsteps of the great experimentalist of the twentieth century, Peter Brook. He opened his 1967 rallying cry of a book The Empty Space with a simple challenge to all theatre makers: I can take any empty space and call it a bare stage. A man walks across this empty space whilst someone else is watching him, and this is all that is needed for an act of theatre to be engaged. 6 If all we need is one person watching someone else walk across a stage: how do we read that?

H ow to R ead a P lay We are back to the question asked by the Greeks: What makes a great play, or what makes a play at all? By looking at these artists who devise plays, we see historical figures in a new light. Aristotle wouldn’t put the text of a play first. He would say that if you tell someone the plot of a great tragedy, that person would weep. If you imagine people going through those events on stage, you will be affected. He insisted that theatre had to be done by actors, not through narration—the first person to believe in the presence of the actor. Stanislavski’s revolution was that to read a play was to examine what the characters were implying. What did the text tell us about their history? Their motivations? What they wanted? What was not being said but revealed by their actions? Brecht saw a play primarily as a way to teach social lessons; the script was only as good as the underlying social structures it revealed. Read the text, but then look for ways to bring out the

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underlying importance of events. Relationships, historical footnotes, stereotypes are all as important as the dialogue. In looking at people who devise work, I’ve come to realize they actually have a lot in common with the people who work on traditional plays. When asked how they read a play, directors answer in a number of ways, but mostly they are looking for clues to creating an entire world. They want to find out what’s missing in the text—what’s unspoken. They are looking for unanswerable questions. The text of the play is just the beginning. Writing and researching this book was a revelation to me: a play is something we can read but, when it’s played, it’s much more than what is on the page. The words on the page are only clues to what will eventually occur. Who says the words, how they say them, to whom, on what part of the stage, in what costume, in what light—These are the things that will affect how the words impact an audience. I used to fear reading plays thinking I’d have no ideas or my ideas would be stupid. Now I procrastinate because to read a play correctly is hard work. You actually have to imagine so many things at once, and you must keep an audience in mind. I often tell my students that people don’t come to the theatre to watch what has happened. They come to watch things happen. To read a play, directors need to imagine: What will happen? I’ve assembled twenty-one ideas on how to read plays with a theatrical imagination in mind.

N otes 1 Antonin Artaud, The Theatre and Its Double (New York: Grove Press, 1958), 41. 2 Roger Blin, Antonin Artaud, Victoria Nes Kirby, Nancy E. Nes, and Aileen Robbins, “Antonin Artaud in Les Cenci”, The Drama Review: TDR, Vol. 16, No. 2, Directing Issue (Jun., 1972), pp. 90–145. 3 Jerzy Grotowski, Towards a Poor Theatre, edited by Eugenio Barba (Denmark: Odin Teatret, 1969. Reprint: New York: Routledge, 2002), 118. 4 Grotowski, 55. 5 Moisés Kauffman, interview. 6 Peter Brook, The Empty Space (New York: Touchstone, 1968), 9.

Ch a p t e r 5

Work b ook C h ap t e r

To read a play, you have to imagine it in the flesh. But how can you do that? You look at the black marks on the page, or more likely the screen, and they are very far from the breathing actors who will speak those lines. The script is just the clues to creating an organic whole, so how do you go about interpreting them? How to keep your thoughts from becoming a jumble? This chapter outlines twenty-one ways to break down a script. The exercises mirror Chapter 3, the survey of current practices, moving from the most general to the particular. Directors read a play to decide whether they want to do it or to convince someone to hire them. The next step is working with designers and producers on creating a world. A director needs to cast next and then get ready for rehearsal. For each task, I spell out the basics, flesh out some of the details, and give suggestions for when and how to use the work. Want to make sure your set model illuminates your play? Pull out Exercise #10, the moment chain, to see whether your ground plan works with the crucial flash points of the script. About to go into auditions? Maybe a good moment to examine Exercise #12, the character bones, to better envision the people of the play. I don’t recommend doing all twenty-one on one project or you’d never actually get to rehearsal. Try them out. See which ones click, and then develop your own variations. Here’s the outline:

T he F irst S teps in P reparation 1 The First Read 2 The General Beauty

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3 4 5 6

Different Editions Comparison Given Circumstances—Part 1: Compiling Evidence Given Circumstances—Part 2: Organizing the Facts Given Circumstances—Part 3: Reading between the Scenes

G etting R eady to Talk to Designers 7 8 9 10 11

The World of the Play French Scenes The Director Breakdown The Moment Chain Playing Space Analysis

G etting R eady to C ast the P lay 12 Character Bones 13 Suffering 14 Relationship Web

G etting R eady for R ehearsal 15 16 17 18 19

Events Scenic Objectives Scenic Breakdown Dialogue Analysis Long Speech Analysis

D ouble - C hecking Your Handle on S tructure 20 Aristotelian Analysis

A F inal G ut C heck 21 Where Is It Personal?

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T he F irst S teps in P reparation How will you first encounter the play? How can you fire up your imagination? What steps can you take to feel prepared?

1. The Fir s t Rea d Turn off all your phones and, if possible, shut off all electronic devices, or at least sever their connection to the Internet. Get comfy. Read the first act trying to experience the play as an audience member. If there’s an intermission, take a break. Stretch your legs. How has the play affected you so far? Read the second act without a break. In the rare instances there is a third act, take another break before reading through to the end. If there is no intermission, read straight through. Now sit down and write about how it affected you. Don’t worry too much about structure—just write what comes to you. How were you stimulated? Were you engaged? Did it affect you emotionally? How so? Write down some basic thoughts and questions. ..................................................................................................

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You have only one chance to read a play for the first time; it’s your best chance to connect with your unfiltered impulses. By getting rid of all distractions, you experience the work the way an audience member would, without interruption. If there is an intermission, you get to experience being in suspense. Hopefully you can’t wait for the break to be over so you can dive back into the world of the play. This first read is also your most honest barometer of whether you are actually interested in the work. We can all convince ourselves later for career or economic reasons why there’s a good reason to direct a play. These first impulses can protect you from straying from your instincts later in the process. Of course, you want to be open to discussion and collaboration with all the artists working on the show, but a first read can give you a sense of direction and help you to lead the charge. Also, if you don’t connect with a play on some level on a first read, you probably shouldn’t direct it. Trust your instincts.

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2. T he Gen era l Bea ut y After reading the play a few times, sit down and answer the following questions adapted from director William Ball’s book, A Sense of Direction: What gives your play beauty? What kind of play is it? What is it about? Why is it necessary? Why does it deserve to be witnessed? What universal truth does it illustrate? What excites you as an artist about the work? What moves you as a person about the play? Why now? Why here? If you already know the theatre: why that theatre? Why that audience? How will you know you’ve succeeded? ..................................................................................................

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The director must believe in the importance of the play for it to succeed. Theatre is made out of belief, and the director is the person who believes first. It’s possible there is only a glimmer of belief that can then be nurtured into a strong desire, but there must be something. (See page 61 for director William Ball’s thoughts on belief.) The questions on the general beauty of the play will allow you to talk about the play’s worth to anyone in any situation. If you are a freelance director, these talking points become the basis for your first discussions with artistic directors. Because they are your idiosyncratic answers to these questions, they give producers an insight into why you are the director for this production. I recently pitched Kaufman and Hart’s 1927 satire, Once in a Lifetime, to a Chicago theatre company because I had a strong sense of the beauty of the play. I was tickled by the story of a trio of vaudeville performers trying to make a quick buck off the invention of the talkies. First off, I found it laugh-out-loud funny, and the theatre company was hungry for a comedy. While it was written as a satire of the movie business, I read it as a critique of the American obsession with get-rich schemes—I saw parallels to the dot.com

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bubble. Finally, I hooked into the main trio’s friendship as they struggled to balance their desire for success with their loyalty to each other. Because I knew the beauty of the play, I could articulate to the company why it would succeed. I got the job.

3. D if f er ent Edit ions Compa ri son Find all the different versions, drafts, or editions of the play that exist. If the play was originally in a different language, look at several translations. Compare and contrast the versions. Differences can be as small as punctuation, formatting and flow or as large as entire scenes missing. Where you find differences, ask yourself, Why did the author choose to go one way rather than another? What does that choice tell you about the playwright’s or translator’s intentions and impulses? ..................................................................................................

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In the second act of Thornton Wilder’s Our Town, just as the young George Gibbs is about to get married, a few of his baseball teammates heckle him, shouting, “George, don’t look so innocent, you old geezer. We know what you’re thinking. Don’t disgrace the team, big boy. Whoo-oo-oo.”1 In the first edition from 1938, one player adds the line, “If things don’t go right call us in. We know what to do.” I was a bit scandalized when we read that line in rehearsal, but it helped the ensemble understand how raucous the players could get and what fears were bubbling for George as he contemplated marriage. In the first act of Shakespeare’s The Tempest, the wizard Prospero tells his daughter the story of his betrayal and banishment for the first time. He interrupts his story three times to see whether his daughter is paying attention. The Arden version of the play published in 2011 prints the testy exchanges thus: Prospero: And rapt in secret studies. Thy false uncle— Dost thou attend me? Miranda: Sir, most heedfully. … Prospero: And sucked my verdure out on’t. Thou attend’st not!

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Miranda: O, good sir, I do. … Prospero: With all prerogative. Hence his ambition growing— Dost thou hear? Miranda: Your tale, sir, would cure deafness.2 The First Folio edition, published in 1623, is punctuated slightly differently. (I’ve updated the spelling.) Prospero: And rapt in secret studies. Thy false uncle (Dost thou attend me?) Miranda: Sir, most heedfully. … Prospero: And sucked my verdure out on’t: Thou attend’st not? Miranda: O, good sir, I do. … Prospero: With all prerogative: hence his ambition growing: Dost thou hear? Miranda: Your tale, sir, would cure deafness.3 In the Arden version, Prospero seems angrier and more petulant. He interrupts himself more violently and yells at Miranda. In the Folio version, he underplays a bit, first asking as a parenthetical phrase whether his daughter is paying attention. In the second instance, he almost seems a bit passive-aggressive, turning a statement into a question—You can almost hear him saying, “You’re not listening? Really?” Personally, I prefer the second version; it sounds more like a father who’s been cooped up with his daughter for twelve years. Regardless, it shows the power of punctuation. (See pages 48–50 for director Charlie Newell’s insights on edition comparison.)

4. Giv en C ircumst a nces—Pa rt 1: C ompiling Evi dence A given circumstance is any fact that can be established in the text. It’s not a matter of opinion. Start reading from the beginning of the play and, on one piece of paper, write any facts about events that happened before the play began or places that exist. Also write questions. Don’t concern yourself with events that happen during the play or between scenes. We’ll get to those later.

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Some facts from A Streetcar Named Desire: Blanche DuBois lived at Belle Reve. Stella Kowalski is Blanche’s sister and is now married to Stanley. Stella Kowalski lived at Belle Reve but now lives in New Orleans. Blanche DuBois was a schoolteacher who taught English.

Some questions:

How long is the journey from Belle Reve to Stella’s house? When did Stella leave Belle Reve? Why did she leave? How long did Blanche teach English? How old were the students? Where? What was happening politically and historically in Louisiana in the early 1940s? ..................................................................................................

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When I teach this method to students, I have found that it’s easy to get confused and start writing everything that happens in the scene (e.g., Blanche meets Eunice; Stanley takes off his sweaty shirt). For the first round, try to stick to things that happened before the play began. These may be from twenty years ago or from just two hours ago. (See pages 72–73 for director Katie Mitchell’s instructions on using facts and questions.) It’s also easy to get misled by what people say or how they describe things. This is a trap. In terms of the apartment, Blanche says that she never could have imagined Stella in such a horrible place—not in her worst nightmares. Eunice, Stella, and Stanley find it to be just fine and, in fact, better than other rooms in New Orleans. What is established in the text is that it is small. We know there are two rooms, and we know that Blanche must sleep on a pull-out cot. So a few questions arise: How small is the apartment? In what condition is the apartment? Now we get to questions. Your task is to turn all the questions into given circumstances that can help to motivate behavior and action on stage. This will be done by a combination of research, close reading, and imagination.

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Something like the length of the journey from Belle Reve in Laurel, Mississippi to New Orleans is pure research. A map can tell you how far apart the two cities are, and some library work will help you to establish the train and bus conditions in 1946. (The journey probably took about eight dusty hours.) How long ago Stella left Belle Reve can be established by close reading combined with research. We know that Stella first saw Stanley in his uniform and the war has been over for about a year. We know that she is twenty-five years old and says she left to make it on her own. We know Stella wasn’t around for the string of deaths and returned to Belle Reve for funerals. She probably left between two and five years ago. You can pin down the exact date with the actors in rehearsal, but now you have a general time frame. The question about historical and political background is a key one. It’s important to pull together a list of historical events that would have been on the writer’s mind when he or she was creating the play. Stanley and Mitch would certainly have experienced the end of World War II together. Blanche was at Belle Reve at the height of the Great Depression. The question of why Stella left Belle Reve is complicated and will likely need to wait until rehearsal. The answer will come from the collective imagination of the ensemble. Once you answer the question, you can move the reason to the fact column.

5. Giv en C ircumst a nces—Pa rt 2: Organ iz ing t he Fa ct s Now take your list of facts and organize them into useful categories. Make a list of given circumstances about every room, building, and place mentioned in the play. You can then sketch out a picture of every place used or referenced in the play. Some facts about Stella and Stanley’s apartment: There are two rooms, separated by a curtain. There is an overhead light in the kitchen. There is an icebox. There is a fold-out bed. Organize the facts for each character, and put them in chronological order. Combine this with dramaturgical work about the period. Create a biographical sketch for each character.

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Some facts about Blanche DuBois She was born and raised at Belle Reve, in Laurel, Mississippi. She was married once, but the boy died. She was an English teacher but just stopped teaching. She’s older than thirty.

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Armed with a list of what must be in each room, you can do some research on your own. By doing some research on apartments in New Orleans in the 1940s, you can discover the basic ground plan of an apartment. Start conversations with a designer with the established needs of a scene. A biography is a key tool before casting. Looking at Streetcar again: Blanche once lived on a palatial estate but also was an English teacher and has a history of seducing young men. In auditions, you have to find an actress who can believably embody all those histories. The ability to portray class and education is a key consideration in hiring the right artist. Character biographies are juicy assignments for actors early in the process. It’s helpful for all actors to know about key historical events that would have affected them. For example, while Stella and Blanche didn’t have slaves at Belle Reve, their parents and grandparents likely did. It’s important to know about Mitch and Stanley’s unit in the army engineer corps and what kind of action they likely saw.

6. Giv en C ircumst a nces—Pa rt 3: Readin g b e t w een t he Scenes Now that you have a sense of every place in the play and everyone’s shared history, let’s establish what happens between scenes or acts. Read over each scene or act of the play. What has happened since the end of the previous scene? How much time has passed? Are we in a new season? Has anyone changed physically? Mentally? Again, using a system of facts and questions will be helpful. Now go more specific: What happened in the last 24 hours? ..................................................................................................

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This is where a close reading is important. In the first three scenes of Streetcar, the chronology is very clear. In the first scene, Blanche arrives around dinnertime. The second scene is twenty-four hours later when the card game starts and the ladies are leaving, and the third scene is at 2:00 a.m. the next morning. Looking at the time between scenes two and three, some obvious and explosive given circumstances present themselves: Stanley and the poker players have been drinking since 6:00 p.m. or eight hours! Stanley has been losing and Mitch has been winning. The two ladies have been drinking and wandering around the hot city to pass the time.

Some questions:

Exactly how much alcohol for everyone, men and women? How much is Stanley down? What state is the apartment in? In terms of the immediate circumstances before scene three, we know a few things. At the end of the first scene, Blanche escaped to the bathroom and vomited. She must have cleaned up at some point. They must have had some sort of dinner. Some conversation happened, the roll-out bed was set up in the kitchen, and everyone went to sleep. The next day Blanche’s trunk arrived. Between scenes three and four is a bit trickier to establish but, with a little math, we can figure it out. Blanche mentioned that her birthday is in a month, on September 15. We know from the stage directions that the first scene is early May. We also know from scene six that Stella gives birth on Blanche’s birthday. So we’ve learned a few things: At the top of scene four Stella is eight months pregnant. The three of them have been living in a small sticky apartment for more than four months.

And we have some questions:

How much has Stanley been traveling during that time? Later Blanche says she helped decorate the apartment. How much has she done?

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Have Stanley and Stella been having sex given her pregnancy and Blanche sleeping in the next room? I don’t recommend figuring these last ones out before rehearsal— They are stimulating questions to ask around the table in the first week. Actors armed with what happened in the last few months, and especially the last twenty-four hours, will come into a scene ready for action.

G etting R eady to Talk to D esigners You’ve encountered the play and have a handle on the basics. You understand the text on some level. What about the physical world? How do you prepare for designers? How can you be imaginative and organized?

7. The World of t he Pl a y Dramaturg and critic Elinor Fuchs encourages readers of a script to imagine that all the places, people, events, and moments in the play exist on one imaginary planet. Shrink the planet of the play down to a manageable size in front of you and squint. Try to see the world from 10,000 feet. Then ask yourself some questions. How do space and time work? What is the tone? Music? Sound? How do people group themselves? Speak to one another? Dress? Where does power come from? How and why is it used? What are the rules of this universe that are different from ours? What is the first thing you see? What is the last thing you see? Is there some door in the middle you need to go through to get from first to last? ..................................................................................................

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Fuchs suggests you can’t know how the characters will interact if you don’t know the rules of the universe. Conducting this exercise before meeting with designers for the first time doesn’t determine what a design will be, but it does help to shape the discussion. It helps to create a framework for the fictional universe you are

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making. (See pages 70–71 for dramaturg Elinor Fuch’s insightful explanation of her small planet exercise.) Think about the world of your play in relation to the one we live in—not as an exact copy. You could expand on this exercise by gathering images or music that remind you of the world. Bring these to first design meetings to encourage all designers to work in the same universe. Squinting at planet Streetcar you observe the following: It is man-made, cramped, and loud. It is frenetic at times, languid at other times. It is a hot universe. A dynamic trio of people dominate the world. Power comes from information, money, and physical strength. The first image: a daintily dressed woman arriving to a world she doesn’t recognize. The central image: the woman, her sister, and the sister’s husband stuck together in a hot, cramped apartment, the sister being eight months pregnant. The last image: the first woman being led to an asylum, dressed for a party, with her sister sobbing in the background, holding a baby.

8. French S c enes To break your play into French scenes, mark a division every time someone enters or exits. List the French scenes in one of three ways: Write them out as a simple list. See Appendix 2. List characters along the left and scene numbers along the top, and put an X whenever someone is on stage. See Appendix 3. Create columns that indicate who is in the scene. You can then add more information in different columns. See Appendix 4. ..................................................................................................

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You can certainly leave the French scene breakdown to your stage manager, but you’ll learn a lot by figuring out when people enter and exit, who is on stage with whom, and who leaves stage for long periods of time. You discover the scenic rhythm of the play—You start to figure out its patterns. Are there a bunch of

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two-character scenes? Does this mean you need to establish some sort of intimacy for this section? How? Where are the group scenes? As in Shakespeare, does it build to a large climax with everyone on stage together? You may find that an entire play tips after one character blazes through the middle, never to be seen again. Of course, there are many practical reasons to do French scene breakdowns. If you need to double characters, you can see who is on stage at the same time. You can start to figure out rehearsal blocks. You start to see when and where costume changes can happen. It’s also the basis for the director breakdown.

9. The Directo r Brea kdow n Start with the French scene breakdown in columns. The first column should have scene number, next page number, next characters in the scene, next location and time of day, next summary, and finally notes and questions. Of course, you can add and subtract any columns you find helpful. You could include events of the scene, design ideas, and scenic and prop needs. (See Appendix 4 for my director breakdown for Streetcar.) ..................................................................................................

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When I was first directing, this tool was my mainstay. It was laborious and painstaking, but once I’d done it, I felt I’d gotten the play under my belt. It’s especially helpful for modern plays, which tend to have a number of short scenes in many locations. Many of your designers will also do this, but I find doing it myself reveals patterns, questions, and concerns early in the process. Depending on your relationship with your designers, you can pass along this document. I’ve often sent it out with the suggestion that they were free to use it or print it out and wrap fish with it if they like. By going scene by scene thoroughly, you tend to generate a lot of questions. Some for designers, some for dramaturgs, and some left for the rehearsal room.

10. T he Moment Cha in This tool comes from legendary writer and director Jon Jory in his insightful book, Tips: Ideas for Directors: “Try to find two dozen

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moments in the text (this includes lines said) that if they were played in order would basically tell both the narrative and emotional story of the play.”4 Make a list of the most important two-dozen moments (eighteen for a ninety-minute one-act). They should include your inciting incident, turning point, and climax. (See Exercise #20 Aristotelian Analysis for these terms.) ..................................................................................................

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Jory suggests that if every moment in your play has equal weight, nothing will stand out. Clear storytelling involves highlighting key decisions, lines, and interactions. The most important step in creating the moment chain is to pick instants, not entire scenes or chunks of scenes. Force yourself to be specific, and pick out the moments that need to explode on stage. Blanche’s entire first scene with Stella is not a moment. The second Stella breaks down and flees to the bathroom after Blanche attacks her verbally is a moment. The entire confrontation scene between Mitch and Blanche isn’t a moment, but the instant when he turns on the light definitely is. [See Appendix 5 for my moments from Streetcar] I use this tool throughout the process. I sometimes share it with designers at the beginning of the collaboration so they know my opinion on the key moments of the play. When I get my first ground plan, I check it against my moment chain. Using Streetcar as an example, it is a problem if the bathroom door is obscured from the audience because a couple of key moments occur right next to it. For each moment, you can ask yourself how you will make it resonate and detonate. Is there a costume choice to help the moment? A lighting and sound cue? A prop that can help to accentuate a piece of behavior? As rehearsal continues, I often come back to the moment chain after run-throughs. I ask myself whether I’m truly taking care of the key story nodes. If you have an assistant director, ask him or her to watch the play and use the chain as a checklist. Finally, I’ve used the list late in the process as a plan for rehearsal. If nothing else, these moments need to land.

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11. P lay ing S p a ce Ana lysi s When the writer wrote the play, did he or she have a physical space in mind? Was the play written to be performed: In the round? In a thrust? Outdoors? Indoors in a large proscenium? With wings and a fly space? With audience and actors mixed together? In a large playing space? Small? What assumptions about that space are written into the play? Are you in the same kind of space or different? How will you account for those differences? ..................................................................................................

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Every Greek play was written for the same type of theatre: The playing space had a large circular orchestra, big enough to hold a fifteen-person chorus. Since plays were done outdoors and this orchestra was conceived of as a central meeting place for characters, this space was always a public one. All the Greek plays use a central door, and it’s something to wrestle with. Who controls the door? What is behind it? Who is behind it? What does it mean to come through it? The side entrances in Greek theatres were very long, and it took a while for characters to make it to the main playing area. Hence lines such as Here comes Creon. He’s looking so mad. Boy is he mad. Here he comes. Oh he’s here. Without a long entrance, you’ll have to find another way to make sense of those lines. Shakespearean plays were always performed in the same deep thrust with balconies on three sides. Audiences were close to the stage and in direct connection with the dense language. There was no scenery used, so scenes dovetailed one into the other. If you are deploying scene changes in your Shakespeare play, be aware that you are breaking the flow of the original text. How will that affect the play? If audiences aren’t right on top of the actors, how will you connect them to this complicated language? Most of the classic American dramas from the 1920s through 1950s were written with the assumption that they’d be in a large Broadway-style proscenium house. The audience was going to be

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separated from the actors and viewing them as if through a fourth wall. If your production is in a different space, how will that affect how it is perceived?

G etting R eady to C ast the P lay You need to choose sides and create lists of potential actors. How can you be sure who you’re looking for?

12. Char acter Bones For each character, list the actions he or she takes in the play or has taken in life that you know about. We’re not talking about business such as getting dressed but the choices they make in the play. Stella conceals and then reveals her pregnancy to Blanche. Blanche steals liquor and then lies about it. Stanley breaks dishes after being called a pig. ..................................................................................................

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A character on stage consists of the bones combined with the particular actor in the role. Every time A Streetcar Named Desire is performed, Stanley will hit Stella, make up with his wife, eavesdrop on Blanche talking about him, kiss his wife in front of Blanche, look into Blanche’s past, and so on. Then with each actor and director, these events can be interpreted differently, but the choices themselves cannot be altered, and they inform us as to what kind of person we are dealing with. (See pages 77–78 for David Ball’s coining of the term the bones from his astute book, Backwards and Forwards.) The main benefit of listing the bones is that they help to sweep away preconceived notions of character. They also help to guard against taking as fact what other characters say about someone. Just because Blanche says that Stanley is a brute or an ape, doesn’t mean it’s true. She’s saying that because she wants to pry her sister away from her husband. There are moments in the play where Stanley is quite gentle and loving.

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13. Suf f erin g Examine each character and ask, how is he or she suffering? What is he or she doing to alleviate that suffering? ..................................................................................................

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Frank Hauser and Russell Reich have a concise book on theatre titled Notes on Directing. Hauser and Reich remind us, “Realize that the human experience is one of suffering and the resolution of suffering.”5 To stay alive, people try to mitigate their pain. Often, the easiest way to do this is to make others suffer, usually the people they love the most. Blanche suffers from being lonely—or perhaps from extreme existential dread. She tries to feel better by drinking, pampering herself, and flirting with young boys. She pursues Mitch to stop feeling lonely and perhaps flirts with Stanley for the same reasons. Mitch is suffering because his mother is dying and he hasn’t found a woman to replace her. He wants someone kind and feminine to take care of him and seeks that in Blanche.

14. Relations hip Web For each character in the play, describe in a short sentence how that character sees every other character in the play. Look for love and conflict. How is each character trying to change other people and convert them to his or her point of view? Stanley: Blanche is a sexy woman and my wife’s sister, but I don’t trust her influence on Stella and she keeps calling me coarse. She needs to understand that I am the king of this castle. Stanley: Stella is the love of my life and mother of my baby, but she’s increasingly seeing me as unrefined. I want her to return to the hero worship she had for me when we first met. Blanche: Stella is my blessed little sister and offering me refuge, but she’s gullible and under the thumb of her brute husband. She must wake up to her undignified situation and escape with me to a better life.

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Blanche: Stanley is offering me refuge for the moment and is certainly handsome, but he is a vulgar thug who treats my sister like dirt. He needs to treat me better and clean up this apartment or let Stella and me leave in peace. You could make a long list—or, if you were feeling crafty, you could make a web on a large piece of paper. Each character could be connected by their relationship description. ..................................................................................................

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Stanley will treat Stella differently than he treats Blanche. Blanche will try different tactics on her sister than on her brother-in-law. If you can get actors to treat each person in the play differently, you’ll be a long way toward creating a complex world. In terms of figuring out these statements, certainly you can look at what people say about themselves or others but, again, the most important tool is to examine what they do. How do they find themselves in conflict with a partner, and how do they resolve that conflict? Blanche is questioned by Stanley and flirts with him. Stanley is put off by Blanche and puts his foot down. Stella insults Stanley and he hits her. Stella brushes aside Blanche’s concerns, and Blanche begs her to remember her past. Typically, people have the same fight over and over—the subject matter might change, but the basic conflict stays the same. What is the problem each character is trying to solve with every other character? If you look at every scene between Blanche and Stella, Blanche encourages her sister to remember their glorious past and escape their current squalid state. Stella is continuously trying to get Blanche to live in the here-and-now. You might develop an idea of an action palette that a character uses in relation to another character. If Blanche is trying to get Stella to see her squalid situation, she might educate, embolden, elevate, and energize her. Stella, on the other hand, might try to ground, dampen, corral, and weigh down Blanche.

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G etting R eady for R ehearsal You’re deep into design meetings, making final decisions as a team on the physical environment. You have the best cast possible. Soon you’ll be hearing the play aloud and leading scene rehearsals. What can you do to get ready to work with actors?

15. E v en ts An event is a moment in the play where a change happens that affects everyone on stage. Go through the play and identify each event: Every time a character enters or exits the stage is an event. Every time someone changes the topic of conversation is not an event. Name each event as simply as possible: Think “Blanche enters” rather than “The butterfly.” Use “Stanley slaps Stella” rather than “The Brawl.” ..................................................................................................

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By identifying the events of the play, in essence you are figuring out what actually happens. People go to the theatre to see things happen on stage in front of them. The events of the play are the things that happen. It’s important to pick moments where the play takes a turn; if this decision didn’t happen, the play wouldn’t keep going forward. It’s also important to pick moments where the decision affects everyone on stage. In the first scene, Blanche and Stella talk of many things, including Stanley, Stella’s weight, and Blanche’s appearance, but these changes in subject don’t alter the course of the play. However, when Blanche tells Stella that Belle Reve is lost, the play takes a turn. It is an event. You can use these events in rehearsal at the table to identify where the turns of the play happen. Perhaps you will discover that your placement of the event was off and the actors have a better idea. Once up on your feet and rehearsing, it’s important to make sure these events actually happen in the moment.

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At this point, you can also look for the major event of the play. What is the one big decision or change that affects everyone in the play and justifies the play’s existence? What is the major event for each act? For each scene?

16. S cen ic Object ives Now that you know where the events are in the play, between each event, identify each character’s intention toward the other characters. The idea is that until there is a change in the scene, a decision is made or someone leaves, people lean into the same intention. They want something from somebody else and are doing everything they can to get it. Intentions are what one character wants from another. Other ways to describe this are What am I fighting for? What do I want? What’s my objective? What am I doing? ..................................................................................................

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Looking at the first scene in Streetcar between the sisters, it’s not helpful to say that Blanche wants to be free or wants to be happy. She might be fighting for her sister to take her into her home. Or her intention may be for Stella to remember her family ties. Also, try to put the two sisters in conflict. So if Blanche’s intention is to make Stella remember her family ties, perhaps Stella’s intention is for Blanche to recognize that she has a new, independent life. Now try to delay the event. When Blanche reveals that Belle Reve has been lost, the first scene takes a big turn. To build tension and drama, Blanche shouldn’t start the scene with the intention to tell Stella the bad news. She does it only because, in the conflict between past and present, losing their ancestral home is the trump card. Should you do this work before rehearsal? As long as you can let go of your homework once you’re in the room and see what the actors bring, why not? Figuring out intentions can absolutely help you to understand what’s happening under the dialogue. It’s the surest path to subtext.

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17. Scenic Brea kdow n For each scene in the play, answer the following: Where does the scene take place? What is present? When does the scene take place (time of day, season, climate)? What happened just before the scene begins? What has happened in the last twenty-four hours? What are the most important facts or given circumstances that affect this scene? What is the current state of the relationship between the characters in the scene? What is each character fighting for in the scene? What is the story outcome of the scene? How does the play progress because of the scene? ..................................................................................................

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This kind of meticulous work is most helpful when preparing to do detailed scene work with actors. It’s very common for actors to forget key given circumstances and start playing for results or effect. It’s also easy for the director to have an instinct about tone and push for that too early. More often than not, a scene can be grounded and made specific through the use of given circumstances. In the first scene, the actor playing Blanche could easily just start generally raging and shouting. Better if she has a clear picture of how Belle Reve was lost and how Stella was to blame. This analysis also helps to differentiate each scene from the next and build the play’s dramatic arc.

18. Dialogue Ana l ysi s Look at the play as a piece of music. Where are the scenes of quick dialogue back and forth? Where are there duets? Quartets? Trios? Where are there long arias? What does this arrangement tell you in terms of storytelling and emotional impact? ..................................................................................................

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It’s easiest to practice this work on Greek and Shakespeare plays and then try it on more modern works. In Greek plays, there are definite patterns: choral odes, followed by scenes, followed by choral odes. The scenes themselves are typically broken up into long speeches, busted up by stichomythia or quick one-line bursts of dialogue. Each time there is a long speech, ask yourself, Why is this necessary here? Why does the other character listen and not interrupt? When and where does the person interrupt? Is it with dialogue? Another long speech? How does that rhythm affect you emotionally? Similarly with Shakespeare, there are clear changes in types of speech: from prose to verse, from verse to rhyming couplets. Shakespeare alternates between long passages and quick banter. Why does he shift? How does it affect the story? How does it affect you emotionally? Viscerally? In modern plays, the shifts from one type of speech to another might be subtler, but you should still look for the differences. Does someone go from rationalizing to arguing to rhapsodizing? Are there short bursts of scenes? How will this impact the viewer?

19. Long S pe ech Ana lysi s Take a look at the longer speeches in the play and dissect the punctuation to find the rhythm. What does the rhythm tell you about psychology? ..................................................................................................

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Studying Shakespeare informs a method for examining the punctuation of newer writers. There are some scholars who believe that the First Folio version of Shakespeare’s plays are replicas of the sides actors used in performance and so are the closest to acting editions we have. These versions are thought to contain clues in punctuation, capitalization, and spelling. As an example, periods or question marks are places where new thoughts begin, and so the next sentence has fresh energy. A colon is followed by a more public thought, and the next line should be lifted to everyone assembled. A semicolon is followed by a more personal thought and should be spoken to just one other character. I’m not suggesting these are hard and fast rules, but they give a sense of potential structure. Try applying these rules to a more modern play and see how length of sentence, use of periods versus commas, and employment

Workbook Chapter  159

of exclamation points affect your understanding of character intent. In Appendix 6, I’ve marked up Blanche’s long speech to Stella at the end of scene four. In Appendix 7, I’ve marked up Prospero’s speech to Ariel from The Tempest.

D ouble - checking Your Handle on S tructure You know the given circumstances. You’ve envisioned the world. You know how the play sounds and how it moves. Take another look, and see whether you understand the dramatic structure—the way the play will build tension through action and conflict from the first moment to the final curtain.

20. A ris totelian Ana lysi s • Protagonist Who is the main character? Whose journey are we following? • Protagonist’s spine What is the main thing he or she is trying to do? What does the character want most? • Antagonist Who opposes the protagonist in his or her quest? • Antagonist’s spine Make sure this spine puts the antagonist and protagonist in conflict. • Status quo or stasis As the play begins, what is the unchanging state of affairs? • Inciting incident What happens to the protagonist to upset the status quo? • Dramatic question Once the inciting incident happens, what question are we tracking? • Rising action How does the protagonist try to achieve his or her main objective? • Turning point Typically halfway through, something happens to the protagonist that forces the character to change his or her attack.

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• Falling action After the turning point, how does the protagonist try to achieve his or her dream? • Oh shit moment The moment where it seems the climax of the play is inevitable. • Climax The moment when the dramatic question is answered. Will the protagonist achieve his or her goal? Yes or no? • New status quo What is the new unchanging state of affairs? ..................................................................................................

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This analysis is based on Aristotle’s Poetics and his belief that plot is the soul of tragedy. The most important thing to keep in mind when doing this analysis is that all the parts need to relate to one another. Looking at A Streetcar Named Desire, one could make an argument for either Blanche or Stanley as the protagonist. Both dominate the play, and both have journeys worth following. In working on the play, I created analyses for both characters and learned how each drives the action of the play differently. I chose Blanche in the end because she changes the most, has the most at stake, and is acted upon by Stanley. Stanley sets things in motion and becomes our antagonist. The status quo is that Blanche is penniless, has told her sister that she is coming to New Orleans, and seeks refuge. Stella and Stanley are married, and Stella is pregnant. They live in a two-room apartment in New Orleans. The inciting incident is when Stanley meets Blanche for the first time and, in a rough manner, asks about her dead husband, causing Blanche to collapse. The dramatic question is kicked off: Will Blanche escape her past? The rising action follows Blanche’s attempts to escape her past by trying to separate Stella and Stanley. She flirts with Stanley, goes out with Stella, and berates Stanley. She worms her way into the apartment. The turning point is when Stanley asks her whether she knows a person named Shaw—who seems to know that Blanche stayed for a while at a hotel known for prostitutes. Her past is catching up with her, and she has to escape. The falling action charts her quest to escape her past by finding a suitor to take her away. At first she pursues Mitch, but when that falls apart, she turns to the phantom suitor of Shep Huntleigh.

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A student of mine, Keira Fromm, came up with the Oh Shit Moment. It’s the moment when the climax becomes inevitable—the point of no return. In this case, when Stanley rapes Blanche, there is no way she will escape. The climax is when she is dragged away to an asylum. Her past has come back to destroy her. The new status quo is that Blanche will be institutionalized. Stella will always be haunted by what she’s done and worried that she did the wrong thing. Stanley is trying to recreate his life before Blanche arrived, but he is getting resistance from all quarters. Mitch is shattered. A baby has been born during all this chaos. The spine is to fabricate a new world. Blanche tries to escape her past by reinventing not just herself but the entire world around her. Stanley wants to solidify his current world. Stella is torn between new and old worlds. These different slants on the spine of the play add dramatic tension. Many plays will resist this analysis. Can you identify protagonists in Chekhov plays? Is it possible to find rising action in a play like 4.48 Psychosis by Sarah Kane? Some directors will argue that you can if you look hard enough. Others will say you are trying to shoehorn every play into a structure invented more than two thousand years ago. Regardless, the attempt will teach you something about the motor of your play.

A F inal G ut C heck If you’ve done half the work above, you’ve probably uncovered your idiosyncratic take on the play, but it doesn’t hurt to look deep one more time.

21. Where Is It Persona l? Ask yourself how you personally relate to the major event of the play. How do you relate to the major event of each act? Each scene? Who are the main characters? Do you see yourself in their choices and desires? What in your life echoes in the play? Where does the play seem slightly embarrassing to you? ..................................................................................................

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Given circumstances aren’t debatable. The bones of the character are the same no matter who is directing. A French scene breakdown won’t change depending on who is directing the play. What will change is how each director personally relates to a play and is able to draw from his or her own life in order to create truth on stage. Through the centuries, many artists have debated how to put reality on stage and whether doing so is possible or even advisable, but most theatre makers have stood by the need to present human truths. Even the most absurdist or postmodern artists felt that they were using abstraction or broken reality to get to the heart of why we exist. This is the thing that you already know. What is true. Either what is true about human interactions, or what is true about social constructs, or what is true about the use of speech. You know this because you’ve lived it. So use your life, relate it to your play, and put the truth on stage.

N otes 1 Wilder, Thornton, Our Town (1938; reprint, New York: Samuel French, 2013), 72. 2 Shakespeare, William, The Tempest (London: Bloomsbury Arden Shakespeare, 2011), e-book. 3 Shakespeare, William, Shakespeare’s Comedies, Histories, and Tragedies, being a Reproduction in Facsimile of the First Folio Edition 1623 from the Chatsworth copy in the possession of the Duke of Devonshire, K.G. with an Introduction and Census of Copies by Sidney Lee (Oxford: At the Clarendon Press, 1902). June 30, 2015. http://oll.libertyfund.org/ titles/1111. 4 Jon Jory, Tips: Ideas for Directors (Hanover, NH: Smith and Kraus, 2002), 247. 5 Frank Hauser and Russell Reich, Notes on Directing (New York: RCR Creative Press, 2003), 3.

Appendic e s

164 Appendices

A ppendix 1 A Street car Name d De sire: B iographies of Bla nche, St a nley, S te l l a Blanche DuBois was born September 15, 1917, in Laurel, Mississippi. She has one sister, Stella. The girls grew up in a big white house with white columns on their family’s plantation called Belle Reve. At age sixteen, Blanche fell in love with a young man named Alan Grey. Alan wrote Blanche love letters, and the couple decided to run away to get married. One night, Blanche discovered Alan having sex with another man. Later that evening, while the couple was dancing to the Varsouviana at Moon Lake Casino, Blanche told Alan she was disgusted with him. Alan ran out of the casino and shot himself in the mouth. In college, Blanche wore Shep Huntleigh’s ATO pin; later she became a high school English teacher. In the summer of 1937, Blanche and Stella’s father passed away. Stella left home, but Blanche continued to keep in touch with her sister by letter. Blanche’s mother, Margaret, and cousin Jessie also died. Only cousin Jessie left money, $100, to pay for his coffin; the rest was paid by Blanche, presumably from her teaching money. Late Saturday nights, Blanche was called to by young soldiers and would sneak out of the house to meet them. The “deaf old lady remaining” in the house was not aware of Blanche’s absence. Around 1945, Belle Reve was lost on a mortgage. Blanche began to stay at the Flamingo, a “second class” hotel in town. She continued to teach and began to have an affair with a seventeen-year-old student. When the boy’s father found out about the relationship in 1947, he wrote a letter to the school’s superintendent, Mr. Graves, and Blanche was fired before the end of spring term. Blanche was kicked out of the Flamingo Hotel by the management. A couple of weeks later, she arrived at her sister’s apartment in New Orleans—632 Elysian Fields. Blanche is thirty years old. Stanley Kowalski was born December 26, 1919. He served in WWII with Harold Mitchell in the two-forty-first outfit and became master sergeant in the Corps of Engineers. While serving, he met Stella DuBois. The couple were married in 1945 and spent their honeymoon in their apartment, 632 Elysian Fields, in New Orleans. Stanley works for a plant and often travels. Harold Mitchell also works at the same plant. The two play poker with

Appendices 165

Stanley’s landlord, Steve Hubbell, and Pablo. Stanley and Mitch are also in a bowling league on which Stanley is team captain. Stanley’s wife, Stella, became pregnant in 1947. Stanley is twenty-eight years old. Stella DuBois Kowalski was born in 1922, in Laurel, Mississippi. She has one sister, Blanche. The girls grew up in a big white house with white columns on their family’s plantation called Belle Reve. Stella left home in the summer of 1937, the summer in which her father died. She met Stanley Kowalski, a young man serving as a master sergeant in the Corps of Engineers, and fell in love. The two were married in 1945 and had their honeymoon in their apartment, 632 Elysian Fields, in New Orleans. Steve and Eunice Hubbell, their landlords, live in the flat upstairs. Stanley works at a plant and often has to travel. Stella became pregnant in 1947. Her sister, Blanche, comes to visit in May of the same year. Stella is twenty-five years old.

166 Appendices

A ppendix 2 A Street car Name d De sire: French S cene Brea kdow n, L i st Vers i o n Scene 1 1.1 Negro Woman, Eunice 1.2 Stella, Stanley, Mitch, Negro woman, Eunice 1.3 Blanche, Negro woman, Eunice 1.4 Blanche, Eunice 1.5 Blanche 1.6 Stella, Blanche 1.7 Stanley, Steve, Mitch, (Blanche) 1.8 Eunice, Steve, Mitch, Stanley, (Blanche) 1.9 Stanley, Blanche, (Stella) Scene 2 2.1 2.2 2.3 2.4

Stanley, Stella, (Blanche) Stanley, Blanche, (Stella) Stanley, Blanche Stanley, Blanche, Stella, Pablo, Steve

Scene 3 3.1 3.2 3.3 3.4 3.5

Stanley, Pablo, Mitch, Steve Stanley, Mitch, Pablo, Steve, Stella, Blanche Stanley, Eunice Stanley, Stella Blanche, Mitch

Scene 4 4.1 4.2

Blanche, Stella Blanche, Stella, Stanley

Scene 5 5.1 5.2

Stella, Blanche, (Eunice, Steve) Stella, Blanche, Stanley

Appendices 167

5.3 Stella, Blanche, Stanley, (Eunice, Steve) 5.4 Stella, Blanche 5.5 Blanche 5.6 Blanche, young man 5.7 Blanche, Mitch Scene 6 6

Blanche, Mitch

Scene 7 7.1 7.2

Stanley, Stella, (Blanche) Blanche, Stella

Scene 8 8

Stella, Stanley, Blanche

Scene 9 9.1 9.2 9.3

Mitch, Blanche Mitch, Blanche, Mexican Woman Mitch, Blanche

Scene 10 10.1 Blanche 10.2 Blanche, Stanley 10.3 Blanche, Stanley (figures on the street) 10.4 Blanche, Stanley Scene 11 11.1 Stanley, Mitch, Pablo, Steve, Stella, Eunice 11.2 Stanley, Mitch, Pablo, Steve, Stella, Eunice, (Blanche) 11.3 (Stanley, Mitch, Pablo, Steve) Stella, Eunice, Blanche 11.4 Stanley, Mitch, Pablo, Steve, Stella, Eunice, Blanche, doctor, matron 11.5 Stanley, Mitch, Pablo, Steve, Stella, Eunice

Doctor

Matron

Young man

Negro woman

Pablo

Eunice

Steve

Mitch

X

X

X

X

X

Stanley

2–3

1.2

Stella

X

1

Pages

Blanche

1.1

Scene

X

X

X

4–5

1.3

X

X

5–7

1.4 X

8

1.5

X

X

8–21

1.6

X

X X

X

X

(X)

22

1.8

X

X

(X)

21

1.7

X

(X)

X

23–26

1.9

A S tr eet c a r N a med D es i r e: Fre nc h Sc e ne B re a k d o w n— C ha r t Ve r si o n, S c e ne s 1 t o 2

A ppendix 3

2.2

2.3

X

X

(X)

X

(X)

X

X

X

27–34 34–38 38–43

2.1

X

X

X

X

X

43

2.4

X

Steve

Doctor

Matron

Young man

Negro woman

Pablo

X

X

Mitch

Eunice

X

Stanley

X

X

X

X

X

Stella

X

X

X

3.3

Blanche

3.2

44–47 47–63 64–65

3.1

Pages

Scene

X

X

65

3.4

X

X

65–67

3.5

4.2

X

X X

X

X

68–80 80–82

4.1

A S tr e et c a r N a med D es i r e: Fre nc h Sc e ne B re a k d o w n— C ha r t Ve r si o n, S c e ne s 3 t o 4

X

X

Stella

(X)

Eunice

Doctor

Matron

Young man

Negro woman

Pablo

(X)

Steve

Mitch

Stanley

5.2

5.3

5.4

X

X

X

(X)

(X)

X

X

X X

X

83–85 84–85 85–89 89–94

5.1

Blanche

Pages

Scene X

94

5.5

X

X

94–97

5.6

X

X

97

5.7

6

X

X

98–114

A S tr e et c a r N a med D es i r e: Fre nc h Sc e ne B re a k d o w n— C ha r t Ve r si o n, S c e ne s 5 t o 7

X

X

(X)

115–25

7.1

X

X

126

7.2

Chrctrs

Negro woman Eunice

Negro woman Eunice Stella Stanley Mitch

Blanche Negro woman Eunice

Sc.

1.1

1.2

1.3

Blanche arrives and at first can’t believe she’s at the right address

Stanley throws Stella some meat from the butcher and then goes to bowl. Stella follows.

Negro woman and Eunice enjoy stoop life in New Orleans on a spring night

Summary

Outside on steps

First dark, evening early May

Location/ time/season

Suitcase

Meat

Blue piano Noises of street

Steps?

Design/ needs

Negro woman goes to fetch Stella

Blanche arrives

Stella follows

Stanley goes to bowling alley

Events

How change when Blanche arrives—should see it from her point of view—she is surrounded and overwhelmed by New Orleans—too loud, vulgar— always heard a screech of the streetcar—maybe caught in the lights as well? Important that Blanche looks out of place

This is the first we see of neighborhood and it should have its charm but also noise and dirt.

Notes/questions

A S tr eet c a r N a med D es i r e: Di re c to r B re a k d o w n— Fi rst Tw o Scenes

A ppendix 4

Chrctrs

Eunice Blanche

Blanche

Stella Blanche

Sc.

1.4

1.5

1.6

Stella greets Blanche. Blanche criticizes Stella’s two-room apartment and living conditions. Stella defends place and Stanley. It is revealed that Blanche is taking a leave from school to live with them in two rooms. Blanche reveals that Belle Reve, the ancestral home, is lost because of debts

Blanche in private moment

Eunice lets her in, and Blanche dismisses her

Summary

Do we lose or keep the outside noise and music?

Notes/questions

Blanche says she’s not well

Stella reveals it’s only two rooms

Blanche criticizes apartment

Blanche asks for drink and gets it

Stella greets Blanche

Start of scene they are going to try to make it work—delay event of them each breaking down. Also Blanche wants to avoid Belle Reve—wants to avoid reliving it and talking about it. The central issue—Blanche blames Stella for leaving her alone.

What are the L&N Tracks? Do we see them? Edgar Allan Poe—is it true? From her perspective?

Blanche has a private moment where she tries to get a hold of herself and steals liquor—a half tumbler, which is a lot.

First time we see inside flat is it from Blanche’s point of view?—it is a horror show for her—how do Blanche dismisses we make sure we get across that Eunice it’s not so bad, but that Blanche is out of place?

Eunice lets Blanche in

Events

Bottle of liquor Blanche has a Screeching cat drink

Design/ needs

Light to turn off Icebox? Getting darker Coke? White lace out collar Two rooms Light turned off—what light Collapsible bed is left? Photo Inside kitchen mostly

Location/ time/season

Steve Mitch Stanley Blanche

Eunice Steve Mitch Stanley Blanche

Stanley Blanche (Stella)

1.7

1.8

1.9

Stella has hidden in bathroom, and Stanley meets Blanche for first

Eunice gently bawls out Steve for not being home for dinner

Stanley comes home, and they set the date for poker at Stanley’s house tomorrow night

Getting darker?

Outside life

Varsouviana

Blanche says she’ll be living with them, Stanley concurs

Steve placates Eunice

Stanley sets the poker night

Blanche criticizes Stella for leaving

Blanche reveals Belle Reve is lost

Stella reveals deep love for Stanley

Stanley takes off bowling shirt. Would he care if he had something under? Would he?

Where we see the upstairs life

See the pecking order immediately up and down

Important the night life comes roaring back into the scene

Possibly would like to pull out the Belle Reve section—really from her perspective? Possibly everything else falls away? Of course we have to be careful not to do too much in first scene. Also, it’s a dialogue—she is truly pulling Stella into her horrific past.

Important to get the complete and total love and sexuality of Stella for Stanley—should reek of sex all of a sudden in that place.

Chrctrs

Stanley Stella (Blanche)

Sc.

2.1 Next day, 6pm Apartment

In the bedroom?

time. He takes off his shirt. He says it’s fine if Blanche stays with them. He says he’s not refined, and he asks after her marriage. Blanche says she’ll be sick.

Blanche is bathing. Stella is getting ready to take her out so they can avoid the poker game. She asks Stanley to treat Blanche nicely because her nerves are shot over the trauma of losing Belle Reve. Stanley asks how it was

Location/ time/season

Summary

Dresses Pearls Tiara

Door for bathroom Trunk Dresses for each

Design/ needs

We see the apartment as it is— Stella and Stanley’s cozy place

Pull to her? She’s going to be sick? For real? Where?

Sexual tension from the top?— We’ve had this date from the beginning?

Why does Stanley go over Blanche a bit at the top? Is he nervous about her? Is she giving off something? Why does he ask about her being married?

Would he take off both? Put something else on?

Notes/questions

Blanche’s been storing stuff since Reveal Belle Reve she was sixteen (1932) and she is lost has a variety of styles in that trunk. Is it gaudy? Or pretty? Stanley tells Stella Probably pretty but just out of he thinks Blanche place cheated them

Reveal ladies are leaving to avoid poker night

Blanche says she’s going to be sick

Stanley says he may strike Blanche as unrefined

Events

Stanley Blanche (Stella)

Stanley Blanche

2.2

2.3

Again sun is setting

Bedroom? Quick exchange in which Stanley inquires about Belle Reve and tries to get the papers from Blanche—he touches her love letters,

Stella is on porch; Blanche exits bathroom to dress. She asks for help from Stanley; he refuses. She asks for compliments; he will not give them. He yells at her, Stella comes in and asks him to leave her alone, and Blanche sends Stella to the drugstore

lost and then accuses Blanche of spending all the money on clothes and jewelry. Stella asks him to come outside while Blanche dresses, but he refuses

Stella comes in and Blanche sends her to store

Blanche flirts with Stanley— Stanley blows up

Blanche asks for compliment, Stanley won’t give one.

She asks for help with her dress, and Stanley says he can’t help her. Does she stay unbuttoned then? Then what is she doing— again her toilette. What does that mean?

Why does he yell “let’s cut the re-bop”? What is she doing? Is it flirting? Is that what bothers him?

First time we see some tension between Stanley and Stella—her calling him stupid—probably she doesn’t do that often. Stella is getting ready—what does that mean?—best if she is down to as little as possible—could be sexy situation—not in a big fight already—let the fight reveal itself

Stanley accuses First time alone Blanche of flirting She says let’s be straight—then Stanley tries to flirts with him—why? Can’t she Reading glasses get into trunk help it? Looking for love from him in the only way she knows

Tin box Papers Love letters

Cigarette Whatever Blanche changes intowhat is it all?

Solid gold Stanley refuses to dress leave when Stella White fur comes out pieces Drapes between rooms Red satin gown

Stanley Blanche Pablo Steve Stella

2.4



Chrctrs

Sc.

Blanche greets Stella and celebrates her being pregnant, then she tells her that she flirted with Stanley

and she says she will burn them. Finally, she gives Stanley the papers and says the place was lost because of family’s epic fornications.

Summary

Outside

Location/ time/season

Design/ needs

What does Stanley do with these papers? Does he have them looked at? The dresses?

Blanche gives Stanley many papers about Belle Reve

Stella and Blanche leave

Men arrive for poker

Blanche admits flirting with Stanley

Blanche rushes to Stella

Stella not answering this thing about Blanche flirting with Stanley—is that common? Is she hiding?

Great explosion over the love letters—She accuses Stanley of wanting to hurt her the way she hurt her husband. How? Letters go flying everywhere—interesting that she kept them. What do they look like?

how? Also thinks that’s how she reaches men

Stanley grabs love letters

Stanley reveals Stella is pregnant

Notes/questions

Events

Appendices 177

A ppendix 5 A S t reetcar Name d De sire : Moment Ch a i n 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28

Blanche arrives at the Kowalskis’ Blanche tells Stella Belle Reve is lost, blaming her for leaving Blanche flirts with Stanley—squirts him with atomizer Blanche gives Belle Reve papers to Stanley When Stella asks Stanley to break up card game, he refuses and smacks her ass Mitch puts Blanche’s lantern on the light bulb Stanley hits Stella Stella goes back to Stanley Blanche implores Stella to not hang back with the apes as Stanley eavesdrops Stella embraces Stanley in front of Blanche When Stanley asks Blanche if she knows a man named Shaw, she denies Blanche tells Stella she can’t turn the trick anymore Blanche kisses the young man Mitch asks Blanche how old she is Blanche crouches as train thunders past after revealing her first husband was gay Mitch and Blanche kiss Stanley tells Stella Mitch won’t marry Blanche Stanley smashes his plate, cup, and saucer When Stanley gives Blanche ticket to Laurel, she runs to throw up Stella asks to be taken to hospital Mitch turns on the light Mitch tries to kiss Blanche Stanley says he’s been onto Blanche from the start Blanche crouches as locomotive passes and Stanley comes out in pajamas Stanley forcibly carries Blanche toward bed Blanche is pinned by the matron Doctor takes off his hat Stella cries with baby after Blanche has left

First truly short sentence—sets the scene quickly

First of 21 exclamation points. Wow!

growls—some creature snatches at something—the fight is on! God!

hulking! His poker night!—you call it—this party of apes! Somebody

front of the cave, all grunting like him, and swilling and gnawing and

been discovered yet! Night falls and the other apes gather! There in the

Maybe he’ll strike you or maybe grunt and kiss you! That is, if kisses have

home from the kill in the jungle! And you—you here—waiting for him!

is—Stanley Kowalski—survivor of the Stone Age! Bearing the raw meat

Thousands and thousands of years have passed him right by, and there he

like one of those pictures I've seen in—anthropological studies!

quite to the stage of humanity yet! Yes, something—ape-like about him,

one, talks like one! There's even something—sub-human—something not

He acts like an animal, has an animal's habits! Eats like one, moves like

Strong one word

Interrupts self to repeat “you” as if she can’t believe it

She interrupts herself six times. All about how much of a brute Stanley is— ideas are exploding out of her

A S tr ee t ca r N a me d D e si re : S p e e c h f ro m B l a nc h e to Stel l a a t the end of Scene Fo ur

A ppendix 6

She finally says something clear. She’s on solid ground again.

She stumbles for a few sentences. Struggling to find the right thing to say

Again, she interrupts self to repeat a word. As if she’s frightened Stella will hang back

Don’t—don’t hang back with the brutes!

our flag! In this dark march toward whatever it is we're approaching...

little beginning! That we have got to make grow! And cling to, and hold as

since then! In some kinds of people some tenderer feelings have had some

as poetry and music—such kinds of new light have come into the world

my sister—there has been some progress since then! Such things as art—

Maybe we are a long way from being made in God’s image, but Stella—

growls—some creature snatches at something—the fight is on! God!

hulking! His poker night!—you call it—this party of apes! Somebody

Maybe he’ll strike you or maybe grunt and kiss you! That is, if kisses have

home from the kill in the jungle! And you—you here—waiting for him!

She’s groping, not sure what to say for the first time? Why? Is she afraid of what is approaching? Death?

Strong one word sentence—after and before a tirade

as if she can’t believe it

Many commas, qualifying and explaining first Ariel’s nature,

Dost thou think so, Spirit?

And mine shall.

One of their kind, that relish all as sharply,

Of their afflictions, and shall not my self,

Hast thou (which art but air) a touch, a feeling

Prospero:

Ariel: Mine would, Sir, were I human.

Prospero:

Would become tender.

That if you now beheld them, your affections

Ariel: Your charm so strongly works ’em

A very short definitive sentence. Followed by two extremely long sentences. Is he sure then backpedaling? Does he need to explain himself? Is he discovering along the way?

The key comparison or antithesis: spirit to human

A short exchange about Prospero’s affections and whether they will soften

(Ariel has reported that Prospero’s enemies are all caught, in a frenzied state, and suffering. Prospero has been gearing up for revenge the entire play.)

Th e Temp es t: Di a l o g ue be tw e e n Pro s p e ro a nd A ri el

A ppendix 7

This is a very long sentence to get to the same thing he just said—he’ll release them. Why? Is he arguing himself into it? Embarrassed?

Many commas, qualifying and explaining first Ariel’s nature, then his own.

And mine shall.

Ariel: I’ll fetch them, Sir.

And they shall be themselves.

My charms I’ll break, their senses I’ll restore,

Not a frown further: Go, release them Ariel,

The sole drift of my purpose doth extend

Three colons in one sentence, each one expanding the argument, opening it out, possibly lifting up in tone and increasing in volume?

Ariel answers with economy

In virtue, than in vengeance: they, being penitent,

Do I take part: the rarer action is

Yet, with my nobler reason, ‘gainst my fury

Though with their high wrongs I am struck to the quick,

Passion as they, be kindlier moved than thou art?

One of their kind, that relish all as sharply,

Of their afflictions, and shall not my self,

Hast thou (which art but air) a touch, a feeling

Prospero:

Ariel: Mine would, Sir, were I human.

List of In t e r v i e w s

Aukin, Daniel. Interview with Damon Kiely. Personal Interview. January 1, 2014. Bogart, Anne. Interview with Damon Kiely. Personal Interview. January 29, 2014. Chambers, David. Interview with Damon Kiely. Personal Interview. June 23, 2013. Chavkin, Rachel. Interview with Damon Kiely. Personal Interview. January 28, 2015. Collins, John. Interview with Damon Kiely. Personal Interview. March 16, 2014. Columbus, Curt. Interview with Damon Kiely. Personal Interview. July 1, 2014. Cromer, David. Interview with Damon Kiely. Personal Interview. June 30, 2014. Danzig, Adrian and Leslie Buxbaum Danzig. Interview with Damon Kiely. Personal Interview. December 3, 2014. Ellis, Scott. Interview with Damon Kiely. Phone Interview. January 31, 2014. Esbjornson, David. Interview with Damon Kiely. Personal Interview. April 29, 2014. Falls, Robert. Interview with Damon Kiely. Personal Interview. July 3, 2013. Fondakowski, Leigh. Interview with Damon Kiely. Personal Interview. July 3, 2014. Foreman, Richard. Interview with Damon Kiely. Personal Interview. January 27, 2014. Garcés, Michael John. Interview with Damon Kiely. Phone Interview. October 8, 2014.

List of Interviews  183

Graves, Thomas, Kirk Lynn, Lana Lesley, and Shawn Sides. Interview with Damon Kiely. Chatzy transcript. February 3, 2014. Halberstam, Michael. Interview with Damon Kiely. Personal Interview. July 25, 2013. Jones, B. J. Interview with Damon Kiely. Personal Interview. April 24, 2014. Kahn, Michael. Interview with Damon Kiely. Personal Interview. March 25, 2014. Kauffman, Anne. Interview with Damon Kiely. Personal Interview. September 16, 2013. Kauffman, Anne. Interview with Damon Kiely. Personal Interview. September 2, 2014. Kaufman, Moisés. Interview with Damon Kiely. Personal Interview. December 11, 2014. Kulick, Brian. Interview with Damon Kiely. Personal Interview. January 28, 2014. Kulick, Brian. E-mail correspondence with Damon Kiely. April 29, 2015. Lehane, Gregory. Interview with Damon Kiely. Personal Interview. April 18, 2014. Leon, Kenny. Interview with Damon Kiely. Personal Interview. August 1, 2014. Lillis, Padraic. Interview with Damon Kiely. Personal Interview. January 26, 2014. Marting, Kristin. Interview with Damon Kiely. Personal Interview. January 29, 2014. McDonough, Meredith. Interview with Damon Kiely. Personal Interview. October 29, 2014. Newell, Charles. Interview with Damon Kiely. Personal Interview. August 14, 2013. O’Hara, Robert. Interview with Damon Kiely. Personal Interview. January 28, 2014. Portes, Lisa. Interview with Damon Kiely. Personal Interview. June 25, 2014. Rhoads, Julia and Leslie Buxbaum Danzig. Interview with Damon Kiely. Personal Interview. November 13, 2014. Rubinstein, Kim. Interview with Damon Kiely. Personal Interview. June 25, 2014. Sanders, Derrick. Interview with Damon Kiely. Personal Interview. July 10, 2014.

184  List of Interviews

Senior, Kimberly. Interview with Damon Kiely. Personal Interview. July 16, 2013. Silverman, Leigh. Interview with Damon Kiely. Personal Interview. January 28, 2014. Thebus, Jessica. Interview with Damon Kiely. Personal Interview. July 17, 2014. Waters, Les. Interview with Damon Kiely. Personal Interview. June 26, 2014. Wing-Davey, Mark. Interview with Damon Kiely. Personal Interview. June 11, 2013. Woodruff, Robert. Interview with Damon Kiely. Personal Interview. January 28, 2014. Yew, Chay. Interview with Damon Kiely. Personal Interview. August 21, 2013.

B i og ra phi e s o f I n t e r v i e w e e s

Daniel Aukin is a freelance director whose work has been seen at the Public Theater, Center Theatre Group, Lincoln Center (LCT3), The La Jolla Playhouse, The Guthrie Theater, Arena Stage, The Children’s Theatre of Minneapolis, Manhattan Theatre Club, Playwrights’ Horizons, Williamstown Theatre Festival, and Woolly Mammoth Theatre. From 1998 to 2006, Aukin was the artistic director of Soho Rep, where he commissioned more than fifty new plays through the Writer/Director Lab and produced sixteen full-length productions (including new plays by Adam Bock, The Flying Machine, Young Jean Lee, and Richard Maxwell). Accolades for this body of work include eight Obie awards, four Drama Desk nominations, two Kesselring Prizes, and one Oppenheimer Award. Anne Bogart is coartistic director of SITI Company, which she founded with Japanese director Tadashi Suzuki in 1992. She is the head of directing at Columbia University and the author of five books, including A Director Prepares; The Viewpoints Book; And Then, You Act; Conversations with Anne; and What’s the Story. Her recent work with SITI includes Persians, Steel Hammer, A Rite, Café Variations, Trojan Women, American Document, Antigone, Freshwater Under Construction, Who Do You Think You Are, and Radio Macbeth, among many others. She is a recipient of the Doris Duke Artist Grant, USA Fellowship, Rockefeller Fellowship, Guggenheim Fellowship, and two Obie awards. Leslie Buxbaum Danzig is co-founder of the Chicago-based 500 Clown, where she cocreated and directed 500 Clown Macbeth,

186  Biographies of Interviewees

500 Clown Frankenstein, 500 Clown Christmas, and 500 Clown and the Elephant Deal. She is also a collaborating director with Julia Rhoads/Lucky Plush Productions, where she cocreated the dance-theater productions The Better Half and The Queue, each of which received a National Dance Project Award and a National Performance Network Creation Fund Award (2012 and 2014). She received her BA degree from Brown University and a PhD degree in performance studies at Northwestern University and trained in physical theater at Écoles Jacques Lecoq and Philippe Gaulier. She is the curator of The Richard and Mary L Gray Center for Arts and Inquiry at the University of Chicago, a laboratory where artists and scholars experiment with forms of collaboration. David Chambers has staged numerous U.S. premieres of American, Canadian, British, and European plays and original translations at theatres such as Broadway’s ANTA, Circle in the Square, the New York Shakespeare Festival, the Guthrie Theater, the Goodman Theatre, the Shakespeare Theatre Company, and the Manhattan Theatre Club (of which he was an early cofounder). He has directed half the Shakespeare canon and the major plays of Molière as well as numerous other classical and modern plays. He has enjoyed long-term artistic relationships with South Coast Repertory in California where he was an artistic associate; Washington, DC’s famed Arena Stage, where he served as associate producing director and later as a producer; and the Yale Repertory Theatre as a resident director. He currently teaches directing at the Yale School of Drama. Rachel Chavkin is a director, dramaturg, writer, and the founding artistic director of the TEAM in Brooklyn, NY. Since its founding in 2004, Rachel has directed/coauthored all of the TEAM’s work, including RoosevElvis and Mission Drift. She regularly collaborates with writers and composers on new work (including composer Dave Malloy, whose collaboration on the electro-pop opera, Natasha, Pierre, and the Great Comet of 1812, earned the two an Obie Award). Chavkin is a New York Theatre Workshop Usual Suspect; an artistic associate at London’s Gate Theatre; an alumna of Soho Rep’s Writer/Director Lab, the Drama League Directors Project, the Women’s Project Director’s Lab, and a New Georges Affiliate Artist. She has also taught directing

Biographies of Interviewees  187

and performance at NYU, Pace, and other colleges as well as workshops with the TEAM about their collaborative process. John Collins is the founder and artistic director of the New York City–based Elevator Repair Service (ERS). Characterized by its mash-up of high- and low-tech design, literary and found text, and innovative choreography, ERS has created theatrical adaptations of mainstays of American literature in GATZ , a real-time reading of The Great Gatsby (The Public Theater, 2010); The Sound and the Fury, a take on the first chapter of William Faulkner’s novel (New York Theatre Workshop, 2008); and The Select (The Sun Also Rises), based on Ernest Hemingway’s novel (New York Theatre Workshop, 2011). Among his many honors, he has received a grant from The Foundation for Contemporary Art, a Lortel Award for Outstanding Director, and an Elliot Norton Award for Outstanding Director, as well as a USA Fellowship and a Guggenheim Fellowship. In 2012, Collins and ERS were honored with an Obie Award for Sustained Excellence. Curt Columbus is the artistic director of Trinity Repertory Company and heads the Brown University/Trinity Rep MFA programs in acting and directing. His directing credits for Trinity include Camelot, Cabaret, The Odd Couple, The Secret Rapture, The Receptionist, Memory House, Blithe Spirit, A Christmas Carol, Cherry Orchard, and the world premiere of The Completely Fictional, Utterly True, Final Strange Tale of Edgar Allan Poe. Prior to becoming the artistic director of Trinity Rep, Curt lived and worked in Chicago for almost twenty years. He was an artistic associate of Victory Gardens Theater from 1989 to 1994, the director of the University of Chicago’s University Theater from 1994 to 2000, and the associate artistic director of Chicago’s Steppenwolf Theatre Company from 2000 to 2005 where he premiered his translations of Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya and Cherry Orchard. David Cromer is an award-winning freelance director and actor based in New York City. Broadway credits include The House of Blue Leaves and Brighton Beach Memoirs, and his off-Broadway credits include Tribes, Our Town, and Orson’s Shadow at Barrow Street Theatre; When the Rain Stops Falling at Lincoln Center Theater, and Adding Machine at Minetta Lane Theatre. In Chicago, his

188  Biographies of Interviewees

work has been seen at Steppenwolf, American Theatre Company, Writers Theatre, Mary-Arrchie Theatre Co., and The Hypocrites, among others. His work as a director has received four Joseph Jefferson awards, three Lucille Lortel awards, and two Obie awards. In 2010, he was named a MacArthur Foundation Fellow. Adrian Danzig is a co-founder and creative director of 500 Clown in Chicago. Danzig regularly performs the shows in the 500 Clown touring repertoire: 500 Clown Macbeth, 500 Clown Frankenstein, 500 Clown Christmas, and 500 Clown Trapped. He has led workshops in physical theater all around the country and internationally for the past ten years. He has performed in shows at Goodman Theatre, The Second City, Steppenwolf Theatre Company, Berkeley Repertory Theatre, Brooklyn Academy of Music, The Public Theater, Court Theatre, Shakespeare & Company, and Lookingglass Theatre. He has performed his solo works at The Kitchen, P.S. 122, The Ontological-Hysteric Theater, and Soho Rep. He was an early Neo-Futurist (1990) and a founding member of Redmoon Theater and Hubinspoke Theater. Scott Ellis is the Adams Associate Artistic Director of the Roundabout Theatre Company in New York City. His Broadway credits include The Mystery of Edwin Drood; The Elephant Man; Harvey; Curtains (Tony nomination, Best Direction of a Musical); The Little Dog Laughed (Lucille Lortel Award nomination); Twelve Angry Men (Tony Award and Drama Desk nominations); 1776 (Drama Desk, Outer Critics Circle, and Tony Award nominations); Company; and Steel Pier (Drama Desk, Outer Critics Circle, and Tony Award nominations) among many others. His off-Broadway credits include Gruesome Playground Injuries, The Understudy, Streamers, and The World Goes ’Round…The Songs of Kander and Ebb (Drama Desk Award and Outer Critics Circle nomination). Ellis was the executive producer for Showtime’s Weeds and has directed Modern Family, Nurse Jackie, The Good Wife, Hung, 30 Rock (Emmy nomination, Outstanding Directing for a Comedy Series), Desperate Housewives, The Closer, and Frasier. David Esbjornson is chair of the theater department at Rutgers University. His work as a director includes the Broadway debut and London West End production of Driving Miss Daisy. His

Biographies of Interviewees  189

work has also been seen at Signature Theatre, Guthrie Theater, Geffen Playhouse, Arena Stage, and the Gate Theatre in Dublin, among others. Esbjornson served as artistic director of Seattle Repertory Theatre from 2005 to 2008, where he directed and/or produced more than forty productions. He was also the artistic director with the Classic Stage Company (CSC) from 1992 to 1997. Esbjornson has helmed four “Fund for New American Plays” world premieres, including Angels in America: Millennium Approaches and the first staged presentation of  Perestroika by Tony Kushner at the Eureka Theatre;  Another Part of the House (after Lorca) by Migdalia Cruz at CSC; the trilogy New Music by novelist Reynolds Price at Cleveland Play House; and José Rivera’s Street of the Sun at Mark Taper Forum. Robert Falls has been the artistic director of Goodman Theatre in Chicago since 1986. During Falls’s tenure, the Goodman has received a Tony Award for Outstanding Regional Theatre and has been named by Time magazine as “America’s Number One Regional Theatre.” Falls’s Broadway and off-Broadway credits include Desire under the Elms; American Buffalo; Shining City; Long Day’s Journey into Night (Tony Award, Drama Desk Award); Elton John and Tim Rice’s Aida; Death of a Salesman (Tony Award, Drama Desk Award); subUrbia (Obie Award); On the Open Road; and The Speed of Darkness. His work has also been seen at the Williamstown Theatre Festival; Shakespeare Theatre Company; Stratford Shakespeare Festival; Lyric Theatre in London; Lyric Opera; Metropolitan Opera; Abbey Theatre; La Jolla Playhouse; and Guthrie Theater, among others. Falls is a past board president of Theatre Communications Group as well as a past artistic director of Northwestern University’s graduate directing program. Leigh Fondakowski was the head writer of The Laramie Project and has been a member of Tectonic Theater Project since 1995, where she is a teaching company member. She is an Emmy-nominated coscreenwriter for the adaptation of The Laramie Project for HBO and a cowriter of The Laramie Project: Ten Years Later. Other original plays (some of which have premiered under her direction) include: The People’s Temple, I Think I Like Girls, SPILL, and Casa Cushman. Fondakowski is a 2007 recipient of the NEA/TCG Theatre Residency Program for Playwrights,

190  Biographies of Interviewees

a 2009 MacDowell Colony Fellow, and a 2010 Imagine Fund Fellow at the University of Minnesota. Stories from Jonestown, her first work of creative nonfiction, was published by the University of Minnesota Press in 2013. Richard Foreman is the founder and artistic director of OntologicalHysteric Theater, for which he has written, directed, and designed more than fifty major productions in New York and Europe from 1968 to 1977.   He has received numerous awards for his achievements in theater, including nine  Village Voice Obie Awards; a Rockefeller Foundation Playwrights Grant; a Ford Foundation New American Plays Award; a MacArthur Fellowship; and an American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters Award in Literature. In 1988, he received one of the first Distinguished Artists Fellowships in Theater from the National Endowment for the Arts for his “significant contribution to the art form.” His plays and essays have been collected in the publications  Richard Foreman Plays and Manifestos (1976) and Reverberation Machines: The Later Plays and Essays (1985).  Michael John Garcés is the artistic director of Cornerstone Theater Company in Los Angeles. His recent directing credits there include California: The Tempest; Plumas Negras; Café Vida; Making Paradise; and 3 Truths, among others. His work has also been seen at Wilma Theater, Intersection for the Arts, Woolly Mammoth Theatre, South Coast Rep, needtheatre, and INTAR, among others. He is a recipient of the Rockwood Arts and Culture Fellowship; the Princess Grace Statue; the Alan Schneider Director Award; a TCG/New Generations Grant; and the Non-Profit Excellence Award from the Center of Non-Profit Management, and is a Southern California Leadership Network Fellow. Garcés is a company member at Woolly Mammoth, an alumnus of New Dramatists, and serves on the executive board of the Stage Directors and Choreographers Society. Michael Halberstam is the cofounder and artistic director of Writers Theatre in Glencoe, Illinois. He has directed more than thirtyfive productions for the company, including Not About Heroes, Private Lives, Look Back In Anger, Candida, The Father, Crime and Punishment, Benefactors, Seagull, and The Duchess of Malfi, among others. His work has also been seen at the Lincoln Center

Biographies of Interviewees  191

Theater, Milwaukee Repertory, San Jose Repertory, and Chicago Opera Theater. He is a recipient of 2010 Zelda Fichandler Award; the 2013 Artistic Achievement Award from the League of Chicago Theatres; and was named the Chicago Tribune’s 2013 “Chicagoan of the Year” for Theater. B. J. Jones is the artistic director of Northlight Theatre in Skokie, IL, where he commissioned and directed the world premieres of Chapatti, Stella & Lou, The Outgoing Tide (Jeff nomination, Best Director),  Better Late, and  Rounding Third.  He has directed productions at Steppenwolf Theatre Company, Center Stage, Actors Theatre of Louisville, Alliance Theatre, the Galway Arts Festival, Asolo Repertory Theatre, Second City, Intiman Theatre, and the Utah Shakespeare Festival. A two-time Jeff Award–winning actor, he has appeared on virtually every stage in Chicago, and his film and TV credits include The Fugitive; Body Double; Law and Order: Criminal Intent, Early Edition; Turks; Cupid; and The Untouchables. Michael Kahn is the artistic director of Shakespeare Theatre Company in Washington, DC. Since his appointment in 1986, Kahn has brought the theater into the national spotlight with productions that garnered him numerous awards, including multiple Helen Hayes awards for outstanding direction. From 1992 to 2006, he was the Richard Rodgers Director of the drama division of the Juilliard School, where he has been a leading member of the faculty since its founding in 1968. Anne Kauffman is an Obie Award–winning director who has directed for Soho Rep, Goodman Theatre, Playwrights Horizons, New York Theatre Workshop, Manhattan Theatre Club, Classic Stage Company, The Vineyard, The Public Theater, Rattlestick Playwrights Theatre, New Georges, Clubbed Thumb, Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company, American Conservatory Theater, American Repertory Theater, and Guthrie Theater. She is a program associate with Sundance Theatre Institute, a New York Theatre Workshop Usual Suspect, a member of Soho Rep’s artistic council, on the New Georges’ Kitchen Cabinet, an alumna of the Lincoln Center Directors Lab and the Drama League, a founding member of The Civilians, and an associate artist with Clubbed Thumb. Kauffman is a recipient of the Joan and Joseph F.

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Cullman Award for Extraordinary Creativity, the Alan Schneider Director Award, and several Barrymore awards. Moisés Kaufman is a Tony- and Emmy-nominated director, awardwinning playwright, Guggenheim Fellow, and founder of Tectonic Theater Project. Kaufman was a co-writer and director for The Laramie Project, which was called “one of the 10 best plays of 2000” by Time magazine and was nominated for the Drama Desk Award for Unique Theatrical Experience. Kaufman also directed the HBO film adaptation of the The Laramie Project. Other directing credits include I Am My Own Wife on Broadway (Obie Award for Direction, Tony, Outer Critics, Lucille Lortell, Drama Desk awards nominations); Macbeth (Shakespeare in the Park); Master Class with Rita Moreno (Berkely Repertory Theatre); This Is How It Goes (Donmar Warehouse); Lady Windermere’s Fan (Williamstown Theatre Festival); Women in Becket (Theater for the New City); Machinal; In the Winter of Cities; and The Nest. Brian Kulick is the former artistic director of Classic Stage Company (CSC) in New York and teaches directing for Columbia University’s graduate theatre program. His notable recent productions include Galileo, The Tempest, Hamlet, and Richard III, all at CSC. He commissioned and codirected poet Anne Carson’s award winning trilogy  An Oresteia.  From 1996 to 2001, Kulick was an artistic associate and then associate producer at The Public Theater where he directed Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, The Winter’s Tale, and Timon of Athens at the Delacorte Theater in Central Park and also A Dybbyk, Pericles, and Kit Marlowe  at The Public’s downtown home. His work has also been seen at New York Theatre Workshop, Playwrights Horizons, Mark Taper Forum, Berkeley Repertory Theatre, The Magic Theater, and McCarter Theatre.  Gregory Lehane is professor of drama and music at Carnegie Mellon University, where he has taught for two decades. His work has been seen in American regional theatres (including New York, where he was a founding member of Primary Stages Company), in Canada, and in Egypt, where he was a distinguished lecturer in drama at the American University in Cairo. He has directed television programs for NBC, ABC, CBS, PBS, TBS, Lifetime,

Biographies of Interviewees  193

Nickelodeon, USA, The Disney Channel, in London, and in France for worldwide syndication. He has been nominated for an Emmy for outstanding direction twice for the children’s series Shining Time Station, which featured Ringo Starr. Kenny Leon is a Tony Award–winning Broadway and film director and the cofounder and artistic director of True Colors Theatre in Atlanta, GA. His Broadway credits include the 2014 and 2004 revivals of A Raisin in the Sun (2014 Tony Award winner for Best Direction of a Play and Best Revival); The Mountaintop; Stick Fly; Fences (which garnered ten Tony nominations and won three Tony awards including Best Revival); Gem of the Ocean; Radio Golf; and Holler If You Hear Me. He currently serves as the Denzel Washington Chair at Fordham University. Padraic Lillis is a director, playwright, and the founding artistic director of The Farm Theater. Recently, Lillis was inducted into the Indie Theater Hall of Fame, was named an Indie Theater Person of the Year, and was awarded both the New York Innovative Theatre Award for outstanding direction and New York International Fringe Festival’s Overall Excellence Award for directing. His plays are published with Dramatists Play Services and Indie Theater Now. Kristin Marting is co-founder and artistic director of HERE Art Center in New York. Over the last twenty-five years, she has constructed twenty-seven stage works, including twelve original hybrid works, eight re-imaginings of novels and short stories, and seven classic plays. Marting has directed seventeen works at HERE and premiered plays at 3LD, Ohio Theatre, and Soho Rep. Her work has also toured to 7 Stages, Berkshire Theatre Festival, Brown, MCA, New World, Painted Bride, Perishable, UMass, Moscow Art Theatre, and Oslo. Marting was recently named a nytheatre.com Person of the Year for outstanding contribution and a Woman to Watch by ArtTable and honored with a BAX10 Award. She teaches creative producing at NYU and lectures at Bard, Brown, Columbia, Harvard, and Williams College, among others.  Meredith McDonough is the associate artistic director of the Actors Theatre of Louisville and currently serves on the board of the

194  Biographies of Interviewees

Society of Stage Directors and Choreographers. Her recent work at Actors Theatre includes The Last Five Years, Noises Off, The Whipping Man, brownsville song (b-side for tray), and The Delling Shore. Her work has also been seen at Marin Theatre Company, the Magic Theatre, Steppenwolf Theatre Company, and Williamstown Theatre Festival. Previously, McDonough was the director of new works at TheatreWorks in Palo Alto, CA, the associate artistic director of The Orchard Project, and the new works director for the National Alliance for Musical Theatre. Charles Newell is the artistic director of Court Theatre, the professional theater in residence at the University of Chicago, where he has served since 1994. His notable productions there include M. Butterfly, An Iliad, Tartuffe, Angels in America: Millennium Approaches and Perestroika, Porgy and Bess, and Caroline, or Change. Newell has also directed at Guthrie Theater, Arena Stage, John Houseman’s The Acting Company, the California and Alabama Shakespeare Festivals, The Juilliard School, and New York University. He is the recipient of the 1992 TCG Alan Schneider Director Award and is a multiple Joseph Jefferson Award winner/nominee. He served on the board of Theatre Communications Group as well as on several panels for the National Endowment for the Arts. Robert O’Hara is a director and playwright known for his work in New York, Washington, DC, Los Angeles, and Chicago. O’Hara has received the NAACP Best Director Award, the Helen Hayes Award for Outstanding New Play, and the Obie award and Oppenheimer award. As a playwright, his work includes Antebellum, Insurrection: Holding History, BootyCandy, and Down Low. He is currently an adjunct professor at New York University Tisch School of the Arts and the Mellon Playwright in Residence at Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company. Lisa Portes serves as the head of directing at the Theatre School at DePaul University and the artistic director of Chicago Playworks for Families and Young Audiences. Her work has been seen at Goodman Theatre, Steppenwolf Theatre Company, TimeLine Theatre, Playwrights Horizons, Soho Rep, New York Theatre Workshop, the Public Theater, the Flea Theater, the Sundance Theatre Lab, the Cape Cod Theatre Project, the Santa Barbara

Biographies of Interviewees  195

Theatre Lab, and the Eugene O’Neill Playwrights Conference, among others. Portes is a founding member of the Latina/o Theatre Commons (LTC) and coproduced the LTC Carnaval of New Latina/o Work in 2015. Julia Rhoads is the founding artistic director of Lucky Plush Productions in Chicago. She has created over twenty works with the company including eleven evening-length productions, several of which have toured extensively throughout the United States. Rhoads is the recipient of the 2013 Alpert Award in Dance; a fellowship from the Maggie Allesee National Center for Choreography; a Chicago Dancemakers Forum Lab Artist Award; a Cliff Dwellers Choreography Award; two Illinois Arts Council fellowships for choreography; a Jacob K. Javits Fellowship; and a 2014 Fractured Atlas Arts Entrepreneurship Award for her work with Creative Partners. She is currently a lecturer and dance adviser at the University of Chicago’s Department of Theater and Performance Studies. Kim Rubinstein is the head of undergraduate acting in the theatre and dance department at the University of California San Diego. Previously, she was Long Wharf Theatre’s associate artistic director where she directed Guys and Dolls, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Private Lives, Santaland Diaries, and The Cocktail Hour. Her work has been seen at Long Wharf Theatre, Shakespeare Santa Cruz, Portland Center Stage, San Jose Repertory Theatre, Chicago Shakespeare Theater, Next Theatre, Roadworks Productions, Running with Scissors, Round House Theatre, and Berkshire Theatre Festival. Rubinstein is a recipient of the TCG/NEA directing fellowship and was nominated for the Alan Schneider Directing Award, among other awards for her directing and teaching. Rude Mechs is an ensemble-based theatre collective operating with a company of twenty-eight members in Austin, TX. Since 1995, the company has created a mercurial slate of original theatrical productions that represent a genre-defying cocktail of big ideas, cheap laughs, and dizzying spectacle. Rude Mechs has received more than 180 local and national awards, created four OffBroadway premieres, and toured to top national venues such as the Walker Arts Center (Minneapolis, MN), the Wexner Center

196  Biographies of Interviewees

(Columbus, OH), and Woolly Mammoth (Washington, DC). Touring productions include Stop Hitting Yourself; Now Now Oh Now; The Method Gun; Get Your War On; How Late It Was; How Late; Cherrywood; and Lipstick Traces. Derrick Sanders is the founding artistic director of Congo Square Theatre Company and has had the pleasure of performing and directing across the globe. Recently, his work has been seen at Signature Theatre, the Kennedy Center, Minneapolis Children’s Theatre, Center Stage, and True Colors Theatre, among others. He was also a part of August Wilson’s world premiere productions of Radio Golf and Gem of the Ocean on Broadway and at the Huntington Theatre, Mark Taper Forum, and Goodman Theatre. Sanders was named the Chicago Tribune’s 2005 Chicagoan of the Year in Theater. Kimberly Senior is a resident director at Writers Theatre and an associate artist at TimeLine Theatre, both in Chicago. Her work has received multiple Joseph Jefferson Award nominations and has been seen on Broadway, Lincoln Center Theater/LCT3, Goodman Theatre, Steppenwolf Theatre Company, Writers Theatre, TimeLine Theatre, Northlight Theatre, La Jolla Playhouse, and City Theatre, among others. As an educator, Senior spent ten years as both an administrator and resident artist with Steppenwolf for Young Adults. Leigh Silverman is an Obie Award–winning and Tony Award– nominated director. She is currently vice president on the executive board of the Stage Directors and Choreographers Society. Her Broadway credits include Violet (Tony nomination), Chinglish, and Well. Her work has also been seen at Second Stage, Playwrights Horizons, Signature Theatre, Manhattan Theatre Club, the Public Theater, Berkeley Repertory Theatre, American Conservatory Theater, and Goodman Theatre, among others. Jessica Thebus is currently director of the graduate directing program at Northwestern University and an associate artist with Steppenwolf Theatre Company in Chicago. Her work has been seen at Goodman Theatre, Kansas City Repertory Theatre, Oregon Shakespeare Festival, Chicago Shakespeare Theater, Victory Gardens Theater, Lookingglass Theatre, and Writers

Biographies of Interviewees  197

Theatre, among others. She is also an artistic associate with The Corn Exchange in Dublin, Ireland and holds a PhD degree in performance studies from Northwestern University. Les Waters is the artistic director of Actors Theatre of Louisville. His productions have been seen in New York at The Public Theater, Second Stage, Manhattan Theatre Club, Connelly Theater, and Clubbed Thumb, and regionally at theatres such as Steppenwolf Theatre Company, Goodman Theatre, Yale Repertory Theatre, American Conservatory Theater, La Jolla Playhouse, and American Repertory Theater. In the last ten years, his shows have ranked among the year’s best in The New Yorker, The New York Times,  Time Out New York,  Time,  and  USA Today. He led the M.F.A. directing program at University of California, San Diego from 1995 to 2003; served as associate artistic director at Berkeley Repertory Theatre from 2003 to 2011; and is currently an associate artist of The Civilians. Mark Wing-Davey is the chair of the graduate acting program at Tisch School of the Arts at New York University. His work has been seen at the Manhattan Theatre Club, Lincoln Center, Playwrights Horizons, LAByrinth, Public Theater, Goodman Theatre, Yale Repertory Theatre, Berkeley Repertory Theatre, American Conservatory Theater, La Jolla Playhouse, Mark Taper Forum, London’s Royal Court Theatre, National Theatre, Edinburgh Festival, and many others in the United States and abroad. Committing much of his career to developing new plays, he has directed new work by Caryl Churchill, Sarah Ruhl, Amy Freed, Naomi Iizuka, José Rivera, Anna Deavere Smith, Tony Kushner, and Craig Lucas, among others. Robert Woodruff has directed over seventy productions at theaters including the Lincoln Center Theater, Public Theater, Brooklyn Academy of Music, American Conservatory Theater, Guthrie Theater, and Mark Taper Forum, among others. Internationally, his work has been seen at the Habimah National Theatre in Israel; The Sydney Arts Festival; Los Angeles Olympic Arts Festival; Edinburgh International Festival; Hong Kong Festival of the Arts; The Jerusalem Festival; Spoleto Festival USA; and Toneelgroep Amsterdam. From 2002 to 2007, he was the artistic director of the American Repertory Theater in Cambridge, MA.

198  Biographies of Interviewees

He is now on the faculty of the Yale School of Drama; previously he taught at Columbia University, Harvard University, and New York University. Chay Yew is the artistic director of Victory Gardens Theater in Chicago. He has directed world premieres by playwrights José Rivera, Naomi Iizuka, Kia Corthron, Julia Cho, David Adjmi, and Jessica Goldberg and performance artists Rha Goddess, Universes, Alec Mapa, Sandra Tsing Loh, and Brian Freeman. He is the recipient of the London Fringe Award for best playwright and best play; the George and Elisabeth Marton Playwriting Award; GLAAD Media Award; Asian Pacific Gays and Friends’ Community Visibility Award; Made in America Award; AEA/ SAG/AFTRA 2004 Diversity Honor; and Robert Chesley Award. As a playwright, Yew has had plays published under two titles: The Hyphenated American Plays and Porcelain and A Language of Their Own, by Grove Press.

B i bliog ra ph y

Aristotle. Poetics. Translated by Malcolm Heath. London: Penguin Books, 1996. Aristotle. Nicomachean Ethics. Translated by Terence Irwin. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing, 1999. Artaud, Antonin. The Theatre and Its Double. New York: Grove Press, 1958. Ball, David. Backwards and Forwards: A Technical Manual for Reading Plays. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1983. Ball, William. A Sense of Direction. Hollywood, CA: Quite Specific Media Group Ltd., 1984. Benedetti, Jean. Stanislavski and the Actor. New York: Routledge, 1998. Blin, Roger, Antonin Artaud, Victoria Nes Kirby, Nancy E. Nes, and Aileen Robbins. “Antonin Artaud in Les Cenci.” The Drama Review: TDR Vol. 16, No. 2, Directing Issue (1972): 90–145. Bloom, Michael. Thinking Like a Director, a Practical Handbook. New York: Faber and Faber, 2001. Bogart, Anne. A Director Prepares: Seven Essays on Art and Theatre. New York: Routledge, 2001. Brecht, Bertolt. Brecht on Theatre: The Development of an Aesthetic. Edited and translated by John Willett. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1957. Reprint: New York, Hill and Wang, 1964. Brook, Peter. The Empty Space. New York: Touchstone, 1968. Carnicke, Sharon Marie. Stanislavsky in Focus: An Acting Master for the Twenty-first Century. Oxon: Routledge, 1998. Reprint: Routledge, 2009. Clurman, Harold. The Fervent Years: The Story of the Group Theatre and the Thirties. New York: Knopf, 1945. Reprint: New York, First Harvest, 1975. Clurman, Harold. On Directing. New York: Macmillan Publishing, 1972. Edgar, David. How Plays Work. London: Nick Hern Books, 2009. Foreman, Richard. Unbalancing Acts. New York: Theatre Communications Group, 1992. Fuchs, Elinor. “EF’s Visit to a Small Planet: Some Questions to Ask a Play,” Theater Vol. 34, No. 2 (2004) 4–9.

200 Bibliography Goldhill, Simon. How to Stage Greek Tragedy Today. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 2007. Gorchakov, Nikolai. The Vakhtangov School of Stage Art. Translated by G. Ivanov-Mumjiev. Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1960. Grotowski, Jerzy. Towards a Poor Theatre. Edited by Eugenio Barba. Denmark: Odin Teatret, 1969. Reprint: New York: Routledge, 2002. Hauser, Frank, and Russell Reich. Notes on Directing. New York: RCR Creative Press, 2003. Hodge, Francis and Michael McLain. Play Directing: Analysis Communication, and Style. 7th Ed. Boston: Allyn & Bacon, 2010. Jory, Jon. Tips: Ideas for Directors. Hanover, NH: Smith and Kraus, 2002. Meyerhold, Vsevolod. Meyerhold on Theatre. Translated and Edited by Edward Braun. New York: Hill and Wang, 1969. Mitchell, Katie. The Director’s Craft: A Handbook for the Theatre. New York: Routledge, 2009. Schmidt, Paul, Ed. Meyerhold at Work. Translated by Paul Schmidt, Ilya Levin, and Vern McGee. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1980. Shakespeare, William. Shakespeare’s Comedies, Histories, and Tragedies, being a Reproduction in Facsimile of the First Folio Edition 1623 from the Chatsworth Copy in the Possession of the Duke of Devonshire, K.G. with an Introduction and Census of Copies by Sidney Lee. Oxford: At the Clarendon Press, 1902. June 30, 2015. http://oll.libertyfund.org/ titles/1111. Shakespeare, William. The Tempest. London: Bloomsbury Arden Shakespeare, 2011. PDF e-book. Sophocles. Antigone. Translated by Ruth Fainlight and Robert J Littman. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009. Stanislavski, Konstantin. An Actor’s Work. Translated and Edited by Jean Benedetti. Oxon: Routledge, 2008. Stanislavski, Konstantin. My Life in Art. Translated by J. J. Robbins. 1924. Reprint, New York: Routledge/Theatre Arts Books, 1996. Thomas, James. Script Analysis for Actors, Directors, and Designers. Burlington, MA: Focal Press, 2009. Vakhtangov, Yevgeny. The Vakhtangov Sourcebook. Translated and Edited by Andrei Malaev-Babel. New York: Routledge, 2011. Vaughn, Virginia Mason, and Alden T. Vaughn, Eds. Introduction to The Tempest by William Shakespeare. London: Bloomsbury Arden Shakespeare, 2011. PDF e-book. Wilder, Thornton. Our Town. 1938. Reprint, New York: Samuel French, 2013. Williams, Tennessee. A Streetcar Named Desire. 1947. Reprint, New York: Book-of-the-Month Club, Inc, 1994. Worrall, Nick. Modernism to Realism on the Soviet Stage. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989.

Inde x

500 Clown 124–5, 131–4

action 91–4, 152, 159–61; Aristotle on 4–6; Clurman, H. on 27–30; Collins, J. on 115, 128; dramatic structure and 45– 7; Falls, B. on 28; Stanislavsky, K. on 11–12; Vakhtangov, Y. on 20 Aristotelian analysis 6, 159–61; dramatic structure and 45–8 Aristotle 4–8; Nichomachean Ethics 6; Poetics 4–6 Artaud, A. 109–10 Aukin, D. 35, 50, 89 Ball, D. Backwards and Forwards 77–8, 92, 152 Ball, W. A Sense of Direction 61, 140 beat 11–12, 93–4 Bloom, M. 34 Bogart, A. 2, 54–7, 63, 121–2 Brecht, B. 23–6; on episodic theatre 24–5 Brook, P. The Empty Space 135 casting 77–86; breakdowns for 83–4 catharsis 6 Chambers, D. 51–2, 95–7 character: action and 5, 11–12; Aristotelian analysis of 6–8; bones of 77–9, 152; costume design and 75; devising work

and 122–3, 127–8, 133–4; dysfunction and 68–9; given circumstances and 9–11, 144–5; histories 81–2, 88; language use and 97–8; past productions and 54–7, 78–81; reading each out loud 51; relationship web 153–4; research and 51–3; spine 27–30; suffering of 153; supertask and 12 Chavkin, R. 58, 114–15, 125–8 Clurman, H. 26–30 Collins, J. 113–15, 122, 128, 130–1, 134–5 Columbus, C. 61–2, 88 conflict 14, 27–30, 51, 93–4, 98–100, 128, 156–7, 159–61 Cromer, D. 37, 53–4, 73, 78–9 Danzig, A. 124–5, 131–4 Danzig, L. B. 124–5, 132–4 design meetings 54–5, 59–66, 69–70, 71–2, 73–7, 147–52; devising and 112–13; 116, 130–1 director breakdown 25, 89, 149 dramatic pyramid see Freytag pyramid

edition comparison 48–50, 141–2 Elevator Repair Service see Collins, J. Ellis, S. 76 Esbjornson, D. 94 events 24–5, 71, 91–2, 149, 155–6

202 Index Falls, R. 28, 30, 36–7, 53, 88 first read 34–42, 139; dangers of 36–40 Fondakowski, L. 112–13, 122–3, 128–30 Foreman, R. 41 French scenes 28, 91, 148–9 Freytag pyramid 45–7 Fuchs, E. “EF’s Visit to a Small Planet” 70–1, 147–8 Garcés, M. 84–5 given circumstances 9–11, 72–4, 81–2, 87–91, 142–7 Goldhill, S. How to Stage Greek Tragedy Today 99 Graves, T. see Rude Mechs Grotowski, J. 110–11

Halberstam, M. 68–9 Hauser, F. and Reich, R. Notes on Directing 153 Ibsen, H. Hedda Gabler 63–5, 79–81 imitation 5–6 Jones, B.J. 51 Jory, J. 87, 93, 149–50

Kahn, M. 42–3, 74, 95 Kane, S. 4.48 Psychosis 6–8, 29–30, 73–4 Kauffman, A. 71–2, 83, 89–90, 96 Kaufman, M. 111–12, 122–3, 128–30 Kulick, B. 43–5, 61, 77, 93, 95, 102–3 language 94–105, 157–9; character use of 97–8; long speeches and 100–2, 158–9; punctuation and 102–5; word choice 48–9, 94–7; word play and 98–100; world creation through 96 Lehane, G. 59, 93–4 Leon, K. 37–40, 80 Lesley, L. see Rude Mechs

Lillis, P. 14 Lynn, K. see Rude Mechs

Marting, K. 116–18 McDonough, M. 82 Meyerhold, V. 15–18, 19 Mitchell, K. The Director’s Craft 36, 72–3, 87 moment chain 26, 149–50 Moscow Art Theatre 9, 15, 19, 22, 26 mystical reading 44–6 narrative see play, story of Newell, C. 48–50, 66, 91, 94–5 O’Hara, R. 65, 74–5

play: crime of 65, 75; end of 63–6, 92; general beauty of 61, 140–1; story of 24–5, 66–70; world of 70–4, 96, 147–8 Portes, L. 75, 83–4 punctuation 60, 102–5, 141–2, 158–9

research: devising and 91, 122–3; historical background 43–4, 51–2, 54–7, 72–3, 87–8, 91, 142–5; impulsive 57–9; past productions 53–7; playwright 52–3 rhetoric 100–2 Rhoads, J. 132–3 Rubinstein, K. 103–5 Rude Mechs 107, 116–20 Sanders, D. 46 scenic objectives 12, 93–4, 156–7 script versions see edition comparison Senior, K. 63–5, 79–81 Shakespeare, W. 42, 48–9, 61, 102–3, 151, 157–9; As You Like It 66–70; Hamlet 10, 77; Henry IV 74, 95; Romeo and Juliet 95–7; The Tempest

Index 203 44–5, 49, 93, 71, 141–2; The Winter’s Tale 95; Timon of Athens 120; Twelfth Night 58–59 Sides, S. see Rude Mechs Silverman, L. 40–2, 88, 97 Sophocles Antigone 98–9; Oedipus Rex 4–6 spine 27–30, 159–61 Stanislavski, K. 8–15, 19–20, 22, 26–9, 110; action 11–12; An Actor’s Work 9–15; given circumstances 9–11; My Life in Art 8–9; supertask 12–15 supertask 12–15, 27

TEAM, the 114–15, 125–8 Tectonic Theatre Project 111–13, 122–3, 128–30 Thebus, J. 66–70

The Group Theatre 26–7 The Theatre School at DePaul University 1, 3, 18–19, 53–4, 75, 76, 85, 120 Thomas, J. 51 Vakhtangov, Y. 19–22

Waters, L. 35, 43, 58, 62–3 Wilder, T. Our Town 15, 49–50, 52–4, 62–3, 90–1, 117, 141 Williams, T. A Streetcar Named Desire 6, 37–40, 45–7, 52, 72–3, 78–9, 81–2, 85, 87–8, 91–2, 97–8, 99–103, 142–7, 148, 150, 152–7, 160–1 Wing-Davey, M. 60 Woodruff, R. 7 Yew, C. 30, 48, 52–3, 90–1