The Art of Dramaturgy 9780300262384

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THE ART OF DRAMATURGY

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THE ART OF DRAMATURGY

anne cattaneo

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Copyright © 2021 by Anne Cattaneo. All rights reserved. This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, including illustrations, in any form (beyond that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public press), without written permission from the publishers. Yale University Press books may be purchased in quantity for educational, business, or promotional use. For information, please e-mail [email protected] (U.S. office) or [email protected] (U.K. office). Set in Minion and ITC Franklin Gothic type by Newgen North America. Printed in the United States of America. ISBN 978-0-300-233698 (hardcover : alk. paper) Library of Congress Control Number: 2020950229 A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper). 10

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There is no more serious praise for an artistically, intellectually creative person than when you can say of him: his contributions—evident to all, precisely known, clearly visible to his collaborators—were accomplished with personal anonymity. This does not mean that his personality or his personal life was colorless or without contours. It means that he was able to funnel all this color and contour into his life’s work, and in doing so render his personality equally transparent behind it. Characteristics that define, to a great degree, the essence and effectiveness of the successfully practicing dramaturg. —A toast to Kurt Hirschfeld, dramaturg of the Zurich Schauspielhaus, at a celebration for his sixtieth birthday in 1962

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CONTENTS

PREFACE: A DRAMATURG’S LIFE

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Introduction: What Is a Dramaturg?

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CHAPTER 1 Find Your Way In: Approaching a Great Classic for the First Time

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CHAPTER 2 Expand the Repertory: Discovering Archival Plays and Finding Their Audiences

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CHAPTER 3 Love and Encourage: Supporting a Playwright’s Work as It Develops Over a Lifetime

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CHAPTER 4 Reflect Light Back: Working with Actors and Framing How the Audience Sees a Play

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GUIDE YOUR AUDIENCE: THE COAST OF UTOPIA PROGRAM INSERTS 120

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CHAPTER 5 Create Work and Opportunities: Dramaturg-Created Productions and Programs

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CHAPTER 6 Step Across Time and Place: Cross-Cultural Investigation

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CHAPTER 7 Search Beyond the Words: Enacting the Unconscious

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CHAPTER 8 Appreciate New Forms and Styles

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CHAPTER 9 Deepen an Interpretation: A Classical Play Successfully Reimagined

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CHAPTER 10 See with New Eyes: Revisiting a Great Classic in Yet a New Way

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To a Young Dramaturg

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APPENDIX 1 A Dramaturg’s Toolkit

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APPENDIX 2 My 100 Interesting Things List: A Midsummer Night’s Dream in 1982

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APPENDIX 3 My 100 Interesting Things List: The Coast of Utopia in 2006–2007

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APPENDIX 4 My List of Images: The Coast of Utopia

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APPENDIX 5 A Syllabus for a Course on Classical Play Interpretation

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SUGGESTED READING 275 NOTES 277 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS 289 INDEX 291

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PREFACE A DRAMATURG’S LIFE

Like all dramaturgs, I’ve been a voracious reader across disciplines since I was young. I attribute this to the fact that I am a product of the California public school system. I graduated from high school at sixteen and I wasn’t eager to go to college. My parents arranged for me to live with a family in a small city in Germany—Karlsruhe—and attend a local Gymnasium, a German high school. My knowledge of German comes from this time, when few Americans were living abroad outside of European capital cities. I did not hear or speak English for over a year and was happily immersed in another culture and way of life. I returned to enter Mills College, a women’s college in Oakland, where I was a science major and took a few literature classes. By the end of my sophomore year—1968–69—with the Vietnam War at its height, HaightAshbury dissolving into chaos, and the Black Panther initiatives close by in Oakland disintegrating due to arrests and violence, I decided to leave again and return to Europe. For thirty years, Mills had been home to the great French composer Darius Milhaud, who was offered a professorship and a lovely faculty-village home on the Mills campus when he fled from France in 1940. His wife, Madeleine, ran the French department at Mills, and was the sister of the head of the comparative literature department at the Sorbonne. I met her distinguished brother when he visited Oakland late in the spring of my sophomore year, and he agreed to guide my studies at the Censier campus at the Université de Paris in the fall. I left for Europe in early June, got to Paris in September, and rented a small studio. When I arrived at his office on the appointed date, a receptionist told me he was no longer employed there. The événements de mai of 1968 the previous spring had precipitated his retirement over the summer. “Bonne chance,” she told me. Somehow, I passed the university’s four-hour general entrance exam in a vast room with several hundred other foreign students (I appeared to be the only American there), and I registered for a number of classes that focused on theater. I had left science behind: the days of 8:00 a.m. calculus class five days a week were over for me. In Paris, I took the great Molière ix

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class with hundreds of other students in a large amphitheater, taught by a professor who had been at the Sorbonne for decades. He taught the class geographically: we learned where Molière and his troupe lived and performed by street name and venue. I took a class on Baroque literature, and, most of all, I went to the theater. When I returned to Mills in my senior year, I could only graduate as a comp lit major: I had never taken a theater class. But the head of the small theater department at Mills took me and my newly discovered love of theater seriously and, in a life-changing move, arranged for me to assist Edward Hastings, the associate artistic director of San Francisco’s fabled American Conservatory Theater, then in its full glory under the leadership of William Ball. Ed was directing a brand-new play called Lemon Sky by a brand-new author, Lanford Wilson, in a student production at Mills during the fall of my senior year. Ed urged me to apply to graduate school and he hired me, right after Lemon Sky closed, as his part-time assistant at ACT. I had no idea what I could contribute to the theater. I had no interest in acting. I began writing weekly theater reviews for one of the San Francisco free papers, which was run out of a commune in the Haight. I had to drop off my copy, sit in a circle on the floor in the editorial meeting, and defend the revolutionary credentials of every play I was covering: not too difficult, as it turned out. From Molière to the Bread and Puppet Theater to Sam Shepard, they all challenged some aspect of their society’s rules. There were few graduate programs then for critics, and I applied and was waitlisted at the Drama School at Yale and began assisting Ed in rehearsals and helping him start a new play program at ACT, then a classical repertory company. I made an additional small salary keeping my head down doing piece work in the costume shop at ACT. I quickly found out that if you want to know every single thing going on in every part of a theater institution, learn to sew. I was happy my mother had taught me so well. It was a very exacting costume shop. It was at ACT that I learned the magic of an acting company, and also the ancient traditions of theater. In some measure, ACT might as well have been an English troupe from the nineteenth century: filled with theater lore, wild ambition, insanely grand gestures and tormented by superstition. The final performance that ended each season at its home at the Geary Theater closed with the entire company doing a walk-down curtain call of all the shows in the rep from the past year in full costume with the grand bows set to triumphant music from The Firebird and specially designed

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Russian lights suspended behind the teaser curtains cueing the elaborate bows. The ACT dressers showed what great dressers can do, racing to ready the changes as the actors saluted triumphantly, exited to the side, and ran back in the dark for another quick change. It was the highlight (and the hottest ticket) of the season. Except for the opening night parties. It was the peak of the Castro era and we lived in a world of strange extravagance. After a very late night at the Cockettes, I would drop my reviews at the newspaper commune, defend the outsider status of the playwrights, and head back to ACT. It was there I was first entrusted with the task of reading plays. I still recall the honor I felt when Ed gave me the manuscript of William Saroyan’s newest play. He was a famed California writer, in his later years, living down the coast. I didn’t like the play, and I still feel the sting of that feeling, and our subsequent rejection, so many decades later. I worked at ACT all spring and summer, and two weeks before the fall semester was to begin at Yale, one of the five admitted students in the dramatic literature and criticism doctoral program dropped out. I was offered the spot. I had no idea where New Haven was. I arranged a flight into the wrong airport. I spent three years in New Haven, where I met my husband and most of the people who are my closest friends today. At Yale I received an outstanding education in theater history, criticism, and the literature of theater. I was a mediocre student, often on warning, and I failed to engender even the tiniest bit of interest from the heads of my department there. One or two distinguished—and kind—visiting professors were occasionally curious about what I had to say. I passed my orals—this was a doctor of fine arts program—but I graduated without ever having had a single meeting about a potential dissertation. I never wrote one, though I tried to start researching on my own the summer after I graduated. There was no such thing as dramaturgy when I was at Yale. I have no memory of how I knew about the profession, but somehow, I did—perhaps from my year in Germany. In my final year I arranged a meeting with Howard Stein, the ever helpful dean of students, and tried to describe what dramaturgy was and how an upcoming Drama School production of Sean O’Casey’s strange play Cock-A-Doodle-Dandy, where Irish village girls dance wildly on the village green and grow horns, might benefit from a little background. The play was to be directed by the Group Theater and Broadway veteran Bobby Lewis, a highly anticipated and distinguished guest director. Howard arranged for me to meet Mr. Lewis on the morning of his first rehearsal. I arrived early and tried to explain what I wanted to do. I still remember him

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saying, as he gently pushed past me into the rehearsal room, “Darling, why don’t you run over to Sterling Library and do the research on this play and come back and see me on opening night?” That was the sum total of my experience with dramaturgy at Yale. After graduation, I had to earn a living. It was a goal of all the graduates to get to New York and try to gain a foothold in the theater. I interviewed and took a job at Briarcliff College, a women’s college about an hour north of New York City, where I was hired to create and single-handedly run a small theater department. I taught all the classes: in acting, directing, and theater literature, invited my Yale friends to give day-long seminars (I had a small budget), directed four plays a year in evening rehearsals, and had a full load of academic committee obligations. I left the city five days a week at eight in the morning and returned after midnight. My students from Briarcliff came into the city to perform with Robert Wilson. After a few years, academic life was wearing on me. I discovered that a male colleague, an exact contemporary, in the small music department, who had graduated with an MFA in composition from Juilliard the same month I had graduated with my MFA from Yale, was being paid a yearly salary a third larger than mine. I had wonderful colleagues, but I felt that if I didn’t quit, I would remain a teacher for the rest of my life. I quit. And a year later the school closed, as so many women’s colleges have done over the years. So there was no going back. I read in the then influential theatrical trade papers of one single job opening that I thought I was qualified for: the literary manager of the distinguished Off-Broadway Phoenix Theater, and I prepared carefully and with some desperation for my interview for this prestigious but not-toowell-paid position. I got the job, and happily remained there for five years, meeting a fellowship of other newly hired literary managers in sister theaters. I had joined the New York theater community. I shared a small room in a suite of offices in a high-rise overlooking Times Square (the posters on the wall included a production of The Seagull with Montgomery Clift from the early days of the Phoenix) with the theater’s casting director, who was also casting Miami Vice on TV during this time and working with the artistic directors of regional theaters seeking to hire well-known New York actors to star in their productions. This was not a match made in heaven— one job never stops talking on the phone, and one job tries to read and think. I worked on wonderful plays at the Phoenix by Wendy Wasserstein, Botho Strauss, Marsha Norman, Fay Weldon, Robert David MacDonald,

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Ron Hutchinson, and Stephen Poliakoff and created a new play development program (all the theaters had them) called Playworks, which brought to life Christopher Durang’s Beyond Therapy, Mustapha Matura’s Meetings, William Hamilton’s Save Grand Central, J. E. Franklin’s Under Heaven’s Eye, and many other new plays. After a change of artistic leadership a few years later, I felt it was time to move on. I went on unemployment. And I began a period of five or six years of freelancing both as a dramaturg and an adjunct teacher at New York University, the MFA program at Columbia, the Playwrights Horizons Theater School, the Graduate Theater Program at UC San Diego for two winter quarters, and I worked on plays at a variety of theaters, such as New York Theatre Workshop and the Public Theater’s Central Park venue, the Delacorte. I translated plays that were never produced for the Guthrie Theater and for Joseph Papp. I got a few translation grants. I wrote articles for The Village Voice, Seven Days Magazine, and other publications. I joined the board of directors of the newly formed HERE Arts Center as it sought to find a permanent home in Soho, and I was a board member for a number of years at INTAR Hispanic American Arts Center. That’s where I met María Irene Fornés, who ran her writing program there during that decade, and I once had dinner with the legendary tango composer Astor Piazzolla when he was doing a show at INTAR—highlights of the 1980s for me. I became the president of Literary Managers and Dramaturgs of the Americas (LMDA) and created a new initiative where the leadership was decentralized and put into the hands of dramaturgs from six regions of the United States and Canada. I started the Script Exchange at LMDA, where five times a year, dramaturgs from theaters around the United States recommended new plays they admired that their own theaters couldn’t or wouldn’t produce. Each play was enthusiastically described, with a cast of characters count and a way to contact the new writer. Usually a home address. The Script Exchange was circulated to all our member theaters. LMDA also became the home of the first National Theater Translation Project, which was administered out of its offices. I became interested in how the arts are funded, and during this decade I participated in many panels for the National Endowment for the Arts Theater Program, lobbied for the NEA in its time of trial, and traveled widely to see plays across the country as a part of that work. I was a great admirer of the grants-maker Gerald Freund, who thought up the MacArthur Awards and created the Rona Jaffe women’s early career fiction award, the Whiting Awards, one of the very

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first grants for emerging writers—now so widely imitated—and the Lillian Gish Prize. He involved me in several of these programs on occasion. I created an evening of plays for the Acting Company and toured and did press for this first, highly successful project, which was called Orchards. And I got a job as the part-time literary manager of Second Stage Theater, then at its ninety-nine-seat theater on Seventy-eighth Street on the Upper West Side. The theater had a small (with the exception of its excellent receptionist) all-female staff, and we still meet for lunch twice a year—our friendship of many decades unchanged. One day, Rosa Vega, the managing director, was bemoaning the meager results of that year’s newly launched subscription drive. “Why can’t everyone just take a hundred flyers and hand them out on the street?” she said. All five of us. And me only a very part-time employee. But I took an armful on my way home and handed them out at the top of the stairs at the Seventy-second Street subway station. Up the stairs came a man I had met casually a decade earlier at the Phoenix when he came to New York to hire his leading actors for the Goodman Theatre in Chicago, Gregory Mosher. “What are you doing in the subway handing out brochures?” he asked me. “I haven’t seen you in years. I’ve just gotten a new job. I’m moving to New York to run Lincoln Center Theater. Why don’t you come see me?” How do you get a job as the dramaturg of Lincoln Center Theater? Hand out the brochures.

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THE ART OF DRAMATURGY

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introduction what is a dramaturg?

Early in my career as a dramaturg, I rehearsed a play on a very high floor of a building on the corner of Forty-second Street and Broadway in a studio rented by the New York Theatre Workshop. The play I was working on was a devised piece created from testimony from the House Un-American Activities Committee hearings. On the weekends, when rehearsals broke in the early evening, I remember having to be escorted out of the building and into the subway to wait for the number 1 train. The trash-strewn, crimeridden center of Manhattan was so dangerous in the 1970s that it was unwise to walk alone on the street. Times Square’s future, soon to come, was unimaginable. It was orchestrated by a small consortium of women led by Cora Cahan, Rebecca Robertson, and Marian Heiskell, who formed an organization called the New Forty-second Street, and they were joined by the powerful commercial real-estate broker Mary Ann Tighe. Together, they jump-started the transformation of the area with a gorgeously renovated historic theater dedicated to children’s programming, Disney Theatricals ensconced on the south side of Forty-second Street, and a state-of-the-art, sunlight-filled rehearsal-studio high-rise gestating productions from all over the city. The offices of Condé Nast soon moved to this new location in the once-depressed area. Not long after, a remarkable book was published: The Experience of Place, by architectural historian Tony Hiss. The book explored the many factors—spatial, historical, emotional, sense-based—that contribute to our perception of place. Written in 1990, The Experience of Place, which was widely read, chronicled Times Square’s radical renovation. The focus of the

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INTRODUCTION 2

book is how the seedy and rundown area, scarred by crime and neglect, was reconceived and rebuilt to regain its status as the legendary neon-lit crossroads of the world. Thirty years after its publication, the book remains distinctly unorthodox. It is not, strictly speaking, a history of the area and how it was changed. The author’s perceptions of place encompass physical sensations of sun and wind. They embrace the traces that remain of the district’s history and the buildings and memorials that ever more faintly mark it. As the area begins to change, Hiss hopes that this three-dimensionality of space, time, and memory will be noted and retained in its new design, so that what made Times Square unique can be preserved in its new skin. To him, place always has a three-dimensional character. The images of new buildings designed on an architect’s drafting board are only the first steps in planning an environment. The psychic sense we have of home: of sky, wind, crowds, and noise in a neighborhood in a city we’re familiar with, as well as our sense of a past we remember there, are as important as the physical space itself. To preserve the essence of place calls for a journey into many dimensions. Taking into account all the planning agencies and commercial interests working to bring about the transformation of Times Square, Hiss notes: The managements of privately owned public areas, like theme parks and shopping malls, see the maintenance of such areas as a routine part of day-to-day operations. At Disneyland, for example, no piece of trash spends more than fifteen minutes lying on the street. But so far there is no watchdog group to act full-time as the vigilant guardian of the experience of a public area not under single ownership. There is one analogous development in the theater, where the director and the actors are sometimes supplemented by a dramaturge. While the actors think about their parts and the director concentrates on shaping a performance, the dramaturge looks out for the play itself, and makes sure no one moves away from what the playwright originally had in mind. I am always delighted when people in other fields know of my profession— as Hiss, surprisingly, did back then. And the comparison between the work of city planners, architects, and dramaturgs is not as far-fetched as it might seem at first glance. I’m nostalgic for the awkwardness I once felt about the early spelling of the word, “dramaturge.” (It took thirty years for the final ‘e’ to be removed from the New York Times style guide so the American spell-

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INTRODUCTION 3

ing could be used in their theatrical listings.) I embrace wholeheartedly the complexity of the dramaturg’s task as described by Hiss: preserving history, working with many undoubtedly imperious, talented, and complicated individuals and organizations, as well as keeping an eye out for the sensory, three-dimensional quality of the actual experience of being in Times Square. These closely resemble the tasks of a dramaturg in a theater setting as she reads words on a page and hopes to imagine how they will resonate in three dimensions, spoken by actors to an audience in a very specific place in a future time. We too share the challenge of understanding something that exists initially in two dimensions like a ground plan or, for us, a play script. Our abilities lie in being able to imagine how the plan will translate into the three-dimensional space where others (we theater people fondly call them “civilians”) will experience it. To a knowledgeable architect, a ground plan of a cathedral with specifications of materials and site will eventually translate into a sensual experience of transcendence and awe at its scale and light, if that’s the desired goal. Or conversely, a building’s plan might convey a feeling of shelter, closeness, and constraint. Or a futuristic feeling, or a reference to a specific historical era. Or it might create a new kind of living space or community or a novel interaction with surrounding buildings. A new conversation. A new context. There is nothing more exciting than creating a thrilling and unique environment. Just as there is nothing like sitting in the audience of a powerful play successfully realized in a new way on stage. But, memorably, this experience is not replicable: it lives in a unique moment in time, and many hearts beat together for one night alone at each performance. The electric synchronicity engendered between the audience and the stage is what has kept our art form alive for two thousand years. In the fifth century BCE, citizens of Athens gathered each year in an open-air theater to cement the bonds of the city—the “polis”—and reinforce its newly forged democratic form of government. A vast cross-section of the citizenry of Elizabethan and Jacobean London attended plays together in great numbers (it’s astonishing that the original Globe Theatre seated somewhere in the neighborhood of two thousand spectators—in a city whose population in 1600 was only 165,000 inhabitants). In more recent times, the bond between the Group Theater’s actors and its Depression-era audiences of recent immigrants was apparent as they echoed back the cry of “Strike!” to Elia Kazan on stage in Waiting for Lefty, by Clifford Odets. And the classic Rodgers and Hammerstein musicals of the 1950s, together with the plays of Arthur

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INTRODUCTION 4

Miller and Tennessee Williams, illuminated to rapt audiences the changing character of our country after World War II. In more recent times, Angels in America, the works of August Wilson, and Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton all exemplify the powerful, in-the-moment, communal connection that has kept the art form alive. If you’ve seen these plays, you know what this experience feels like. The feel of a powerful audience-stage synchronicity is what all theater aspires to. Playwright Ayad Akhtar refers to this aspect of the shared theater experience as “the act of gathering to witness the myths of our alleged origins enacted—this is the root of the theatre’s timeless magic.” Neuroscientists recently discovered that watching live theater can synchronize the heartbeats of an audience. One of the researchers put it this way: “Experiencing the live theater performance was extraordinary enough to overcome group differences and produce a common psychological experience.” Googling the term “Motor Neurons” opens another portal through which to explore the process whereby humans and animals sync their emotions and responses when they are present together in the same space. Theater is an ancient and unique hybrid: it’s created collectively and grows to include an audience that wants to be a part of the experience. But its first component must always be the fearless expression of individual artists. If their impulses are censored or second-guessed, their investigation will be limited, and the power of the work will be compromised. The opportunity to express one’s feelings freely, to harness them to a collective that is striving to transform them into art, is what gives the theater its special place. You don’t lose yourself in the ensemble—or the audience—you find yourself. And you find others with you along the way: other artists and, hopefully, a larger community who come to the theater and discover and connect to the work. Two decades ago, in a highly prescient annual report to the board of directors of Teachers College at Columbia University, then-president Arthur Levine noted four newly noteworthy characteristics of undergraduate populations, which were contributing to an increasing sense of division on campuses across the country. There are large divisions between college students, which are exacerbated by four characteristics of current undergraduates. . . . First, they think of themselves in terms of their differences rather than their commonalities. . . . The second characteristic that stands out is

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INTRODUCTION 5

mitosis among students. Their differences are becoming larger and more significant. . . . The third characteristic is a separation between students based upon their differences. Walk into almost any college cafeteria and you find that students are sitting at tables with people of the same ethnicity, race, or difference they find important. The fourth characteristic is a sense of victimization. That is, a belief that someone on campus is getting something I am not, and I am being made to pay the cost for providing that thing. There are two very interesting exceptions—athletes and students in theater. These are groups in which students must get past their differences if they are to work effectively. Everyone who has worked on a play, or played on a sports team, will recognize the truth of this observation. In addition, the makeup of a professional theatrical collaboration is a mirror to a cross-section of society in terms of the participants’ income, education, and class. Actors work with their dressers; designers with the scene and costume shops and the skilled staffs who realize their designs; stage managers and directors rely on their backstage crews; producers depend on front-of-house managers and their staffs of ushers, porters, and security, as well as publicity, production and marketing departments, fundraising and box office personnel. If you pause a technical rehearsal on Broadway or at a regional theater and ask everyone in the house to come onto the stage and stand together across the proscenium, a genuine cross-section of society will be represented, working toward a common end. In his introduction to the “50 Years of Theater at Lincoln Center” issue of the Lincoln Center Theater Review, artistic director André Bishop put it this way: Our theater is never closed. Engineering crews watch the building in the night, cleaners start their shifts at 4 a.m., our backstage crews often arrive at 8 a.m. to begin their work maintaining the lighting instruments and sets prior to rehearsal, and the wardrobe staff comes in to wash and iron the costumes from the previous night’s performances. The administrative staff arrives at 10 a.m. along with the stage managers and the actors and directors working on upcoming productions in our underground rehearsal rooms. Hopeful actors arrive to audition for our casting department for future shows. By early evening, rehearsals have ended and our front-of-house staff arrives with the running crews for 7:30 half hours, and, finally our loyal audiences—fourteen hundred people every night—pour in. They come

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INTRODUCTION 6

on foot, and by subway and taxi, arriving just in time for curtain. The shows begin and afterwards the actors linger to greet visitors at the stage door, and the engineers start to shut the building down until another day begins. We live in a world where roles are carefully defined, rules of interaction are handed down as gospel, and training is required to enter the profession. This was not the case for the Provincetown Players, or the members of the Group Theater, or so many others who came before. What remains constant is the fluid, selfless work that is required by a troupe to lift a play from the page to a fully realized production. Creating an environment where a group of collaborators can contribute individual ideas and impulses without fear of censure, with acceptance and understanding, is the essence of the art of theater. It’s why film actors come back to the stage. It’s the process that is the great lure for artists at all points in their careers. This environment is created in rehearsal today by the director, but it has existed throughout history in many different configurations. The connectivity also extends, after the rehearsal period, to include the audience. I think for most theater people, this ideal of collaboration and community is one of the primary reasons we enter the profession. And, of course, we’re devoted to the plays we work on and love. “The only response to greater genius,” wrote Goethe, “is love.” Goethe also wrote: “We are shaped by what we love.” It may seem unusual to speak of love in a book about dramaturgy, but emotion is a most comfortable arena for theater people, and in the guided expression of emotion lies the power of theater. The emotions theater artists explore in safe rehearsal spaces with trusted circles of collaborators are often dark ones. The strength of dramatic art is that it is not afraid to deal with the most difficult conflicts in life. The root of the word “protagonist” is the Greek agon, or struggle. The Chinese-language character for the word “theater” is an abstracted depiction of two people fighting. Every positive objective needs an obstacle to reveal it, we learn in Acting 101. “Every real effigy has a shadow, which is its double,” says Antonin Artaud in his influential and useful book The Theater and Its Double. The power of the words and the worlds the theater explores can emerge from a safe collaborative circle. Crafting that space is the job today of the director with the aid of a supportive producing organization. Plays can be rehearsed and emerge from rehearsals where everyone is watching their backs and doing what they already know how to do well;

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INTRODUCTION 7

but the experience of bringing them to life will be a selfish and unhappy one. Mastery of one’s role, together with the confidence to loosen one’s area of control and expertise, can lead to a great production. And a series of important productions can lead to the creation of an entire theater, and a change in the kind of work that is made—a forward step in the evolution of playwriting and theater history that attracts a new audience eager to be present and hear the news. Though many of the plays cited throughout this book are now classics, they were once submissions to fledgling theaters that had the foresight to engage with them. These plays are now in the dramatic canon, read, revived, and taught regularly around the country, and beloved by audiences. This order of things hasn’t changed in two thousand years. I recognize that the prescient words of Arthur Levine about the collectivity of the theater-making experience might seem idealistic or even problematic today in a world where young artists are conscious of their differences although still eager to know how to collaborate constructively with individuals from other backgrounds. And rightfully cautious about how to approach material that is outside of their personal experience. Can one just jump in, collaborate, speak one’s mind, and express one’s feelings in a group in rehearsal? Or will only certain voices feel free to participate and be welcome in the room? This will be a challenge that requires a decision for each individual production. I have pondered the implications of the new world we live in right now and its impact on how theater productions are created. In my experience, creative theater rehearsals aspire to the notion of collectivity Levine evoked so long ago now. I will share in a footnote a series of questions I pose to the directors who join us each summer in the Directors Lab. I hope they are useful for anyone who is facing these challenges today. My life in the theater has focused on collaboration. I believe that artists of different backgrounds, nationalities, training, and sensibilities can find common ground; I feel that the investigation of a play is richer as a result of a process that takes diversity into account. And I believe it has been ever thus. Artists find common ground by working out and through their different approaches and opinions and feelings, ultimately creating together a rich mixture of voices that resonates with many kinds of spectators. And dramaturgs have been a part of this work for hundreds of years. The profession of dramaturg, as a job per se, was first noted in the mideighteenth century when the classical German Enlightenment playwright Gotthold Ephraim Lessing took up the challenge of recommending an

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INTRODUCTION 8

Portrait of Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (1729–1781), painting by Anton Graff, 1771 (Art collection of the University of Leipzig, Germany)

innovative repertory of plays to the newly created Hamburg National Theatre. This predates the first mention of the role of the director in theater by almost a century. So strictly speaking, the official role of the dramaturg is older than that of the director. But on the other hand, this is nonsense. From the time the theater began, someone always directed, and someone always did the dramaturgical work on a production. Back before the titles of director and dramaturg existed, in a sixteenth-century Commedia dell’Arte troupe, who chose the comic bits of “lazzi” and organized the story line? Who staged the plays of Shakespeare and chose the few scenic effects needed to realize them? In this fluidity lies the glory of theatrical collaboration. When the role of actor-manager in the nineteenth-century theater transformed into the twentieth-century jobs of director and artistic director, the first individuals who worked as what we today call dramaturgs

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INTRODUCTION 9

or literary managers appeared in the U.S. John Corbin was America’s first literary manager, working under that title from 1908 to 1910 at the New Theatre on Central Park West and Sixty-second Street, only three blocks from today’s Lincoln Center campus. The business manager of this theater was Lee Shubert. At the American Laboratory Theatre, Francis Fergusson supported the vision of Richard Boleslavsky and Maria Ouspenskaya. The Theatre Guild in New York and Pennsylvania’s Hedgerow Theatre hired people to read plays and oversee commissioning programs early in the century. A decade later, Harold Clurman worked in this same capacity at the Group Theatre with Elia Kazan, Lee Strasberg, Luther and Stella Adler, Clifford Odets, and Irwin Shaw. Clurman, who began his career as a play reader for the Theatre Guild, was known for lecturing the members of the Group Theater—sometimes for days—on the intricacies of each play they were rehearsing. He was the primary stage director as well as, later, drama critic for The Nation and the New Republic. Clurman’s lectures during the Group Theater’s early days were essentially the dramaturgical work of placing the plays that the Group was developing (such as the early plays of Clifford Odets, like Waiting for Lefty and Awake and Sing!) in the context of what the Group, as a theater, was trying to achieve, and defining the style of performance and staging that would be needed to realize them. This is a model of dramaturgy later practiced by a number of dramaturgy departments in German theaters of the 1960s and ’70s, such as Peter Stein’s Schaubühne am Halleschen Ufer. In the United States, Arthur Ballet’s Office for Advanced Drama Research, based at his home at the University of Minnesota in the 1960s, allowed him to become the dramaturg of the entire nation as the first grants from the Ford Foundation Program in the Humanities and the Arts established regional theaters across the country. The focus on new work (instead of the classics) in the repertory of these fledgling institutions was in some measure influenced by the plays Ballet sent to their very first, newly appointed artistic directors. Todd London, former artistic director of New York’s New Dramatists and a well-known theater journalist, author, and commentator, assembled a book titled An Ideal Theater: Founding Visions for a New American Art, which brought together almost fifty founding mission statements of American theaters from the end of the nineteenth century until the present. Some of them are still flourishing. Many of them were once influential but their groundbreaking work is now forgotten. Each theater was founded

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INTRODUCTION 10

by a group of artists with a specific vision—artistic, political, regional— exactly as theaters of all kinds are founded today by so many young artists. The members of each theater in London’s book took the time to assess a vision that included a way of working, a repertory, and an intended audience. It’s striking how familiar the challenges remain over time, in different traditions and communities. At the beginning of the previous century, there was a lively debate about creating a national theater in England. The leading practitioners of the day participated in the discussion, among them George Bernard Shaw, William Archer, and Harley Granville-Barker. The position of literary manager, following the German model, was recommended for the future institution. When the National Theatre (today renamed the Royal National Theatre) was finally created in 1962, in a brilliant artistic moment in English theater, two dramaturgs played important roles in the theater scene of that time. Kenneth Tynan, whose early critical appreciation of writers such as John Osborne, Harold Pinter, and Joe Orton helped redefine postwar English theater, was brought to the National Theatre by Sir Laurence Olivier in 1963, and he introduced numerous cutting-edge contemporary plays into the primarily classical repertory. Tynan also encouraged Olivier to undertake roles he had not played before or was reluctant to play. Another example of the power of dramaturgical thinking in this era was Jan Kott’s study Shakespeare Our Contemporary published in 1964. It was the primary influence behind Peter Brook’s groundbreaking production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, which brought Shakespeare into the age of Beckett. Although Kott also worked in rehearsals with Brook, it was his ideas about Shakespeare that provided the dramaturgical impulse behind Brook’s 1970 production, as well as much of his later work. Bertolt Brecht began his professional career in Berlin working as a dramaturg for Max Reinhardt at the Deutsches Theater, where he nurtured new writers such as Marieluise Fleisser and prepared his own adaptations of classic plays (which were not produced as often as he would have liked). Brecht was not happy in a dramaturg’s role: he wanted all the theaters he collaborated with to produce plays that he alone suggested or wrote, supported by his own theories of what came to be defined as Epic Theater. Only much later, after the war, at his Berliner Ensemble, did he gain the control he needed to achieve these goals. And unfortunately, he had only a few short years there before his death in 1956 to program the plays he wanted to produce, as well as find the kind of actors who could realize

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INTRODUCTION 11

them in the Berliner Ensemble’s unique style of acting. Erwin Piscator, a colleague and rival of Reinhardt’s from Berlin who came to the United States as a refugee during World War II and founded the drama department at the New School for Social Research (where he trained actors such as Marlon Brando, Elaine Stritch, Tony Randall, Eli Wallach, Bea Arthur, Harry Belafonte, Tony Curtis, Ben Gazzara, Judith Malina, Walter Matthau, and Rod Steiger), worked often with dramaturgs, including Brecht, early in his career. Kurt Hirschfeld, dramaturg of the Zurich Schauspielhaus from the early 1930s until well after World War II, was responsible during this difficult time for introducing virtually the entire contemporary European repertory—Miller, Sartre, Wilder, O’Neill, Anouilh, Elliot, Williams, Ionesco, Osborne, Pirandello, Lorca, and Giraudoux—as well as discovering and encouraging two new authors from his own country, Max Frisch and Friedrich Dürrenmatt, who would become world renowned. When modern writing and art were banned in the 1930s by Hitler, Franco, Mussolini, and Stalin in countries across the European continent, England and Switzerland were the sole refuge for censored work. In 1933, the young Hirschfeld fled Germany to become the dramaturg of what had been essentially a boulevard theater in Zurich, Switzerland. He created there a remarkable Eden for forbidden work. As a Jewish exile, he was unable to take the reins publicly. The previous director remained nominally in charge. But as dramaturg, he quickly offered employment to many theater artists who were fleeing Germany during the 1930s, creating one of the greatest German-speaking acting ensembles of all time and saving many artists from deportation or certain death. The Zurich Schauspielhaus went on to produce the world premieres of Brecht’s Mother Courage, The Good Person of Setzuan, The Life of Galileo, and Puntila, which Hirschfeld also directed, along with countless contemporary new writers and plays from England and the United States, countries at war with the Axis during these years. He commissioned plays such as The Visit of the Old Lady by Friedrich Dürrenmatt and Andorra, by Max Frisch, the latter following the story of a boy whose identity is defined, by others and by himself, by his Jewishness until it is revealed at the end that he is in fact not Jewish. After the war, Frisch’s play The Firebugs, a brilliant parable about the rise of fascism, was created for the Schauspielhaus at Hirschfeld’s initiative. These examples can suffice for now to give an outline of what I call the “micro” and “macro” aspects of a dramaturg’s work. The “micro” is an

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INTRODUCTION 12

initial focus on the first order of business, which is the play. Finding it, reading it, and then supporting its realization as it is brought into a theater where it can find the collaborators it needs. Each play needs an appropriate style of acting, a fresh relationship with an audience (perhaps even the creation or discovery of its ideal audience), the specific stage architecture in which the play can be realized, as well as the collaborators who can design the scenery, costumes, and lights and write the music it requires. In general, we could call this the discovery of the play’s style. And then from the micro to the macro: the central undertaking is taking the play from the page to the stage for an eventual audience that responds as powerfully as we know it’s possible to do. Voilà a new Times Square. Let’s keep the vision of the dramaturg as imagined by Tony Hiss in mind. What will be the experience of standing in this newly reenvisioned Times Square? I’ve participated in this effort for four decades using several titles: literary manager of the Phoenix Theater and, later, at Second Stage, dramaturg of the Acting Company and, for many years now, dramaturg of Lincoln Center Theater. In my view, dramaturg and literary manager are identical jobs: the billing is created by management or boards of directors. I’ve read articles where people attempt to divide and define—literary management refers to work outside the rehearsal room, dramaturgy inside it—but these distinctions have never made any sense to me. Literary manager or literary adviser is a more common term in the United Kingdom, though this is changing now too. I have always preferred the title of dramaturg— primarily because no one knows exactly what it means. And that means I can do anything I decide should fit under the umbrella of dramaturgy. From the micro of reading a play to the macro of creating an evening of theater myself; to starting a lab for young stage directors or working on audience outreach to bridge the distance between what the artists on stage are creating and how the work is received. It may entail writing program notes that will point curious audience members to additional material about the play’s subject, or creating helpful lobby displays or moderating in-person colloquia with artists from the production whom audiences are curious to meet. Dramaturgy offices in European theaters produce elaborate “Program Books,” often lavishly illustrated, which chronicle the process of investigating and rehearsing the play, so that audiences can share the artistic journey of the play’s collaborators: what they were looking at, discussing, and thinking as the play was rehearsed. These are often for sale in theater lobbies. In the United States, perhaps the best example is the

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INTRODUCTION 13

book Hamilton: The Revolution, by Lin-Manuel Miranda and Jeremy McCarter, from 2016. At Lincoln Center Theater, I oversee, with playwright John Guare, a literary magazine that relates the concerns of the plays we produce to the intellectual, literary, and political life of our city and country—thereby taking the plays out of the realm of entertainment alone. To circle back, dramaturgy is a job that keeps the whole in mind. It connects people. It provides information. It can be useful wherever it is needed. As a dramaturg, the question I’m most frequently asked is how to read a play and imagine the dimensions that lie behind the words on the page. How can I see from a theatrical ground plan what an actual evening of theater can be? The job of reading a play and digging into the wellsprings of its power is, of course, shared by everyone who works on a play in production: actors first of all, and then directors and designers. Good actors don’t just count lines (although they do that first!) but use their own tools to understand the power of presence and silence as well as the dialogue in the play, especially new and unique dialogue. They know that a first and simple test of a play script is to take away the title page and still be able to recognize who wrote it. A David Mamet play will easily withstand this test. So will an August Wilson play, or a Sam Shepard play, or a Tina Howe play, or one by Ntozake Shange. You can do this easily with classical plays from the Greek writers through Shakespeare and his contemporaries, right up to the work of Eugene O’Neill, Samuel Beckett, or Edward Albee. The syntax of the dialogue, the movement of the action is in each case unique. When too many plays sound the same, it’s time to do something about this and make a program that will expand the range of voices writing for the theater. Dramaturgs are well placed to encourage writers of more singular gifts. Encouraging playwrights, “keeping the whole in mind,” reading plays, as well as so many of the other aspects of a dramaturg’s work, are not new tasks. They have existed from the time theater began. Someone always did these things. The collaborative work of creating a theatrical production has remained, in my view, constant. And this collaborative work is the singular joy of making a life in the theater. And it’s alive in theaters large and small. Theatre Communications Group, the organization that represents not-for-profit American theaters, currently tracks more than 1,750 theaters working across the United States. In 2003, Time magazine noted, “There were just 23 [regional theaters] in 1961, when the first national organization of nonprofit theaters was formed; today there are 1,800.” At the time of the Ford Foundation

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INTRODUCTION 14

grants in the 1960s, which created the regional theater movement, only 5 percent of the American population had ever visited a theater. America is a nation of immigrants, without a long theater-going tradition. This has changed remarkably quickly. Today, smaller cities with a university presence, a locally-sourced food scene, a forward-looking industry or employer in town, affordable real estate, and a vibrant cultural scene are flourishing. The stories told in the Times Squares of each newly reenvisioned city need to be written by writers from these communities to encourage voices from these many places to be heard, as it was when the regional theaters were first built half a century ago. In addition to new work, there are countless existing plays waiting to be performed, “lost” plays to be rediscovered, reinterpreted, and made newly relevant to what is happening in each part of the country today. How is this work done? Who creates the ground plan and how is it brought to life? My first professional job in New York theater was as the literary manager of the distinguished Phoenix Theater, one of the first Off-Broadway theaters, whose repertory changed periodically from producing new plays, to American play revivals, to classical plays on Broadway for a time. In the late 1970s, its mission was producing world premieres of new American and international plays. I’m pretty sure I got the job (and luckily so, because it was one of a very few available at that time) by coming to my interview with three complete seasons of possible new plays, and the directors I thought could direct them. The play ideas and the directors came from my own theater-going downtown and my time living abroad as a student. The artistic director had never worked with any of these artists. And so it was the work of others, and it was advocacy, that gave me my start. It’s not a coincidence that the profession of dramaturg arose in the United States in the 1970s. This time coincided with the establishment of the regional theater movement, which in fact actually had a distinctly regional character. And it happened by fortune to coincide with a groundswell of new American playwriting. Chicago was represented on stage by Lorraine Hansberry, David Mamet, and Steve Tesich. Philadelphia was home to Albert Innaurato, Bill Gunn, and Charles Fuller. Sam Shepard set his plays in California, as did David Henry Hwang early in his career. Lanford Wilson, Adrienne Kennedy, and August Wilson wrote of the Midwest, and Horton Foote, Beth Henley, and Samm-Art Williams of the South. All these and many, many other plays, whose writers were without agents (there were no agents representing plays except for Audrey Wood in the rarified Broad-

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INTRODUCTION 15

way realm), poured into the newly created regional theaters around the country, and into summer new-play development programs such as the Eugene O’Neill Theater Center run by George C. White and Lloyd Richards. Someone had to read these plays. Without the vise-like winnowing machinery of agent-only submissions that is in place today, theaters across the country received thousands of “over the transom” scripts. Most were written by playwrights who hadn’t any drama school training (look at the authors in the paragraph above). In retrospect, I think the strength of this new American playwriting movement came in large measure from its diversity, and from the authors’ strong community roots. These were distinct voices: they were not in any sense uniform. And the sometimes surprising ways these playwrights began their careers was not only an American phenomenon. I recall an Irish writer I worked with during this time who was discovered at a bus stop in Canterbury, England, by a BBC team in a rented van that roamed the city asking people if they had a story to tell. A few years after, Ron Hutchinson won the George Devine Award, England’s premier prize for emerging playwrights. In that first job in New York at the Phoenix, I read about five hundred plays a year. And my colleagues and friends who held similar new jobs in sister theaters in New York—Bonnie Marranca at the American Place Theatre, Steve Carter at the Negro Ensemble Company, André Bishop at Playwrights Horizons, B. Rodney Marriott at Circle Repertory Company, and Morgan Jenness at the Public Theater—all had similar reading loads. We read every night, we read every weekend, and most of the plays we read were terrible. But we read with hope, and most important, our theaters had different sensibilities. We were responding to and looking for different things. We recommended plays to each other if they weren’t right for our own theater. We were receiving an education. And we felt an obligation to the writers: we took pride in responding quickly to the plays we received. We recorded and noted what we had read. I have made notes since graduate school about the plays I read—for both contemporary submissions and also for plays from the classical canon. I find the notes useful for many reasons: to keep track of a writer’s development over time, to keep track of your own development as you change your responses to a classical text—and these responses do change over time as life changes you. I’ve been buoyed to learn that this recordkeeping is common among people I admire. The film scholar Annette Insdorf, for instance, told me she has kept notecards on every single film she

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INTRODUCTION 16

has ever seen, starting in her student days. Sometimes my notes are extensive and sometimes they are brief plot descriptions together with remarks about what I perceive to be the strengths and weaknesses of each script. Recently, with the help of an energetic assistant, I had these individual pages scanned, backed up, and loaded on my computer—over 10,000 reports. I view this initial writing step as an important part of my work. It encourages me to formulate my thoughts about a script. It also allows me to preserve my enthusiasm for each play. This is of the utmost importance to the work of a dramaturg. If an editor in a publishing house gets tired of reading manuscripts, it’s time to move on (and editors have far greater reading loads than dramaturgs). If the hope of finding something remarkable or someone new fades, it’s time to move on too. Every play is the product of months or, more often, years of work, and a first reader’s written response is only a small token of the time it took to produce the manuscript. It represents a modicum of the emotional investment the author needed to write it. The play that will change the course of theater history will look like an unsolicited script. Be ready to be the first reader of Waiting for Godot. Luckily, in real life, this was Roger Blin, the director who went on to direct the play, as well as most of the plays of another new playwright, Jean Genet. Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot looked like nothing that had ever preceded it. I’ve just read the never-produced plays of the seventeenth-century English writer Margaret Cavendish (Bell in Campo is a good one to start with). I imagine they were just as baffling back then as the first Adrienne Kennedy plays were in our day, and they remind me oddly of Sarah Ruhl’s plays too. Odd can be bad, but odd can also be very good. Like the job of an admitting physician in a large hospital, it is wiser to let a doctor with experience and an open imagination do the triage rather than a brand-new resident going by the book. Mostly it will be run-of-the-mill flu; but once in a great while, it will be something far rarer. Dramaturgs share a sense of hopefulness and a desire to discover new worlds with both directors and casting directors. In a casting session with Michael Kahn, the veteran artistic director of numerous theaters, former head of Juilliard’s Drama Division and director of hundreds of classical and new plays produced from Broadway to rural Chautauqua theater, a young actress entered to audition for a classical play we were working on. (I think it was Philip Massinger’s A New Way to Pay Old Debts, written in 1625. Lucky me. Who gets to work on wonderful classics like these that are almost never produced?) “What will you be doing for us today?” Mi-

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INTRODUCTION 17

chael always asked. “I’ll be doing Portia’s monologue from The Merchant of Venice,” she replied. “Excellent choice,” was without fail his enthusiastic response, no matter what the selection. How many times had he heard, “The quality of mercy is not strained . . .” in his years of auditioning, both for his many productions and for student admissions to Juilliard, I wondered? Yet how sincerely attentive he was to each actor who came in. One of the apocryphal Lincoln Center Theater stories is the Carousel audition of the great Audra McDonald, then a young Juilliard voice student, for the role of Carrie Pipperidge. As she began to sing “(When I Marry) Mister Snow,” she fainted from nervousness and had to be revived by a glass of orange juice fetched by the composer’s daughter, Mary, in the audition room representing her father’s estate. Another team would have sent this novice away. In casting, or in reading, if you lose heart, or become bored or blasé—if you don’t have the patience to read beyond the first ten pages (I can think of a number of plays whose first ten pages were discarded in rehearsals) it’s time to stop and move on to another job. You have to read and watch always in genuine hope. Most scripts will not justify that hope and will need to be returned— just as most actors are not eventually offered the role. And the scripts need to be returned promptly and with kindness. In Robert Gottlieb’s autobiography Avid Reader, I was delighted to learn that the renowned editor and writer read every manuscript sent to him during his years at Simon and Schuster on the same evening of the day he received it. I was impressed. Playwrights tell me time and again that they send work into a void, and scripts are returned (if they are returned at all) years after they are submitted. This is inexcusable, as our job exists to serve these writers, not the other way around. When I was the president of the national organization of dramaturgs, Literary Managers and Dramaturgs of the Americas, our office was in the CUNY Graduate Center, back then on Forty-second Street, in a room donated by the dean of the CUNY graduate theater program, who was a scholar, professor, drama critic, and sometime playwright. LMDA made good use of this valuable, free, centrally located space for many years. This gentleman later withdrew the space because he told me he was tired of sending his plays to theaters around the country, whose dramaturgs were all members of LMDA (and probably didn’t know of his connection to the LMDA offices), and never once receiving an acknowledgment of the play’s receipt or a response. “What are they all doing?” he asked me. In my notes about each play I read, I write a brief plot summary to remind myself of the surface content of the play. This is, I think, the way

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INTRODUCTION 18

most people read a play: for plot alone. Of course, a good, original plot is a valuable thing. A play about something unusual or new or important at the moment is an excellent asset. This can range from a play speaking to an experience or a social circumstance that hasn’t been seen on the stage before (see the work of Tony Kushner, Wendy Wasserstein, or August Wilson) or a new vision of something we already know—Tom Stoppard is good at this (among so many other things he’s good at). Think here of the remarkable conceit of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead or the historical coincidences in Travesties, where Stoppard revealed the surprising fact that the founders of the modern revolutionary movements in politics, literature, and art—Vladimir Lenin, James Joyce, and Tristan Tzara—actually lived in Zurich in close proximity in the early part of the last century. What if they had met? I then note the first few things that have made a positive impression on me: dialogue (or, better said, speaking) that is written in an unusually interesting or unique way. I try to describe it. I might make note of the interesting subject or an ingenious plot. Or an interesting character or a unique way of telling a story, as in Ntozake Shange’s for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf, or today in any of the plays of Stephen Adly Guirgis. Something that makes the play stand out and shows the sign of a writer of individual vision. These strengths are important because they will be the first things an audience will respond to at each performance—and it’s wise to write them down so you can recall them throughout the play’s development process. That way they are not weakened or edited out during the time before the play starts its first previews. In my reports, I also note questions I have about the play: its similarities to other works; what I see as plot inconsistencies; or questions about specific characters, about whom one might want to know more or less. Most important, I try to perceive what tradition or what models this play is working in. I don’t phrase these things as weaknesses or problems; I think of them as questions. When I read a play I like, I usually ask to meet the author. I’m always curious to know what authors the playwright admires, and I listen to how she or he goes about writing a play. There are many traditions and models in writing plays, and a beginning author may be modeling a specific tradition, or trying to take a tradition into new territory. Only a very few plays will be totally sui generis. Our profession’s biggest liability is the urge to suggest improvements to the playwright. We can reflect light back onto elements that are already

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INTRODUCTION 19

in the play. These are surprisingly often things the author has forgotten or never noticed in the first place. I used to describe this process with an extended analogy about coming upon a car on the side of the road. The car is idle. Is this because the driver wants it to be or has the car stalled? Can the driver look up to notice the landscape and proximity to help, or see if there are resources that can be used in the trunk of the car? It’s not the dramaturg’s job to drive the car. And a dramaturg with that agenda should become a playwright. The content of a play is provided by the writer, not the dramaturg. The driver of our imaginary car may have forgotten what was placed previously in the trunk, and may be eager—or not eager at all—to make use of it. Noting that a writer such as María Irene Fornés or Sam Shepard has not specified the exact geographic location in their play will allow you to discover that it isn’t meant to be identified. So it’s well advised to be careful about the questions you ask. And to judge carefully what kind of answers you will want. To put it baldly, you don’t want to ask Neil Simon to write like Samuel Beckett, and you won’t want to encourage Samuel Beckett to write like Neil Simon. And they won’t be able to. One of the challenges of our field, which many dramaturgs have sought to solve in various ways, is that of coercion—of being in an institution and suggesting changes, which the author interprets as demands that must be met in order to get into the theater that employs you. Many dramaturgs and playwrights worry about the literary office as a funnel, where only works of a certain size and shape can make it into the building. In the initial reading of the manuscript and subsequent meetings with the author, the dramaturg’s first challenge is understanding the structure of the play. It is this structure, which may come into focus only gradually, that will open the play up to the third dimension where it can live eventually in real time and space. Often, the author is writing intuitively and this architecture may be elusive even to the writer him or herself. Joyce Carol Oates described what it feels like to write a novel or story or play: having one’s face pressed tight to a giant wall that looms above you far and wide. You try to feel your way, as far as your hands can reach, as you write what is in front of you, pressed against your nose, only being able to sense the wider context in which it will eventually belong. There is much to be learned from good editors, and the first thing is how to keep your hands off a script. A. Scott Berg’s biography of Maxwell Perkins describes the working life of this editor for Thomas Wolfe, Ernest Hemingway, and F. Scott Fitzgerald. The work of dramaturgs shares so much with that of editors that it’s worth pausing to watch an editor at work

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and see the effect he or she can have on the book being revised. Here’s Perkins’s marvelous response to Fitzgerald’s first submission of The Great Gatsby (at that point its title was Trimalchio): Dear Scott, I think the novel is a wonder . . . it has vitality to an extraordinary degree, and GLAMOUR, and a great deal of underlying thought of unusual quality. It has a kind of mystic atmosphere at times that you infused into parts of “Paradise” and have not used since. It is a marvelous fusion, into a unity of presentation, of the extraordinary incongruities of life today. And as for sheer writing, it’s astonishing. Six days later Perkins wrote again with further praise and brought up one significant query: he asks about Gatsby’s past, which is mysterious and should remain so, he feels, but is confusing in this first draft. He asked Fitzgerald to look at it. A month later, Fitzgerald responded: “I myself didn’t know what Gatsby looked like or was engaged in and you felt it. If I’d known and kept it from you you’d have been too impressed with my knowledge to protest. This is a complicated idea but I’m sure you’ll understand.” Fitzgerald, revising and re-revising the book, wrote to Edmund Wilson, “The worst fault in it, and I think it is a Big Fault: I gave no account and had no feelings of or KNOWLEDGE OF the emotional relations between Gatsby and Daisy from the time of their reunion to the catastrophe. However the lack is so astutely concealed by the retrospect of Gatsby’s past and by blankets of excellent prose that no one has noticed it—tho everyone felt the lack and has called it by another name.” In other words, Fitzgerald couldn’t write more about this crucial relationship because, in one of the greatest novels in the American canon, this author was working at the limits of his capacity. He himself didn’t know any more than what he had already written, and Perkins sensed this, and let it be. Returning to the theater, I am reminded of Sarah Ruhl’s well-known maxim “Clarity is over-rated.” We don’t need to ask Shakespeare to spell out why Hamlet hesitates and doesn’t kill Claudius. Each play, and each author, will intuitively find a way to take the audience on a journey with as much information as is required to reach the end. And this journey needs to be first understood by the collaborators who will explore it in rehearsal. If a play is intriguing but also baffling in parts, you must go deeper to understand it—just as you do with Shakespeare. The last thing you should do is suggest to the writer that the play should be simplified or cleaned up. Let the mystery prevail.

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After finding and reading a play that appears to be interesting and worthy of taking a step further, the dramaturg’s job consists in recommending the play to the right theater, and often to the right director, as well as overseeing its development, and sometimes even its publication in other languages. The editorial process starts on the page, but then continues to open up to the other collaborators who eventually make up the production team. In the chapters that follow, I describe in detail how plays of different styles have come into being and what a dramaturg’s role in each part of the process can be. Play discovery starts with defining, culling, searching out, identifying something new to say and a new way of saying it. Such a vision might originate with a contemporary voice, in “found” material, or be rediscovered in the depths of a great classic that reveals something about a contemporary moment. All of these steps call for a dramaturg’s skill set, whether it’s a dramaturg or a director doing the work—or ideally, when they are working together. There are dramaturgs today working exclusively in dance, movement theater, and multidisciplinary work. Their vocabulary will be different because their building blocks will be the body, motion, imagery from visual artist collaborators. Text will not be at the core of the work. I have no expertise in musical theater, but Lincoln Center Theater can rely on the genius of Ira Weitzman, whose specialty it is, and whose enormous résumé includes the discovery and realization of musicals by William Finn, Stephen Sondheim, Adam Guettel, Kirsten Childs, Lynn Ahrens, and Stephen Flaherty, as well as many others. Those who have worked extensively in all these areas maintain that the process is similar. My experience is in working in the tradition of scripted theater and with artists who make and have made words the center of their work. For me, the ongoing work of reading plays (plays that come into the theater sent by their authors or their agents, and plays solicited by contacting writers and colleagues to see what’s new) takes place outside office hours. Evenings and weekends are also devoted to theater-going to see new artists and hold close the collaborators from one’s past. This is a social function that all theater artists embrace and it’s an important one. If you’ve done a play with someone, you should go see their newest venture, and thank them and comment favorably—an art in itself. During the day, there are meetings with playwrights to discuss plays—future plays and plays that exist already—most especially if the plays are scheduled for production. There are meetings with artistic collaborators for plays in pre-production, which I describe in detail in the chapters that follow. And often a dramaturg

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INTRODUCTION 22

participates in casting sessions. Documenting all this work and carefully saving drafts of each play is an important archival task that all dramaturgs do. As I will discuss with writers from Jane Bowles to Zora Neale Hurston, there are all kinds of lost treasures in archives. And to discover a “lost” play in an archive means that someone put it there. That someone will be the dramaturg. In addition, the pages of notes and observations I have kept (that are included as examples in the chapters and appendixes in this book and have made this book possible) come from journals and records of my own that I have kept on each project. They document the production. Michael Lupu, the long-serving, highly esteemed dramaturg of the Guthrie Theater, used to say, “The dramaturg is the one who remembers.” A dramaturg also needs to join the rehearsal process at the very beginning, thereby putting the acting company at ease and effortlessly becoming a part of the team. The dynamic of a room changes later on when a stranger comes in. Don’t be that stranger. The dramaturg watches how things unfold, and what the participants in the room bring in to contribute to the exploration of the play. There will be dramaturgical information that the director thinks the company needs. Usually, the creative team and the actors look within the play at the same things that the dramaturg is exploring. You learn things from them and cross off your list a few questions that others will answer. The dramaturg keeps first impressions of the play in mind throughout the rehearsal process so they are not lost. Gradually, the room may focus on a few places that need work, and the dramaturg contributes thoughts to the director or, with the director’s permission, to the room. After the play starts running, often a dramaturg pulls away and begins to come less frequently—perhaps to try to get a more objective, overall look at how the play is coming together, at the same time the director has to focus on making so many hundreds of specific things “work”—set changes, lighting, blocking adjustments. During this phase, the dramaturg keeps the whole in mind and prepares material to communicate to the audience— author discussions, program guides, and so forth. We don’t do post-show audience discussions with playwrights at our theater. I think they are brutal for writers, and it’s very hard to manage a room full of civilians giving notes to a professional author. As a former theater professor of mine used to say, “A surgeon doesn’t invite people into an operating room and ask them where to put a suture.” But audiences love to get a glimpse behind the scenes into the process of making theater, and there are ways to encourage their interest with events that are appropri-

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INTRODUCTION 23

ate for the authors as well. Lincoln Center Theater’s website holds years of podcasts I have done with authors, directors, and actors. We do these in the week before reviews come in. Finally, for a dramaturg, throughout the process from first reading of the play to the play’s closing, a lot of time is devoted to the care of the writer, whose play will only unfold once the rehearsals and then performances begin. During previews, reserve lots of time to spend in bars after each show. And visit the theater often during the run to report to the author how the play is doing and what the actors are still discovering. I vividly remember Lanford Wilson, whose back was injured at the time, coming to every single performance of the revival of his play Lemon Sky, a play I had suggested Second Stage rediscover, and lying on the floor at the top of the house once the latecomers had been seated at each performance. Every single evening, he went backstage and asked the company (about a play he had written many years before), “How was it for you tonight? What happened? What did you learn?” An old theater axiom goes: “First the playwright knows the play best, then the director knows the play best, and then the actors know the play best.” Most of us who work in the theater do not wait passively for plays to come in over the transom. We try to take a more active role in encouraging new writers, re-encouraging dispirited writers whose careers have fallen out of fashion, and otherwise creating opportunities to support new playwriting. There is always a danger—perhaps in any field—of homogeneity, of a very few “in-fashion” playwrights whose plays are seen again and again and who receive the lion’s share of acclaim, just as there are lookalike clothes in fashion, or similar kinds of songs that seize the moment, or an overabundance of architectural styles during a certain decade. I always tell young dramaturgs who visit me, “If you notice everyone lining up to praise a certain writer, or a certain kind of writer, don’t join the queue. Find an artist you like without a line of admirers and start advocating!” And this applies to more than individual artists. For decades there was no one advocating for female writers. Today, many playwrights of distinction who have had significant artistic success in the past find themselves and their plays forgotten. There is a trove of work by older living writers waiting to be rediscovered and performed again. I am involved in a new venture with the Dramatists Guild called the “Legacy Playwrights Initiative,” which seeks to highlight important writers—many are writers of color—still living, whose work has been forgotten by a new generation. I have just learned of a new program to identify female playwrights throughout history whose work

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INTRODUCTION 24

was never produced. At this very moment, when the theater is crying out for plays about the current political and racial situation across the United States, I can think of only one or two heterosexual African American male playwrights writing today. If Ron Milner, Charles Fuller, August Wilson, Amiri Baraka, Ed Bullins, Melvin van Peebles, Samm-Art Williams, and Ray Aranha had not brought their stories and characters in their stylistically varied plays to large Broadway and regional theater audiences, imagine what the repertory of the past fifty years would have been like. Let’s start a new line here! I also feel strongly that theaters have pulled back from identifying and producing writers from their own communities whose work speaks to national audiences as well. As theaters professionalized during the 1990s and into the current century, the variety of plays has narrowed and been replaced by a roster of Tony Award and Pulitzer Prize winners that go on to have multiple productions nationwide. These plays can be easily advertised to local audiences. But much diversity of style and substance, and some immediacy, has been lost in this process. There’s also far too much influence from TV, with its focus on short attention spans. Dramaturgs can be instrumental in changing this. Outstanding productions of long duration—from Angels in America to Elevator Repair Service’s Gatz to Taylor Mac’s A 24-Decade History of Popular Music—easily attract audiences today. The dramaturg’s work is to find new or old material that, in fact, has depth and appears to be worthy, one hopes as one sets out, of exploring. This is a process that has taken place for centuries. Whatever the configuration of theater troupes of the past, the work has always been the same. The artistic collaborators, with different and also with overlapping skills, bring their individual imaginations to bear on exploring a text, with a method that unites them and one they hope will bring their collective insights to life. As with a building, a play’s real depth of feeling—as well as its visual and emotional impact—happens behind or under the words, in the third dimension of live space the theater shares with architecture. The text is vital, but it’s only a blueprint. When the work begins, today and in the past, once the repertory is chosen or brought into being, the process is always the same. The group goes deeper into the play’s text. Or into the non-dramatic material, if it’s a devised piece. It is through the words that one finds the structure and the power of the play. And it’s in the words, in the dialogue, in the diction of the speech, that a play reveals its characters. But it is in

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the characters’ actions—what they desire in any given moment, and how they navigate the obstacles to their desires—that the play comes off the page. From plays filled with frantic activity (such as farces by Feydeau, Joe Orton, Christopher Durang, or satires by Ben Jonson or George C. Wolfe) to plays like Chekhov’s or Beckett’s or Hansberry’s, where the emotional decisions are buried and hidden deep, the task is to find the actions—what a character wants at any given moment—within the overall structure of the play. Every actor in the world knows this. “But most important of all is the structure of the incidents,” wrote Aristotle in the Poetics. “For tragedy is an imitation, not of men, but of an action . . . character determines man’s qualities, but it is by their actions that they are happy or the reverse.” I have often been asked to summarize what a dramaturg does by reducing my work to a few simple rules or techniques. “What are ten things that a dramaturg does?” These requests have always baffled me. In my experience, the theater I like best is powerful and complicated, unable to be reduced to anything remotely simple. My response is always, “I like things that are complicated, that break new ground in terms of form and subject matter. So I don’t know what I’m going to do when I start a project. I know I will bring my experience, my past history, my enthusiasm and curiosity as well as my eagerness to work with collaborators new and old. And with these other artists—writers, actors, designers, and directors who I hope have the skills to excavate a play’s hidden elements and bring them to life— the work can begin. And I hope each time it’s different.” There is no single model because there is no single kind of play. A dramaturg’s background and training are literary, historical, and language-based. But a dramaturg’s contribution is as another working theater person, not a scholarly expert. On almost every project I’ve participated in, I have found or could have found an expert or scholar whose professional life was devoted to the subject at hand and whose knowledge was far more encyclopedic than mine. But in the theatrical arena, knowledge alone, while needed, is useless unless it can be brought into the rehearsal room in a way that can be used by directors, designers, and actors. This is why, for dramaturgs who are starting a career, an experience of acting, directing, and even design is important. Such exposure will enable a dramaturg to learn the vocabulary and understand the process of each discipline. A dramaturg is a working theater person with specific skills that actors, directors, designers, and playwrights can make use of, as they please. If they want to. The information

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and insights a dramaturg brings have always been present in rehearsals, whether they have been contributed by an actual dramaturg, a director, the actors, or at times by the ensemble as a whole. Many collaborators work together to realize the potential of a play. Each collaborator arrives in the rehearsal room with preparation well under way, with things to try, insights, information, and wild guesses. The primary collaborators are the playwright and the actors. Today, the director (the newest profession in terms of history) guides the investigation together with designers and now, more and more often, a dramaturg. As on a sports team, in the best collaborations, when each person contributes generously, the lines blur and the work is company-created. This intentionally or unintentionally follows a historical model of theater-making from the time of Shakespeare—when work was realized without a director—to the Moscow Art Theater, the Provincetown Players, and many theaters today. Each person in a rehearsal room brings a specific talent to bear on the process of understanding and interpreting a play. The interaction of these roles can be fluid. Some productions proceed with roles rigidly defined and sometimes the work suffers as a result, and the process is often less joyful. But productions and rehearsals like these once in a while produce a memorable result. There are no rules, and personality plays a big part in the outcome. I believe the optimal situation is when each role—the actor, the director, the writer, the designer, the dramaturg—is familiar with the other collaborators’ skill sets. Only then can ideas mesh and the exploration expand without trampling on toes. In the ideal collaboration, which happens so rarely, it often gets to the point where no one remembers whose idea it was. It has become everyone’s idea. Michael Lupu, dramaturg of the Guthrie Theater, brilliantly summed up this ideal state: “To limit the definition of dramaturgy to research and gathering of relevant background information is to leave out its true vitality and creativity. Dramaturgy functions as a sort of monitoring device meant to keep the process on course. Whether a barely audible yet persistent whisper or a vocally assertive and persuasive argument, dramaturgy does not emanate exclusively from one individual who qualifies as dramaturg. Rather, it forms the underpinning of all intuitive or deliberate choices, thoughts, debates, and nurtures the passionate search for artistic truth on stage.” Each person in the rehearsal room has a job to do. And each person’s creativity will determine the worth of his or her contribution. Aspiring to work at a high level of creativity should be the goal of the dramaturg as it

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is for everyone else in the room. Think of the revelations a great actor can bring to a role. Whether the play being rehearsed is a classical play that has been done many times, or a new work that has never been seen before, the process of delving into the play remains the same. Each moment needs to be understood, to be thought about, digested, “felt” and made personal. When this process is done by creative people who can approach a text without preconceptions—who can see each moment freshly, in a personal way—without received ideas about “how Chekhov is done” or “how this moment in Waiting for Godot has to work” (or a favorite from my first time at the Delacorte in Central Park where our voice coach on A Midsummer Night’s Dream demonstrated to all of us “exactly how fairies talk”), then the play will live in the time of the production. Good actors instinctively know how to do this—how to initiate a process in rehearsal where they can try to find, with the help of their collaborators, dimensions in their roles that have never before been seen, seeing things freshly, in personal terms. They will be able to make a role modern, to make it their own if it’s an old play, or to realize for the first time the voice of a new writer. To bring into being a new form of writing—what we now know is an Edward Albee play, or an Adrienne Kennedy play, or a Sam Shepard play—requires a new form of staging, of acting, and often of design. Lovers of art will recognize the same ambitions in works that took painting and sculpture into each new age—a new way to see a nude, or a landscape or an emotion. My own relationships with actors have brought me, without qualification, the greatest joys in my professional life. The dramaturg charts a course to a successful career in the theater by proximity to actors—if you know and love and spend time with actors, you will be okay. If you don’t, you won’t. At the first meet-and-greet of a play, as your work advances, there should be more than one actor who will run across the room and hug you. Because they know that, working together, you can take them higher. And you will know how to do that because you know them as a person. As an individual. I’ve never understood when people tell me dramaturgs pass out packets of research or information in rehearsal: how can anyone make use of cookie-cutter material when everyone is so different? Each actor will want and need different things. And some won’t need or want anything at all. Once rehearsals approach and then begin, a dramaturg needs to be there, with the director’s approval, to listen to what each actor wants and give him or her that information in a form they can digest. The best

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directors I’ve worked with approach the text with their own insights but are careful to observe and work with each actor’s ideas and expertise in the way they feel will elicit the best performance. No cookie-cutter approaches for them either. The closer you live your life to that of an actor, the easier it will be for you in your job as a dramaturg. And try telling something to Kevin Kline, who knows more about Shakespeare than anyone I’ve ever worked with. It’s hard to find something that will be useful to him. He described his process of collaborative research to me: I’ve always done a lot of research, but over the years I’ve learned that it’s useful if it ignites another idea in your head: your own idea. The text is the only thing you’re given—Shakespeare doesn’t even give you any stage directions—you’ve got to take those words and make them play. The research will enhance the setting, the world that you’re doing the play in, but the audience isn’t going to know that except by how the actors play it. Any other versions, or previous texts, or bad quartos or foul papers—whatever—ultimately, it’s very practical. Pick one, and make it work in the moment. When I give master classes, I always say, “Look up the words, look at the footnotes, you’ve got to know what those words meant at that time. So you can have them land on the ears of the audience at this time. But most importantly, how do you feel once you figure out what the character is saying?” But then you have to forget the scholarship and focus on putting on the play and making an entertaining evening—that’s our job. That collaboration comes from the team. When Kline played Falstaff at Lincoln Center Theater, he was so far ahead of me in terms of textual variants and the Henry IV production histories, and choices made by actors in the past, that I despaired. Finally, I found one thing he didn’t know: in the mustering scene in Part Two when Falstaff cobbles together his ragtag band of recruits to travel to the Battle of Shrewsbury, Kline didn’t know whether his troop was average-sized or comically small. I was sent to find an answer. It was small. Of course. That’s funnier, and easier to cast. For all the collaborators, and most especially the core creative team, individuals who live fully in the world outside the theater and have a range of interests will have more to bring into the room. A costume designer is expected to know the history of clothing and to be observant about the

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fashions of the present. But having a wider point of view that references current events as well as images from advertising, graphic design, painting, photography, and other art forms will add another dimension to their work. As a dramaturg, you must also live deeply outside the bubble of theater at the same time you have to bring into the room the facts of theater history and past productions that are in your toolbox. If you have only a narrow range of outside interests, you’ll be a great dramaturg on plays that focus on those areas, but not much else. It’s important to look up. And live. For most dramaturgs, the process begins with the text. The legendary German theater director Peter Stein, in a discussion prior to his production and adaptation of Dostoevsky’s The Demons that toured to the Lincoln Center Festival, said simply, “I am not a director who has ideas. I only have the text.” What is included in the text? What is not and why? What is the author aiming to do besides tell a story? If a writer like Brian Friel can write a play with traditional plot and character development in Translations and then, at the play’s climax, end it without denouement of any sort—why does he do this? Why are there no boys in the New England village where Arthur Miller sets The Crucible? What is the world of the Fairies in Midsummer? What do they look like? Why are there three separate stories in this play? Why are there so many stage directions in Eugene O’Neill’s plays? What should be done with them? What is that sound of a string breaking offstage in The Cherry Orchard? Reading a play should spark many questions—and each question should lead to a consensus formed by the artists investigating it. For each collaborator, it begins with asking, “What does this mean?” Or more specifically, “What does this mean to me?” The discussion these questions provoke will lead inevitably to a group consensus if the rehearsal room is allowed to be free of censorship and the artists can speak candidly of their feelings, impressions, and thoughts. This exact question—“What does it mean to me?”—arose in a question and answer session in the Directors Lab with the renowned English director Richard Eyre, then head of the National Theatre, who brought his production of Richard III, with Ian McKellen in the leading role, to New York. He put the play in a 1930s European setting and discussed why and how he had made this and other choices for the production. A Lab director asked him, “I have ideas, and so do my friends who are directors, and we see each other’s shows and afterwards at a bar we tell each other what our ideas were. How do you actually get your ideas onto the stage?” The

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ultimate question. Eyre paused and said, “A few months before you start, you make dinner once a week and invite your closest collaborators on the team to your house—your leading actor, your designer, a dramaturg if you have one—and no one pays you to do this. After dinner you start reading the play aloud to each other. You stop at every line, every punctuation mark and ask each other: ‘What does this mean?’ ‘What does this mean to me?’ ‘What do I feel about it?’ So emotion—not only thought—is invited into the room. And if you do this with every line, and it will take a while, all of your ideas will get onto the stage.” Although I prefer to embrace complexity and feel that there are no rules to making theater, this simple advice is one of the few truisms I wholeheartedly embrace. And I want to underline the notion contained in Eyre’s response—that all the answers can be found in the text, in the writing. You just have to go deeper sometimes to find them. And you have to communicate honestly and openly and respectfully with your fellow artists. Going deeper into the text: that’s the first piece of wisdom any great actor of Shakespeare knows. If you don’t understand what you are saying, go back to the text, to the words, to the rhythm, to the punctuation, to the earlier versions of the text, to the Variorum editions of the play. Make sure you have the words that are as close to the original words as you can get. And then try to see them through your own present-day eyes—see what they mean to you now in your life and what they make you feel. To end with the second and final simple truth I believe in—one that bedevils theater artists as they begin their careers—your creativity will come from seeing freshly things that many people have seen before you. Look closely and carefully at the text of the play you are working on and note your own personal reactions. Connect the play—its imagery, dialogue, structure, characters, and ideas—with what you think, feel, and know about the play, the writer, yourself, our times, and the past. In this way, your personality and insights, as well as the thoughts you share, will contribute to the collaboration. Actors, directors, designers, and dramaturgs need to be equally creative, to be open enough to draw on their own experiences, knowledge, and instincts. And they need to listen to each other. And by listening and being open, you stretch and grow and change. Almost everyone who has spent time with Greek plays and their authors knows that Aeschylus was buried in Sicily in a tomb that noted something to the effect of “Here lies Aeschylus, who fought in the Battle of Marathon”—without a word of his immortal achievements in playwrit-

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ing. But it was only Bryan Doerries of the Theater of War who made the connection that this prioritizing meant that the male citizens of Athens who created and attended the Greek plays at the City Dionysia festivals year after year were proud of being soldiers first. That is, the audiences of the ancient Greek theater festivals were all, first and foremost, veterans, as we would say nowadays. And the Greek plays, as Doerries suspected, find a powerful and highly specific response in front of audiences of veterans today too. In the same way, my first glimpse of Meryl Streep at work in her student days was as Girl #3, the General’s pony girl who visits him in the brothel in Jean Genet’s The Balcony, in a truly terrible student production. Instead of showing what a twenty-two-year-old college actress thought was a prostitute, she threw herself into this role as herself: a young woman who had absolutely no idea what to do to pretend she was a horse. A new and personal idea. My first conversation with director Mark Lamos about a production of Measure for Measure here at Lincoln Center Theater began when he said, “Have you noticed that Shakespeare ends this play not only with a closing line of dialogue but with an image—the image of a monk kissing a nun?” How could I have missed that insight, hiding in plain view? It’s the ending of the play! Go deep, collaborate lovingly, and try to discover your own original point of view in whatever part of your life you are in. Each rehearsal is a new configuration of individuals at a specific moment in time, responding to each other and, equally important, to what is going on in the world at the moment they are together. The process of asking, “What does this mean?”—if done lovingly and honestly and well by people of talent—will bring the play into a world that the audience recognizes. Whatever is on the minds of the artists will, if luck holds and the play is good enough, emerge as the three-dimensional interpretation of the play script for a contemporary time. It will be the interpretation of the play, and the play will take on yet another new life and reflect the world of the audience watching it. The audience will see it with new eyes, and it will seem “relevant” and “surprisingly modern.” If everyone comes into the rehearsal room having carefully read the play, with a number of questions based on that reading, and if the dramaturg brings original “takes” on scenes or characters, or moments in the play, on specific language or word choices, reflections on the play’s imagery or its references to history or current events, then these many aspects of the world enter the room. Working on classic texts, I try to write up

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“100 interesting facts” from my reading and noodling around—facts of all kinds—some immediately relevant to the play and others that are relevant only tangentially. Some of these facts seem totally compelling to me and end up being of no interest to anyone else. Some catch the imagination of others in the room and become central to the production. And this is the case for each collaborator. When an actor asks, “What if I try . . .” something will be revealed. It’s in this phase most especially that the dramaturg’s wide knowledge of the world and the text will manifest her creativity. An example of a strong dramaturgical idea can be found in the Berlin Schaubühne’s 1971 production of Ibsen’s Peer Gynt. Peter Stein directed a legendary acting company and the dramaturg was Botho Strauss. The interpretation centered on the play’s politics—as was often the case at that time with new interpretations. The structure of the action appeared to them to depict the distortions to the character of the morally flexible Peer as the play progresses. Peer leaves his almost medieval rural upbringing in Scandinavia (the costumes have a Bruegel-like feel at the top) and he comes to a bad end in an approximation of nineteenth-century colonial Africa (and, in this production, America) before he finally returns home to find his first love, now an old woman. The idea that caught hold was to keep the play intact, play it totally straight in period, but simply cast a different actor as Peer in each new section of the text. In this way, it became not the story of a specific individual with unique personal strengths and weaknesses but it tracked an idea: the destructive influence of capitalism on the human character. Another example: in the early 1970s Ellis Rabb did a brilliant production of The Merchant of Venice at the American Conservatory Theater in San Francisco just as the Castro District was becoming the center of the newly coalescing LGBTQ world. What interested Rabb was the gorgeous, louche world of Venice, and the complex, nuanced, and tenuous relationships between the characters surrounding Shylock. Shylock himself, as well as Portia, played by the company’s leading actors, carried their part of the play, but it was Antonio, Jessica, Bassanio and others who exemplified the frisson and strange sadness of a new kind of city, full of joy and freedom but also impending loss. As happens when an interpretation like this works, strange scenes come to the fore that haven’t been a focus in other productions. Here it was a memorable, extended moment when Jessica betrays her father and runs away to join the unknown, alluring, and alien Christian world. This production transferred a few years later to the

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Vivian Beaumont Theater in the early days of Lincoln Center, and perhaps because the space was so different, or perhaps because the world of New York City was harder and less idyllic, the production, with the same cast and designers, didn’t connect in the same way that it had in those early days of gay liberation on the West Coast that the play’s collaborating artists had been part of. After a development process at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, Mabou Mines director Lee Breuer and composer Bob Telson brought a production to the Brooklyn Academy of Music in 1983 that drew from the fact that the stories in Greek plays were familiar to their audiences. Telson and Breuer recognized that these plays were actually civic engagements intended to bind the community together and reflect on their shared beliefs. They realized there was a powerful modern-day equivalent in contemporary church services. And so their Gospel at Colonus was born, in which Sophocles’ Oedipus at Colonus was narrated by enrobed actors, including, in this original production, Morgan Freeman, stepping out from a magnificent gospel choir, to tell the familiar tale again. And the “stasimons” (the choral interludes of the original play) were set to music by Telson and sung by a number of celebrated choirs as the piece moved from BAM to the Apollo, and then around the world. Another approach can emerge from a deep knowledge of a playwright’s biography. Jean-Loup Rivière, my counterpart at the Comédie Française (his title, conseiller littéraire et artistique, far surpassed my own!), worked with director Jacques Lassalle on a number of Molière’s finest plays. To open their interpretive process to their audiences, they published a short volume of conversations about interpreting Molière’s Dom Juan first at Avignon and afterward at their theater. Molière is traditionally approached as the “homme moyen” whose plays happily resolve into an affirmation of both a familial and social order. In them, the more reasonable family members (or in Tartuffe, the great patron the King) see the unreasonableness of the characters’ behavior. With their sage intervention, the stability of the social and familial norms is restored by the end of the play to the audience’s appreciation and delight. Jean-Loup and Lassalle had a totally different approach. In the review Les Cahiers de la Comédie Française, which they edited for many years, they published an absolutely fascinating anonymous document from the early eighteenth century that was widely read in its day. It speculated that Molière had in fact married his own daughter Armande Béjart, and traced

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the whole story through his biography, citing many contemporary acquaintances. “Inquiry into an Anonymous Libel . . . ,” which Jean-Loup’s publication reprinted in its entirety, places Molière frankly into the skin of his mores-breaking fathers, who unabashedly woo their children’s fiancées. No “homme moyen” he, the “Libel” implies. He lived it in his real life right through the plays of sexual avidity, The Imaginary Cuckold, The School for Husbands, The School for Wives, and The Misanthrope, all written during the years of his second marriage as his youthful daughter-wife was betraying him. “Force yourself to appear faithful and I will force myself to believe you are so.” In their production, a scream was heard from offstage after Alceste, played originally by Molière, exited. As they knew, it was in this same intersection of art and life that Molière died as well: unable to rise from his chair during the fourth performance of the wonderful and hilarious The Hypochondriac (The Imaginary Invalid), coughing blood, he died in his rooms later that night from tuberculosis. What a new dimension this biographical information implies. As directors, designers, and dramaturgs first gather to exchange ideas, their own interests, knowledge of the past, and responses to the current day’s events come into the room. It’s impossible to know what will catch fire or what will become the organizing, experiential idea that ignites an existing classical text. In the chapters that follow, I track a number of ideas in specific productions. The team starts the process of asking the questions that will lead to an insightful production. What kind of questions are these? Actors look for clues to their characters, for places to play positive choices, for an understanding of given circumstances. Of course, most important, directors look for playable action, and for the resonance of the play’s ideas in the world. What is it saying, how does it work? Designers look at visual clues, at the kind of space the play can work in, how constrained or how open, the relationship between the audience and the actors that best facilitates the action, the resonance of color, the amount of abstraction or literalness the play calls for. And all this comes before the thinking about individual character choices even begins: where do they live, what do they wear? I am increasingly interested in and aware of how good design can make or break a production. All directors are aware of this too. Powerful insights into how and why a production is coming to its feet have come to me sitting with designers for long hours in darkness, staring at the stage, in technical rehearsals. They become the dramaturgs, I weigh in on design, and we ponder why something is working or not working in a given scene.

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To return to the beginning, the architecture is coming off the page into three dimensions. Will the feelings follow? The collective artistic process described above—never easy to achieve— is one that mirrors the complex synchronicity of growth in the natural world as well as in artistic creation. It’s been depicted beautifully by the poet A. R. Ammons. POETICS

I look for the way Things will turn out spiraling from a center, the shape things will take to come forth in so that the birch tree white touched black at branches will stand out wind-glittering totally its apparent self: I look for the forms things want to come as from what black wells of possibility, how a thing will unfold: not the shape on paper—though that, too—but the uninterfering means on paper: not so much looking for the shape as being available to any shape that may be summoning itself through me from the self not mine but ours. How to begin to create such an organic and sublime collaboration enriched by many voices and differing points of expertise and view? In rehearsal, the dramaturg, who needs to be just as creative as the other

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members on the team, will focus on his or her own terrain—though again this may and often should overlap with the thinking of other collaborators. First of all it’s the dramaturg’s responsibility to know the text, its variants, its history, and whether it existed originally in different versions, as well as the circumstances in the playwright’s life that brought the play into being. If the play was written in another language, it is very helpful to know the original language or other translations of the play, if it is not possible to read the original text. Learning a language is a commitment to and a recognition of another culture and another way of life. And plays from these cultures will need informed dramaturgs to bring them into the American repertory. All the circumstances of the original production of the play are brought into the room by the dramaturg, since these circumstances offer valuable clues to how the play worked successfully in its own time. And these clues can be translated into a contemporary approach that will allow the play to breathe and live again. For plays from non-Western traditions, this work is vitally important, since the way actors are trained, and the way audiences now participate in the theater experience may be vastly different than it was in the time the play was written. These elements always vary with any classic text. Finding an equivalent that can be translated into action that actors today can play is a fascinating challenge. I discuss this in the chapter on The Orphan of Zhao, a Chinese classical play from 1280 that was directed by Shi-Zheng Chen and produced with an American cast in the Lincoln Center Festival. Asking “What does it mean?” leads to a complex and challenging journey when the ur-text is both from the distant past as well as from another theater tradition. Sometimes authors embed clues in the text to guide future interpreters of the play long after they are gone. A surprising example took place during rehearsals in the mid-1980s at the Goodman Theatre for a production of Brecht’s The Life of Galileo that I translated. Robert Falls directed and Galileo was played by Brian Dennehy. Galileo was the final play directed by Brecht before his death, and the Berliner Ensemble kept a record of his rehearsals, which are published by Suhrkamp as Materials to “The Life of Galileo.” I read this in the back of our Chicago rehearsal room thirty years later, watching Falls and Dennehy investigate the same scenes that the book described Brecht and Ernst Busch rehearsing in 1953. Dennehy felt he needed to be very physical in the first scene—a scene where his shirt is off, he is washing and drying himself and picking up his young appren-

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tice and whirling him around the room. In the Materials book, Busch asks Brecht the very same questions about this scene—and I felt the action was being guided by the words in the script—the words were directing the actor to ask the right kind of questions. The answers were not provided: that’s what each interpreter brings. But the journey through the play was crafted by the now long-deceased author’s original hand. There are endless, fascinating challenges for dramaturgs. I’ve always been partial, fond even, of those souls throughout the history of theater who wrote down what they had to work with: the Elizabethan theater owner Philip Henslowe, whose marvelous inventory of the Rose Theatre gives us a glimpse into the possible stagecraft of the plays of this time, or Renward Cysat, the medieval town clerk of Lucerne who noted the particulars of what was needed to produce that city’s Mystery Cycles. He might have even been a very, very early director. There is a charming illumination by Jean Fouquet of a medieval mystery play rehearsal from the fifteenth century with a man, pointer in hand, surrounded by the total chaos of what I imagine to have been a technical rehearsal with a cast of hundreds of amateur actors, much like the Lucerne town square was to know in a later century under Cysat’s guidance. And apocryphally, it was Edward Knight, an actor and shareholder in the King’s Men, Shakespeare’s company, who may also have been the bookkeeper whose task it was to take the changes from the Master of the Revels when the playscripts were submitted for censorship. These men were doing the same work as we do today—in circumstances vastly different from our own. The production at New York Theatre Workshop rehearsing in the old Times Square, mentioned at the start of this introduction, was of a play called 1951, directed by Anne Bogart, which was based on “found texts” from House Un-American Activities Committee transcripts. From that material, we sought to create an evening of theater. Would it be a historically accurate, chronological structure, or one focusing on specific individuals involved in the hearings, as it had been in previous plays such as Peter Weiss’s The Investigation or Eric Bentley’s Are You Now or Have You Ever Been? The form of these earlier plays seemed to come from the generation directly affected by the hearings. For us in the next generation, the question was why these societal purges had taken place at all and why they have continued to take place throughout history and continue in our present time as well. In rehearsal, we discussed colonial witch hunts as well as tribal rivalries in cultures that called for sacrificial victims. I became

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The Martyrdom of St. Apollonia, painting by Jean Fouquet, circa 1460, from Le Livre d’Heures d’Etienne Chevalier, “The Suffrage of the Saints,” Ms. 71; fol. 39 (Photograph by René-Gabriel Ojéda; Musée Condé, copyright RMN-Grand Palais/ Art Resource, New York)

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fascinated with children’s rhymes and the ancient lyrics of jumping-rope songs, which I discovered had been carefully collected and preserved by an English couple named Iona and Peter Opie. This led me to books on the structure of children’s games, where a random participant is chosen to be “it” and placed in the center of a circle to be either attacked or celebrated. Our production’s structure emerged from the structure of a game, and the language from the transcripts was the dialogue. And of course, all of it harkened back to the oldest theatrical trope of all: the ritual sacrifice at the tomb of Dionysus in the ancient days of the dithyramb, the Western theater’s earliest wellspring. The freedom of rehearsal, the nurturing of a collaboration that allows a range of contributions and expertise to meld into one harmonious whole, and the connection to an audience have remained constant in our art form for two thousand years. Exciting new playwrights, the subjects of their plays, and the structures of collaboration will be different as the world changes and evolves. There are welcome changes happening as we rush forward into a new age connected by means unheard of at the time even my own career began. We can look forward to a degree of change in theater as great as from the dithyramb to the devised play. But I believe the art of rehearsal, of collaboration and the connection to the audience, will remain constant, regardless of the shape the final form assumes. This book is a record of its time, just as Tony Hiss’s book is a record of a Times Square already ready to evolve yet again today. With trust and freedom and an ambitious artistic agenda, each new vision will emerge. Looking back over it all now, how I wish I could have been hired as the dramaturg of the renovation of Times Square. Understanding where each participant is coming from and what background each one brings to the project, complete with their ways of working and professional protocols, I could have learned the history of Times Square, its architectural and artistic past, a sense of which professions thrived there, and perhaps why they did. I could have become familiar with city planning regulations, the mayor’s office, the powerful real estate interests involved in the renovation, New York’s building unions and their rules, the police and their security requirements, as well as the all-important community of citizens who still make the area their home. I would have been careful to understand the restrictions and requirements of each party’s role, and eager always to share what I learned with others, who I know now may not understand as much as you think they do about the other players. I would have learned about

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architectural history, as well as building materials old and new, and gotten to know the personalities and vision of the architects themselves as well as their office and design staffs. I’d carefully study examples of city planning that had been done successfully—and unsuccessfully—in the past, both in New York and in other great cities from long ago: Baron Haussmann’s nineteenth-century reconfiguration of Paris, Brasília’s architects Lúcio Costa, Oscar Niemeyer, and Joaquim Cardozo, plans by Robert Moses for New York City in the twentieth century and the responses to them from Jane Jacobs. There have been many ambitious dreams to renew the hub of a city. I’d certainly try to think about why some worked and others didn’t. I’d relish meeting with contemporary city planners from other countries at work on new city-center designs or creating new cities from scratch in the Middle East. Connecting with experts based in New York City tech firms, I’d ask about new technologies and how they might be utilized in the safe management of crowds, the conservation of natural resources and reduction of pollution, and the design of new kinds of safe public transportation. I’d certainly keep the vision of the Times Square of the past in everyone’s mind, so it would be a constant inspiration for those reconceiving it. And I’d aim to figure out a way to get the responses of the people from the city and around the world who will move through the new Times Square. After all, it’s for them that this project is under way. We find ourselves in a troubled year now, in which New York City threatens to look as bad as it did back in the 1970s—the time chronicled in the book by Tony Hiss—but let’s not forget that it was the vision of four powerful women and the men who worked with them, and it was, in fact, the theater that, improbably, brought New York City back from the brink. The Times Square renovation story told by Hiss is now ancient history, of course. To be lucky enough to participate in a post-9/11 reconfiguration of the area, what a radically different design could emerge. How marvelous—and even more urgently needed for so many reasons—would be a new design for Times Square in a post-Covid-19 time. But life in every field spans such changes. In theater, the French director Michel Saint-Denis (every dramaturg should read his work) led an archetypal theater person’s life of change, as the readers of this book also will. Saint-Denis began his career early in the twentieth century working with the experimental theater director Jacques Copeau in a collective company in rural France in what was in many ways an early incarnation of Moisés

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Kaufman’s Tectonic Theater Project in the Laramie Project days. SaintDenis headed the Old Vic in London for many years, where he directed Sir Laurence Olivier and trained a generation of fabled English actors; near the end of his life, he was brought to America to found the Juilliard Drama Division in New York. He concluded, “There is only one theatre and it is in constant evolution as time goes by.”

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1

find your way in approaching a great classic for the first time

What does it mean to interpret a classical play? How is it done? How is it done well? Who does what part of the work? And how does an audience experience a new interpretation? A production of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream that I worked on early in my career shows some ways of approaching these questions. An audience can always experience a classical play (that is to say, a play out of copyright, whose author is no longer living, or a play by a more recently deceased writer whose estate no longer controls the work) as it was written: for its beloved characters, for its plot and language. There are other classical plays—and these change over time—that are so profound that they can also shed light, simultaneously, on the issues from the era of the play as well as the concerns of the play’s contemporary interpreters. Thus a modern interpretation of a classical play might do two things at once: provide an enjoyable evening of theater for everyone and at the same time reveal hidden relevancies to issues or concerns of the present day. Alongside the primary goal of connecting an audience to a great play, an interpretive team can also work through a second theme or explore an artistic or political question while preserving what might be called the original intentions of the play. A play of depth will allow both through-lines to be realized. And if the new interpretation approaches the level of subtlety of the play, and doesn’t violate or overwhelm the ur-text, the production will do justice to both. The original text and the interpreted text will be alive together for the duration of the production. And then life will move on, and a new interpretation of this same text will emerge in a new era as the result of the work of a new set of collaborators. 42

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When a theatrical interpretation like this succeeds, audiences, say, who love Midsummer’s mechanicals and its star-crossed lovers will enjoy their actions as they always have, but there will be another through-line activated that will allow the characters to be seen at the same time in a new way. If the process destroys or renders indecipherable the strengths of the original text, I would call the results a violation of the text. Though if a text is thoroughly reexamined, completely seen in a new way, perhaps this “violation” will assume the stature of a new work of equal merit. David Henry Hwang’s M. Butterfly might be such an example. A Midsummer Night’s Dream is a play that’s easy to understand and enjoy, and at the same time it’s unfathomably rich and deep. It is familiar to general readers and to student actors and audiences everywhere. I worked on a production of the play directed by James Lapine, produced at the Delacorte Theater during Joseph Papp’s tenure. Through the story of our maiden journey to make sense of the play in our lives at that moment in time I hope to illuminate the challenges we overcame and the ones we were unable to overcome. A dramaturg’s first task is to ask what we know about A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Answering this always boils down to three things: what do we know about the text and its variants and sources, what do we know or what can we surmise about how it reflects Shakespeare’s life (probably very little) and world, and what do we know about how it might have been performed in its first production and then in subsequent productions in the centuries that followed its creation. This information will always be incomplete. But at the same time, what information we can glean will be deeply meaningful in its possible implications. One of the enduring mysteries of Shakespeare and his era is how such a flowering of secular drama written by such a large group of brilliant authors arose so suddenly from a history of exclusively religious playwriting (all, alas, by anonymous authors). Medieval religious cycles and morality plays were performed for centuries, continuing into Shakespeare’s boyhood. Is it possible, as some have speculated, that the change from Catholicism to Protestantism, which defined the sixteenth century in England, destroying abbeys and religious retreats, somehow moved the contemplative urge into new forms of poetry and drama, which suddenly emerged at this time? There had not been a secular play written in English for a thousand years when Gorboduc and Gammer Gurton’s Needle, on the tragic and comic fronts, were written in the 1560s, the decade of Shakespeare’s birth.

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E. K. Chambers, a venerable English scholar in the first decades of the twentieth century, devoted his life’s work to collecting every bit of information, every reference from every source, concerning the Elizabethan and Jacobean stage. It’s not a great deal of material. These sparse mentions are the reason for the centuries-long speculation about the life and existence of Shakespeare. You can easily read all four volumes of Chambers’s The Elizabethan Stage—all the mentions of the drama in contemporary pamphlets and letters, court records, payment accounts, announcements of plague closures of the theaters, lists of actors in every known company, sketches of playing spaces and maps of London—and come to your own conclusions, as so many passionate writers about Shakespeare and his era have done. Everyone is looking at the same raw material found in Chambers and elsewhere, weighing it slightly differently, focusing on one or another aspect, making a case for a specific mention or fragment that each scholar feels changes the narrative in a small way. This work began right after the Restoration, when the theater returned to London in 1660 and the great editors (William Davenant, Nicholas Rowe, Alexander Pope, Lewis Theobald, Edmond Malone, William Warburton, Edward Capell, and others) began centuries of commentary that continue to the present day. I believe the editors of centuries past are as interesting and creative with the scraps of information they have about the theater of this era as anyone writing today, mainly because they wrote closer in time to Shakespeare’s life. And many, many actors I have worked with are familiar with these editors’ speculations, which include how actors have made sense of troublesome passages in productions in centuries past. Shakespeare is handed down to us by actors. To know how an entrance was made, or how a difficult section of text was parsed in productions from the centuries before ours, is invaluable to a modern interpreter. All these variants and references from the past are conveniently collected in what is called a Variorum edition of each play, a massive volume that lists on each page one or two lines of text, followed by a page of commentary collected from scholars and actors and commentators through the centuries. The word “variorum” in English derives from cum notis variorum in Latin, which simply means “with notes from various persons.” An old Variorum of the play (as opposed to the abridged New Variorum editions now in paperback—a different beast) should be in every rehearsal room working on Shakespeare. In addition, every book about Shakespeare’s life and times is interesting. And there are hundreds of them, each piecing together a life from the

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exact same set of limited facts. I once took a class in translation from Erich Segal, widely known for his romantic best seller Love Story, but who was in his real life a classics professor at Yale. His comparative literature class “Problems in Translation” required students to be fluent in two languages besides English, and the class translated a few poems of Catullus—not that difficult for someone with even a year or two of high school Latin—and looked at the history of previous translations of these poems. For me, the takeaway was how time-specific and historically bound the translations we read were—with very, very rare exceptions. You could immediately tell a Victorian translation, or one from the 1920s or from the eighteenth century. Unless a major poet or writer, equal in stature to the original author, is the translator, everything needs to be retranslated for its own time. So too with the biographies of Shakespeare, which range from portrayals of a Romantic genius to a focus on specific cultural influences: we are just passing out of a decade in which it was proposed to see him and his family as Catholic recusants. For a dramaturg, they are all equally useful because a specific piece of information—inferred or accepted as gospel—will be of different interest to each actor and director. Every dramaturg will find different biographies—some from past centuries—that will resonate. Seek out the ones you like. Kevin Kline, a real Shakespeare autodidact, stands behind the theory that Shakespeare began as a valet parker, arriving in London to get his start by holding the horses of highborn audience members attending the theaters. You won’t find this piece of speculation in every biography. But this is a bit of apocrypha that is resonant to him. That’s what counts. A dramaturg first turns to discover the editions of Shakespeare’s plays, and the sources for each play: this is where our work begins. Today, every edition of a Shakespeare play is compiled by a different scholar, and in each contemporary published edition (Arden, Signet, Riverside, Pelican, Oxford, Folger, Methuen, to name a few), before or after the text of the play itself, a reader will find information about the variants of the text, along with the possible sources Shakespeare drew on for his plot and characters. Shakespeare’s plays were published together in a single volume in 1623 by John Hemmings and Henry Condell, his friends and fellow actors and shareholders of his company the King’s Men (only the second collected works of an author published in the English language), a little less than a decade after his death. So on one hand, we can assume that these devoted friends had played many of these actual roles. And that they knew Shakespeare

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himself, though seven years had passed since his death, and more since his retirement from London to Stratford, where he died. However, there are a number of irregularities in the First Folio, and some omissions that were corrected when the Folio was reprinted later in its second and third editions. Publishing in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries bears almost no resemblance to what we know of publishing today, where we can assume that an author has looked at page proofs, made corrections, and the text we read is the text the author wrote. Not so in London at that time. The value of the play was in the playing, and every biography of Shakespeare makes note of the irregular and often totally illegal Quarto editions that were printed during Shakespeare’s lifetime to capitalize on the popularity of his plays. Bootleg recordings, we would now call them, but valuable beyond measure for all theater people. The official First Folio of 1623 slots the plays into genres: tragedies, histories, and comedies (The Merchant of Venice!) and helpfully breaks them into acts, and often further into individual scenes and sometimes specifies the locations of these scenes. These divisions and the genre allocations should all be thrown out—they are not Shakespeare’s hand and members of a modern production team should feel free to adjust act and scene breaks and location indications as they wish, and play a comedy as a tragedy if it seems artistically viable and resonant. A dramaturg begins with a careful examination of the textual variants of the play at hand, and luckily has a long line of distinguished editors from the past to help adjudicate each matter. These editors are the heroes of every dramaturg, and the farther back they are in time, the closer they are to Shakespeare. Bits of apocrypha are a delightful part of this research: William Davenant’s anecdotes lead an eager interpreter to suppose he notes them because he might be Shakespeare’s illegitimate son and privileged to some inside information about the poet. The tragedy of the “contribution” of the eighteenth-century editor Warburton’s cook, who singlehandedly did incalculable damage to Shakespearean scholarship by lining her pie tins with leaves from the Quarto volumes in his collection—now lost forever. There are entire books written about the typesetters (names unknown—called Typesetter A, B, and so on) who set the plays at various imprints, and the implications of their common mistakes—a specific letter often misplaced and substituted for another. There are plays where text that was probably originally written as poetry with line breaks becomes prose as it’s squeezed into a corner in order to make a folio or quarto page fit.

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A Quarto, by the way, refers to a page of print folded in four, and was the Elizabethan equivalent of a paperback book—a single, slim volume. Every one of the legendary Shakespearean editors has a strong opinion on every questionable line, and that means about one quarter of the lines of the plays. A dramaturg can join right in to that long line. So much for all those stage directions like “Enter Lion, Thisby and Moonshine,” or “Enter Puck [with a broom].” They’re not Shakespeare. These helpful directions were added to the First Folio after his death. You don’t have to honor them. Bring Puck in anytime you and your collaborators like. And although there are not many examples of line differences between Folio and Quartos to cite from Midsummer, as there are in so many of Shakespeare’s other plays, here’s one from Act 2, scene 1, line 200, that might have a significant effect on the interpretation of the character of the lover Demetrius: Or rather do I not in plainest truth Tell you I do not, nor I cannot love you. This is from the First Folio (which we call F1), and it’s a rather definitive rejection of poor Helena. On the other hand, Quarto 1 reads: Or rather do I not in plainest truth Tell you I do not, not I cannot love you. This is a declaration that might give Helena some hope. Midsummer has two Quartos: the first (known as Q1) from 1600, and the second (Q2) from 1619, when Shakespeare had been dead for three years. Q1 of Midsummer is only occasionally different from Q2, which was probably the sole source for F1. So unlike a play such as Hamlet, which requires months of deciding which parts to use from the significantly different Quarto and Folio texts, Midsummer is not much of a challenge. In Midsummer in both the Quartos and the Folio, just after Theseus speaks “A Fortnight hold we this solemnity, In nightly Revels and new jollity,” the word “Exeunt” appears set on the right margin of the page. Stage directions set on the edge of the page are understood to have been taken from the performing playbook, and not from the hand of the author. In a modern production, throw that out too, if you like, and keep everyone on stage until the end of the play. Take the intermission where your director decides it works best. Make a suggestion of your own. See what other artists have done in the past. Your production’s own, unique version of the text, created from the original

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versions of a Shakespeare play, with your production’s cuts and act and scene divisions, needs to be created and retyped under your supervision. And your text will continue to be refined and edited as rehearsals progress. An equally deep fount of information comes from Shakespeare’s sources. For all the writers of this era, there was no special emphasis or reward assigned to originality. Playwrights lifted from all kinds of sources, sometimes (famously in certain sections of Antony and Cleopatra, which is taken from Sir Thomas North’s 1579 translation of Plutarch’s “Lives”) making almost no changes from the original. Robin Hood forestry plays were all the rage and doing well at the rival troupe the Lord Admiral’s Men, so Shakespeare wrote As You Like It. Every edition of each play—and it’s wise to have them all at hand in rehearsal—reprints its known or possible or suspected sources. The changes Shakespeare made are legitimate subjects for discussion in rehearsal. Why did he omit or rename a certain character? Or eliminate part of a source plot, or add his own new material to the original story? These are the clues we have to his thinking, about what was important to him as he transformed the material into his play. Unlike a number of his contemporaries (we believe we know Christopher Marlowe’s last words as he lay dying of a stab wound in a tavern brawl, as well as his possibly suspicious travels to the Lowlands, or his suspected dealings at Court), there is an abiding mystery surrounding Shakespeare. This has led to what is essentially an industry of speculation about his existence. There are very few details of Shakespeare’s life in the chronicles of this time, and it’s hard to find him in his plays. Even though we know so little about his life or about him personally, we still seek to understand the work as we do most plays today—in an autobiographical way—through the extremely meager clues we actually have. His wife’s age, his son’s death, his father’s fortunes, his real estate purchases, his will. Helpful scholars in times past, who devoted their lives to speculating in what order the plays were written, offer guidance that can verge on the personal: in the nineteenth century Edward Dowden identified a Shakespearean play order close to what is accepted today, and he tried to help by dividing the work chronologically into four parts. In the first section, “In the Workshop,” are early writings, a period of “dramatic apprenticeship and experiment” showing Shakespeare trying on various models from the Henry VI plays (drawing on the English historian Holinshed’s Chronicles of England, Scotland, and Ireland, a source Shakespeare used often to better effect later on) or The Comedy of Errors (lifted pretty much wholesale from the Roman

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playwright Plautus) to Titus Andronicus, a truly interesting hybrid from Seneca. This is followed by a second period that Dowden calls kindly “In the World,” where from Love’s Labor’s Lost through Romeo and Juliet, Richard II, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the later Henrys, Julius Caesar, and As You Like It, Shakespeare can do no wrong. Then comes “Out of the Depths—the grave and bitter comedies and the great tragedies,” starting with Twelfth Night, already a decided change in tone, right into Hamlet, Troilus and Cressida, Measure for Measure, Othello, Lear, and Macbeth, among others. Dowden ends with “On the Heights,” the late plays with their new and distinct character of storytelling, and reconciliation. It’s good to know where the play you are working on sits in the canon. Mostly you’ll just learn how old he was when he wrote it—although not in all cases—and what was going on in the larger world around him in that year. Really the only glimpse of Shakespeare the man might be gleaned from the Sonnets, which give some insight in a number of the poems into what is today called a psychological character, including hints of episodes in Shakespeare’s emotional life. If you compare him with writers from Chekhov to O’Neill to Shepard to Beckett or August Wilson, say, you can see just how anonymous Shakespeare is and how hard you have to look into his syntax and word choices, and the structure of his plays, to understand them—in a totally different way than when we begin our work with writers in the modern tradition. Since there is no biography to shed light on the plays, insight comes from the textual variants and the sources. And Midsummer, oddly, or perhaps they all share some mysterious oddness, has no source—it’s one of the few plays in the canon without one. The others are Love’s Labor’s Lost, The Merry Wives of Windsor, and The Tempest. This quartet of plays is the only (what we would today call) fictional work he wrote. It’s a clever device of Tom Stoppard’s screenplay of Shakespeare in Love to tie The Tempest to Sir Walter Raleigh’s voyages of discovery that sailed to the New World starting in the early 1590s—but like every good interpretation, the connection is pure speculation. Clearly the source of Midsummer is England, and English life of the time—its customs, fairy tales, folklore, and mores. This is the easiest play—perhaps with The Merry Wives of Windsor—to tie speculatively to Shakespeare’s early life in the English countryside and the world he might have known as a boy. And the mechanicals rehearsing their play have a sense of reality that might be drawn from life despite their foolishness (they are called “Clownes” in Quarto 1), which allows a clever

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dramaturg to possibly track down the members of Shakespeare’s company who might have originated these roles. Sometimes it’s helpful to guess who might have played Shakespeare’s parts in their original productions—and this is by no means known with any certainty whatsoever. But several of his fellow shareholders have personalities that have come down to us. When the physical comedian Will Kempe, creator of Shakespeare’s early clowns (who famously danced a jig from London all the way to Norwich), died and Robert Armin, a less physical comedian, replaced him, we can convince ourselves that we see this in how Shakespeare’s clowns changed in his later plays to the more philosophical Touchstone and the Fool in King Lear. It’s also interesting to speculate about the original performances— what, if any, the doubling was—and you have to see what the size of the company (along with the apprentices, rarely mentioned) was at the time of each play to speculate on this. Conventionally (what a loathsome word!), Egeus is doubled with Philostrate, the Master of the Revels at the celebration at the end of the play, and Theseus and Hippolyta can easily be doubled with Oberon and Titania, but this has such huge interpretive implications that (finances notwithstanding—and that’s ever a big consideration) it’s better to start fresh by thinking about beginning with a full cast. And where and when was each play originally performed? Was Midsummer performed in the sunlight at two in the afternoon? At court inside by candlelight? At a private wedding, as some have speculated? How would this have worked? What set pieces are actually needed to perform this play? Here is where Henslowe’s inventory (mentioned in the introduction), albeit for a rival company, is so interesting: “A sheet in which to go invisible,” “a Hellmouth,” “a cauldron for the Jew.” The costumes were normally donated by the patrons of each company and were by no means historically accurate— here in Midsummer, Athens most probably looked exactly like Elizabethan London. And always of importance, what was the playing space, and the relationship between the stage and the original audience? Finally, all of Shakespeare’s plays are shot through with English Renaissance ideas. They are unexplorable without understanding the theory of humors, which is the explanation for psychological behavior at the time, and theories about the structure of the universe such as the Great Chain of Being, which are perfectly outlined in Titania’s first long speech (and reoccur often elsewhere in Shakespeare—see Troilus and Cressida I, iii, 78 for another good example). Any time a character mentions the word “spleen,” or “choler,” or Saturn, it’s giving an actor a clue.

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And so to begin! Armed with this background material: the textual variants and possible sources of the play, all the previous productions and commentary on those productions one can find, a dramaturg meets with a director and the play’s designers. Each of these collaborators arrives with his or her own material, expertise, and, of course, wild ideas and insights. The process of exchanging ideas forms the core work of interpreting the play—and it will of necessity be totally different for each group of collaborators. Even if these same people return to the play later in time, life will have changed the world and the interpretation will be different again. It should, it must, reflect what the interests of the artists are—and hopefully they are wide-ranging interests that include what is going on in the world and in other forms of art, so the theater production is not ghettoized and self-referential. It needs to speak to a wide audience in the world. This process of interpreting a play is intensely interesting, and creative and fun. As you get started, you begin to get to know the play—and a collaborator who already has finished ideas about any aspect of the text doesn’t belong in the room. There are strong ideas to advocate always, but this is a group creation, and will only start here, and be shaped as the contributing circle widens. You get to know the play, and how the play works, by working on it, and it’s a different kind of knowledge than you get from just reading it on the page. Its secrets and its problematic knots that need untangling are often hidden and only gradually revealed. The play’s structure slowly reveals itself too. I know so many directors who feel after a show closes that they have figured out certain things about the play they’ve just directed, and they know the sections that still mystify them—perhaps the next production will untangle the knots. When the knots all come loose, you have a masterpiece of interpretation—and if you get to work on two or three of these in a lifetime, consider yourself very lucky. Like an architectural plan, a theater text lives in three dimensions. Finding the action of a play, the task of its interpreters, allows the play to move off the page into its three-dimensional life. In theater, stage action can proceed with words and psychologically revealing blocking, but it can proceed equally powerfully with a progression of images: a movement from darkness to light, or from sparseness to plenty, from the confines of the town to the wildness and freedom of the forest. From image to image. A play such as George Büchner’s Danton’s Death alternates between huge crowd scenes and very intimate indoor scenes focusing on the central characters. The dramaturgy of this alternation viscerally conveys the action

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of these private individuals being overrun by the larger forces of history. This action is evident not only in the language expressing the ideas of the play, but experienced in its physical production. Time is also a powerful element on stage. In Midsummer, what struck us as we began was the inexorable movement from day to night to day. James Lapine and I noted that immediately. In plays new and old, a first impression is one that should be kept clearly in mind as you proceed. The arc of Midsummer’s action seems to take place over a night—though in fact the text contradicts this. It’s always important to keep an eye on the span of a play, and this is a subject that has been of interest to theater-makers and observers from Aristotle to neoclassical writers such as Dryden to presentday commentators. And it’s a very useful thing to think about. In Midsummer, despite the fact that Theseus and his bride in the first exchange of the play discuss the four days they must wait to celebrate their wedding under the new moon, and two mentions of “tomorrow night”—when Lysander and Hermia agree to flee into the woods, and when Bottom tells his friends they have until the following day to “con” their lines before they meet to rehearse in the woods about the town—somehow, nonetheless, the internal action of the play shown on stage seems to encapsulate a tidy thirty hours or less from the appearance of Egeus with his complaint against his daughter Hermia, to the events in the woods overnight, after which everyone is discovered asleep at daybreak by Theseus and the hunt. For an audience, there is no break. Bottom runs to meet his friends rehearsing at court, and Pyramus and Thisby immediately segues into the post-wedding celebration, which is vividly set at night. Then everyone is off to bed. Midsummer is almost a neoclassical play in its time span: the action portrayed in a single day and a night. It’s also an echo of an ancient classical structure from the origins of drama, the “Komos,” where worship of the God Dionysus in comedy ended with an orgy—which by the sixteenth century had been tamed to a group wedding. This is a non-intellectual arc of action—an escape to the woods, the events in the dark, and the change upon resuming “real” life. I was fortunate to be able to approach A Midsummer Night’s Dream with the then first-time Shakespeare director James Lapine, who had just been hired by Joseph Papp to stage the play in the Delacorte Theater for his Shakespeare in the Park summer season of 1982. Once again, and this is perhaps a pattern in the life of all theater people, I got the job because of a coincidence. Although in retrospect, I think I see that you seed the ground from which your coincidences will spring. During the time I worked at the

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Phoenix, I was almost constantly invited (as all dramaturgs are) to see plays written and directed by unknown theater artists. One of the new plays I chose to attend was presented in a church on the Upper East Side—not a usual performance venue back then—where a young writer-director was staging a section from C. G. Jung’s Memories, Dreams, Reflections, which memorably includes the dreams of the child of an American psychiatrist Jung met on his only trip to the United States. Jung recognized them as death dreams. The play I saw turned out to be the very first incarnation of James Lapine’s Twelve Dreams. It was a lot to bite off for a first-time theatermaker. I loved the Jung book and I knew an adaptation for the stage of any part of it would be either terrible or quite good. Happily, it was the latter. Afterward I met the artist, the young Mr. Lapine, who had worked until then primarily as a graphic designer. He told me later I was the only person working at an established theater who responded to the invitations he had mailed. Before Midsummer began its pre-production, I had had some dealings with Papp about translating plays. None of these plays ended up being produced, but Papp generously got me a translation grant, and he knew who I was, so Lapine suggested that we work together on his first Shakespeare production. Papp had never heard of a dramaturg, and when I met with him, he told me he didn’t want anyone interfering with a director’s vision or job. After a great deal of back and forth, James insisted I join the team, but I had no billing and was paid as an assistant. The dog trainer (there was a hound in our production that entered with the hunt to wake up the lovers) got title-page billing, but I did not. It was a brutal negotiation that I had to conduct alone, without a union or guild of any sort to support me. The beginning of my journal of this production is painful reading so many years later. I was listed on the contact sheet as “Drama Turk,” as a joke by a savvy stage manager. But I had a job of some six months duration, and I think I was one of the first dramaturgs ever to work on a Shakespeare play in New York. My friends consoled me, noting that going first over the barricades was often the hardest task, and I should “preserver,” as Shakespeare would say. James stood behind me, and I remain grateful to him. In my next outing, six years later at the Delacorte, working under Adrian Hall on As You Like It, I had title-page billing with everyone else on the primary creative team. In the spring of 1982, James came to my house every morning and we read the play to each other, and I recall these morning sessions with great fondness. We had an absolutely fascinating series of discussions, which

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continued as he later began casting the play, and in retrospect (this was a first time for both of us) we should have started six months earlier. We easily could have, so wonderful was our exploration of this extraordinary play. Perhaps he knew to do this or perhaps it was sheer luck, but James had already solved the biggest problem we didn’t know we faced, which was the stage design in the park. He had hired Heidi Ettinger, a brilliant designer who, like all female set designers back then, worked far less than she should have or could have. The set idea was complete and perfect before we even began thinking about the play, and we worked everything around it. It was a simple and quite radical design: the entire Delacorte stage was to be created from real greenery, grass and real trees, with huge trees flown in by helicopter and planted before tech rehearsals to remain for the duration of the month-long run. The idea was that this was a secret, undiscovered part of Central Park that would only be seen on Midsummer Night by our audience. This was in the days when you could really think big in the park—Raúl Juliá made his entrance as Prospero in The Tempest around that time descending in a harness from a helicopter. He had to go out to New Jersey before the show, and the stage manager in the park had to call the cue from the Delacorte booth by dialing the New Jersey heliport on a landline (called a telephone back then) for them to take off ten minutes before “beginners.” Of course, in the Midsummer run, the set was a nightmare to maintain, with frequent rain in the outdoor space—but when it wasn’t raining, the set was magnificent. It also had a “reveal”—the play opened with a wall on stage that concealed the secret forest, and the opening court scene was played on the grass in front of the wall. This served a double purpose. It hid the secret forest with its gorgeous trees and the view of the lake. But also, I loved the fact that just like the Mechanicals in the play, we too had to consult an almanac to see when the moon rose, or rather when the sun set, so that we could delay the play’s start long enough (while still bringing the show down before the crew went into overtime at 11 p.m.) so it would be dark when we finally went into the woods. I don’t write these words “into the woods” lightly, because now so many decades later, I see that this Midsummer interpretation came to complete fruition in the collaboration between James and Stephen Sondheim some years later in the musical Into the Woods. They met for the first time when Sondheim came to see Midsummer that August in the park. The story and the arc of both works are very similar.

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Not only had James come with Heidi’s set, he had started work with an idea. It’s not a coincidence that the artist who adapted Memories, Dreams, Reflections and who would later go on to write Into the Woods found it fascinating that the action of Midsummer takes place during the night. What happens to us, and to each of the characters in the play during the night, and how we and they have changed by the morning, became the animating idea of our production. Every word in our production was Shakespeare’s, of course. But to track this meta-idea as we worked through the journeys of the characters, some text was moved in places, and we cut the top of our Act 2 (Shakespeare’s Act 3, scene 2) as our actors played the action Puck describes in double time to remind the audience what had happened before the break. And I stuck in a whole section of text from Two Noble Kinsmen (which also features a Theseus and Hippolyta) and, to my surprise, no one outside the rehearsal room ever noticed it had been added. I was already beginning to learn a few things. I have kept the journal that I wrote from the first day the play was proposed to me, with my journey to getting the job, and then most importantly my “100 ideas” and our reactions to each other’s insights. We were due to rehearse (though alas not to perform—we were in the second summer slot) our play on Midsummer Night itself. According to the research I started to do in the Jung Institute, the comparative mythologist J. G. Frazer writes in The Golden Bough about the Druid myth of midsummer, the night when the ancient Oak Tree blooms, and the blossoms are gone before morning. The mysterious Oak “flower” will “reveal one’s lover, give prophetic dreams, ensure fertility, innocence, good luck and easy childbirth.” I was enchanted with my discovery that the Jung Institute Library was organized not by words but by images. I looked under “oak” and found images going back thousands of years. We began to think about what happened to each character during this magical midsummer night—the night the Duke’s oak bloomed in our secret part of Central Park. We began to look in the text to find what each character might be seeking, what happens to them, and how and if they are transformed during this special night. As we began reading the play aloud to each other, I mentioned items in my “100 interesting things” list to James, and one that caught his eye at the outset was about the scene between the Mechanicals as they meet for the first time. Why was Bottom talking about the colors of a costume beard? (“your straw-color beard, your orange-tawny beard, your purplein-grain beard, or your French-crown-color beard, your perfit yellow.”)

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We discussed the occupations of the quintet, Bottom the weaver, Snug the joiner (or carpenter), and I mentioned that James Burbage, the father of Richard Burbage, who may have originated a role in Midsummer (Oberon?) was also a joiner, as the playwright Ben Jonson’s father was a bricklayer, Philip Henslowe’s father a dyer (I’ve also read that he was a sometimes brothel keeper), and Shakespeare’s own father a glover. To James, this information changed his view of the quintet from “clownes” to what we would soon between ourselves describe as “regular people.” People who back then belonged to a lower rung on the Great Chain of Being, but who today would be called regular folk. And regular folk capable of being changed by a night in the forest. So we cast actor Jeffrey DeMunn as Bottom, a funny but sexy normal guy who ended up having quite a night, and changing thereby not only himself but the Queen of the Fairies as well. As anyone who has worked on Midsummer knows, the Mechanicals’ play Pyramus and Thisby is awfully hard to mess up, and the more seriously you play it, the better it works. It ended up really meaning something to us. In our production the mechanicals were people, not clowns. Funny people, but as close to real modern friends as we could make them. James and I started to look at the meter of the words in the play—and this is a standard way a director and actor will approach a Shakespeare text. Who speaks in iambic pentameter (unrhymed)? Theseus and Egeus. In rhymed couplets? The Lovers. In prose? The Mechanicals. And in the magical trochaic meter? The Fairies. We carefully tracked the references in the dialogue about who knew whom before the play’s action begins—Oberon’s mention of his relationship with Hippolyta, for example. Then we focused on really interesting details of the characters’ pasts: the lovers’ parentage, what we know of the history of the Changeling Boy, and what (outside the parameters of the play’s text) the audience could be allowed to see on stage. If it’s discussed in the play, could we show it? And what to do with all these details we learn about that happened in the past, before the action in the text commences? What was everyone seeking at night? What happens to them during the night we witness in the play—and by this point, for us, it had become a single night, the arc of our production. And how is each character changed when they return to the city? This led us inexorably to the obvious next step (knowing we had license from the play’s printed Quarto and Folio texts): could we find ways to see a few characters silently, when they were not speaking? Could the Fairies or the Mechanicals be seen at the top of

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the play during the opening scene between Theseus and the lovers? Could Titania appear at the wedding celebration in Act 5? And silently watch a play that might be a comic mirror to what happened to her the previous night? Where was Oberon when he wasn’t speaking? We began by striking through every entrance and exit, every stage direction, in every modern edition. We set out to track each character through the play—making a giant diagram of who was where, given the clues from the text, through all the scenes of the play. Our goal was to see if the different worlds—the worlds of Athens, of the lovers, the Fairies and the Mechanicals—could overlap as much as possible, and to see then where that led in terms of the journey of the play. Did the characters change after what was experienced in the forest, and is the marriage at the end (the “Komos” of the ancient Greek theater) a healing, or a resurrection of some sort after a night of abandon and then insight? Could we come out of the forest and bring the non-intellectual knowledge and wisdom of the trees and tree spirits into “real” life? Pasted on the inside cover of the journal where I kept a record of our conversations is an iconic photograph by Edward Curtis, Masked Dancers, showing a Northwest Native American Kwakiutl family group from the turn of the last century, with some of the group standing in daily clothes and some, at ease in the family group, in utterly fantastic masks of unworldly creatures of great beauty and strangeness. The spirit world, at home, among us, was our model. Probably only James and I would have found interesting the items in my “100 interesting things” list, which I kept in my journal (and which is reproduced here in the Appendix). If we did the play again today, probably we would not focus on the same items again. There are, for all interpreters, dozens and dozens of different paths to follow. In the books about the play from the past, we found many avenues we didn’t choose to explore: the form of the Court Masque and the Anti-Masque (the Mechanicals’ play) or the world of Athens itself that Shakespeare depicts in the play. The interests of a different interpretive team will open up the play in completely different directions. As we rehearsed at the old 890 Broadway building where Michael Bennett had built A Chorus Line (its magic as a rehearsal space seemed like a good omen), and which we later refined in previews in the open air at the Delacorte, we made the fairy world as beautiful and magical as possible—and our inspiration was to equal (although not in any way literally) the strangeness and beauty of the Edward Curtis image. William Hurt and

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Masked Dancers—Qagyuhl, photograph by Edward Curtis, 1914 (Edward S. Curtis Collection, Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, Washington, D.C.; originally published in The North American Indian, by Edward S. Curtis)

Michele Shay, in an extremely long wig, were beautiful fairy regents, and James engaged the young magician Ricky Jay, just starting his career, to create levitation effects for the bower scene, with fog drifting in the lights and covering Titania and Bottom as they consummated their love. The Changeling Boy played a big role in our production—silently. We worked with the remarkable Emmanuel Lewis. Emmanuel (who went on to play the title role in Webster, and have the biggest TV career of anyone in the production except Christine Baranski—our Helena) was a young man of about twelve with a growth disorder that made him appear to be a beautiful child of about four. He was always held by the fairies, doted on, and was on stage from the top of the first forest scene until his abduction by Oberon. He was an important character. As was Hippolyta, played by the gorgeous and mysterious Diane Venora, who stalked through Athens and the forest with the carriage of a conqueror.

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Of supreme importance, we had to decide who the fairies would be for a modern audience and a modern team of interpreters. After much, much discussion, which delved into the family unit of Oberon and Titania, their changeling child, their servant Puck and, finally, where they all go off to, and in what states of mind (if Fairies have states of mind) after the play closes—reconciled? changed? alone?—we made a simple choice. And that choice was reflected in our casting of the fairy group. We had a ravishingly beautiful Titania, with long robes and hair, and a remarkable Changeling Boy (Emmanuel demanded to be given a name in the play and James dubbed him CB), who when given any piece of direction, would climb into the lap of the speaker and be immediately embraced. His feet never touched the ground in rehearsal. We had a stunning score by Allen Shawn (which in the play from “The Tongs and the Bones” onward exists mostly in the fairy realm) and a solitary and imposing Oberon in William Hurt. With our choreographer Graciela Daniele, we decided to define the fairy world by what I would call “mass and loneliness.” Titania was always surrounded. Besides CB, her train included a rail-thin Filipino-American actor, Nicky Paraiso, the small, round Latina actress Olga Merediz, a ravishing, odd, almost albino child actress about ten years old with a halo of utterly white hair like a small sheep (today, so many years later, looking for her name in the program I regret that I don’t recall which of the many child actors she was), as well as adult actors with distinct visual characters. They always moved together; they shared care of the Changeling Boy. Oberon, on the other hand, was always alone. He was a polestar. But perhaps, we hoped, an audience would feel his yearning for company, for a child, or a companion, since Puck so clearly was rebelling against this role. For us, most effective was our love scene between Bottom and Titania, which we did not play for humor. Our Bottom was changed by this night, and we saw it in his demeanor afterward at the play-within-the-play. He genuinely mourned for his lost Thisby and his emotion summoned Titania, who passed silently through the scene, behind him, drawn by his passion. The evening’s final scene, when the fairy world blessed the “house,” was a visual high point, with the late-night winds swirling fog under the lights as the forest swayed, and the acting company sang the beautiful music of Allen Shawn. James and I were blocked at several places—as happens early in a career, or when trying to work an interpretation through a play. Some of our actors were eager to buy into our journey—others were not. We lost our

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costume designer at the last minute, and with the “neutral” set of real trees, the clothes became the only reference point that the audience could hold on to. “What period is this?” “What are they saying with these costume choices?” The vital importance of the visual, the fact that productions can stand or fall on good design choices, was here made evident. The costumes confused people, and we didn’t have time to figure them out. I recall seeing the play nightly with truly mixed feelings—enormously moved by certain scenes, and enormously disappointed by others that we had failed to integrate. It was an ambitious artistic production for a first-time Shakespeare director to wrangle. In this kind of work, an animating idea like the journey to the unconscious forest can get you far. Whether it can get you through all five acts is the challenge. I would say we made it two-thirds of the way through. We tried to take the play seriously and to avoid what seems to be the inevitable habit of playing the forest scenes (which do, after all, make up three-fifths of the play) as a kind of college frat night. Our lovers were really lost in a very wild place. So were the mechanicals—and they took the experience back into Athens with them and were changed by it. I think that affected our Pyramus and Thisby, which we played as straight as we possibly could; and while this makes it even funnier, it was also at the same time heartbreaking to see Bottom returned to his “real” daytime life as a clown, not a king. Jeffrey DeMunn found a way to play this beautifully. The final scene after the play-within-the-play, going into the transcendent poetry of the epilogue, was the most beautiful scene of the evening. The worlds of the court and the fairies were present together, perhaps as they had been in Shakespeare’s own time. And echoing in our minds was the wonderful Curtis photograph of the spirit world living among a community in the real world. What should have been a highlight in the production, given our interests, was the handing over of the Changeling Boy—a still mysterious action. Why does Titania do this? What is Oberon’s reaction? Does this unwritten moment somehow loop in Hippolyta? And how does it affect Puck? These were things we wanted to try to deal with, but we chose to investigate them during rehearsal rather than decide them up front. I think this is always a better decision, but in this production we ran out of time: another of the thousand challenges directors must manage. Our least understood character was Puck, in multiple ways: visually, as a reluctant servant versus an independent spirit. And what is the arc of action that leads Puck to bless

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the house with such splendid and triumphant verse at the play’s close? I recently heard of a new production of this play in London that doubled Egeus with Puck. I so wish I had thought of this and wonder how it might have threaded its way through our production. It’s quite a deep idea and one that would be fascinating to explore. We Shakespeare novices had a wonderful rehearsal investigation. But in production, we had a difficult time taking on this great play. We did succeed in not making the voyage literal in any way, just as a dream is not. I think our audiences felt they had been on a journey and seen Shakespeare’s familiar and beloved play in a different light. A Midsummer Night’s Dream prompted the gifted James Lapine to continue the investigation in a slightly different way in his soon-to-come works with Stephen Sondheim.

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expand the repertory discovering archival plays and finding their audiences

Expansion of the theater repertory is at the core of the dramaturg’s work. We look to find new and different modes of contemporary theater writing. And we look to the past, if we are lucky enough to work for a theater that can do non-contemporary plays with their larger cast sizes. Some houses have long been known for finding and championing overlooked plays and playwrights, including the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis, Arena Stage under Zelda Fichandler in Washington, D.C., the Goodman Theatre in Chicago, Hartford Stage when its primary focus was the classics, the Stratford Festival in Canada, and a number of large European houses. The goal is to enlarge the canon by discovering something new that deserves a fresh look: not simply reviving the same, familiar plays over and over. The goal of producing a play is to offer a work of artistic excellence brought to life by a community of artists performing for people who complete the circle: audience members who will respond to and appreciate the work. The play might be about these audiences and their lives and how they imagine their place in the world at a particular time. Plays can emerge from communities with common interests and resonate strongly on both artistic and communal levels. This powerful stage-to-audience connection has happened throughout history. One thinks of theaters as diverse at the Group Theater (with its unique acting and writing aesthetic and subject matter) that connected powerfully to an immigrant audience, or the radically new artistic world of Paris in the first half of the twentieth century that connected a burgeoning avant-garde audience with works by Cocteau, Jarry, and later Beckett and Genet. This powerful stage-to-audience 62

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synchronicity happened, in my own professional life, with Sarafina!, with Mule Bone, Wendy Wasserstein’s plays, Stoppard’s The Coast of Utopia (for a swath of New York intellectuals starved for a challenging and uplifting marathon of cultural and intellectual struggle), and Eric Bogosian’s subUrbia (with its hipster cast and audience). Specific large groups of people were transfixed by seeing their stories, their ideals, their dreams, or their history reflected on the stage in an artistically outstanding way. This happens any time groundbreaking work is made—and the work can be in musical theater as well (Fun Home or Rent or any of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s great musicals are good examples). Sometimes these works are newly written, and sometimes they are revelatory revivals that show a play from an earlier era in a new light, speaking to a new time. Creating this connection with an audience is critical because it keeps the theater front and center in the culture and not in a niche of an artistic special-interest group. Such a group might create a production of merit, but if it does not emerge into a larger cultural consciousness or speak widely in the world or to a special audience, it will disappear into obscurity. Unlike in publishing and the visual arts, where a significant book or painting can be discovered and appreciated by a later age, theater lives in the here and now. Many passionate theater artists create plays, but through circumstance or fortune, only certain works find their audiences and become resonant in the culture of their time. The plays of Shakespeare came down to us this way, first loved in their own time, some of them falling out of fashion or relevance for generations, only to reappear mysteriously, speaking in a fresh way to a later era. Dramaturgs help to further this process of rediscovery and they can guide a contemporary audience to an understanding of the issues and aesthetics such a reinterpretation or rediscovery is speaking to. Why revive this particular play now? When Kenneth Tynan was literary adviser at the National Theatre under Laurence Olivier, for instance, he ended up writing copy for the press office so their repertory would be presented to the public in a way that he felt matched the producing intentions of each play. Jan Kott, author of Shakespeare Our Contemporary, a book that inspired Peter Brook’s Shakespearean productions of the 1960s, including his legendary A Midsummer Night’s Dream, showed how Shakespeare could speak to that tumultuous decade in a newly relevant way. Each discovery of a forgotten play will require a unique process. As with everything in the theater, there is no cookie-cutter approach. How

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much information about the play and the author will be required? Who should join the artistic community to reintroduce the newly discovered work? If the play has never been produced (a true “lost” play) and has not come to full fruition because its final state of growth during rehearsal never occurred, what (if any) adjustments will need to be made? Who should work with it and who are the ideal audiences who will welcome it? We used one model at Lincoln Center Theater, shortly after André Bishop assumed the job of artistic director, with a revival of the longforgotten In the Summer House by Jane Bowles, the eccentric and experimental author, wife of novelist Paul Bowles. Her play was brought to us by JoAnne Akalaitis, who had just left the job of artistic director at the Public Theater. The play had been performed only once before, oddly, in a Broadway production in 1953, with the classical leading lady Judith Anderson in the central role. Anderson (who was a great star of that decade) demanded and got rewrites enhancing her role from the young, unknown avant-garde playwright. For the first revival thirty years later of this play by a significant, largely overlooked modernist female writer, I undertook to find the original pre-Broadway manuscript (that is to say, preMrs. Anderson), which was in the Bowles archives at the Michener Center at the University of Texas. We were able to incorporate some of the author’s original scene fragments into our production, which starred Dianne Wiest and Liev Schreiber working on an innovative set created by George Tsypin, who later designed Robert Lepage’s controversial Ring Cycle at the Met and, in 2014, the spectacular Olympic opening ceremony in Sochi, among other large-scale works. Our version of In the Summer House, which incorporated the newly discovered archival material, had to be approved by the Jane Bowles estate, since the play was under copyright. And Paul Bowles, quite old but still very much alive and residing in Morocco, was the trustee of his wife’s estate. He had no telephone. Mail delivery was unreliable. We communicated with him by faxing material to a drugstore near his apartment in Marrakesh. He would receive the fax by a messenger of some sort sent from the drugstore, and we would receive responses by fax from the drugstore. He was very supportive of the revival. Lincoln Center Theater wanted to convey to its audiences who Jane Bowles was, and remind them of her groundbreaking and idiosyncratic work, her artistic circle and her times. With the feminist movement under way, audiences in New York were eager to rediscover the theater work

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of this important “lost” female writer. I was charged with reaching out to those who could write about her to gather material we could include in our program. The first person on my list was William Burroughs. With the help of his publisher, I tracked down the fax number of his assistant, who was living and working with Burroughs somewhere in the Midwest. Like Paul Bowles, Burroughs was very old. I begged him for a comment or a memory of his friend and fellow author Jane Bowles. By return fax I got a garbled but, I felt, highly poetic comment. A helpful young assistant in the office was putting together the program, and when I saw the proofs, I was horrified to see that he had “corrected” the legendary disjointed style of Burroughs and taken the liberty of sending it back to the assistant for approval. But, to my surprise—and a dramaturg’s job is always full of surprises— Burroughs himself faxed back to approve the corrections, adding, “I was always a terrible typist!” In a similar vein, working in archives, I spent several weeks in Yale’s Beinecke Rare Book Library in the Thornton Wilder papers, again with the permission of the estate, which was then under the gentle and supportive guidance of Wilder’s nephew Tappan Wilder, tracking down a trove of fascinating one-act plays by Wilder (short plays with a wide spectrum of influences from Eastern theater to experimental fiction) that had never been produced. Alas, I failed to persuade my theater to produce the plays. I still believe it was a missed opportunity. A tip for all dramaturgs: if there are plays still to be discovered from a writer as well known as Thornton Wilder, imagine what other works can be found! When I arrived at Lincoln Center Theater in 1988, it had only recently reopened under the leadership of Gregory Mosher and Bernard Gersten. My first day on the job, I found two large boxes of scripts waiting in my new office. One was already full of contemporary new-play submissions. The second box contained manuscripts that Gregory had brought from his former post at the Goodman, and almost all were the wonderful “lost” plays that artistic directors covet: an unproduced Tennessee Williams adaptation of Chekhov’s The Seagull called The Notebooks of Trigorin, a never-produced Faulkner play, a Beckett manuscript, a play by Toni Morrison, James Baldwin’s unpublished final play The Welcome Table, plays by Vladimir Nabokov, and many others. I was coming into the job with my own list, of course. I also had an ancient copy of Kenneth Tynan’s twenty-four-page single-spaced repertory list, typed on long English typing paper and dated 1963–64, noting every play from the

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Greeks onward that should be considered for production at the National Theatre. The American section is quite sparse, beginning only at the end in the twentieth century, and there are few female writers—Hrosvitha von Gandersheim from the Middle Ages; Aphra Behn from the Restoration period; Hannah Cowley from the early eighteenth century; and Lillian Hellman, Gertrude Stein, Shelagh Delaney, and Ann Jellicoe from the modern era. There was just one Black writer, Aimé Césaire, as well as a special page of plays from China, India, and Japan, from Han-Ching Kuan to Chikamatsu. Among the box of “lost” plays in my office, I was surprised to find a worn copy of a typewritten manuscript by two authors I admired—Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston—whom I did not know had written a play together. I knew other plays by Hughes, and his lyrics for the opera Street Scene by Kurt Weill, with a libretto by Elmer Rice from his play of the same name. I didn’t know Hurston wrote plays. The play was genuinely funny, with character types uniquely treated and a wonderful sense of community emanating from every page. I was really interested in both of these writers. The typed manuscript read Mule Bone: A Comedy of Negro Life, and it became the next two years of my life. I asked Gregory where it came from, and he told me, “I got it from Skip Gates.” Gates, more formally known as Dr. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and now the renowned director of Harvard University’s Hutchins Center for African and African American Research, later explained: “I can’t even remember where I found it. It might have been at Beinecke Library at Yale, where the Hughes papers are, or at Howard University where there is material by Zora in the Moorland-Spingarn Research Center. Or George Bass, Langston’s executor and former secretary, might have given it to me. Or Zora’s brother. I gave it to Gregory because I wanted to see their names in lights on Broadway.” In Zora Neale Hurston: A Literary Biography, Robert  E. Hemenway wrote: “Mule Bone has never been produced, and only its third act has ever been published. Fewer than ten copies of the play survive, all deposited in private papers.” Its creation precipitated an abrupt, now well-documented sundering of a collaboration between the two leading lights of the Harlem Renaissance. After their falling out, the two writers never spoke again. Hurston left New York for her hometown in Florida under a cloud some years later. She was buried in an unmarked grave, and her work, unlike that of Hughes, was unpreserved and lost for several decades.

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So at this time it was Hurston, whose work had fallen into oblivion for thirty years and who was unknown to a readership outside academia, who needed to be reintroduced to a larger pubic. At one of our Mule Bone colloquium evenings, Gates noted: At the end of her life, she couldn’t get published because of her politics. She took several unpopular positions: she opposed Brown vs Board of Education, as I understand it, on the grounds that it would have disruptive consequences on the black community when there was an implicit assumption that our institutions would be better if they were integrated with white institutions. Once again, she turns out to sound like a prophet to some people. . . . In addition, the social realism or naturalism of Richard Wright and Richard Wright’s heirs reigned supreme for a while as the dominant mode of representing the black experience. You can hear just from the lyricism and the densely metaphorical structure of “Their Eyes Were Watching God,” that it is nothing like Bigger Thomas cutting off Mary Dalton’s head and stuffing her up a chimney. So she was unpopular for all those reasons. And it took a new generation of readers—some women, some men—to rediscover her. I think it’s very interesting that the Black Aesthetic movement did not publish her in the first generation of reprints—and they were reprinting a whole lot of people. But even they couldn’t get a handle on her. Mary Helen Washington in the introduction to our new edition of “Their Eyes Were Watching God” talks about the whole underground network of xeroxing her work and sharing it with other people. When I first taught it in 1976, it was from a xeroxed copy. And then we took over. I mean, our generation took over the classroom and took over reviewing and took over whatever influence that we could possibly have and so now it’s Zora’s time. Since January of last year, this edition of “Their Eyes Were Watching God” has sold 200,000 copies. That’s amazing. So that’s what happened, at least as I understand it. Gates was overseeing the publication of Hurston’s individual works in single volumes at the time of our rehearsals. The Mule Bone manuscript could not have surfaced at a more fortuitous moment. “Zora,” according to Gates, “was already a superstar in academia by then,” her literary reputation jump-started by Alice Walker’s influential article “Looking for Zora,” published in Ms. magazine in 1975.

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Langston Hughes was coming back into the public consciousness at this time as well. Arnold Rampersad’s lavishly praised two-volume biography had been published just as our pre-production planning began, and Hughes was suddenly again on everyone’s minds. He too had been forgotten, according to Rampersad: Since his death in 1967, it seemed, Hughes’ reputation had fallen into decline, and scholarly interest had all but dried up. Of course, he still had certain loyal admirers. Generations of blacks who had been introduced to poems such as “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” and “Mother to Son” and “I, Too, Sing America” . . . could no more forget them and their author than they could forget the games of their childhood. Hughes had been dubbed “Poet Laureate of the Negro Race” (a term he himself encouraged) and had remained so despite sometimes bitter attacks on him and his work by the Black Power and Black Arts movements in the late 1960s and early 1970s. However, among many discriminating readers, and especially among many academics, black as well as white, his popularity was often taken as proof of his shortcomings as a writer. For such readers, Hughes was—Hughes is—too simple and shallow and unintelligent a writer to warrant serious scholarly attention. Following his death in a New York City hospital, Hughes’s writing had been overshadowed by more modernist writers of a new generation (all of whom, ironically, had benefited from his early support) such as Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, as well as Amiri Baraka. While there were major stylistic differences between Hughes and this new generation of writers, the primary impulse that pulled them away was relevant to Mule Bone. It was both his and Zora’s view of race. In 1959, Hughes finally received the Spingarn Medal from the NAACP after years of being overlooked, and Rampersad describes his reaction: Quoting “The Negro Speaks of Rivers,” “Merry-Go-Round,” and “I, Too, Sing America,” Langston acknowledged his primal debt to the black tales and songs of his boyhood in Kansas and Ohio. He asserted the dignity of black America, the compatibility of its culture with great art, and the boundless potential of the black artist who chooses to write about his people instead of fleeing from them in confusion and shame.

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Regarding his being honored with such an award, it was not something he could receive “in my name alone,” Hughes said. “I can accept it only in the name of the Negro people who have given me the materials out of which my poems and stories, plays and songs, have come; and who, over the years, have given me as well their love and understanding and support.” His acceptance speech continued: Without them, on my part, there would have been no poems; without their hopes and fears and dreams, no stories; without their struggles, no dramas; without their music, no songs. Had I not heard as a child in the little churches of Kansas and Missouri, “Deep river, my home is over Jordan,” or “My Lord, what a morning when the stars begin to fall,” I might not have come to realize the lyric beauty of living poetry. . . . There is so much richness in Negro humor, so much beauty in black dreams, so much dignity in our struggle, and so much universality in our problems, in us—in each living human being of color— that I do not understand the tendency today that some American Negro artists have of seeking to run away from themselves, of running away from us, of being afraid to sing our own songs, paint our pictures, write about ourselves—when it is our music that had given America its greatest music, our humor that has enriched its entertainment media for the past 100 years, our rhythm that has guided its dancing feet from plantation days to the Charleston . . . There is nothing to be ashamed of in the strength and dignity and laughter of the Negro people. And there is nothing to be afraid of in the use of their material. . . . The local, the regional can—and does—become universal. Sean O’Casey’s Irishmen are an example. So I would say to young Negro writers, do not be afraid of yourself. You are the world . . . The embrace of these sentiments, long out of fashion, coupled with the newly reissued, warmly welcomed writing of Hurston celebrating her hometown, Eatonville, and its storytelling culture, marked a sea change in public thinking about their work, just as we were contemplating producing their play. Beginning with the lost manuscript, our process required holistic thinking about which artists, which communities, and which audiences would complete the circle. We knew the decision to produce the play

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needed to be taken by the community of artists who carried the heritage of the Harlem Renaissance and who had a stake in preserving Langston’s and Zora’s memory. The theater immediately organized a private reading of the play to bring it to spoken life for the first time. It had never been read aloud before. To our reading we invited both literary estates, friends of both authors, their biographers, and an impressive range of writers and theater artists from the African American theater community. The reading was followed by a four-hour discussion about Mule Bone and whether Lincoln Center Theater should produce the play. Those attending included George Bass, Hughes’s former personal secretary and the executor-trustee of his estate; Arnold Rampersad; Skip Gates; and Michael Schultz, whom we hoped to interest in directing the play and who was the original staff director of the Negro Ensemble Company, a distinguished film and TV director, and a Lincoln Center Theater alum who had directed the premieres of Ron Milner’s What the Wine-Sellers Buy and Sam Shepard’s Operation Sidewinder on the Beaumont Stage under two previous administrations. Then came a roster of brilliant and highly opinionated writers, directors, and actors, including the Nobel Prize winner Wole Soyinka, Ntozake Shange, the author of for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf, the actors Frances Foster, Roger Robinson, Joe Morton, Paul Winfield, and Novella Nelson, playwright Steve Carter, directors Oz Scott, Rick Khan, then the artistic director of Crossroads Theater, the most prominent African American theater at the time, and Thulani Davis, and Duma Ndlovu, co-producer of our Woza Africa! evenings, as well as others from the African American theater community. There were practical challenges to producing the play. With a cast of twenty-nine, and an on-stage band, Mule Bone was not a play that many theaters could undertake. The proposed production aimed to be at once a celebration of a lost work, as well as the validation of the aesthetics of Hughes and Hurston. Both writers, with their embrace of what they fondly called “Negro Life,” were sounding a new note in this new decade. As we began our planning, there were also symposia taking place at City College reevaluating Hughes in exactly this new light, occasioned, in part, by the acclaim and popularity of Rampersad’s prize-winning biography. We all went as a group to hear the speakers and what they had to say, to take the temperature of the times. Central to the discussion we held in the rehearsal room after that first reading was the issue that dogged the lives of the authors: the affectionate

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depiction of “Negro Life,” which in their time and even at the time of our reading a half century later remained controversial, too private, too “stereotyped” to be seen in public. This was the issue that concerned everyone as we reached out for advice about whether the play should be seen at all. Mule Bone’s subject and cast of characters, drawn from Hurston’s childhood in Eatonville—the free Black town of “five lakes, three croquet courts, three hundred brown skins, three hundred good swimmers, plenty guavas, two schools, and no jailhouse”—had not been portrayed successfully on stage yet in the way these two great authors conceived the play, Mule Bone: A Comedy of Negro Life. As Rampersad noted in our postreading discussion: By using the vernacular tradition at the foundation for their drama— indeed, as the basis for a new theory of black drama—Hughes and Hurston succeeded quite impressively in creating a play that implicitly critiqued and explicitly reversed the racist stereotypes of the ignorant dialect-speaking darky that had populated the stages of the minstrel and vaudeville traditions. Indeed, we can only wonder at the effect that a successful Broadway production of Mule Bone might have had on the subsequent development of black theater, given the play’s sheer novelty and freshness of language. Hurston had studied anthropology in the early 1930s at Columbia under Franz Boas. Later, as an employee of the WPA during the Depression, she returned to the South to make field recordings of stories and tales from the people she met, as did Alan Lomax with music at this time. She is credited with the story of Mule Bone—a folk fable of two friends from a small town, who are in love with the same young woman. Their rivalry grows to encompass the entire community—and a town meeting is called in the church where two factions, the Baptists and the Methodists, take opposite sides and air their grievances. After a fractious town meeting, the young rivals play the doubles, then decide to throw in the towel and leave town, again as friends, to make their way in the outside world. The play offered a wealth of material for an eager group to contemplate, and the discussion following the reading was a lively one. Arnold Rampersad began the discussion: I’m not sure I can put all my thoughts together, there are so many. I enjoyed the reading very much. One could stress the play’s

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limitations, but I think it’s an extraordinary play. Afterwards, the actors kept talking about the language—which is extraordinary. You can’t compare it to one of those WPA pieces, because those pieces were not written by Zora Hurston. To me, the play is Hurston’s much more than it is Langston Hughes’. [Sounds of general agreement] It’s a very successful play. . . . I know that a play like this being put on is an opportunity for some people to make certain statements and to voice certain feelings about Lincoln Center, about society and civilization as we know it. I think there would be some heat, but I think it may be worth taking the heat to put on the production. I would not frame it in any significant way. The play is framed by the publicity surrounding it before the first curtain rises. It’s framed by the advertising, and the program that’s handed out. I think it should be presented as the world premiere of a long-lost comedy by Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston, and that is that. . . . I think the play as written by Hughes and Hurston should be respected. I think if we can put on Love’s Labor’s Lost, we can put on a flawed play by Hughes and Hurston. . . . I’m only sorry that, once again, Skip Gates was there in front of me. [Laughter] The playwright Ntozake Shange chimed in: I just want to make a historical note that’s been tickling me, which is that Zora Neale Hurston was pilloried during her lifetime for writing exactly what you’re talking about. Her work has always made black people nervous because it reflected rural diction and syntax—the creation of a different kind of English. That’s one thing. The other thing is: Can it be that sixty years later we are still trying to figure out what we can present about ourselves without being embarrassed by it? Are we still trying to figure out what is real about ourselves that we know about that makes it too dangerous to say it in public? This is really phenomenal. We could probably go back and look in The Crisis magazine and find this same discussion sixty years ago. I really think all of us in the performing arts need to explore that. That is a very, very important thing. We’re doing it all over again, right here in New York City. Our doubts—our reaction to the play is making me nervous. We’re sixty years too late. They already did this. Playwright and dramaturg Steve Carter took a position in the middle, lamenting the fact that no African American theater in the past had the

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means to produce the play so the work on it could have been completed in its own time. I think it might be better just to put it on just as it is. After all, what is theater, except taking risks? That’s possibly all it should be. Maybe as an audience, we shouldn’t be pleased when we go home, but rather be able to take the play home with us and get mad at it, chew it up. As long as you take it out of the theater, that’s when it becomes an event. There have been too many productions which we have applauded, loved, and left it all right there when we left our seats. I am not really an advocate of tampering with the work of two gods—I think we have to be very careful with our “improvements” of it. I am not totally an advocate of the play, but if you’re going to do it, maybe it should be done as the work of two great artists who had yet to mature. Other people’s young works have been done. “That was my agenda—to take the lid off of black self-censorship,” recalls Gates. The ultimate consensus among that unofficial group of artists, the estates, and the theater was yes. Produce the play and let people finally see it. The theater that had done Soyinka’s Death and the King’s Horseman, that had Sarafina! running on Broadway, on tour and on film, and was capable of producing a work of this size not far from the original home of its authors in Harlem was given the rights by both estates, with the advice and blessing of the artistic community. Without this reading, the discussion that followed, and the approval of the African American theater community that knew our theater, we would not have proceeded. The full discussion in the rehearsal room in all its complexity can be heard today as a podcast housed at the Woodberry Poetry Room at Harvard University. We also printed a transcript of the discussion in the Lincoln Center Theater Review. We desired to shed light on all the points of view about these writers, this subject, and the play. The dramaturg’s task is to make suggestions grounded in knowledge. So I dug down and reached out. As the production planning moved forward, everyone wanted it to be a community effort. One might think that bringing together a huge creative team of African American artists would have been a challenge way back then, but it wasn’t at all. Our casting director Aisha Coley, now one of Hollywood’s leading African American casting directors, took charge of finding the cast. African American designers

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came on board. Although Schultz had worked with a roster of stars both as the first staff director of the Negro Ensemble Company and later as one of the first African Americans to direct feature films, here he chose not to follow that route. Instead he assembled a circle of collaborators from Langston’s community in Harlem: artists who had personally known and loved Hughes. Also, as his early films (including the priceless Car Wash starring Richard Pryor) showed, Schultz was a superb director of comedy. For the musical component in the play, the songs sung by the two leading men, it was important that it reflect the authenticity of the period music that had so interested Zora (and Langston) during their trips to the South in the 1930s. This is the tradition of Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, Robert Johnson, and other blues masters long passed. In our generation, it was the legendary Taj Mahal who knew this tradition, and who also knew—because of his years on the road—many of the artists working in this form who had never achieved a national level of fame. Taj was a major artist who had never worked in the theater and was interested in doing so. I flew to California and sat for several hours with him at Lois the Pie Queen’s restaurant in Oakland, near his home, and talked him into being a part of this historic production. I was working so hard, I don’t even remember what kind of pie I ordered. He signed on and later in the year, on the road with his band, Taj found us our leading man: Kenny Neal, the charismatic young son of a legendary New Orleans family of blues musicians. We would have never been able to find a guitarist and singer like Kenny. Kenny was not an actor playing a young blues master, he was one. Michael Schultz and Lincoln Center Theater’s casting director Aisha Coley brought the community together in the creation of our acting company. Many of the actors had known Langston personally. Despite its size, the process of assembling this cast was one of the easiest we had ever experienced. Aisha told the actors who wrote the play and who was directing, and everyone immediately accepted the role. This created a company with a family feel. It included Robert Earl Jones, the father of James Earl Jones, who worked with Langston at the Suitcase Theatre in Harlem in the late 1930s; the great Theresa Merritt, who brought the house down every night with her song in the second act; Edwina Lewis, Arthur French, Marilyn Coleman, Ebony Jo-Ann, and Novella Nelson; as well as Michael’s leading lady from the original NEC, Frances Foster. Joining them were a generation of young actors, from Spike Lee’s sister Joie Lee to Reggie Montgomery to

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Akosua Busia, Peggy Pettit, Myra Taylor, Vanessa Williams, Fanni Green, and others. Ossie Davis and Ruby Dee’s son Guy joined Taj’s band. Edward Burbridge created our sets, Lewis Brown made our costumes, Allen Lee Hughes designed the lights, and Dianne McIntyre was our choreographer. My work then shifted into the rehearsal room and, at the same time, out to the world we thought would be interested in the production. We knew from our experience producing Sarafina! that, other than the Harlem newspapers and radio stations, we would not be able to interest the “mainstream” press in this production. Our support would have to come from the community, from word of mouth. It’s useful to remember that a successful production can be made (without press support or the draw of a star actor’s name) by connecting to an audience hungry for the subject and style of a play. This challenge is what most fledgling theaters face when they start out and it is how all theaters have to work at times. In the case of our 1986 South African theater festivals Asinamali! and then Sarafina! it was the anti-apartheid movement, gaining strength as our productions began, that brought audiences interested in this struggle to the performances, and they carried the play and kept it running until world events overtook it. Nelson Mandela was released from Robben Island prison, apartheid ended, and the theater press finally took note of the play. The lack of interest from the mainstream New York press provided, as often happens, an unexpected and long-term benefit: it created the Lincoln Center Theater Review. Since no one was interested in these important artists who were spearheading the awareness of the political developments in South Africa, we decided to print the news ourselves. When faced with an obstacle, as Ibsen’s character The Boyg says in Peer Gynt, “Go around!” With LCT’s resident playwright John Guare as editor, volume 1 of the Lincoln Center Theater Review, printed modestly on newsprint, included interviews with the artists and a discussion of the political situation in South Africa. The South African plays needed no help; they were playing to rapturous audiences. But the audiences wanted more. More information, more reflection, guidance on where to take the experience they had seen on stage. No magazine can generate the response an audience has with a play. If the stage-audience connection isn’t happening, no amount of explaining is going to help. But how wonderful to introduce a play to an audience leaving the theater wanting to know more, wanting to engage and reach out politically or otherwise with the subject. This is what the

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Review could do—and has continued to do for the eighty issues we have produced since that first one that originated out of necessity—the mother of invention. With Mule Bone, we knew to rely on the powerful community in Harlem that loved and admired Langston Hughes and still think of him as their poet laureate. So many people were delighted to see him honored and recognized again. With the help of our friends Dr. Gates and Dr. Rampersad, we reached out to Langston’s friends, who were only too happy to help us put our upcoming production into a historical and artistic context. Following the path that began at our first post-reading discussion, we also decided to embrace and explore the controversies surrounding the play: the neglect of Zora for so many years, the divided opinions about Mule Bone’s depiction of “Negro Life,” and the comic tropes in the play. Gates and Rampersad helped us organize a series of six sold-out colloquium evenings on Sunday nights during previews in Lincoln Center Theater’s three-hundred-seat Mitzi Newhouse Theater. Each of these evenings was followed by a reception, which brought an array of writers and thinkers together to listen to the panels and discuss the issues raised by the play. They can be heard today in their entirety on Harvard’s Woodberry Poetry Room’s podcast site—and they give a powerful sense of the community that loved Langston. The photographer Roy DeCarava—the first African American to win a Guggenheim Award in photography and whose collaboration with Langston on The Sweet Flypaper of Life brought the two artists their first financial success, said movingly at the colloquium night that celebrated what would have been Langston’s eighty-ninth birthday: “It’s been almost forty years since I met Langston Hughes and this is the first time that I’m able to make a public testimony to my love for him.” As Rampersad had noted in his biography, this sense of gratitude to Hughes extended to writers as different as Gwendolyn Brooks and Aimé Césaire. Alice Walker remembered, “Langston Hughes published my first short story and his support of me meant more to me than I can say. Who was this man? I wondered. That he should care so much about a young and unknown writer? That he should write to me, that he would take for granted that, yes, of course, I was a writer and should be respected as one. How could he be so kind, so generous? How much had he suffered?” Meeting him, she wrote elsewhere, “I was struck by how alone Langston seemed . . . and by the intensity of the love he evoked.” LeRoi Jones, later Amiri Baraka, joined one of our Mule Bone colloquium evenings, in return perhaps for a memory cited by Ram-

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persad, “He sent me a letter, and I’d never talked to him before in my life. He sent me a letter and said he liked the poem!” These six evenings are even more remarkable now since so many of the illustrious participants have passed away; fortunately, their voices are still alive in the Woodberry archives. Gates led an evening he called “Zora Neale Hurston and the Tradition” with Elizabeth Alexander, the future poet laureate of the United States; West African author Abena Busia, who was also the sister of Mule Bone’s leading lady Akosua Busia; novelists Marita Golden and Helen Elaine Lee; Zora’s niece Lucy Hurston Hogan; playwright Ntozake Shange; and Cheryl A. Wall, literary editor of Hurston’s estate. Taj and the show’s band performed an evening of music. Linda Goss moderated an evening called “The Storytelling of Mule Bone” with Ramona Bass, Jamal Koram, Tejumola F. Olegboni, and Mary Carter Smith, the “official griot of Baltimore, Maryland.” Quincy Troupe moderated an evening titled “The Past, Present, and Future of Black-American Literature” with Amiri Baraka, Nelson George, Vertamae Grosvenor, David Levering Lewis, Greg Tate, and Cornel West. Rampersad organized a surprise “Birthday Celebration,” where Langston’s friends Loften Mitchell and Roy DeCarava remembered him on what would have been his eighty-ninth birthday, along with Ntozake Shange and Mari Evans, another young poet who had been encouraged by Langston as a young girl. The novelist Paule Marshall and the actor Avery Brooks rounded out the roster. The evening’s highlight was Ruby Dee reading selections from Langston’s great Jesse B. Semple stories. There were so many people trying to get into the Mitzi Newhouse Theater on these Sunday evenings that we broadcast the proceedings into the lobby for those who couldn’t be accommodated but still wanted to stay and attend the receptions that followed. An entire community of writers and readers made Lincoln Center Theater their home. The word of mouth in the community about Mule Bone had begun in a powerful fashion. I spent most of these six evenings in the lobby, together with William Swinton, our director of audience development, who had helped me with the programs and transportation logistics, calming down frustrated audience members who couldn’t get in, and organizing the hors d’oeuvres—all while listening on the lobby monitors. At last, Mule Bone was produced by Lincoln Center Theater on Broadway at the Ethel Barrymore Theater, where it ran for twenty-two weeks. Lincoln Center Theater sought to reach out to many parts of the African

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Mule Bone colloquia brochure, art by James McMullan (Courtesy of James McMullan)

American community in New York. Our symposium events gathered readers, writers, and teachers who loved these two writers. In early previews, we invited a sizable group of pastors from Harlem and Brooklyn churches to see the play as our guests, so that word of the production and the symposium events would go to audiences through the church-going community. The climactic scene of the play, after all, was set in the church in Eatonville. We didn’t want the production to be a memorial or marketed solely to an earlier generation that remembered these artists, we wanted to move an awareness of their work into the next generation. We did this by picking up a thread in Rampersad’s biography, in which he wrote of two central missions in the life of Hughes: to bring African literature to a greater awareness in the West and to encourage young people to write poetry. Hughes tirelessly traveled across the United States during the Jim Crow era, organizing poetry workshops with groups of children. Often the only places that would offer shelter to these poetry gatherings were African American funeral parlors. Rampersad gave me a copy of Hughes’s own simple instruc-

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tions to children, encouraging them to write poetry inspired by the world of their family, friends, and the community around them, and we created a Mule Bone poetry contest with the New York City Board of Education’s “Poetry in the Schools” program. Over five hundred schoolchildren wrote poems about their own lives and saw the play, and the winners were recognized on stage at the Barrymore by Taj before preview performances. All of the poems were published and distributed to the schools of the young poets. Thus, the circle widened, driven by the community. There were other matters to attend to in pre-production. Because Zora was still unknown to many, we decided to add a prologue to the play, spoken by Joie Lee as the character of Zora, in which she tells the audience that what’s to come is a story she found in Eatonville. After some discussion about what this prologue would entail, I was dispatched to find a passage from one of Zora’s books that could serve this purpose. We used a passage from Mules and Men. Although George Bass initially wanted to add his own prologue and epilogue, we looked back to Langston’s life in the theater, where his work was often altered and credited to others, and it was decided by the team that the words on stage should be only Zora and Langston’s. (George had insisted on being credited with a prologue and epilogue of his own authorship when the production contract was signed with the estate, but in fact, they were not used—the added words in the prologue were only Zora’s.) Beloved by all, Bass died unexpectedly at age fifty-two, before rehearsals began. I did some dramaturgical research in the WPA archives at the Smithsonian Museum and, to my delight, found an audio recording from the 1930s of Zora herself speaking and singing. We played this in rehearsal—what a wonderful moment!—and it became the basis for Joie Lee’s work on the “Zora” prologue. Zora’s voice too is now at the Woodberry Poetry Room at Harvard and can be accessed with the same link as the symposium evenings and the rehearsal room discussion. I recall the rehearsals in Lincoln Center Theater’s large rehearsal room, with Taj and his marvelous band playing during the breaks and everyone in the large cast and crew dancing, as perhaps the most joyous of my professional life. The friends in the play, Jim and Dave, are musicians, and in the manuscript they serenade Daisy with “found” folk songs with traditional lyrics— mostly comic in nature—that Zora discovered and documented on her WPA-sponsored trips to the South. The music, the storytelling, the jousting of the doubles, the humor, and the scenes from daily life were the essence of the play. These elements were hot and funny and not remotely

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cool—and this depiction of life among African Americans had not lost any of the controversy it held during its authors’ lifetimes. With this on everyone’s minds, I suggested that a number of the traditional song lyrics be replaced by poems by Hughes, especially since he wrote many poems with the form and length of lyrics. Rampersad was preparing the collected poetry of Hughes at the time, so I had the pleasure of reading his galleys and finding poems appropriate to the situations in the play where the traditional lyrics were located. We retained two of the “found” songs (Taj knew the traditional melodies) and, in a second change from the manuscript, I replaced the others with Hughes’s words. The conceit was that these young friends were proto-poets whose future, post-Eatonville lives might turn out to be as interesting as Langston’s and Zora’s had been. Taj chose the poems from a group I had selected and several of his songs were composed at my kitchen table. My favorite was “Crossing”: It was that lonely day, folks, When I walked all by myself. My friends was all around me But it was as if they’d left. I went up on a mountain In a high cold wind And the coat that I was wearing Was mosquito-netting thin. I went down in the valley And I crossed an icy stream And the water I was crossing Was no water in a dream And the shoes I was wearing No protection for that stream. Then I stood out on a prairie And as far as I could see Wasn’t nobody on that prairie Looked like me It was that lonely day, folks, I walked all by myself: My friends was right there with me But was just as if they’d left. It was interesting to me how little the white press understood this play, and at the same time how popular it was with African American audiences.

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A big house like the Barrymore can keep a show running with a famous star for that long a run, but here the focus was solely on the writers and the community of the company. Our large constituency of Lincoln Center Theater members (by no means all-white back then after Sarafina! Death and the King’s Horseman, and other plays) attended of course; but the majority of the audience was the Harlem community coming downtown. My own contributions of the choice of prologue and the substitution of the songs—which did have a significant though subtle effect on the audiences’ response to the two leading characters—remained unremarked on. I was happy about that. When the production opened, it was baffling to the critics in the mainstream papers. They were beginning to know who the authors were, but they were not able to place this rediscovered text in any context in their lives or understand the literary forms they were working in. They didn’t find it funny and mistakenly assumed it had been rewritten by Hughes’s executor, although that was not the case. Just as when I added in a section of text from a different Shakespeare play to A Midsummer Night’s Dream at the Delacorte, I found here again that the theatrical press was not as knowledgeable as I assumed. In a word, they weren’t very familiar or interested in the work of the two authors. We didn’t care. The uptown press was covering the production. We had an audience. The circle was complete. As with all productions, tantalizing loose ends remained. Here are two for a young and determined dramaturg to track down and bring into the  canon. During their final meeting in Paris, a terminally ill Richard Wright pressed into Langston’s hands Daddy Goodness, a play he had written. Perhaps Hughes could place it with some small theater company in the United States. “I’ll write you soon,” Wright promised. A day or two later, in rainy, pleasant London, Langston attended a party at the African writer Bloke Modisani’s modest flat. The talk turned to Wright’s controversial African travel book, Black Power, which many Africans had disliked. At midnight, the news came on the radio that Richard Wright was dead. Langston could scarcely believe the report, since Wright had not seemed ill. Where is this play? And a second: in his memoir Run-Through, John Houseman, the codirector, with Orson Welles, of the Federal Theater Project’s Negro Theater Unit in 1935, wrote,

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Soon after the opening of Macbeth, it became necessary for the Negro Theatre’s contemporary wing to put its next production into rehearsal. And here the usual problem arose—the scarcity of suitable scripts, aggravated by a widening split between the “social-conscious” members of the project and the others. For a few days I thought I had found the solution in a new play by Zorah [sic] Hurston, our most talented writer on the project, who had come up with a Negro Lysistrata updated and located in a Florida fishing community, where the men’s wives refused them intercourse until they won their fight with the canning company for a living wage. It scandalized both Left and Right by its saltiness, which was considered injurious to the serious Negro image they both, in their different ways, desired to create. So I had to give that one up. I went as far as requesting a complete index of the Houseman archives at UCLA to see if this manuscript was in the index. It was not; but that means nothing to a determined researcher. Whoever compiled and indexed the UCLA archive might never have heard of Zora, whose gifts languished so long in obscurity. It might very well be there in Los Angeles, waiting for someone to find it.

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3

love and encourage suppor ting a playwright’s work as it develops over a lifetime

As you enter a field, you begin to see, behind the scenes, how the profession works. You identify editors who are known for their stables of writers, who return to them again and again for guidance and a sure hand in the publication process. Their opinions and discretion are prized. While these relationships may remain obscure to the general public, they are well known to insiders. In our field, a theater’s goal is to have a group of playwrights who call the theater their home. Theaters through the ages have aspired to be associated with a brilliant circle of writers, who define the identity of the theater. Usually this happy result is a product of the personal friendships between the theater’s artistic staff and the artists. In addition, many dramaturgs, and directors too, have long-term artistic relationships based on discretion and trust that continue even as writers send their plays to other theaters and broaden their careers. Not every play written by a writer you love will be right for your spaces or audiences. And playwrights want to change and work in different kinds of organizations as their work develops. A dozen or so playwrights I know well regularly send me drafts of plays they are working on for production at other theaters. Although there may be years between productions at Lincoln Center Theater, these are lifelong relationships that continue in the meantime, based on trust, friendship, and mutual understanding. Sometimes the dramaturg’s work on a play may be directed toward a future production already scheduled, but just as often it is in support of a friend, and his or her artistic growth. It might involve sending a grant to an author in a time of need, or a prize when morale is low and the new play

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is having a hard time being born, or connecting a playwright with a new director, or a new theater in a different city. It might circle around to vetting a translation of a successful play into another language. Always needed is a shoulder to cry on. There is always advice about and acceptance of career decisions and more encouragement than seems possible for anyone to need. A dramaturg’s life with his or her playwrights will be an adventure. If you believe in the work of the writer and feel that it’s important to get it out into the world, you put your shoulder to the wheel and find yourself occasionally in surprising places. One of the writers I believed in was Wendy Wasserstein. Like so many people who knew and worked with her, I was a devoted admirer of Wendy and her plays. What she wrote about, as she began her career and then mastered it, I found vitally important and needed in the world. Wendy was a dazzling intellect, artist, and friend. We met briefly as students at the Yale School of Drama, introduced by our mutual friend the playwright Christopher Durang. She was a first-year playwright, I was in my final year. Unlike Chris’s experience at the Yale School of Drama, her plays were never produced there. Wendy struck me as extremely tongue-tied, shy and awkward. Eight years passed. My first day of work in the professional theater in New York, as literary manager of the Phoenix Theater, was also (by some divine chance) the second day of rehearsal of Wendy’s play Uncommon Women and Others. As I hesitantly entered the rehearsal room (not a good idea to enter a rehearsal room on the second day—that’s a very practical piece of advice I can give to any dramaturg), fearful of what my reception would be, Wendy turned in her chair and said to me, “Thank God, you’re here.” I was hers for life. And this rehearsal room was happy and productive, a group that remained bonded throughout the play’s highly successful run. Uncommon Women came to the Phoenix from the Eugene O’Neill Playwrights Conference in Waterford, Connecticut, a hothouse of new playwright development run by George C. White and Lloyd Richards. At that time, new play theaters in New York traveled each summer to the O’Neill to look for plays for upcoming seasons. The O’Neill pioneered a number of important new-play development techniques that were integral to its success. Writers and directors attended a pre-conference weekend early in the summer, a month or more before the conference itself began. During this weekend, each playwright read his or her play aloud, and the first incarnation of a brand-new play thus came to life in the author’s own voice. The

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play’s director, and the other writers and directors at the conference, heard it first in this fashion. This is an invaluable practice that has fallen out of fashion, one that can help future collaborators understand the intention of the author. Think of a recording of Yeats, Sexton, or Pound reading their own work, with the author’s own voice offering insight into the poems. Once the O’Neill conference opened later in the summer and the acting company convened, several other unique traditions came into play. The actors were not allowed to memorize their lines, so that the authors could rewrite freely without encumbering actors who had already learned lines. On each day of rehearsal, new rewrites appeared on paper of a different color, so that the changes could be easily removed, if the group felt they didn’t work. The actors’ scripts were multicolored: you could see that a script was in progress and how much it had changed over its rehearsal process. Lloyd Richards also required the playwrights to sit in the middle of the audience when the plays were performed, scripts in hand, when guests were invited on the conference’s final weekends. No author could pace at the back of the house, or hide. Audiences always give signs of engagement or, on the other hand, restlessness. Richards wanted writers to actually sense these responses. (And you learn quickly that audience responses do not necessarily mean that the writing at that exact moment is a problem. If, say, the audience is restless, the issue might be hiding somewhere earlier in the play with its results manifesting later.) The O’Neill was a paradise of creativity for a number of years under Richards and White’s leadership; but it gradually lost its preeminence as a fount for new work moving steadily into the regional and New York theaters. Mostly this was due to its own success. Initially, everyone came to Waterford in the summer to find interesting new plays and see them explored by wonderful new actors. Over time, though, a collegial spirit of equality was replaced by an increasing sense of competition. “What were the best plays?” theaters asked. “Which weekend should we come up?” An inevitable focus more on results than process began to undermine the O’Neill’s earlier ambiance. Perhaps an inevitable evolution, but a sad one. Wendy’s Uncommon Women along with its director, Steve Robman, was picked up by the Phoenix from the O’Neill. After the 1978 conference, Wendy, Steve, and actress Alma Cuervo, who played Wendy’s persona on stage for years, came down to the Phoenix from the O’Neill. The Phoenix at that point was a major Off-Broadway theater, performing at the twohundred-seat Marymount Manhattan Theater, part of a thriving Off- and

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Off-Off-Broadway scene devoted to new plays. Like its mythical namesake, which rose from the ashes every seven years, the Phoenix changed its mission and its home too on a regular basis. At that point in its history, it was doing premieres of contemporary American and international plays. And because the Phoenix in its earlier incarnations had always been known as an actors’ theater, it was especially easy to find gifted actors eager to work at the theater on these new plays. The most immediately striking characteristic of Uncommon Women and Others was its all-female cast of seven, and its sole focus was on the protagonists’ friendships and futures. Today, it’s hard to believe how novel this was: it was told exclusively from the women’s point of view. The male characters mentioned in the play did not appear on stage. The play was immediately popular with the Phoenix’s audiences, and the reviews—from an all-male reviewing cohort—were very positive. There was much discussion with and outreach to commercial producers about moving the play to a larger house to allow its run to continue. The run of a play at a major OffBroadway theater during the 1970s was three weeks long. We waited with bated breath as the bigwigs from the Shubert Organization attended Uncommon Women on the final weekend. Their verdict was that they enjoyed the play but felt there would not be an audience big enough to support it in a commercial run. This set Wendy on her life’s path to prove them wrong. Luckily, after the play closed, the Phoenix arranged for its production to be filmed for the Great Performances series on PBS and thus achieve a longer life. It can be seen today in this version, which preserves its freshness, immediacy, and wonderful acting. The Phoenix immediately commissioned Wendy to write a second play for production. What it would be about was unknown— both to her and the theater. She had a number of ideas, of course, for future plays. So Wendy and I began what became our custom of having lunch once every two weeks or so, to talk about life and what a possible play might be. I did the same thing with Chris Durang, whom the Phoenix had also commissioned at this time. His mother had recently died and he was at a vulnerable point in his life. I felt that a promised production of a new play—subject also yet to be determined—might help him move forward. His commission turned out to be Beyond Therapy. Although I commissioned a few plays at the Phoenix, two evenings (fourteen short plays) of work for the Acting Company that included Orchards and Love’s Fire, and, later, two plays at Lincoln Center Theater (one

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was Bruce Norris’s Domesticated), these were all plays that I knew my theaters would produce, and my work to support each author was done with this end in mind. One of the plays I commissioned at Lincoln Center was not given the green light for production, and I have not commissioned a play since then: the risk that I cannot offer a guaranteed production to an author is too great. This position puts me wildly out of step with the standard commissioning policies now in place at almost all not-for-profit theaters, which can have as many as twenty or more writers under commission at any given time, often with their sponsor’s names attached. Commissioning has now also become a branding opportunity. I worry how the literary staffs of theaters can find the time to stay close to so many writers. And what happens to the many commissions that, once written, are not produced? Is this good for the writers? How much time and energy does it take to write a major play? What happens to all these plays when they are not put into production and allowed to develop and be explored and grow in rehearsal? In more extreme moments, I’ve gone as far as feeling that play commissioning today is a form of indentured servitude: a promising new writer with a successful early play is showered with commissions from highly regarded theaters; indeed, I know young writers with as many as six commissions. The advance money and recognition are highly welcome, the money soon spent, time passes, and I wonder about the plays these authors will write, years down the road, when the last of them are finally due. How good will these plays be? Is this helping the American theater? Many established writers will not accept commissions for exactly these reasons. They don’t want to be indebted in their future creative life. It takes the energy away from the impulse to write. But more fundamentally, what is broken is the commitment from theaters to playwrights to bring their plays to completion on the stage, the ongoing company model that tied Lanford Wilson to Circle Repertory Theater, Charles Fuller to the Negro Ensemble Company, and Irene Fornés to INTAR. These writers knew their plays would be produced. They wrote them for actors associated with the company. They had ongoing relationships with the theater’s artistic staff. Set designer John Lee Beatty speaks of how his conversations with Lanford Wilson about their playing space at Circle Rep were incorporated into Lanford’s rewrites. If the field were to put a five- or ten-year moratorium on all commissions and readings, what would be the result? What other means could be found to give writers both the money and the experience of getting to know their

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plays? Could we give money to writers directly, who themselves could arrange what they need to take their plays to the next step, at a time, place, and with collaborators of their choosing? All good playwrights need and deserve money, as well as a reliable connection to an artistic team that loves and supports their work. For dramaturgs, this means we need to know the writers personally, listen to them, be there for them and, ultimately, support the creation of a play that our theater will commit to. It’s also not a bad idea to look at the contract your theater is asking them to sign. You might have an opinion about what’s in it. A theater with twenty commissions out at one time might not be able to give each writer the time and attention she or he deserves from the dramaturgy staff. The individual work to support the writers won’t get done, unless there are resident directors committed to each play, and not absent due to outside freelance projects. Ideally work on each play will be done by a director and a dramaturg, although in many cases, until the play is written, it may be unclear who the best director for the play will be. At the Phoenix, Wendy was obviously not the only playwright we were producing: artistic director Dan Freudenberger was working with Corinne Jacker on her poetic play Later in that same season, and the following year, the dynamic Getting Out by Marsha Norman, with Pamela Reed and Susan Kingsley, had its New York premiere at the Phoenix and later moved into an extended run downtown at the Theater de Lys. Marsha’s work was nurtured by director Jon Jory and by Susan Kingsley in this same way at the Actors Theatre of Louisville. But my focus at the Phoenix at that time was not on these works. My focus was on Wendy. When we began meeting for lunch, Wendy had one just-about-fulllength play under her belt, Uncommon Women, and several one-act plays written in her student days. The Phoenix was a high-profile platform and there was now much expected of her. Her work then and up until her final play was a complex mixture of several kinds of writing. She was a brilliant, natural playwright with a gift for collaboration with directors and actors. She was also a great rewriter, who took suggestions with grace and ease from directors and actors who developed their own understandings of the play at hand. Her plays always improved in rewrites, which is not often the case. Many plays are harmed by workshops and readings, by writers unwisely accepting too much unhelpful advice. Her work, as it developed, was conventional in the best sense: she wrote plays with characters that audiences could relate to, and she was interested in a traditional narrative arc.

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So much so that one of her most frequent jokes was how much she hated the word “journey”: an overused, traditional query to try to understand a character’s arc through a play, as in “what is the character’s journey?” But all of her characters, in fact, had a journey. Her work was also a powerful and, I think, unique combination of three kinds of playwriting. First, she was interested in writing plays to figure out her life; her work was personal to a great degree, in the Eugene O’Neill tradition. O’Neill’s lengthy, ritualistic purgation of his family history and personal life challenges form the trajectory of his plays. You can’t edit or cut them; you have to live through them at the same speed and punishing length as the personages themselves. Wendy’s life and material were not as brutal as O’Neill’s; but her impulse to understand, explore, and make sense of her personal circumstances was as strong. It’s interesting to consider the playwrights who have written so directly from their own lives: much of Strindberg, Tennessee Williams, Horton Foote, Clifford Odets, David Rabe, Amy Herzog today in certain plays. Perhaps Lorraine Hansberry in The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window and Larry Kramer’s The Normal Heart. I can’t think of many others. Writers from Beckett to Kushner draw on their own personal experiences and combine them with invented material and situations. Strictly autobiographical writing is not as common. Second, Wendy’s goal of writing personally was combined with a powerful political agenda. She wanted the challenges and struggles of women of her generation to be heard. This was not being done on stage at that time. Corinne Jacker’s plays were far more private and poetic in nature. Marsha Norman told powerful stories with strong characters but, at the time, without overt political subject matter. Downtown at the Public, Liz Swados, Tina Howe, and Ntozake Shange were taking on social issues in a personal way in Runaways, The Art of Dining, and for colored girls . . . But Wendy wanted to confront women’s social issues more directly. This was starting to be done at the time in journalism and in fiction. Wendy had a great deal in common with writers such as Nora Ephron, whose toughness and acid brilliance were then making a powerful mark in journalism. Finally, Wendy wanted her work to be heard and recognized. She was ambitious and wanted to play a big role in the conversation of the time. Her wit and her laser-eyed ability to observe social mores put her in a perfect position to be a commentator of contemporary society. In Wendy’s writing life, there was a split between the sides of her that wanted to be, or rather could so easily be, Philip Barry—a once celebrated, now long-forgotten

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Broadway playwright who portrayed the mores and manners of wealthy and influential society between the wars—and Chekhov, who focused on the subtleties of his characters’ hearts. Wendy’s writing career for the next thirty years was a tug of war between these forces. It’s hard to stress how challenging the environment was that she faced. It used to be a truism that there is only room for one successful woman writer in the theater at any given time. Lillian Hellman. Clare Boothe Luce. There was no community. Wendy was the first woman to win the Tony Award for Best Play. She was one of only six women to win a Pulitzer Prize for Drama since the prize was established in 1918. When Wendy began writing, her passions were of no interest to the fraternity of critics or the producers of Broadway. For the first twenty years of her playwriting career, she was supported by the second-string drama critic of the New Yorker, the venerable and ladylike Edith Oliver, the age of her grandmother, who had worked with Wendy at the O’Neill but was allowed only occasionally to write about her work in print. Only one leading drama critic of a New York newspaper, Linda Winer, of Newsday, did so. Marilyn Stasio was a second-string critic of the New York Post back then but was rarely assigned to review larger theaters; that was the privilege of Clive Barnes. Even now, I will finish forty years of a professional career without first-string reviewers other than ambitious young white men. And how ironic this is, considering that I went to graduate school in dramatic literature and criticism to train as a drama critic. I often wonder what the face of the American theater would look like today if all the drama critics over these past forty years had been, say, women of color in their fifties. Uncommon Women and Others made its way quickly into multiple print editions and onto countless regional and amateur stages. Isn’t everyone always looking for plays with lots of good female roles? The cheerful yellow cover of an early paperback edition of the play displayed this quote: “Female, flip, hip and funny . . . uncommonly, intensely contemporary”— The Washington Post. This was the mountain she had to climb. The Uncommon girls were cute, the play contained some genuinely funny original jokes, and there were some sexy scenes (Wendy kept on her answering machine the phone message from her PBS producer and friend Ann Blumenthal saying, “Wendy, they’re going to allow ‘clitoral orgasms’ in the broadcast!”). Uncommon Women’s female audiences couldn’t believe they were seeing a play about women who were friends, outside the male gaze. There was a truth that no one had presented before. And the play’s ending

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at the friends’ first college reunion, was, like all of Wendy’s endings, rueful and prescient—“When we’re forty, we can be pretty amazing.” When Uncommon Women and Others burst on to the scene, Wendy was dating a nice-looking Jewish guy from Brooklyn, whose reaction to her success was mixed: he was happy but also a little baffled by it. And as she and I began meeting to talk and ponder what her commission for the Phoenix would be, she awkwardly asked me if I wouldn’t mind reading a first play newly written by him, for consideration by the theater. After her success, he had concluded, he could write a play, too. I still have his name, address, and phone number in my old Rolodex from the time they were living together, when I needed to reach her. He became the model for one of the quartet of central characters of Isn’t It Romantic, the title of her Phoenix commission, along with the man she began having an affair with after she broke up with the one-time-only aspiring playwright. But the central concern of Wendy’s work then, as she turned thirty, was her extremely acute observation of her friends and exactly how they were making accommodations (or not) between establishing a career, finding a husband, and “settling down.” How much of yourself did you have to sacrifice to be with a man? Did you need a man at all? Wendy was also interested in mothers: hers and others. What had mothers done in their own lives? What advice did they have to give? I adored the fact that, right until the end, through all her major successes, Wendy’s leading characters were called Janie, Pfeni, Heidi. Real names of women never before used on the stage, where audiences were used to the Reginas of the theater: grander, more elevated heroines. Wendy’s protagonist might be called Heidi, but she could be taken seriously. Like so many of the playwrights and actors of note I have been fortunate to work with, Wendy was a laser-like observer of human behavior. It was scary at times, and often odd and unexpected. After one early reading of Isn’t it Romantic for the Phoenix hierarchy and a bevy of agents, I asked Wendy, over a beer alone in a nearby bar, what she had made of it. I could clearly see that everyone had loved the play. “I actually spent most of the time studying everyone’s shoes,” she told me. “Sensible shoes, fancy shoes, tired shoes. And I tried to figure out how to connect the shoes with the people who were wearing them.” Isn’t It Romantic became the story of Janie and Harriet, two friends newly arrived in New York, and their boyfriends, their mothers, and what happens to their relationships. Wendy was the model for Janie, the Jewish

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girl, always to be played by the astonishingly sympathetic Alma Cuervo (of Cuban ancestry). Wendy’s longtime best friend in real life was the model for Harriet. With only this basic premise, the play began. She didn’t know how it would turn out. That was the challenge, a challenge that I’ve seen writers face several times. Playwrights with a gift for observation may falter when their plot leads them into territory they haven’t yet lived through. To complete the play, they have to speculate instead of shape and dramatize actual events that they’ve experienced. It’s easy to speculate, but the speculation usually lacks the same weight or feel as lived observation. And this will be a weakness or, let’s say, a difference in the play. Not all writers, by any means, write like this. Many, if not most, plays are purely imaginary constructions. When working on a play with an author, it’s important to ferret out which is which. Wendy dove into her play making the most of the fact that Janie’s family was Jewish and Harriet’s family members were WASPs, a classic New York comic trope. This was not in fact the case in terms of the real people the play was based on, or its casting, but it was most definitely real on the page, and Wendy’s Philip Barry side had a field day. The play was really funny, at times too funny. Wendy, at this young age, was passing through to the end of her psychiatrist days (soon she would no longer see one) and she was ready to pillory her years of sessions during her student years. However, it became clearer that Wendy was writing a therapy scene for Romantic as a means of at once getting to know her central character but also, we realized together gradually, because at that point she wasn’t able to figure out where the play would end. She dawdled with the easily written, very funny shrink scene because she didn’t know what was going to happen to the friendship between the two young women at the center of her play. What was to happen to them hadn’t happened yet. And then it did: her friend suddenly decided to marry a man she barely knew. Wendy felt it was a terrible choice. And so she had her ending and the Janie-psychiatrist scene was cut. Regrettably. It was a great scene, and it would have made the career of a lesser writer; but it didn’t move the action forward. The action needed to stay focused on the relationship between Janie and Harriet. The psychiatrist jokes were incidental. At such moments, Wendy always said of work she cut, “It’s going to the Pinto warehouse in Oklahoma,” where at that time recalled cars were warehoused and destroyed. That imaginary warehouse by now probably also holds dozens and dozens of commissioned plays written—but never

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produced—for new play theaters that were only on the horizon back then. The Phoenix committed to producing Isn’t It Romantic without knowing the play’s ending. Wendy didn’t know it either. That always meant that the central characters would dance optimistically together and avoid a final conclusion. This drove a number of people crazy, including the one man who had believed in her at Yale: Howard Stein, the dean of students. “Embrace your pain, like Chekhov,” he told her, knowing that Chekhov was Wendy’s favorite writer. Wendy reported this to me each time after she saw Howard. But until late in her career, she wasn’t ready to do this. During rehearsals and performances of the world premiere of Isn’t It Romantic, I had a number of roles to play. Beginning with one that resembles a football guard, looking to clear the way and run interference on anyone who would compromise the forward movement of the star quarterback. For instance, we engaged the very charismatic Peter Riegert, fresh from successes in films as diverse as Animal House and Local Hero, to play Janie’s boyfriend Dr. Marty Sterling, and he threw himself into rehearsals with great enthusiasm. His picture on his Wikipedia page even now gives a good idea of his special sort of magnetism. I would see him sitting in the house next to Wendy in the dark in tech rehearsals with his arm casually draped on the back of her chair, whispering seductively into her ear. And then she would approach the director to wonder if Dr. Marty shouldn’t have a few more lines in the scene they were about to rehearse. I had to remind her sternly that this was a play about two female friends and not the story of Dr. Marty. Running interference between a sexy actor and an easily charmed playwright is not usually included in the dramaturg’s toolkit, but it may be needed at important moments. Of course, I told Peter what I was doing, and we remained friends: he’s a smart actor who can keep the whole picture in mind. Another of my tasks, once the play started performances, was to stand outside the theater at curtain down and waylay Wendy’s mother, who walked over from her nearby apartment each night at ten o’clock to wait on the sidewalk outside the theater and accost the exiting theater-goers. “My daughter wrote this play! Did you like it?” This was one of my more difficult assignments, since Lola Wasserstein was sharp and very quick, and I had to work very hard to distract her with conversation in a friendly but intense fashion for the fifteen minutes it took the audience to exit. Wendy was mortified by it all. Imagine David Mamet’s mother doing this? I stood there outside the theater each night because I wanted to keep Wendy focused on

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her play and not have the play distorted by the opinions of, I felt, untrustworthy people, however closely related to her they happened to be. Lola was a very powerful influence on Wendy—and I knew she would accost the audience members with pride, but also ask them what they hadn’t liked in the play and immediately report it to Wendy and “hock” her (as Wendy would say) until she changed it. So I blocked for Wendy. She never had to hear anything unless it was from someone she personally asked to comment on the play, and she continued to write the play she wanted to write. Another task: she asked me to sneak in the back of the theater with her so she wouldn’t be alone as the real-life model for Harriet’s boyfriend— Wendy’s new crush—attended the play. Would he recognize himself and some of his words she had used in her play, words he had spoken at moments when he’d been the cruelest to her? Not a bit. He didn’t even flinch. He loved the show. Isn’t It Romantic was very well received. It was of the moment, funny, rueful, and sad as the relationship between Janie and Harriet dissolved under the pressures of the decisions they made. In real life, by the time of the opening, Wendy and her best friend’s relationship had ended. A group of Wendy’s friends, led by André Bishop and Gerald Gutierrez, who would go on to produce and direct the play when it was revived three years later, didn’t care for the set of the Phoenix production by Marjorie Kellogg or the play’s direction; so in 1983, Isn’t It Romantic was recast, redesigned, and rewritten slightly, and made into a far funnier and more entertaining play, highlighting the comic Jewish-WASP social differences of the characters and their families and focusing less on the dissolution of Janie and Harriet’s friendship, which was the primary focus of the Phoenix production. Betty Comden, a legendary Broadway figure, stole the show as Janie’s mother in this revival. The voices of celebrities of the day (with their names featured prominently in the program) had been prerecorded as the voices on Janie’s answering machine. The play was a hit. It was successful at the Phoenix, but in a different way than this second run. The director of the revival, Wendy’s friend Gerry Gutierrez, would jokingly say “ka-ching” each time the audience laughed, and laugh they did. Wendy’s career began to move to another level. There are writers who sketch out their plots in advance, who work toward an ending that is already in their imagination. Wendy wrote more by feel, shaping her plays in the moment by the events happening in the world and to her personally, and by careful, nuanced observation, like her

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hero Chekhov. She did not write with an agenda, but looked around with a fine, discerning eye for behavior, not polemics. She always looked deeply enough into all her characters to understand what their motivations were and what might redeem them. That’s why actors loved to work on her plays and why her characters continue to surprise and confound their types. Chekhov’s model and her own observational powers guided her. Typically, she would make the first draft of a supporting character as a difficult and oppositional antagonist, and then in rewrites redeem the character by finding a deeper level that revealed a more positive motivation. For instance, in The Heidi Chronicles, Heidi’s great love marries another woman who at first appears to be a brainless Southern charmer. But we soon learn that this impression is false: she’s a children’s book writer and her books for hospitalized children are highly valued by Heidi’s doctor friend who is working the pediatric AIDS wards of New York. These character layers always came as a surprise and a delight both to her and eventually to her audiences. It’s why actors loved to play these multifaceted roles—even in the supporting category. The endings of Wendy’s plays were impossibly difficult for her to write, and they were always slightly askew. She hadn’t lived them yet. As a result, they often struck audiences as false or misleading. Sometimes they were projections and wish fulfillments; though, often, they kept audiences very happy. They also grew increasingly bitter in tone as she grew older, and were often a source of controversy. However, as her longtime friend and producer André Bishop noted after her death, “Wendy always told us at the end of her plays what was going to happen.” At the same time that Wendy’s endings caused dissent in her time, they were—now that we look back from a different perspective—uncannily prescient. In her final play Third, written in 2006, in which with unerring foresight she focuses on the exact red state/blue state divide that was to define the time of the Trump presidency a decade later, she signaled her own death: “I’m thinking of taking a leave of absence . . . a sabbatical’s just a year. This might be longer.” At the end of her most influential play, The Heidi Chronicles, Wendy was alone in her personal life, and the play’s ending came with its own controversies. Scoop Rosenbaum, the man Heidi loves, has a new family. He visits Heidi in the play’s final scene to speak of his regrets in life and finds her in a new apartment with an adopted newborn baby. This ending sent the women’s movement into a frenzy, and I recall being on a number of panels trying to defend the ending, which, as André points out, actually

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happened in Wendy’s own life; she much later became a single mother. And of course, looking around today, having a child on one’s own is a common choice for many women. But back then? I find particularly distressing the glib situation: Heidi adopts a baby even as women artists, her babies, start making it big; a final slide shows us Heidi hugging her infant in front of the Met’s Georgia O’Keeffe banner. That is too easy: I’ll buy that ending when I hear that Miss Wasserstein has adopted a baby: There are times when life had better imitate art if we are to believe either of them. Even twenty years later, when The Heidi Chronicles was revived on Broadway with Elizabeth Moss, directed by Pam MacKinnon, the ending was still taking the heat, but from a different side: Heidi’s predicament, rather, is that for most of the play she doesn’t take charge of her life. “LEAN IN!” one wants to shout at her—not as a strategy to advance at work, but as basic dramaturgy. Heidi is a passive protagonist. What 40-something overworked second-shifting Broadway ticket-buyer has patience for that? Would one dream of asking this of Chekhov? “Irina, I can’t relate to you until you lean in and buy a ticket for that train to Moscow!” Now, years after Wendy wrote The Heidi Chronicles, with the waves of sexual harassment claims brought to light in workplaces everywhere, we’ve seen that taking charge of one’s life is perhaps more difficult than we anticipated. As an author who watched people so closely, who saw their contradictory behavior so clearly, Wendy had no party line. She wrote it as she saw it. And took the heat for being both too progressive and not progressive enough. She took far more heat in her life than David Mamet, Sam Shepard, or August Wilson ever had to. In The Sisters Rosensweig at Lincoln Center Theater and later in its long Broadway run, the ending dilemma happened again when Wendy’s oldest sister—a widow, and the model for the character Sara, played by Jane Alexander—was dying of breast cancer. On the stage, Sara’s suitor Mervyn Kant, the furrier, played by the utterly charming Robert Klein, came back to give the play a happy ending. In life, the furrier didn’t come back—there was no one to come back to. Wendy won the Pulitzer Prize. As reported by Judith Miller in the New York Times, Wendy said:

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“It was important to me to write a play about three uncommon women who are not 23. It was important to write a romance about Sara, a 54-year-old woman, and about Merv, a man of 54 who falls in love with a woman that age, for real.” Drama, she says, and romance in particular, are almost always presented in contemporary works by men. In their plays, the character Pfeni, the unmarried, wandering writer looking for love and possibly fame, would be “pathetic,” she says. Gorgeous, the loving mother and everyone’s best friend, “would be a cliché.” And Sara would just be a “bitchy, hard-bitten woman.” Wendy’s decision to focus on real women, but to give their stories a happy outcome, allowed her to achieve spectacular success, including winning a Tony Award and the Pulitzer Prize, as well as a powerful platform for her feminist ideas. In The Heidi Chronicles, Wendy was determined to draw attention to so many things, starting with the fact that the longtime standard college art history textbook at the time, H. W. Janson’s History of Art, did not include a single female artist. Wendy wrote a scene in which Heidi pickets the Chicago Art Institute with her friends, holding signs that read “Women in Art,” to protest a museum without women artists. The play engendered a mountain of press, including a stand-alone four-page insert in Newsday titled “Ever Hear of Sofonisba Anguissola? Heidi of The Heidi Chronicles wants to know why the artist doesn’t merit even a line in art textbooks. Have women artists been undervalued?” The article interviews curators, museum directors, New York City’s cultural commissioner, as well as distinguished contemporary painters from Susan Rothenberg to Elizabeth Murray, who began her response by saying, “I totally agree with Heidi . . .” Wendy did the rounds of the late-night television talk shows. She wrote for countless publications outside the theater community. In 1993, The Sisters Rosensweig moved from the Beaumont to Broadway with a $2.5 million advance. Since her death, there has been no one from the theater speaking and writing about American women’s issues for mainstream audiences on this scale. Happily, serious plays by female playwrights make it to Broadway now; but unfortunately, at least so far, they have only succeeded in limited runs. Wendy tried to change that dynamic. It’s difficult to quantify that advance in today’s numbers, but dramaturgs can and should read the weekly grosses just as managers do. I’d compare the financial success of

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Sisters Rosensweig at that point with today’s Book of Mormon or To Kill a Mockingbird in terms of draw. Wendy’s life’s work was to put women’s issues—their friendships, successes, and disappointments, portrayed realistically, at the fore. Despite the Shubert Organization’s judgment at the time of Uncommon Women, female theater audiences turned out to be, in fact, actually the majority of the theater-going public, and they were hungry for Wendy’s material. They bought tickets and they brought their husbands, lovers, families, and friends. Wendy’s later plays, like her life, were less and less funny. The final play of hers that I worked on from start to finish was An American Daughter, a hard-hitting play about Lyssa Dent Hughes, a medical doctor involved in women’s health issues, a descendant of President Ulysses S. Grant, and most important, a woman in her inaugural run for public office who is brought down by almost everyone around her except her best friend and her father, a wise and experienced politician. It was directed by Wendy’s long-term collaborator Daniel Sullivan, who had worked with her since The Heidi Chronicles. Its climactic line was, “There is nothing quite so satisfying as erasing the professional competency of a woman, is there?” Without as much leavening humor and a happy ending, the play was coolly received. Broadway was not an arena that welcomed an honest, acid-eyed play like An American Daughter. And in a recent revival of the play I saw during the run-up to the 2016 election, the world had traveled so far from any sympathy for a character like Lyssa that her big line, which we all had found heartbreaking, got a house laugh. Wendy always asked me what I thought after each rewrite and listened carefully to what I said. Just as she listened to her beloved director and her actors and her friends. I felt this diversity of opinion helped her clarify her thinking as she worked on each play. I was definitely on the side of more realism, no matter how distressing the reality. But I also recognize that there would never have been a Wendy Wasserstein—and no dramatist has even approached her success and her influence on women’s issues since her death—if it weren’t for her plays’ genuine and fantastically funny laughs and happy endings. Perhaps, though, these have damaged her works in the years that have passed since her death and her plays are less and less often successfully revived. Wendy worked in a world of men and relied on them for her professional advancement. In this she had no choice. But looking at the plays now, it’s astonishing how risky their subject matter was. She blunted her endings and cut lines that she felt would offend certain

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friends; but her observations, the issues she championed, and her preoccupation with female friendships were groundbreaking. The uncommon women, Janie and Harriet, the Rosensweig sisters, the inaugural political candidate Lyssa Dent Hughes and her best friend Dr. Judith B. Kaufman, the Black Jewish gynecologist (Lynne Thigpen won the Tony Award for this juicy role, in an era when so few women of color participated in the Tonys), and the professors Laurie Jamieson and her friend Nancy Gordon, dying of cancer, who regret their lives in Wendy’s final play Third, among others. Working on so many of her plays as her dramaturg and trying to think hard about these issues over the years, I still feel the need to understand why she delved so deeply at moments, and at other points glided over only the surface. Wendy’s speculative, not-yet-lived endings always had a funny feel on stage if the rest of the play was observed from actual life. But the endings were also out of step with their time. Looking back now, in many cases—Heidi especially—they were right on target. We just couldn’t see it back then as clearly as she had already imagined it. The Scoop Rosenbaums of the world are now on wife number four, supporting a troupe of children; and their first loves, women who were, like Heidi, their equals, are single mothers who raised their children alone. She saw that coming. But some endings I’m still not so sure about. There is a Lear-like thread running through Third, and when Laurie Jamieson finds her addled-withAlzheimer’s father lost in the rain, they end up dancing again. It’s easy to pontificate about what should be written, and almost unimaginably difficult to actually write. As a dramaturg and friend to a writer you admire, you can offer support, sustenance, and opportunity, in your advocacy within your theater, your recommendations to others, and on awards committees. Especially when the subject matter is one you see as vital. Why do we continue to find ourselves again and again in the theater with important constituencies absent from our stages? What are we going to do about it? That’s the bread and butter of a dramaturg’s work. It’s thrilling to see how many women are writing now—and I especially appreciate writers like Lynn Nottage, Dominique Morisseau, Lauren Gunderson, Heidi Schreck, and Lauren Yee, whose work speaks to specific communities and like Wendy’s also successfully reaches a larger public. We need to reach out and sustain new writers across the United States whose plays touch life in their own geographical and personal communities, that reveal a universal truth that audiences everywhere can identify with. The theater needs unique voices writing plays that people—regular people outside

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Manuscript page of The Sisters Rosensweig, signed by Wendy Wasserstein to the author (Property of Wendy Wasserstein, used with permission by the Estate of Wendy Wasserstein)

the theater community—actually want to see. In her day, Wendy’s work was playing alongside Anna Deavere Smith’s on Broadway, and both drew strong audience interest and support. No one will pay to see a play out of duty. They will only see it out of love, admiration, identification, controversy, or excitement—wrapped up in excellent stagecraft. This is the work that needs nurturing.

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To me, a lifelong friendship with a great writer is its own highest reward. Just as writers of fiction work for decades with editors who understand them and what they hope to and can achieve in their writing, I tried to be there always for Wendy. I believed in her, and I saw firsthand the tremendous obstacles that she so bravely faced.

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4

reflect light back working with actors and framing how the audience sees a play

Lincoln Center Theater’s 2006 season in the eleven-hundred-seat Vivian Beaumont Theater was devoted entirely to one work: Tom Stoppard’s trilogy The Coast of Utopia. Jack O’Brien directed a company of forty-four actors who were engaged for the entire season. The first play of the trilogy, Voyage, began rehearsals in late August, and was performed alone in the fall, going into a reduced performance schedule as the company began to rehearse Shipwreck, the second play, which was added to the performance calendar by Christmastime. The final play of the trilogy, Salvage, rehearsed in the winter, and by the early spring all three plays were performing on alternate nights. Several weekends that spring were devoted to running the complete trilogy as a marathon. With lunch and dinner breaks, audiences were at Lincoln Center for twelve hours of theater. In the New York Review of Books, Anthony Grafton wrote: The marathon version of Tom Stoppard’s Russian trilogy is charged with excitement. When I saw the three plays in one day at the end of March, virtually the entire audience stayed until the end. Some of those present—who ranged from eager students to slippered pantaloons—clutched battered blue copies of Isaiah Berlin’s Russian Thinkers. Others congratulated one another enthusiastically on seeing plays “that are so much more demanding than the usual.” One young man who passed me during an interval on the plaza outside the Vivian Beaumont, talking and gesturing as wildly as the young Russian intellectuals in the first of Stoppard’s plays, cried “Knowledge! I want more knowledge!” as he went by, smiling seraphically. 102

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When the audience gave the actors a standing ovation— something that happens more often than it should these days—the actors applauded the audience in their turn. Some of them even appeared in costume after the show and joined the ushers in handing out buttons that read “I ran the marathon.” The ties of feeling that bound cast and audience were almost visible and broke slowly. An older man, behind whom I walked to the subway after the third play came to an end, used his cell phone to give a friend or loved one an urgent, detailed, scene-by-scene account of what we had just watched. Our year in Utopia was, in retrospect, a high-water mark of achievement for Lincoln Center Theater. The resources of the theater were focused for almost two years—a year of pre-production and a year of playing—on this remarkable, ambitious work. The company felt joyously bound together during their year at Lincoln Center. Not since my first job in the theater at the American Conservatory Theater in San Francisco had I experienced the rewards that come from a long-term commitment to a resident acting company. Utopia had premiered at the National Theatre in London a year before we began our production. I had read the trilogy and found it daunting and quite hard to understand. With the exception of a very small number of secondary characters and one imaginary one (a six-foot tall ginger cat), Utopia was completely drawn from the actual lives of a group of friends from the nineteenth century, now almost completely forgotten, who together sought to bring Russia into the modern age. The friends’ astonishing achievements, starting with the emancipation of fifty million serfs and the establishment of the first Russian free press, along with the absolutely unbelievable events of their personal lives, drove the action of the trilogy, as did the heartbreaking notion that their achievements and their own personal sacrifices had been almost totally forgotten. Stoppard, as usual, sensed a sensational opportunity in this rich historical material. Now all we had to do was understand it. And then convey this understanding to the audience. We began—and it’s always a good way to begin, as I’ve noted elsewhere— by reading the play to each other. In December, a full nine months before the rehearsals were due to start, Jack O’Brien, designer Bob Crowley, and I spent a week in our small production office at the theater doing exactly

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that. Jack and Bob had just returned from London where they had seen the newly minted production of Utopia at the National and had been totally baffled by it. Voyage, the first play in the trilogy, had gone into rehearsal while Tom was still finishing the final play, Salvage. Because the action and setting of the final play were unknown, the London team decided to locate the action of the entire trilogy using slide projections, so that no matter where Tom took them (and the trilogy went from Russia to Paris to Italy, London, and Switzerland) they would be able to follow him. We had an advantage because we were able to start with a completed play. Bob and Jack both felt that the projections distanced the action and reduced the emotional involvement of the audience. They brought back programs from the National’s production, which I felt read like small encyclopedias. They were off-putting, with biographies and historical photographs of the countless characters (the actors doubled and tripled roles over the course of the trilogy). In general, I dislike college-syllabus-like program inserts—theater is entertainment. And genealogy charts are a particular bête noire of mine. I read the trilogy on my own some time before we three gathered to read it aloud to each other, and it was a challenging text. The action was clearly not only in the many words. The three plays were fascinating but unbelievably complex both in their overall structure and in how the story of the lives of these friends was told. And the scale of the trilogy—its exploration of politics, philosophy, history, marriage, to name only a few of the areas it touched on—was daunting. In sum, I did not understand much about the play—neither its subject matter nor the dramatic structure Tom had chosen to carry the story. I decided that my job, as dramaturg, was to give Tom all the credit he deserved and to try to understand the trilogy. This task took me a full year. I had read the standard nineteenth-century Russian novelists and I knew some basic Russian history. That was the extent of my expertise as we began. So I set out to find out more about Russia during this century. At the same time, reading and rereading the trilogy, I tried to understand both the not-so-cryptic as well as the often very cryptic sections of the plays. What was Stoppard referring to in each line? Why was the story being told in this particular way? As I began my reading, I started keeping notes about interesting things I found in my general research. When Jack, Bob, and I met before Christmas to read the play to each other, I was ready with my usual version of the 100 interesting things I had found and I brought them into the room (Appendix 3).

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This list was my attempt to throw a lot of mud on the wall. I had no idea what would stick. Personally, I liked the birds being freed in the early spring. I thought Bob Crowley, a resident of London, would be familiar with and inspired by the local addresses I had found where Herzen had lived in the nineteenth century. What was the takeaway? The third item on my list about population statistics: nine of ten people in Russia in 1840, the time the trilogy begins, were serfs—basically the equivalent of slaves. In the United States at this time, 13 percent of the population was enslaved. When some months later I saw Bob Crowley’s model—there it was. The opening image of each play in the trilogy was a spotlight focused on Alexander Herzen, totally alone, sitting in a vast empty space in a chair high in the air, a billowing silk ocean surrounding him. In his hand he holds a child’s small blue glove. We learn only at the end of the second play that his mother and his deaf child, Koyla, drowned together at night when a steamer carrying them sank at sea off the Italian coast. The terrible death of their son caused Herzen’s wife Natalie to die, of grief, shortly thereafter. In the first minutes of the trilogy, the opening of Voyage, Herzen disappeared into the waves, and the heaving silk ocean was pulled away to reveal an empty stage and a vast, single line of people at the rear of the Beaumont stage—perhaps a hundred figures. It’s the third largest backstage space in New York City, after Radio City Music Hall and the Metropolitan Opera. Ten of the figures—the play’s main characters—stepped out of the line and began the play. The others remained upstage, silent and immobile. The serfs—first seen by the audience among the speaking characters, but themselves without a voice—were lifelike mannequins. After our time together at Christmas, while Bob was thinking and drawing and Jack began his epic quest to cast the play—which he did beautifully by talking a truly astonishing group of actors into giving a year of their lives to Tom Stoppard—I went to work. Tom would not appear in person until rehearsals began in the fall. By this point, after we had read the play together and started discussing it, and after I read it many more times, I could confirm that except for one or two ancillary characters (Belinsky’s mistress, for instance, in a nice small scene) everything in the play was based on real incidents and real people. Tom had brought us a gold mine of interesting events, ideas, information, and philosophical reflections. And I set out then to understand it all—or at least as much of it as I could. As I read and reread the play, I found that tiny phrases opened a door to highly

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meaningful ideas that needed to be explored to understand a character’s through-line. What actors call “given circumstances.” How could these moments become comprehensible to an audience? And so I read Fichte and Schelling for the first time, and Hegel for the second time since college. These were the new philosophers who were the contemporaries and idols of the young Utopians. I read deeply from Russian history, not only to understand the historical events but also to discover fascinating things like the social hierarchies of this century: Tsar Peter I’s Table of Ranks, or “sosloviia,” which gave each Russian a place in the social hierarchy. And “chin,” which, alongside a person’s social rank further designated an individual’s place by his service to the state—clearly the origins of what would later become, under new names, the bureaucracy of Soviet Russia. These two rankings (I found each spelled out in enormous detail) were as long and detailed as the medieval Great Chain of Being hierarchies in Western Europe so important to understanding Shakespeare: highest animal, the lion, under the lowest human, the serf. The lowest animal, the oyster, above the highest vegetation, the oak. Social ranking is a given circumstance actors know how to work with. How many have trained in school by playing Max Stafford-Clark’s game of taking a card from a deck, and without looking, placing it on their forehead and moving around a room, seeing only the cards of others? They can quickly determine their own place in the society of any play based only on the reactions of the group. Basic training for doing Shakespeare, where rank played such a role in that era. In nineteenth-century Russia, the Tsar could whimsically adjust anyone’s “chin,” I learned. I found speculation that Pushkin’s “chin” had been adjusted downward (restricting him to a lower social order, where he was unable to participate in the nobility-only events he had formerly enjoyed) shortly before the duel that killed him. Was he acting rashly in accepting this challenge as a result of his new social uncertainty? And how to put Pushkin on our stage in a way that anyone in the audience would recognize? Stoppard has him appear silently in two tiny scenes. Of an older generation, he was deeply admired by the young characters in the play. Since he was of partial African heritage (could we count on audiences to know this?), could we double a silent actor and give him a pistol and have it be understood? I made a “Revolution of 1848 Crib Sheet,” which much later ended up on the wall in the rehearsal room. I made reproductions of all the photographs I could find of the characters in the play. I read a lot of Turgenev. I read biographies of everyone, rejecting many—too dry and impersonal

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to be of use to actors. But I thought Edmund Wilson’s chapter on the anarchist Bakunin in To the Finland Station was perfect, though it portrayed a man of mixed attributes. “What to do?” I asked Jack. Should I show it to our Bakunin, Ethan Hawke, warts and all? “He’s a big boy. He can take it!” he wisely admonished me. I read the poet Georg Herwegh—a character in the second play of the trilogy—in German (a sensation at the time, his work quickly faded and has never been translated into English). I still have on the back of the door of my office a five-foot-long spreadsheet titled “Coast of Utopia Timeline, 1801–1870,” with column headings for “RealLife Events,” “Year,” “Time,” “Play & Scene” numbers, and “Events That Occur in the Play”—which I had to create just to keep it all straight. And how was all of this going to be clear to an audience? The trilogy’s first play has a unique structure: the action in the first act takes place from 1833 to 1844 on the rural estate of the Bakunin family and then, without warning or any kind of notice, in Act 2 returns to 1834 and follows the characters during the same decade in Moscow. This goes against the standard theatrical expectation that events in Act 2 in a play follow chronologically after events in Act 1, or, once in a while, precede them (as in Betrayal or Merrily We Roll Along). What were we going to do about making this odd timeline clear? And more important, why did Stoppard write it like that? And what about the six-foot ginger cat that Stoppard puts at the masked ball in Moscow in the first play’s final scene? I wrote Jack in a frenzy: This leads me to ask a larger question and brings me to an even larger realization—at least it all seemed large last night after I had thought about it for HOURS. WHAT IS THE ACTION OF VOYAGE? WHY DOES THE PLAY DOUBLE BACK ON ITSELF STRUCTURALLY AND GO BACK IN TIME IN ACT TWO? I think I see a line—it’s about infection. An infection of the new ideas that Michael Bakunin brings back from Moscow to the Premukhino estate in the persons of his new friends Stankevich, Belinsky and Turgenev. This virus is thrilling and deadly and it destroys most of his family, who are living in a peaceful pre-Chekhovian rural world. The final scene of Voyage— the verandah at sunset—is butting up against the bonfire offstage that engulfs Bakunin’s sister’s death bier. If you think about it, it will be her grandchildren who will watch Premukhino burn after the 1917 revolution. The image can be an unconscious one, a premonition on our stage. Michael brings to Premukhino three friends who infect his

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The “Coast of Utopia Timeline” chart that I had to create to make some sense of the dramatic and historical events in The Coast of Utopia, still hanging on my office door

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sisters and, as the play progresses, we see their ancient and timeless world fall apart. The time split shows the contrasts between now and then, just as the funeral pyre bleeds (in the play’s final scene) into the majestic sunsets of the play’s opening—a harkening back to a rural era soon to vanish. And that cat! Is it the Devil from Michael Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita that Tom has thrown in to torture us? Who in the audience will know this, and how will they? We were never able to answer this final question. Jack had no idea. But with a logic of its own, the appearance of the extremely tall ginger cat, marvelously created by costume designer Cathy Zuber, dancing unnoticed in a top hat together with all of the main characters at the formal ball, brought, in performance, an element of surreal insanity that foreshadowed all that a people on the verge of massive social unrest had to ignore. It worked in production, but there was never a rational explanation for the image. And then I was ready to meet the actors. By this point, it was June. Vanity Fair was doing a photo shoot of the leads (we called them the Tier 1 actors) at Chelsea Piers and I went along to say hello to those I knew (like Ethan Hawke from the Henry IV’s) and meet others I didn’t. I told them I had a lot of information. All of them were delightful and became great friends—though a few I ended up never working with. Richard Easton had everything he needed. So did Billy Crudup, who stole every scene he was in as the charismatic and doomed editor Belinsky, who died so early in the trilogy that Billy was able to change out of costume, walk home and put his son to bed, and then return to take his calls. But the rest of the Tier 1 actors were soon on my doorstep and spent weeks in my office from the beginning to the end of the year we lived together in Utopia. Jason Butler Harner, playing Ivan Turgenev, told me he just needed a list of Turgenev biographies. He was already well into reading all the novels. Jennifer Ehle, an actress I revere, quickly came up to my office to confess, “I almost didn’t take this job and I really only took it because Varenka Bakunin and Natalie Herzen triple with Malwida von Meysenbug in Salvage and that’s the role I want to play.” A Tony Award winner previously in Stoppard’s The Real Thing, she said of the character Natalie Herzen, “In Tom’s plays I’m tired of the men having the intellectual argument and the women having the emotional argument.” “I’ll find you an intellectual argument,” I told her. It was surprisingly easy: it was embedded in the play in her character’s admiration of George Sand and her philosophy—and George Sand was there with the Utopians on the barricades in Paris in 1848. And

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it was a wonder to share Natalie Herzen’s backstory with Jennifer—she and Malwida were utterly distinct and complex characters. I later told Jennifer I couldn’t believe she hadn’t wanted to play the fascinating Natalie! Ethan was a totally different story. Of course, I gave him the Edmund Wilson book. But I had learned that his character, the anarchist Bakunin, was a close friend of Richard Wagner. And some commentators feel that Wagner’s character Siegfried was inspired by Bakunin. I shared a fabulous story with Ethan: the two revolutionary friends on horseback riding through a small duchy somewhere in northern Europe, come across peasants surrounding and trying to attack a castle. With his youthful artillery school training, Bakunin rides up, quickly organizes the peasants, “Put the cannon there!” As the two friends, deep in conversation, ride away—the castle behind them in flames—they never learn and do not care whose castle it was. I called my friend John Rockwell, the former classical music critic for the New York Times, and asked him for a recommendation. Here’s what I sent to Ethan: Ethan, Here’s an MP3. This is about ½ hour of Siegfried music from Wagner’s Ring Cycle in one of the greatest recordings ever—Wolfgang Windgassen and Birgit Nilsson singing, Solti conducting. I’m sending 8 tracks. Tracks 1–2—Siegfried discovers and forges his powerful sword— he’s with Mime, the evil dwarf caretaker who has raised him. Track 3—Siegfried in the forest—called the Forest Murmers section—looking for the mother who abandoned him. Tracks 4–8—Starts with the truly amazing sunrise orchestra passage—Brunnhilda awakes to see the sun, Siegfried has come upon her, frees her, thinks she’s his mother but she’s not and it ends in the truly druggy sex scene—“radiant love, laughing death”—end of opera. You can follow the libretto for this last section (they’re singing in German) to see how deep they get into it—it takes a while—15 min or so—but it builds to something awfully cool. The translations are sort of stupid, but you get the drift of the power of the emotions. Ethan put the music on his phone, and listened to it while he biked around Manhattan. The greatest weight of The Coast of Utopia, in my opinion, was carried on the shoulders of Brían O’Byrne as Alexander Herzen. We spent a lot of time together in our year in Utopia and he was a regular on the couch in

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my office. I wanted to do everything I could for him because he himself had so much to carry in the show: the active life history of the central character who brought such change into the world and was himself brought low by both his personal and political life. Like Kevin Kline in the Henry IV’s, there was nothing I could tell Brían about the character: Brían had read Herzen’s My Past and Thoughts and many other books too. What did we talk about then? I suppose it was a form of psychotherapy about the character of Herzen, attempting to be understood by a master actor. An attempt to calibrate where the character was emotionally and intellectually at each moment in his life that Tom portrayed in the play. Something happens, how much does he know when and how does he respond to that knowledge? Mostly I would listen as Brían thought it through, and mostly I would agree with the conclusions he came to. Then he would try out his choices in rehearsal or in performance and tell me how he felt they had worked. Occasionally when there were two options and he needed to choose one, I would send him to Jack for his suggestion about which to play. He faced the challenge of finding the arc of being on stage for over seven hours: the energy he can display at each specific moment, calibrating the triumphs and failures his character goes through and how he reacts to each one. I wanted to hear every problem Brían was having, after every rehearsal, after every preview. I tried to go to the show as often as I could in previews and watch, from our back-of-the-house production seats, the different choices he made on stage. And Jack of course was always there to find a solution when something didn’t work. While Billy Crudup was home putting his baby to bed, Brían was still on stage talking. For hours. I still wonder what the word count of his role was. Brían was also very insightful about the larger play itself and its structure. Although his maxim was always to “make it work,” he felt the great speeches he had in the first play—he called them Stoppard’s equivalent of Hamlet’s monologues—came very early in the trilogy, before the audience really got to know Herzen. And it was a lost opportunity, he felt, that the incredible words weren’t able to come later. But, as we soon found, there were no mistakes in these plays. Herzen was a different man, and in many ways, especially toward the end of the trilogy, a defeated man, without the passion and idealism he manifested in his youthful words. Every play requires different supplemental materials. Some plays require none at all. What an actor needs is to understand the given circumstances of a scene and what the character wants at any given time, and what is preventing him or her from getting it, and to convey this in as active and positive a way as possible. That’s the behavior the director and the actors

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will discover in each beat. Most contemporary plays set in modern times are totally comprehensible to everyone. But in Utopia, we had a lot of work to do. This era was quite different from our own. In plays from the past or portraying the past, the specific meaning of sections of the text may be obscure and need to be clarified. Sometimes historical material can shed light—what happened before the play begins in Shakespeare’s history plays, for instance. Or why a second son might have different motives from a first son. This information might not be in the play itself, but is a part of the cultural circumstances of its time. Other writers, such as Chekhov, remain beloved because all the information is emotional and it’s all in or under the text. A patient director and a creative actor, with enough digging and good instincts, can find a new way into each character. But before they can begin where they would begin with Chekhov, actors in plays like Utopia need a lot of specifics explained; the crux and stakes of the scenes must be understood before the acting work begins. And each actor needs different knowledge, delivered in different ways. No two actors work or think alike. I’m embarrassed to share them, but I will note below all the questions and doubts I had about the highly unconventional storytelling Stoppard uses in Utopia, which I examined and questioned in anguished emails to Jack over the spring—both of us too scared to ever suggest changes. I think at the end, only Ethan got Tom to change one line. In every case, I was wrong to doubt his choices. On the page, scenes that seemed to stop the interminable action (the actual playing time of the trilogy was nine hours!) ended up being the highlights of their evenings—charming or challenging interludes. Characters we’d never seen before or would never see again stole the show. The one scene that Jack found impossible to stage was a strange pantomime scene—unrealistic in nature—that started Salvage, the final play of the trilogy. Amusingly, Jack had said to the company at one point after six months of rehearsals, “I don’t have one blocking idea left,” and he was at sea here. I was watching this scene sitting with Tom in the house during a tech rehearsal and he said to me, “Jack doesn’t trust the material. If he trusted it, he’d know how to stage it.” During our time trying to understand the trilogy in the run-up to rehearsals, continuing on to the next task, I made a list of important things I felt the audience needed to know and I feared might not know. After all, we had the specter of the impenetrable London production to worry us. I added symbols next to each item on the list indicating whether the idea or incident needed words on stage or could somehow be portrayed by an

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image if Tom hadn’t included the words in the play. Again, imagery is just as meaningful as text to advance action and aid in understanding character. The list of imagery possibly carrying important meaning in the trilogy actually seen on stage, and the imagery only mentioned in the dialogue, appears in Appendix 4. Did we need it? Would it be helpful to add it? Meanwhile, the cast was on fire. Before the summer drew to a close and the first rehearsals began at the end of August, the actors decided to visit Russia as a group and see it for themselves. Tom generously arranged for his favorite Russian interpreter and guide to show them around. I emailed everyone I knew in Russia. What would actors find useful? Of course, they would visit the Sparrow Hills overlooking Moscow where the friends made their vow to change Russian history. But the specifics of Russian life back then? I emailed Tatiana Tolstoya, who was writing an article for Utopia’s Lincoln Center Theater Review, and she invited the actors to dinner at her Moscow home shortly after they arrived. With her excellent instincts, she brought in the main course—a calf ’s tongue on a silver platter—and carved it for them with a big knife. That was impressive. I called a Washingtonbased attorney with many Russian postings in his past, and he generously left vodka and caviar at their hotel to welcome them to Russia. And my friend Lena Vitenberg, the head of the cultural fellowships program at the Likhachev Foundation, a Russian NGO (who you can tell really understands actors), emailed: In St. Petersburg I have good contacts in museum/costume world. I would advise actors to visit Pavlovsk Museum-Park; they have a great exhibition of nineteenth century Russian Interior Decoration of Living Quarters (you can see some examples) http://www.pavlovsk.org/ english/palace/interior/page8.html. It represents very well the living style of upper middle class of Russia in the nineteenth century. I am also closely acquainted with the chief curator for costume and textile collections. I have to check whether she will be back in town by then after her summer holidays, but if I know the dates for St. Petersburg I will try to put together a private visit; she can take the group around and show some wonderful things she has starting from dresses of Catherine the Great to the last Russian Queen, Alexandra. It is always breathtaking experience: http://www.pavlovsk.org/english/palace/ collections/cost1.html I also could introduce the group to Natalya Kostrigina, a prominent antiques dealer in St. Petersburg and owner

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of one of the best collections of the Russian city (as opposed to countryside) costume of the nineteenth century. Apart from the fact that she can show her collection and tell many interesting things about it, she also has many items on sale, if there would be any interest in buying some small original items like hats, bags, an umbrella or a walking stick. Having original period items used on stage might give a more genuine spirit to the production. The actors returned, and the first-day room was set up with the largest series of interlocking tables I have ever seen in a rehearsal room, with place names to remind all fifty of us who we were. The charismatic, louche, and always generous and amazing Mr. Stoppard entered the room, fresh from London, ready to spend the first two weeks of rehearsal explaining the historical background of the trilogy. After the welcoming formalities, the administrative staff left the room, and Jack asked Tom to begin. He thanked the company for their generous commitment of a season’s time in their busy careers. There was a pause. He pointed to the enormous production scripts in front of each actor. “Does anyone have any questions about the events in the play?” he suavely asked of this mountain of unbelievably complex historical material I had lived with for over a year. The Tier 1 actors eyed me with secret smiles. The response was total silence. There was not a one. I silently cheered. I had done my docent’s job. Jack immediately started to stage the first play. And I felt that this had been my contribution: Jack needed superhuman resources to block each complex and lengthy play and have the time to explore the motives and circumstances of each scene in the rehearsal time he had been given—generous as it was. Tom got it. Later, he occasionally would say as a preface to a company note, with his very dry humor, “As Miss Cattaneo undoubtedly knows . . .” The Coast of Utopia was an almost perfectly written play, once the company understood what was going on—what the stakes were and what the action to be played was. Jack O’Brien was right at home: knowing which questions to ask, guiding each actor to find what to play, and brilliantly staging the scenes—both the intimate and epic ones—in a way that honored the grand sweep of the play. Again, I felt my contribution had been to allow the actual rehearsal time to be given totally to Jack to stage this monumental trilogy. And he needed every second of it. The Beaumont is a challenging house, with tricky sightlines; everything always needs to be in constant movement on diagonals so that the audiences in the three-quar-

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ters’ house can see everything. I don’t know how Jack did it. Every morning, once performances had begun, he gathered the huge company on the steps in the lobby—it was the only place large enough to fit everybody—to give notes on the previous night’s performance, cheer them on, and answer questions. This was really fun and bonded the company deeply. It’s an incredible challenge to keep a company together, and Jack appealed to all their better instincts. I was always there sitting on the steps among them. Occasionally, questions would come my way in these note sessions. I kept working. When we reached the rehearsals of Shipwreck, the second play, Jennifer Ehle, playing Herzen’s wife, Natalie, could not understand why with such an admirable, idealistic husband, she would have an affair with the admittedly handsome and charismatic—but married—poet Georg Herwegh, played in our production by David Harbour. Tough question. Privately, after my research, I considered the real, historical Herwegh to have been a ridiculous imitation of the young Goethe in his “Sorrows of Young Werther” period—though perhaps better looking. But I went down to the NYU library, found this Herwegh poem in German, and translated it (for the first—and last—time in history): Ich bin nicht ganz Von dir getrennt; Im Abendglanz, wenn schweigend brennt Die Meeresflut Zu Füßen dir, O denk, die Glut, Sie kommt von mir—

I’m not completely Gone from you; In the sunset’s glow The ocean’s tide Quietly burns At your feet Oh think that it comes from me The silent heat.

I gave Jennifer and David a copy, in separate sealed envelopes. I did not share this poem with Jack, or Brían O’Byrne, who played Jennifer’s betrayed husband. Josh Hamilton, playing Herzen’s friend Ogarev, was required to have an epileptic fit on stage. It soon became apparent that no one, including Josh, Jack, or I, had ever seen this in real life. I called the Epilepsy Center at New York Presbyterian Hospital and, graciously, a small, stage-struck delegation visited a break-out room to show Josh videos and coach him. Josh’s moment—which had seemed interminable on stage—was transformed. The introduction of the real seizure, which he mimicked brilliantly, changed absolutely everything about the scene.

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During previews, the actors playing the Bakunin family at home in their country estate in Voyage felt something was off during their first dinner scene. I emailed Tatiana Tolstoya again to ask where to find help, and she told me that nineteenth-century manners were something of a specialty of hers. I posted her return email in the green room: we were already in performances. The backs of the ladies at table would never touch their chairs. Everyone dressed formally in the country, with a serf serving at each place, but the family’s clothes were rarely washed, and the floor was strewn with dirt and scraps of food. I watched the show that night, and it looked quite different. So on to our last hurdle: we had to tackle the trilogy’s fearsome reputation as an evening you had to have a PhD to understand. There were actually articles in the season preview sections in the newspapers that mentioned how challenging the plays would be. By this point, on the contrary, I had come to feel that the basic structure of Utopia was almost identical to The Guns of Navarone, the wonderful but hoary World War II movie from 1961. To accomplish their wartime mission of taking out the guns guarding a strategically important strait in Greece, each member of the unit had a role: one was the climbing genius, one the muscle, one the explosives expert. In Utopia, there were also six friends: the brains, the money, the reckless activist, the philosopher, and the brilliant writer whose stories first convinced the Tsar that serfs were also human, who banded together to accomplish their task. And then these friends of such rare accomplishments were totally forgotten by history. I confided my theory to Tom. He was surprised by it. To assuage the audience’s apprehensions, I arranged for the Playbill to have very little in it. When Herzen washed up in London, defeated and alone after the failure of the 1848 revolution, supporting a ménage of revolutionary leaders in exile, I merely called them in the program “The Exiles,” followed by an indented list of their names. The audience only needed to know they were greatly principled but had failed. If an audience member knew the details of the lives of Lajos Kossuth or Louis Blanc, so much the better. If not, it didn’t matter. Finally, I wrote three (for me very challenging) program inserts, which had to honor but not simplify the plays, without giving away any spoiler plot points like the deaths in Herzen’s family. I also wanted to gently guide eager audience members who were inspired by the plays to outside sources without making them feel it was in any way necessary. These inserts also had to work for audience members who saw

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either the whole trilogy or only one of its parts: Utopia soon sold out its year-long run, and some spectators only saw the second or third play and needed to know what had come before. I quickly decided that the suggested reading should be primarily from the authors in the play, with three exceptions. One was Isaiah Berlin, who was a primary source for Tom when he was writing the trilogy—I believe it was reading Berlin’s Russian Thinkers that had inspired him to write The Coast of Utopia in the first place. These program inserts, which I agonized over for weeks (and for which André Bishop offered very helpful suggestions), led to two results. Isaiah Berlin’s book Russian Thinkers, Ivan Turgenev’s novels, and Herzen’s My Past and Thoughts became impossible to find in New York City, as described in an article in the New York Times: “One of the hottest books in New York appears on no bestseller lists. Russian Thinkers, a 1978 collection of essays on 19th-century Russian intellectuals by the philosopher Isaiah Berlin, has virtually disappeared from bookstores across the city, including Barnes and Noble, Labyrinth Books and Shakespeare and Company. The Internet is not much help either: the book is sold out on bn.com, and though it can be ordered on Amazon, the order won’t be shipped for two or three weeks.” And Sir Henry Hardy, the Oxford don who was the executor of the Isaiah Berlin estate, initiated a charming email correspondence with me saying that Professor Berlin would never have imagined that his book would ever end up being so widely read. In the program inserts I wrote for the trilogy, which I hoped to make as different from the didactic notes in the original London program as I possibly could, I have to confess that I made one terrible mistake. Ironically, I underestimated Michael Bakunin. Arriving penniless in San Francisco as a stowaway from Japan in 1861, half starved after escaping from Siberian exile, he sought two things: to meet the poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, author of Hiawatha, in New York, and to return to live with his friend Alexander Herzen in London. He was able to realize both of his dreams. On the second leg of his trip, I had assumed he had stowed away again on a boat and gone through the Panama Canal. But later in the season, a friendly critic pointed out to our press agent that the Panama Canal was only built in the twentieth century. Bakunin, still penniless, had somehow made his way by wagon or on foot across the United States (the transcontinental railroad was only built in 1863), or walked across the Isthmus of Panama, or made his way via a vastly longer and far more dangerous sea journey around Cape Horn. It was my mistake. I had underestimated him.

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Curtain call after the final marathon performance of The Coast of Utopia, photograph copyright by Paul Kolnik (Courtesy of Paul Kolnik)

The inserts I wrote follow this chapter. It is my hope that readers will see that the process of investigating the trilogy, first with the creative team and then with the actors, now extends in the guides to the audience as well. I have to mention the ginger cat. The audience needs to know who the silent man with the dueling pistol is. They will feel more at ease if they understand the play is going back in time before it once again moves forward. Natalie Herzen gets her intellectual argument and a description of her amazing back story. With so many revolutions portrayed in other plays, which one exactly is the Revolution of 1848? For all these avid spectators, what else is there to read, if they are so inclined? And as a parting gesture, I chose what I felt were the most moving lines from the trilogy for those inclined to remember our production after the evenings were over—a short Utopia mix-tape. I hope they convey even a portion of the love I—and the company—felt for these remarkable plays. At the end, I learned that a play that at first you might find impenetrable and of no interest to you can, with a great deal of work and excellent collaborators, turn out to be a high point in your professional life.

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The Coast of Utopia required the anarchist Michael Bakunin, played by Ethan Hawke, to keep a journal with him throughout the course of the plays. Ethan chose to write his actual thoughts each night while he was on stage during the play’s long run. Later, we published an article he wrote about the production in the Lincoln Center Theater Review that included excerpts from this diary. When the excerpts end, he concludes, “That’s where the journal ends. I remember sharing a cab with my mother after the final marathon performance. She said, “Well, you are going to do a lot of things in your life. And hopefully some of them will be tremendous, but you will never be involved in anything better that what I just saw. You may as well start getting used to that now.”

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GUIDE YOUR AUDIENCE THE COAST OF UTOPIA PROGRAM INSERTS

For audiences starting with Play One of the trilogy: VOYAGE

“We Russians, belonging neither to East nor West, have never advanced with other people in the march of enlightenment. The Renaissance passed us by while we remained squatting in our hovels. . . . How did we come to be the Caliban of Europe?”* The population of Russia in 1835 at the time our play begins was sixty million. The gentry made up one percent of this number. The clergy comprised another one percent. Both groups were literate, exempt from taxation, conscription, and corporal punishment. There was a small merchant and professional class, and a massive serf population, which was only freed in 1861. Two years before America’s Emancipation Proclamation, Tsar Alexander II freed fifty million serfs—and the scale of the emancipation surpassed Lincoln’s by a factor of twelve. Like American slaves, serfs were bought and sold, subject to corporal punishment at the whim of their lords, and were conscripted into the Russian army at their masters’ choosing. It is conscription of his sons that the old serf Semyon fears at the close of Voyage’s Act I. The gentry lived in a world of its own, speaking Western languages—often unable to read or write Russian. A few nobles from an earlier generation had traveled to the West at the end of the eighteenth century, but it was Napoleon’s invasion of Moscow in 1812, the setting of Tolstoy’s War and Peace, and the Russian Army’s subsequent occupation of Paris the following year that first brought back on a wider level new winds of change from the West. The Russian serf soldiers and gentlemen officers soaked up the atmosphere of post-Revolutionary Paris and began to question the conditions of their lives at home. Upon the death of Tsar Alexander I in December 1825, a group of young noblemen advocated for change: a successor who would begin the process of modernization and political reform. They were called the Decembrists because they made their proposals and agitated publicly for reform in December, immediately after the old Tsar’s death. These idealistic young men called *From The Coast of Utopia

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for a new Tsar who would consider a constitution and allow foreign travel, religious tolerance, and some freedom of expression. Instead, the new Tsar who was chosen, Nicholas I, frightened by what he perceived as an aborted coup d’état, executed the Decembrist leaders and sent their followers into lifelong exile in Siberia. Their heroic stories of courage and loss inspired the characters in The Coast of Utopia, who were in their early teens at the time of the Decembrist uprising, to continue the fight. The Coast of Utopia is the story of six friends, members of the “Generation of the 1840s,” idealistic young Russian noblemen who met as students at the University of Moscow during that difficult, repressive decade in the reign of Tsar Nicholas I. They shared deep friendships, as young men do, which lasted throughout their lives as they were buffeted by history and their own triumphs and personal tragedies. Together as friends, they struggled to bring Russia into the modern age. Synopsis Act One

Our first image in Stoppard’s trilogy is Premukhino, a timeless Russian country estate in 1833, early in the reign of the despotic and reactionary Tsar Nicholas I. It is the home of the prosperous Bakunin family, and we quickly follow their son Michael Bakunin, a young Artillery School cadet, through his rebellion from the military to his escape to a new life in Moscow University circles where he embraces exciting discoveries in philosophy and politics, newly minted in Berlin and France. German Idealism, the sensational novels of George Sand, a flirtation with a pretty family friend—a whirl of new ideas comes back through young Bakunin to his eager, more cloistered sisters, destined for respectable marriages to local noblemen. As the scenes fly by in Voyage’s Act One, we meet Michael’s new friends from the university who come to Premukhino for summer visits, and watch the lives of his sisters change. First to arrive is Nicholas Stankevich, leader of the students’ philosophy circle, “a gentle and idealistic personality with exceptional sweetness of character and a passion for metaphysics,”+ who lives in the world of Kant and Hegel as well as the minor philosophers Fichte and Schelling. Stankevich is followed by the awkward and compelling Vissarion Belinsky, their only university friend not from the upper class, whose passion for literature will give him an immortal place in Russian history. “We have no literature!” is Belinsky’s rallying cry. “Folk tales and foreign models, that’s our lot . . . We will have our literature. What kind of literature and what kind of life are the same question . . . But we have produced Pushkin . . .”* And it is Pushkin’s presence that hovers in the air +

From Isaiah Berlin, Russian Thinkers

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of Voyage. With such strong censorship in place, and an aristocracy in the sway of foreign fashions, Russia had no literature. At the time of Voyage, Russia’s sole writer of greatness was Pushkin, whose life was cut short by an ill-fated duel. Pushkin (who appears silently in two small interludes in Voyage) is a hero to Belinsky and to the Bakunin sisters at Premukhino and an inspiration to all who sought to follow him in creating a free portrait of Russian life. At the end of the act, the insouciant young sportsman Ivan Turgenev pays a call. Later in his life, grateful for Belinsky’s early support, Turgenev will follow Pushkin and Gogol to write masterpieces of Russian literature such as Fathers and Sons and A Month in the Country, and along with Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, bring Russian literature and its people to the attention of the world. Act Two

Voyage’s Act Two rewinds our time machine, and we return to 1834 to watch the action unfold during these same years in Moscow itself. The friends meet in Moscow cafés, in parks and at skating parties, and the Bakunin family comes from the country to visit their son in his new world. Here he—and we— meet the last two friends Stoppard’s trilogy will follow: our central character, Alexander Herzen, and the poet Nicholas Ogarev. Ogarev, jaunty and ebullient in a revolutionary tricolor, appears only briefly in Voyage, but he will play a memorable role in Salvage, the trilogy’s final play. Herzen and Ogarev are the nucleus of the university’s political circle and they joust with their friends Stankevich, Belinsky, Turgenev, and Bakunin about ideas and ways to change Russia and the world. Herzen recalled many years later, “We sat side by side on a bench in the amphitheater, looked at each other with the consciousness of our dedication, our league, our secret, our readiness to perish, our faith in the sacredness of our cause—and looked with loving pride at the multitude of handsome young heads about us, as at a band of brothers . . . We gave each other our hands and à la lettre went out to preach freedom and struggle in all the four quarters of our youthful ‘universe’ . . . we preached a constitution and a republic, the reading of political books and the concentration of forces in one society. Most of all we preached hatred for every form of violence, for every sort of arbitrary tyranny practiced by governments.”^ For this circle of students, the decade of the 1840s was a dangerous time. “At Moscow University teaching philosophy is forbidden as a threat to public order.”* Censorship is absolute and even an oblique reference in a literary review can result in jail or exile. Herzen is banished to Perm, a thousand kilometers east of Moscow on the border of Asia, when informers for the Tsar report that he is harboring subversive political ideas. Bakunin is stripped of his noble rank and escapes ^

From Alexander Herzen, My Past and Thoughts

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into exile. Stankevich and Belinsky suffer from tuberculosis and will both be dead by their early thirties. At the close of Voyage, we bid farewell to Russia, and move with the friends into their new lives in the West. It will be in the thrilling days of the Revolution of 1848, in Paris, that they will meet again. For audiences starting with Play Two of the trilogy: VOYAGE TO SHIPWRECK—WHAT HAS COME BEFORE

As Voyage’s friends plunged into the youthful whirlwind of self-discovery and radical new thoughts during their university days, their nascent political ideas led to actions that changed their lives. The rebellious Michael Bakunin fled to the West in the nick of time—bidding farewell to Russia from the deck of the steamer at Kronstadt. His friend, the gentle philosopher Nicholas Stankevich, unable to reconcile the ideal world in his head with the realities of marriage, left Bakunin’s dying sister Liubov without proposing to her. His friends learned of his death in Italy from tuberculosis. Nursing Stankevich there was Liubov’s sister Varenka, who made a last promise to her sister to care for him and left her own husband to follow him to the West. Alexander Herzen, banished to a five-year exile in far-away Perm, began a correspondence with a beautiful cousin and married her, “in a midnight elopement as romantic as anything out of George Sand.”* The passionate Vissarion Belinsky found his calling as a literary critic and decided to marry. His encouragement helped the idle young Ivan Turgenev begin a writing career. The Moscow editors and pamphleteers we met in Voyage, sneaking political articles past the Tsar’s censors, paid a heavy price. They were put under house arrest or jailed and all dissident writing was suppressed. At Voyage’s final costume ball, we saw a mysterious sixfoot Ginger Cat in a black top hat smoking a cigar. Was he a party guest? Or a malign spirit let loose in the world: the force of the dialectic of history that will propel the characters of our play onto the farthest shores of fortune? As young Herzen observed, “We’re not the plaything of an imaginative cosmic force, but of a Romanov with no imagination whatsoever, a mediocrity . . . But about the Cat . . . when it catches your eye, what happens next is not up to the Cat, it’s up to you.”* Synopsis

As Shipwreck opens, the friends from Voyage have passed through their twenties, and the harsh realities of this difficult decade, the 1840s, have warped their lives. Those who are still in one piece gather to spend summers outside of Moscow. These are the “superfluous” men, whose education, upbringing and talents make them a threat, not an asset, to their country. They can look

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forward to a future of idleness. They cannot travel. They have no need to work. They argue about coffee. At the center of the circle are Alexander and Natalie Herzen, whose astounding lives are described by Herzen in his great memoir My Past and Thoughts. The illegitimate son of a Russian nobleman of ancient lineage with an enormous fortune and close family ties to the Tsar, Herzen was given his name because he was a child of the heart (from the German word Herz). His mother, Madame Haag in Shipwreck, was the daughter of a minor German court official his father had met on a youthful trip abroad. At his father’s death, Herzen inherited a fortune of such size that it later took the help of the Rothschilds to leverage it out of Russia. Natalie Herzen was his first cousin, herself also illegitimate—one of a half dozen children of Herzen’s unmarried uncle, who kept a serf harem in the rooms of his vast Moscow mansion. After the uncle’s death, the children were paraded past his sister, the Princess Khovansky, on their way to live as serfs on the family’s country estates. The pretty eight-yearold Natalie was pulled out on a whim by her aunt and raised as a gentlewoman. Ivan Turgenev and Herzen’s childhood friend, the poet Nicholas Ogarev, are spending the summer with the Herzens, arguing about coffee too. Turgenev has already met the love of his life: the fabled opera singer Pauline Viardot. Despite the fact that she is married, he will follow her for the rest of his life. Ogarev’s first marriage, to Maria, a grasping provincial social climber we meet in a memorable scene in a Parisian garret, will relieve him of a third of his inheritance. Following his beliefs, Ogarev will free his serfs and give them the remainder of his lands. His own life will end in destitution. News comes suddenly that Herzen’s family has been given permission to travel abroad to seek medical care for their son Kolya, who is deaf. They will never set foot on Russian soil again. “I left Moscow with Natalie and the children and my mother, packed into a carriage hung with furs against the January cold. Half a dozen sledges with our friends came to see us off as far as the staging post, and then we were on our way. I came to Paris as people used to come to Jerusalem or Rome . . .”* Paris in 1848 was the epicenter of change in the world. Following the Revolution of 1789, which ended in the First Empire under Napoleon, and the failed student uprising of 1832 portrayed by Victor Hugo in Les Misérables, Paris in 1848 was finally poised to lead Europe into a new age. And in Shipwreck, everyone has come to Paris to be a part of it. Only Vissarion Belinsky, futilely seeking a cure for his consumption in German spa towns on his way to Paris with Turgenev, feels out of place when he arrives. Karl Marx called the February 1848 overthrow of King Louis Philippe “the beautiful days,” when workers and the bourgeoisie fought together for enfranchisement. George

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Sand herself had been on the barricades, and her example of the freedom “to follow our heart wherever it leads us . . . to let love be our guide to the greater good!”* is avidly followed by all the characters in our play. Natalie Herzen and her visiting friend Natasha Tuchkov are especially drawn to its siren call. The sensationally famous rebel German poet George Herwegh is in Paris too, with his rich Jewish wife Emma, the daughter of a Berlin merchant family. The new French Republic spread the flame of revolution to Saxony, Rome, Berlin, Baden, Vienna, and Greece. Michael Bakunin is in his glory, setting Europe afire, with friends such as the composer Richard Wagner at his side. The June days that brought the Republic to its climax, and which end Shipwreck’s Act One, saw the revolution betrayed as the nine million newly enfranchised French voters returned a monarchist Assembly, which harshly put down the workers who had made the new Assembly’s existence possible. “In a free vote, the French public renounced freedom,”* Herzen observed. Within three years, the newly elected Prince Louis Napoleon staged a coup d’état and proclaimed himself Emperor. The dream of a Republic died in the ashes of the Second Empire. In Shipwreck’s second act, Herzen’s private life mirrors the descent from the exhilaration of 1848 to the disillusionment and tragedy that followed this tumultuous time. “I came to Paris as people used to come to Jerusalem or Rome and found the city of the plain. It made one half-hearted effort to be worthy of itself and then collapsed satisfied under six feet of dung.”* For audiences starting with Play Three of the trilogy: WHAT CAME BEFORE SALVAGE

The arc of Alexander Herzen’s life can be sketched from three points. At the first, he stands on the Sparrow Hills overlooking Moscow as a young man with his friend Nicholas Ogarev vowing to avenge the Decembrists and bring Russia into the modern age. “It was the hinge of my life,”* he recalls in Voyage. The second point in the arc is Paris in 1848 (Herzen’s spiritual shipwreck, as Lenin put it much later) as he watches the people of France, newly given the vote, go against their own interests and choose a king instead to lead them. The dark time that follows these political reversals is mirrored in the devastation of Herzen’s personal life and it casts him adrift. The third and final point in the arc takes place in Herzen’s lonely exile in London where, newly reunited with Ogarev, he founds the Free Russian Press, which publishes The Polar Star, named after a Decembrist publication, and Kolokol [The Bell]. Each part of Stoppard’s trilogy begins, in our production, with the image of Alexander Herzen alone, holding the lost glove of his child, Kolya, and each part begins with the sound of a bell.

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Synopsis

It is The Bell for which history remembers Herzen. A cheap, muckraking sheet published frequently and smuggled back into Russia, The Bell exposed corruption, published opinions from within Russia and without that had never been heard there, and gave a forum to censored ideas and writers. The Bell’s constant advocacy of free speech, of Polish Independence (only to be achieved in 1918), and, above all, of the Emancipation of the Serfs (celebrated in 1861) brought its—and Herzen’s—influence to a high-water mark. The death of Tsar Nicholas (1825–55), whose despotic rule had cast a shadow over Russia from the time of the Decembrists, released a wave of reforms. Herzen wrote a public letter to the new Tsar, Alexander II, in The Bell. Michael Bakunin’s mother Varvara, the matriarch of Premukhino whom we met in Voyage, visited the new Tsar (her distant relative) in person to beg him to release her son from his chains in the Peter and Paul Fortress, where he had suffered unimaginable hardship. She had her way, and Bakunin’s sentence was commuted to life-long exile in Siberia. A quick escape by boat brought him to Japan, and from there to San Francisco, to New York via the Panama Canal and thence to England, where he arrives, physically debilitated, newly married and politically and passionately intact in Salvage. Bakunin concludes, “Seven degrees of human happiness! First, to die fighting for liberty; second, love and friendship; third, art and science; fourth, a cigarette, five, six, seven, drinking, eating, and sleeping.”* Herzen’s reunions with Bakunin, with the now internationally acclaimed writer Ivan Turgenev and with Ogarev (who arrives with his second wife Natasha Tuchkov, Natalie Herzen’s former friend), the founding of The Bell and finally the celebrations at the news of Tsar Nicholas’s death and the Emancipation of the Serfs are memorable scenes in Salvage. Surrounding Herzen in his London exile is a “flotsam of refugees . . . from every failed insurrection from Sicily to the Baltic,” a “theatre of political exile,”* which gathers at his hearth to recall happier times, take nourishment and quarrel over what might have been. Vastly reduced in circumstances, often penniless, each has paid a heavy price for his or her beliefs. Among the former heads of state, editors, activists and writers are the old Count Stanislaw Worcell—leader of the Free Polish government in exile, a man Herzen deeply admires, who has left his family and his fortune to devote his life to the ideal of liberating his country—and the fascinating Malwida von Meysenbug, friend to Nietzsche, Romain Rolland and Richard Wagner, deserving of a play of her own, who comes to reside in the Herzen household as his children’s tutor. After the Emancipation, Herzen’s high-water mark, history overcomes him. Like the Reconstruction era shortly to follow in the U.S. after the Civil War, a period of unrest came after the 1861 Russian Emancipation. It brought a new

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generation of radicals to the fore, who reproached Herzen and The Bell for not advocating for faster change. Growing up in Russia without a “squeak or pinpoint of light,”* they are impatient and intolerant of compromise. In Salvage, this “New Generation” that overtakes the “Generation of the 40’s” encompasses men such as Nicholas Chernyshevsky, later a patron saint of the Bolsheviks, who visits Herzen’s chaotic household in London; the young radical Slepsov who leaves Herzen with the bill in a Geneva café, and the doctor at the seashore who will inspire the fictional character of Bazarov in Ivan Turgenev’s masterpiece Fathers and Sons. These are nihilists and men of action with a firm grasp on the sacrifices others need to make to see their ends met. “Only the axe will do,” we hear in Salvage’s second act. “Very dangerous,” Herzen writes in The Bell. “There’s something fascinating about them,” says Turgenev. Surrounded by “New Men” exhorting The Bell to follow their new way of making history, Herzen wavers. “In Paris I saw enough blood running in the gutters to last me. Progress by peaceful steps. I’ll babble it as long as I’ve got breath.”* “Our hallowed Bell . . . refuses to agitate for an uprising.”* “The Free Russian Press has taken a vow of silence about socialism. If the Tsar frees the serfs, I’ll drink his health. After that, we’ll see.”* But The Bell’s hand is forced, and the results are catastrophic—a plan betrayed, idealistic young men of the next generation killed or imprisoned. Even the activist par excellence Bakunin, fighting in later years with Marx for control of the Workers International, finds his way blocked. Although as young men they shared ideas (Marx observed that the events in France in 1848 showed that democracy was not a viable form of government) Bakunin and Marx ended as enemies, one believing in a theory of history, the other trying to destroy all systems of order. Lenin, the flower of the New Generation—born in 1870, the year Herzen died (two years after our trilogy ends)—recalled that he couldn’t listen to Beethoven after 1917, the year his utopia was created, because it left him unable to find the resolve to accomplish What is to be Done. Bakunin’s words to a friend in the week he died were, “Everything will pass, and the world will perish, but the Ninth Symphony will remain.” For Bakunin and Herzen, their time is past, the tide sweeps them out, their names are forgotten. “Sasha . . . this is a book I wrote in the year of revolution . . . From the Other Shore. . . . Don’t look for solutions in this book. There are none. The coming revolution is the only religion I pass on to you, and it’s a religion without a paradise on the other shore. But do not remain on this shore. Better to perish. Go in your time, preach the revolution at home to our own people. There they once loved my voice, and will perhaps remember me.”* —Alexander Herzen to his son Anne Cattaneo, dramaturg

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MEMORABLE LINES FROM THE COAST OF UTOPIA

“Where are we off to? Who’s got the map? We study the different utopias . . . power to the experts, to the workers, to the philosophers . . . property is a right, property is theft, the evil of competition, the evil of monopoly . . . central planning, no planning, free housing, free love . . . and each of them uniquely harmonious, just and efficient. But there’s one question none of the maps explain: why should anyone obey anyone else?” “We discovered that history isn’t impressed by intellectuals. History is more like the weather: you never know what it’s going to do.” “Everything you hold dear in civilization will be smashed on the altar of equality . . .” “Without faith in something higher, human nature is animal nature.” “There were more poor people with the vote than rich people . . . How could it turn out the way it did?” “We’ve enjoyed the feast, we can’t complain when the waiter says, ‘L’addition, messieurs!’” “Well, I didn’t want to be the only one standing up.” “Nature doesn’t disdain what lives only for a day. It pours the whole of itself into each moment. We don’t value the lily less for not being made of flint and built to last. Life’s bounty is in its flow, later is too late. Where is the song when it’s been sung? The dance when it’s been danced? It’s only we humans who want to own the future, too . . . The death of a child has no more meaning than the death of armies, of nations. Was the child happy while he lived? That is a proper question, the only question. If we can’t arrange our own happiness, it’s a conceit beyond vulgarity to arrange the happiness of those who come after us.” “Our meaning is in how we live in an imperfect world, in our time. We have no other.” FOR AUDIENCE MEMBERS INTERESTED IN FURTHER READING:

Russian Thinkers by Isaiah Berlin The Romantic Exiles by Edward Hallett (E. H.) Carr Natasha’s Dance: A Cultural History of Russia by Orlando Figes My Past and Thoughts by Alexander Herzen, introduction by Dwight Macdonald Indiana by George Sand A Sportsman’s Sketches by Ivan Turgenev Fathers and Sons by Ivan Turgenev

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5

create work and opportunities dramaturg-created productions and programs

Finding an existing play that has been forgotten—perhaps one that was ahead of its time or has been overlooked—or encouraging a fledgling author to write for the stage for the first time are exciting aspects of a dramaturg’s job. Both have the goal of adding to the repertory and expanding the artistic reach of a theater. In addition, there are other ways to achieve this goal that make use of a dramaturg’s own creativity. As the field matured during the 1990s, the burgeoning involvement of dramaturgs helped to create from scratch half a dozen plays on widely varying themes that went on to achieve significant critical and popular success. In fact, at the time, the contributions of dramaturgs seemed so promising that I felt that LMDA, the membership organization of our profession, which I was running then, should craft a contract to protect the contributions of the dramaturgs who played a central role in creating these evenings. It appeared to be an upand-coming new way to make projects for the stage. LMDA did eventually create such a contract. Personally, I had hoped LMDA might join with the Society of Stage Directors and Choreographers (SDC) to achieve actual guild status and so also be able to protect its members when a successful show that a member had helped to create moved to a bigger venue. That has not yet happened. Ideally, I feel the credit and compensation for a dramaturg should match that of the production’s designers, because the work is comparable in the creative input and time devoted to the realization of the project. The projects that were making such a splash then were a varied group. Most of them ended up on Broadway. Mark Bly was the first dramaturg

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to receive a Broadway dramaturgy credit on director and writer Emily Mann’s Execution of Justice. Some years later, working with Emily on Having Our Say, a stage adaptation of the Delaney sisters’ oral history of their life stories from the slavery period to the present (the sisters were both more than a hundred years old when the play opened in 1993), dramaturg Janice Paran—the resident dramaturg at the McCarter Theatre in Princeton, where the play was developed—was an integral part of the production from its inception. Shelby Jiggetts, the Public Theater’s dramaturg, suggested episodes from African American history to George C. Wolfe and the creative team of Bring in da Noise, Bring in da Funk that they developed in rehearsal. Noise/Funk was a dance/theater piece that grew by improvisation from the experiments of its core creators—primarily director George C. Wolfe, writer Reg E. Gaines, actress Ann Duquesnay, and tap-dance great Savion Glover—and it was Shelby’s job to suggest scenes, historical incidents, and resonant locations that would interest and inspire them. Also making historical change was Tony Kushner’s play Angels in America, which had begun its life at the Eureka Theater in San Francisco under the watchful care of dramaturgs Kimberly Flynn and Oskar Eustis, who both retain a percentage of Kushner’s royalties for their contributions. And on Broadway was Jonathan Larson’s Rent. This musical exploded into dramaturgy’s most public face when the commercial producers who transferred the production to Broadway from New York Theatre Workshop—where the musical was developed and premiered—ousted its dramaturg Lynn Thomson shortly after the move. She sued the producers and Larson’s family for credit and compensation. Larson died at the start of the show’s Off-Broadway previews from an undiagnosed cardiac condition (without health insurance, he was unable to afford medical care). He and Lynn each received a grand total of somewhere in the neighborhood of three thousand dollars for their work on this blockbuster musical. In a highly publicized lawsuit after the Broadway transfer, the commercial producers and the Larson family attempted to deny her role in the creation of Rent. Thomson lost the initial trial and in turn counter-sued, eventually receiving a small settlement and title-page credit. It was a lopsided battle from the start, with the lure of a proposed film hanging over the musical’s future and the profits from the show even then in the multimillion-dollar range. Lynn’s attorney worked pro bono and later received a portion of the settlement. I had no knowledge of the specifics of the creation of Rent, and I participated in the trial only as an expert witness attempting to answer

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the question “What is a dramaturg?” Lynn called several witnesses who testified on her behalf, among them the playwrights Craig Lucas and Tony Kushner, who testified for Lynn because they supported Larson’s right to choose his collaborators. Kushner had, himself, long experience developing material with dramaturgs. Lynn, who apart from musicals also had a deep focus on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century American drama, went on to create the brilliant America-in-Play project (americainplay.org), which matched contemporary playwrights with their forebears from the roots of American theater. These almost unknown and unstudied playwrights from the American theater in frontier times often candidly embrace issues of identity, race, and geographical stereotypes, and their plays are surprisingly stage worthy. The contemporary writers who encountered them had a field day adapting and responding to the material. Around this time, I had left the Phoenix to freelance and become a project dramaturg of the Acting Company, then under the direction of Michael Kahn, who was also running the Juilliard Drama Division and the Shakespeare Theatre in Washington. The company’s emeritus founding director, John Houseman, and its managing director, Margot Harley, completed the management troika. The Acting Company had been founded in 1972 so that the first group of drama graduates from the Juilliard School could form an acting company and work in a repertory of classical plays. Group One (as Juilliard cohorts are called, instead of “Class of X”) included now legendary actors such as Kevin Kline and Patti LuPone, and the company soon made its mark presenting a repertory of plays and musicals both on tour and on Broadway. The Acting Company continued to hire from the ranks of Juilliard graduates because it could rely on both their strong training in the classics and their all-round versatility. By the early 1980s, the Acting Company was looking to expand its repertory. A decade into its existence, it had already produced many wellknown and well-loved classics. I was hired for the half-time job of suggesting additional plays from the classical repertory. But the company also wanted to do something with Chekhov above and beyond the plays that had already been presented. The company had produced a few contemporary writers who were writing on vaguely historical themes, and wondered if in the middle of this red-hot new playwriting decade, I could also suggest other new plays. Michael Kahn was a highly experienced and knowledgeable director with a decades-long track record of producing classics. I had no idea what I could know that he didn’t. With many commitments

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at other theaters, he felt he did not have the time he needed to think up something new for such a project and he gave me his blessing. The Chekhov repertory is limited: we all regret how few plays Chekhov was able to write before his death from tuberculosis at the age of forty-four. There had been attempts to approach Chekhov in ways that capitalized on the love both audiences and actors feel for his work: adaptations and versions of his untitled and unfinished five-hour-long play Platonov, and plays about Chekhov himself (such as Neil Simon’s The Good Doctor). I didn’t see any possible headway in either of these directions. I found Chekhov’s fascinating notebooks, which contain scraps of dialogue, ideas for scenes, and descriptions of characters: “N dreams that he is returning from abroad, and that at Verzhbolovo, in spite of his protests, they make him pay duty on his wife.” “In a love letter: Stamp enclosed for a reply.” “A certain captain taught his daughter the art of fortification.” “New literary forms always produce new forms of life and that is why they are so revolting to the conservative human mind.” I thought I might find an outline or prompt for an unwritten play that I could commission a contemporary playwright to write. I found some titles Chekhov had never used, but no play descriptions. In fact, what remained after his four great plays was, and is, actually, the majority of his writing: his countless, and often sublimely great stories. So I had the dream job: after finishing the notebooks, I was paid to read the stories of Anton Chekhov. This turned out to be more difficult than I expected. Of course we know his finest stories, and we know that they are “collected” in various editions, starting with the wonderful Victorian translations by Constance Garnett. I knew Chekhov’s family was large and needy, but as I read and reread a couple of biographies about him, I began to get a glimpse of just how much his family had depended on him financially. To support them all, Chekhov, from a very young age, had to write for absolutely anyone who would pay him. So finding all the stories of Chekhov—and I’m sure I never accomplished this—took me through countless byways, through sporting and humor publications, and volumes such as Lost Stories by Anton Chekhov and Unknown Stories by Anton Chekhov. I had to use all the library skills I had. I was very happy, but I had no idea what I was looking for and was no closer to coming up with an idea for the Acting Company. I debated abandoning Chekhov and going back to the classical repertory to look for very rarely produced plays. And then I read “Vint.” It was in a volume of

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stories edited by Avrahm Yarmolinsky titled The Unknown Chekhov. That title had my name written all over it. The story was about a group of office employees who stay after closing to play cards, and rather than “queen,” “knight,” or “ten,” the employees give each card the name of one of their employers. This became: “All right . . . two Treasury, and I raise Vrazhansky.” “Fine. Vrazhansky.” “Your . . . bid?” “Madame Persolin.” The story was the card game and it illuminated both the players and their absent employers. It seemed like a David Mamet play. And soon it was a David Mamet play. That’s how the idea for Orchards was born. Here’s how it’s reflected now on Wikipedia: “Chekhov himself was the first to realize that many of his early stories, consisting largely of dialogue, could be easily transferred to the stage. Mamet made the same discovery.” Actually, I made the discovery. I mailed the story to David, and within a week, the fax machine at the Acting Company came to life and the play printed out. It was perfect—thanks to both authors. And I was still nowhere. Or rather I had one very good short play and a glimpse of an idea—but not an idea I could force. I had to go back and keep reading and pray that lightning would strike again. And how many times would it have to strike to make up a full evening for a rep company? Seven times, as it turned out. I realized I was looking for “voice.” I was looking for other Chekhov stories—and there was such a range of stories—that in a literal way reminded me of the voices of other contemporary playwrights I knew and admired. I read on and intuited that Chekhov’s beautiful and touching “The Man in a Case” would interest Wendy Wasserstein, and, indeed, with her technical mastery, she transformed it easily into a beautiful little play about loneliness, which was deeply on her mind at this time. We did it without rewrites, just as she wrote it. I wanted to work with Samm-Art Williams, whose play Home, an affectionate look at life in his hometown (a small African American community in North Carolina) had brought him a Tony nomination when it moved to Broadway. Samm-Art was a genuinely funny and highly observant writer. I knew him as a member of the playwrightdramaturg Steve Carter’s Writers Unit at the Negro Ensemble Company. He went on to have a significant career in television, continued to write for the theater, and was later inducted into the North Carolina Literary Hall of Fame. When I read Chekhov’s story about a group of small-town Russian characters who find themselves in a rural train station waiting for a longdelayed train, I realized Chekhov’s comic genius—so evident in his one-act plays such as The Bear—deserved a place in the evening. Chekhov’s story

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was set in Georgia and so was Samm-Art’s play. Only now it was the state of Georgia, USA. We met a number of times to center his play, an adaptation of Chekhov’s “The Eve of the Trial,” in that single setting to keep the action concentrated in time and place. Williams, a six-foot-eight leftie, had been a former sparring partner of Muhammad Ali, and I think we both found our script meetings amusing visually—one very tiny creature exchanging notes with a giant. The characters and comic insights he transposed into a modern idiom were all his own. I was delighted to have him be a part of the evening. I reread Chekhov’s memorable story “The Witch,” a well-known tale that conjures a mood of palpable, ominous strength. I had been an admirer of Spalding Gray since his early days at the Wooster Group, where his plays such as Rumstick Road, brilliantly directed by Elizabeth LeCompte, had expanded what I thought the theater could do. I knew him because he lived in my neighborhood, so I approached him about being a part of the project. He was auditioning (he was also an actor) for movies in Los Angeles, and in a bit of a lull in his career. We met for coffee a number of times to discuss the project, and on a hunch I mailed “The Witch” to him in Los Angeles. One day he telephoned me and asked if he could speak his response as a monologue—the stage form he was working in at that time. I thought it was a brilliant idea, so he brought me a tape recording when he returned, which we transcribed, and it became his play Rivkala’s Ring. It began, “The day the Chekhov short story arrived, I saw my first missing child.” John Guare wrote a brilliant arpeggio of a play in response to Chekhov’s “A Joke.” John is always eager and able to find a novel way to approach a subject; which he did again later in Love’s Fire. Here he dreamed up an onstage sleigh ride repeated several times with increasing and surprising consequences. And Irene Fornés, whom I knew well from serving on the board of INTAR, took on Chekhov’s brief “Drowning” in a most unusual way: she turned it into a three-scene play with characters dressed in outsized, exaggerated costumes, who spoke in heartbreaking, minimalistic dialogue. Her playlet was recently revived on a triple bill with two other experimental works: Edward Albee’s The Sandbox and Adrienne Kennedy’s Funnyhouse of a Negro, and strongly held its place in their company. “Drowning” has most recently been transformed into an opera by Philip Glass. Only one writer I approached did not, I felt, take the project seriously, and I was given a play that I’m pretty sure already existed—an unproduced play from

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a desk drawer, which had no discernible tie to the story I had sent—only a subtitle was added: “Based loosely, very loosely, on A. Chekhov . . . actually the Chekhov short story The Skit, or the theme thereof.” In retrospect, we should have paid the author a kill fee and done the evening without it. Otherwise, I was very happy with the range of responses and the varying forms the adaptations had taken. At an NEA panel meeting in Washington, Michael Kahn had met a young director unknown to me, Robert Falls, making a name for himself running a small theater called Wisdom Bridge in Chicago. Michael thought I should consider him as a possible director of the evening. So I was sent to Chicago. I was, to put it mildly, nervous about entrusting these newborns to an unknown director. Our first meeting, like our last one this past year, lasted six hours. Bob and I have been alerted to closing time by tired waiters at restaurants and bars in cities too numerous to name for the past twenty-five years. We bonded instantly and I agreed with Michael that he was the right director for the yet-to-be-titled evening. He brought on a brilliant design team, connected immediately with all the playwrights (Mamet was a friend already from Chicago), and we opened the Acting Company’s seventy-city tour in Bob’s college home town, Champaign-Urbana, Illinois. It was nothing short of a hoot to have these writers together in the sole multistory hotel in town, a Holiday Inn. Irene and Spalding and Wendy were most definitely on foreign ground. Wendy snuck into my room at midnight as the bonfires in front of the college’s fraternity houses near the hotel burned into the night (it was Rush Week): “Is this a pogrom?” I had taken the plays and stories to my friend Terry Adams, whom I had worked with when a translation I did of a Botho Strauss play, Big and Little, was published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux. Terry had been Bob Giroux’s assistant. He had since moved to Knopf, and that house generously offered to republish Chekhov’s original stories alongside their new stage adaptations. The legendary marketing genius of Knopf, Nina Bourne, Robert Gottlieb’s right hand, agreed to find the project a title and a cover image. Titles are tough. The only title I had ever remotely liked was one from Chekhov’s notebooks that he had never been able to use: “Lemon Peel.” I loved the title, but I could see how it might not be obvious that “Lemon Peel” would convey that its subject matter was seven plays by contemporary playwrights based on stories by Chekhov. So it became, under Nina Bourne’s expert guidance, Orchards, with its beautiful green cover

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Orchards, poster art by Scott McKowen (Courtesy of Scott McKowen)

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designed by Scott McKowen. The book was presented to me when it came off press with a surprise: its dedication page read “To ANNE CATTANEO, who has the same initials.” Orchards turned out to be a big success for the Acting Company, which toured the evening through seventy cities across the United States in rep with As You Like It, starting with that first evening at the Krannert Center in Champaign-Urbana, ending up in June 1986 at the Goodman Theatre in Chicago, Bob Falls’s new home. He’d been appointed artistic director. His predecessor, Gregory Mosher, had moved to New York to take over the reins of Lincoln Center Theater, and would hire me a few years later. I went on to create a second evening for the Acting Company before that occurred, however. After a success like Orchards, the company wanted a second evening that would again take its mission of presenting classical work and combine it with the energy of a contemporary perspective. The Orchards experience had been pretty intense: I must have done thirty or forty interviews as the tour moved around the country. The interviewers always asked the same questions, which I had to pretend to be surprised by again and again in each new city. I can sympathize with actors who endlessly go through this. There was a détente happening at that moment between the United States and the Soviet Union at the time of Mikhail Gorbachev’s rise to power, and although I had conceived and been working on Orchards for two years before the tour began, it seemed that I had foreseen this and arranged the evening to suit the political reality of the moment. But all the press on the show acknowledged me as the creator of the idea of the evening. When the Acting Company approached me a second time and asked me to make another evening, Michael Kahn had left to focus on his work in Washington at the Shakespeare Theater, and John Houseman had passed away. This second time around was different. I believe what I put together was as successful artistically as the first evening—and I’m speaking first of all in terms of the work, of course, but also the long tour, the company’s travel to the Barbican Theatre in London, and its return to a nice run at the Public’s Newman Theater, with Broadway producers looking it over for a possible transfer. This didn’t happen in the end: though the writers were known, there were no “stars” in the acting company. I had a hard time figuring out how to combine the idea of contemporary writers and a classical model for a second time. Many of my initial ideas went nowhere. I felt I was being too literal. Then it dawned on me

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that I could work without actual content and focus on emotion. And what is more emotionally specific than Shakespeare’s sonnets? So, with far less to read this time—or rather reread—I created Love’s Fire by choosing sonnets with specific emotional situations that would resonate with playwrights I had in mind. I was able to include Ntozake Shange and Marsha Norman. I talked Eric Bogosian into taking on the wonderful Sonnet 118, and I love what he did with it. I had felt by the end of the Orchards tour that what was missing from that evening was music in some form, so this time I commissioned William Finn, the composer and author of Falsettos, to take on a sonnet. My longtime collaborator and friend John Guare went wild and wrote a forty-five minute play (for a two-and-a-half-hour evening with six other authors) inspired by two sonnets and Jacapo De Vergine’s The Golden Legend; and in a fit of genius, John asked Adam Guettel (composer of The Light in the Piazza and Floyd Collins) to set Sonnet 154 to music. This sonnet concludes “but I, my mistress’ thrall, Came there for cure, and this by that I prove, Love’s fire heats water, water cools not love.” Adam’s music was as divine as the poem. While John was safely in Rome, I cut his forty-fiveminute play by two-thirds, and he returned to see a run-through, which he loved. I would never cut a play without the author’s permission and participation. But I have worked with John on almost half a dozen plays (he’s a genius of storytelling fecundity) and his collaborators always face the challenge of cutting and shaping the fantastic tales he spins. I suggested that Mark Lamos, a frequent collaborator of ours at Lincoln Center Theater whom I deeply respected, direct the evening, and he brought Tony Kushner on board, who contributed the gem Terminating, or Lass Meine Schmerzen Nicht Verloren Sein, or Ambivalence, one of the most personal and quietly nuanced of his plays. Wendy Wasserstein as usual contributed a strong play inspired by Shakespeare’s line “Lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds” that ends Sonnet 94, and the evening was ready to go. I was extremely happy with the musical components, and John’s piece, The General of Hot Desire (which featured the entire company telling the story of the creation of the world), ended the evening as Adam’s music brought it to a rousing conclusion. For me, it was a triumph, and at the same time the genre was exhausted. I had done enough with contemporary playwrights taking inspiration from classical source material to make up an evening of theater. I’m happy that both Orchards and Love’s Fire have generated plays that I often see in auditions, and I know that many of the plays in both collections

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Love’s Fire, poster art by Scott McKowen (Courtesy of Scott McKowen)

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have been produced countless times regionally in different configurations. Everyone seems to know both projects. My own experience on Love’s Fire, after it opened, was shaped by the absence of artistic support from the Acting Company. Mark Lamos had some conflicts as we neared the start of rehearsals, and I had to threaten to go to the authors to ask them to pull their plays when the Acting Company sought to replace him. I won. The Acting Company waited and he directed the evening. But my role was decidedly overlooked this time around as the tour rolled out. The plays were again published, this time by William Morrow, which was arranged through the theater, and I was billed as “Dramaturge” only after a long list of other administrative staff members. Mark wrote the introduction to the volume, and his discussion of my contribution was cut by the publisher. Many years later, at an Acting Company benefit I attended honoring John Guare, the idea for the entire evening was credited to the managing director. So this chapter returns to the importance of credit. Dramaturgs often play a critical role in the creation of the evenings they work on. Unlike Orchards and Love’s Fire, in most cases the originating force is, of course, the writer first, and then the director. But as theater programs list countless contributors from design to stage management to dog trainers (pace Joseph Papp), it’s necessary to insist that we be given credit for what we have done. I think my own impulse—like many of my predecessors—is to be happy with the gratitude of the artists I have worked with. And for the most part they have always been generous in their acknowledgment of my work. But when push comes to shove—though it has rarely come to that in my career—you need a union or an organization to back you up, or your work will be unacknowledged or even stolen. Whether it’s creating evenings like Orchards and Love’s Fire; or discovering new writers as the mid-twentieth-century dramaturgs Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Hirschfeld did (Marieliuse Fleisser, and Max Frisch and Friedrich Dürrenmatt, respectively); or contributing to projects like the ones described in the opening pages of this chapter, our role needs to be credited and acknowledged. Back in the early days of the National Theatre, even Kenneth Tynan was never billed in the program. Dramaturgs are given credit now, but credit will continue to be the work of the generation to follow. I haven’t thought of doing anything like Love’s Fire or Orchards again. But I would like to try something with a director, instead of a series of playwrights, interpreting a classic writer. One of my favorite writers is Nathaniel Hawthorne. I had hoped to be able to spend some time thinking up a Hawthorne evening,

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and of course Robert Lowell’s marvelous adaptations of several Hawthorne stories exist, though they are rarely produced now. I hope at some future date to get a chance to put together an evening in yet again a new form. Finally, in this chapter on creating work, I want to emphasize that dramaturgs have wide leeway to make change in the field at large. Just before I came to Lincoln Center, while I was president of LMDA, I worked for several years with Carey Perloff, who was then the artistic director of the Classic Stage Company in New York. We decided that what the theater needed was a wider repertoire of plays from other cultures and languages, so we created the National Theater Translation Project, which was administered out of the LMDA office. We received a generous start-up grant from the Pew Foundation thanks to the always forward-looking Marian Godfrey, hired a part-time director (the gifted dramaturg Royston Coppenger, who later taught at CalArts and Hofstra), and the program sent out a call for translations and administered annual translation prizes in four or five languages. We found candidates to form the judging panels. We began working on an African translation project devoted to theater writing. This was in the mid-1980s, and it was our hope that the fruits of this initiative would influence the theater as the millennium approached. All was going well until we needed to find a place to house online the many translations the project had identified or brought into being; there were a large number of them, and we envisioned a database that could be accessed by theater people across the country. We approached the Library for the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center, then under the administration of a mutual friend, but we were firmly rebuffed. There would be no interest in these plays from abroad, we were told. I think the National Theater Translation Project was, certainly for Carey, the only thing she ever failed to accomplish. She was being courted at that time as a possible candidate to run the American Conservatory Theater in San Francisco, and she took the job and made a success of it for many decades. Rusty Coppenger went to CalArts. I stepped down as president of LMDA. And the American theater, I’m convinced, lost a potentially valuable resource that would have shifted its course in some way. I count the creation of the Lincoln Center Theater Directors Lab, which began in 1995, as another, more successful example of how the field can shift and be enriched by new ideas. In that year, André Bishop—former literary manager of Playwrights Horizons, later its distinguished artistic director, and my dear friend—replaced Gregory Mosher as artistic director

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of Lincoln Center Theater. Following in Mosher’s footsteps, he transformed the theater once again with his producing partner, executive director Bernard Gersten, and they found a new sustaining vision that has made it one of the most artistically and financially innovative and successful theaters in the country. Gregory’s policy had been to focus on a core group of master artists and allow them the freedom to work as they wished. Two projects from that time, Measure for Measure and Mule Bone, are discussed in this book. When André arrived, he intuitively turned to the creation of new plays (his focus during his years at Playwrights Horizons) and hoped to involve a larger group of young artists in the theater’s work. This turned out to be oddly difficult, due in part to the fact that Lincoln Center Theater hadn’t been in the new play game since Joseph Papp left Lincoln Center in 1979. The world of new play development that André and I shared with so many other theaters and literary managers in the 1970s had radically changed during this time. Now, there were agents everywhere. We put out feelers to a huge community of playwrights asking to read plays, and every play we received had already had at least one other reading or had spent time in a new play development lab somewhere. Everything had been discovered, since there were so many players now in the new works community. We also soon realized that the success that Gregory and Bernard had made limited in many ways what we could do. Lincoln Center at the time had two theaters—the wonderful and imposing Vivian Beaumont, which for many reasons (of expectations and architecture) was a venue that nourished musicals, classics, and new plays that had already received the blessings of good reviews in our smaller space, the three-hundred-seat Mitzi Newhouse Theater. Modeling the first success of the Mosher-Gersten administration, popular plays such as John Guare’s The House of Blue Leaves could move easily upstairs from the Newhouse into the Beaumont after they opened. It was almost impossible to make a success of a brand-new play that started in the Beaumont. The expectations were just too high. And by the time André arrived, because of Lincoln Center Theater’s artistic successes and inexpensive ticket prices (the Lincoln Center Theater motto from the beginning of the Mosher-Gersten administration was simple: “Good Plays, Popular Prices”), we had almost forty thousand members, which are Lincoln Center Theater’s version of subscribers. Members actually sued us when they couldn’t get into a show—this had happened right before André arrived, during the production of Waiting for Godot directed

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by Mike Nichols in the Newhouse. As a result, our runs downstairs had to be lengthened, and they are currently about ten weeks long. Because of audience demand, most of them add extensions of several weeks. With fifty-two weeks in a year, there is only room to produce three plays annually in this house. Our hands, we soon realized, were tied by our successes. I believe that the way I found to escape this bottleneck is typical of how a dramaturg thinks. Three things defined how I moved forward. First, I was drawn to the idea of gathering young directors—and I realized no resources had been devoted to them in the professional theater outside of a few, excellent but very small resident assistant positions in one or two regional theaters. These opportunities were not serving enough artists— even though the young directors who came through these programs were promising. But a nationwide directing equivalent of the 1970s new play movement was not happening. Furthermore, I wondered—in fact I still wonder—if there is some seesaw-like equation between the artistic prominence of playwrights versus directors. Countries with brilliant and innovative directors who focus on reinterpreting the classics inhabit a landscape without much original writing. And, vice versa, an era of strong plays overshadows strong interpreters. You have to go as far back as France in the first half of the twentieth century to find an exception to this. I have also always worried about the dramaturgy office funnel problem, where plays coming in to theaters must pass by an office or a person with too much influence and too singular a vision of what constitutes a good play. My instinct is always to let a thousand flowers bloom. A gathering of directors with many different ideas and playwright collaborators they could bring with them could address this issue too. With these questions in mind, I reached out for ideas and for help to our community of artists and friends. How should Lincoln Center Theater proceed? Over a period of a year, André and I held numerous think-tank meetings around these questions: we invited actors, directors, designers, and writers and told them of our dilemma. How best could we open our theater to a community of young artists? Many people in our field ponder its best practices and have dreams and ideas about how to implement change. Our informal brainstorming meetings included actors such as Lois Smith and Novella Nelson; designers John Conklin and Peter Kaczorowski; directors JoAnne Akalaitis, Graciela Daniele, and Dan Sullivan; and playwrights and performers from Chris Durang to Laurie Anderson. As I did during my year of reading Chekhov for the Acting Company, I kept

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the churn of ideas and thoughts in my head, and hoped to find a way to begin. Should we pair writers and directors? How could we bring in artists from other cultures, and other parts of the United States, now teeming with new theaters? How could best practices from different artistic traditions be passed on? In 1995, we invited our first Lab to Lincoln Center. It began with a set of ideas. And it was flexible and able to try anything. As each year passed, principles emerged that are now bedrocks of the Lab. My job has been to perceive what these organizing principles are and to pull us back from ways of working that are not productive in our Lab setting. The most important insight dawned on me only gradually: directors are the loneliest people in the room. The field desperately needed an environment where directors would not compete for, but instead share resources. I noted that—unlike the 1970s when artists working at theaters of varied missions socialized and helped each other—things had grown stratified and narrow. This fit into my observations of the history of theater, as well as other art forms, where the flowering of artistry—say, the world of Elizabethan England, or the second-generation Abstract-Expressionist artists who drank at the Cedar Tavern in the 1940s—occurred because of actual personal contact. In other words: a scene. We needed to create a scene. In a time of constant contact on social media, emerging directors these days had few actual personal connections with their peer directors—the results of Bowling Alone. So many creative movements in history emerged from a rich stew of ideas, rivalries, and personal friendships. I have often joked that I could have saved myself a lot of time and trouble and just opened a bar. Wasn’t the Moscow Art Theater conceived in a bar after a long night of drinking? The peer-to-peer relationship is key to creating new forms of theater. I’ve become convinced that all of the theaters of the past we remember were created by friends who were peers—similar in age and outlook. No one has ever been picked out by a senior figure—a master artist. The artistic life is made by the young artists themselves. I believe that theater has been created by groups of friends—a director, a writer, a designer, some actors— who see the world in a similar way. They don’t like the theater they see around them. They stay up all night in a bar and decide to create an alternative. The Lord Chamberlain’s Men. The Moscow Art Theater. The Group Theater. Steppenwolf Theatre, La MaMa, Circle Repertory Company. Each year, I have worked to create in the Lab a large community of directors from wildly different theater traditions: Shakespeare directors, Broadway assistant directors, assistants at the Wooster Group, young artis-

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tic directors founding theaters in small towns in rural America, directors of drama ministries in churches, opera directors, people working on cruise ship shows, devising directors, musicals directors, and more. Soon, and I’m sure it’s because the Lab is provided by Lincoln Center Theater free of charge, applications from other countries began to come in. The Lab each summer now usually numbers around sixty-five directors, with about onethird coming to New York from around the world. As I write this, directors from over seventy countries—from Burundi to Brazil—have joined us over these past twenty-five years. I see the establishment of the Lab as an important contribution to the continuation of the apprentice tradition of theater that has carried it down through the ages since the time of Shakespeare. Only in the past fifty years has theater training moved into academia. The Lab directors work each year at Lincoln Center Theater in an intense schedule from ten in the morning to ten at night, six days a week, on a wide array of rehearsal investigations with varied directorial approaches. Each Lab has a different focus. The Lab brings established artists to work alongside and speak with the directors, and we engage an acting company each summer to work on all the projects. For many young directors, this is their first experience with an acting company, and their participation opens up the possibilities of what a company can do: the directors see first-hand how versatile actors can be when they are not typecast. Thanks to designer John Conklin (“How can you create a Directors Lab and not have peer designers be a part of it?” he asked right away in our first brainstorming meeting in 1993), we also have involved young designers every year. In the profession today, designers are the most marginalized people in the theater. Plays are chosen and critical decisions made and then, usually, the designer is the last one to be hired. Yet in the most memorable productions, the design is absolutely central to the interpretation. How can theater rise to this level without the participation of designers from the very beginning? In the Lab we pay designers— and we call set, costume, lighting, sound and projection designers simply “Designer.” But we pay them not to design. We pay them for their time: time spent in the rehearsal room contributing their ideas. They are not allowed to be out of the room shopping or building, as their work in the “real world” normally requires of them. Another foundational idea for the Lab that I quickly took up was proposed by the actress Lois Smith, who said simply, “What I do in a reading— and I do readings almost every Monday—bears no relation to what I do in rehearsals for a production. I can only show a single color in a reading—I

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make a quick choice. In a rehearsal, it’s only in the second or third week that a play opens up to me and allows for exploration. How can young directors learn how to navigate this journey if everything they have to do in their early careers is fast? Only day-long work? Ten-minute plays. Let them have time to explore!” And so I have always tried to work slowly and deeply during the Lab’s play explorations. My own involvement is primarily devoted to focusing the Lab each year, choosing the directors from applications that I design to elicit their personal ideals and ideas. I always need to keep the Lab diverse—in every sense of the word: geographically, ethnically, artistically, and in terms of traditions of theater. I have deliberately accepted more women than men in every Lab since 1995. I see the Lab as an agent of change. Lincoln Center Theater’s website (lct.org/explore/directors-lab) has a complete archive of all the Lab years, participants, guests, and sessions. To date, over sixteen hundred directors have participated in this program. I tell the directors on the first day: The Lab is not a teaching environment. We believe that artists throughout the history of theater have often done their best work early in their careers. No one will mentor you. Here, you will find your way over a mountain of experience that you will give each other, and that will be given to you also by the other artists who come here as our guests, as well as the artists you bring with you—the artists you’ve worked with before at home, or assisted or learned from. Depending on your personality—your openness of mind, where you are in your life—you can access a thousand new things in the coming weeks. How you make use of this new knowledge may take you a decade to fully realize. We so want you to watch and listen and take away what you respond to—positively and negatively. Each of you will have a different journey. You will see and participate in things that will be inspirational and life changing and things that you will find idiotic and repulsive. These will be different for each of you. On your individual journey through the Lab, you will find fellow comrades who agree with your assessments about what you are seeing and doing and these people will become your friends. Above all, I ask the directors to bring in their own traditions—what they know how to do, who they have worked and studied with—and share all of it with the others. With this level of diversity, we always joke that when

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someone mentions an artist’s name or a specific technique or play, onethird of the Lab thinks that’s a theatrical ideal, one-third has never heard of it, and everyone else is somewhere in between. But by the end of the Lab, it’s all known. The Lab is for directors who want to change and grow and is the opposite of a showcase or tryout. No one’s career is advanced by attending. We encourage directors to try things they have not done before. Our goal is to open the field to different traditions and practices and allow the directors to create worldwide connections. Established theater artists from around the world have been enormously generous to the Lab, coming in for mere carfare to share their methods and ideas about directing. They have ranged from renowned international artists like Richard Eyre, Michael Ondaatje, Toni Servillo, Duma Ndlovu, Jacques Lassalle, Simon McBurney, Lev Dodin, Liviu Ciulei, Andrei Mogouchiy, Shi-Zheng Chen, and many, many prominent American directors. Lab members have formed working ensembles after the end of their visits, and countless national and international collaborations have emerged from their time here. We have, in fact, a world wide web of our own, with spin-off Labs now in Los Angeles, Chicago, Toronto, Melbourne, and a new Mediterranean Lab that includes alums from countries in that region. It began in Beirut in 2019 and will move to Barcelona and Cypress in the next few years. And there is a Baltic Lab currently in formation. My hope is that the solely artistic focus of the Lab can, in some ways, be a dream of a working theater—devoted to art, not commerce—about challenge, experimentation, and change, and not results; to friendships and collaboration, not competition. I know now from experience that directors are hungry for this. It took me decades to find the structure for the Directors Lab that seemed to work best. Discerning structure is a classic dramaturg job. Then at one point I realized that unconsciously I was doing something else. I was making a universe of equality: of rigorous theatrical collaboration across borders without the burden of competition or showing off, or prizes or presentations: a utopian theater venue that I dream will not be forgotten and will come to life as these many talented directors take their places at the helms of theaters around the world. They will have known the joy of creating without rules and prohibitions. They will have treated each other as equals. They will have made friends and found future collaborators. By now it’s unsurprising that the Lab’s final evening each year is an unbridled night of dancing in a bar large enough to accommodate a hundred people,

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Lincoln Center Theater Directors Lab, Opening Day 2018, photograph copyright Joan Marcus (Courtesy of Joan Marcus)

and you can bet that the evening will include a few designers and actors and stage managers who, even though they are already off contract, return to join the dance. Whether it is a translation project, a Directors Lab, a new idea for an evening of theater, or building out a new program to benefit the entire field, a dramaturg can look at the larger picture and, with the freedom of a title that so few people understand, make some real change in the world. A dramaturg’s special gift is structure, and our personal relationships with artists allow us to understand their concerns and generate ideas of change. When a tsunami hit Japan in 2011, I received a visit the next morning from the actor James Yaegashi, a friend from productions we had worked on

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together, who told me a harrowing story about his brother outrunning the terrible wave in his car. “We have to do something!” he said. With friends from other New York theaters—Maria Goyanes from the Public Theater and Linda Chapman from New York Theatre Workshop, and the invaluable assistance of the Theatre Communications Group and the Japan Society— a year later, on the anniversary of the natural disaster, we licensed nationwide twelve plays (six American and six Japanese) to be performed without royalties across the United States on that day only. Their subject matter dealt with Japan, the tsunami, or both. Theaters around the country collected donations to aid the displaced population, and the funds from ticket sales were received by the Dramatists Guild Foundation and sent from U.S. theaters to the Japan Playwrights Foundation. Stephen Sondheim wrote a new addition to Pacific Overtures for the occasion, and an illustrious group of actors and singers—from Ron Nakagawa to Patti LuPone—came together for the New York presentation at Cooper Union. Bartlett Sher directed the New York event. Right now, I am working on another new program: The Legacy Playwrights Initiative. I’ve been worried that so many once highly successful plays by older, living authors, many of whom are writers of color, are unknown to young theater people. Recently a renowned playwright of advanced years, on being awarded a very high honor in the theater, told me confidentially that it would not be possible to travel to New York to receive the award, because of lack of funds. I was appalled. We’re working now with a huge circle of organizations and individuals to do something about this on a national scale, for many exemplary older artists are in exactly this situation. Certainly all of these writers don’t need money, but their outstanding plays all deserve attention. And we know how powerfully their stage work speaks to audiences. Why is our American culture so forgetful of its living masters? And why did no one notice this problem before? Stay tuned. I have been inspired during my professional life by the founder of La  MaMa, Ellen Stewart, whose motto was, “Put your shoulder to the wheel!”

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6

step across time and place cross-cultural investigation

In 1999, the Lincoln Center Festival brought a new interpretation of Tang Xianzu’s The Peony Pavilion to New York, directed by Shi-Zheng Chen. Peony was written in 1598, Shakespeare’s era in the West, and is considered one of the masterpieces of Chinese Kunqu opera. It became the most popular play of the Ming Dynasty. The twenty-hour-long play, which moves from reality into a supernatural world, features a powerful central female heroine, Du Liniang, who falls in love and enters into a series of adventures in a dream. The producer of the Lincoln Center Festival, John Rockwell, learned of this classic masterpiece while traveling through China looking for material. The young director Shi-Zheng Chen was an interpreter and guide on this trip. Rockwell encouraged Shi-Zheng to stage his own production of the complete story and, when he saw the results, invited it to Lincoln Center. Shi-Zheng, his leading lady Qian Yi, and several of the musicians involved with the piece traveled to New York after Peony’s preview run in Shanghai to prepare for the transfer, and then, suddenly, the new production was banned by the Chinese government on the grounds that it was “decadent.” The sets were seized and held at the airport in Shanghai. It took the intervention of the Lincoln Center Board and several political figures including, reputedly, Henry Kissinger, to persuade the Chinese government to release the sets and allow the production to proceed in the United States. The artists already here would not be allowed to return to China, however. The Peony Pavilion was a huge success, with its large cast, innovative staging with water and live birds and ambient noise, and its beautiful music and extraordinary acting. It went on to perform at the Fes-

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tival d’Automne in Paris, the Piccolo Teatro in Milan, the Perth International Arts Festival, the Aarhus Festival in Denmark, the Berlin Festival, the Vienna Festival, the Singapore Arts Festival, and finally the Spoleto Festival in Charleston, South Carolina. I asked to meet Shi-Zheng during Peony’s run in New York, and he visited my office at the theater and told me there was another classical play, from an earlier era, that he had always thought would be of interest to contemporary American theater artists and audiences. Like Peony, it was a play Chinese theater artists knew well and many had worked with in their training. Shi-Zheng was part of the generation born early in the Cultural Revolution. His father, a professional, was sent to a reeducation camp in the countryside shortly after Shi-Zheng was born; it was only after the death of Mao Tse-tung, when Shi-Zheng was in his late teens, that he saw his father again, but their family bonds were never reestablished. His mother bled to death after being accidentally shot at a patriotic rally with Shi-Zheng and his sister, then young children, at her side. Taken in by relatives, Shi-Zheng by the age of six was performing in public as part of Chairman Mao’s propaganda team. “That was my early training,” Shi-Zheng told me. “We performed ballet, in pageants, and in Madame Mao’s opera on the stage, in stadiums and on the street.” At fourteen he began training in Chinese Opera School, as in the film Raise the Red Lantern. Shi-Zheng left for the United States in 1983 under the sponsorship of a patron, with the goal of becoming a classical Western opera singer. Unable to connect to the training here, he left the world of opera to attend NYU’s Experimental Theater Wing on a scholarship and, after graduation, worked for several years as a performer in New York. Here, the artist he felt the most kinship with was Meredith Monk because of her integration of image, movement, sound, and music. “It was the closest to the tradition that I came from.” Upon his return to China, Shi-Zheng began directing. The play he gave me, Ji Juan-Xiang’s The Orphan of Zhao, dates from 1280. It was written during the hundred-year Yuan dynasty, a century marked by the rule of a conquering Mongol emperor in the north of China. The Yuan dynasty period saw a loosening of Confucian doctrine, which had prized poetry and rigid obedience to its principles above all else. According to the scholarly books I began consulting, the drama “was never taken seriously or regarded as orthodox literature worthy of the endeavor of Confucian scholars or the attention of the educated reader. Actors and actresses were placed in the same class as prostitutes, barbers and

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corn-removers, and like them were forbidden to take part in the imperial examination.” As to the plays that were being created, Yuan drama was the first great flowering of Chinese dramatic literature. Before the thirteenth century, theater was a poor cousin to the other literary arts. Poetry and philosophy were central to Chinese education and formed the basis for recruitment for public office. But under Mongol rule, beginning in 1276, the traditional examination system was disbanded, resulting in the unemployment of an entire generation of Chinese scholar-officials, who turned their talents to popular entertainment. More than 600 plays are known to have been written in the brief 98-year-course of the Yuan dynasty. The Yuan dramas were destined to be remembered for a thousand years. I knew that the written Chinese character that signifies the word “theater” represents two figures fighting, harkening back to drama’s origins in watching people fight—like earlier versions of boxing matches or the equivalent of the agon, or struggle, the fundamental notion of Greek drama. The Orphan of Zhao is a revenge play—itself a dramatic tradition of ancient lineage in the West too, as we see in plays such as Medea or The Oresteia. But the degree of satisfaction in the revenge in Orphan is astonishing for a Western audience to grasp, or maybe not so astonishing, as ShiZheng intuited. The Chinese scholar Liu Jung-en notes in his introduction to the only English publication of plays from this period: This is a play of vengeance. . . . Vengeance is almost a religious cult in China, zealously pursued from the dawn of its history. The saying “My enemy shall not share the same heaven with me,” puts the seal of nation-wide approval on the avenger. The gruesomeness of the punishment meted out to Tu-an Gu [in Orphan] was only matched by the enormity of his crime. . . . When passion held sway and little justice was done, when a dog could be credited with sagacity and an emperor could be so simple as to believe it, one shouldn’t wonder too much at the consequences. To kill nine generations of your enemy’s family (great-great-grandfather, great-grandfather, grandfather, father, enemy himself, son, grandson, great-grandson, great-great grandson) had been the standard recipe of Chinese emperors and tyrants for exterminating their foes. It was done for fear of vengeance. . . . They die willingly; as we Chinese say, they “see death as a journey home.”

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Professor Liu also notes a theory that “the Zhao family was possibly associated with the House of Sung conquered by the Mongols, and that the vengeance was the vengeance of the Chinese people on the Mongol tyrants.” So there was a political dimension here as well in these plays written during this century of occupation. Yuan plays were short, constructed usually of four brief acts, and were played in their own time and in later centuries with interruptions for musical interludes using contemporary popular music that might or might not be related to the plays’ contents. Often the songs would use melodies that audiences could hum along to. Direct audience address, asides, and soliloquies were common. The acting roles were often “typed” with brave, beleaguered princesses, loyal servants, and ruthless tyrants. Dream sequences, supernatural elements, and fights were popular features. The plays move freely in time, often jumping decades between acts—just as we see in Shakespeare. If the audience needs to know something, an actor addresses them directly. These plays have an interesting structural feature called “The Wedge,” or “hsieh tzŭ,” which Shi-Zheng also translates as “a tool,” which characteristically functions as a prologue, where it is placed to spring and support the action. Zhao’s “wedge” or hsieh tzŭ begins the play with a thrilling and absolutely improbable monologue that sets the tone for what follows. (It struck me later that perhaps the hsieh tzŭ is a tool somewhat like an overture.) Certainly, in the Orphan of Zhao it does give a preview both in content and style of what to expect in the play that follows: the characters, the extreme violence, the embrace of incredibly unexpected coincidences, as well as the great kindnesses and many significant personal sacrifices that follow. Shi-Zheng sent me the play from Paris a few months later in September 2000, when Peony was performing there (in my capacity as archivist, I have kept the charming note that accompanied the package). The Orphan of Zhao’s only previous performance in the West known to any of us was in an adaptation by Voltaire from 1753, who had called it “L’Orphelin de la Chine.” In his letter, Shi-Zheng mentioned the artists he wanted to work with on this project: the brilliant stage designer of the Theatre de Complicité, Michael Levine, and the popular New York songwriter Stephin Merritt, whose latest CD Sixty-Nine Love Songs was being compared to the work of Cole Porter. And of course his leading lady, Qian Yi. Under the aegis of the Directors Lab, I committed to doing an exploratory workshop in the 2001 Summer Directors Lab when the Peony tour

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had finally concluded. And so began a truly challenging investigation of how to perform a play from this tradition with a company of Western artists and actors. Classical Chinese plays require actors with brilliant vocal technique and vivid stage presence, but the plays do not venture into the territory of psychology. The characters of the princess, the doctor, the tyrant, are drawn from archetypes and are not delineated in a personal or psychological way. The complexity of merging the characteristic Eastern and Western traditions only unfolded once we began to work, and it deepened as we progressed. My role in this process was to be the voice that had no hesitation about telling our Chinese collaborators how little we knew. And asking them and the American artists to find a way to explore the gaps that separated them—how to build a bridge between two different styles of actor training, understand how a play relates to its audience, and what techniques (song, movement, gesture) are needed to connect the play and the audience. We all soon learned that all these would need to be quite different in the West. By the time The Orphan of Zhao was produced in 2003, our developmental work (which looped in actors, design, and music) included two complete workshops; a week-long exercise in Chinese theater techniques for a group of prominent New York actors; two commissioned scripts; a weekend where Shi-Zheng read the play in Chinese to our collaborators and explained how he believed each line was meant to work; and visits to the Metropolitan Museum’s Chinese tapestry wing. At the end of this two-year process of exploration, Orphan was invited to perform in the summer Lincoln Center Festival at the suggestion of Nigel Reddin (who had succeeded John Rockwell as director). Reddin suggested as well that we add four performances of Orphan in Chinese, directed by Shi-Zheng, with Chinese actors and musicians performing the play more or less in the “traditional” style, so audiences could see both versions of this remarkable play. I use the word “traditional” advisedly because Shi-Zheng is never a traditional director. At the outset, I discovered only one translation of the play. It was from Professor Liu Jung-en’s book of Yuan plays and it was heavily edited and academic in tone. Shi-Zheng and Qian Yi worked from the original Chinese, and actually Qian Yi used no text at all—she knew the play by heart. We set about finding someone who would do a new version of Orphan under Shi-Zheng’s guidance, and started a long search to find the actors who could perform the play in the way Shi-Zheng wanted. Little did I know at

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the outset how long a process this would turn out to be. I got in touch with Howard Korder, a talented playwright whose plays we had produced at Lincoln Center Theater with a real gift for collaboration and an exemplary, naturalistic style of writing characteristic of American theater. Finally, our casting department found a small company of adventurous actors from a variety of traditions (including musicals and dance theater, for instance) as well as different ethnicities: Asian American, Latinx, Caucasian, and African American. This initial workshop brought several gifts and revealed several large obstacles still to be surmounted. Shi-Zheng’s approach, which he described as typical of his training, was highly physical, and each day began with an hour of warm-ups led by Qian Yi. The American actors were able to keep up—except for an exercise that surprised all of us Westerners. Shi-Zheng asked that each line of dialogue, or rather each thought in the dialogue, be punctuated by an eye gesture. A line of dialogue and a punctuation. This practice totally changed the room: each action was slowed, and became more pronounced, and clear in a new way. It seemed to involve those who were watching—to ask them to be complicit in their understanding of what had just been said. The exercise no longer had an American feel. And the American actors’ eyes were soon exhausted. They had never worked these muscles before. The physical exercises were interesting too. The stage manager’s report in one of the first rehearsals included: “10:00–10:55: Company Warm-up: Warm-up intent to create ‘body unity’ on stage. Clean and precise movement: ‘sculptural’—moving away from realism. Today’s warm-up work focused on a physical protocol for characters greeting each other. But like a Bach variation, the same gestures can be performed differently by each character.” Describing these exercises, which I have saved in my archives, makes me realize once again how valuable it is for dramaturgs to keep a record of each production. Michael Levine began his unique hands-on design process. In his theater work, this only begins once the actors enter the rehearsal room. Sitting quietly in a corner, he watched every moment of rehearsal. He had done no work in advance. As he watched, the days passed and he began to slip out of the rehearsal room and we would find him roaming the costume and prop shops, returning with bits of wire and cloth, and talking with each actor in turn on our breaks. Michael began his process of making them more of who they already were, isolating and defining the essence of what the actors were discovering in their characters. Much later, Michael wrote

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to me: “The experience of working on Zhao for me was like excavating the past to find the future. A kind of archeology where you discovered the building blocks for a new foundation. By exploring this musical, codified and ritualistic language with the other Westerners involved in the process, something new began to emerge. A kind of hybrid. I felt at the time that it was somehow closer to the classical roots of theatre where gesture, as in classical ballet, was judged not only by its beauty of movement, but also in its ability to tell a story. It’s a journey I would like to continue.” Equally important, among our first small workshop cast, we found a few actors who “got it”: who joined the search for a way of working that would draw on their Western training but who also—without leaving it behind—spent the workshop with Shi-Zheng and Michael Levine finding a way to break through a purely psychological approach to their characters. These actors were David Patrick Kelly, Rob Campbell, and Jennifer Carpenter. David was trained in martial arts, which provided the jumping-off point for his exploration of the villainous ruler Tu-an Gu, who spends his life searching for the Orphan, only to discover him, finally, in his own household. David immediately began incorporating slow martial arts movements into his blocking, and Michael created simple but fantastical weapons and armor for him, made from sticks and cloth, and attached them to his body, enlarging it into space. Rob Campbell found his approach using his training in commedia dell’arte: he began exploring his role as the lowly rural comic doctor visiting the court, who stumbles upon the crime in progress and surprisingly, even to himself, saves the Orphan. Against all odds, he takes him to the country and, sacrificing his own son, raises the Orphan safely to adulthood. Shi-Zheng noted at one point that in his own childhood, it was often the least likely, least powerful people who had done the most remarkably daring deeds of resistance. For Rob, Michael Levine created exaggerated eyeglasses out of wire, as though the doctor was always trying to see ahead. He was always bowing and stooped, yet strong and canny. He also began to use a handkerchief and held a small doctor’s bag, just big enough to conceal the orphan baby. Jennifer Carpenter played the Princess—in Shi-Zheng’s mind she is a girl of thirteen—who appears in Act 1 hiding in the palace, where she is discovered and subsequently killed trying to protect her newborn son, the last in the line of the Zhao family. Michael Levine kept gaining insight: Jennifer was extremely tall and willowy but strong. He quietly emerged from the Lincoln Center Theater shops with a long, long cloth and bound her from head to toe—her

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dress had sleeves that were six feet long. She was an astonishing presence on stage with her baby, unable to flee, but powerful and protective. After saving her newborn son by giving him to the doctor to hide in his bag and so escape the palace, she unwound herself and used the cloth as a noose to commit suicide. Qian Yi played the Orphan, who appears in the final act as a young man of twenty—having grown up between Acts 3 and 4—and takes revenge when his real identity is revealed. He kills Tu-an Gu, the tyrant who, he learns for the first time, has killed his entire family. It became clear that the English text was too difficult for Qian Yi (although that is not the case now, many years later in her life in the United States) and we would need to find an actor or actress with more English to play the Orphan. Historically, actors played roles of any sex. And finally, Howard Korder felt he couldn’t make headway with the text. As was the case with the other actors in this initial workshop, it wasn’t a question of ability or experience, but something else—at this point, impossible to put a finger on. Excited by our progress, I scheduled a second workshop a few months later, in October 2001, in order to add music to the piece and find additional actors and a new writer. This second workshop too had triumphs and breakthroughs as well as actors who walked away out of frustration with the challenges of this investigation. The composer Stephin Merritt began to work with the master musicians Shi-Zheng had hired to play the instruments that accompanied Stephin’s songs. The ancestors of the instruments in our room accompanied the Yuan plays when they were first created: the Pipa, the Erhu, both traditional stringed instruments, and the autoharp. In interviews later, Stephin, who (to put it mildly) had never composed for these instruments before, came to call his songs “Country Eastern” music. Our stage manager’s log notes that Mr. Wei and Ms. Yi spent mornings working on playing American country western music on their instruments, well-known marches like “Off We Go, Into the Wild Blue Yonder” and Lawrence Welk music. A week later in rehearsal the log notes that Lawrence Welk on the Pipa was cut and replaced with Track 1 on a Bach Cantata CD. “The music that was used in the Yuan plays was familiar to the audiences,” says Shi-Zheng. “I was interested in what emotion the music would engender—what kind of music would a thirteen-year-old listen to? Think today how the music functions in the Mamma Mia! movies. Everyone knows the tunes. The tune carries the text and everybody sings along. It was like using ‘Love Me Tender,’ or ‘God Bless America’ or a

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Christmas carol. These were popular plays. The songs are juxtaposed with the text. They estrange it. They do not support it.” We became familiar with the realities that our immigrant collaborators faced: our musicians were master artists whose brilliance was unappreciated and rarely asked for in the West. After workshopping the Orphan of Zhao, touring The Peony Pavilion around the globe, and playing the leading role in The Bonesetter’s Daughter at the San Francisco Opera, Qian Yi returned to New York to work as a nanny. During our second workshop, we were all under the cloud (literally and figuratively) of 9/11, which had happened eight weeks before we began to work. But it was here that Michael Levine found his breakthrough, which became the defining image of the production. “I joined the project,” Michael noted, “because I was interested in investigating gestural theater in the West. Like Eleanora Duse’s acting in the nineteenth century, or the way a story is told in ballet. How clearly can you convey a narrative and an emotional journey outside the bounds of words? Can you do it by gesture alone?” When I mentioned Michael’s observation to Shi-Zheng later, his response was simple, “Yes, you can.” Michael’s intense scrutiny of each actor led him to create a canvas with them: each actor was dressed simply in white, and they were all seated on stage for the duration of the performance on wooden benches on either side of a large white sheet of paper, perhaps twenty by twenty feet. This was the playing area. On two sides, between the benches and the paper there was a thin, shallow gutter on the floor about an inch high, filled with red finger paint. The actors were barefoot and had with them only the props Michael had made with and for them—the weapons and armor, the modest leather doctor’s bag, the binding cloth and cloth baby. Each time they stood and “entered” to play a scene, they walked across the shallow trough and their feet left red calligraphic marks on the paper. By the end of Act 3, at every performance there remained a different, beautiful and intricate red pattern. In the twenty-year gap between Acts 3 and 4, a clean sheet of paper was placed over the original paper with its red markings. Then a new adult character appeared for the first time: the Orphan of Zhao. He has grown up ignorant of his heritage, ironically thinking himself the son of Tu-an Gu, who has adopted and raised him. His true identity is finally revealed to him by the dying doctor, who has cared for him through his life. As his story unfolds, the orphan of the Zhao family, incredulous, drops to the ground, tearing the paper, revealing all the red

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beneath. The doctor dies, Tu-an Gu enters, and the final battle begins between Tu-an Gu and his son—the child he abducted. Shi-Zheng wrote in the program when the play was finally produced: “In the workshops at Lincoln Center Theater with a superb group— American actors and designers, the writer and the composer—I’ve tried to create a theatrical expression that is neither conventional Western theater nor conventional Chinese opera, but a new kind of theater in which these dualities are transparent. . . I used physical characteristics from Chinese theater, yet incorporated the Western emphasis on text and psychology.” He reflected later in an interview with me: I wanted actors who had a deep understanding of human nature. I didn’t want actors from the musical theater—I hate musicals—and for me these actors (who do sing and dance well) are like Chinese opera actors. I didn’t want any presentations: “I’m happy.” “I’m sad.” That’s too easy. For my culture has such a complicated and convoluted history. In the Zhao story there are several reasons for the actions of each character so I thought we needed to find actors who have the intellectual ability to understand the characters’ situations, but also the physicality to express it. And that’s why it took such a long time to find them. To have both is pretty rare . . . I’m from a culture that I think has so much hypocrisy—the beautiful written language doesn’t mean anything. I always take that as the basis of everything that I do. It’s the actions you take that count. Words often disguise things rather than express things. That’s why I chose Orphan: because it is so brutal and honest. Each character has the baby at one point and each time the stakes are extremely high. There’s no time to be neurotic about it. You have to think what you will do: the baby is in your arms. In the workshop I tried to remove— little by little—as many of the surrounding circumstances as I could and just put every character on the spot: saying: “Now you have to act: you can kill someone, kill yourself, or you can kill the baby. What do you do?” I wanted an absolutely minimal approach. I wanted to take as much away as I could. Then you can see the bone structure, you can see how things work. It was the same process with Michael Levine’s design: I wanted less and less. In the beginning, when you play something you always try to emulate something you have known. In the first workshop, Michael invented a lot of things that,

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eventually, we didn’t use. It was looking like or sounding too much like the original play I knew from China. I thought it was too close. If you took a few pieces away, the gap—the space in which to imagine— would be bigger. Eventually it would be vast. Through each workshop, we tried to reduce it to one thing per person—simplicity, and a strong visual vocabulary. Not head-gear, or make-up. Rob started with glasses and a costume and he ended up with just his bag. From my perspective, the so-called Chinese theater has presented a stodgy, fixed form to Western audiences—they think of certain costumes, certain fixed expressions. That’s what you get. It’s like a wall or a beautiful façade. No one gets in. I want to get inside, to see it from the other perspective—backstage. It’s about us. Not just about them. Theater has to interact with a contemporary audience. The sound, what you see, you need to create a new kind of vehicle. My obsessions are colors, shapes, materials. I want to know what keeps people playing video games for 24 hours without getting tired. I want to make the theater like that. Do I have to make it shorter, make it less like, or not sound at all like a Chinese play? Our next challenges were to find a new writer; hold on to David Patrick Kelly, Rob Campbell, and Jennifer Carpenter; and find more actors who had an interest in and an intuitive way of exploring this world. I approached David Greenspan, a downtown writer whose work is highly literate and experimental in nature. He was fascinated by the challenge and became the new translator-author of the play. It was primarily for him that, later, Shi-Zheng read the play aloud to us in Chinese. Shi-Zheng responded strongly to the fact that David was also an actor with many years of experience. David’s text was simple—the words could be spoken easily, they came easily off the tongue. “It’s physical,” Shi-Zheng said later of David’s text. “Finding David was part of our journey.” David recalled: SZC spoke of his desire for a script that emphasized rhythm and speed. He spoke often of creating drama with quick repetition of key words—‘Help, help, help, help.’—and sometimes just sounds, say of sobbing rendered through simple language—‘Ah, ah, ah, ah.’ SZC, it seems to me, was accustomed to creating drama with a decidedly musical and choreographic vocabulary. He was really directing the writing. Yes, shorter and shorter. Basically, he wanted as little language as

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possible. I seem to recall SZC expressing his enjoyment of Western nursery rhymes—and that influenced my writing. David worked on the text as Stephin was working on the music: they became quite close, and after our Zhao adventure was over, they created and produced their own adaptation of the children’s book Coraline. Stephin and I spoke—often in the company of SZC. I would occasionally create rhyming language—that we either used or simplified— or that Stephin utilized to create his own lyrics. I may have once or twice suggested a rhyme—Stephin and I enjoyed batting those around—but the songs (music and lyrics) were completely his. In the end, I felt there was an unresolved tension (and I don’t mean that negatively—something like a dissonance) between the American acting and writing and the Chinese sensibility. In a way, I think Stephin’s songs resolved that tension via the scales he devised, the instruments he used and his own wide-ranging musical vocabulary. We added actors who had excellent instincts and helped us move the process forward. It had been Shi-Zheng’s conviction for some time (and still is) that the contemporary theater needs to return to its ancient roots and capitalize on the public’s hunger for entertainment of a popular kind. He sees it as the same hunger for action and story that people—especially young people—find in video games, where fighting and revenge, unlikely allegiances, the joys of camaraderie, and intricate and astonishingly inventive plotting rival the action of any Yuan play. The imagery Shi-Zheng used in later projects, such as his Monkey: Journey to the West, is taken from video games, and he is fascinated by Kung Fu masters and acrobats (so few of whom, to his frustration, have American Actors Equity cards). The freedom of ancient drama—its tribalism, exorcisms, and wildly inventive nonrealistic storytelling—are elements he is trying to put on stage. “Theater has to interact with a contemporary audience. The sound, the visual world you see needs to be reimagined to create a new kind of vehicle,” he notes. After the fall 2001 workshop, not everyone could stay with the project, so we had to enlarge our pool of actors as we looked toward producing the play as part of the Lincoln Center Festival in 2003. We held auditions, sending as “sides” sections from the printed play. These auditions were perhaps the most baffling and challenging thing we had experienced thus far. Our casting department sent out the sides; the actors were scheduled in

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half-hour intervals and had, in standard fashion, prepared the text at home ahead of time. In the audition, each actor entered and read the side opposite Qian Yi, who had memorized the English lines. Then Shi-Zheng asked Qian Yi to perform the role the actor was auditioning for—which she did at full volume, in the sliding intonation in which it is traditionally performed. The actors were stunned. “Now try to do it exactly like she did!” asked ShiZheng of each American actor. Much later, I asked him what he was doing. He explained, “There is so much music in the Chinese text. Like in poetry, it’s the rhyme, the musicality. I was looking for voices with expressive character—like you cast an opera, the voice type defines the character. In theater in the West, you cast by age or looks or type. I was trying to insert some kind of musicality into the casting—I was interested to see if I could extend the range of the casting criteria. It was an experiment. I wanted to see if actors could work not only through the words but with their voices and their physical movements. They are equally important. Otherwise I would just be doing a translation.” Here again is an example of a director forging a new path. It starts even in auditions and moves into a totally new kind of rehearsal exploration. I quickly realized that doing auditions the Western way was not going to work quite as we had hoped. So we organized a week-long workshop in Chinese acting techniques, led by Shi-Zheng and Qian Yi, six months before the scheduled production. Perhaps spending more than thirty minutes with the material would allow actors to find their own insights into how to experiment in this way, and together we could gauge their interest by means that were different than judging a standard audition. We worked with our casting department and the Actors Center to gather what became a remarkable group of singing actors, most of whom have made their names since then on Broadway. They gave us their time for a week of training. They brought their yoga mats and moved their eyes until they couldn’t see. I so wish this would be something institutional theaters could do on a regular basis for the community—especially for actors hungry to experiment with other traditions, as most good actors are. Our small creative team also spent a weekend in the early spring with Shi-Zheng, during which he read the play to us in Chinese and we asked questions about every line of a play we all knew well by then. I joined them because this weekend exercise was my idea. It was the same way of going deeper that I believe had enriched so many classical play rehearsal preparations: now that we all had information and experience under our belts, we

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could take the opportunity to ask of each moment, of each line, “What does this mean?” “How should this make us feel?” We also visited the Metropolitan Museum to look at the visual imagery from this ancient time. David and Stephin continued to refine the script and the music. This, again, was for us a new form for music within a play. The music was never meant to accompany the text in the way it is used in musicals or in opera—as underscoring or heightening the action or emotion of the story. In the history of this period, music was used—like the fighting scenes—to lure spectators to the entertainment. It acted as an interlude, not as a part of the storytelling or character writing. Brecht would pick up on this “alienated” use of music in Chinese drama in his work in the twentieth century. I imagine that a future production of Orphan would use music that is popular with audiences right at the time of the production. The Orphan of Zhao was presented in the Lincoln Center Festival in July 2003 as a co-production with Lincoln Center Theater, and it was extremely well received. Audiences were curious to see both the English and Chinese versions. There were many articles written about the collaboration. Stephin’s music was eventually released as an album titled Stephin Merritt + Showtunes, which includes his music from Orphan along with two other evenings he later did with Shi-Zheng: a Ming dynasty play called Peach Blossom Fan and a Hans Christian Andersen evening with Fiona Shaw, Blair Brown, Qian Yi, and Mary Lou Rosato called My Life as a Fairy Tale. Of the actors who started with us, only David Patrick Kelly and Rob Campbell finished the race. Qian Yi played the Orphan in the festival’s Chinese version. Jenny Bacon, Bill Youmans, and Li Bo completed the American cast. Michel Levine was back in England by this time working with Complicité, and his set had to be rethought for the large space where the play was performed in the festival. Michael’s assistant Peter Nigrini took over as co-collaborator, with Michael’s basic idea preserved; though the delicate troughs on the floor now turned into a sea of blood that the entering actors had to wade through, which, I felt, altered the interpretation. I’ve been drawn to these cross-cultural collaborations since I began working in theater. They need to be approached with delicacy and lots of time for experimentation. It’s also very hard to predict who will be the right people who can work together, as the Orphan production attests. But it’s very powerful and fresh when it works. I see this kind of cross-cultural collaboration happening everywhere in film and music, and occasionally in dance, with artists from different countries, and I think it holds promise

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The Orphan of Zhao, Lincoln Center Festival production poster (Image courtesy of Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, Inc.)

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for the future of theater if it’s given the time to truly develop artistically and it is not just a list of famous names on a blind date, who never get to know each other’s way of working, who’ve never spent real time together. Yes, there will always be value in the model of touring, of seeing a production by a significant artist or group brought in from another country. But that is something different and it costs a great deal more money. The crosscultural collaboration I’m proposing here has to begin, it seems to me, at a very early stage of the investigation. For example, it’s a type of artistic collaboration that has arisen from time to time between members of the Directors Lab who come from different countries. There has always been pleasure in this joint work. We had interesting experiences once or twice in the Directors Lab when distinguished directors visited from abroad, eager to work with American actors. It was a shock for our actors to play “stylized” scenes from Molière quietly lying on a bed in a post-coital discussion under the direction of the Comédie Française’s artistic director Jacques Lassalle. Or to work on a play set in the United States with the structural features of South African Township Theater under the guidance of Duma Ndlovu. Cultures meld in unusual ways in a modern time. After they met at Lincoln Center Theater in 2009, three gifted Lab directors—directors I would have never imagined would find common ground—began a process of working together similar to ours on The Orphan of Zhao. Rubén Polendo, artistic director of New York’s Theater Mitu, KaGe Mulawi, artistic director of Bangkok’s B-Floor Theater—both are experimental theater companies—and Moqi Trolin from Aarhus, Denmark, began to collaborate to develop work in Denmark, Thailand, New York, and Abu Dhabi, where Rubén was teaching. What brought us together was an interest in embodiment and in difference. Often when artists engage in trans-global dialogue there is a desire to identify, acknowledge, and at times celebrate the similar. KaGe, Moqi, and I quickly found an inspiring paradox; our only shared interest was an interest in our differences—we were far more excited about the space of tension between us than the space of harmony. We first met in Bangkok, Thailand, and began a dialogue about the nature of bodies and how they embody histories. We discussed at length how this embodiment shapes our belief system and our perspective. The conversation traveled through the personal and the

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theoretical through the historical and the hypothetical. Our meetings were heated, driven, and above all complicated. We felt assuredly that it was the complicated nature of our exchanges that made the conversation inherently aligned to theatrical exploration. As our conversations continued, we insistently engaged in this space of difference—in the acknowledgment that bodies are histories and that those histories are radically different. It is this that made the trans-global nature of this conversation key. It not only created a space of discovery as we explored each other’s cultural frameworks—but it also allowed us to explore global narratives from radically different perspectives. And in so doing to validate and acknowledge that all of those varied perspectives (even when they differ radically) are real and true and essential. The Lab has spawned many such collaborations. I feel confident that they will open a new door, and a new way of collaborating. During the work on The Orphan of Zhao, I carefully archived all the materials involved in the various stages of the production’s growth. It was these rehearsal reports, the drafts of the scripts, and sketches of the set and clothes that, just recently, allowed Shi-Zheng to return to China twenty years later with several of the original cast members who were in the Lincoln Center Festival’s production. I hope the process behind this twentyfirst-century international mutation of the play will widen the path for others to follow.

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7

search beyond the words enacting the unconscious

In certain kind of plays, only a small portion of the play lies in the text. The rest of the play lies underneath. Actors find these other parts of the play, the parts not in the words, the parts behind or under the dialogue, and they learn how to reveal what they find. Dramaturgs learn to do this too, and indeed this practice is central to our role. We notice how the structure informs the action of the play. We look out for the physical world that the author calls for: is it realistic, in a certain period? Or not specified? What kind of imagery is used? What’s in the stage directions? Are music or the plastic arts included? Is a character either on stage or off stage required to play a piano or other instrument? And is the music we hear being played badly or is it well played? I’m not referring to the contributions of a sound designer, but to the sounds embedded in a text. How does a play communicate to the audience in space and with what architecture? Finally, with which means will it best connect with its audience: words? movement? imagery? And who is that ideal audience it wants to communicate with? Investigating what is hidden under the recognizable world portrayed in a naturalist text, or in plays set in a more stylistically heightened world (in Racine or Molière, say), actors come to understand the characters and the larger emotional situation that supports each moment in the play. A realistic setting—a country house in rural Russia, the home of the Younger family on the South Side of Chicago—and the psychologically based character writing of such plays, gives everyone a place to start. In plays that might or might not have a real-world setting, there may also be a whole other universe behind the words that propels the action like a river current,

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but it may be largely invisible in the surface text. Nonetheless, it carries the play to its conclusion with a firm and inevitable sense of destiny. Many playwrights experiment with this form of nonliteral drama, which presents a world that distorts or imagines reality. Works that use an unconscious propelling force as a shaping device range from A Dream Play by Strindberg, many of Ibsen’s late plays, to plays by Maurice Maeterlinck, Jean Cocteau, Samuel Beckett, and even the early work of Sam Shepard. In recent times, you can see this in the plays of Adrienne Kennedy, whose dramaturgy is a series of highly specific images linked together that move the action forward in a process of free association. The guiding light of this type of drama is Antonin Artaud, and anyone seriously interested in theater should read—and I’ve actually memorized certain passages—his book The Theater and Its Double to get a sense of the dream of what this kind of theater might be. The book remains, without question, a radical and inspiring document about what theater can do in the world, and the possibilities of cathartic change it can “transmit” (one of his favorite words) to an audience. Artaud upends the order of the elements of theater that Aristotle lists in the Poetics in his own order of importance—plot/action, character, diction or language, thought/ideas, song and spectacle—to make a theater of spectacle with a direct link to the unconscious. The structural unity of plays that follow this subterranean path can be, in the finest examples, perfect—though almost impossible to describe in words. But the rush of the action to its inevitable conclusion can be intuitively felt. And tinkering with the structure of a play like this usually only leads to a diminishment of its force. The visual elements of these plays, in addition to their language, are key to expressing their meaning and heart. Shakespeare’s plays have been studied for their use of emblems. For instance, in Cymbeline, the journey of Posthumus concludes in a rationally incomprehensible series of images about his family, led by the God Jupiter, that appear to him in his dream while in prison. These images allow him to find the will to die, and thereafter the wisdom instead to live. The Elizabethan playwright John Ford’s ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore is a central text for Artaud in The Theater and Its Double: the final iconic image of the play, the sister’s heart brought in on a dagger, is a perfect example of symbolic meaning. Like tarot cards laid down, these images resonate vividly. Shakespeare uses symbols in a similar way in plays from Richard III to Henry VIII, Pericles, and The Tempest. And the magnificent final act of Cymbeline is so satisfying because it contains twenty-one surprise recon-

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ciliations in which hidden connections and relationships are revealed— one could call them Aristotelian anagnorisis moments—moments wherein individuals with blood relationships recognize each other. It’s a gratifying and unconscious dance of enlightenment and human connection, as well as the action of a play plot. This unconscious pull beneath the surface dialogue is immediately apparent in Sam Shepard’s plays. When my life in the theater began, I spent a long summer afternoon in Golden Gate Park in San Francisco with Shepard, his wife at that time, O-Lan Jones, and his director from the Magic Theatre, John Lion. It was 1972 and most of Shepard’s major plays were ahead of him. He had been offered a commission and a residency in London at the Royal Court Theatre and was reluctant to leave the Bay Area during this golden moment as the 1960s ended. But he was broke and needed the money. The play he wrote during his English sojourn was Geography of a Horse Dreamer, and we’re lucky to have it. My impression of his writing method then was that he got high, or got ready to write by some other means, and stayed up and wrote all night. Whatever he wrote in this state, by morning, was the play. Its action came complete from his unconscious. Like the writing of the French surrealist poets at the beginning of the twentieth century, one could almost say he took dictation directly from his brain without conscious editing. What emerged needed to remain intact as it was written down on the page. A year or so later I directed one of his early plays, Mad Dog Blues, which gave me the insight that improvisational music was an inspiration to him. That was the subject of this short play, as it was in The Tooth of Crime, the play that put him on the map, as it were, in the New York scene. This way of writing reached its apogee in his finest play, Curse of the Starving Class. It’s difficult to find a traditional dramatic arc in this play, yet it reaches its end with tremendous reward. Its symbols—especially the refrigerator, and the real lamb brought on stage toward the end—are emblems that focus on the emptiness of the family’s emotional life, its starvation actually, and its sacrificial underpinnings. Even giving these elements a name diminishes them, as Artaud would say. As designers do when they read a play, it’s useful to note the kind and quality of the visual elements a writer calls for in a script and to track how they appear or progress as the play moves through time—say, from sparseness to plenty, from the confines of a city to the wildness and release of nature. With Shepard, the only knowledge that contraindicated my “writing with the unconscious” theory came from actress Lois Smith, who led the

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Steppenwolf cast under Gary Sinise’s direction when Buried Child was revived on Broadway much later. To my surprise, Lois told me that, with Sinise’s encouragement and guidance, Shepard had gone back and rewritten Buried Child—and that a different, more rationally “comprehensible,” but still extremely moving arc of action emerged from the play: the young man returns to his parents’ home now an adult, a changed person—and no one in his family is able to recognize him. He has become, literally, a total stranger. This is the only time I have heard of a play with this kind of subterranean through-line being brought “up” to something more rationally explicable. Another way of thinking about an unconscious arc is to look at a specific work—say, Shakespeare’s final Sonnet 154, the sonnet mentioned in Chapter 5 that Adam Guettel set to music in John Guare’s play The General of Hot Desire in Love’s Fire. This sonnet is one of only two that Shakespeare takes directly from a classical source; but one that nonetheless tracks a highly personal, intuitive journey. Shakespeare, as noted earlier, worked largely from other source material—only a handful of his plays are what today we would call fictional; but even with these to tantalize us, it is only in the sonnets that we may get an even oblique glimpse of his personal situation. And a slim volume published last year by two well-known Shakespeare scholars tries out a new idea of ordering the poems, not as they were published but by what they interpret as a chronology. They posit that the final sonnet is actually a schoolboy exercise from Shakespeare’s boyhood. Here it is: SONNET 154

The little Love-god lying once asleep, Laid by his side his heart-inflaming brand, Whilst many nymphs that vowed chaste life to keep Came tripping by; but in her maiden hand The fairest votary took up that fire Which many legions of true hearts had warmed; And so the General of hot desire Was, sleeping, by a virgin hand disarmed. This brand she quenched in a cool well by, Which from Love’s fire took heat perpetual, Growing a bath and healthful remedy, For men diseased; but I, my mistress’ thrall,

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Came there for cure and this by that I prove, Love’s fire heats water, water cools not love. The sonnet begins with marvelous military imagery— “legions,” “General,” “sleeping, by a virgin hand disarmed”—and then moves suddenly to the confessional: “I, my mistress’ thrall, came there for cure.” This is a dive into the helplessly personal (“thrall!”), after which the poet recovers with the deeply strange “and this by that”—four extremely impersonal words in a formal poetic form whose parameters allow for only a very limited number of words. It’s almost a breath to regroup from that personal descent, four safe stepping stones allowing Shakespeare to recover and end the sonnet with its lovely, and less anguished, line, “Love’s fire heats water, water cools not love.” The arc from armed to disarmed, on to utter helplessness and then to recovery is the journey of this sonnet. Though this is a poem and not a dramatic work, here too the action is hidden underneath. When I arrived in New York in the mid-1970s, I was fascinated by theater and dance artists such as Pina Bausch, Meredith Monk, Laurie Anderson, and Ping Chong, who were successfully merging a variety of art forms into works that took the audience—I won’t say on a journey—but into some other realm of consciousness. So it was with high expectations that I first attended Robert Wilson’s work: I believe the first two pieces I saw were The Life and Times of Joseph Stalin at BAM and A Letter for Queen Victoria, which performed for two weeks at odd times (12 noon!) at the old ANTA theater on Broadway. The latter show featured Wilson himself, and recently he confirmed that his grandmother was also in the cast, at age ninety. “My grandmother was Queen Victoria; the last performances were on Broadway. She went back after the Sunday matinee performance and died a week later in her sleep.” Bertolt Brecht’s son Stefan also appeared in the play. Wilson’s early collaborator Christopher Knowles, a young autistic teenager who was the son of a prominent architect (his father went on to design the Harvey Theater at BAM), had come to live and work with Wilson. His unconventional artistic gifts, unrecognized in any traditional school setting, blossomed and he became somewhat of a muse to Wilson during this decade. Forty years later, Wilson officiated at Knowles’s wedding to a former teacher many years his senior at Wilson’s Watermill Retreat on Long Island. Back then, Wilson was largely without funds. He created an artistic home on Spring Street in Soho that he named after a teacher, Byrd Hoffman, from his hometown (Waco, Texas) who had cured him of a childhood

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stutter. After leaving the University of Texas, Wilson had come to New York to study at the Pratt Institute. It’s interesting that three major theater artists emerged from the same, perhaps unlikely, milieu of rural Texas at roughly the same time: Robert Wilson, Adrian Hall, founder of Trinity Repertory Company and artistic director of the Dallas Theater Center, and Garland Wright, artistic director of the Guthrie Theater. All three are among the finest American directors of the past fifty years. I had never seen anything like Wilson’s work—and I can safely say no one else had either. It was a form of unconscious storytelling in images, in which all scenic conventions were challenged or stretched or subverted. Time moved very slowly. The pieces required intense concentration as one image blended into the next, but there was at the same time a surprising informality to his performances. Audience members came and went into the lobby during the extremely long shows, without breaking the mood of the action. I sensed a kind of pure, untampered-with series of unconscious images that elicited a unique, different meaning or “feel” in each spectator. When you couldn’t take it anymore, you went to the lobby for a while to decompress. Screaming was often featured—as early as Queen Victoria and as late as Hamletmachine. In all of this work, text (and this would have so pleased Antonin Artaud) was perhaps the least important element on stage. At that time, I was teaching at a small college about an hour north of Manhattan in an attempt to earn money, stay in New York to see plays, keep in touch with theater people, and perhaps find a chance to start working in a theater. Like all colleges, this one was eager to have its undergraduate acting students find some opportunity to be involved in the professional theater—an almost hopeless task with so many gifted young professionals vying for a foothold at the same time. Many future dramaturgs will start their careers as instructors of drama, and it’s a vantage point that offers some distinct possibilities for using the resources of a college to help the field. Colleges have personnel, space, transportation and, often, facilities that are far superior to the spaces in the off-off theater scenes in many communities. Both large established institutions and emerging theaters can and have found such opportunities mutually invaluable. There are countless examples of these kinds of university-theater collaborations today. Your own knowledge of who future theater-makers are and who is in the process of creating important new work in financially struggling new not-for-profit theaters will be your guide. Back then, I knew Wilson was not in a position to pay actors, so I suggested my students join his

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work for his upcoming creation, The $ Value of Man, which was inspired or prompted by Shakespeare’s Macbeth. The play was to perform for a brief run in a large rehearsal room at the old, unrenovated BAM. I cold-called the Byrd Hoffman offices and arranged for my acting students to participate. They traveled down to New York in the college van several evenings a week for the rehearsals. Sometimes Knowles was in charge, sometimes Wilson. When I met the students in class the following day, I asked them what they had done in rehearsal the night before, and their answer was always the same: “We twirled for three hours.” As best I recall, the piece itself—the budget must have been infinitesimal—featured an expansive use of the empty space, almost no language, and a sensational, very long ending where the large cast all carrying fragrant branches of fir trees twirled themselves, dervish-like, into insensibility. For me—and I can only speak for myself—Birnam Wood had come alive. Later, I wondered how Wilson’s work would have developed had he collaborated with trained actors—also young and starting their careers back then but with ideas, strong acting instincts, and impeccable technique— instead of with students and a coterie of trust-fund kids looking for an artistic experience. Did he want his to be the only dominant voice? But he seemed to relish relinquishing control to Knowles. (Much later, of course, he would work with superstars from the worlds of theater, opera, and music, from Edith Clever to Jessye Norman, who themselves wanted a “Robert Wilson experience”—“lower your hand on a count of 165, fill the space.”) But in these later collaborations there was no longer any give and take. The stars fit into a form already completely conceived by Wilson. I asked him once whether his art would have taken another path had he worked with actors of equal artistry early on, and I recall him saying there was no possibility of doing this back then. He didn’t know them or have any money to pay them. When Einstein on the Beach suddenly brought Wilson worldwide attention, first at BAM and then later at the Metropolitan Opera, he moved into an even larger institutional and public sphere: the international festival circuit, with its lavish budgets that made his grandest visions possible. I was worried about him and whether he would have, above all, the downtime and privacy he would need to continue to look so deeply inward. Th e demands of working on this scale in the artistic world that had newly welcomed him were daunting. In an attempt to keep him in the United States, Wilson’s CIVIL warS: a tree is best measured when it is down was invited

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to the 1984 Olympic International Arts Festival in Los Angeles. When it became clear the production required a tech period of a month—and that to pay for this, all the other theater productions would be canceled—CIVIL warS was canceled instead. In contrast, at European theaters, Wilson was welcomed with open arms and provided with lavish budgets and unlimited rehearsal time. Wilson’s Death Destruction & Detroit premiered in Berlin at the Schaubühne in 1979—and it was there that he first met Heiner Müller, who, unlike some others, championed his work. Starting in Germany, Wilson quickly took European theaters by storm. But I had the feeling (I was often in Germany then, working on translations) that he was considered, as American artists often are, an enfant sauvage—a role Wilson embraced to a degree. He was a highly sophisticated artist, in control of his imagery along with every other aspect of his art, and this European view of him seemed false to me. After early struggles, Müller was emerging from obscurity in East Germany around this time. He had visited me at the Phoenix some years before, early in my time there, on his second trip to the states, probably looking for a production. I found it odd, before the fall of the Berlin Wall, that an East German was able to get a visa and permission to travel to the United States. Müller taught for a time at the University of Texas and traveled throughout the western United States. His travels around the globe became more understandable (though less admirable) much later, when it was revealed that he had started working with East German intelligence (the Stasi) around this time. No other East German author had this kind of freedom then. And there were many significant East German playwrights at that time whose names have disappeared into obscurity because they refused to corporate with the East German regime. The wonderful Academy Award–winning film The Lives of Others gives a vivid insight into the perils faced by theater artists, among others, in the East during these years. In The Theater of Heiner Müller, Jonathan Kalb singles out Müller’s early contributions to appropriation art and the process of sampling material from other artists. Müller’s work is a veritable laboratory for experimentation with the new “postindustrial” creative paradigm that Michael Foucault described in his famous essay “What is an Author?” The world would soon redefine “the author function,” Foucault predicted. . . .

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Foucault died in 1984, too early to witness the flowering of the information age, where digital music sampling, data networks, chat-rooms, on-line reference materials and other electronic library resources would pose challenges to received notions of private, individual authorship on a more massive and popular scale than he ever envisioned. Müller, however, lived until the end of 1995, and clearly understood both the open nature of the new age and the battles that would be waged in it to preserve the traditional boundaries of private property in the form of copyright. . . . As many critics have observed, Western copyright laws are rooted in a two-century-old Romantic model of authorship whose assumptions about the sanctity of the individual creation are ill-fitted to many current circumstances. Like many of his contemporaries, Müller embraced this way of working, and his disinterest in traditional playwriting skills moved him over time to embrace sampling, pastiche, and collage. He borrowed material freely from the classics, the headlines, and history. His is a biography that would have given a more traditional writer pause: Müller was repeatedly rejected by Brecht himself for a staff position at the Berliner Ensemble at the beginning of his career, and his first successes were with pieces coauthored with his wives, whose contributions were inadvertently forgotten in his official bios. These works meshed with the new spirit of the times that rewarded and honored appropriation and self-invention. Soon he was regarded as the heir to Brecht, or even mentioned as an artist Brecht had singled out, although his relations with Brecht and the Brecht estate were hostile: Brecht’s heirs sued him for appropriating Brecht’s work. In 1992, three years before his death, however, Müller joined the artistic administration of the Berliner Ensemble and became a darling of academia, which he remains to this day. Müller was venerated and produced often in Germany, in that country’s highly subsidized theaters where “Intendanten”— the German word for artistic directors—program their seasons at will, without regard for ticket sales or audience validation. In contrast, Müller’s exposure in the United States has been limited to academia, and his works then and now have never reached any kind of wider public here. So it was with great interest and enthusiasm that some years after my students had stopped twirling—and I had in fact begun working in the New York theater—I accepted the invitation of John Wulp, then producing plays for NYU and running NYU’s undergraduate Playwrights Horizons

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Theater School, to work as a dramaturg with Wilson on Müller’s Hamletmachine. The production would take place in a tiny seventy-five-seat black box theater hidden on the second floor of an NYU classroom building on lower Broadway. Wilson called Hamletmachine “a kind of turning point. First I was working with the text of my close friend Heiner Müller. I did it as a teaching experience for students at the NYU University, and there was very little money, and it was performed in a black box. When I stopped playing in small theaters in the 60s, I wanted to go to large-scale proscenium theaters, which I did in the US and Europe. This was something different than being in a black box.” At NYU back then, Wulp was producing a mix of plays and musicals ranging from revivals of the plays by the authors of the Group Theater to musicals directed in radical new ways by Anne Bogart. This is where she and I first worked together. Wulp persuaded an eclectic mix of people to join his merry band, including Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller, the legendary Brill Building songwriters who wrote hit songs for everyone from Elvis Presley (“Hound Dog”) to the Coasters (“This Magic Moment”). Their music later formed the basis for the long-running Broadway show Smokey Joe’s Café. Wulp also corralled the up-and-coming costume designer William Ivey Long, who was soon to win the first of his countless Tony Awards for Nine on Broadway. At this moment, to make money, he was also building dresses for contestants in the Miss Universe Pageant. The young sound designer Scott Lehrer was also on board. And the lighting was designed by Jennifer Tipton, who had collaborated with Wilson before. It was an eclectic mix of collaborators. William and I view this time with some fondness. “After all, at Yale we were trained to work on a wide range of material,” he reminded me. I was moving between rehearsals of Orchards and Kathy Najimy and Mo Gaffney’s feminist comedy revue Parallel Lives at Second Stage. Feminist comedy, Chekhov, and Robert Wilson—in some ways it was the apex of my very diverse career. Other than Leiber and Stoller, who had never heard of Robert Wilson, the rest of us had been blown away by Wilson’s earlier productions and were eager to work with him in any way he found useful. Rehearsals for Hamletmachine took place in the small black box student theater where the play was to be performed four weeks later. I entered the rehearsal room with respect, admiration, and curiosity. I wanted to watch a master artist at work and wait to add my contributions only once

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I understood what they could be. I noted everything and sought to understand how and why the director was working as he did. My plan was to contribute once I could figure out and respect Wilson’s rehearsal process. The way such novel theater was created was not perceptible to me, even though I had seen quite a bit of his work by then in performance. I did not want to just jump in. And I strongly recommend this way of approaching a director new to you: it’s the dramaturg’s job to add to the director’s process, but one must first understand what that process is. During Hamletmachine I stayed the course, I watched everything, I went out with Wilson and the artistic collaborators on breaks and after rehearsals. I asked questions. And I documented everything I saw. As it turns out, that was my contribution. Wilson’s loyal German assistant Ann-Christin Rommen notated the blocking, as she had done for him on every show since Einstein and continued to do for decades to follow. The fifteen-person cast included NYU acting students and a few recent graduates. Jennifer Rohn, a recent graduate of the NYU program who went on to work with Wilson for a number of years and become somewhat of a muse to him, described the auditions, which took place only a few days before the rehearsals began: “There was a chair in the middle of the room. I was asked to stand on the side of the room, and then move to the chair on a count that he gave me. Then I sat on the chair on a count that he gave me. I didn’t speak.” The creative staff was drawn from the New York theater community and the NYU faculty. NYU students were stage managers and assistant directors. Wilson was not particular at all about observers, and a number of people pressured me to get them seats in the small house to watch him direct for a day. He had no problem with that. He didn’t even notice them. Wilson began rehearsing the day after auditions ended, working on the stage floor with the cast seated around a table with him, while he drew images constantly on countless sheets of paper. He called the students “8” or “5” since he had not had time to learn their names. In rehearsal, Wilson began a process that, without Equity rules, extended into periods of up to ten hours, often with only small breaks. The cast worked in the evenings during the first two weeks, as they had classes during the day, and they rehearsed for extended hours each weekend. Wilson told the group he had neither insight nor understanding of the play’s contents—and he had told Müller this. He also told the actors that after the NYU production, which was to run for three weeks in May, they would be invited to perform the play in the fall on a European tour—a momentous opportunity.

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Jonathan Kalb describes Wilson’s staging as “almost completely uncontingent on the play.” “I do not understand the text,” said Wilson at a press conference during his Hamburg rehearsals [Hamletmachine was produced in German at the Hamburg Schauspielhaus after it closed in New York]. Indeed he did no research or textual interpretation, as directors usually do, to identify or highlight subtexts and themes, apart from a chat with the author he described as follows. “I came to Berlin to see Heiner before I went to New York and asked him whether he could say something to me about it. He said, ‘No, do it however you want.’ ‘Help me out a little.’ (laughs) He said: ‘It shouldn’t be longer than fifty minutes.’ I said, ‘Okay.’ [The running time of the NYU production was two and a half hours.] Then I went to New York, worked for ten days—I had only three weeks—and brought all of the action and movements onto the stage without thinking about the text and then laid the text over the movements and then began to fit the movements to the text.” The students were highly disciplined and quivering with enthusiasm. They embraced the fact that this would be the artistic opportunity of a lifetime, as they had been told. Like the others in the room, I was there because I was interested in Wilson. I felt unenthusiastic about the play and didn’t understand how what is now a classic post-dramatic text could be brought to life, but I was eager to see what Wilson would do with it. I felt that if anyone could bring such a play to life on stage, it was Wilson. Unlike anyone else in the room, I did know something about German literature, Shakespeare, Heiner Müller, and the East German political history of the 1950s that was referenced in the play. And, of course, I could have easily filled in any gaps in my knowledge, and tracked down every reference, as I was later to do with a very different play that also was based in history and literature: The Coast of Utopia. But I did not. I hoped that Hamletmachine would be the first of many plays I would work on with Wilson. I decided to watch carefully and silently observe him in rehearsal. I wanted to understand and follow his method of directing actors, which was unknown to me. I had only seen results and heard stories from my student actors who had executed decisions—primarily blocking decisions—that had been made when they were not in the room. Before adding my contributions, I wanted to understand how Wilson worked.

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Looking back, I don’t know if this was a mistake or not. Outside rehearsal, he welcomed conversation about how he directed, and we spoke often during the few breaks and afterward in a bar nearby that he liked. In hindsight, I recognize that his use of choreography by Lucinda Childs in Einstein on the Beach was incorporated whole into that production—it was not the result of a traditional collaborative development. He liked to see things that interested him, and he gladly made use of them. But I didn’t realize that then. He was a magpie who eagerly incorporated a shiny idea or image or sound that caught his interest. Hamletmachine is a short play in five acts of widely different lengths (in total, a mere six single-spaced pages in Carl Weber’s English translation). A postmodern collage of references to Shakespeare and East German politics, it concludes with a line of dialogue from a follower of Charles Manson. It contains no discernible through-line or arc of action. That, I thought, was what Müller wanted Wilson to provide. The text was to be the raw material. In the first two rehearsals, we stayed at the table and the acting company, with lines still unassigned, slowly read the play aloud. Wilson stopped the young cast after every sentence and asked the group, “In this line of dialogue, what are the bones, what is the meat and what is the skin of this line?” Here are a few selections from the Hamletmachine text: “I was Hamlet. I stood at the shore and talked with the surf BLABLA, the ruins of Europe in back of me.” “I’M LUGGING MY OVERWEIGHT BRAIN LIKE A HUNCHBACK/CLOWN NUMBER TWO IN THE SPRING OF COMMUNISM.” “My drama didn’t happen. The script has been lost. The actors put their face on the rack in the dressing room. In his box, the prompter is rotting. The stuffed corpses in the house don’t stir a hand. I go home and kill the time, at one/with my undivided self.” “I am Ophelia. The one the river didn’t keep. The woman dangling from the rope. The woman with her arteries cut open. The woman with the overdose. SNOW ON HER LIPS.” Without knowledge, I’m pretty sure, of anything except possibly the Hamlet references, the actors threw out ideas such as: “I feel like The Roadrunner on cocaine playing Hamlet.” Wilson would draw. He drew constantly. He questioned the cast, but rarely answered his own questions. It seemed that his ideas were coming from his hand. This made perfect sense

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Hamletmachine rehearsal room drawing, by Robert Wilson (Courtesy of Robert Wilson)

to me. “I can only spoil this,” I thought. “Call out three associations to this line of dialogue,” he asked the cast. “Now two. Now only one.” On day two, Wilson asked the actors to bring in visual material inspired by lines of the play, and this material was taped up in the room. Later, his own drawings for the production were hung in the lobby when the play was performed.

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For now, there were not yet any design elements on the small black box stage; it was bare. After the first two days, the discussion table was removed and brought into the house to function as a tech table, with Ann-Christin at Wilson’s side to notate blocking. He entered the staging process. Wilson began staging by asking actors one by one to assume a position—almost always standing or sitting without movement, or at most only an extremely slow hand or arm gesture, difficult to execute, even for a strong young actor. The first actress to enter sat on an office chair and twirled slowly in circles. Everyone was in rehearsal clothes. Some characters were doubled or tripled—there were eventually three “Ophelias” at a single table— although no one would know they were Ophelia (they were called “Woman at the table” later in the program) because the rehearsal proceeded in silence. But roles were gradually assigned by visual means. Wilson began to call for simple set pieces: a thin black chair with a high, laddered back (which has now been duplicated and is for sale on the web) and a strange twiglike tree. Wilson chose a single song by Leiber and Stoller, “Is That All There Is?” which had been made famous by Peggy Lee. Wilson gave it to Scott Lehrer, an up-and-coming sound designer also on the NYU faculty at the Playwrights Horizons studio. In the second week of rehearsal, Wilson asked him to make loops of sections of the recording, “which I did with enthusiasm,” Lehrer told me. “I put loops on top of loops. I slowed the song down until it was unrecognizable, layered it on top of itself, added machine gun fire and explosions, and the sounds of wolves howling. When Bob asked the three Ophelias to scratch the table, I put mikes under the table, and added scratching to the sound track on top.” Tipton was at the tech table working next to Wilson with a small cache of instruments. The largest task fell to William Ivey Long: “Bob asked me what everyone should wear. I had absolutely no idea. Any direction I would go—Shakespearean costumes, modern dress, futuristic dress, clothes from the 1950s in East Germany—would take the play to a highly specific place. His set was abstract to an extreme degree. Completely at a loss, I looked carefully at each cast member and drew their bodies as best I could—each on a single page. Without clothes, without genitals obviously—just their shapes and height and a sense of them. Bob seemed to like this, and he asked each actor to look at ‘their’ sketch and tell him what they would be wearing.” And so the timeless costumes for Hamletmachine were born: the actors on stage, for the most part, dressed as they dressed in life. The

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actors of all future productions would costume themselves. The cast told Wilson what they were comfortable wearing, what they wanted to wear in the role they were playing. This has remained the same for every revival since then, and has allowed the piece to be personalized and modernized as the decades have passed. The only exceptions were two almost mythological figures who appeared at the very end of each segment of the action—a cupid-like figure, who like his namesake was blocked to balance on one foot; and a tall, top-hatted figure covered in soot, in tails, who looked like a chimney sweep. Both of these non-naturalistic costumes were inspired by the first actors who created them: Leif Tilden was an angelic-looking blond-haired sprite, and in the play he appeared coated in gold with a bow and arrow, balancing on one leg. But then at the end, in addition, Bob smeared my mouth with white goo, which I found creepy. No way was I judging the goo on my face. I found it creepy but I also understood and actually enjoyed Bob treating my face as a canvas. It was an honor. And here’s the story of how Tom Tenney was cast. The night before the audition he was in a brawl and his face was covered in bloody scabs. He almost didn’t show up for the audition because he was in such a state. Walking into the audition, wearing old blue jeans and a leather jacket and a scabcovered face, Bob said, “Now there’s Hamlet.” William Ivey spent decades feeling like he should have done something else—Tipton was angry that William didn’t offer more of a vision, but I feel that his hesitant contribution was what has given the piece its timelessness. In week two, Wilson suddenly had an inspiration. After looking at the series of entrances and the positions he had given the young cast, he asked that the set be rotated ninety degrees after each short act so that the action would be repeated five times, with the final section returning to the initial orientation to signal the play’s end. The blocking was identical in each of the five acts. An actor entered, sat, extended an arm, made a movement, then a second actor entered and did a new movement. Rotating the set was an enchanting and radical idea and the act of the rotation itself lifted the play into an arc of action. It served as a theatrical metaphor: you felt you were seeing the action from backstage, but it was also an exercise in perspective. Days of extreme concentration followed, in darkness and silence, with Wilson, sternly commanding a long stick in wizard-like fashion, con-

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ducting the actors’ movements. His assistant director was given a set of wooden clavés to sound at his command which would cue the actors for each entrance, turn-of-head or lowering-of-a-hand. Everything was done to long counts and was extraordinarily difficult and slow. And each tiny change seemed like a revelation—a total reorganization of the action. I left rehearsal and entered the real world to find it horribly noisy, and fast and visually oppressive. In fact, the utter, pure concentration sustained during these long rehearsals was perhaps the biggest takeaway for me from this experience. Wilson watched every tiny change of position, speed of a movement, or facial expression as though it had the highest possible artistic stakes. Nothing was general. Even a tiny change was shocking and revelatory. And when this kind of focus happens in a rehearsal, each moment becomes important, and remains important when an audience later attends. Rehearsals were never a strain for us observers—no matter how long they lasted. I was constantly fascinated and I felt Wilson was at the top of his form. It made me wish that all rehearsals were as important and focused as this one was. Wilson created a unique world inside the theater. With its intensity and his extraordinary control of the room it was also slightly scary and oppressive, especially for the actors who had to hold difficult positions for long periods of time, which they did without complaint. It was perhaps a mirror of the inside of his mind: his need for control was paramount and one sensed that this was an extension of his life outside the room. Control and loss of control. It was what he needed to work. After the repeated fifteen-minute blocking sequence was created, the set rotated and Wilson and Tipton lit each new configuration. The process could be puzzling and often disturbing—Wilson ran the room like a dictator with a lash—formidable and not approachable by the actors. When the actors asked him a question about how to execute a movement, which they did only rarely, he was kind, but he snapped his stick. This was far from a relaxed, collaborative environment. Perhaps the renown of this production (it is still being recreated on tour as I write this book decades later) comes from the uncompromised rigor of its creation. Finally, the strangest part of the whole experience occurred. By this time, we were all enthralled by the silent progression of imagery, which we would view five times—from rotated viewpoints. With each rotation the imagery seemed deeper and the perspective totally new. The first rotation used no text and the actors each entered in silence and assumed their

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positions facing the audience. It took a little over fifteen minutes for the action to be complete: Leif ’s “Cupid” and the man in black, called “Man behind woman” in the program, were the last to enter, shortly before the scene blackout. Then the set was turned to face stage left (the actors moved the furniture) and the action was repeated, the assistant director’s clavé clicks initiating each entrance and each on-stage movement. The actors had to be alert and listen for their cues. In this second rotation, the dialogue was to begin, Wilson decided, from the top of Hamletmachine’s Act 1 in a monotone, about half an hour into the performance. “Now let’s put on the text,” Wilson said one day after his initial silent staging had been completed. I had never heard this sentence before in my life. After the actors’ thus-far silent entrances and movements had been assigned, toward the end of the second rotation, Wilson began randomly assigning lines to the cast. The actors quickly memorized them, and the following day the set was once again rotated to face upstage and the cast moved into the lines from Müller’s Act 2. In the audience, we saw the action from the rear—or from “backstage” as it appeared. Wilson began adjusting each actor’s movements ever so slightly and asking them to try different things with their voices. The most memorable piece of direction, remembered by all for years after was, “You have to hate the audience. The more you hate them, the more they’ll love you.” So in week two, with the movements firmly memorized, we began a run-through with the actors speaking the words of the play for the first time. The action went totally dead. Everyone in the room had the same feeling; it was like being slapped. The visual resonance of the stage symbols vanished. I recall someone saying, “Oh well.” “I hope it all means something,” Wilson commented. It reminded me of seeing a thrilling final runthrough of a play in the rehearsal room that never regains the same magic once it is in the theater. But here, the experience was far more abrupt. We felt the experiment was a failure. Since the first public performance was around the corner, Wilson decided he wanted to add a video to the evening, filmed with the actors on the actual stage; and I still have the call sheet for the day-long shoot that was done in the final week of rehearsal, which became the fourth section of the play. This section, midway through the evening, gave the young cast a chance to rest (as the film played) from the extremely strenuous blocking requirements, which were often painful. The progression was: three rotations (facing the audience, facing stage left with text beginning, and then

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facing upstage); then a film of the cast doing the identical blocking projected onto a scrim with them speaking a recorded voiceover of Müller’s Act 4 text. This was followed by a recording of Jessye Norman singing Schubert’s Lied “The Dwarf ”; then two final rotations with the actors back live on stage. In the video section, images of clouds and fire were superimposed on the actors. The last scene of the evening, with the cast again facing the audience, was an exact repeat of the first scene but the actors screamed at the end of the play for several minutes—as I had seen done in earlier Wilson productions. We all went home for the day off, and then, for the final week’s rehearsals, Müller himself arrived to participate, in anticipation of the play’s premiere scheduled for Hamburg later in the year. New York reviews were not anticipated. In fact, they were expressly forbidden, though that is never an obstacle for a New York producer. Wulp had already arranged for a full panoply of critics to attend. After viewing a run of the play with the spoken text on our first day back, Müller came in with Wilson the following day very unhappy that the cast was unfamiliar with the historical references. Puffing away at his ever-present cigar, Müller, in deeply accented English, spent some hours back around the table explaining the historical background to the students. Details of the actions of Ernst Honegger went right over the heads of the young company. Müller—perhaps rightly—ignored me. I had not done my job. I had only witnessed. The cast was given a cut and slightly changed text, which was basically an abbreviation of the Weber translation, which Müller disliked. Müller remained until the play opened a few days later to rapturous reviews in the New York papers. Only we lucky few had known what was there before the words “went on.” We had witnessed the symbolic stage action before the words were placed over the visual elements—which had become magical to us. Jennifer Rohn also recalled the shock of this moment and, with her ever generous spirit, attributes it to the fact that the cast had not been bodymiked yet. I’m pretty sure it was something else. I accompanied Wilson and Müller after the final evening rehearsals to a bar, where they drank me under the table. After I dragged myself into a taxi, they continued on in another unknown-to-me location. Wilson was in Müller’s thrall. I recall him saying, “You’re so smart!” I felt it was the other way around. After the reviews, the NYU production was extended. Then, after a short summer break, Hamletmachine, with the original company, began a European tour that started in the fall at the Almeida in London and ended

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at Thanksgiving in Palermo. The iconic production, perhaps the highlight of Müller’s theatrical career, is still in Wilson’s repertory and is played regularly in Europe, always with student actors on the same rotating set, and with Scott Lehrer’s original sound cues, rehearsed by a Wilson assistant from the original blocking notation. Just before the NYU Hamletmachine began production, Müller contributed a short prologue to a production of Euripides’ Alcestis at the American Repertory Theater, which Wilson directed and Tipton lit. The response was unenthusiastic. The costumes there were designed by John Conklin, who went on to work with Wilson several times, encouraging him to undertake productions of densely scripted plays. These text-heavy productions all had their difficulties, perhaps because of their dense language, or Wilson’s increasingly busy travels that kept him away from rehearsals for periods of time. Or perhaps words were simply not Wilson’s natural milieu. He explores what lies beneath the words. His visual insight can support singing perhaps better than it can support dialogue. Wilson’s direction to the young actors of Hamletmachine included advice such as: “Heiner’s texts are very strong. What people always do is illustrate them, it’s redundant.” “Don’t tell them what it is but make them ask what it is.” “You should direct as if you have a half an hour to do a play.” “It is important that we, the collaborators, don’t agree on specifically ‘what it is’ but that we ask and invite a public to ask that question. We must disagree.” “Theater must always be dangerous. Alive. There is magic in the contradiction in movement—if you are going from A to B, you must never anticipate B.” This last maxim is a sentiment Stanislavsky would have approved of. But the demands of this kind of work over the long run can have ruinous effects on actors who are traditionally trained. “I will always be grateful for the extraordinary opportunities he afforded me, but after my fourth play with Bob, I had to stop,” says Jennifer Rohn, the original Woman Standing—perhaps the central figure of Hamletmachine. “I was afraid that I could no longer act. I felt like Nina in the fourth act of The Seagull.” In Wilson’s later travels through the great theaters of Europe, illustrious collaborators each had their “Robert Wilson experience,” starring in lavish productions where they were called on to move with the direction “Millions of minute changes make up a single gesture.” Or “There is no difference between speaking and not speaking.” In retrospect, Hamletmachine marked a high point in Wilson’s oeuvre. As a work of art, it did not surpass the earlier Einstein on the Beach or other

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creations. But after Hamletmachine, Wilson’s international career overcame him and marked a new stage in his career: and the extraordinary demands made on his imagination, as he traveled, negotiated with festivals and large organizations, raised money, and perhaps divided his concentration in order to generate several pieces at the same time, marked a new stage in his life. For all the artists mentioned at the beginning of this chapter—Bausch, Monk, Anderson—the 1970s was a simpler, more self-produced era, without the deadlines and expectations required by highly organized, lavishly funded festivals and resident European theater companies. These artists all made a transition from the informal downtown scene in New York, or from the small-city dance theater in Wuppertal, to an extreme, high professionalism. And the game-changing innovation of their work during the 1970s has not produced successors. The unique melding of theater, dance, and performance remains a brilliant product of its time for those lucky enough to have seen it. In the end, I wonder if the unconscious is a young person’s game. Can it be forced when the exigencies of keeping a career afloat begin to take precedence? During all the early years that I watched Wilson’s work with such fascination, I never saw him “quote” anything, nor did I see an image or sequence appropriated from another source. His imagery was completely his own. But years later, I watched in disbelief during his Threepenny Opera, created at the Schaubühne in Berlin and brought later to BAM, as a woman’s arm in a long black glove emerged from the proscenium and beckoned suggestively. That image is a cliché. How far removed from those youthful twirling fir trees, or the three young women at a table or the unique enchantments of Joseph Stalin or Queen Victoria with the latter’s dancing letters of the alphabet dangling in the air above the members of the cast. Müller remains a revered icon of the theater in academic circles. After Hamletmachine, except for Danton’s Death at the Alley Theater, where Wilson was absent for extended periods during the rehearsal period, Wilson created his work largely in Europe, and it often toured to New York after opening elsewhere. He has directed here at the Metropolitan Opera. And he has always been generous in finding the time to come to Lincoln Center to speak to the directors in the Directors Lab. It’s difficult now to gauge what I might have done better or differently than I did. Essentially, I bore witness and tried to learn how such a significant artist created his theater. As a dramaturg, I engage primarily—or at least first of all—with the writer and the text. But with Wilson, I was

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interested in the director. And this director did not really engage with the text. Virtually all of Wilson’s notes were visual and acting notes—it was almost like the text didn’t matter. My opportunity might have been on the day when the assembled group was asked to bring in visual material. I could have contributed images referred to in the text that the actors might not have known about and these might have made their way on stage via his drawing. I think Wilson was looking for ideas; though whether he would have used what I brought is another question. I had also hoped during this experience to come to a better understanding and appreciation of Müller’s work, which had previously eluded me. What I did come to understand, and this took some time, was that in Müller’s texts, the randomness—and the collage of references to existing artistic works and historical events—undigested as they were, were remarkably similar to the (also short) texts Wilson had worked with in his early career. They were like pieces of information that a greater mind could unconsciously organize. For a dramaturg with my experience, I had always focused first on text, but here the text was a pretext for the unique vision of another, superior, artist. Hamletmachine was a highly unusual working experience for many reasons. Except for Jennifer Tipton and Wilson’s German assistant, the collaborative team was totally unknown to him. We all admired him and had gladly signed up to be a part of the production, which did turn out to be memorable for many reasons. I don’t think any of us saw him as a peer, but as a master artist of unusual genius. As a result, we first-timers all had varying degrees of difficulty discerning how he would find us useful in a rehearsal process that was unknown to us. For my part, looking back, I think I was right to keep my thoughts to myself as Wilson did the tablework, and I would argue that jumping in without knowing the rehearsal procedures a director is comfortable with is, in general, a bad idea. Hamletmachine was an unusual situation, but for dramaturgs who find themselves paired with directors they haven’t worked with before, I would strongly suggest a getting to know you period of the kind I tried to initiate in our post-rehearsal bar hopping. Wilson—and all directors, I would imagine—was eager to talk about what he was doing and he was generous to me. Had I had discussions with him about my role before the rehearsal process began, I suppose, in retrospect, I could have contributed information and imagery about the ur-text of Hamlet and about Müller’s German background in the brief two-day discussion-around-the-table sessions. But, actually, I don’t think

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I would have done that. The NYU production was not a German production and it really wasn’t about Hamlet: it was about the inside of Wilson’s brain. What I should have done was, at the end of our time together, suggest an interesting and artistically successful play for him to approach next. One that would challenge his superb imagination and allow free rein to his unique vision. That’s what the dramaturgs of many European theaters and festivals were soon to do. But would they know the American side of Robert Wilson that could be engaged in exploring a deep work of literature from his own tradition and upbringing, as he had chosen to do early in his career when his grandmother acted in his play? O’Neill? Emily Dickinson? A writer from Texas? Too late, Wilson was on the plane.

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8

appreciate new forms and styles

Recognizing the merits of a new play manuscript and advocating for a production of such a play by an unproduced playwright are the bread and butter of a dramaturg’s work, just as an editor at a publishing house dreams of bringing an exciting author working in a new form or with new subject matter to the attention of the reading public. We can see the germ of this process unfold in Chekhov’s masterpiece, The Seagull, when the aspiring young writer Konstantin presents his new play to his mother and their circle of family and friends on the shore of the lake of their country estate. Alas, Konstantin’s play is cruelly rejected. In the small audience, only the understanding Dr. Dorn has some patience with Konstantin’s radically experimental work and offers encouragement. At the end of the final act of The Seagull, we learn that as time has passed, others in faraway Moscow have come to see merit in Konstantin’s new style of writing too. Although it is too late for him, we know his vision will become more familiar as the world learns about Maurice Maeterlinck, Edward Gordon Craig, Marina Tsvetaeva, and later, Tadeusz Rozewicz. Clearly, this personal trial was a situation Chekhov drew from his own life. We know from his director Stanislavsky how groundbreaking Chekhov’s plays were for Russian audiences used to the theatrical histrionics of the classical nineteenth-century Russian repertory. “The founding of our new Moscow Art Theater was in the nature of a revolution. We protested against the customary manner of acting, against theatricality, against bathos, against declamation, against overacting, against the bad manner of production, against the habitual scenery, against the star system which spoiled the ensemble, against the

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light and farcical repertoire which was being cultivated on the Russian stage at that time.” This beautifully defines the challenge that all innovative stylists face. How do the collaborators of such an author come to understand a play that is pushing boundaries? How will they connect such a play with readers, fellow artists who might become the author’s acting and design team, and, finally, the audiences who will appreciate this new kind of theater? These are the kind of writers I wish to focus on here—those who require a reader who envisions with them a theater yet to come. Dramatists who write outside the common style of an era require a first reader of skill to recognize what they are trying to do. And a play that advances the form may only be partially realized in the manuscript, since so much of the work of play development takes place as the play is refined in rehearsal. At any given historical moment, there is always a dominant or standard dramatic form, and most plays will be written in that form. Stanislavsky’s list of the things he was reacting against nicely describes the style of plays he saw in his youth. Plays in any era’s standard form are the bulk of the plays that come into the dramaturgy office of a theater. And that is as it should be: a theater’s job is to reach the public as widely as possible. This public will be tuned in to the mission of a particular theater; it will be an audience that has formed the subscribership of a theater over time and is comfortable with its programming. Will the subscribers be ready to be challenged with plays of a different sort? When I refer to plays “in a standard form” today, I mean plays that are written to be interpreted by the acting methods of our time: plays that can be broken down (and Stanislavsky has changed the course of theater history here) into structures of inciting incident, climactic incident, resolving incident, or understood by contemporary acting methods—dividing a play into beats, identifying the action, making positive choices, not playing results. These are all basic techniques taught to actors and directors over the past hundred years. To master these ABCs, an acting class, at some point, is an invaluable experience for a dramaturg. The structure of plays that can be analyzed by these acting techniques has not changed significantly since the advent of naturalism. Chekhov’s work, which later brought his director Stanislavsky’s methods to the United States courtesy of several generations of influential acting teachers, has been a touchstone for much of the acting training of the last century. A play such as The Little Foxes by Lillian Hellman, with its three acts of 45, 35, and 25 minutes and two intermissions and a compressed

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progression of dramatic events, is a classic example of a 1940s play, just as the looser, less plot- and more character-driven two-act plays written by Tennessee Williams, Arthur Miller, or Neil Simon characterize plays of the 1960s. The high naturalism of August Wilson or Beth Henley or Lanford Wilson—whose plays depict a community or a family unit in a specific historical moment—is a characteristic of these well-loved plays from the 1980s. The dominant style of the current decade is a play of eighty minutes in a semi-realistic setting focused on family, sex, or identity politics with a limited number of characters and a series of blackouts punctuating the introduction of each new piece of plot information. I’m going to take a guess and look into the future (after the time this book appears) and predict that I already see a change coming: a new interest in plays with complex plot threads, highly nuanced social and cultural dimensions, and very large cast sizes that present a world on stage that is grappling (not always in a realistic way) with both the past and its influence on the present—with whole communities and the ghosts of their history. Halfway Bitches Go Straight to Heaven by Stephen Adly Guirgis, for example, or Good for Otto by David Rabe, Shipwreck: A History Play About 2017 by Anne Washburn, Mary Page Marlowe by Tracy Letts, The Ferryman, by Jez Butterworth. Good writers can write good plays in whatever style happens to be common to a period, and the bulk of plays a dramaturg will read in any given decade are usually written in the prevailing style. But alongside these playwrights, there are also authors who are not writing in an era’s typical form. Edward Albee broke away from tradition in plays ranging from Zoo Story to Tiny Alice, and, most generously, with his profits from Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? he founded the Abarwild Theatre on Vandam Street with Richard Barr and Clinton Wilder, to give encouragement to innovative writers not working in a naturalistic form: Sam Shepard, John Guare, Adrienne Kennedy, Terrence McNally, and others. Samuel Beckett was clearly an influence on all of them, and from this more renegade tradition came, in other venues, María Irene Fornés, Wallace Shawn, Spalding Gray, Ntozake Shange, Don DeLillo, and others. The work of understanding both traditional and groundbreaking writing is largely done by “feel” or by instinct, though over the years I have come to follow certain ways of reading and approaching each new manuscript. Editors and dramaturgs read hundreds of manuscripts each year, written by authors young and old, at the beginning of a career, or the end of a former one in an unrelated area: an attorney or teacher who feels at

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the end of another career they have something vital to express, but without possessing any understanding of writing for the stage. Classic unsolicited scripts. Scripts of this kind will pour into the theater in the same week that a genuinely innovative new play may arrive. That’s one reason I think it’s impossible to understand a play by reading only a sample of it. Why is it important to read each play in its entirety? First, to get your reading skills up to speed. And there are occasionally sections of a play that show promise—and these sections may not be the ones you’ve chosen to read. If you look into the history of a play such as Angels in America, which was hundreds of pages long at various points, it’s easy to see why picking out only ten pages on which to base a judgment might not be wise. It’s important for a first reader to recognize, even in an imperfect first play, the signs of future potential—a writer with a unique voice, or a writer exploring, perhaps not yet totally effectively, a new way of writing for the stage or grappling with a new subject. For all these reasons, keeping a history of reports on individual play submissions is extremely useful. You see a writer grow over time, and begin to understand what this author wants to do with a dramatic form, perhaps a new one she or he has created, as this new author gains control over it. Your responsibility is to the field as well as to your own theater. It’s a pleasure sending a play to a theater or a director you think will find it of interest, if you don’t feel it is right for your own company. I have found a valuable—and non-judgmental—way of taking a first step toward understanding a play whose form I don’t find familiar. I note my impressions in the following way: I write a list of the play’s strengths— perhaps it deals with novel or previously unknown or unexamined subject matter, features unusual or compelling language or dialogue, a unique character who connects with an audience or reader in an interesting way, a provocative or timely premise, a strongly visual setting or universe, or an unusual, perhaps not totally realistic style. I try to identify conflict in the play and if it is resolved in an innovative manner. Usually these first impressions correspond strongly with an audience’s eventual impressions when the play is produced—audiences who, like you, will be coming across this new play for the first time, you on the page, they in the theater. It’s important to write down and remember these strengths as you encounter any play for the first time, and not allow them to be diminished or edited away as the play develops in rehearsal. What you first responded to in the play will be what audiences like about the play. A good exercise for a new

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dramaturg is to write a report of Konstantin’s little play in Act 1 of The Seagull—or as much of it as we get to see—and imagine how his art will come to fruition before his untimely death. Next, I often pose a series of questions—not criticisms, but questions— about things I don’t understand yet about the play. Identifying these questions requires moving away from the plot or action of the play. It means a dramaturg must try to place the manuscript in a theatrical tradition, and perhaps see if it is breaking or extending that tradition. Questions might be about structure or form—whether the action is discernable throughout each part of the play, for instance, and how the action is being advanced. Maybe an O’Neill play is long for a reason and the challenge is to find out why the protagonists torture each other with their memories and recriminations at such length. Maybe Beckett’s plays do not need to be located in a real-world place. “Is Godot set in France?” or “In what year is the play set?” may be the wrong questions to ask. The worst possible questions are always about clarifying things. For example, the hallmarks of Beckett—the parts of his plays that contain and carry his meaning—are equally in the costumes and set descriptions: the visual vaudeville references, the desolate postwar refugee landscapes, the shabby clothes. Conversely, when reading Brecht, it won’t be a good idea to opine, “I don’t identify with a character as forbidding or ruthless as Mother Courage. Can you show moments when she is vulnerable?” Such questions will not strengthen Brecht’s play. They miss its point. As I’ve noted, one of my favorite Sarah Ruhl quotes is “Clarity is over-rated.” I also love: “I remember once hearing a young male student describe the structure of his play. He said, ‘Well, first it starts out, then it speeds up, and it’s going and it’s going, and then bam, it’s over.’ And I thought, Do we think the arc is a natural structure because of the structure of the male orgasm?” Much like approaching a Shakespeare play, it will take some time to even begin to understand an innovative play. The model used to understand Shakespeare—reading the play aloud, asking what each moment means—should be the same model for approaching what seems to a reader to be an unusual new play. Besides the plot and characters, there is the all-important structure of the action—why is it the shape it is? And what mechanisms move the play forward to its conclusion? What kind of style characterizes the dialogue? These are questions to pose—initially to oneself—and their answers (and perhaps there is work to be done on the play) might only come when the play is opened up in rehearsal and non-

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verbal elements can be explored and finally revealed. These elements of theater writing bring in the next dimension of the action that only comes to life when the actors are engaged in the process of discovery with the director. One thinks again of Chekhov here—a highly innovative playwright in his own time who knew how to guide actors to fill in his silences with highly specific information. I have always found it useful to draw the shape of the play—making note of each scene, how many scenes there are, and how long each one is. And seeing how the play is divided in terms of acts or scenes, and where, if there is one, the intermission is placed. This shape can be revealing. A series of many short, linked scenes—with one or two exceptions—will draw your eye to those longer scenes. A plot action that ends abruptly without a traditional conclusion (Brian Friel’s Translations, say) will have a reason behind it: the conclusion Friel wants, which in stage time might be lengthy, is inevitable and the audience understands perfectly where the action is heading without it having to be spelled out. That’s Friel’s political point in this play—and very smart playwriting. Plays that are pushed by visual association (many examples here from Strindberg to Edward Albee to Adrienne Kennedy) have the internal logic of a dream and the action proceeds to its end non-naturalistically. Asking for clarification about what and where the scenes are set and pushing for script additions that spell out what the characters cannot or are unable to say will diminish their effect. Strindberg’s A Dream Play, Ibsen’s When We Dead Awaken, Albee’s Tiny Alice, Bowles’s In the Summer House, and Spalding Gray’s Rumstick Road are all plays that follow this path. In her book 100 Essays I Don’t Have Time to Write, Sarah Ruhl addresses this question: Paula Vogel, who was my teacher, teaches that there are six plot forms, and Aristotelian form, or the linear arc, is only one of them. Aristotelian form progresses through a logical series of cause and effect. One thing happens, so the next thing happens, and so the next thing happens, so the climax happens, and so on. Vogel explains that alternatives to Aristotelian form include: circular form (see La Ronde), backward form (Artist Descending a Staircase or Betrayal), repetitive form (Waiting for Godot), associative form (see all of Shakespeare’s work, in particular his romances), and what Vogel calls synthetic fragments, where two different time periods can coexist (Angels in America or Top Girls).

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I would humbly add a seventh form, Ovidian. In Ovid’s Metamorphoses, he begins, “Let me begin to tell of forms changed.” His emphasis, in terms of story, is on transformation, rather than a scene of conflict or rational cause and effect. . . . This story structure is reminiscent of fairy tales. Objects have magical properties, people transform, and the natural world is likewise transformative. One thing becomes another thing and then another, and there is no clear moral. If there can be said to be verisimilitude in Ovidian form, it is the sort that imitates dreams or the unconscious. What follows is a concrete example of a perhaps unconventional dramaturgical suggestion about an unconventional play. I had the privilege of working with Sarah and her director Rebecca Taichman on How to Transcend a Happy Marriage at Lincoln Center, and this wonderful play is a good example of Sarah’s Ovidian form. The plot begins in a naturalistic world with two midlife professional couples in their forties—one mother is a lawyer with a young teenage daughter—who invite a young, polyandrous intern from the law firm together with her significant others to a New Year’s Eve dinner. The New Year’s Eve party brings an irrational world of sexuality and intoxication into their carefully constructed bourgeois household. It pushes the action outside the house into nature and threatens the parents’ bonds with their children and with each other. In other words, sexuality is a force that cannot be contained. The play is resolved and convincingly ended not by dialogue and logic but by music and the mysterious transformation of a human character into a bird: a live bird in our production. In early drafts (before rehearsals started) in Sarah’s stage directions, the bird was to fly onto the stage and perch on the lap of Sarah’s central character. But months later as we began technical rehearsals, everyone on the team felt something was off—the play was not yet concluding in an emotionally satisfying manner. It didn’t seem to be the writing that was the problem. I tried to look at what the symbol of the wildness of the real bird meant in terms of the play. It occurred to me that to symbolically restore the order of these families’ households, the bird needed to return to the character of the mother whose child had been harmed and, by doing so, it brought the real child back. So my contribution, as dramaturg, was to suggest a switch in the bird landing. As I say, the job is full of surprises. This change, followed by the return of the child, together with the beautiful song about marriage that ended the play, seemed to everyone to complete the emotional arc in

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Lena Hall in How to Transcend a Happy Marriage, 2017 (Photograph by Sara Krulwich/The New York Times/Redux Pictures)

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a highly satisfying, nonliteral way. Sarah and Rebecca made it a part of the play’s Ovidian, emotionally resonant resolution. It’s a lovely, mysterious play and it was very popular with audiences. This suggestion of mine, I should also note, is not something I could have made at an earlier stage of the process: either on the page or even in rehearsal. The real bird was not added until technical rehearsals. Only then was the problem visible. My patience paid off. I think the anxiety many playwrights feel toward dramaturgs stems from inappropriate, uninformed, or untimely questions: requests that reveal mostly that the dramaturg has not fully understood the play. And responding to these questions by changing the play will only harm it. In an initial conversation about a new play, I am always interested in the questions the writer has—how far have they been able to take the play? What elements are still mysterious or unrealized to them? Hope (and exhaustion) might lead an author to assert the play is perfect. But in my experience, writers will be curious if feedback is thought-provoking and insightful. There are endless theatrical tropes—direct address to the audience is one—that might be important and necessary. Plays can have several repeated but different endings played one after the other (The Threepenny Opera by Brecht and Kurt Weill, for instance) and why this device is used needs to be understood. Perhaps there is no inevitable ending, all is relative and the outcome can be different: a well-known Brechtian sentiment. You can also sense a shift in the tone or quality in the writing if an observational writer finds him or herself in a corner and needs to speculate to finish the action. I mentioned examples of this in the chapter on Wendy Wasserstein. These portions of the script will have a different feel—maybe a bad or maybe a good thing. But one that should be noted and made apparent. Many, many playwrights write about their personal visions of theater. Brecht on Brecht is a good place to start to understand his plays. In our time, David Mamet’s True and False: Heresy and Common Sense for the Actor and Sarah Ruhl’s 100 Essays I Don’t Have Time to Write are ones I’ve found useful. Written decades ago, the brilliant exchange of letters between Jean Genet and Roger Blin reveals the vital political and social dimensions Genet wanted in his productions. He wanted the audiences in the cheaper seats on high to have their view of the action restricted by the heads of the rich in the seats below them closer to the action—they see their place in real life reflected in the theater. Most playwrights have highly specific thoughts on the kind of acting their plays require. I would go so far

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as to say that every writer of significance needs to find the actors who instinctively understand the kind of plays they are writing. This was certainly the case for Beckett, for Shepard, for August Wilson, for Genet, as it was in an earlier time for Chekhov. Christopher Durang’s early productions were uncertain and searching for a style until the actor-recently-turned-director Jerry Zaks cast actors who played them like Chekhov. Suddenly the style that we recognize as “Chris Durang” turned from academically brilliant and bratty to heartbreakingly funny and quietly political. I encourage writers at the very beginning of their careers to send their manuscripts to actors they feel will be right for their plays—not famous actors deluged with material, or actors whose names will bankroll a production, but actorcontemporaries a playwright feels might intuitively grasp the style of their work. A play with a note of appreciation from an author left at the stage door of a small theater will be remembered. I can’t stress enough how difficult it is to write a play, and how much playwrights long for support and intelligent feedback. This has been true forever. It was at the heart of the relationships of Tennessee Williams, Jerome Lawrence, and Robert Lee, and Horton Foote to Margo Jones: her understanding and support were vital to launching their careers. Jones directed their work (she was the original director of The Glass Menagerie and produced its world premiere in 1944) as well as the premieres of other new plays such as Inherit the Wind at her theater in Texas. Jones sent her authors to other producers and theaters to widen their experience. At her recommendation, the young East Texas playwright Horton Foote went to the Pasadena Playhouse for more training, and it was there that his career began. Many of literary agent Audrey Wood’s clients depended on her script feedback and career advice, just as English writers from Alan Ayckbourn, Caryl Churchill, and David Hare to Joe Orton depended on Peggy Ramsay’s agenting and advising skills in London. Ramsay literally created Orton’s career, discovering his work when he was an impoverished writer on welfare. And if you look at these writers, you can see that they were attempting to do vastly different things with their equally great playwriting skills. Ayckbourn, as The Norman Conquests attests, is at heart an experimental writer whose focus is on the power of company-created theater: actors working together over time in a community in which they live, doing plays that reflect and question the values and life of their community. This is a mission I would love to see encouraged in the United States. Hare

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is a political writer of passion and power and in his heyday took on every aspect of the British establishment—from the press to the judiciary to foreign policy—in the major theatrical arenas of the United Kingdom. Caryl Churchill revolutionized both the subject matter and way of creating plays with her brilliant political vision, provocative storytelling skills, and radical staging notions. And with his roots and inspiration in the Greeks and in French farce, Joe Orton brought his wild and fantastic physical humor to bear on the hypocrisies of English life, with a special, early focus on LGBTQ characters. These examples of writers and their support systems mirror the devotion of novelists like Hemingway, Thomas Wolfe, and Fitzgerald to Maxwell Perkins, the Scribner editor who carefully nurtured their writing. And there are countless other such relationships in the history of publishing. The writers’ work was understood, and their professional and personal challenges navigated, with the help of these colleagues. These are models to aspire to. Since a new play often arrives before a director is engaged, the choice of director can also be a crucial decision that a dramaturg may be party to. This choice can take the play into vastly different territory depending on the kind of director who comes on to the project. And it’s important to note that once a director is “attached” to the play, all script notes you want to give to the author must be discussed with the director before you give them to the author. There needs to be a common vision focused on the path forward, not conflicting advice. In rehearsal, if you and the director don’t agree, the director’s vision takes precedence. But it should never come to that. I am often slow to understand a play. Like a director who works with a great play and finishes a production with questions still unanswered, mysteries they hope to address the next time they direct the play—I often wait for a play to reveal how it works in rehearsal, and let a good director or actor address a question I have. They usually sense if there’s a problem too. A play may not open up quickly. For instance, in Bruce Norris’s unbelievably prescient play Domesticated, a rare play I commissioned, which Anna Shapiro directed here at Lincoln Center Theater, a successful politician, played at LCT by Jeff Goldblum, is married to his former college sweetheart. As his sexual transgressions play out in the protagonists’ prosperous Upper East Side household, we see their marriage dissolve. Written just as the Eliot Spitzer scandal broke and years before the #MeToo movement, the play was sensationally accurate and cutting about the politician’s be-

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havior and the reaction of his wife and daughters. I was being driven crazy by a single line spoken by his wife, played by Laurie Metcalf, who tells her daughters that after the scandal has cost their father his job, they have to downsize financially. She tells them, “Pilar’s going to show us how to use the washer and dryer and the vacuum cleaner.” I told Bruce I found the final part of the line gratuitous and, realistically, I didn’t believe a couple who had lived together as college students would not have known how to turn on a vacuum cleaner. Maybe they hadn’t vacuumed in a long time, but not to know how to operate this ordinary machine? Bruce wanted the line left intact. Anna was on my side. And it was Laurie who solved the problem. In the third week of rehearsal, she said, “I know how to make this work. I’ll say it as a joke.” So the line turned into a real asset, a character insight, and the way it was meant to function was not revealed until the play was ready to leave the rehearsal room. Bruce had been right. All writers have readers they trust. These readers might be their spouses, agents, friends, fellow playwrights, actors, dramaturgs, or directors. A carefully chosen observation can open up a knot that has been holding an author back. John Guare used to always say that the best notes he ever got early in his career were from the ushers in the second balcony of the St. James Theatre. Sarah Ruhl told me that her play In the Next Room was helped by a note from our casting director here at Lincoln Center Theater. There is no single model for a conversation with a writer. Everything depends on what kind of play it is, on the personality of the playwright, and what stage of development the play is in. There is much work for a dramaturg to do, after reading a play manuscript, before communicating with the author. In brief, this work entails trying to understand both the structure of the play and how the play could work on stage. How to do this? It’s imperative to begin by reading the author’s earlier plays, if they exist. It’s also helpful to have seen their plays in production—productions good and bad—which is why an active theater-going habit is so important. A dramaturg’s own script reports can chart the author’s previous works. In the same way that one immerses oneself in a classical author’s past work and world, it’s important to take the time to see where a new play is coming from. And again, keep close your notes on what you felt the strengths of the play were, so they don’t ever get lost. What follows is one model of a dramaturg trying to understand an innovative new play that has not yet had a production. It comes from a real-life conversation with Sarah Ruhl that I recorded for this book. The

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first play of Sarah’s I saw, Eurydice, featured an elevator filled with rain and three talking stones. Her most recent play focused on the Bush family and the family of King George III. I admire her use of language, or what is usually referred to as “voice”; the astonishing range of subjects, settings, and characters she chooses to dramatize; and the widely different ways she writes for the stage. Lincoln Center Theater has produced a number of her plays including The Clean House, In the Next Room: The Vibrator Play, The Oldest Boy, How to Transcend a Happy Marriage, and Becky Nurse of Salem. As I demonstrate below in our actual conversation, I usually begin by asking writers what drew them to write for the stage, how much they know about theater literature, and what plays they love or hate. It’s a good way to begin, and it will tell you a lot about the work itself as well as the playwright you are collaborating with. “It seems that you and Eugene O’Neill are the only major American playwrights who are children of actors. You grew up with theater in your life and an actor mother who was performing in a specific Midwestern, semi-professional community theater repertory, just as O’Neill’s father was performing in an equally specific repertory of nineteenth-century swashbuckling melodramas like The Count of Monte Cristo. Are your plays a reaction to the plays of your childhood, or is there any connection at all?” “I think there is a huge connection. I’d be sitting in the living room trying to entertain myself and they’d be reading William Inge’s Picnic out loud, or I would be dragged to rehearsals of A Midsummer Night’s Dream at Regina Dominica High School, or I would see my mom playing the nurse in Romeo and Juliet. It was the repetition that was a privilege, because not only is it a privilege to go to the theater, but most kids don’t get to go to the same play multiple times. It’s like the difference between getting to go to a museum to see a painting and the luxury of having a painting in your house. You get to contemplate its meaning over and over again. That’s a privilege that is hard to overstate, when I think about it. Plays were both exciting and also very ordinary, a part of the furniture. My mother started out in professional theater in Chicago in the 1960s and when she had kids, she gave it up for a while and community theater was a way of staying engaged. As a child, I enjoyed watching my mom on stage unless she was dying, which she often was!”

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“When I look at a list of your plays—and I’ve happily read, seen, or worked on them all—I’m struck by the extreme range of your imagination. Your radical reimagining of what the stage can do is so pioneering that I have trouble tracing it back to Picnic. Was that a conscious decision, a reaction to the early plays you knew, or is that a sensibility you were born with? I’m under the impression that your first writing, in college, was short stories and poetry and not plays. I don’t see the connection between Picnic and Eurydice.” “It’s funny, but I don’t think of myself as that innovative. The sources I looked to were always the ancients, and they’re incredibly strange. Ovid is strange, the Greeks are strange, Shakespeare is strange. I think theater fell into a period I would call ‘the not strange’ for about one hundred years—right after Ibsen. For me it was always about looking back, but looking back to the grandfathers. Paula Vogel says that often the avant-garde is looking to the great-grandparents, not the grandparents. If you pair Maurice Maeterlinck with William Inge, then you get something really strange.” “So it came more from your reading than lying on the living room floor listening to your Mom?” “Possibly, and then there’s just the inexplicable. How an artist sees the world. I was really intrigued to learn that Van Gogh really saw Starry Night like he painted it. It was not from his imagination—he had a problem with his eyesight. That was the way he saw it—the blobs of luminosity. I think that’s what we do. We’re not striving for a particular voice—we just have it. Maybe because I started out as a poet, I have a different way of laying things out on a page, maybe the way I hear dialogue is slightly different.” “If you had to take Aristotle’s list of the components of drama: they are (in his order) plot/action, character which he defines as the habit of action, diction, language, poetry, ideas, spectacle, and music, in what order of importance would you put them in your plays?” “I think for me it would be diction, spectacle, ideas, music, character, plot. It’s such an interesting thing. I was thinking about something like this list recently because I went to see J.K. Rowling’s The Cursed Child on Broadway with my kids. We loved it. It was fascinating to me to think here’s this children’s book writer (I know it was a playwright who did the stage adaptation) who essentially created a mythology in a different form. She created a mythos through detail

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and deep character. On the stage, you don’t get the interior landscape, so they replace it with spectacle. Spectacle and story are the two engines of that production. What’s interesting is that when my daughter read the play in its book form—she loves Harry Potter—she was very disappointed. When she read the play, she felt it was not like J.K. Rowling’s voice. But when she saw it on the stage she was astonished. And it’s because the element missing on the page was spectacle. I always have to laugh when I’m walking near Lincoln Center and I see the Juilliard posters: drama, music, dance. There’s a beautiful picture of someone singing—it looks very dramatic. And one for music and the dance poster looks very dynamic and then for drama, it’s just a picture of two people talking to each other while sitting down. How is that dramatic? It makes our art form look so impoverished. So I think of going back to Aristotle. His thoughts on including spectacle, in a way feels avant-garde.” “Artaud says that too, but he says spectacle is the first thing. When I wrote about Robert Wilson’s production of Hamletmachine, I called it Theater of the Unconscious, theater which doesn’t focus on language but uses it as ‘sonorisation,’ which somehow has a progression you discern.” “I think that ‘Theater of the Unconscious’ is a great term. One thing that frustrates me about naturalism is it feels like theater of the conscious. Ironically it seems to all come from Freud, and it makes so much visible that I find it kind of boring.” “I think even Chekhov—I don’t know what percentage you would say—let’s say thirty percent or maybe a little less of a Chekhov play— is under the surface . . .” “Agreed, Anne!!” “And yet that underground part is equally powerful if you can cast it right, and direct it right. The actual dialogue is icing on the cake. I think that’s one of the reasons that I have always tended to wait to talk about a play with the author. I do talk to playwrights before rehearsals. But I like to wait for things to be revealed that are there under the text before I get busy having opinions—because I may not see them yet.” “And I have always found that so helpful. I remember this with In the Next Room. I would say ‘Anne, do you have any notes? What should I do here?’ You get desperate to fix things before they need to

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be fixed. You said, ‘Wait. Let the actors find it first.’ We’re inundated with a world of opinion, our culture is all about opinion, and dramaturgs in a way are professional opinion givers, but I think you are saying you are a professional question asker, a professional illuminator, a Socratic gadfly. That’s a good methodology. It’s better for everybody.” “What kinds of conversations are helpful to you in which stages of the writing and production process?” “While I’m writing, very little. Sometimes I might want to hear pieces out loud, but in private, so I can go right back to write some more. While I’m rehearsing, I love talking to the director and the dramaturg about how the play is living—how it’s functioning. Actors tend to know when something is not working. I feel like if you have really good actors, your hearing is tuned toward them. And if something is not working, they know it. You don’t have to have that many conversations with the director.” “I’ve been in rehearsal with a couple of your plays. My own questions that are unique to your plays—and I’ve always tried to be very respectful of them—center on the fact that you’re not writing in a traditional, psychological way and yet you’ve found success working in theaters with very good actors who are trained to look for certain things: beats, motivation, positive choices, etc. in their training and practice. My interest has been to protect the form that you create and at the same time see if the actors have all the hooks that they need so that they can find their way through an unconventional structure, using the power and the tools that they have. I’ll confess that before we started rehearsals of your play The Oldest Boy—perhaps in a moment of insanity—I went up to my office and typed every word of the mother’s dialogue in the play as a monologue and gave it to the director, Rebecca Taichman. I was thinking that for her and for Celia Keenan-Bolger, who would be playing the character, it might be interesting to narrow the focus for a bit to her individual journey to see where you had her going—emotionally as well as in terms of plot. Were all the steps there Celia would need? Even though it’s a play about a particular situation and a particular culture—the very unusual situation of her child being identified as a ‘tulka,’ a reincarnated Lama, it is also a metaphor for every mother’s dilemma—your child is identified with a gift and goes away and becomes something and you have to say goodbye. Though this is about a particular situation, the

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resonances are universal because that’s what we all go through. Celia is a brilliant—and conventionally trained—actor, in the best sense of the word. I was trying to see if she had everything she needed to get to the end of the journey—without ever violating your structure or your play. I see the same issues here as in Beckett. Beckett wasn’t writing anything conventional, and yet very good actors, from David Warrilow, to Hume Cronyn, to Jessica Tandy and so many others— they just jumped into it like into a warm pool. They had all they needed.” “Yes. And I do think if diction or language is preeminent in your play—actors get that. They’re good with language. To use your metaphor: they jump in the water and they swim—if they know that that’s what they’re supposed to pay attention to. If they’re looking around elsewhere for backstory and other things they’re used to, then they start doggie-paddling and they start drowning a little bit. I saw Jessica Hecht teaching acting students a monologue from one of my plays, coaching them how to approach it, and she was so brilliant. She was in my play Stage Kiss. Jessica, would you teach every actor I work with? Jessica doesn’t like to talk much in rehearsal—she’s pretty quiet. When she told these young actors how to approach the material, it was like a conductor: ‘Stop, pay attention to that semicolon, do that again.’ She was like a spiritual conductor. It was just astonishing to see how she knew how to excavate the material, and she had never talked to me about it before. She just did it intuitively.” “It’s not a coincidence that a number of writers have written additional books like your 100 Essays I Don’t Have Time to Write, or David Mamet’s books on acting. Is it because the plays require something in terms of acting that isn’t standard? Or do the plays work better if you do not ask certain questions or should you learn to ask different questions? This would not be a question I would have asked a playwright like Wendy Wasserstein, because those standard acting questions were all valid in the exploration of her work. Which I treasured. When did we first meet? How do we feel about each other? What are the stakes here? In your case, it’s almost like you pay the price of innovation by having to reinvent acting too to some degree, or perhaps not reinvent it, but reshape the process of it. I think for dramaturgs, there’s a tendency to work with what’s known and that may not be appropriate for new forms.”

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“I just go back to this term you used, ‘The Theater of the Unconscious,’ because I think it’s wonderful. I’m always interested in how the actor and writer channel the unconscious material. For me, those questions about backstories, or fixing moments or fixing story, make it way too cognitive. Table work for my plays, I think ideally, is much more about trying to distill the language. Though anything that comes up about the actor’s personal life—all those associations are really interesting to me, and valid and beautiful, and I also don’t need to know anything about them. They also could be intensely private. I feel that same way about the audience response to my plays. Ideally, I want the audience to connect in a subliminal way and feel things that have to do with their lives, but in a way that’s completely out of my control. A writer who taught me a lot about that was María Irene Fornés. Using her great writing exercises, she was all about excavating the unconscious.” A perceptive reader will note that Ruhl is gently giving me Hamlet’s “Advice to the Players” in our conversation—just speak the speech. In 100 Essays I Don’t Have Time to Write she notes, When I hear complaints about this writer or that writer becoming less avant-garde and more commercial, I often think that writers actually have no active interest in the marketplace, but they do, after a time, want to please the very fine actors they work with, and they increasingly try to give such actors satisfying roles, which influences the writer’s aesthetic over time, like the steady lapping of water over a rock. And so it might be worth going back to first principles once in a while and wondering, sitting before the blank page, if one wants to people one’s plays with people . . . or with devils, fairies, furies, and stones. Years ago, Lanford Wilson and his director Marshall Mason visited the Directors Lab at Lincoln Center Theater and Wilson, then toward the end of his life, made exactly this point. He told the Lab he had begun as an experimental writer—with plays such as Balm in Gilead and The Gingham Dog. And it was his closeness to the Circle Rep’s acting company and their many post-show conversations in Greenwich Village bars that had led him to write for the way, he learned, they approached a role. His work became more conventional and, ironically, successful with a wider Broadway and regional audiences as a result.

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Finally, in her invaluable volume from which I have continued to cite, Ruhl includes a chapter devoted especially to dramaturgs. Chapter 56. Advice to dead playwrights from contemporary experts To Ionesco: “I can’t track the rhinoceros’s journey.” To Shakespeare: “You should cut that long monologue. I hate direct address. Also ‘To be or not to be.’ It’s confusing and it doesn’t advance the story.” To Sophocles: “I don’t get enough information about Oedipus’ backstory in the first act.” To Shakespeare: “It is too sudden when the lovers fall in love with each other in the forest. Couldn’t they get to know each other a little better first?” In conclusion, I asked Sarah to give me examples of feedback she’s received that she found helpful, and not helpful, while she was composing a new play. She was kind enough to do this, and I took this idea and sent it to a few other contemporary playwrights. I asked these distinguished writers to contribute helpful and unhelpful comments they had received about their past work. To my surprise, many of them spontaneously mentioned the name of a person who had helped them. That’s how meaningful good advice and encouragement are. It brings to mind the grateful memories of the poets whose very first efforts were lauded by Langston Hughes in an earlier era. It was a lifeline that kept them writing. SARAH RUHL:

The most fruitful comment came in auditions for In the Next Room from Daniel Swee, LCT’s casting director. Auditions are so useful because you hear scenes again and again that you still may be tinkering with. He asked me why the wet nurse Elizabeth never breastfed the baby on stage, and that sent me in a whole different direction in the script. So casting directors, designers, you never know where you will hear a useful question. Mostly what you just want is a lot of love. Dramaturg Liz Engleman gave that to me when I was writing the first act of The Clean House at the McCarter Theater. If you say nothing else, just say “yes.” “Good work.” “I’ve read it,” is the most heartening thing a young writer can hear. Especially if you’re in that horrible, messy stage, and have to try to find a way to push through to the next draft.

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The least fruitful comment I received from a dramaturg was to say I shouldn’t have the word “socks” in my play Passion Play because socks weren’t invented until 1600. DAVID HENRY HWANG:

Most fruitful comment: “You have two characters, one of whom has been wearing a [figurative] mask for most of the play. Then he takes off that mask, but we don’t get to see what happens between the two of them before one of them exits the show.” Least fruitful comment: “That character needs to be more sympathetic.” BRUCE NORRIS:

The most fruitful comment a dramaturg ever made to me was made by my friend, dramaturg Michele Volansky, who explained to me that, when plays are being workshopped, the success of the workshop will be judged (by the dramaturg) by the extent to which the dramaturg has effected change upon the play. Therefore it always behooves a playwright in that situation to change a few minor things and tell the dramaturg how grateful she/he is for their wisdom and insight. The least fruitful thing a dramaturg ever said to me was telling me Clybourne Park would never work as written, because there is an unwritten dramaturgical rule that, quote, “You can never follow tragedy with comedy” and that I needed to immediately reverse the order of the two acts. I didn’t follow his advice. JENNIFER HALEY:

The most fruitful comment a dramaturg ever said to me about a specific play was to say/ask: “What if you add an actor to PLAY this character whose actions we currently only HEAR about?” I can’t remember the least fruitful comment, as I usually forget those . . . TAMMY RYAN:

While at New Harmony Project, I was in the midst of completely taking apart the second act of my play and woke up one morning in tears. I was afraid I was losing the play, and I had no idea how to put

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it back together. Dramaturg Adrien-Alice Hansel said something to me, as she made me a cup of tea, that has stayed with me since and which I repeat often to myself as a guiding mantra: “The only way out is through.” At the time this was exactly what I needed to hear. She followed that up with telling me I could do it, she had no doubt I would do it, and that she would be there for me, however I needed her until I found my way out the other side. The least fruitful comment: I like working with dramaturgs usually and find their insight and comments helpful—especially when they are concrete and specific. Less helpful is the dramaturg who is trying not to be prescriptive—and so ends up being cryptic—while at the same time, clearly trying to lead me somewhere, until I discover exactly what s/he intends, without saying what it is. I much prefer being told directly, even if it is prescriptive, what the dramaturg thinks: cut that scene, you repeat yourself here, this is unclear, I don’t know why that character does that, etc. MOISÉS KAUFMAN:

Dramaturg Mark Bly advised me to keep the editor out of the room until it’s time to bring him/her into the room. And then, give him/her free rein to cut, trim, delete. He meant that the act of creating/writing a new play has two parts. First you create, then you edit. If you start editing too soon, you interrupt the creative process. Or if you don’t edit enough, you end up with things unformed, or formed incorrectly. Least fruitful comment I’ve gotten: “What do you want this play to achieve in the world?” PHILIP GOTANDA:

I’ve worked with dramaturgs here at Cal/Berkeley on two of my plays—one new, I Dream of Chang and Eng, and the other a re-written version of After the War Blues. Being in an academic setting has been surprisingly beneficial as the two dramaturgs—one a professor and the other a grad student—were knowledgeable about intersectionalities of new Asian immigrants and white and black communities and offered good insight to period racial attitudes. There was an intellectual rigor they both brought that I did not normally have access to.

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A thought: With my plays, it’s critical that whoever I work with knows the cultural, historical and societal implications of the play’s world. And that they are comfortable and conversant with the themes. Too much time can be wasted on playing catch up when I’m interested in taking the discussed themes and pushing arguments further. I do find most young dramaturgs are well informed in these areas. Kudos to the grad schools. Sometimes, however, a bit too strident even for my tastes. Another thought: Showing up. I know dramaturgs are as busy or more so than playwrights so it’s encouraging when a dramaturg you’ve worked with and will hopefully continue to work with, “shows up,” at your productions, readings, panels, etc. It shows, quite frankly, that she or he cares about you and your work. That goes a long way towards allowing the playwright to trust the dramaturg. It means the playwright will listen with a more open mind, accept or, if need be, frankly argue some point that is in disagreement. Being too civil and polite can also be a hindrance for some. And finally, allow oneself to look stupid by sharing a “silly” or outlandish notion that, who knows, might be the key to cracking the work open. I also have an anecdotal story about Oskar Eustis that is not exactly advice but was something curious that I took into account as dramaturgical commentary, nonetheless. While working on one of my first plays, Fish Head Soup, I came to realize that Oskar had an unbridled nose for critical social issues floating in the public ethos. He had this tendency to jump up and pump his fist. “Yes!” when he felt the text was addressing an important issue. Oskar also was a good example of “showing up.” While working on this play, Oskar drove five hours each way, to hold a meeting about the work. That’s five hours one way, meet, turn around and drive home for five hours. Could’ve been six, it’s been a while. LYNN NOTTAGE:

Throughout my career as I was building confidence in my voice and struggling with craft questions, I was fortunate to have several dramaturgs who I could lean on for advice and guidance. But perhaps the best advice I received was from director Daniel Sullivan, who also happens to be a marvelous dramaturg.

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I had a scene in Intimate Apparel that was slowing the forward action and grinding the play to a halt every time we reached it. I’d rewritten the scene a dozen times and could not successfully activate it. The scene had some of the most beautiful writing in the play, and yet continued to fall absolutely flat. Finally, Dan said, “You’re struggling to build a scene around one line of exposition that can be strategically placed elsewhere. You’re fighting to hold onto floral language rather than creating meaningful action that will drive the scene forward. You keep bogging us down with the past history of your characters, rather than showing us who they are into the moment. Lose the scene and find an earlier and more subtle place to sprinkle the necessary exposition.” It was painful to cut the scene, but suddenly the play flowed forward. He taught me that less sometimes is more. The action of the play was buried beneath too many ideas and an avalanche of language, and as such was losing its potency and momentum. I learned from Dan how to surgically prune and be less precious about holding on to language and ideas that impede the forward action. It might seem obvious, but in the moment it was a revelation. He taught me the art of letting go. I went back through the play and eliminated all of the fatty excess, and in the process rediscovered my characters. And now if a scene is vexing me, I realize that perhaps it’s the roadblock to preventing the forward action.” TAZEWELL THOMPSON:

Most helpful: these are all from my former mentor and friend Zelda Fichandler, Artistic Director, Arena Stage. Don’t write what you know. Write what you feel. (Zelda) Write what must be written or you will die if you don’t write it. (Zelda) I don’t want to know what happens next, like a documentary. I want to know what happens emotionally next, like life. (Zelda) Ask yourself if what you’ve written is stage-worthy, meaning: is it worthy to stand on its own on the stage, a sacred place. (Zelda) There are parts of your play that are shocking. That’s good. Theatre needs to shake us and shape us and send us staggering out into the world. (Zelda)

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Find humor. Always find humor. Even if Electra’s mother is being slaughtered offstage, I want humor. (Zelda) Let your characters not so much walk in the shoes or shadows of someone, but in their light. (Zelda) Least helpful: I find it impossible to enter your world. I think the audience will find it difficult as well. Please go back and create a world where everyone can enter. You need to be not so angry and put me off, in general; and a white audience, in particular. Your punctuation is pretentious. People speak in complete thoughts and sentences. They don’t speak in short spurts with periods sometimes coming after a single word. Why do black playwrights always feel it is necessary to include a song somewhere in their play? DAVID RABE:

The best bit of advice from an actual functioning dramaturg was the ongoing advice and support I received from Evangeline Morphos when I was doing Those the River Keeps at The McCarter Theatre in Princeton. I was also directing so she was particularly helpful keeping her eye on the text while I found my brain pretty taken over by the task of directing. Also, she was pregnant at the time, and the play trafficked in the issue of pregnancy, or more specifically the issue of getting pregnant; finding the opportune time for sex from Susie’s point of view, which would be the worst time from Phil’s who was trying to avoid, or at least delay the pregnancy. Evangeline had a sharp eye on the matter. Another thought and maybe the most succinct thought on a text that altered my understanding of a play—in fact revolutionized my understanding—came from Joe Papp on Goose and Tomtom. The director and I were in Joe’s office, babbling on about the way the relationship between Goose and Tomtom worked, specifically how Tomtom’s mind worked. And we were explaining how Tomtom seized on a thought and got overtaken by it—in this case the idea that Goose had been a frog at one point in his life. So we were sort of tag-teaming our way along this somewhat idiotic, wholly cerebral course, when Joe brought us to a halt with: “No, no, no. Tomtom hates Goose. He

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hates him. That’s what’s going on here. He wants Goose to know and never forget that he was and is a damn frog.” This idea stopped me in my tracks. The tendency had been to think of the two of them as buddies. A veil melted from my understanding of the play and how to approach it. I knew where it came from in me and what it was all about. The director and I had been completely wrong—Tomtom was a magisterial manipulator—a liar, who would say anything to force things to the way he thought he wanted them, and Goose was a child. Not child-like, but a child. That sentence from Joe opened the way to the heart of the play. Joe also gave me great advice on Pavlo Hummel when he told me to take the scenes which were proceeding in a little too orderly a fashion, and “just put through them into a blender” and see where I ended up with them. Because I knew something was wrong in the way it was “working” or not working at that moment. I did it and it led to organic emotional connections in the sequence of the material, rather than following a temporal one. For the most part I think I escaped really bad suggestions. One particularly comes to mind that was aimed somewhat relentlessly from early rehearsal on—requiring daily resistance—at eliminating a section, mainly a speech that in the long run gave the play its special power. In general, I’ve always felt a play had to find its shape and get up on in its feet and be “playing” to some extent before its nature was revealed enough to determine what might need to go or be addressed. It’s an approach that tests the patience of dramaturgs, or that impulse in directors to shape something, rather than letting its shape emerge and so dictate the further shaping. It’s an approach that has saved many good things in my work and caused some problems, too. To end this chapter about understanding your peers, I can’t help but add an eerily similar anecdote from Stanislavsky’s My Life in Art, where Chekhov stubbornly resists what would have been a disastrous suggestion made by the committee acquiring plays for the large theater that had given  him his first major production, and instead entrusts his new play to a group of young artists. But even with these friends, he is unable to articulate what he wants. However, they respect him enough to take the

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time to finally understand the fundamental notion of how his play, Uncle Vanya, works. ANTON CHEKHOV, AS PER CONSTANTINE STANISLAVSKY:

After the success of The Seagull all the theaters of Russia began to demand Chekhov’s work and began negotiations with him for the production of his other play, Uncle Vanya. Representatives of various theatres visited him at his home and Anton Pavlovich conducted his business with them behind closed doors. This confused us, as we also wanted to produce his play. But one day Chekhov returned home angry and excited. It seems that one of the administrators of a theatre to which he had long promised his play and with whom he was forced to conduct negotiations, had unknowingly insulted the famous writer. . . . at the end of the interview Chekhov was handed a report from the Repertoire Committee of the theater in which there were many flattering words about his play, which was accepted for production in the theatre, on one condition, however,—that the author change the end of the third act, in which the indignant Uncle Vanya shoots Professor Serebriakov. “It is impossible to think,” said the report, “that an enlightened, cultured man like Uncle Vanya could shoot on stage at a person with a diploma, that is, Professor Serebriakov.” Chekhov reddened with indignation at the foolishness of the report and at once broke out into prolonged and happy laughter when he quoted the above sentence, which later became historical. Only Chekhov was able to laugh unexpectedly at a time when laughter was the last thing expected from him. We were inwardly triumphant, for we felt that we were in for a holiday, and that the fate of Uncle Vanya had been decided in our favor. And of course, in the end the play was given to us, which made Anton Pavlovich himself very happy. We began to work at once. It was first of all necessary to take advantage of the presence of Anton Pavlovich in order to have him explain what he wanted as the author of the play. It may seem strange, but he could not talk about his own plays. Feeling as if he were being questioned himself by a judicial examiner, he would grow confused, and in order to find a way out of the strange situation and get rid of us, he would take advantage of his usual statement:

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“Listen, I wrote it down. It’s all there.” . . . after waiting for some time, we would renew our questions until at last, in a word dropped by accident, Chekhov would hint to us of an interesting thought or some characteristic trait of his creations. For instance, we talked of the role of Uncle Vanya himself. It is accepted that Uncle Vanya is a member of the landed gentry who manages the estate of the old Professor Serebriakov. It would seem that we had not far to look. The costume and the general appearance of a landed gentleman are known to all, high boots, a cap, sometimes a horsewhip, for it is taken for granted that he rides horseback a great deal. It was so that we painted him to ourselves. But Chekhov was terribly indignant. “Listen,” he said in great excitement, “everything is said there. You didn’t read the play.” We looked into the original, but we found no hint there unless we were to reckon several words about a silk tie which Uncle Vanya wore. “Here it is, here it is written down,” Chekhov tried to persuade us. “What is written down?” we were in amazement. “A silk tie”? “Of course. Listen, he has a wonderful tie; he is an elegant, cultured man. It is not true that our landed gentry walk about in boots smeared with tar. They are wonderful people. They dress well. They order their clothes in Paris. It is all written down.” This little remark uncovered the drama of contemporary Russian life: the giftless, unnecessary professor [Serebriakov] enjoys life. He has a beautiful wife, he enjoys scholarly fame which he has not deserved, he is the idol of St. Petersburg; he writes foolish, learned books which his mother-in-law, old fool that she is, reads like the Bible. In the burst of general enthusiasm even Uncle Vanya himself is under his influence for a while, accepting him in the light of the Petersburg rumors about him, considering him to be a great man, and working unselfishly for him on the estate in order to support his fame. But in the end, it is seen that Serbriakov is a blown-up soap bubble who occupies a post in life that he has not earned, while the talented Uncle Vanya and his friend Astrov are forced to rot in the darkest corners of the provinces. One wants to call the real doers and workers to the source of power and to throw the giftless and famous Serebriakovs from their high posts. From that time on, Uncle Vanya

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became for us a cultured, soft, elegant, poetic, fine type of man, almost like the unforgettable and enchanting Petr Ilyich Tchaikovsky. When the roles of the play were being distributed, many interesting things took place . . . Chekhov wanted his favorite actors to play all the parts in the play. Otherwise he threatened: “Listen, I will rewrite the end of the third act, and send the play to the Repertoire Committee.” But Chekhov seldom finished the sentence without beginning to laugh and infecting us with his pure, childlike laughter also.

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9

deepen an interpretation a classical play successfully reimagined

I believe the art of interpreting a classical play is the pinnacle to which a team of theater artists can aspire. Perhaps that’s an odd sentence to read after this volume has shared the many joys of working with contemporary authors. I value nothing more than the often lifelong friendships of my playwright contemporaries. It’s a different intellectual challenge to work with classical texts: there’s an urge to delve into the minds of brilliant writers from the past. I am especially drawn to plays by writers whose worldviews have been forgotten or are unpopular today but whose complex characters and unfamiliar actions might shed light on our current time in a totally new way, in a subtle but radical reinterpretation. This can be a fabulously interesting journey to undertake with the right team of equals. The team is led by a director with vision, originality, deep knowledge of a text, and tremendous people skills. Along on the journey go designers, actors, and a dramaturg of, hopefully, equal skill. As the Romanian director Liviu Ciulei once said about approaching a complex classical play, “When you’re climbing Mt. Everest, why not take all the help you can get?” I have avidly followed new interpretations of classic plays over my lifetime, and I think that if you are fortunate enough to have successfully interpreted such a play with subtlety and new ideas maybe twice in your professional life, you can consider yourself lucky. It’s extremely, extremely hard to do. Advice that Michel Saint-Denis gives in The Rediscovery of Style remains a guiding beacon: he suggests fully and completely understanding how a play functioned in its own time—from the words on the page to the play’s original staging and acting style, to the architecture of the original

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performing space and how the play communicated to its original audience. All this needs to be understood to realize a radically new, modern production. An equivalent has to be found for each of these original production elements. The mantra of this kind of interpretation is most definitely, “Ride the horse in the direction it’s going.” It’s the ultimate challenge for an artistic team to take on a great work and find a new way to approach it that doesn’t diminish the text or simplify it. The director guides the designers and a company of actors who are (or who will be molded into) a loving company of exactly the sort needed to realize the new interpretation of the play. The composition of the company (and the relationships between their different backgrounds, experience, and training as well as their fellow-feeling toward the project) needs to be shaped and bonded. And at the end, all this should be tied to a visual interpretation—scenery, costumes, and lighting—that understands and enhances the play in a modern way. Finally, an originating idea of nuance, subtlety, lightness, and timeliness is needed to begin the journey. Without a doubt, knowing where this idea will end up before the work begins will kill the interpretation. For each rare sighting of a real interpretation that lets a classic play breathe, show a never-before-seen relevance to the current age, and reveal its glories of language and construction, there are twenty hamfisted, forced interpretations where the end of the process comes at the beginning: let’s do a production where Coriolanus is Stalin. But even starting with a good idea is no guarantee of success. You can’t force it through the play; it has to work organically. That is always the specter of failure that classical directors and dramaturgs face: fifth-act dramaturgy. You can get the interpretation to work almost all the way through, but not completely. Exemplars of this type of classical directing are artists with vision, knowledge of the classics, and immense people and visual skills. One such director is Ariane Mnouchkine, who approached many classical plays (or compilations of historic texts) with her resident company in Paris, Le Théâtre du Soleil. Her straight-up interpretation of Euripides’ Iphigenia at Aulis, with an Indian-influenced design, was a revelation about the Chorus: each member was a uniquely speaking and moving individual and together they brought Iphigenia and the audience to the realization that her sacrifice was her triumph, her path to immortality. The company on stage moved individually, but they were bonded tightly into a novel vision—of movement and of ideas. Similarly, the great Italian director Giorgio Strehler of the Piccolo Teatro of Milan, who championed the “idea of a theatre as a

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group of people who come together to work hard, yet joyfully, who know how to love and how to forgive each other, and who are happy in what is both the most terrible and the most beautiful trade in the world,” traveled often in his productions to the ancient roots of the Italian theater tradition. His gentle efforts to find the elemental archetypes of commedia dell’arte in a variety of non-Italian classical plays reached an apogee in his legendary The Tempest, where the magician Prospero was literally conjuring all the elements: the shipwreck, the action of the heavens, and the characters of the play itself. In the famous moment when Prospero throws down his staff at the end of the play, his magic ended, the entire handmade commedialike proscenium that had framed the action of the evening collapsed into the audience. The theater was destroyed. Only his mind had held it up; it was his creation. Another tantalizing example comes from Bertolt Brecht’s notebooks, where he discusses a possible place to start an interpretation of Hamlet: the young student from Wittenberg returns to a Denmark of such barbarity that he is unable to make it right using the rational tools he has learned at university. His Enlightenment knowledge is useless to combat the tribal behavior of the Danes, and this realization has driven him mad. The ending is Hamlet’s gift to Fortinbras. The world is better off without people like his family. I think these productions start with an insight, with a glimpse of a possible idea that might find resonance in the text. A director comes to an initial idea after reading and thinking about a play, with the hope that the idea will be rich enough to investigate at some depth. It’s most likely not a conclusion or a complete idea, but rather an instinct to follow an intuition that might lead to something. As one gets to know the play more deeply, the idea will reveal elements in the text that resonate with what is happening in the contemporary world—because that is where the team members are in their real lives outside the theater. A gifted interpreter is specifically interested in finding out more about the present day but through the mind of a great playwright from another time. This kind of classical interpretation is called “Directors Theater,” or “Regietheater” in German, and it has fallen into ill repute as a result of far too many “Coriolanus as Stalin” productions. I spoke with Thomas Ostermeier, the current director of the Berlin Schaubühne, about this subject, in part because I admired a production he directed of Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People, which had toured to BAM. I felt it was in the great tradition of Regietheater. The moral compass of all the play’s characters, into the play’s

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final scene, was very subtly revealed to be compromised in a specifically twenty-first-century way—unfortunately, a way we all know well from just reading the news today. I also admired how Ostermeier had added visual symbols so powerfully into the production: for instance, the actor playing Morton Kill, the rich owner of the tanneries polluting the water of the town and father of the crusading Dr. Stockman’s wife, appeared in each of his scenes with a large, strikingly powerful German shepherd straining on a leash. Ostermeier’s production was set in the present. The newspaper was a modern muckraking alternative paper run by the younger generation in the play, and Morton Kill was dressed in expensive, though traditionally styled, clothes (these clothes are called “Tracht” in German). With each appearance, accompanied by the gorgeous, quivering, highly trained dog, Morton Kill almost didn’t have to speak, so powerful was this image associated with the German past. Surprisingly, Ostermeier told me he had grown suspicious of much “Regietheater” produced today; he said he felt it was often simplistic, and “patronizing: a director is telling an audience what to think. When you have an opinion, you’re not in the show. I tell my actors in rehearsal not to have an opinion but instead to live in the given circumstances of the scene. I like Stanford Meisner. To me, most contemporary European ‘Regietheater’ today is a bad habit I would call ‘Capitalist Realism.’ It only references. It doesn’t effect change.” Looking around at most European classical productions that have made it to New York in the last decade I agree with this. Deborah Warner’s are an exception: Warner’s #MeToo-prescient Medea with Fiona Shaw on a contemporary Beverly Hills-like set, which I saw in 2002 at BAM, was a revelation and it’s well worth viewing in the video archives of the New York Library for the Performing Arts. The art that can effect change comes from a deep and subtle understanding of a great play. This might be a classic text whose reflections on a specific human situation or social dilemma can reveal something new about our contemporary lives—if the interpretation equals the subtlety and insight of the original play. The process of discovery that drove a Lincoln Center Theater production of Measure for Measure, I believe, approached as closely as I’ve been privileged to get to this summit. It was directed in the 1988–89 season in the Mitzi Newhouse by Mark Lamos, Hartford Stage Company’s then-artistic director and one of the leading American interpreters of Shakespeare. Lincoln Center Theater’s artistic director, Gregory Mosher,

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approached Lamos and asked him to select a Shakespeare play, and it was originally planned that the production would play in a year-long rep in a Broadway house with Mosher’s production of Our Town, starring Spalding Gray as the Stage Manager, and Charles Fuller’s A Soldier’s Play. At this time, our productions of Sarafina! and Speed the Plow were performing on Broadway. As it turned out, only Our Town ended up there. The Fuller play was scrapped and the Shakespeare was moved uptown to the three-hundred-seat Mitzi Newhouse on the Lincoln Center campus. I was unhappy but not surprised by the sudden change. Gregory’s excellent Our Town became an award-winning success on Broadway. Such are the advantages of running a theater. However, the possibility of performing in this larger proscenium venue had given Mark and his longtime designer John Conklin the germ of an idea—an idea that was not able to be realized in the Mitzi but one that, I felt, richly informed the ultimate production. For the Broadway venue, the idea was floated to build Measure for Measure’s locations in Vienna (Vienna—what a strange choice of city on Shakespeare’s part!) on a revolve so that they could all be seen simultaneously, if imperfectly, as the play progressed. Duke Vincentio’s adviser would exit the palace at the end of the first scene through a door to the street to find Lucio and Mistress Overdone holding court. And this was as far as the design idea had gone before the venue changed: the entire city would be seen, however imperfectly, throughout the play. The walls of the set would be low enough for the audience to be aware of the other locations. The city of Vienna with all its levels of society, and its outcasts in the country, would exist simultaneously on stage. This scenic idea, unfortunately, was not possible on the Mitzi stage; and perhaps it would not have worked ultimately in a Broadway proscenium house, either. But it triggered an insight about the makeup of this very mysterious city and the variety of people who live and interact there. This germ of an idea began to grow—note an idea that begins as a visual idea—and it combined with a unique insight of Mark’s. This is a play, he told me when we first met about it, that ends with a powerful image—the image of a nun and a monk in a sexual embrace. Shakespeare wrote that image. It’s not in the stage directions, but it’s clear from the play’s text. And in 1604—a plague year in London, during which most theaters were closed and the new King James I, the son of a devout Catholic mother, arrived to take residence (alarmingly) in the Tower of London—both the nun and the monk on stage would have been men. Measure is one of Shakespeare’s great

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Problem Plays, filled with brilliant writing, a profound sense of disquiet, memorable characters, and meditations about governance, power, transgression, and sexual desire. With these two notions held gently before us—an exploration of the makeup of the city Shakespeare had given us, and the final image of the kiss—the journey began. Looking back, I feel that these two rich ideas were large enough to provide a jumping-off point that could carry a team investigating them a good distance. And modern enough too to give the team plenty of room to look around at the contemporary world. In Measure for Measure, Duke Vincentio confides his challenge early in the play, and it’s one that has not aged in any way over the centuries. Vienna had much in common with the New York City we were working in at that time. We have strict statutes and most biting laws, The needful bits and curbs to headstrong weeds, Which for fourteen years we have let slip, Even like an o’ergrown lion in a cave, That goes not out to prey. Now, as fond fathers, Having bound up the threat’ning twigs of birch, Only to stick it in their children’s sight For terror, not to use, in time the rod Becomes more mocked than feared; so our decrees, Dead to infliction, to themselves are dead, And Liberty plucks Justice by the nose; The baby beats the nurse, and quite athwart Goes all decorum. (1, 3, 19–31) Our first idea: the world of Vienna with its many constituencies was our own Bonfire of the Vanities, the best-selling book by Tom Wolfe that had been published the year before about a great city—ours at that time—riven by divisions of race, class, and money. This linking notion was realized (and this skips over literally months of work) not by any literal references, but in the casting of this production. We gathered a company of actors of tremendous diversity—decades before this became a standard idea. And I don’t mean only racial diversity—I mean that the complex and contradictory city of Vienna was inhabited by an equally complex and contradictory company of actors and each one’s style and background butted up against another. The only thing they shared was a brilliance of technique that allowed the words of Shakespeare to be the focus of the production, since

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the play ended up being performed on, essentially, a bare stage in modern dress. The acting worlds that came together and bumped into each other created one of the most bonded and joyful companies I have ever worked with. The cast included the Stratford and Sondheim veteran Len Cariou as Duke Vincentio; Campbell Scott and Kate Burton, the young heirs of two great acting families, as Angelo and Isabella; the legendary Broadway and film comedian Jack Weston as Pompey (playing Shakespeare for the first time); Reggie Montgomery, the first African American clown in Ringling Bros. and Barnum and Bailey Circus and an original company member of George C. Wolfe’s The Colored Museum as Lucio; Ethyl Eichelberger, the legendary downtown performer from the world of Charles Ludlam and John Vaccaro, as Froth; Thomas Ikeda as Elbow; and Lois Smith (whose first film was East of Eden, opposite James Dean, and who now in her late eighties is theater royalty) as Mistress Overdone, overseeing this renegade crew of hangers-on. Other cast members were Bradley Whitford as Claudio, Gabriella Diaz-Farrar as his beloved Juliet, and Lorraine Toussaint as Mariana, the betrayed lover of Angelo. A company of supporting actors of mixed ethnicities peopled our city. I hosted a number of raucous dinners at my home for the company and, much later, the family connection had remained so close that I spoke at the memorials for three of the cast members: Reggie Montgomery, Jack Weston, and Ethyl Eichelberger, giving each one a tribute to his skill as a Shakespearean actor. The Measure production had been their only experience with the Bard, and three more different and gifted men I cannot imagine knowing. Much was made of the diversity of the company in ways that are now hard to imagine. Several of the reviews wondered whether the classic Shakespearean bed trick was believable if one woman was Black and the other white. But in general, the worlds of New York City’s neighborhoods of the 1980s and the strands of its theater traditions during this golden time existed together in an extremely complex way that exemplified without comment Shakespeare’s equally nuanced and complicated Vienna. Nothing had to be said—it was there on stage for the audience to see in the composition of the acting company: the many worlds of a city in crisis, crammed and jostling against each other. Just like what was going on outside the theater. Even a decade after the headline “Ford to City: Drop Dead” first appeared, it was still on everyone’s minds. The difference between an oversimplified, obvious, unartistic exploration of a classical play and an intriguing and memorable one is easy to

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define: the artists begin the latter process without a conclusion. The interpretation tries to be as subtle and as complex as the original text and it provokes and includes the audience’s own multifaceted reflections in its conclusion—it doesn’t preach a simple answer to them. The melding of an original text freely explored in rehearsal with the creative insights of a modern-day artistic team with its of-the-moment concerns determines the success of the interpretation. In our Measure for Measure, the delicately held question we posed as we began was: “Might the idea of the city (let’s call it New York or Vienna) with a unified identity be in fact a thing of the past, fading into history?” Was the city to become, as Bonfire of the Vanities had so memorably depicted, a series of subgroups with conflicting aims, impossible to control, at odds with each other, each with its own set of transgressions? From the mayor’s office to the then ever-present squeegee army, the artists community in Soho, the subway graffiti artists, the new kings of Wall Street, and the increasingly visible drug trade, each group— and there were so many others—existed in close proximity within its own separate world and with its own code of ethics and conduct. And all these worlds, it seemed, were increasingly unable to communicate with each other in the way that makes a city cohere and prosper. Was this the London that Shakespeare was observing in his time as he wrote this play? And does the “Problem Play” nature of Measure emerge from his unease with what he was observing in 1604, one year after the death of Elizabeth I, at the end of a plague year? In the play, each character, each group—from the disguised Duke, to the passionate novice, her erring brother and his abandoned fiancée, the priapic rogues at the “Bunch of Grapes” and the deeply hypocritical young deputy, to name only a few—have made measure of their actions. And each is measuring by a different and extremely inflexible set of ethics. What does this bode for the identity and unity of a city if each group has its own ethical code? “Your measure will be made by the measure by which you measure,” says the Bible passage that gives the play its name. How does such a divided city survive? In the play, Shakespeare gently holds up a possible answer: by exploring forgiveness. Who has the capacity and desire to change? Can forgiveness exist in the real world? If this was a complex question back then in a society with a (perhaps fraying) religious worldview, how even more relevant it is as we look at the play from the vantage point of the present. Perhaps this time was a sea change in both eras. We were trying to chart that change back then in our production.

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As the casting proceeded, Mark continued to work with designer John Conklin. The focus of this production was to be on the speech, the words of the play—not on a set with any kind of literal references. The three-quarter stage ended up being bare—with only a table, chairs with a slightly formal, courtroom-like feel, and a few small set pieces to indicate the “Bunch of Grapes” pub where Mistress Overdone and Pompey hold court and Froth comes looking for them—it wasn’t hard to find dozens of dives like the “Bunch of Grapes” in the five boroughs back then. The back wall of the Mitzi Newhouse Theater was visible throughout the evening, and was covered with Cy Twombly-like scribbles that evidenced the thoughts and concerns of the characters (and the author) with an almost graffiti-like feel that mirrored the graffiti that defaced the cars of the subway trains that brought the audiences to the show each night. On the back wall were words that reoccur throughout the play and they were also in the headlines as we rehearsed: “Authority.” “Mercy.” “Grace.” “Scope.” “Liberty.” “Restraint.” “Justice.” And Nancy Reagan’s admonition to “Just Say No.” Conklin later recalled his feeling that the words were also an attempt to deface the theater, to break through its walls. Audience members remarked that the words drawn in chalk made up an imaginary skyline of a city. Here is where we would begin to go deeper, said Mark. “In the play, and in my work as a director of this particular play, I want to try to understand the idea of forgiveness, forgiveness after trespass, forgiveness that comes from deep understanding of oneself. I think that is an idea that Shakespeare in 1604 found resonant in his own life and I wonder how it plays out in New York City today and how it will play out in my work with this company.” As the play ends, Duke Vincentio says, . . . my business in this state Made me a looker on here in Vienna, Where I have seen corruption boil and bubble Till it o’errun the stew. Laws for all faults, But faults so countenanced, that the strong statutes Stand like forfeits in a barber’s shop, As much in mock as mark. (5, 1, 318) The very mercy of the law cries out Most audible, even from his proper tongue, “An Angelo for Claudio, death for death!”

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Haste still pays haste, and leisure answers leisure; Like doth quit like, and Measure still for Measure.” (5, 1, 412) This notion, an eye for an eye, of justice meted out by one who is himself guilty, is also the focus of Portia’s speech in The Merchant of Venice, and it’s an idea that resurfaces often in Shakespeare’s work. Each of the characters in Measure faces it in his or her own way. The citation above is referenced in almost all versions of the text with the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 7:1–2): “Judge not, that ye be not judged. For with what judgment ye judge, ye shall be judged: and with what measure ye mete, it shall be measured to you again.” This was the question we posed as we began to explore the text. Is there room for forgiveness in an immoral world, and what form might it take today? Is this a positive notion and what are its social implications? It is the idea that Shakespeare uses to conclude the play and resolve the plot. What might it have meant to him in 1604? Exactly what kind of nuance would the ending reveal? Is forgiveness still alive in the world, or is it only meant ironically and forced into practice by law? Do we feel any possibility of forgiving our fellow citizens today? Did he back then? And why is the play focused, in both the plot and the subplot, on ungoverned sexuality and its effects on a city? Measure is a First Folio–only text, so there was no work to be done collating and comparing alternate versions. We played the play in its entirety. We modernized about a hundred words for simple comprehension but otherwise we left the play intact. And often the original words were reinserted when the actors could eventually make them comprehensible after they were embedded in the playing. As usual, most of this happened in the clowns’ world. For instance, Lucio’s “I will .  .  . learn to begin thy health, but whilst I live, forget to drink after thee” became “I will . . . learn to drink thy health, but, whilst I live, forget to drink after thee.” Or being asked why Claudio is to die, “For filling a bottle with a tun dish” became “For sticking a cork in a bottle” to refer to his lover’s pregnancy. We tried our best to follow the scansion. At Mark’s suggestion, our job was to begin to understand what Shakespeare had written by reading in three areas. First, we looked at the sources Shakespeare used and discovered that, once again, he had drawn his plot from an oft-told tale. We were amazed at how he and so many other writers of that time returned to the “bed trick” to resolve the plot—he had just used it in All’s Well That Ends Well the year before. Next, we asked why he

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had chosen to write this play at this time in his life. And, finally, we looked to find resonances to the themes and concerns of the play in Shakespeare’s other writings. We began by reading all of the essays and commentary in the numerous published versions of the play, from the Riverside, Signet, Penguin, Pelican, Folger, Arden, Oxford, and Annotated Yale editions, plus of course the old Measure Variorum. These editions should be de rigueur reading for anyone starting work on any Shakespeare play. The following books and essays also proved influential in our thinking about mercy, and about the play’s characters and their motivations: A. P. Rossiter, “Angels with Horns,” Fifteen Lectures on Shakespeare William Witherle Lawrence, Shakespeare’s Problem Comedies S. Nagarajan, Measure for Measure and Elizabethan Betrothals F. R. Leavis, “Measure for Measure” in The Common Pursuit M. C. Bradbrook, “Authority, Truth, and Justice in Measure for Measure,” The Review of English Studies, October 1941 Bernice W. Kliman, Isabella in Measure for Measure Wolfgang Sohlich, Prolegomenon for a Theory of Drama Reception: Peter Brook’s Measure for Measure and the Emergent Bourgeoisie Robert G. Hunter, Shakespeare and the Comedy of Forgiveness Nevill Coghill, “Comic Form in Measure for Measure,” Shakespeare Survey #8 William W. Lawrence, “Measure for Measure and Lucio,” Shakespeare Quarterly #9 R. A. Foakes, Shakespeare: The Dark Comedies to the Last Plays, from Satire to Celebration John Dover Wilson, Life in Shakespeare’s England Harold Child, The Stage History of Measure for Measure Elizabeth Petroff, ed. Medieval Women’s Visionary Literature: Women and Spirituality in Medieval Italy And a series of books for Kate Burton on the Order of St. Clare. I was tasked with finding the blessings “Attributed to St. Clare” and the vespers that Isabella speaks in Latin in the play. To do this, I visited the Monastery of St. Clare in the Bronx and interviewed the sisters there, who, as I was leaving, offered to pray for our success with the production. We read the sonnets, especially Sonnet 95, “They that have the pow’r to hurt and will do none”; Sonnet 35, “No more be grieved at that which

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thou hast done”; and of course Sonnet 129, “Th’ expense of spirit in a waste of shame.” We also explored Portia’s thoughts on mercy in Merchant and Alfred Lord Tennyson’s reflective poems on Measure’s wonderful character in “Mariana” and “Mariana in the South” from his volume The Lady of Shalott. But most of all we read the Bible, as Shakespeare must have done, vide his play’s title. We know that the law is spiritual; but I am carnal, sold under sin. I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate. (Romans 6:13) But I say unto you which hear, Love your enemies, do good to them which hate you, Bless them that curse you, and pray for them which despitefully use you. And unto him that smiteth thee on the one cheek offer also the other; and him that taketh away thy cloke forbid not to take thy coat also. Give to every man that asketh of thee; and of him that taketh away thy goods ask them not again. And as ye would that men should do to you, do ye also to them likewise. For if ye love them which love you, what thank have ye? for sinners also love those that love them. And if ye do good to them which do good to you, what thank have ye? for sinners also do even the same. And if ye lend to them of whom ye hope to receive, what thank have ye? for sinners also lend to sinners, to receive as much again. But love ye your enemies, and do good, and lend, hoping for nothing again; and your reward shall be great, and ye shall be the children of the Highest: for he is kind unto the unthankful and to the evil. Be ye therefore merciful, as your Father also is merciful. Judge not, and ye shall not be judged: condemn not, and ye shall not be condemned: forgive, and ye shall be forgiven: Give, and it shall be given unto you; good measure, pressed down, and shaken together, and running over, shall men give into your bosom. For with the same measure that ye mete withal it shall be measured to you again. (Luke 6:36–39) Do not judge, so you may not be judged. You shall be judged by the judgment by which you judge, and your measure will be made by the measure by which you measure. (Matthew 7:1–2) Your measure will be made by the measure by which you measure. (Mark 4:26) “Your measure will be made by the measure by which you measure.” This deeply ambivalent sentence from the Bible embodies a universe of

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disunity. Not only does each person have his own criteria of conduct, but each person judges others through a solely personal lens and will in turn be judged only by the criteria of others. Others will act and be judged by their own, different measures. To speak of an agreed-upon code of morality or conduct is a mockery. But how to live together in a world like this? What kind of a society will this make? This Bible passage could be at home in a book on existentialism. And is this how we live today? Was this how Shakespeare saw life in 1604? Is this vision of ambiguous social darkness what the New Testament was addressing? Most importantly, the passage clearly directs a reader away from anything simple—a simple point of view, a simple conclusion. Someone is right, someone is wrong—no one can make a judgment that builds a bridge to others, whether that person is a character or a spectator watching the play. It’s far more complicated than that. It’s a dark place and everyone is working their way forward alone. Forgiveness can come only from deep understanding of who you are and what you value. How to understand and forgive the things that are hardest for one to understand and forgive? These phrases became resonant as rehearsals began and we saw them played out again and again in the action of the play at times comically and at times seriously—with various outcomes, at times reasoned and at times irrational. And we asked ourselves: Are mercy and forgiveness still alive in our own time? Is there a form of governance that can function given the sexual and personally selfish drives of each person? Can individuals change, be forgiven, and come to understand another’s measure? Shakespeare’s dark time was mirroring our own. In 1988, none of this sounded too abstract to me—perhaps because Sarafina! was still playing and we were witnessing the remarkable phenomenon of the Reverend Desmond Tutu and President Nelson Mandela’s Truth and Reconciliation Act start to play out in South Africa after the end of apartheid. The notion of looking within—and of mercy and forgiveness between victim and oppressor being publicly aired and legally resolved— had a radical immediacy. Mark’s work with the company focused almost entirely on acting and opening up the text of this complex and deeply strange play as clearly as possible. He was interested in a director’s own embrace of the challenges of directing, which requires forgiveness at times, as well as an understanding of the scope of the contributions of the individuals in the acting company. He was endlessly patient and loving to the cast—perhaps a reason they bonded so deeply. I recall a rehearsal just for the guards—who also

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played small supporting roles, understudied, and mirrored the company in their diversity and range. Mark told them that their attention and focus— what they did with their eyes while scenes with the principals took place in front of them—would play a vital role in the meaning of the scenes and the success of the production. Kate Burton and Campbell Scott rehearsed endlessly, and of course, after we opened, their scenes kept evolving well into the run. The peculiarities of the text were embraced: its often strange verse, its silences and evasions. Its mysterious shifts from poetry to prose. Why does this play move from verse into prose? Conventionally, with only rare exceptions, Shakespeare’s plots are written in verse and his subplots in prose, but here the writing of the main plot alternates between the two, especially in the last acts. Can this movement from verse to prose be understood as a way to shed light on character? And when Duke Vincentio leaves at the very end to return in the robes of Friar Lawrence—the disguise he has used throughout the play while masterminding the action— the speed with which he wraps up the plot strands and declares his love for Isabella was also embraced with all its ambiguities. The final act of a play such as Cymbeline, which ties up so many loose ends with utter harmony, stands in contrast to Measure for Measure, where the matches made are ambiguous at best and look with unease into the future. And most problematic is Isabella, who has hundreds and hundreds of lines in the play, and who is a powerful force moving the action forward. She is one of Shakespeare’s greatest heroines. But her stern, almost philosophical, unforgiving judgment of her brother’s sexual transgressions reveals a rigidity that is out of step with life. Although he loves his betrothed Juliet, Isabella would rather see her brother die for his transgression. Then in the play’s final hundred lines, she is suddenly, shockingly silent as her brother is revealed to be alive, pardoned and married, and she herself—a virginal sister of the strict order of St. Clare—is suddenly and strangely courted by the Duke, who is robed as a friar. Shakespeare gives her no words. Perhaps in this city in extremis there are no words—only scraps of words and slogans written on the walls. As Isabella and Vincentio approached each other in our production, the lights went out. “Your measure will be made by the measure by which you measure”: a reflection both of Shakespeare’s view of his life in 1604 as well as our own time of corruption and excess. A bad “Regietheater” production would have the Duke rape Isabella at the curtain.

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Kate Burton and Len Cariou in Measure for Measure, 1989 (Photograph copyright Brigitte Lacombe, 1989, courtesy of Brigitte Lacombe)

Numerous ambiguities inform a cautious investigation of this brilliant and challenging work. The fact that Shakespeare is writing a play whose central figures are Catholic—or dressed in Catholic vestments—leads one to the endlessly pondered question of his own personal faith, and his position on the outlawed Catholic church in his time. What does this suggest? And again why this strange setting—Vienna? Not a classic Jacobean city of vice—in Shakespeare’s day (traditionally) this would have meant an Italian location. What about the brilliant fugue and variations on sexual love and desire—reflected in the subplot, as usual, where they are played out with more transparency among Lucio, Mistress Overdone, and Pompey? Sexuality is a part of human nature. Those who repress it (Angelo and Isabella in different ways for different reasons, as well as Duke Vincentio, who allows it to flourish in his city but appears removed from it himself until the mysterious ending) are tormented by this issue. “But earthlier happy is the rose distilled,” says Shakespeare in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. In Measure, it is Mariana and Juliana, two abandoned pregnant women, who redeem their faithless lovers. However, as in the sonnets (where sexual and romantic love are more often painfully thwarted or betrayed than returned), in Measure for Measure there is only an ambiguous end. In 1604, Shakespeare’s

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reflections are in a minor key. In the canon, he is in pretty deep territory: his next play is generally believed to be King Lear. Measure for Measure is a reflection of all his feelings about the varieties of sexual and secular love, and they are all highly ambiguous in this play. The powerful final image sums up these contradictions, in a dangerous, puzzling transgression—on both a human and a philosophical level. It is not a conclusion. It does not convey a message. I think the degree of subtlety and depth with which the audience was allowed to contemplate the characters, situations, and ideas in Measure in our production was a result not only of the acting and the direction, but also to a large degree because of the design. I haven’t focused much on design in this book, but as I look back at a lifetime of work, I am struck by the vital role it has played in the success of so many of the productions I have worked on. I don’t mean success in terms of acclaim or awards, but rather in terms of meaning and experience for an audience. Audiences hunger for information, and will seize on anything to guide and focus their response while they are watching a play. Often it’s the wrong thing, or something that sends them in an “incorrect” direction. I think there is a natural affinity between designers and dramaturgs—especially set and costume designers, who (along with dramaturgs) have the luxury of time to talk and reflect sitting together during long technical periods. Lighting designers have no time here—it’s where they do all their work, alas. For instance, in the production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream at the Delacorte in 1982, James Lapine’s idea had been to people a real forest with a cast of humans and other-worldly fairies. He had hired actors with unique and interesting visual personas, starting with the scene in the almost-dark forest when the tiny Changeling Boy appeared. But on the background of a totally neutral set of real trees and greenery, it turned out that the clothes became the only thing the audience could hold on to for meaning: what period was this set in; was the production meant to be comic? And the realities of show business intervened: we lost the costume designer who had been part of our process from the start, and another designer was hired at the last minute. The then-unknown technician we had hired to work with us on a mechanical levitation device for Titania and Bottom’s erotic bower scene was the later legendary magician Ricky Jay, and he often entertained us in tech rehearsals by flipping individual playing cards from the lip of the stage. The cards flew so far that they disappeared over the back of the huge two-thousand-seat house and landed outside the theater. As we faced the

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small dilemma of holding for a few minutes each evening to start the show, James Lapine asked the shop to throw Ricky Jay into a costume and he sent him (willingly!) out to entertain the crowd. In some measure, the production never recovered from this. The tone was totally and inadvertently set, and the seriousness and quiet beauty we hoped the audience would discover in our hidden corner of Central Park was hard to tease back after this last-minute, remarkably entertaining but stylistically jarring opening. Similarly, in Sarah Ruhl’s mysterious How to Transcend a Happy Marriage, in which a modern, rational suburban marriage transforms into wildness, a semi-psychedelic set unfortunately took away the surprise of where the action would go right at the top, compromising the end of the play. And when the Orphan of Zhao moved from our modest workshop space with its simple white paper floor into the huge expanse of the LaGuardia Main Stage for its run at the Lincoln Center Festival, the simple traces of red paint made by the feet of the actors entering each scene became a lake of blood surrounding the stage with a new designer on board. While powerfully imagistic, it had a totally different meaning. I mention these only to point out the success of John Conklin’s set and costumes in Measure for Measure, which returned the audience’s attention again and again to the language and the actions of the characters. He gave the audience nothing to hang on to except the words of the play. And with the actors in almost anonymous dress—modern business suits, traditional veiled wedding gowns, and timeless ecclesiastical garb, on a bare stage—the audience had to listen. And the listening grew deeper as the play grew more ambiguous and layered—as it is on the page. A problem play by Shakespeare is not a play you can wrap up in a neat bow—with Isabella, for instance, succumbing to the Duke. She doesn’t. Or Isabella assaulted by the Duke. She isn’t. Or Lucio, master of misrule and enemy of order, triumphing. He doesn’t. There is a quiet, uneasy resolution at the end of Measure that hints at the unresolvable tension between our desires and what is required to understand them or rein them in to live together in civic life. These might not even be the right terms—perhaps what is under the spotlight is even more profound—can we judge only with the criteria of who we are? “Your measure will be made by the measure by which you measure.” Along with many of his favorite tropes—the bed trick, the world of the clowns, disguises, the masterminding of the action by the Duke (soon to be seen in another key in The Tempest’s Prospero), and a fearless

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heroine—this is what Shakespeare was thinking about in 1604. And audiences were eager to contemplate the words on our stage wall in the “Drop Dead” New York of 1988. Perhaps not surprisingly, today these same, timeless issues are roiling our entire country, just as they have on many occasions throughout history: “Authority.” “Mercy.” “Grace.” “Scope.” “Liberty.” “Restraint.” “Justice.” “Just Say No.”

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10

see with new eyes revisiting a great classic in yet a new way

Early in my career, I worked as a German-English translator and focused on plays and other material that had never been translated before. This material ranged from plays by Botho Strauss (Big and Little), which is how I came into contact with the Schaubühne artists in the 1970s; Ernst Jandl (From the Frontier—a fascinating experimental play written entirely in the subjunctive tense that I translated under commission for the Guthrie Theater during the brief tenure of Liviu Ciulei); Gert Heidenreich (Weather Pilot, his interesting play about the Enola Gay airplane crew); and the liner notes of the Estonian composer Arvo Pärt’s Tabula Rasa, his first music to be released in the United States by ECM, a German record label. Translation is a fascinating undertaking—immensely deep and interesting. There is no better way to understand a work than by translating it. It’s also a poorly paid, underrecognized profession, and if you translate material that has never been translated before, you can be certain your work will be appropriated and, with merely a few small changes, presented by a non-speaker of the language as his own. So on one hand I was happy to give it up, but I also miss the depths of insight it gave me into the work I translated. While I was working with Robert Falls on Orchards, he was in the process of interviewing for the job of artistic director of Chicago’s Goodman Theatre. He directed our evening well and he also got the Goodman job. Bob wanted to start his tenure with a very strong play in a production that would make a big impression. He decided that play would be Brecht’s Galileo (as it was called in that production), which was to star our mutual friend Brian Dennehy, who would go on with Bob soon after to win Tony

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Awards for their acclaimed productions of Death of a Salesman and Long Day’s Journey into Night. Bob began to prepare Galileo with a text of the play that Adrian Hall had sent him for a production Adrian had wanted to do himself but was never able to realize. The translation was credited to Adrian (who did not know German) and another name I wasn’t familiar with—James Sheville. Bob wasn’t happy with it and after he read a few published Galileo texts, he realized there were several versions of the play. At this point, he called me to come in and help him, and I ended up doing an entirely new translation. During the six months I was working at this (at the same time I was freelancing as a dramaturg at several theaters in New York) the then notoriously difficult Brecht estate signed off on the Hall/Sheville translation. Bob went into production with my text, but it was approved by the estate only after the production closed. I don’t recommend this way of working. I consider The Life of Galileo a perfect play. And I don’t say that lightly. There are other perfect plays, by Brecht and other playwrights as well. But this play astounds me every time I return to it. Brecht wrote The Life of Galileo over almost half his life and it exists in multiple versions, each of which deepened and changed his understanding of this magnificent and very complicated scientist. The play mirrors the radical changes in Brecht’s own life from his early successes in the 1920s to the rise of Hitler and into World War II and its aftermath. The Life of Galileo was one of the plays Brecht began when he fled Germany after his books were burned in 1933, and he was working on it and directing it himself at the Berliner Ensemble when he died in 1956. By then, his view of the character of Galileo had changed radically. This change began at the end of the war after the United States dropped the atomic bomb on Japan. I have found four different versions of Galileo’s short final scene. There are copious notes and evaluations of all the drafts and versions of the play collected in annotated Brecht anthologies, letters between Brecht and his collaborators about the development of The Life of Galileo, and a log recording his own direction of the play (due to his final illness, the production opened after his death) at the Berliner Ensemble. All of these documents make for very interesting reading. When I say it is a perfect play, I mean that when you go deeper into each scene—trying to understand what the scene is accomplishing, why it is written as it is, and how the stagecraft supports its ideas and emotions—a perfect vision for each scene gradually emerges. And since the scenes are

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counterposed in montage style (Brecht’s preferred method of structuring a play according to his critical writings) they build one upon the other to create a shattering and complex portrait not only of one of the greatest scientists in history, but also of science as a profession and finally of Brecht himself. I emerged with one view of the text while working on it at the Goodman, influenced by the company, the designers, and of course Bob Falls. Returning to the play now, I see a completely different side to it. I don’t think it is uncommon for plays of this depth to have these kinds of dimensions. I discovered that the first version of The Life of Galileo was written in sixteen days while Brecht was temporarily living in Scandinavia, during a time he was forced to move from one country to the next as the German army invaded Scandinavia from the east. He returned to the play in Los Angeles in 1944, where an abbreviated version titled Galileo by Bertolt Brecht, English Version by Charles Laughton (who did not speak a word of German) was presented at the Coronet Theater in 1947, with Laughton starring. And the final, longer version emerged from the Berliner Ensemble during the years 1953–56. There is an excellent, albeit very English, translation of this final version by Ralph Manheim and John Willett, the greatest translator of Brecht’s poetry. Brecht came into the theater as a young man with a vision of collective creation—this way of working was manifested in his early plays in Bavaria, through the model he set up in the Dramaturgy Department at Max Reinhardt’s theater in Berlin in the 1920s, and it continued in the creation of his great plays written with countless devoted (and uncredited) female collaborators with whom he had sexual as well as professional relationships. Even in his final years, he wrote poems addressed to his wife and leading lady Helene Weigel when the Berliner Ensemble moved up from the old Deutsches Theater to a newer house (its own building was still not finished): ON THE BERLINER ENSEMBLE’S MOVE TO THE THEATER AM SCHIFFBAUERDAMM

At first you acted in the ruins. Now You’ll act in this fine house, for something more than fun, From you and us a peaceful WE must grow To help this house to last, and many another one.

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And in the Willet volume, this poem is followed immediately by another (especially apt for this book!) addressed to his newest lover: TO A WOMAN COLLEAGUE WHO STAYED BEHIND IN THE THEATER DURING THE SUMMER VACATION

Across the courtyard I see you go into the dramaturgs’ Building and, up the stairs, to the hall where Under our comrade Picasso’s poster, in blue tobacco smoke Plays are cast and texts are cut and new rehearsals Are fixed, while the telephone Forever rings, regardless. I follow you On to the photographer’s rooms and see you Fetch pictures for France and again I cross the courtyard with you and look at the stage Where builders now must be getting rid of those troublesome corners To make room for the new cyclorama for Coriolanus and dropping dust on the place where The chair of Azdak stands. An enormous amount of information about Brecht’s personal life exists, as well as an equal number of opinions about it. As a young man, an early relationship produced an abandoned son who later died fighting in the German Wehrmacht in World War II. A daughter from his brief first marriage became a well-known actress, and Barbara and Stefan, his two children with his second wife, Helene Weigel, oversaw his estate in Germany and the United States, respectively, after his death. Barbara Brecht became the director of the Berliner Ensemble and was married to its leading actor, Ekkehard Schall. From his earliest beginnings as a writer in Bavaria, Brecht led a difficult life for himself and for his family and his collaborators. The extreme decadence and brilliance of the artistic circles of Berlin in the 1920s as mirrored in his plays reflect the particular moral (let’s call it) “rot” of the first third of the twentieth century in Germany. He was at the center of a good deal of it and he too paid a price. Today, I see The Life of Galileo as a more personal play that reflects upon and acknowledges Brecht’s many weaknesses and failings, as well as his many accomplishments. In other words, I now see the play as one that was changed and shaped as Brecht’s life progressed over these decades, as the barbaric times

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he lived in unfolded. Because of its extremely long gestation, The Life of Galileo can in some measure also chart the development of Brecht’s thinking about the monumental figure of Galileo—a man who, as noted, was not unlike Brecht himself in many respects. There were collaborators and translators along the way. Brecht worked with several people on the script of The Life of Galileo over the years, including Elisabeth Hauptmann and Margaret Steffin. These collaborators succeeded one another (they died fleeing Germany or were left behind as Brecht moved to other parts of the globe), new associates joined his project in his Los Angeles exile, and he finished the play largely alone at the very end of his life. The vision guiding its changes remained his own. In other words, to me the idea of collective creation was never evident in this play. When I first encountered the play, it read (and it still reads to me today) as more than a set of ideas about science and society. It is also a brutal view of a groundbreaking, idealistic but often personally weak and cowardly creative genius. These contradictions, good and bad, comprise the whole of Galileo’s character and they are the montage of the play. Recently, I was surprised to come across a confirmation of my hunch in a reprint of a decades-old New Yorker essay by Hannah Arendt, who intuits these two sides of Brecht’s character. Arendt hypothesizes about Brecht’s influence on the poet W. H. Auden from their time together in Berlin in the 1920s and, surprisingly, asserts that both writers were profoundly concerned with the lives of common men and women, less so in philosophizing about politics. As I read the published documents detailing the rehearsals at the Berliner Ensemble under Brecht’s direction in the 1950s, I began to get a new sense of his well-known Epic Theater acting method, discussed in his theoretical writings, where the actor in a third-person-presentational style demonstrates the essence of his or her point of view about the actions of their character. It asks the actors to play their actions as though they are describing the scene of a car accident (or other incident) to a jury. It should encapsulate their critical point of view and retain a distance between the actor and the role. I have never seen this acting method work—even while watching the Berliner Ensemble’s great leading man Ekkehard Schall, who looked like a naturalistic actor to me. (Schall, by the way, was the original Andrea, Galileo’s pupil, in The Life of Galileo that Brecht himself rehearsed in Berlin.) Brecht also discusses his notion of “Gestus”—a physical, nonverbal summing up of the central tenet of a character or a scene. The clos-

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est I’ve gotten to understanding how “Gestus” might function on stage was in another Brecht production, Mother Courage in Shakespeare in the Park in 2006, when the very un-Brechtian actor Meryl Streep wore a soft leather pouch filled with coins hanging low from her belt. Courage was constantly fondling her pouch throughout the play. Enough said. The specifications called for in casting and designing Galileo, like all his plays, are the work of a master playwright: Brecht’s central character opens the play at age forty-seven and ends it at sixty. The character never leaves the stage—a role perfectly aimed to lure a great actor in his prime. The second lead, Galileo’s pupil and surrogate son Andrea, the son of his housekeeper, enters in the play’s second half and carries the play until its end: a perfect role for an up-and-coming future star. The officials, cardinals, and the Pope appear in short scenes, with time to rest in dressing rooms and review their lines before each entrance. And Galileo’s daughter Virginia, her fiancé Lodovico, and Galileo’s housekeeper Mrs. Sarti are also excellent and easily cast roles. During rehearsals at the Goodman, in an effort to meld an American acting tradition with Brecht’s desire for a more objective narrative point of view, I began to look at what made each scene in the play different from the others—not so much in content, but in how the scenes varied in rhythm, or movement, or how they worked in a constricted or expanded physical space. I began to discover something that I had not seen on the page and it became evident throughout the play. Each scene needed to find a rhythm or visual metaphor that contradicted and pushed against what had come before, and that was itself different from any other. The “style” of The Life of Galileo comes from the juxtaposition of these many different rhythms. For instance, I noted the happy bustle of the opening scene in Galileo’s household in his early years in Padua (when everything was innocently hypothetical and not yet proven) has physical indications of comfort hidden throughout: washing, touching, a household brimming with human connection, and a free and visceral feeling of childhood and carefree hope for the future. Later, in the vast rooms of the “Collegium Romanum,” where the Pope’s scientists are deliberating offstage about Galileo’s findings, he stands silently throughout the scene as the monks and officials run on and off (fearful about the mathematical assessment from the head of their scientific order). The entire scene is an on-stage visual representation for the audience of the radical new universe about to be revealed: the rotation of

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lesser stars around an unmoving, newly important sun. “He’s right!” is the word from offstage—the scene’s final line. At the news, a scurrying monk passes out, unconscious. And the scene in which the Little Monk visits Galileo is a quiet pas de deux, which in its simplicity and stillness underscores how clear this new vision of the universe will be to all men. In the play’s famous scene where the new Pope is being robed in his ecclesiastical garments, the audience sees him transformed before their eyes from a man into an authoritarian figure. This new Pope, formerly a mathematician himself, defends Galileo as the scene begins but, once fully dressed, is transformed into an official of the church, and in this new persona he allows the instruments of torture to be shown to Galileo—but only shown, not used. “Mr. Galileo knows all about instruments,” he is told. And the Pope’s dressers are also there to discreetly feed an older actor his lines, should that be needed. In the play’s greatest scene, as Galileo hides his increasing blindness (which has resulted from the secret observations of his newest discovery: sunspots), he hears the news that his former friend, the old Pope, is dying. This means he will finally be allowed to experiment openly and work again after so many years. He brutally sends away his daughter Virginia’s rich fiancé, an agent of the church, and throws open the observation deck to the roof. Virginia, also no longer young, runs on in her wedding dress—her long bridal veil white against the blinding white sunlight. Her future is erased. She faints. “I’ve got to know,” Galileo cries. The terrible, uniquely modern image of an atomic bomb explosion (a sight the world had never seen before 1945) is the unmistakable visual resonance, and the destruction soon to follow will alter the course of the play and the world. Each scene, taken apart, reveals equally unique visual content that supports the action of the scene. It would be interesting to see how comprehensible the play would be if you did a visual—no dialogue—blocking “Italian.” An “Italian” is a very old theater tradition, where cast members gather and, off-book, speak a play as fast as they possibly can. It serves several purposes: to speed up a show that is lagging time-wise and dragging in parts, to remind a company of the unity of action of a play, or to bond or rebond a company together. An “Italian” is fun. Here I’m suggesting (though this would never happen) that a blocking-only Italian of The Life of Galileo might give an observer the exact content of the play by visual symbols and movement alone.

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For the Goodman production, Bob Falls and his designer George Tsypin (who was also the designer of In the Summer House by Jane Bowles) had a specific concept: to move the play forward in time from the Renaissance to the present. The early scenes were staged on a perspective set, which collapsed (Giorgio Strehler-like) in the Collegium Romanum scene at the pronouncement that Galileo’s theory of a sun-centered universe was correct. The antiquated structure supporting the old worldview literally fell away. By the time Galileo was threatened and taken in for questioning, and shown the instruments by the Inquisition, the scenery and costumes were visually resonant with Brecht’s HUAC days, and the production had moved forward several centuries in time. The final scene, a real tour de force in this production, pulled the entire set away to reveal the back wall of the theater for the first time. It showed Dennehy in an almost Beckettian setting: in a Krapp’s Last Tape–like wheelchair, alone in a new, huge, empty universe with his daughter and his guard, and later his final visitor: the now grown-up Andrea, leaving Italy forever because of the repression of scientific research Galileo’s recantation had caused. The production brought Bob Falls artistic acclaim and a big and well-deserved welcome to his new job. Brian Dennehy was superb. It was a huge effort and a great pleasure to work on. When I began to revisit the play some twenty years later, I had a new interest in Brecht’s life and I went back and did some research about it yet again. And a new “take” based on his biography began to occur to me. Brecht was born in 1898 into an undistinguished middle-class family in Augsburg, which was a cultural and social backwater at the turn of the century. Between the ages of sixteen to nineteen, he avoided service in World War I by working in a hospital, so the limits of his education are clear. (His education was very similar to Shakespeare’s, it occurred to me.) In the six years between the end of the war and his arrival in Berlin in 1924, at twenty-six, he became the center of the small nearby Munichbased countercultural arts scene, where he sang ballads, smoked cigars, dressed in black, and had an out-of-wedlock child with a member of his little artistic circle. He also wrote Baal and Drums in the Night and won the Kleist Prize. Two years after he arrived in Berlin, he and Kurt Weill created The Threepenny Opera, which I would describe (pace any purists) as the Hamilton of its time. He was thirty, he was celebrated beyond imagination, he was rich, and he was right in the red-hot artistic center of the world.

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Five years later, Hitler banned all of his work. Just like Galileo, Brecht was put “on the index” in March 1933 in the first round of what were to be over forty lists of forbidden artists issued by various “authorities” by the end of that spring. Brecht and his family left Germany the following day to avoid arrest. He would not return for sixteen years—sixteen years of a thirty-fiveyear career. Also on the first list were: Karl Marx Sigmund Freud Stefan Zweig Thomas Mann Heinrich Mann Franz Werfel Carl Zuckmayer Franz Kafka Heinrich Heine Erich Kästner Lion Feuchtwanger Bruno Frank Georg Kaiser

Arnold Zweig Jakob Wassermann Alfred Döblin Robert Musil Leonard Franck Max Herrmann-Neisse Robert Neuman Oskar Maria Graf Erich-Maria Remarque Alfred Kerr Ernst Toller Fritz von Unruh

Besides these writers, there were the composers Paul Hindemith and Felix Mendelssohn, and the architects Walter Gropius and Hans Pölzig. It’s an interesting list. If you remove the names like Heinrich Heine, Karl Marx, Franz Kafka, and Felix Mendelssohn (already world-renowned, dead, and whose artistic reputations would easily survive) and the Jewish artists already under siege by the Nazis, not many others remain. These particular authors must have been extremely threatening to the Nazis to have made this first list. Some of the books being burned by eager German party members in the newsreels from 1933 are Brecht’s. Hitler also banned the work of these artists in all the countries he was shortly to invade. Novelists who fled—Thomas Mann for instance—had their works translated and lived in exile in the United States off the proceeds of sales through the Book of the Month Club and other sources. On the other hand, literary renown was fleeting for authors such as Stefan Zweig, one of the most popular writers in the world in the 1920s and ’30s, whose work immediately faded into obscurity once he left Europe, and who was a suicide before the end of the war.

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But as a group, the émigré novelists had an easier time. For a German playwright in exile, there was no way to make money at all. Outside of the ever loyal Kurt Hirschfeld in Zurich’s Schauspielhaus, Brecht did not have a production outside of Switzerland from the time of his Scandinavian exile in 1933 until his return to Europe in 1947. In Hollywood during the war, the émigré circle of writers, composers, and above all the film directors Billy Wilder, William Dieterle, Ernst Lubitsch, Fritz Lang, and others were having remarkable success. Brecht was unemployable. An interesting book about this time is City of Nets: A Portrait of Hollywood in the 1940s by Otto Friedrich. “City of Nets” is a line from Brecht and Weill’s opera Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny. By the time Brecht finally met Charles Laughton, it was Laughton who was the star. Only in the small German émigré community in Santa Monica might Bertolt Brecht have been remembered, at best among a select few, as the Lin-Manuel Miranda of a time long past in a foreign land. In 1934, Brecht wrote a poem titled “When I Was Rich” about a country estate he purchased near Augsburg, his childhood home. It begins: For seven weeks of my life I was rich. With my earnings from a play I bought A house in a large garden. I had been Looking over it for more weeks than I lived in it . . . . . . What satisfying proportions! Every room different Each better than the last. And how they all changed with the time of day! The changes accompanying the seasons, no doubt exquisite Were something we did not experience, for After seven weeks of genuine riches we left the property; soon we Fled over the border. Immediately after writing “When I Was Rich” Brecht’s next composition was ON READING “WHEN I WAS RICH”

The joy of proprietorship was strong in me, and I am glad To have felt it. To walk through my garden, to have guests

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To discuss plans for the building, like others of my profession before me This pleased me, I admit it. But now seven weeks seems enough. I left without regret, or with only slight regret. Writing this I already found it hard to remember. When I ask myself How many lies I would be ready to tell to keep this property I know it is not many. Therefore I hope It was not bad to have this property. It was Not a small thing, but There are greater. Galileo by Bertolt Brecht, English Version by Charles Laughton, opened at the Coronet Theater in West Hollywood during a summer heat wave in August 1947 and ran for three weeks: an August opening in an un-airconditioned theater in Los Angeles. Helene Weigel was in charge of wardrobe. The Coronet Theater is still in West Hollywood, unrenovated, not far from the Beverly Center. It seats about 275 people and the interior looks remarkably like the Lucille Lortel Theatre in the West Village of New York today. A modest space. Brecht and Laughton had a happy collaboration and several of Brecht’s poems from his final Los Angeles years attest to this, as seen in a letter he wrote to Laughton concerning their work on the play: Still your people and mine were tearing each other to pieces when we Pored over those tattered exercise books, looking Up words in dictionaries, and time after time Crossed out of texts and then Under the crossings-out excavated The original turns of phrase. Bit by bit— While the housefronts crashed down in our capitals— The facades of language gave way. Between us We began following what characters and actions dictated: New text. Again and again I turned actor, demonstrating A character’s gestures and tone of voice, and you Turned writer. Yet neither I nor you Stepped outside his profession. For the rest of the team on the Los Angeles production, composer Hanns Eisler and director Joseph Losey, it was a less happy experience,

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just as the collaboration had been years earlier between Brecht and Kurt Weill. Before the end of the play’s three-week run at the Coronet, Brecht was called up by the House Un-American Activities Committee as a suspected communist (he was never a party member either in Germany or in the United States—he was never a member of anything), and he immediately moved his family to the East Coast to prepare for the hearings that fall. While Brecht was waiting to learn the date of his HUAC hearing, Laughton was already in New York happily recording his role on a master tape, continuing their interesting discussion, and making notes and suggestions to Brecht from a private studio in Carnegie Hall. Brecht appeared in front of HUAC in Washington, D.C., on October 30, 1947 (the committee interrogating him that day included Richard M. Nixon). Brecht gave a now famous performance as a bumbling ignoramus with limited English. He left the United States forever the following morning with his wife and daughter, the same way he had left Germany on a moment’s notice fifteen years before. His son Stefan stayed behind to attend college at Harvard. The Brechts’ flights to Switzerland were paid for by the U.S. producer of Galileo, T. Edward Hambleton, soon to be the founder of the Phoenix Theater (and later my first boss in New York). In November, when the taping finished, before the New York production opened, as a courtesy to the star, Laughton’s studio sent his recording at some expense by air courier to Brecht in Zurich, in care of the Schauspielhaus, where he had been welcomed home by Kurt Hirshfeld. Brecht’s many long-ago German theaters were in ruins, bombed and under rubble, their Nazi-appointed administrators dismissed. Brecht received the elaborate air package on November 20, an expensive gift when mail service was so unreliable after the war. It arrived just before the play was to open in New York. Galileo opened at the Maxine Elliott Theater on Broadway in early December, and despite Laughton’s renown, it gave only six performances. Laughton, always justifiably concerned that his homosexuality could be revealed and his career ruined (he had hired his current lover for the role of Andrea in the Los Angeles production), “withdrew from the New York production of Galileo at his manager’s suggestion in order to disassociate himself from Brecht’s newly publicized political views.” The “views” had been in the public eye for a month. Before his HUAC appearance on October 30, Brecht had been unknown in the United States. After that, Laughton “never read any story or poem by Brecht in his reading tours. He omitted Galileo from his list of roles,” Simon Callow

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reports. In the Brecht archives in Berlin is Brecht’s final poem about his time in America—in the archive it is titled “Nachruf auf Ch. L.” However, in the collected poems, published much later, it has an anonymous title: OBITUARY FOR XX

Speak of the weather Be thankful he’s dead Who before he had spoken Took back what he said. Brecht never saw the New York production. According to Callow: “When Brecht died, Laughton received a cable from the East German Culture Ministry asking for his reaction. He contacted his lawyer, who contacted the FBI, saying cable received from red country. The FBI indicated that there would be no repercussions if Laughton sent a telegram of condolence. So he did.” Bertolt Brecht arrived back in Europe at the age of fifty-one. In Switzerland, he was reunited with Hirschfeld. Brecht was soon offered the artistic directorship of a new theater that was to be created for him—the Berliner Ensemble—in what was to become East Berlin. But the city was in rubble for years after the war ended, with few buildings standing or undamaged. We know he began to rework the script of The Life of Galileo while closely following the Rosenberg trial in the United States. The newly built Berliner Ensemble finally opened with The Caucasian Chalk Circle only in 1954. Brecht was fifty-six by then, a lifetime away from the confident—and cruel—artistic genius of his few early Berlin years. He began to rehearse his revised Life of Galileo in 1955, and died the following year, still in rehearsal. The play finally opened in 1958, after the Berliner Ensemble’s acting company had returned from a historic postwar London tour, which is universally credited with jump-starting the angry young man movement of British playwriting and inspiring a generation of English directors. As I ended my biographical investigation, I began to see the play in a new way. The Life of Galileo now seemed to be a play of ideas with an equally remarkable personal dimension—a dimension that all the wonderful, attention-getting sets and direction in that first production in Chicago had lavishly and brilliantly covered up. And I stress that I do not see this “new way of seeing the play” as a literal one: I can’t imagine anything worse than putting an actor into owlish glasses and making him a stand-in for a

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Shipping label of the package containing Laughton’s recording of Galileo, sent to Brecht in Zurich in 1947. The handwritten notation reads, “Laughton to Brecht.” (Photograph by B. Witzenhause; courtesy of Akademie der Künste, Berlin, Bertolt Brecht Archiv 3446)

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biographical Brecht figure. Instead, I see it as a new starting point, and one that might allow the investigators of this play to take stock of a great but ultimately highly compromised individual, as so many historical figures are. A shift of focus from the events in the history of science to a portrait of a fallible, courageous, weak, and totally original genius. Like the kiss of a monk and a nun, a place to start. When I returned to my translation so many years later, I tried to see how few production elements The Life of Galileo actually requires (I found helpful photos from the very low-budget Los Angeles production) and I wondered if a reduction of scenery would shift the focus to the acting and the development of the central character. I found that several scenes needed a high place—such as the “above” where the young apprentice Andrea and the future Medici ruler, a boy Andrea’s age, wrestle on the floor over possession of Galileo’s telescope, brilliantly foreshadowing everything that is to come. Another “above” was needed for Galileo and his friend Sagredo, who stand on the roof and observe the heavens through his new telescope and during the night discover for the very first time the rotations of the moons of Jupiter. An additional “above” is needed in the plague scene, when Galileo sends his devoted young apprentice back into the city to retrieve his star charts, endangering Andrea’s life by his unceasing thirst to know, while quarantined citizens fearfully watch from high windows as the boy makes his lonely way. The inquisitor’s terrible room is probably “up” too. And in the play’s short final scene, the adult Andrea smuggles a copy of Galileo’s world-changing work on mechanics and the laws of falling bodies, The Discouri, into Germany, past guard stations that could be elevated to suggest unpleasantly resonant Nazi overtones. There are also references to milk, oddly, in the play. Galileo is drinking milk in the opening scene and there is a glass of milk left alone on stage at the end of the plague scene, which is probably where an intermission could be taken. A new production could try to understand this imagery. Simple scenes of conversation, such as that with the Little Monk, alternate with encounters of intense and complex emotional stakes—such as the recantation in the garden, and the final reunion of Galileo and Andrea in the play’s last, long final scene. These are written in a conversational, powerful style. “Happy the land that has no heroes,” says the incredulous and bitterly disappointed Andrea after Galileo recants. “Happy the land that needs heroes,” is Galileo’s quiet reply after Andrea exits. Galileo’s almost reckless selfishness pushes him toward his great discoveries, but it

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also harms the people closest to him: his daughter, his pupil Andrea, his apprentices, and others who have followed his teachings. He realizes this at the end of the play: For me, the only purpose of science is to ease the difficulties of human existence. If scientists let themselves be put in a position—by the self-serving nature of those in power—of piling up research for research’s sake alone—and if they remain satisfied with that, science will be crippled and all your new military and industrial inventions will only end up being another burden. In time you may well discover all there is to discover, but your progress will be progress away from mankind. And one day, the gulf between you and the people may become so wide that your latest discovery will be greeted by a universal outcry of horror. As a scientist, I had a unique opportunity. In my time, astronomy emerged into the marketplace. For a moment, under these special circumstances, the courage of one man to stand up for what he believed might have had tremendous repercussions. If only I had held out! Scientists might have been able to develop something like the Hippocratic oath, like the doctors, a vow to use their knowledge only for the benefit of mankind! As things stand now, the best we can hope for are generations of ingenious dwarfs who can be hired to do anything. I’m convinced now, Sarti, that I was never in any real danger. . . I have betrayed my profession. A man who does what I have done cannot be tolerated in the ranks of science. Galileo’s daughter enters and responds, “You have been received into the ranks of the faithful.” Exiting with Galileo’s forbidden book, Andrea asks, “Then you no longer believe that a new age has dawned?” Galileo responds, “Oh, a new age has dawned. Be careful when you go through Germany, with the truth under your coat.” And of course, it’s kismet that the real Galileo lived during the time in history when the first stirrings of capitalism began to change the world order. For Brecht, there could be no more important historical period to investigate. This had never occurred to me before, though several of his plays including Mother Courage are set during this era. There are a number of prologues to scenes and one scene itself that bring into bold relief how new knowledge can be seized by common people and used to destroy existing political and financial hierarchies. Galileo says, “That sounds like me. ‘New

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science, new set of ethics.’ ” Or a line we did not use at the Goodman from the Carnival scene: “It’s hot down deep, up high it’s cool, The streets are loud, the court is still.” And how newly relevant in the twenty-first century are the unsettling social effects unleashed on the world by a new technology? This is the real takeaway from revisiting the play. First the atomic bomb. Now the internet. Scientific progress but at what social and personal cost? “The atom bomb is, both as a technical and as a social phenomenon, the classical end-product of his contribution to science and his failure to contribute to society.” While working on the play in Los Angeles, Brecht noted: In the end, Galileo destroyed not only himself personally, but also the most significant part of his scientific work. The church (like any form of supreme authority) defended its teachings because the new world view was a threat to its authority. The people were interested in Galileo’s discoveries about the stars, when all was said and done, because they suffered under the yoke of the church. With his renunciation, Galileo abandoned his teachings, and he left the people in the lurch. Astronomy once again became merely a subject of study, in the realm of experts, without political dimensions, isolated. The church separated the “Problem of the Heavens” from those of the earth and shored up its control, and after that was done, they were happy to acknowledge the new discoveries to a wide public. In another life, I would suggest giving the actor playing Galileo a cell phone in his final scene and I am certain any good actor would feel the urge to pitch it into the audience at a certain moment. This idea today seems too obvious to me. But what I would suggest to the director is to give that actor a phone during the rehearsals of the scene, and take it away at the tech. I’m certain the audience would understand all the implications. Brecht’s life in Berlin in his final half-decade was a compromised and troubled one, constrained by politics and by his stature as a celebrated East German public figurehead. His reaction to the 1952 workers’ uprising, which Günter Grass excoriated in his play The Plebeians Rehearse the Uprising, Brecht’s rumored Swiss bank accounts—all this links so closely to the amoral Mother Courage. Wily and selfish, both the author and his most famous character left behind them a trail of destruction. In Brecht’s case, as well, that destruction fell most strongly on those who had devoted their lives to his genius.

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Here is a poem from Brecht’s final collection, The Buckow Elegies, named after the location of his small country residence outside East Berlin where he lived at the end of his life with Helene Weigel. It is reported that the countryside there reminded him of the landscape of his childhood. CHANGING THE WHEEL

I sit by the roadside The driver changes the wheel. I do not like the place I have come from. I do not like the place I am going to. Why with impatience do I Watch him changing the wheel?

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to a young dramaturg

Like any important artistic calling, dramaturgy is a complex profession and incapable of being reduced to a simple set of rules. I hope this book has been a testimony to this idea. Nonetheless, I venture to make a few simple suggestions to young people who are intrigued by the work of a dramaturg and want to find out more about how to start on a dramaturg’s career path. First and foremost, I would stress that this is the job of a theater person: someone who has an intuitive knack for collaboration and someone who loves being in the theater—with all its messiness and emotions and shifting ground. You can find out if you feel at home in this life by working in different jobs in the theater when you are starting out. You don’t have to excel in them—but they will give you invaluable insight into what your future collaborators know. It’s like a young doctor doing rotations on different wards. I’ve known really gifted actors, directors, and some designers—perhaps in certain cases more gifted than many others who succeeded—who just couldn’t take the lifestyle. Those who seek job security, and like having their opinions received without challenge, will not thrive in the theater. Nor will people not comfortable with acknowledging the emotions of others or who are drawn to absolutist judgments. I’ve found that personality is not really a factor. The greatest dramaturgs I had the pleasure to know, Botho Strauss and Dieter Sturm, had very different characters. Being outgoing, or cheerful, withdrawn or shy doesn’t determine one’s suitability for the job. It’s a gift for intuitive understanding and collaboration that makes the job a good fit. And being very, very flexible.

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I am aware that many of the artists and productions in this book are well known. It was important to refer to plays and people that readers might be familiar with or want to know more about. Many of the artists in this book were unknown when I worked with them. Some saw their careers lift off around the time I knew them. You will begin your life’s work with unheralded artists and as they advance, you will go with them. I incorporated this idea as the essence of the LCT Directors Lab: I believe it’s a false notion that artists are picked out by more established artists or producers. No one picked out Shakespeare. Or Chekhov. Or the Group Theater. Or Margo Jones. Or the Negro Ensemble Company. Or the Steppenwolf actors. In each case, these young artists banded together with a group of friends who saw the world in the same way. They were gifted writers, actors, directors, and producers. Those who made similar associations but did not have significant gifts have disappeared from history. Making a path with a like-minded group of visionary unknown artists is what theater people have done for thousands of years. What is shared is the recognition of mutual talent and the joy of working together. There are innovative people surrounding you right now and you can get to know them and then support, nurture, and spread the word about your shared, exciting new vision of theater. You will find new ways to connect with other theaters to bring the work of your fellow artists to a larger national audience. And you will discover new and better ways to support the writers you admire that will allow them to earn a living without being forced into indentured artistic servitude. It’s your peers you are nurturing. Your career trajectory does not need to steer toward existing stars. The artists you work with now will later be those luminaries. Your curiosity, your ability to extend and refine your dramaturgical skills, and the discovery of your own artistic point of view will develop over time. It will be a welcome gift to your collaborators. I actually believe that the inner circle of collaboration among theater artists is one of the great, equalizing factors that still exists in the world today. To state it even more emphatically: working with a great group of artists is a kind of utopia. I hope you all have a chance to experience this. Perhaps “support” and “creativity” are ingredients essential to this quest. Best of luck to you!

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APPENDIX 1 A DRAMATURG’S TOOLKIT

1. ABCS

Come prepared with the tools of the trade: a mastery of theater history, a comprehensive knowledge of theater literature from many world traditions, an active, wide-ranging, and enthusiastic contemporary theater-going habit, a knowledge of languages, and an enthusiasm for and an awareness of your generation’s playwrights. A dramaturg’s expertise combines a deep knowledge of the text with an understanding of structure—the structure of an existing play, the potential ideal structure of a new play in development, the structure of the creative process (specifically when things can emerge and change in writing, rehearsal, and previews), and, in original evenings you dream up, the concept of an evening you’ve created from scratch with its own unique structure. Take the time to understand—maybe having tried them out for yourself—the processes of the peers you will be joining in rehearsal. The basics of acting, of directing and design, will help you understand the work of the artists in the rehearsal room. Part of a dramaturg’s job is to preserve and record a process—the process of a specific production and how it interacts with the public. The dramaturgy office is a record of each production’s development, just as the production stage manager’s final production script records its realization. The drafts that most (though not all) plays go through are preserved by the dramaturgy office for future historical reference. These might be the drafts of a new play or a new “cut” or adaptation of a classical play. A dramaturg’s files also carefully record the play submissions you read during your lifetime and your responses to each one. First impressions are important and should be noted and not lost. Work on making those notes insightful and informative— not judgmental. The dramaturg is the one who remembers, the one who keeps the whole in mind. 2. RESEARCH AND RECORD—A NEW PLAY OR A CLASSICAL PLAY

As the actor’s training involves the physical body, the dramaturg’s preparation primarily revolves around research and information gathering: information about the play, the playwright, the words and the references and the ideas in the text. It’s important to find out how the play came into being and under what circumstances, who performed in it and where it was presented in the past. This process is identical for classical plays, new plays, or forgotten plays that you have discovered. Find out what others before you have discovered in a play—in past theater 257

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productions or in critical essays about the play text. A dramaturg’s ability to reach out to experts is also important: there will be countless authorities on subjects dealt with in a play. It’s a dramaturg’s job to understand the material referenced in a play, both by reading and meeting people. All this knowledge should be brought into the rehearsal room in a way that is of use to the director and actors. Bring your own 100 interesting facts—ideas and details that you have found illuminating—into each rehearsal room of a classical play. In this way your personality will enter the room and the collaboration. Into a new play rehearsal, bring your knowledge of all the writer’s previous plays and their role models (if any!) from the past. Take your cues from your fellow collaborators: your opinions do not have special weight. Just as a creative idea from a designer or an actor will be eagerly put to use in the room by the director, work to make your contributions original and useful, so that they enlighten or solve problems. Seek to discover all the dimensions of a work. As your own process begins, record what you are discovering and then be ready to communicate what you have found to your collaborators. When the play begins performances you might want to organize any interesting and relevant information you have discovered and share it with audiences in the form of playbills, program inserts, colloquium discussions, lobby displays, or pre-show panels with the artists so you can share the work, the process of the artists, and the play’s ideas with the last key members of the theater community—the audience. 3. ADVOCATE AND CONNECT

Look around, as you see and read plays, and take stock of what is being produced in the world today. Get out of the rut of what is accepted and admired by the mainstream cultural establishment. Seek to enlarge and change the repertory by supporting new voices, or new forms. Find something new in the past. Anticipate what audiences in the future will want to see. Keep the art form alive and engaged with life in the larger world, not just in the theater community. Bring your aunt and uncle to a play you’re working on. Create opportunities that will foster theater which will address contemporary feelings and concerns in new ways. Think of Konstantin’s play in The Seagull. Who first appreciated that strange new form and found a community of readers and audiences for it? Communicate your enthusiasm back to writers. Make things happen. Connect theater people (especially writers) to others you think will make enthusiastic colleagues for them. If you love a play yet to be produced, either from today or from the past, find it a home and a group of receptive collaborators. Join the theater community by being of use. Introduce people. Volunteer to read plays. Meet artists yet unknown to the larger community who speak to your sensibility. Or rather, playwrights who draw you to theirs. 4. LOOK BEHIND THE WORDS

As you read a play, be mindful that only a portion of the play lies in the text. That portion will be greater or smaller depending on the play. Aristotle has something

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to say about this in the Poetics. Look for these other parts of the play—the parts that are not the words. Actors find them behind or under the dialogue and learn how to reveal what they find. You should learn how to do this too. Notice how the structure informs the action of the play. Look out for the physical world the author calls for in the play. Is it realistic, in a certain period, is it not specified? Why? What kind of imagery is the author using? What’s in the stage directions? Are music or other forms of art called for in a text? Is a piano or saxophone playing? What music is the instrument playing? Is the music being played well or badly? Notice how the play communicates to the live audience in space and with what architecture. Finally, with which means will it best connect with its audience: Words? Movement? Imagery? And who is that ideal audience it wants to communicate to? 5. DISCOVER, REALIZE, AND REMEMBER—EXPANDING THE REPERTORY

Find a “lost” or overlooked play or playwright. Discover the hidden treasure of archives and what they contain. Make your own archive of valuable plays. Research a play you feel has relevance to today. Find the contemporary artists who connect to this lost manuscript and can bring it to fresh life, honoring its traditions and heritage, and yet at the same time making it relevant to the present day. A new discovery will require a new audience and a new way of reaching it, as well as outreach and welcome to those who already know and believe in the material but think it has been forgotten. Connect to this community. Then find the audiences it will speak to now. Will adjustments have to be made to the play for the present day? 6. BE CREATIVE AND THINK FOR YOURSELF

As a dramaturg, you have the same challenge as every theater person: to make your mark as an individual artist with your own unique insights. Most theater artists are exposed to some sort of training nowadays, but only a few ascend to be the actors, directors, and designers with a unique vision. As you begin, try to see the world and the plays you read with your own sensibility—as an individual from whatever background has made you. Be honest with yourself. Note your real reactions. If you don’t understand something, and that will happen often, push deeper and try again. Write down what you think and feel. Annotate and make notes. Ask yourself questions. See what others have thought and whether you agree with them. Start to define your sensibility—and when that begins to happen and you discover over time what that sensibility is, find others in theater who share it. 7. GO DEEP AND HAVE FAITH

The plays from the past have come down to us for a reason. Find out for yourself what that reason is. You may have to read very closely, return to a text multiple times, and consult your peers or artists from the past who have written about

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their attempts to climb the same mountain. You stand shoulder to shoulder with people in music, poetry, fiction—and science, for that matter. When you’re challenged, work hard, go deep. The essence of the work and its possible present-day, deeply relevant interpretations will be revealed. 8. LOVE AND ENCOURAGE

If you do nothing else as a dramaturg, just say “Yes.” “Good work.” And listen and watch carefully to see what comes next. Being mindful of others’ states of mind is key to a dramaturg’s work. The privacy and sanctity of the rehearsal room are what will make a great production. Freedom from censure, the ability to try things and make mistakes, are hallmarks of good work in a collaboration. Friendship is also key. And trust. Join the theater community. Support friends. Go backstage after a show. Avoid the autograph mentality. Attend readings. Write handwritten notes to young artists you admire. Connect people. Join panels of prizes and grants. Talk someone into creating a new grant or other opportunity for a theater artist. The respect you gain over time will come from helping others rise to a higher artistic plateau. 9. LOOK OUT FOR THINGS YOU CAN CREATE AND NEEDS THAT NEED TO BE MET

Put together an evening of theater that has never been made before. Support artists in need: in financial need, in need of new spaces and forms and communities. Enliven a neighborhood by bringing theater into it and involving its community. Bring a knowledge of a new artistry, training, or a different way of working into the consciousness of theater artists you know. Find a play that has been overlooked or forgotten. Volunteer at a struggling theater that needs your help. 10. PROCESS AND PROTOCOL: REFLECT LIGHT BACK

Be aware of how a play is written, rehearsed, and begins performances in front of an audience. Each part of the process requires a different form of involvement. A comment or insight that can be helpful or that might change the course of the production will be useless if it comes at the wrong time. Keep the whole in mind: where the play or production started, where you hope it will go, and how it will connect with the audience. A dramaturg’s involvement will change as the process progresses. Once rehearsals approach tech, text changes need to slow down. Some, or most, but by no means all of a dramaturg’s suggestions should be on the table by then. But as the play comes to life and the vast contributions of the acting company kick in under the director’s guidance, new vistas will appear. Some issues will disappear. Others will be revealed. Don’t move too soon—see what you have been given. Reflect light back: “Are you aware that at this moment, there is an echo of an earlier moment in the play?” “Will the audience understand what

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the consequences of this character’s decision are if they have not remembered . . .” Your thoughts, and questions and encouragement, should be shared with your director and, with permission now, the writer. Be aware and respect the protocols of theater collaboration. While these protocols are accepted in many kinds of collaborative circles, they are not set in stone: they have changed throughout history. They are different in groups making theater in different ways. Most theater today is director driven. But there is a long history of theater collectives—starting with the Lord Chamberlain’s Men—whose members had roles that were less narrowly defined than they are today. In the contemporary theater, training has cemented lines of communication that were far more flexible in the past. These can be discussed and changed. Today, actors are not often free to speak to writers. When did this “rule” originate? If a play comes into your theater at your suggestion and you are involved in working with the writer to choose a director, once the director is on board, the director now leads the room. A dramaturg’s thoughts need to be given now to a larger circle. Finally, as the play continues to grow and the production unfolds in front of an audience, the director’s first responsibility is focusing on each day’s work—work with the actors and the physical production. This is often a good moment to take a break for a bit and return with fresh eyes to communicate what is or is not working with the director and writer’s newest changes. A fresh eye, a new insight is always welcome.

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APPENDIX 2 MY 100 INTERESTING THINGS LIST A MIDSUMMER NIGHT’S DREAM IN 1982

FOR A PRODUCTION IN CENTRAL PARK, DIRECTED BY JAMES LAPINE • •

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What kind of a character is Puck? Should there be two or even three Pucks? The characters who mutate and change are Helena, Hermia, Titania, and Bottom. The characters who are regimented and don’t change are Egeus, Demetrius, Lysander, and Theseus. Where does Oberon fit here? Demetrius and Lysander are charmed. The women always see clearly. Why is there no central character? Is the play’s structure reflective of medieval theater staging with many locations juxtaposed together? Is the order in the geometry, the arrangement of the actions, actually the meaning of the play? Is the play a pattern? Do the scenes reflect different versions of a pattern of the same action or idea? In mythology, there is no Theseus-Hippolyta connection. Theseus goes to the war with the Amazons, abducts Hippolyta’s sister Antiope, they have a son, Hippolytus, and in revenge the Amazons invade Attica. Why does Hippolyta speak so little in the play? What was the relationship between Oberon and Hippolyta? “Your buskined mistress and your warrior love,” says Titania. She is an outsider to Athens. How old is she? Is she very young? Can she be our eyes and ears in this production? She watches as we do, from outside, the actions of the play. Is there power in her silence? Does she still have feelings for Oberon and he her? Do we ever see them silently on stage together? Does Hermia have an orgasm during her serpent monologue in the forest at II, ii, 147? Is “Bottom’s Dream” a dream of enfranchisement, power, and love? What is Theseus’ offstage council to Demetrius and Egeus as they exit together at the top of the play? Theseus is the abductor of Helen, Ariadne, and Persephone in myth—all were originally nature goddesses. Demetrius wants what he can’t have, and he wants what others want. He wants Hermia and then, when Lysander wants her, he wants Helena. He seconds Theseus at every turn during the performance of Pyramus and Thisby. Is Helena for him a means to Theseus? Is Demetrius a young Theseus? A lover and leaver of women? Quick to fight? Is Theseus’ council to him how to leave

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women better? What would Demetrius’ dream be? Marriage: the opposite of his waking life? Is he, at the end of the play, blissfully, drunkenly happy? Do the Fairies fall down when Bottom sneezes? The dream warns Helena what could happen. Do Puck and Philostrate have similar jobs as a kind of Master of the Revels? Or is Puck more a slave? Do the mechanicals see the lovers at times during their night in the woods, and use what they see in the blocking of their play Pyramus and Thisby? “Either you or death I’ll find . . .” Is Helena her own worst enemy—does she do everything to herself? Are Hermia’s and Helena’s roles reversed by the end of their time in the forest? Titania/Oberon—does what they say affect the natural order as they say in Titania’s first Great Chain of Being speech? How? When Oberon stamps, is there an earthquake? Do we see the “bolt of Cupid fall” (II, i, 165)? Is the ability to affect the physical earth a blessing or a curse? When they make up, and put their quarrel behind them, can only then the lovers reconcile? When they speak, does the earth move? The power of the word. Hermia, Helena, Demetrius, and Lysander have no mothers—the only female is Lysander’s widowed dowager aunt of great revenue and to get to her they must go through the woods. Are they renewed in the night by the contact with mother earth? When the lovers get into the woods they start to see each other as distorted— a cat, a Tartar, a dwarf, a bead, an acorn. Is Hermia’s blindness a kind of breakdown? Can the fairy world be present outside the forest at the top of the play as it is at the end? Can we see the tricks Puck describes—overturning the milkmaid’s stool—somehow in the first scene if someone—Egeus? sits down for a moment? From the Jung Society Library: an unusual child was handed over in myth for males to raise—so Dionysus was raised by satyrs. Females were too ruthless. Who is the Changeling Boy and why does Oberon want him so badly? Why does Shakespeare tell us why Titania wants him, but we don’t learn Oberon’s motivation? How closely in terms of blocking can we make Pyramus and Thisby mirror the lovers’ actions that the audience has seen in the woods? How do we maximize the contrast between the strictures of the world of Athens and the scary freedom of the forest? And then how are they reconciled on the characters’ return? How can we convey the notion of time and the pattern of the action (from town to forest to town) overtaking the characters?

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Should the forest be gloomy and scary at first and then after III, i—when Titania and Bottom go to bed at Midsummer midnight—do we take our intermission when the forest blooms? When we return after intermission, if taken after III, i, can the top of the scene that follows, III, ii (when Puck tells Oberon what happened), be treated as a kind of teaser—a fast-forwarded recap of the previous action? And with the fulfillment of Titania and Bottom’s dream—in our production a glorious and sexy one, and real—can it launch an action where the lovers’ personalities disintegrate? We like the idea of there being one of two sculptural “putti” in Athens as décor when the play begins and as the Mechanicals exit for the forest, they bump into one and knock it over and it turns out to be a fairy. Theseus sees the woods as only for hunting. When the lovers finally see how they are acting under the influence of the love juice—with this realization, they are brought to consciousness and they stop. Bottom waking up from his dream is the supreme moment of the play. The beginning of a spiritual life. “Dreams on Midsummer always come true.”—Frazier Why, traditionally, does Puck have a broom? Jung Foundation: “Puck is a trickster. The spirit of disorder, the enemy of boundaries. His function in an archaic society, or rather the function of his mythology is to add disorder to order and so to make a whole, to render possible within the fixed bounds of what is permitted, an experience of what is not permitted. He serves the order or the boundary of which he is the enemy.” Bring the forest back into Athens. What was learned? What can the lovers oversee while they are in the woods? Can Hermia see Titania and Bottom? Does Lysander see Oberon go forth with Hippolyta? Does Helena see that Oberon is her protector? Does Demetrius see Titania losing the Changeling Boy to Oberon? Do we? Hermia passes through sex, anger, rejection, to an understanding of ambiguity.

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APPENDIX 3 MY 100 INTERESTING THINGS LIST THE COAST OF UTOPIA IN 2006–2007

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Only nobles can buy serfs—decree by Tsarina Elizabeth in 1746 Peasants forbidden to submit complaints against their landowners—1767 decree Population of Russia in 1835—60 million 1% gentry—literate, exempt from taxation, conscription, and corporal punishment 1% clergy 8% professional class 50 million serfs freed by Tsar Alexander, more than 10x number of slaves freed by Lincoln. “Aksakov wore a dress so national that people in the street took him for a Persian.” Herzen p.30 “A passionate man with a ‘leonine physiognomy,’ Aksakov is (and later Solzhenitsyn is in this tradition too) a nativist.” Stankevich (1813–40) died at age 27 at Lake Como. He was “a silver rouble that envies the size of a copper piece” Lenin: “1848 was Herzen’s spiritual shipwreck” Lenin’s later book “What is to be Done?” was inspired by Chernyshevsky’s book “What is to be Done?” In exile in France, Herzen worked with Baron Rothschild to get his fortune out of Russia. The money was invested in American bonds and Parisian property. Belinsky was known as “Furious Vissarion.” His position as a literary critic was anti-Slavic, anti-nativist, and in favor of a new realism, for content over style. Literature should transform society. Belinsky was a big influence on Dostoevsky. Dead of consumption in 1848, he didn’t live to see the literature he dreamed of. Chaadaev—Tsar Nicholas I ordered him to be visited by a doctor daily so his sanity would be questioned $ in the Bakunin family came from the mother Varvara, heiress of the prominent Muraviev family. The family in reality had five girls and five boys— Michael was the oldest boy. Stoppard removed some of the children. “Dahin lasst uns ziehen” quote from a poem from Goethe’s Italian Trip

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Romanovs Assassinated: Alexis (1718), Peter III (1762), Paul I (1801), Alexander II (1881), Nicholas II (1917) George Sand is a huge influence on everyone in the play. An actual friend of Bakunin’s in Paris. Main influence on Natalie Herzen, who wrote her friend Natalya Tuchkov using nicknames from Sand. Sand was Natalie’s model: a liberated, passionate, unconventional, professionally successful woman. Tsar’s title was “Emperor and Autocrat of all Russia.” The Tsar was both a monarch and a priest. The coronation rituals were religious in nature. The country was run by a 10-man ministerial council. Each minister was both appointed and dismissed by the Tsar. The Tsar also had the power to grant hereditary titles. These usually went to men who had achieved high rank in the armed forces and the civil service. Titles and social rank could be adjusted by the Tsar at whim. The Tsar’s official seal was the seal of Genghis Khan—his ancestor. By 1900 it was estimated that there were about 1.8 million members of the nobility in Russia. Herzen’s father was nobleman Ivan Iakovlev, from an ancient noble family closely related to the Romanovs. During Napoleon’s siege of Moscow, he was the intermediary between Napoleon and Tsar Alexander—this episode is recounted in the opening chapter of Herzen’s autobiography. Herzen was illegitimate. His mother, Louise Haag, was German. Herzen’s last name was “Heart” as a token of his parents’ feeling. Iakovlev met Haag when she was 16, daughter of a minor German court official, when he was traveling. Iakovlev had spent time in both Italy and the courts of Germany. Madame Haag returned with him to Russia and they lived together until his death. They were not married in an Orthodox ceremony—she was Lutheran. She lived in his homes, with countless serfs, in isolation. Iakovlev had another illegitimate son, ten years older, by a household serf, but the boy wasn’t well, wasn’t smart, and died young while living on a country estate. Herzen was raised and educated like a legitimate noble son, and he inherited his father’s fortune at his death. Iakovlev had a brother who also fathered illegitimate children—a flock of them by house serfs and others. One of these children became Herzen’s wife. Herzen and Natalia were first cousins who met as young teenagers. Bakunin as a young artillery officer had seen the Polish uprising of 1832 crushed and it deepened his hatred of despotism. Imprisoned many times, Bakunin spent years in jail—chained to the wall in Oltmutz prison after Dresden, imprisoned in the terrible Peter and Paul Fortress in St. Petersburg, and in Schlusselberg Prison during the Crimean War. He came down with scurvy there and all his teeth fell out. The collagen in his joints dissolved and his shoulders dislocated. The new Tsar Alex II personally crossed his name off the amnesty list and only, much later, when Bakunin’s mother went before the Tsar and begged him for mercy for her son, was he

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released and sentenced to perpetual exile in Siberia. As a noble he could not be killed. In Siberia he lived and worked for a mining company. Under the pretense of mining business, he traveled toward Japan and made his escape, via San Francisco and New York to London. This was during the time of the American Civil War. He sought out the poet Longfellow in New York—that was his only wish. Otherwise he knew few people and had no funds. Nihilists—the name is taken from Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons. Nihilists had a “look”—hairy, dark glasses, sexually promiscuous. Herzen resisted their support of assassination and their embrace of violent means and called them the “syphilis of our revolutionary lusts.” Annual Russian tradition on Annunciation Day (March 25): songbirds kept in indoor cages in homes during the winter were set free—finches, etc. Nadar photographed Herzen Alexander II at ascension in 1855 opened the universities to non-nobles, allowed foreign travel, and stopped torture, nostril slitting, and beheading— traditional practices in Russia. “At their meeting, the large gray-haired and bearded Turgenev apparently bent over and embraced Dostoevsky with his auburn beard and pale complexion. The latter reported that he did not like the ‘aristocratic’ way that Turgenev embraced him and offered his cheek to be kissed. Since embracing and kissing on both cheeks was a typical Russian practice, it must have been the manner and not the act itself which upset Dostoevsky.” Ogarev’s prostitute mistress Mary Sutherland had dark hair and her son Henry was five when she met Ogarev. At the end of Herzen’s life, when everyone was living in Geneva, Dostoevsky was also living there with his wife Anna, who was pregnant. Ogarev saw much of them and lent them money. They had little money and few friends other than Ogarev. Herzen was an acquaintance but they didn’t like each other. D was working on The Idiot. Their baby daughter died. From 1852 to 1865, Herzen had at least fifteen addresses in London and the London suburbs. Three of these included Elmfield House; Teddington (1863–64), where he was visited by Garibaldi; Richmond House; Twickenham (1854–55); and St. Helena Terrace, Richmond (1854). More housing references: “Herzen was then living in Putney on the southwestern outskirts of the city. From the center of London one could ride the train to the Putney Station, from which it was only a very short walk to the Herzen residence. The ivy-walled house with its metal roof painted red sat amidst a garden, courtyard, and empty stables and resembled more an English farmhouse than an urban dwelling.” Reference is from (I think) 1858. Herzen, Ogarev, his wife and former mistress Natalia, the children, and servants (Herzen always had several, including at different times a Negro butler named George and

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an Italian cook recommended by Mazzini) had all moved to a larger dwelling in the nearby suburb of Fulham. Herzen was later living at Orsett House, Westbourne Terrace. It was a stone house of several stories with a pleasant tree-lined courtyard. Trotsky in his book The Russian Revolution: “Herzen once accused his friend Bakunin of invariably, in all his revolutionary enterprises, taking the second month of pregnancy for the ninth. Herzen himself was rather inclined to deny even in the ninth that pregnancy existed.” Emma Herwegh, née Siegmund, from a wealthy Berlin Jewish family in the silk trade, converted to Christianity. Her husband George noted in later years her loud voice, aggressive manners, and large nose. Intelligent and educated. Her revolutionary activities with Herwegh led to her family’s financial ruin and they ceased to support the couple. Emma wore men’s clothing in Paris during the 1848 Revolution (see George Sand influence), carried a pistol, and smoked cigars. Franz Wedekind was fascinated by her. George Herwegh was very beautiful. The spoiled son of Stuttgart restaurateur and overbearing mother. Mysterious illness at fourteen (St. Vitus’ dance) cured by animal magnetism—mesmerism—at Tuebingen University. Graduated from university in theology, studied medicine, and, drafted unwillingly into the military, he wrote a protest book, Poems of One Who is Alive. Like Goethe after Werther, he became an instant international celebrity, received by King Frederick Wilhelm of Prussia. His book sold 15,000 copies—an unheard-of number in that era. Rich, sensitive, handsome, and famous, his character “would have better fitted a Marquis of the Regency than a hero of the Revolution.” Emma and George were happily married—Bakunin was a witness at their marriage in 1843. In 1848, Herwegh began his affair with Natalie Herzen. Before that he had a mistress, the Duchesse d’Agoult, in Paris. Emma outlived George by 34 years. She died in 1904. Smoking among Russians, from Herzen’s memoirs quoted by Stoppard: “Heaps of tobacco lay on his table, cigar-ash covered his papers, together with half-finished glasses of tea . . . Clouds of smoke hung about the room from the regular suite of smokers who smoked as if they were in a smoking race, hurriedly blowing it out and drawing it in as only Russians and Slavs smoke.” Herzen’s daughter Liza, the infant in Salvage, tried to follow in his revolutionary footsteps. Taken advantage of because of her money, she committed suicide at seventeen. Nice was a part of Italy at this time. Ogarev was a wealthy nobleman with three large estates that were lost—to former wives in bond, etc. He ended up destitute, supported by Herzen. An epileptic and an alcoholic. A kind and lovely man. Natalie Herzen called him a “gentle, kind, affectionate old bear.”

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Bakunin’s accomplice in the Dresden revolt of May 1849 was Richard Wagner. A “gigantic figure of a man,” Bakunin fought with heroic bravery against the Prussian troops and was arrested. Wagner hid in his sister’s house and escaped. Ogarev and Herzen were short, Bakunin and Turgenev very tall. The Polar Star was the forerunner of The Bell. The Bell was published monthly at first, and soon bi-weekly. It advocated abolishing serfdom, capital punishment, and censorship. Ogarev was the more radical editor, Herzen more temperate. Central character of Nihilist Bazarov in Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons is loosely based on Belinsky. From this novel: serfs kissed hands of their masters in greeting. Westernized nobles shook hands in the “European style” and then followed with Russian three kisses.

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APPENDIX 4 MY LIST OF IMAGES THE COAST OF UTOPIA

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* = Images in the text + = Images not in the text that might be useful to add to our production Voyage * Pushkin at the theater * Pushkin’s duel and death * Offstage bonfire * Bakunin’s sister Luibov in her deathbed is pulled on stage in flower-draped cart, accompanied by musicians + Herzen arrested and sent into exile + Varenka and son go to Berlin + Stankevich’s death with Varenka at his side * MB leaving Russia on tender boat—AH sees him off * Ginger Cat * Fishing Knife * Masked ball with all characters in costumes + the Ginger Cat * Final scene—Chekhovian sunset Shipwreck * Tricolor, Rachel singing “La Marseillaise,” fall of Louis Philippe * Marx with yellow book, red banner * Rioting offstage * Descriptive scene of June 21, 1848—fall of the Republic (Turgenev letter describes this) * Marx again * Paris reception scene—Belinsky exits (last time we see him) + Belinsky’s death * Kolya (the deaf child), “hears” thunder three times * Déjeuner sur l’herbe tableau * Steamer railing—MB and AH + Natasha’s death + Shipwreck death of Kolya Salvage * Kite * Child’s glove * Blackgang Chine from Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons 270

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* Marx * Dream of the Emigrés on Parliament Hill at Herzen’s house + Capture of the revolutionaries Vetoshnikov and Sleptsov + Pauline Viardot—Turgenev’s love + Death of Tsar Nicholas + Death of Twins + Ginger Cat (final scene)

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APPENDIX 5 A SYLLABUS FOR A COURSE ON CLASSICAL PLAY INTERPRETATION

The exercise involves taking a very deep and very loosely structured play—I chose Büchner’s Woyzeck—and working a number of interpretive models through it. First on the list was Aristotle’s Poetics (of course, this was by no means the intention of this ancient treatise) and as a successful example of the guidelines of the Poetics, I used the text of Oedipus Rex. With this reading under our belts, the class attempted to take the text of Woyzeck and turn it (with as little alteration as possible) into an Aristotelian play. Some things fit, some things don’t. The progression of the class is outlined below. After Aristotle came Dryden’s “Essay of Dramatic Poetry” and Racine’s Phèdre, and an attempt to turn Woyzeck into a Neo-Classical play. After this followed an acting analysis text by Harold Clurman or Lee Strasberg and a Method play such as A Streetcar Named Desire as a model, so that the modern actor’s process and a naturalistic worldview would come to the fore. And onwards through Artaud and, at the end, Brecht and his Epic Theater. Today, I would add Sarah Ruhl and her Ovidian Theater to this list. This class focuses on the way the text of a play can be re-interpreted and re-shaped using the visions of these—quite varied—theater artists. This is a class in theoretical dramaturgy. In real life, the organizing model will come from the interests of the artists in the rehearsal room, not from Aristotle. But the process is the same. METHODS OF DRAMATURGY: A SAMPLE SYLLABUS FOR A CLASS IN DRAMATURGY

This is essentially a two-quarter class that with some expansion could cover two semesters. The class uses Büchner’s Woyzeck as a base text and in the course of the semester interprets the text and shapes it for a hypothetical production following the theories of a variety of theatrical approaches. Because Woyzeck’s scene order is historically indeterminate, students can rearrange scenes. No original student emendations are allowed. (no rewriting.) Students can, if desperate, find Büchner material from other plays and texts and interpolate. Interpretations for each unit can be written up as papers, but class discussion to share approaches is a must. SYLLABUS

Class 1: Work through Büchner’s Woyzeck, without outside references or information on Büchner, pointing out how text works as theater, elements of music, casting, etc. 272

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Class 2: Read Aristotle’s Poetics and go through thoroughly. Class 3: Read Oedipus Rex and see how it follows the form of tragedy outlined in Poetics (do this technically—where is the parabasis, where is the anagnorisis, is hero high or low? Go through each section). Class 4: Make Woyzeck into an Aristotelian tragedy. Students bring in their approaches. As in Class 3, they identify (this time in Woyzeck) each part of tragedy-ultimately to see which are lacking. What can then be done to satisfy Aristotle—what must be added or changed or cut? Students present a production concept à la fifth century that would have pleased Aristotle—staging, acting, etc. Class 5: Read Dryden’s An Essay of Dramatic Poetry as a theory of neoclassical theater. Class 6: Read Phèdre and All for Love and see how they follow Dryden’s guidelines. Class 7: Make Woyzeck into a neoclassical tragedy (try French scenes, decorum, etc.). Present production concept. Class 8: Read Clurman or Strasberg or some preferred Method text and go through thoroughly. Class 9: Invite acting or directing teacher to class. Read a twentieth-century play that conforms to Method analysis and go through the play breaking it down into beats, find objectives and super-objectives—do a complete technical breakdown according to Clurman’s or Strasberg’s Method analysis. Class 10: Make Woyzeck into a Method play. Students break it down in the same way and see what’s there to support this way into the play and what’s lacking. Present a production concept for this kind of theater. Class 11: Read Brecht on Theatre and go through Epic vs. Culinary Theater. Class 12: Read The Good Woman of Setzuan or another play by Brecht and see how it fits the definition of Epic Theater. Class 13: Make Woyzeck into an Epic Theater text—what parts would be stressed, what would need to be added (lines from the play as supertitles, music, etc.)? Present a production concept Brecht would have approved of. (Historically, I think there is material from the Berliner Ensemble on this.) Class 14: Read The Theatre and Its Double and discuss Artaud’s vision of theater. Class 15: Read a Theater of Cruelty piece—The Cenci or Jet of Blood. Class 16: Turn Woyzeck into a Theater of Cruelty piece—what would be kept, stressed, what added for production concept, how staged, where, etc. Class 17: Return to an interpretation that honors Büchner himself. Read Büchner’s complete works and get biographical information so much as it is possible.

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Class 18: Present a production concept Büchner would have approved of, in line with his philosophy of theater, playwriting, and politics. This syllabus has been published previously in Dramaturgy in American Theater: A Source Book.

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SUGGESTED READING

Aristotle. Aristotle’s Poetics, trans. S. H. Butcher (New York: Hill and Wang, 1961). Arons, Wendy. “Kurt Hirschfeld and the Visionary Internationalism of the Schauspielhaus Zürich.” Theatre Survey, December 28, 2018. Artaud, Antonin. The Theater and Its Double (New York: Grove, 1958). Ballet, Arthur. “Fifteen Years of Reading New Plays: Reflections on the Closing of the Office for Advanced Drama Research.” Theater 9 (1978), no. 2 . Berg, A. Scott. Maxwell Perkins: Editor of Genius (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1978). Brecht, Bertolt. Brecht on Theatre, ed. and trans. by John Willet (New York: Hill and Wang, 1964). Brook, Peter. The Empty Space: A Book About the Theatre: Deadly, Holy, Rough, Immediate (New York: Touchstone, 1996). Chambers, E. K. The Elizabethan Stage (Oxford: Clarendon, 1923). Clurman, Harold. The Fervent Years: The Group Theatre and the Thirties (Boston: Da Capo, 1983). Conducting a Life: Reflections on the Theatre of María Irene Fornés, ed. Maria M. Delgado and Caridad Svich (Lyme, N.H.: Smith and Kraus, 1999). Crespy, David. Off-Off-Broadway Explosion: How Provocative Playwrights of the 1960s Ignited a New American Theater (New York: Back Stage Books, 2003). Dramaturgy in American Theater: A Source Book, ed. Susan Jonas, Geoffrey S. Proehl, and Michael Lupu (Orlando: Harcourt Brace, 1997). Dryden, John. An Essay of Dramatic Poesy, 3rd edition, ed. William T. Arnold (New York: Andesite Press, 2015). Freund, Gerald. Narcissism and Philanthropy: Ideas and Talent Denied (New York: Viking Press, 1996). Genet, Jean. Letters to Roger Blin: Reflections on the Theater (New York: Grove, 1969). Hagen, Uta. Respect for Acting (Hoboken: Wiley, 2008). Henslowe, Philip. Henslowe’s Diary. Edited by R. A. Foakes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). Hiss, Tony. The Experience of Place (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1990). Houseman, John. Run-Through (New York: Curtis Books, 1972). Kott, Jan. Shakespeare Our Contemporary (New York: W.W. Norton, 1974). Lessing, G. E. The Hamburg Dramaturgy, ed. Wendy Arons and Sara Figal (Abington-on-Thames, U.K.: Routledge, 2018). 275

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London, Todd. An Ideal Theater: Founding Visions for a New American Art (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 2013). Mamet, David. True and False: Heresy and Common Sense for the Actor (New York: Vintage First Edition, 1997). Miranda, Lin-Manuel, and Jeremy McCarter. Hamilton: The Revolution (New York: Grand Central Publishing, 2016). Playwrights for Tomorrow: A Collection of Plays, vol. 1–12, ed. Arthur Ballet (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1966–75). The Production Notebooks, Theatre in Process, vol. 1–2, ed. Mark Bly (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 1995–2001). Putnam, Robert D. Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (Simon and Schuster: New York, 2001). The Roots of African American Drama: An Anthology of Early Plays, 1858–1938, ed. Leo Hamalian and James V. Hatch (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1991). Ruhl, Sarah. 100 Essays I Don’t Have Time to Write (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014). Saint-Denis, Michel. Theatre: The Rediscovery of Style (New York: Theatre Arts, 1960). Shakespeare, William. A New Variorum Edition of Shakespeare: A Midsommer Nights Dreame, ed. Horace Howard Furness (Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott, 1895). Sheehy, Helen. Margo: The Life and Theatre of Margo Jones (University Park, Texas: Southern Methodist University Press, 1989). Shellard, Dominic. Kenneth Tynan: A Life (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003). Smith, Wendy. Real Life Drama: The Group Theatre and America, 1931–1940 (New York: Vintage, 2013). Stanislavski, Constantin. My Life in Art (Cleveland: Meridian, 1956). Tynan, Kenneth. Theatre Writings (Los Angeles: Quite Specific Media, 2007). Zuckmayer, Carl. A Part of Myself: Portrait of an Epoch (Cambridge: Da Capo, 1993).

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NOTES

INTRODUCTION

1. Laurence Maslon, “The Resurrection of 42nd Street,” Broadway: The American Musical, PBS, www.pbs.org/wnet/broadway/essays/resurrection-of -42nd-street. 2. Tony Hiss, The Experience of Place (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1990), 93. 3. Ayad Akhtar, “An Antidote to Digital Dehumanization? Live Theater,” New York Times, AR 5, December 31, 2017. 4. “Audience members’ hearts beat together at the theatre,” University College London Psychology and Language Sciences, November 17, 2017, www.ucl.ac .uk/pals/news/2017/nov/audience-members-hearts-beat-together-theatre. 5. Arthur Levine, “Diversity Is Personal,” Lincoln Center Theater Review, Summer 2000, 13. Article excerpted from the 2000 Teachers College, Columbia University, Annual Report. 6. André Bishop, “Lincoln Center 50 Years,” Lincoln Center Theater Review, Fall 2009, 3. 7. Antonin Artaud, The Theater and Its Double (New York: Grove, 1958), 12. 8. “Comfortable” Exercise: I feel comfortable in a rehearsal room working on: I would, if hired, work on: If I answer “yes” to any questions below, would I work as I usually do or instead change my way of working in some way? I would never direct: Plays written in a style or that require a rehearsal method I am used to working in: Plays written in a style or that require a rehearsal method I am not used to working in: Plays written on the topic of/by authors of my gender: Plays written on the topic of/by authors not of my gender: Plays written on the topic of/by authors of my sexual orientation: Plays written on the topic of/by authors not of my sexual orientation: Plays written on the topic of/by authors of my race: Plays written on the topic of/by authors not of my race: Plays written on the topic of/by authors of my religious beliefs: Plays written on the topic of/by authors not of my religious beliefs: 277

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Plays written on the topic of/by authors of my country: Plays written on the topic of/by authors not of my country: Plays with points of view/opinions voiced in them by characters/authors that I agree with: Plays with points of view/opinions voiced in them by characters/authors that I don’t agree with: Plays written on the topic of/by authors of my culture: Plays written on the topic of/by authors not of my culture: Plays written on the topic of/by authors of my age: Plays written on the topic of/by authors not of my age: Plays written in cultures past/present with unequal participation/representation: Ancient Greece, Elizabethan England, American Drama pre-Civil War, today: contemporary Uzbekistan, North Korea, other? Plays written on the topic of/by authors of my economic background: Plays written on the topic of/by authors not of my economic background: Plays written on the topic of/by authors about whose personal life I know little: 9. Although this book’s focus is on dramaturgy in the English-speaking world, it’s hard to pass over our first ancestor so quickly. Lessing was an artist of rare accomplishment, and his plays are still in the repertory of German theaters centuries after his death. His Nathan the Wise is universally acknowledged as the first European play to focus in an admiring way on a Jewish central character. In “The Hamburg Dramaturgy,” Lessing’s assessment of what plays the audiences of this theater would accept, and how he hoped the repertory might be enlarged, is a model for all of us. Evidently his reflections had no effect: the theater in Hamburg closed a year later. When I read “The Hamburg Dramaturgy” today, besides a continuing admiration for Lessing’s intelligence, care, and thoughtful advice, I also see the limitations of asking playwrights with—by definition—a distinct sensibility to assume a less partisan role in making recommendations to an institution. Because of their own accomplishments (Brecht as dramaturg is another case in point), outstanding playwrights tend to acknowledge work that is created in a mold close to their own sensibilities. Lessing’s own subject matter was unusually wide, but still a caution. 10. Arthur Ballet, “Fifteen Years of Reading New Plays: Reflection on the Closing of the Office for Advanced Drama Research,” Theater 9.2 (1978): 41–44. 11. Todd London, An Ideal Theater: Founding Visions for a New American Art (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 2013). 12. “Kenneth Tynan (1927–1980),” National Theatre, www.nationaltheatre .org.uk/sites/default/files/kenneth-tynan-profile.pdf.

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13. Jan Kott, Shakespeare Our Contemporary (New York: W.W. Norton, 1974). 14. There is an amusing portrait of Brecht’s activities as dramaturg in his early days in Berlin (which revolved largely around which day of the week he picked up his check) in Carl Zuckmayer’s intelligent and touching memoir A Part of Myself: Portrait of an Epoch. Brecht and Zuckmayer, his friend and also an aspiring Munich playwright, were brought to Berlin by Max Reinhardt to work as dramaturgs at the Deutsches Theater in 1923. 15. Wendy Arons, “Kurt Hirschfeld and the Visionary Internationalism of the Schauspielhaus Zürich,” Theatre Survey, December 28, 2018. 16. Lin-Manuel Miranda and Jeremy McCarter, Hamilton: The Revolution (New York: Grand Central Publishing, 2016). 17. Richard Zoglin, “Bigger than Broadway!” Time, May 27, 2003. 18. Richard Florida, “Maps Reveal Where the Creative Class Is Growing,” CITYLAB, July 9, 2019. 19. Robert Gottlieb, Avid Reader (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2016), 122. 20. Of course this origin story is typically complex and intertwined with the intervention of Stoppard’s agent and with Kenneth Tynan, the literary manager who “discovered” the young author. (Benedict Nightingale, “Theater; Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Back,” New York Times, May 17, 1987.) 21. A. Scott Berg, Maxwell Perkins: Editor of Genius (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1978). 22. F. Scott Fitzgerald and Maxwell Perkins, Dear Scott, Dear Max: The Fitzgerald-Perkins Correspondence, ed. John Kuehl and Jackson R. Bryer (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons: 1971), 89. 23. F. Scott Fitzgerald, F. Scott Fitzgerald: A Life in Letters (New York: Touchstone, 1994), 108. 24. Fitzgerald and Perkins, Dear Scott, Dear Max, 82. 25. Francis Fergusson, Aristotle’s Poetics, trans. S. H. Butcher (New York: Hill and Wang, 1961), 62. 26. Michael Lupu, “There Is a Clamor in the Air,” Dramaturgy in American Theater, 1997. 27. Kevin Kline, in conversation with author, October 10, 2017. 28. Peter Stein (Lincoln Center Festival), in conversation with author, July 9, 2010. 29. Jean-Loup Rivière, ed., “Enquête sur un libelle anonyme . . . ,” Les Cahiers, La Comédie Française, 1999. 30. “Poetics,” copyright © 1969 by A. R. Ammons, from The Complete Poems of A. R. Ammons: Volume 1, 1955–1977, by A. R. Ammons, edited by Robert M. West; used by permission of W.W. Norton & Company, Inc.

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31. Bertolt Brecht, Materialien zu Brechts “Leben des Galilei” (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1963). 32. Philip Henslowe, Henslowe’s Diary, edited by R. A. Foakes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). 33. The Peter and Iona Opie Collection of Folklore and Related Topics, The Lilly Library, Indiana University, Bloomington, collections.libraries.indiana.edu/ lilly/exhibitions_legacy/shorttitle/opie.html. 34. Michel Saint-Denis, Theatre: The Rediscovery of Style (New York: Theatre Arts, 1960), 76. CHAPTER 1. FIND YOUR WAY IN

1. E. K. Chambers, The Elizabethan Stage (Oxford: Clarendon, 1923). 2. A New Variorum Edition of Shakespeare: A Midsommer Nights Dreame, ed. Horace Howard Furness (Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott, 1895). 3. Edward Dowden, Shakespeare Primer, ed. J. R. Green (New York: D. Appleton, 1881), 37, 47. 4. Raphael Holinshed, Holinshed’s Chronicles of England, Scotland, and Ireland, ed. Vernon F. Snow (New York: AMS, 1965). 5. James George Frazer, The Golden Bough (New York: Touchstone, 1922), 818. 6. William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. Blakemore Evans (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1974), 226, 1.2.93–95. CHAPTER 2. EXPAND THE REPERTORY

1. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., in discussion with the author, October 16, 2017. 2. Robert Hemenway, Zora Neale Hurston: A Literary Biography (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1977), 136. 3. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Mule Bone Colloquium Series: “Zora Neale Hurston and the Tradition,” January 20, 1991, Lincoln Center Theater, cassette, PS3515.U274 M855 1991 pt. 1, Woodberry Poetry Room, Lamont Library, Harvard University. 4. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., in discussion with the author, October 16, 2017; Alice Walker, “Looking for Zora,” in In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens (New York: Harcourt, Inc., 1983). 5. Arnold Rampersad, I, Too, Sing America, vol. 1 of The Life of Langston Hughes, 2nd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 399. 6. Rampersad, I Dream a World, vol. 2 of The Life of Langston Hughes (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 413. 7. For the New Masses (October 5, 1937: 22–23), Richard Wright reviewed Their Eyes Were Watching God along with another “negro novel.” To him

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Hurston’s book was a kind of minstrel show, http://people.virginia.edu/~sfr/ enam358/wrightrev.html. 8. Zora Neale Hurston, Mules and Men (New York: Harper and Row, 1990), 4. 9. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Mule Bone: A Comedy of Negro Life (New York: Harper Collins, 1991), 22. 10. Arnold Rampersad, “Mule Bone: a discussion in the rehearsal room and in Gregory Mosher’s office,” November 28, 1988, Lincoln Center Theater, cassette, PS3515.U274 M855 1991 pt. 6, Woodberry Poetry Room, Lamont Library, Harvard University. 11. Ntozake Shange, “Mule Bone: a discussion in the rehearsal room and in Gregory Mosher’s office,” November 28, 1988, Lincoln Center Theater, cassette, PS3515.U274 M855 1991 pt. 6, Woodberry Poetry Room, Lamont Library, Harvard University. 12. Steve Carter, “Mule Bone: a discussion in the rehearsal room and in Gregory Mosher’s office,” November 28, 1988, Lincoln Center Theater, cassette, PS3515.U274 M855 1991 pt. 6, Woodberry Poetry Room, Lamont Library, Harvard University. 13. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., in discussion with the author, October 16, 2017. 14. Taj’s personal connection to the material grew as the project moved forward. At our “Music of Mule Bone” colloquium, he noted, I had read Zora. I came to her on my own, I used to be a farmer before I played music. I really like mules and she was talkin’ about mules and men. And I said, “Wow, a lady talkin’ about mules? I don’t ever hear no sister talkin’ about mules. What she got to say?” So I was really thrilled and then I fell in love with her like a fool. I’d only read this much, this much of Langston—only one play and one poem. One of the things I took into consideration when I took this project on were the poems that were given to me and what they talk about. They came to me sounding like songs, begging and aching to have some music put behind them. After reading both volumes of Langston’s biography, I was fired up sufficiently to be able to sit down and just open my ears up, read a poem and almost with my eyes closed hear the music come in and say “Yeah, that’s what I want to do right there.” A lot of people ask me, “Well, Mr. Mahal, what did you actually do when you heard the poem and then put it together with the music?” At this particular point in time, it’s almost like you get to a point where you just quiet yourself down in the center and just hear it come in. It was very exciting to work with Langston’s lyrics. They have a way of being musical when you read them. This is something the Africans picked up on when he was first writing— Langston went over to Africa many times playing music in the form of his

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poetry. And what really struck me was how easily HIS songs found their way to the music. (Taj Mahal, Mule Bone Colloquium Series: “The Music of Mule Bone,” January 27, 1991, PS3515.U274 M855 1991 pt. 2) 15. Arnold Rampersad, Avery Brooks, Steve Coleman, et al., “Langston Hughes: A Birthday Celebration,” February 3, 1991, PS3515.U274 M855 1991 pt. 3. 16. Roy DeCarava, Mule Bone Colloquium Series: “Langston Hughes: A Birthday Celebration,” February 3, 1991, PS3515.U274 M855 1991 pt. 3. 17. Arnold Rampersad, I Dream a World, vol. 2, 313. 18. Rampersad, I Dream a World, vol. 2, 311. 19. There is now a CD of “The Music of Mule Bone” by Taj Mahal. 20. Langston Hughes, Selected Poems of Langston Hughes, ed. Arnold Rampersad (New York: Vintage Classics, 1959), 138. 21. Rampersad, I Dream a World, vol. 2, 403. 22. John Houseman, Run-Through (New York: Curtis Books, 1972), 205. CHAPTER 3. LOVE AND ENCOURAGE

1. Uncommon Women and Others, dir. Merrily Mossman and Steven Robman, by Wendy Wasserstein, featuring Jill Eikenberry, Ann McDonough, Alma Cuervo, Ellen Parker, Swoosie Kurtz, Josephine Nichols, Cynthia Herman, Meryl Streep, Anna Levine, and Alexander Scourby, Great Performances, PBS, May 1978. 2. Wendy Wasserstein, The Heidi Chronicles, Uncommon Women and Others, and Isn’t It Romantic (New York: Vintage, 1990), front cover. 3. Wikipedia contributors, “Peter Riegert,” Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Peter_Riegert&oldid= 804645197 (accessed November 16, 2017). 4. Wendy Wasserstein, Third (New York: Dramatists Play Service, 2008), 71. 5. John Simon, “Review: The Heidi Chronicles,” New York Magazine, January 2, 1989, 48. 6. Alisa Solomon, “Why The Heidi Chronicles Failed to Find a New Audience,” The Nation, April 24, 2015, www.thenation.com/article/why-heidi -chronicles-failed-find-new-audience. 7. Judith Miller, “Theater: The Secret Wendy Wasserstein,” New York Times, October 18, 1992. 8. Karin Lipson, “The Heidi Question,” New York Newsday, January 30, 1989, Special Section, Part 2, 14. 9. Ibid. CHAPTER 4. REFLECT LIGHT BACK

1. Anthony Grafton, “Stoppard’s Romance,” New York Review of Books, May 31, 2007.

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2. Elena Vitenberg, in an email conversation with author, August 1, 2006. 3. Julie Bosman, “From Unread to In Demand, Thanks to Utopia,” New York Times, January 26, 2007. 4. Ethan Hawke, “Bakunin’s Journal,” Lincoln Center Theater Review, 49–50 (2009–10): 23. CHAPTER 5. CREATE WORK AND OPPORTUNITIES

1. Arthur Lubow, “Tony Kushner’s Paradise Lost,” New Yorker, November 30, 1992. 2. “Lynn M. Thomson,” Internet Broadway Database, www.ibdb.com/ broadway-cast-staff/lynn-m-thomson-75047. 3. Anton Pavlovich Chekhov and Matthew Josephson, The Personal Papers of Anton Chekhov (Lear: New York, 1948), 103, 60, 36. 4. Anton Pavlovich Chekhov, The Unknown Chekhov: Stories and Other Writings, trans. Avrahm Yarmolinksy (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1954). 5. David Mamet, “Vint,” Orchards (Alfred A. Knopf: New York, 1986). 6. Harvey Pitcher, The Chekhov Play: A New Interpretation (University of California Press, 1984). 7. Spalding Gray, “Rivkala’s Ring,” Orchards (Alfred A. Knopf: New York, 1986). 8. Seth Colter Walls, “Review: ‘Drowning’ Is a Philip Glass Opera for Just 99 Seats,” New York Times, February 23, 2020, www.nytimes.com/2020/02/23/ arts/music/review-drowning-philip-glass.html. 9. Anton Pavlovich Chekhov, Orchards (Alfred A. Knopf: New York, 1986). 10. Adam Guettel, “Love’s Fire” (1978–1979), www.dropbox.com/sh/ qwf94ag3d10630g/AABu3UZpFmvy5n1cFz9WGSOia?dl=0&preview. 11. Fifteen years later, significant funds were raised to build a beautiful 100-seat theater on the roof, and LCT3 was created to produce the work of playwrights under the age of thirty. 12. Robert D. Putnam, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2001). 13. “Shinsai: Theaters for Japan,” Theatre Communications Group, www.tcg .org/Default.aspx?TabID=2345. 14. “Legacy Playwrights Initiative,” https://dgf.org/programs/grants/awards. CHAPTER 6. STEP ACROSS TIME AND PLACE

1. Shi-Zheng Chen, in conversation with author, January 11, 2018. 2. Liu Jung-en, Six Yuan Plays (London: Penguin, 1972), 10. 3. Chen Shi-Zheng, “Notes on the Program: The Orphan of Zhao,” Lincoln Center Festival 2003 Program Guide, 70. 4. Liu, Six Yuan Plays, 21.

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5. Liu, Six Yuan Plays, 24. 6. Thanks to Paul Walsh, I have since learned that the ever adventurous eighteenth-century English actor-manager David Garrick also knew the play. At the time, none of us, including the illustrious Yuan scholar Mr. Liu Jung-en, knew that Garrick played in an adaptation of the Voltaire translation by Arthur Murphy called Orphan of China, which also toured to Philadelphia in 1767. 7. Jeremy McCarter, “On the Yangtze with the Hatfields and McCoys,” New York Times, July 13, 2003. 8. Michael Levine, in conversation with author, February 11, 2018. 9. Shi-Zheng Chen, in conversation with author, January 11, 2018. 10. Michael Levine, in conversation with author, December 20, 2017. 11. Chen Shi-Zheng, “Notes on the Program: The Orphan Zhao,” Lincoln Center Festival 2003 Program Guide, 70. 12. Shi-Zheng Chen, in conversation with author, January 11, 2018. 13. David Greenspan, in conversation with author, January 21, 2018. 14. David Greenspan, in conversation with author, January 21, 2018. 15. Shi-Zheng Chen, in conversation with author, January 11, 2018. 16. Shi-Zheng Chen, in conversation with author, January 11, 2018. 17. Heidi Waleson, “Chinese Music Theater and Dance Are Among the Offerings at Lincoln Center Festival,” Wall Street Journal, July 29, 2003; Margo Jefferson, “Treachery and Revenge in Ancient China,” New York Times, July 24, 2003; Gordon Cox, “Revenge That’s Sweet But Bloody,” Newsday, July 21, 2003; Michael Feingold, “Family Feud(al) Obligations,” The Village Voice, July 23–29, 2003, 55. 18. Stephin Merritt, My Life as a Fairy Tale, recorded February 2006, Nonesuch Records Inc., compact disc. 19. Rubén Polendo, in conversation with author, August 7, 2018. CHAPTER 7. SEARCH BEYOND THE WORDS

1. Antonin Artaud, The Theater and Its Double (New York: Grove, 1958), 12. 2. All the Sonnets of Shakespeare, ed. Paul Edmondson and Stanley Wells (Cambridge University Press, 2020). 3. Anne Cattaneo, “Pina Bausch: ‘You Can Always Look at It the Other Way Around,’ ” The Village Voice, June 19, 1984. 4. Robert Wilson, in an email conversation with author, April 23, 2018. 5. “Sylvia Netzer, Christopher Knowles,” New York Times, August 16, 2015. 6. Jonathan Kalb, The Theater of Heiner Müller (New York: Limelight Editions, 2001), 240. 7. Robert Wilson, in an email conversation with author, April 23, 2018. 8. Jennifer Rohn, in conversation with author, February 28, 2018.

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9. Kalb, The Theater of Heiner Müller, 123. 10. Heiner Müller, Hamletmachine and Other Texts for the Stage, ed. and trans. Carl Weber (New York: Performing Arts Journal, 1984), 53–54, 56. 11. “Pair of Hamletmachine Chairs, 1986,” Lot 7, Paddle8, https://paddle8 .com/work/robert-wilson/34425-pair-of-hamletmachine-chairs. 12. Scott Lehrer, in conversation with author, February 15, 2018. 13. William Ivey Long, in conversation with author, February 26, 2018. 14. Leif Tilden, in Facebook conversation with author, March 5, 2018, and in an email to the author, July 23, 2018. 15. Hans-Werner Kroesinger, from an unpublished dissertation. 16. Franz Schubert, “Der Zwerg (The Dwarf),” Schubert: Thematic Catalogue of All His Works in Chronological Order, ed. Otto Erich Deutsch, Op. 22, No. 1, D. 771, 1951. 17. John Rockwell, “Wilson and Muller at N.Y.U.,” New York Times, May 12, 1986. 18. From the personal Hamletmachine rehearsal notebook of Tim Maner, 1986. 19. Jennifer Rohn, in conversation with author, February 28, 2018. 20. From the personal Hamletmachine rehearsal notebook of Tim Maner, 1986. 21. Jonathan Kalb, “Heiner Mueller on the American Stage,” in The Handbook on Heiner Mueller, edited by Florian Becker and Janine Ludwig (Berlin: De Gruyter, forthcoming 2021). 22. Christopher Baker, “Danton’s Death at Alley Theatre,” in The Producer’s Notebooks: Theatre in Process, edited by Mark Bly (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 1996), vol. 1, 63–124. CHAPTER 8. APPRECIATE NEW FORMS AND STYLES

1. Constantin Stanislavski, My Life in Art (Cleveland: Meridian, 1956), 330. 2. Sarah Ruhl, 100 Essays I Don’t Have Time to Write (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014), 16. 3. Ruhl, 100 Essays, 32. 4. Bertolt Brecht, Brecht on Theatre, ed. and trans. by John Willet (New York: Hill and Wang, 1964); David Mamet, True and False: Heresy and Common Sense for the Actor (New York: Vintage First Edition, 1997); Ruhl, 100 Essays. 5. Jean Genet, Letters to Roger Blin: Reflections on the Theater (New York: Grove, 1969). 6. A. Scott Berg, Max Perkins: Editor of Genius (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1978). 7. Bruce Norris, Domesticated, rehearsal draft, October 30, 2013, 42.

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8. Conducting a Life: Reflections on the Theatre of María Irene Fornés, ed. Maria M. Delgado and Caridad Svich (Lyme, N.H.: Smith and Kraus, 1999). 9. Sarah Ruhl, in conversation with author, May 21, 2018. 10. Ruhl, 100 Essays, 21. 11. Lanford Wilson in discussion with the Lincoln Center Theater Directors Lab, May 1997. 12. Ruhl, 100 Essays, 188. 13. Sarah Ruhl, in conversation with author, May 21, 2018. 14. David Henry Hwang, in an email to the author, June 6, 2018. 15. Bruce Norris, in an email to the author, May 31, 2018. 16. Jennifer Haley, in an email to the author, June 4, 2018. 17. Tammy Ryan, in an email to the author, May 31, 2018. 18. Moisés Kaufman, in an email to the author, May 31, 2018. 19. Philip Gotanda, in an email to the author, June 14, 2018. 20. Lynn Nottage, in an email to the author, August 24, 2018. 21. Tazewell Thompson, in an email to the author, June 16, 2018. 22. David Rabe, in an email to the author, September 6, 2018. 23. Stanislavski, My Life in Art, 360–63. CHAPTER 9. DEEPEN AN INTERPRETATION

1. Liviu Ciulei, in conversation with the Lincoln Center Theater Directors Lab, June 1997. 2. Michel Saint-Denis, The Rediscovery of Style (London: Heinemann, 1960). 3. Thomas Ostermeier, in conversation with author, October 12, 2017. 4. William Shakespeare, Measure for Measure, ed. Sylvan Barnet (New York: Signet Classic, 1963), 1.3.19–31. 5. Shakespeare, Measure for Measure, 5.1.318. 6. Shakespeare, Measure for Measure, 5.1.412. 7. Matthew 7:1–2. 8. Alfred, Lord Tennyson, “Mariana,” The Lady of Shalott (London: Oxford University Press, 1987), 6–9. CHAPTER 10. SEE WITH NEW EYES

1. Bertolt Brecht, “Last Poems, 1953–1956,” in Bertolt Brecht, Poems, 1913–1956, ed. John Willet and Ralph Manheim (London: Eyre Methuen, 1979), 446. 2. Brecht, “Last Poems, 1953–1956,” 446. 3. Hannah Arendt, “Remembering W. H. Auden,” New Yorker, December 3, 2018. 4. Otto Friedrich, City of Nets (New York: Perennial Library, 1986).

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5. Bertolt Brecht, “Poems of the Crisis Years, 1929–1933,” in Bertolt Brecht, Poems, 1913–1956, ed. John Willet and Ralph Manheim (London: Eyre Methuen, 1979), 220. 6. Brecht, “Poems of the Crisis Years, 1929–1933,” 221. 7. Bertolt Brecht, “American Poems, 1941–1947,” in Bertolt Brecht, Poems, 1913–1956, ed. John Willet and Ralph Manheim (London: Eyre Methuen, 1979), 405. 8. Simon Callow, Charles Laughton: A Difficult Actor (New York: Grove Press, 1987), 185; “Notes on Individual Poems,” in Bertolt Brecht, Poems, 1913– 1956, ed. John Willet and Ralph Manheim (London: Eyre Methuen, 1979), 596. 9. Callow, Charles Laughton, 196. 10. “Notes on Individual Poems,” ed. John Willet and Ralph Manheim, 596. 11. Bertolt Brecht, “Poems of Reconstruction, 1947–1953,” in Bertolt Brecht, Poems, 1913–1956, ed. John Willet and Ralph Manheim (London: Eyre Methuen, 1979), 418. 12. Callow, Charles Laughton, 196. 13. Bertolt Brecht, Bertolt Brecht: Plays, Poetry, and Prose—The Collected Plays, vol. 1, pt. 1, ed. John Willet and Ralph Manheim (London: Eyre Methuen, 1980), 126. 14. Bertolt Brecht, Leben des Galilei (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1998), 146 [English translation by the author]. 15. Günter Grass, The Plebeians Rehearse the Uprising: A German Tragedy (New York: Mariner, 1966). 16. Bertolt Brecht, “Buckow Elegies,” in Bertolt Brecht, Poems, 1913–1956, ed. John Willet and Ralph Manheim (London: Eyre Methuen, 1979), 439. APPENDIX 5

1. Anne Cattaneo, “Methods of Dramaturgy: A Sample Syllabus for a Class in Dramaturgy,” Dramaturgy in American Theater: A Source Book, ed. Susan Jonas, Geoffrey S. Proehl, and Michael Lupu (Orlando: Harcourt Brace, 1997), 531.

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

As I began the journey of writing this book, I soon realized what a gift a life in the theater is. Everyone mentioned in this book was still talking to me. And in many cases, decades had passed since we worked together. So many artists were not only kind enough to confirm my recollections, but eager to share additional memories, add material, and offer significant help in chronicling our time together, as well as contributing their thoughts about the profession of dramaturg. Their words make up a good portion of this volume. I salute them all. Thank you. Behind the scenes as the book took shape over several years, Kate Marvin sat with her mother and slowly transformed the decayed, now obsolete cassette tapes that I had boxed away into audible Mule Bone colloquia evenings, which made it possible for me to hear them once again after so many years and send them electronically to Skip Gates, who immediately, on his own initiative, sent them to the Woodberry Poetry Room where they were welcomed and preserved and are available for readers to discover for themselves. Tim Maner came to my office with his own notebooks of his time, with Kristin Marting, as assistant director of Hamletmachine and allowed me to cite exact words of Robert Wilson that I had only remembered in an approximate way. And the gifted and ever generous Jennifer Rohn shared her memories of acting in the production. My childhood friend Susan Bogas welcomed me to her home in California to help me understand indexing and footnotes—what I have learned to call “back matter.” Other friends, some of great renown, who prefer not to see their names on paper, helped me greatly. You know who you are. Thank you. And, of course, my gratitude to my family and Lincoln Center Theater, my home of so many decades. I owe a great debt to Yale University Press for asking me to write this book, and to Heather Gold and Eva Skewes for bringing it safely to shore. I bonded deeply with my gentle and insightful copy editor Phillip King. And, lucky me, indexer extraordinaire Charlee Trantino was able to find the time to guide readers through the text. The wise Alexis Gargagliano, editor of the LCT Review, lent me perspective, insight, advice, and encouragement throughout my journey. My friends Julia Judge and Benita Hofstetter kept me going. Several distinguished fellow dramaturgs read drafts of this volume at various stages and improved it immensely with their long experience and knowledge of the field: Paul Walsh, Mark Bly, Kristin Leahey, Lue Doethit, and, most especially, Geoff Proehl. My thanks to

289

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all of them for their support, corrections, and words of wisdom, and as the saying goes, all the mistakes are mine. I am most indebted to my assistant Kerry Candeloro who, with absolutely unflagging enthusiasm, never lost a single draft, footnoted with incredible accuracy, and was always eager—what an actress!—to negotiate the next impossible task on the computer. Thank you, Kerry.

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INDEX

Page numbers of photographs appear in italic type Abarwild Theatre, 192 Acting Company, xiv, 11, 131–40, 143–44; commissioned work for, 86, 132–40; founding of, 131; Love’s Fire, 86, 137–40, 139; Orchards, xiv, 86, 133–35, 136, 137 actor-manager, 7 actors: acting methods, 191; appreciating new forms and styles, 181–83, 205–7; auditions for, 161–62, 177, 182, 208; Brecht’s Epic Theater method, 240; companycreated theater and, 199; dramaturgs and, 27, 109, 102–19, 191; directors and, 27–28, 195; Hamlet’s “Advice to the Players,” 207; influence on playwrights, 207; instinct of, 27, 199; Meisner’s advice to, 221; naturalism and, 191, 240; The Orphan of Zhao and, 155, 156, 157, 159, 161–62; playwrights and, 198–99; rehearsal process and, 27; searching beyond the words, 167; Shakespeare’s works and, 44, 50, 56; Stanislavsky’s methods, 191; understanding scene and character, 111–12; Wilson’s effects on, 186 Actors Theatre of Louisville, 88 Adams, Terry, 135 Adler, Luther, 8 Adler, Stella, 8

advocacy, 12, 14, 129, 190, 192, 199, 258; advice for young dramaturgs, 23, 99; interpreting a play and, 51; Mule Bone and, 66–73; new plays and, 21, 190, 193 Aeschylus, 30–31 After the War Blues (Gotanda), 210 agents, 14, 15, 21, 91, 142, 199, 201, 279n20; agent-only submissions, 15; encouraging writers, 199 Ahrens, Lynn, 21 Akalaitis, JoAnne, 64, 143 Akhtar, Ayad, 4 Albee, Edward, 12, 27, 192, 195; The Sandbox, 134; Tiny Alice, 192, 195; Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf ? 192; Zoo Story, 192 Alcestis (Euripides), 186 Alexander, Elizabeth, 77 Alley Theater, 187 All’s Well That Ends Well (Shakespeare), 227 America-in-Play project, 131 American Conservatory Theater (ACT), x–xi, 103, 131, 141; The Merchant of Venice, 32–33 American Daughter, An (Wasserstein), 98–99 American Laboratory Theatre, 8 American National Theatre and Academy (ANTA), 171

291

Y7864-Cattaneo.indb 291

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INDEX 292

American Place Theatre, 15 American Repertory Theater, 186 Ammons, A. R., “Poetics,” 35 Anderson, Judith, 64 Anderson, Laurie, 143, 171, 187 Andorra (Frisch), 10 Angels in America (Kushner), 4, 24, 193, 195; dramaturgs’ contributions, 130 Anouilh, Jean, 10 Antony and Cleopatra (Shakespeare), 48 appreciating new forms and styles, 191–217; actors and, 181–83, 205–7; Chekhov and, 190–91; choice of director and, 200; dramaturg’s input, 196, 198, 200–201; Levine’s forging a new path, 162; play endings and, 196, 198; play structure and, 192, 195–96; readers and, 191, 201; reading a play and, 192–96; Ruhl and, 196, 197, 198, 201–8; searching beyond the words, 167–89; understanding an innovative play, 200–208; Wilson’s work and, 176–89 Aranha, Ray, 24 Archer, William, 9 archival tasks, 22, 153, 166, 257 Arendt, Hannah, 240 Are You Now or Have You Ever Been? (Bentley), 37 Aristotle: anagnorisis moments, 169, 273; plot/action and, 25, 52, 168, 195, 203, 273; Poetics, 25, 168, 258–59, 272, 273; spectacle and, 203, 204 Armin, Robert, 50 Artaud, Antonin, 168, 204, 272; Jet of Blood, 273; The Theater and Its Double, 6, 168, 169, 172, 273 Art of Dining, The (Howe), 89

Y7864-Cattaneo.indb 292

artistic directors, x, xii, 7, 8, 14, 16, 65, 70, 88, 141, 165, 172, 212, 221; Bishop at LCT, 5, 64, 141–42; Brecht at the Berliner Ensemble, 248; Falls at the Goodman, 137, 236; German “Intendanten,” 175; Mosher at LCT, 137, 141–42, 221–22 As You Like It (Shakespeare), 48, 49, 53 Auden, W. H., 240 audience: catharsis and, 168; citizens of Athens, 3; The Coast of Utopia and, 102–3, 112–13, 116–18, 120–28; colloquia and discussions with, 11, 22, 67, 76–78, 78, 258, 281n13; connecting to a classic play, 42, 219; design and staging and, 233; dramaturg’s role and, 11, 22–23, 63, 167, 102–19; for Measure for Measure, 233; for Mule Bone, 75–76, 77, 78, 79; for The Orphan of Zhao, 152, 153, 154, 157, 160, 161, 163; new play development and, 85; stage-to-audience connection or stage synchronicity, 3–4, 6, 11, 39, 62–63, 75, 154, 161, 167; subject and style of a play, appeal to, 75; for Wilson’s long plays, 172 Avid Reader (Gottlieb), 17 Awake and Sing! (Odets), 8 Ayckbourn, Alan, 199; The Norman Conquests, 199 Baal (Brecht), 243 Bacon, Jenny, 163 Balcony, The (Genet), 31 Baldwin, James, 65, 68 Ball, William, x Ballet, Arthur, 8 Balm in Gilead (L. Wilson), 207

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INDEX 293

Baraka, Amiri (LeRoi Jones), 24, 68, 76, 77 Baranski, Christine, 58 Barbican Theatre, 137 Barnes, Clive, 90 Barr, Richard, 192 Barry, Philip, 89–90, 92 Bass, George, 66, 70, 79 Bass, Ramona, 77 Bausch, Pina, 171, 187 Beatty, John Lee, 87 Beckett, Samuel, 12, 25, 49, 62, 65, 89, 168, 192, 199; actors and, 206; hallmarks of his plays, 194; Krapp’s Last Tape, 243; Waiting for Godot, 16, 142–43 “bed trick,” 224, 227, 234 Bell in Campo (Cavendish), 16 Bennett, Michael, 57 Bentley, Eric, Are You Now or Have You Ever Been? 37 Berg, A. Scott, 19 Berlin, Isaiah, 117; Russian Thinkers, 102, 117, 121n, 128 Berliner Ensemble, 9–10, 175, 237, 238, 239, 248 Berlin Schaubühne, 8, 32, 220, 236; Peer Gynt production (1971), 32 Beyond Therapy (Durang), xiii, 86 B-Floor Theater (Bangkok), 164 Big and Little (Strauss), 135, 236 Bishop, André, 15, 64, 94, 95–96, 117; as artistic director, 5, 64, 141–42; “50 Years of Theater at Lincoln Center,” 5–6; LCT Directors Lab and, 143 Black Power (Wright), 81 Blin, Roger, 16, 198 Blumenthal, Ann, 90 Bly, Mark, 129–30, 210 Boas, Franz, 71 Bogart, Anne, 37, 176

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Bogosian, Eric, 63, 138 Boleslavsky, Richard, 8 Bonfire of the Vanities (Wolfe), 223, 225 Book of Mormon, The (musical), 98 Bourne, Nina, 135 Bowles, Jane, 22; In the Summer House, 64–65, 195, 243; as “lost” female writer, 65 Bowles, Paul, 64 Bread and Puppet Theater, x Brecht, Barbara, 239 Brecht, Bertolt, 9–10, 140, 171, 175, 239; “alienated” use of music and, 163; Arendt’s essay on, 240; Berliner Ensemble and, 9–10, 175, 237, 238, 248; collective creation and, 238, 240; as dramaturg, 9–10, 278n14; Epic Theater and, 9, 240, 272, 273; on “forbidden artists” lists, 244; HUAC and, 247; on interpreting Hamlet, 220; letter to Laughton, 246; notion of “Gestus,” 240–41; play structure and, 237–38, 240; reading his plays, 194; seeing with new eyes, 243–53 —works: Baal, 243; Brecht on Brecht, 198; Brecht on Theatre, 273; The Buckow Elegies, 253; The Caucasian Chalk Circle, 248; “Changing the Wheel,” 253; Drums in the Night, 243; The Good Woman of Setzuan, 10, 273; The Life of Galileo, 10, 36, 236–53; Mother Courage, 10, 241, 251; “Obituary for XX,” 248; “On the Berliner Ensemble’s Move,” 238; “On Reading When I Was Rich,” 245–46; Puntilla, 10; Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny, 245; The Threepenny Opera, 198, 243; “When I Was Rich,” 245; “To a Woman Colleague,” 239

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INDEX 294

Brecht, Stefan, 171, 239, 247 Brecht on Brecht (Brecht), 198 Brecht on Theatre (Brecht), 273 Breuer, Lee, 33 Briarcliff College, xii, 172–73 Bring in da Noise, Bring in da Funk, 130 Brook, Peter, 9, 63 Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM), 171; The $ Value of Man, 173; Einstein on the Beach, 173; An Enemy of the People, 220–21; Gospel at Colonus, 33; Medea, 221; The Threepenny Opera, 187 Brooks, Avery, 77 Brooks, Gwendolyn, 76 Brown, Blair, 163 Brown, Lewis, 75 Büchner, George: Danton’s Death, 51–52; Woyzeck, 272–74 Buckow Elegies, The (Brecht), 253 Bullins, Ed, 24 Burbage, Richard, 56 Burbridge, Edward, 75 Buried Child (Shepard), 170 Burroughs, William, 65 Burton, Kate, 224, 231, 232 Busch, Ernst, 36, 37 Busia, Abena, 77 Busia, Akosua, 75, 77 Butterworth, Jez, The Ferryman, 192 Cahan, Cora, 1 Callow, Simon, 247–48 Campbell, Joseph, 163 Campbell, Rob, 156 Capell, Edward, 44 Cariou, Len, 224, 232 Carpenter, Jennifer, 156–57 Carter, Steve, 15, 70, 72–73, 133

Y7864-Cattaneo.indb 294

Car Wash (film), 74 casting: dramaturgs and, 16, 17, 21–22, 54, 59, 73, 162; for Hamletmachine, 177, 182; for In the Next Room, 208; for Isn’t It Romantic, 92; Kahn’s process, 16–17; for Measure for Measure, 224, 226; for Midsummer’s Night Dream, 54, 59; for Mule Bone, 73–74; for The Orphan of Zhao, 155, 161–62 Cavendish, Margaret, 16 Cenci, The (Shelley), 273 Césaire, Aimé, 76 Chambers, E. K., 44 “Changing the Wheel” (Brecht), 253 Chapman, Linda, 149 Chekhov, Anton, 25, 49, 90, 93, 95, 96, 112, 199; innovation, 190, 195, 214–17; limited repertory of, 132; plays about, 132; searching beyond the words and, 204; short stories adapted for Orchards, 132–34, 143–44; Stanislavsky on Uncle Vanya, 215–17 —works: The Cherry Orchard, 29; Platonov, 132; The Seagull, 190, 194, 215, 258; Uncle Vanya, 214–17; “Vint,” 132–33 Chen, Shi-Zheng, 36, 147, 151; collaborations with Merritt, 163; directing style, 154, 155; forging a new path, 161–62; Monkey, 161; and The Orphan of Zhao, 153–66, 164; The Peony Pavilion production, 150–51, 153 Cherry Orchard, The (Chekhov), 29 Childs, Kirsten, 21 Childs, Lucinda, 179 Chong, Ping, 171 Chorus Line, A (musical), 57 Churchill, Caryl, 199, 200

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INDEX 295

Circle Repertory Company, 15, 87, 144, 207 City of Nets (Friedrich), 245 Ciulei, Liviu, 147, 218, 236 CIVIL warS (R. Wilson), 173–74 classic plays: artistic collaborators for, 42, 218, 219; Berlin Schaubühne and, 32; biographical information used for interpreting Molière, 33–34; casting for, 16–17; Chinese drama, 151–53, 154, 157, 161; connecting an audience to, 42, 219; defined, 42; director’s role and, 218, 219; “Directors Theater” and, 220–21, 231; dramaturg and, 36, 37, 45, 46–48, 51, 53–54, 218–19; dramaturg’s research and, 36, 43–50, 51, 151–55, 157, 159, 228; Elizabethan plays, 168; gesture used in, 156; Greek drama, 3, 6, 30, 31, 33, 39, 52, 57, 152, 169, 273; interpreting the play, 42–54, 218–35; Medea adapted by Warner, 221; Merchant of Venice and, 32–33; “100 interesting facts” for productions, 31–32; revenge plays, 152; revisiting in a new way, 236–53; Syllabus for a Course on Classical Play Interpretation, 272–74 Classic Stage Company, 141 Clean House, The (Ruhl), 208 Clever, Edith, 173 Clurman, Harold, 8, 272, 273 Clybourne Park (Norris), 209 Coast of Utopia, The (Stoppard), 63, 102–19, 108, 118, 270–71; audience needs, 112–13, 116–17, 118; cast, 105, 113, 116; challenges of the text, 104, 107, 109, 112; character of Bakunin, 107, 110, 117, 119; character of Herzen, 105, 110,

Y7864-Cattaneo.indb 295

111, 116, 117; designers, 103, 104, 105, 109; director, 102, 103, 105, 111, 112; dramaturg and actors, 109–15, 117, 128; imagery in, 112–13, 270–71; London premiere, 103, 104, 117; marathon version, 102, 112; “100 interesting things,” 104–5, 265–68; playbill with program inserts, 116–18, 120–28; pre-production reading, 103–5; previews, 116; rehearsals, 102, 114, 115; review by Grafton, 102–3; Salvage (third play), 102, 109, 112, 125–27; Shipwreck (second play), 102, 123–25; six-foot ginger cat, 103, 107, 109; staging the pantomime scene, 112; success of, 117; Voyage (first play), 102, 104, 105, 114, 120–23 Cock-A-Doodle-Dandy (O’Casey), xi Cocteau, Jean, 62, 168 Coleman, Marilyn, 74 Coley, Aisha, 73, 74 colloquia, 11, 22, 258; Mule Bone, 67, 76–78, 78, 281n13 Colored Museum, The (Wolfe), 224 Columbia University, xiii Comden, Betty, 94 Comédie Française, 33, 164 Comedy of Errors (Shakespeare), 48–49 commissioned plays, 86–88, 200; Durang’s Beyond Therapy, 86; for Love’s Fire, 138; Norris’s Domesticated, 200; for Orchards, 133–35; scripts for The Orphan of Zhao, 154, 157, 160; Shepard’s Geography of a Horse Dreamer, 169; successful model, 87; Wasserstein and the Phoenix Theater, 86, 91 Condell, Henry, 45

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INDEX 296

Conklin, John, 143, 145, 226, 234 Copeau, Jacques, 40 Coppenger, Royston “Rusty,” 141 Coraline (Greenspan and Merritt), 161 Corbin, John, 8 Coronet Theater, 238, 246, 247 Craig, Edward Gordon, 190 credit and compensation for dramaturgs, v, 53, 129–30, 140 Cronyn, Hume, 206 cross-cultural investigation, 150–66; Directors Lab member collaborations, 165–66; The Peony Pavilion and, 150–51; Shi-Zheng Chen’s production of The Orphan of Zhao, 153–66, 164; value of, 163, 165–66 “Crossing” (Hughes), 80 Crossroads Theater, 70 Crowley, Bob, 103, 104, 105 Crucible, The (Miller), 29 Crudup, Billy, 109, 111 Cuervo, Alma, 92 Curse of the Starving Class (Shepard), 169 Curtis, Edward, Masked Dancers, 57, 58, 60 Cymbeline (Shakespeare), 168–69, 231 Cysat, Renwald, 37 Daddy Goodness (Wright), 81 Dallas Theater Center, 172 Daniele, Graciela, 59, 143 Danton’s Death (Büchner), 51–52, 187 Davenant, William, 44, 46 Davis, Guy, 75 Davis, Thulani, 70 Death Destruction & Detroit (R. Wilson), 174

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Death and the King’s Horseman (Soyinka), 73, 81 Death of a Salesman (Miller), 237 DeCarava, Roy, 76, 77 Dee, Ruby, 77 deepening the interpretation, 218–35, 259; “Directors Theater” and, 220–21, 231; Lamos’s Measure for Measure, 221–33, 232; Mnouchkine’s Iphigenia at Aulis, 219; Ostermeier’s An Enemy of the People, 220–21; Strehler’s The Tempest, 220; Warner’s Medea, 221 Delacorte Theater (Central Park), xiii; A Midsummer Night’s Dream, 42–61; As You Like It, 53; The Tempest, 54 DeLillo, Don, 192 Demons, The (Dostoevsky), 29 DeMunn, Jeffrey, 56, 60 Dennehy, Brian, 36–37, 236–37, 243 designers, 5, 12, 25, 26, 28–29, 33; dramaturgs and, 33–34, 51, 233; interpreting the play, 30, 33–35; LCT Directors Lab and, 143, 145; Levine’s design process, 155–57, 158, 159–60; as marginalized, 145 Deutsches Theater, 9, 238, 278n14 De Vergine, Jacapo, The Golden Legend, 138 Diaz-Farrar, Gabriella, 224 directors: approach to actors, 27–28; classical directing and examples, 219–20; collaborators on a play and, 26; “Comfortable” exercise for, 7, 277n8; commissioned plays and, 88; crafting a safe collective space, 6–7; Directors Lab at LCT, 7, 29, 141–48, 148, 153–54, 165–66, 187, 207, 255; dramaturgs and, 21, 22, 51, 88, 107, 177, 178–79, 188,

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INDEX 297

200, 261; encouraging writers, 199; interpreting the play, 31–36, 178; prominent American directors, 147; Stein on the text, 29; theatrical innovation and, 200 Directors Lab at LCT, 141–48, 148; apprentice tradition and, 145; archive for, 146; collaborations emerging from, 147, 165–66; “Comfortable” exercise, 7, 277n8; designers involved in, 143, 145; diversity of participants, 144–47; established theater artists contributing to, 147, 165, 187, 207; exploratory workshop for The Orphan of Zhao at, 153–54; Eyre session at, 29; principles and foundational ideas, 144–46, 255; structure of, and the dramaturg’s special gift, 147, 148 “Directors Theater” (Regietheater), 220–21, 231 Disney Theatricals, 1 Dodin, Lev, 147 Doerries, Bryan, 31 $ Value of Man, The (R. Wilson), 173 Domesticated (Norris), 87, 200–201 Dom Juan (Molière), 33–34 Dostoevsky, Fyodor, The Demons, 29 Dowden, Edward, 48–49 Dramatists Guild Foundation, 149; Legacy Playwrights Initiative, 23, 149 dramaturgs, 5, 16–17, 55; acting class and, 191, 257; advocacy role, 12, 14, 21, 23, 51, 66–73, 99, 129, 190, 192, 258; appreciating new forms and styles, 190–217; archival tasks and note keeping, 15–18, 22, 55, 57, 104, 153, 155, 166, 177, 193, 257; audience communication

Y7864-Cattaneo.indb 297

and, 11, 22–23, 63, 167, 102–19; background, education, experience, 21, 25, 257; book editors and, 16, 19–20, 101, 190, 192; classic plays and, 42–54, 218–35; and collaboration, 5–6, 7, 11, 12, 13, 20, 21, 24–36, 39, 42, 51, 85, 118, 138, 143, 162, 163, 165, 177, 202, 233, 254–55, 277n8; colloquia and discussions, 11, 22, 67, 76–78, 78, 258, 281n13; creating a theatrical experience, 3, 11, 12; creativity and, 26–27, 35–36, 259, 260; credit and compensation for, v, 53, 129–30, 140; cross-cultural investigation, 150–66; department at LCT, 155, 161, 162, 201; directors, working with, 21, 22, 51, 53–54, 88, 107, 177, 178–79, 188, 200, 261; expansion of the theater repertory and, xiv, 15–16, 62–82, 129–49; generating real change, 141–49; German model, 9; Hiss on, 2, 3, 11; importance of “showing up,” 211; influence of, 9, 24; as instructors of drama, 172; “keeping the whole in mind,” 12, 22; literary manager as synonymous with, 11; living fully outside the theater, 28–29; making suggestions grounded in knowledge, 73; “micro” and “macro” aspects of a dramaturg’s work, 10–12; office funnel problem, 143; playbill, play program, 11, 22, 65, 72, 77, 94, 116–18, 120–28; play interpretation, 31–36, 59, 118, 162, 167–89, 194–95, 200–201; and playwrights, 83–101, 129, 192, 196, 198, 199, 208–15, 255, 260; qualities of, v, 254–55; questioning by, 7, 18, 19, 22, 29, 31, 34, 42, 112, 162, 177,

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INDEX 298

dramaturgs (continued ) 194–95, 198, 200, 205, 259; reading a play, 15–22, 29–30, 192–96; reading weekly grosses, 97–98; rehearsals and rehearsal protocol, 22, 26–28, 75, 84, 93, 196, 198, 201, 205; research and information gathering, 27–28, 36, 37, 43–50, 51, 104–7, 108, 109–18, 120–28, 238, 243–53, 249, 257–58; Ruhl on, 208; suggestions for a young dramaturg, 254–55; as a theater person, 21, 25–26, 254; working hours of, 21; work of, unacknowledged, 140; writing play evaluations or reports, 15–18, 193–94, 201 Dramaturg’s Toolkit, 257–61 dramaturgy: of Adrienne Kennedy, 168; Clurman’s model of, 8; in German theaters, 8, 278n14; history of, v, 7–10, 12–13, 14, 37, 129, 278n9; Lupu on the function of, 26; Sample Syllabus for a Class in, 272–74; profession’s biggest liability, 18–20; at Yale School of Drama, xi–xii Dream Play, A (Strindberg), 168, 195 Drowning (Fornés), 134, 135 “Drowning” (Glass), 134 Drums in the Night (Brecht), 243 Dryden, John, 272, 273 Duquesnay, Ann, 130 Durang, Christopher, 25, 84, 86, 143, 199; Beyond Therapy, xiii, 86 Dürrenmatt, Friedrich, 10, 140 Duse, Eleanora, 158 Easton, Richard, 109 Ebony Jo-Ann, 74 Ehle, Jennifer, 109–10, 115 Eichelberger, Ethyl, 224

Y7864-Cattaneo.indb 298

Einstein on the Beach (R. Wilson), 173, 177, 179 Eisler, Hanns, 246 Elizabethan Stage, The (Chambers), 44 Ellison, Ralph, 68 Enemy of the People, An (Ibsen), 220 Engleman, Liz, 208 Ephron, Nora, 89 “Essay on Dramatic Poetry” (Dryden), 272, 273 Ethel Barrymore Theater, Mule Bone at, 77–78, 78, 79, 81 Ettinger, Heidi, 54 Eugene O’Neill Playwrights Conference, 84–85 Eugene O’Neill Theater Center, 15 Eureka Theater, Angels in America production, 130 Euripides: Alcestis, 186; Iphigenia at Aulis, 219; Medea, 221 Eurydice (Ruhl), 202, 203 Eustis, Oskar, 130, 211 Evans, Mari, 77 Eve of the Trial, The (Williams), 133–34 Execution of Justice (Mann), 130 expansion of the theater repertory, 62–82, 259; audience and, 63; benefit performances and new works, 149; changing the field at large, 141–49; creation of original plays, 129–41; cross-cultural investigation and, 150–66; finding “lost” or overlooked plays, 22, 63, 64–66, 81–82, 149, 259; LCT Directors Lab and, 141–48, 148; Legacy Playwrights Initiative and, 23, 149; National Theater Translation Project and, 141; producing Mule Bone, 66–82; revival of In the Summer

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INDEX 299

House, 64–65; revival of The Life of Galileo, 236–43 Experience of Place, The (Hiss), 1–2, 39 Eyre, Richard, 29–30, 147 Falls, Robert: Life of Galileo, 36, 236–43; Orchards, 135, 137, 236; Tony Awards, 236–37 Faulkner, William, 65 Federal Theater Project, Negro Theater Unit, 81, 82 Fergusson, Francis, 8 Ferryman, The (Butterworth), 192 Feydeau, Georges, 25 Fichandler, Zelda, 212 “50 Years of Theater at Lincoln Center” (Bishop), 5–6 finding a play (discovery), 21, 22, 23, 129, 190; expansion of the repertory and, 62–82, 129; “lost” plays, 22, 63, 64–66, 81–82, 149, 259; proactive roles, 23; reading and recommending a play, 21, 193; rediscovering work, 23–24, 63; revivals, 63, 64–65, 236–43; Weitzman’s discovery and realization of musicals, 21 Finn, William, 21, 138 Firebugs, The (Frisch), 10 Fish Head Soup (Gotanda), 211 Fitzgerald, F. Scott, 19, 20, 200 Flaherty, Stephen, 21 Fleisser, Marieluise, 9, 140 Flynn, Kimberly, 130 Foote, Horton, 14, 89, 199 for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf (Shange), 18, 70, 89 Ford, John, ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore, 168

Y7864-Cattaneo.indb 299

Ford Foundation, grants to establish regional theaters, 8, 13–14 Fornés, María Irene, xiii, 19, 87, 192; Drowning, 134, 135 Foster, Frances, 70, 74 Foucault, Michel, 174–75 Fouquet, Jean, 37, 38 Franklin, J. E., Under Heaven’s Eye, xiii Frazer, J. G., The Golden Bough, 55 Freeman, Morgan, 33 French, Arthur, 74 Freudenberger, Dan, 88 Freund, Gerald, xiii–xiv Friedrich, Otto, City of Nets, 245 Friel, Brian, Translations, 29, 195 Frisch, Max, 10, 140; Andorra, 10; The Firebugs, 10 From the Frontier (Jandl), 236 Fuller, Charles, 14, 24, 87; A Soldier’s Play, 222 Funnyhouse of a Negro (Kennedy), 134 Gaines, Reg E., 130 Gammer Gurton’s Needle (Still), 43 Garnett, Constance, 132 Garrick, David, 284n6 Gates, Henry Louis, Jr., 66, 70, 73, 76; on Hurston, 67, 77 Gatz (Elevator Repair Service), 24 Geary Theater, x General of Hot Desire, The (Guare), 86, 134, 138 Genet, Jean, 16, 62, 198, 199; The Balcony, 31 George, Nelson, 77 George Devine Award, 15 Gersten, Bernard, 65, 142 Getting Out (Norman), 88 Gingham Dog, The (L. Wilson), 207

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INDEX 300

Giraudoux, Jean, 10 Glass, Philip, “Drowning,” 134 Glass Menagerie, The (Williams), 199 Globe Theatre, London, 3 Glover, Savion, 130 Godfrey, Marian, 141 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 6 Goldblum, Jeff, 200 Golden, Marita, 77 Golden Bough, The (Frazer), 55 Golden Legend, The (De Vergine), 138 Good Doctor, The (Simon), 132 Goodman Theatre, xiv, 36, 62, 65, 137, 236; The Life of Galileo, 236–43 Good for Otto (Rabe), 192 Good Woman of Setzuan, The (Brecht), 10, 273 Goose and Tomtom (Rabe), 213–14 Gorboduc (Norton and Sackville), 43 Gospel at Colonus (Breuer and Telson), 33 Goss, Linda, 77 Gotanda, Philp, 210–11 Gottlieb, Robert, 17, 135 Goyanes, Maria, 149 Grafton, Anthony, 102–3 Granville-Barker, Harley, 9 Grass, Günter, The Plebeians Rehearse the Uprising, 252 Gray, Spalding, 134, 135, 192, 195, 222 Great Gatsby, The (Fitzgerald), 20 Greek theater, 3, 6, 30, 31, 33, 39; agon, 6, 152; anagnorisis moments, 169, 273; audience of, 3, 31; Chorus, 219; dithyramb, 39; komos of, 52, 57; plot/action and, 25, 52, 168, 195, 203, 273; stasimons, 33 Green, Fanni, 75 Greenspan, David, 160–61, 163

Y7864-Cattaneo.indb 300

Grosvenor, Vertamae, 77 Group Theater, xi, 3, 6, 8, 62, 144, 176 Guare, John, 12, 75, 140, 192; feedback and, 201; The General of Hot Desire, 86, 134, 138, 170; The House of Blue Leaves, 142; The Talking Dog, 134 Guettel, Adam, 21, 138, 170 Guirgis, Stephen Adly, 18, 192 Gutierrez, Gerald, 94 Gunderson, Lauren, 99 Gunn, Bill, 14 Guthrie Theater, xiii, 22, 26, 62, 172, 236 Haley, Jennifer, 209 Halfway Bitches Go Straight to Heaven (Guirgis), 192 Hall, Adrian, 53, 172, 237 Hambleton, T. Edward, 247 Hamburg National Theatre, 8, 278n9 Hamburg Schauspielhaus, 178 Hamilton, Josh, 115 Hamilton, William, xiii Hamilton (musical), 4, 63 Hamilton: The Revolution (Miranda and McCarter), 12 Hamlet (Shakespeare), 47, 49, 220 Hamletmachine (Müller): actors and casting, 177, 181–82; collaborators for, 176, 177, 181, 188; costumes for, 181–82; critics and, 185; dramaturgy work for, 175–77, 178, 183, 187–89; European tour, 185–86; German production of, 178, 185; Müller attending, 185; music of, 181, 185; rehearsals, 176–77, 179, 180, 181–85; running time, 178; as “Theater of the Unconscious,” 204; translation, 179, 185; venue for, 176; video added

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INDEX 301

to, 184–85; Wilson production at NYU, 172, 176–89 Hansberry, Lorraine, 14, 25, 89 Hansel, Adrien-Alice, 210 Harbour, David, 115 Hardy, Sir Henry, 105 Hare, David, 199–200 Harley, Margot, 131 Harner, Jason Butler, 109 Hartford Stage, 62 Harvard University, Woodberry Poetry Room, 73, 76, 77, 79 Hastings, Edward, x Hauptmann, Elisabeth, 240 Having Our Say (Mann), 130 Hawke, Ethan, 107, 109, 110, 112; “Bakunin’s Journal,” 119 Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 140–41 Hecht, Jessica, 206 Hedgerow Theatre, 8 Heidenreich, Gert, Weather Pilot, 236 Heidi Chronicles, The (Wasserstein), 95–96, 97, 98, 99 Heiskell, Marian, 1 Hellman, Lillian, 90, 191–92 Hemenway, Robert E., 66 Hemingway, Ernest, 19, 200 Hemmings, John, 45 Henley, Beth, 14, 192 Henry IV (Shakespeare), 28, 109, 111 Henry VI (Shakespeare), 48 Henry VIII (Shakespeare), 168 Henslowe, Philip, 37, 50, 56 HERE Arts Center, xiii Herwegh, Georg, 107, 115 Herzen, Alexander, 111, 117 Herzog, Amy, 89 Hirschfeld, Kurt, 140; Brecht and, 245, 247, 248; as dramaturg, v, 10 Hiss, Tony, 3, 11, 40; The Experience of Place, 1–2, 39

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Hogan, Lucy Hurston, 77 Home (Williams), 133 Houseman, John, 131, 137; RunThrough, 81 House of Blue Leaves, The (Guare), 142 Howe, Tina, 12; The Art of Dining, 89 How to Transcend a Happy Marriage (Ruhl), 196, 197, 198, 202, 234 Hughes, Allen Lee, 75 Hughes, Langston, 66; “Crossing,” 81; falling out with Hurston, 66; friends and reminiscences of, 76, 208; Jesse B. Semple stories, 77; Mule Bone production, 66–82, 281–82n14; Rampersad’s biography, 68, 70, 76, 78; renewal of interest in, 68, 70; Southern blues tradition and, 74; Spingarn Medal acceptance speech, 68–69; The Sweet Flypaper of Life, 76; two central missions, 78–79; Wright’s lost play and, 81 Hurston, Zora Neale, 22; as anthropologist, 71, 79; audio recording of, 79; colloquia and, 67, 76–77, 78, 281–82n14; depiction of “Negro Life,” 72, 79–80, 280–81n7; falling out with Hughes, 66; Gates on, 67; introducing her to the Mule Bone audience, 79; lost play of, “a Negro Lysistrata,” 82; Mule Bone production, 66–82; Mules and Men, 79; rediscovery of, 67; Southern blues tradition and, 74; Their Eyes Were Watching God, 67, 280–81n7 Hurt, William, 57, 59 Hutchinson, Ron, xiii, 15 Hwang, David Henry, 14, 43, 209 Hypochondriac, The (Molière), 34

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INDEX 302

Ibsen, Henrik: An Enemy of the People, 220–21; late plays of, 168; Peer Gynt, 32, 75; When We Dead Awaken, 195 Ideal Theater, An (London), 8 I Dream of Chang and Eng (Gotanda), 210 Ikeda, Thomas, 224 Inherit the Wind (Lawrence and Lee), 142 Innaurato, Albert, 14 Insdorf, Annette, 15–16 In the Next Room (Ruhl), 201, 204–5, 208 In the Summer House (Bowles), 195, 243; cast for, 64; original performances, 64; revival at LCT, 64–65; set design, 64 INTAR Hispanic American Arts Center, xiii, 87, 134 Intimate Apparel (Nottage), 212 Into the Woods (Sondheim and Lapine), 54, 61 Investigation, The (Weiss), 37 Ionesco, Eugene, 10 Iphigenia at Aulis (Euripides), 219 Isn’t It Romantic (Wasserstein), 91–94 Jacker, Corinne, 89; Later, 88 Jandl, Ernst, From the Frontier, 236 Japan Playwrights Foundation, 149 Jarry, Alfred, 62 Jay, Ricky, 58, 233–34 Jenness, Morgan, 15 Jet of Blood (Artaud), 273 Jiggetts, Shelby, 130 Ji Juan-Xiang, The Orphan of Zhao, 36, 151–66 Jones, Margo, 199 Jones, O-Lan, 169 Jones, Robert Earl, 74

Y7864-Cattaneo.indb 302

Jonson, Ben, 25, 56 Jory, Jon, 88 journaling, note keeping, 22, 55, 57, 104, 155, 177, 257; reading a play and, 15–18, 22, 193 Juilliard Drama Division, 41, 131 Juliá, Raúl, 54 Julius Caesar (Shakespeare), 49 Jung, Carl, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, 53 Kaczorowski, Peter, 143 Kahn, Michael, 16–17, 131–32, 135, 137 Kalb, Jonathan, The Theater of Heiner Müller, 174–75, 178 Karlsruhe, Germany, ix Kaufman, Moisés, 40–41, 210 Kazan, Elia, 3, 8 Keenan-Bolger, Celia, 205 Kellogg, Marjorie, 94 Kelly, David Patrick, 156, 163 Kempe, Will, 50 Kennedy, Adrienne, 14, 16, 27, 192, 195; dramaturgy of, 168; Funnyhouse of a Negro, 134 Khan, Rick, 70 King Lear (Shakespeare), 49, 232 Kingsley, Susan, 88 King’s Men acting company, 37, 45 Klein, Robert, 96 Kline, Kevin, 28, 45, 111, 131 Knight, Edward, 37 Knowles, Christopher, 171, 173 Koram, Jamal, 77 Korder, Howard, 155, 157 Kott, Jan, Shakespeare Our Contemporary, 9, 63 Kramer, Larry, The Normal Heart, 89 Krannert Center, ChampaignUrbana, 137

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INDEX 303

Krapp’s Last Tape (Beckett), 243 Kushner, Tony, 18, 89; Angels in America, 4, 24, 130, 193; developing material with dramaturgs, 131; Terminating, or Lass Meine Schmerzen Nicht Verloren Sein, or Ambivalence, 138 Lady of Shallott, The (Tennyson), 229 La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club, 144, 149 Lamos, Mark, 31, 138, 140; Measure for Measure production, 221–22, 226–27, 230–31 Lapine, James, 43, 52; Into the Woods, 54, 61; A Midsummer’s Night Dream at the Delacorte, 42–61, 233; Twelve Dreams, 53, 55 Larson, Jonathan, Rent, 63, 130 Lassalle, Jacques, 33, 147, 165 Later (Jacker), 88 Laughton, Charles, 238, 245, 246–48, 249 Lawrence, Jerome, Inherit the Wind, 199 LeCompte, Elizabeth, 134 Lee, Helen Elaine, 77 Lee, Joie, 74, 79 Lee, Robert, Inherit the Wind, 199 Legacy Playwrights Initiative, 23, 149 Lehrer, Scott, 176, 181, 186 Leiber, Jerry, 176, 181 Lemon Sky (L. Wilson), x, 23 Lepage, Robert, 64 Les Cahiers de la Comédie Française, 33 Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim, 7–8, 278n9 Le Théâtre du Soleil, 219 Letter to Queen Victoria, A (R. Wilson), 171, 187

Y7864-Cattaneo.indb 303

Letts, Tracy, Mary Page Marlowe, 192 Levine, Arthur, 4–5, 6 Levine, Michael: and The Orphan of Zhao, 153, 155–60, 163 Lewis, David Levering, 77 Lewis, Edwina, 74 Lewis, Emmanuel, 58, 59 Lewis, Robert (Bobby), xi–xii Li Bo, 163 Life of Galileo, The (Brecht), 10; actors for, 241; Berliner Ensemble production, 36, 37, 238, 248; blockingonly Italian for, 242; Brecht and instructions, 241, 252; collaborators for, 240; dramaturgy for, 237–53; English version, Charles Laughton and, 238, 246–47, 249; Goodman Theatre production, 36–37, 236–43; Materials to “The Life of Galileo,” 36, 37; multiple versions of, 237, 238, 239–40, 246–47, 248; as a perfect play, 237–38; rehearsals, 241; set design, 243; translations of, 36, 237, 238, 250; what a new production could explore, 250–53 Life and Times of Joseph Stalin, The (R. Wilson), 171, 187 Likhachev Foundation, 113 Lincoln Center Festival: Asinamali! 75; The Demons, 29; The Orphan of Zhao, 36, 151–66, 164, 234; The Peony Pavilion, 150–51, 153; Reddin and, 154; Rockwell and, 150, 154 Lincoln Center Theater (LCT): audience involvement at, 22–23; Bishop as artistic director, 5, 64, 141–42; Carousel audition, 17; casting department, 155, 162, 201; The Coast of Utopia, 102–19, 108, 118; Death

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INDEX 304

Lincoln Center Theater (continued ) and the King’s Horseman, 73, 81; director of audience development at, 77; Directors Lab, 7, 29, 141–48, 148, 153–54, 165–66, 187, 207, 255; Directors Lab, “Comfortable” exercise, 7, 277n8; Domesticated, 86–87, 200–201; dramaturgy for, xiv, 11, 12, 64–65, 77; Gersten at, 65, 142; Guare as resident playwright, 75; How to Transcend a Happy Marriage, 196, 197, 198, 202; In the Summer House, 64–65; Measure for Measure, 31, 142, 221–33, 232; members, 81, 142–43; Mosher at, xiv, 65, 137, 141, 221– 22; Mule Bone, 66–82, 142; Mule Bone colloquia, 67, 76–77; Ruhl’s plays produced at, 202; Sarafina! 63, 73, 75, 81, 222, 230; The Sisters Rosensweig, 96; Speed the Plow, 222; theaters of, 142, 283n11; Waiting for Godot, 142–43; website, 23, 146; Weitzman and musicals at, 21; Woza Africa! evenings, 70 Lincoln Center Theater Review, 12; “Bakunin’s Journal” (Hawke), 119; The Coast of Utopia article (Tolstoya), 113; creation and purpose of, 75–76; “50 Years of Theater at Lincoln Center” issue, 5; Mule Bone discussion transcript in, 73 literary manager. See dramaturg Literary Managers and Dramaturgs of the Americas (LMDA), xiii, 17, 129, 141 Little Foxes, The (Hellman), 191–92 Liu Jung-en, 152, 284n6 Lives of Others, The (film), 174 lobby displays, 11, 258

Y7864-Cattaneo.indb 304

London, Todd, An Ideal Theater, 8 Long, William Ivey, 176, 181 Long Day’s Journey into Night (O’Neill), 237 “Looking for Zora” (Walker), 67 Lorca, Federico García, 10 Lord Chamberlain’s Men, 144, 261 Losey, Joseph, 246 “lost” or overlooked plays, 22, 63, 64–66, 81–82, 149, 259; Baldwin’s unpublished final play, 65; Bowles’s In the Summer House, 22, 65; Cavendish’s Bell in Campo, 16; Hurston and Hughes’s Mule Bone, 63, 65–82; Hurston’s play called “a Negro Lysistrata,” 81–82; Mosher’s box containing plays by Faulkner, Beckett, Morrison, 65; Weitzman’s discovery and realization of musicals, 21; Wilder’s unproduced one-act plays, 65; Williams’s Notebooks of Trigorin; Wright’s Daddy Goodness, 81 love and encourage: encouraging an audience’s interest, 22–23; nurturing new works, 99–100; supporting the playwright, 83–101, 129, 192, 199, 208–15, 255, 260; Wasserstein and, 84–101 Love’s Fire, 86, 134, 139, 170; music and, 138; play development and, 137–40; playwrights chosen for, 138; publishing of, 140 Love’s Labor’s Lost (Shakespeare), 49 Lowell, Robert, 141 Lucas, Craig, 131 Luce, Clare Boothe, 90 Lucille Lortel Theatre, 246 LuPone, Patti, 131, 149 Lupu, Guthrie, 22, 26

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INDEX 305

Mac, Taylor, A 24-Decade History of Popular Music, 24 MacArthur Awards, xiii Macbeth (Shakespeare), 49 MacDonald, Robert David, xii MacKinnon, Pam, 96 Mad Dog Blues (Shepard), 169 Maeterlinck, Maurice, 168, 190, 203 Mahal, Taj, 74, 75, 77, 79, 80, 281–82n14 Malone, Edmond, 44 Mamet, David, 12, 14, 96, 135, 206; Speed-the-Plow, 222; True and False, 198; Vint, 133 Man in a Case, The (Wasserstein), 133, 135 Manheim, Ralph, 238 Mann, Emily, 130 Mann, Thomas, 244 Marlowe, Christopher, 48 Marranca, Bonnie, 15 Marriott, B. Rodney, 15 Marshall, Paule, 77 Martyrdom of St. Apollonia, The (Fouquet), 38 Marymount Manhattan Theater, 85–86 Mary Page Marlowe (Letts), 192 Masked Dancers (Curtis), 57, 58, 60 Mason, Marshall, 207 Massinger, Philip, 16 Matura, Mustapha, xiii Maxine Elliot Theater, 247 M. Butterfly (Hwang), 43 McBurney, Simon, 147 McCarter, Jeremy, Hamilton: The Revolution, 12 McCarter Theater, 130, 208, 213 McDonald, Audra, 17 McIntyre, Dianne, 75

Y7864-Cattaneo.indb 305

McKellen, Ian, 29 McNally, Terrence, 192 Measure for Measure (Shakespeare), 49; as Problem Play, 222–23, 225; published versions, essays, and commentaries on, 228, 229; Shakespeare’s sources, 227 —Lamos production for LCT, 221–33, 232; audience and, 233; biblical references and, 229–30; cast for, 224, 226, 230–31; closing line, monk and nun kissing, 31, 222, 223, 231, 232, 233; design and staging, 223–34; dramaturgy for, 227–29; Lamos as director, 221–22, 226–27, 230–31; questions raised by, 230, 232; rehearsals, 230–31; Sonnets and, 228–29; success of interpretation and, 224–25; Vienna as setting, 222, 223, 225, 232 Medea (Euripides), 221 Meetings (Matura), xiii Meisner, Stanford, 221 Memories, Dreams, Reflections (Jung), 53, 55 Merchant of Venice, The (Shakespeare), 227; Rabb’s production, 32–33 Merediz, Olga, 59 Merritt, Stephin, 153, 157, 161, 163 Merritt, Theresa, 74 Merry Wives of Windsor (Shakespeare), 49 Metcalf, Laurie, 201 Midsummer Night’s Dream, A (Shakespeare), 29, 232; editions of the play, 45; English Renaissance ideas and, 50; original performances of, 50; Peter Brook’s production, 9, 63; Shakespeare’s sources, 48–49; textual variants, 46–48

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INDEX 306

—Lapine’s production for LCT, 42–61; animating idea and arc of the production, 55, 56–57, 60–61; cast for, 54, 56, 57–59; choreographer, 59; costumes and costume designer, 59–60, 233; depicting the fairies and fairy world, 59; dramaturgy and “100 interesting things,” 43–50, 51, 52–54, 55–56, 57, 262–64; interpreting the play, 53–56, 59, 61; love scene between Bottom and Titania, 58, 59; Mechanicals’ play Pyramus and Thisby, 56, 60; meter of the words in, 56; previews, 57; rehearsals and, 55, 57, 61; score by Shawn, 59; set designer, 54–55, 57–58, 233; text from Two Noble Kinsmen added, 55, 81; time span of, 52, 55; tracking the play’s characters, 56–57; unresolved problems, 59–60 Milhaud, Darius and Madeleine, ix Miller, Arthur, 3–4, 10, 192; The Crucible, 29; Death of a Salesman, 237 Miller, Judith, 96–97 Mills College, ix, x Milner, Ron, 24; What the WineSellers Buy, 70 Miranda, Lin-Manuel, 12; Hamilton, 4, 63 Mitchell, Loften, 77 Mitzi Newhouse Theater, 76, 77, 142, 143; Measure for Measure at, 221, 222, 226 Mnouchkine, Ariane, 219; directing Iphigenia at Aulis, 219 Modisani, Bloke, 81 Mogouchiy, Andrei, 147 Molière, x, 165, 167; biographical information and interpreting, 33–34; death of, 34; The Hypochondriac,

Y7864-Cattaneo.indb 306

34; Lassalle and Rivière, interpreting Dom Juan, 33–34; plays of sexual avidity, 34; Tartuffe, 33 Monk, Meredith, 151, 171, 187 Monkey: Journey to the West (ShiZheng Chen), 161 Montgomery, Reggie, 74, 224 Morisseau, Dominique, 99 Morphos, Evangeline, 213 Morrison, Toni, 65 Morton, Joe, 70 Moscow Art Theater, 26, 144, 190–91 Mosher, Gregory, xiv, 65, 66, 137, 221–22 Moss, Elizabeth, 96 Mother Courage (Brecht), 10, 241, 251 Mulawi, KaGe, 164 Mule Bone (Hughes and Hurston), 63, 65–82, 142; audience for, 75–76, 77, 78, 79, 80–81; casting and casting director, 73, 74–75; challenges for production, 70, 72; choreographer, 75; collaborators for production of, 74; colloquia for, 67, 76–77, 78, 281–82n14; costume designer, 75; controversies surrounding, 76; critical response, 81; decision to produce the play, 73; designers for, 73–74, 75; director, 70, 74; dramaturgy, 74, 79–82; lighting designer, 75; lyrics from Langston Hughes’s poems, 80, 281–82n14; musical component, 74, 79–80, 281–82n14; “Negro Life” depiction, 71–73, 74, 76, 79–80; poetry contest, 79; previews, 76, 78; prologue added, 79; reading and post-reading discussion, 70–73; rehearsals, 79; set designer, 75 Mules and Men (Hurston), 79

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INDEX 307

Müller, Heiner, 174–75; Hamletmachine, 172, 176–189; influence on Wilson, 174, 185, 186 Murray, Elizabeth, 97 My Life in Art (Stanislavsky), 214–17 My Past and Thoughts (Herzen), 111, 117 Mystery Plays/Mystery Cycles, 37, 43 Nabokov, Vladimir, 65 Nakagawa, Ron, 149 Nathan the Wise (Lessing), 278n9 National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), Theater Program, xiii National Theater Translation Project, 141 National Theatre (now Royal National Theatre), 9, 66; The Coast of Utopia premiere, 103, 104; production of Richard III, 29; Tynan as literary adviser at, 9, 63, 140 Ndlovu, Duma, 70, 147, 164 Neal, Kenny, 74 Negro Ensemble Company, 15, 70, 74, 87; Williams as playwrightdramaturg, 133 Nelson, Novella, 70, 74, 143 New Harmony Project, 209 New School for Social Research, 10 New Theatre, 8 New Way to Pay Old Debts, A (Massinger), 16 New York Library for the Performing Arts, 221 New York Theatre Workshop, xiii, 1, 37, 39, 149; development and premiere of Rent, 130 New York University (NYU), xiii; Experimental Theater Wing, 151; Hamletmachine production, 172, 176–89; Playwrights Horizons

Y7864-Cattaneo.indb 307

Theater School, xiii, 15, 141, 142, 175–76, 181 Nichols, Mike, 143 Nigrini, Peter, 163 Nine (musical), 176 1951 (“found texts” play), 1, 37, 39 Normal Heart, The (Kramer), 89 Norman, Jessye, 173 Norman, Marsha, xii, 89; Getting Out, 88; short play for Love’s Fire, 138 Norman Conquests, The (Ackbourn), 199 Norris, Bruce, 209; Clybourne Park, 209; Domesticated, 87, 200–201 North, Sir Thomas, 48 Notebooks of Trigorin, The (Williams), 65 Nottage, Lynn, 99, 211–12; Intimate Apparel, 212 Oates, Joyce Carol, 19 “Obituary for XX” (Brecht), 248 O’Brien, Jack: director, The Coast of Utopia, 102–5, 107, 109, 111, 112, 115; working with actors, 114–15 O’Byrne, Brian, 110–11, 115 O’Casey, Sean, Cock-A-DoodleDandy, xi Odets, Clifford, 3, 8, 89 Oedipus at Colonus (Sophocles), 33 Oedipus Rex (Sophocles), 272 Oldest Boy, The (Ruhl), 205 Olegboni, Tejumola F., 77 Oliver, Edith, 90 Olivier, Sir Laurence, 9, 63 Ondaatje, Michael, 147 “On the Berliner Ensemble’s Move to the Theater am Schiffbauerdamm” (Brecht), 238

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INDEX 308

100 Essays I Don’t Have Time to Write (Ruhl), 195–96, 198, 206, 207; on dramaturgs, 208 O’Neill, Eugene, 10, 12, 49, 89, 202; Long Day’s Journey into Night, 237; play structure and, 194; stage directions in plays, 29 “On Reading When I Was Rich” (Brecht), 245–46 Operation Sidewinder (Shepard), 70 Opie, Iona and Peter, 39 Orchards (seven short plays), xiv, 132–37, 136; design team, 135; Falls as director, 135, 137, 236; play development, 86, 132–37, 236; playwrights for, 133–35; publication by Knopf, 135, 136, 137; success of, 137 Orphan of Zhao, The (Ji Juan-Xiang), 36, 151–66, 164; actors’ challenges, 155, 156, 157, 159, 161–62; audiences for, 163; audience-stage connection and, 154; cast for, 156, 161–62, 163; challenge of merging Eastern and Western traditions, 154, 156, 157–58; commissioned scripts for, 154, 157, 160; designers, 153, 155–60, 163; developmental work for, 154, 162–63; director, 153–66; dramaturgy for, 151–55, 157, 158, 159, 162; music created for, 153, 157–58, 161, 163; play program book, 159; rehearsal process, 155–56, 157, 162–63; as a revenge play, 152; set design for, 158–59, 234; Voltaire’s adaptation and, 153, 284n6; writer, 160–61, 163 Orton, Joe, 9, 25, 199, 200 Osborne, John, 9, 10 Ostermeier, Thomas, 220–21

Y7864-Cattaneo.indb 308

Othello (Shakespeare), 49 Our Town (Wilder), 222 Ouspenskaya, Maria, 8 Pacific Overtures (Sondheim), 149 Papp, Joseph, xiii, 43, 52, 53, 140, 142, 213–14 Paraiso, Nicky, 59 Paran, Janice, 130 Pärt, Arvo, Tabula Rasa, 236 Part of Myself, A (Zuckmayer), 278n14 Passion Play (Ruhl), 209 Pavlo Hummel (Rabe), 214 Peer Gynt (Ibsen), 32, 75 Peony Pavilion, The (Tang Xianzu), 150–51, 153 Pericles (Shakespeare), 168 Perkins, Maxwell, 19–20, 200 Perloff, Carey, 141 Pettit, Peggy, 75 Phèdre (Racine), 272 Phoenix Theater, 14, 85–86, 88, 174, 247; literary manager for, xii–xiii, xiv, 11, 14, 52–53, 84, 86–87, 131, 247; Wasserstein and, 84, 85, 86, 91 Piazzolla, Astor, xiii Piccolo Teatro of Milan, 219 Pinter, Harold, 9 Pirandello, Luigi, 10 Piscator, Erwin, 10 Platonov (Chekhov), 132 play (dramatic work), 258; acting style and, 11; approaching without preconceptions, 27; Aristotle’s structure, 25, 52, 168, 195, 203, 273; collaborative research and, 28; as collective artistic process, 11, 26, 30, 34–36, 51, 62; design as central to interpretation, 145; dominant

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INDEX 309

dramatic form, 191–92; dramaturg and finding of, 11, 21–24, 129, 190; dramaturg’s journal or notes, 15, 16, 17, 18, 22, 55, 57, 104, 155; dramaturg’s questions and, 7, 18, 19, 22, 29, 31, 34, 42, 112, 162, 177, 194–95, 198, 200, 205, 259; dramaturg’s reading of, 11, 12, 15–22; dramaturgs and rehearsal, 31–32; exploration process, 24–25, 31; finding an audience, 167; finding a personal connection to the play, 30, 31; finding the action of a play, 51–52, 167; first impression and, 52; focus on the text and, 30; goal of producing, 62; interpreting, 31–36, 42–54, 59, 118, 162, 194–95, 200–201; interpreting, reimagining, and deepening, 218–35; interpreting, searching beyond the words, 167–89, 204; interpreting, seeing with new eyes, 236–53; an “Italian” and, 242; Method play, 272, 273; montage structure, 237–38, 240; music and, 167; naturalism, 67, 167, 191, 192, 204; new forms and styles, 190–217; nonliteral drama, 167–68; regional groundswell, 14; setting of, 167–68; stage-to-audience connection, 3–4, 6, 11, 31, 39, 62–63, 75, 154, 161, 167; story arcs, 194, 195–96; structure or architecture of, 19, 51, 168; supplemental materials for, 111; three-dimensional life of, 51; time as an element on stage, 52; visual associations and, 195 playbill, play programs, 11, 22; for The Coast of Utopia, 104, 116–18, 120–28; content of, 104; dramaturg’s credit in, 140; for Isn’t It

Y7864-Cattaneo.indb 309

Romantic, 94; for Mule Bone, 65, 72, 77; for The Orphan of Zhao, 159; “Program Books,” 11–12 play evaluations and reports, 15–18, 193, 201; exercise for a new dramaturg, 193–94 playwrights: actors and, 198–99, 207; advocacy for, 12, 14, 23, 99, 129, 192; agents and, 14, 15, 21, 91, 142, 199, 201; changing from experimental to commercial, 207; colloquia with, 11; commissioned plays and, 86–88, 133–35, 138; difficulty faced by, 199; discovery of, 15–16, 129, 140, 190; dramaturg collaborating with, 201–8; dramaturgs and, 23, 36, 83–84, 88, 93–94, 98, 99, 100–101, 196; encouragement of, 88, 129, 199, 208–15, 255; feedback for, 198, 208–15; George Devine Award, 15; innovation and, 190–217; Legacy Playwrights Initiative and, 23, 149; O’Neill conference and new play development, 84–85; play types and, 92; readers for, 201; recognizing the playwright’s style, 12; regional groundswell, 14; unsolicited scripts and, 15, 16, 193; women as, 97, 99–100 Plebeians Rehearse the Uprising, The (Grass), 252 Plutarch’s Lives, 48 “Poetics” (Ammons), 35 Poetics (Aristotle), 25, 168, 258–59, 272, 273 Polendo, Rubén, 164 Poliakoff, Stephen, xiii Pope, Alexander, 44 Provincetown Players, 6, 26 Pryor, Richard, 74

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INDEX 310

Public Theater, 15, 64, 89, 130, 149 Puntilla (Brecht), 10 Qian Yi, 150, 153, 154, 157, 158, 163 Rabb, Ellis, 32 Rabe, David, 89, 192, 213–14 Racine, Jean, 167, 272 Raise the Red Lantern (film), 151 Rampersad, Arnold: collected poetry of Langston Hughes and, 80; The Life of Langston Hughes, 68, 70, 76–77, 78; Mule Bone colloquia and, 76, 77; Mule Bone reading and discussion, 70, 71–72 Ramsay, Peggy, 199 reading a play, 11, 12, 15–22, 192–96; appreciating new forms and styles, 191, 192–96; approaching a Shakespeare play, 194–95; beginning with the text, 29–30; dramaturgs and, 15, 21, 193–94; individual vision and, 18; keeping notes, 15–16, 17–18, 22, 193; noting the strengths, 18, 193; placing the manuscript in a theatrical tradition, 194; play discovery and, 193; play structure and, 19, 192, 195; plot and, 17–18; questions raised by, 18–20, 29–30, 194; Ruhl on, 20, 194, 195–96; searching beyond the words, 167–89, 204, 258–59; seeing the author’s intention, 29; understanding an author, 198; unsolicited scripts, 15, 16, 193; writing evaluations or reports, 15–18, 193–94, 201; writers’ favorite readers, 201 Real Thing, The (Stoppard), 109 Reddin, Nigel, 154 Rediscovery of Style, The (SaintDenis), 218–19

Y7864-Cattaneo.indb 310

Reed, Pamela, 88 reflect light back, 102–19; dramaturg’s toolkit for, 260–61; framing how the audience sees the play, 116–18; “100 interesting things” and, 104–5; raising questions and doubts, 112; working with actors, 102–12 regional theaters, xii, 5, 9, 13–14, 24, 85, 90, 143, 207; dramaturgy profession and, 14; Ford Foundation grants and, 8, 13; growth of, 13–15 rehearsal process, 22, 31–32; art of, 39; dramaturg and, 22, 27–28, 31–32, 75, 84, 93, 176–77, 183, 196, 198, 201, 205; for Hamletmachine, 176–77, 179–85; How to Transcend a Happy Marriage and, 196; for Isn’t It Romantic, 93; an “Italian,” 242; for Mule Bone, 75; of mystery plays, 37; New York Theater Workshop production, 37, 39; for The Orphan of Zhao, 155–58, 162–63; protocol for, 22, 84; questions about the play and, 29; refining new forms and styles in, 162, 191; for Uncommon Women and Others, 84 Reinhardt, Max, 9, 10, 278n14 Rent (Larson), 63, 130–31 research and information gathering, 27–28, 36, 37, 43–50, 51, 257–58; for The Coast of Utopia, 104–7, 108, 109–18, 120–28; informational materials for actors, 109, 110–11, 112, 114, 115; for Measure for Measure, 227–30; for The Orphan of Zhao, 151–53; revisiting The Life of Galileo, biographical investigation of Brecht, 238, 243–53, 249; for Shakespearean plays, 43–50

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INDEX 311

Rice, Elmer, 66 Richard II (Shakespeare), 49 Richard III (Shakespeare), 168; National Theatre production, 29 Richards, Lloyd, 15, 84, 85 Riegert, Peter, 93 Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny (Brecht and Weill), 245 Rivière, Jean-Loup, 33–34 Rivkala’s Ring (Gray), 134 Robertson, Rebecca, 1 Robinson, Roger, 70 Robman, Steve, 85 Rockwell, John, 110, 150 Rodgers and Hammerstein musicals, 3 Rohn, Jennifer, 177, 185, 186, 188 Romeo and Juliet, 49 Rommen, Ann-Christin, 177, 181 Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Awards, xiii Rosato, Mary Lou, 163 Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (Stoppard), 18 Rose Theatre, 37 Rothenberg, Susan, 97 Rowe, Nicholas, 44 Rowling, J. K., 203–4 Royal Court Theatre, 169 Rozewicz, Tadeusz, 190 Ruhl, Sarah, 16, 20, 194, 196; conversation with, 202–8; on feedback, 208–9; Ovidian form and, 196, 198, 272; plays produced at LCT, 202; Theater of the Unconscious, 204, 207 —works: The Clean House, 208; Eurydice, 202, 203; How to Transcend a Happy Marriage, 196, 197, 198, 202, 234; In the Next Room, 201, 204–5, 208; The Oldest Boy, 205;

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100 Essays I Don’t Have Time to Write, 195–96, 198, 206, 207, 208; Passion Play, 209; Stage Kiss, 206 Rumstick Road (Gray), 134, 195 Runaways (Swados), 89 Run-Through (Houseman), 81 Russian Thinkers (Berlin), 102, 117, 121n, 128 Ryan, Tammy, 209–10 Saint-Denis, Michel, 40–41, 218–19 Sandbox, The (Albee), 134 Sarafina! (Ngema), 63, 73, 75, 81, 222, 230 Saroyan, William, xi Sartre, Jean-Paul, 10 Save Grand Central (Hamilton), xiii Schall, Ekkehard, 239, 240 Schreck, Heidi, 99 Schreiber, Liev, 64 Schultz, Michael, 70, 74 Scott, Campbell, 224, 231 Scott, Oz, 70 Seagull, The (Chekhov), 190, 194, 215, 258 searching beyond the words, 167–89, 204, 258–59; actors dealing with unconscious material, 205–7; Artaud’s Theater and Its Double and, 168; non-literal drama and, 168; questions to ask about the play, 167–68; real-world setting or imagined reality, 167–68; in Ruhl’s plays, 196, 198, 201–8; seeing the “unconscious arc,” 169–70; in Shepard’s plays, 168, 169; structure of the play and, 168; symbolism in Shakespeare’s plays, 168; visual elements and, 168; in Wilson’s plays, 171–74; Wilson’s production of Hamletmachine, 176–89

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INDEX 312

Second Stage Theater, xiv, 11, 23 Segal, Erich, 45 Servillo, Toni, 147 Shakespeare, William: actors and, 44, 50, 56; anagnorisis moments, 169; audience synchronicity and, 63; clowns of, 49–50; dramaturg’s research and, 43–50, 226; editions of the plays, 45–47, 228; English Renaissance ideas and, 50; focus on the text and, 30; going deeper and, 20, 226; history plays, material on, 112; King’s Men and, 37, 45; Kline’s collaborative research and, 28; Kott’s study and power of dramaturgical thinking, 9; life of, 44–45, 48, 49, 56; Lord Chamberlain’s Men and, 144, 261; meter of the plays’ texts, 56, 231; model for reading a play, 194–95; order of plays, 48–49, 231; plays without identified sources, 49; problem plays, 222–23, 225, 234; sources of, 48, 170, 227; stage directions and, 47, 56–57; symbolism in, 168–69; Variorum editions, 44 —works: All’s Well That Ends Well, 227; Antony and Cleopatra, 48; As You Like It, 48, 49, 53; The Comedy of Errors, 48–49; Cymbeline, 168– 69, 231; Hamlet, 47, 49, 220; Henry IV, 28, 109, 111; Henry VI, 48; Henry VIII, 168; Julius Caesar, 49; King Lear, 49, 233; Love’s Labor’s Lost, 49; Macbeth, 49; Measure for Measure, 31, 49, 142, 221–33, 232; The Merchant of Venice, 32–33, 227; The Merry Wives of Windsor, 49; A Midsummer’s Night Dream, 9, 29, 42–61, 232; Othello, 49; Pericles,

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168; Richard II, 49; Richard III, 29; Romeo and Juliet, 49; Sonnets, 49, 170–71, 228–29, 232; Sonnets adapted as Love’s Fire, 137–40, 139; The Tempest, 49, 168, 220, 234; Titus Andronicus, 49; Troilus and Cressida, 49, 50; Twelfth Night, 49; Two Noble Kinsmen, 55 Shakespeare in Love (Stoppard), 49 Shakespeare Our Contemporary (Kott), 9, 63 Shakespeare Theatre (Washington), 131, 137 Shange, Ntozake, 12, 70, 72, 77, 192; for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf, 18, 70, 89; short play for Love’s Fire, 138 Shapiro, Anna, 200, 201 Shaw, Fiona, 163, 221 Shaw, George Bernard, 9 Shaw, Irwin, 8 Shawn, Allen, 59 Shawn, Wallace, 192 Shay, Michele, 58 Shelley, Percy Bysshe, The Cenci, 273 Shepard, Sam, x, 12, 14, 19, 27, 49, 96, 169, 192, 199; Buried Child, 170; Curse of the Starving Class, 169; early work, 168; Mad Dog Blues, 169; Operation Sidewinder, 70; The Tooth of Crime, 169; writing method, 169–70 Sher, Bartlett, 149 Sheville, James, 237 Shipwreck (Washburn), 192 Shubert, Lee, 8 Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window, The (Hansberry), 89

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INDEX 313

Simon, Neil, 192; The Good Doctor, 132 Sinise, Gary, 170 Sisters Rosensweig, The (Wasserstein), 96–98, 100 Smith, Anna Deavere, 100 Smith, Lois, 143, 145–46, 169–70, 224 Smith, Mary Carter, 77 Smokey Joe’s Café (musical), 176 Society of Stage Directors and Choreographers (SDC), 129 Soldier’s Play, A (Fuller), 222 Sondheim, Stephen, 21; Into the Woods, 54, 61; Pacific Overtures, 149 Sonnet 154 (Shakespeare), 170–71 Sophocles: Oedipus at Colonus, 33; Oedipus Rex, 272 Sorkin, Aaron, 98 Soyinka, Wole, 70; Death and the King’s Horseman, 73, 81 Speed-the-Plow (Mamet), 222 Stage Kiss (Ruhl), 206 Stanislavsky, Konstantin, 186, 190, 191; My Life in Art, 214–17 Stasio, Marilyn, 90 Steffin, Margaret, 240 Stein, Howard, xi, 93 Stein, Peter, 8, 29, 32 Steppenwolf Theatre, 144 Stewart, Ellen, 149 Stoller, Mike, 176, 181 Stoppard, Tom, 18, 114; The Coast of Utopia, 63, 102–19, 108, 118; The Real Thing, 109; Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, 18; Shakespeare in Love, 49; Travesties, 18, 279n20 Strasberg, Lee, 8, 272, 273

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Stratford Festival (Canada), 62 Strauss, Botho, xii, 254; Big and Little, 135, 236; Peer Gynt production, 32 Streep, Meryl, 31, 241 Streetcar Named Desire, A (Williams), 272 Street Scene (Weill) Strehler, Giorgio, 219–20, 243 Strindberg, August, 89, 168, 195 Sturm, Dieter, 254 subUrbia (Bogosian), 63 Suitcase Theatre, 74 Sullivan, Daniel, 98–99, 143, 211–12 Swados, Liz, Runaways, 89 Swee, Daniel, 208 Sweet Flypaper of Life, The (Hughes and DeCarava), 76 Swinton, William, 77 Tabula Rasa (album, Pärt), 236 Taichman, Rebecca, 196, 198, 205 Talking Dog, The (Guare), 134 Tandy, Jessica, 206 Tang Xianzu, The Peony Pavilion, 150–51 Tartuffe (Molière), 33 Tate, Greg, 77 Taylor, Myra, 75 Tectonic Theater Project, 41 Telson, Bob, 33 Tempest, The (Shakespeare), 49, 168, 234; Strehler’s production, 220 Tenney, Tom, 182 Tennyson, Alfred, Lord, The Lady of Shalott, 229 Terminating, or Lass Meine Schmerzen Nicht Verloren Sein, or Ambivalence (Kushner), 138 Tesich, Steve, 14

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INDEX 314

theater: as ancient and unique hybrid, 4; apprentice tradition, 145; audience-stage synchronicity, 3–4, 6, 11, 39, 62–63, 75, 154, 161, 167; axiom on who knows the play best, 23; Chinese-language character for, 6, 152; collaboration and community, 5–6, 7, 12, 26, 39, 255; director’s role, 6–7; diversity and, 5, 7; evolution of, 40–41; exploration of emotion and, 6; fifty founding mission statements of American theaters, 8–9; Greek word agon and, 6; groups of peers and, 144; historical model of theater-making, 26; national theater in England, 9; personal contact and flowering of artistry, 144; process of bringing a play to life, 24–25; Russian, Moscow Art Theatre and new form, 190–91; spectacle and, 203, 204; Strehler’s “idea of a theater,” 219–20; Theater of Cruelty, 273 Theater of Heiner Müller, The (Kalb), 174–75 Theater and Its Double, The (Artaud), 6, 168, 169, 172, 273 Theater de Lys, 88 Theater Mitu, 164 Theater of War, 31 Theatre Communications Group, 13 Theatre de Complicité, 153, 163 Theatre Guild, 8 Their Eyes Were Watching God (Hurston), 67, 280–81n7 Theobald, Lewis, 44 Thigpen, Lynne, 99 Third (Wasserstein), 95, 99 Thompson, Tazewell, 212–13 Thomson, Lynn, 130–31

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Those the River Keeps (Rabe), 213 Threepenny Opera, The (Brecht and Weill), 198, 243 Tighe, Mary Ann, 1 Tilden, Leif, 182, 183 Times Square, New York City, 1; a dramaturg’s approach to renovation, 39–40; The Experience of Place and, 1–2, 39 Tiny Alice (Albee), 192, 195 Tipton, Jennifer, 176, 181, 186, 188 ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore (Ford), 168 Titus Andronicus (Shakespeare), 49 To the Finland Station (E. Wilson), 107 To Kill a Mockingbird (stage adaption by Aaron Sorkin), 98 Tolstoya, Tatiana, 113, 116 Tooth of Crime, The (Shepard), 169 Toussaint, Lorraine, 224 “To a Woman Colleague Who Stayed Behind in the Theater During the Summer Vacation” (Brecht), 239 Translations (Friel), 29, 195 Travesties (Stoppard), 18, 279n20 Trinity Repertory Company, 172 Troilus and Cressida (Shakespeare), 49, 50 Trolin, Moqi, 164 Troupe, Quincy, 77 True and False (Mamet), 198 Tsvetaeva, Marina, 190 Tsypin, George, 64, 243 Turgenev, Ivan, 117 Twelfth Night (Shakespeare), 49 Twelve Dreams (Lapine), 53, 55 24-Decade History of Popular Music, A (Mac), 24 Two Noble Kinsmen (Shakespeare), 55 Tynan, Kenneth, 279n20; billing in program lacking, 140; as literary

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INDEX 315

adviser, 9, 63, 140; repertory list, 65–66 Uncle Vanya (Chekhov), 214–17 Uncommon Women and Others (Wasserstein), 84, 86, 90–91; O’Neill conference and development of, 85 Under Heaven’s Eye (Franklin), xiii Universite de Paris (Sorbonne), ix–x Unknown Chekhov, The (Yarmolinsky, ed.), 132 van Peebles, Melvin, 24 Vega, Rosa, xiv Venora, Diane, 58 “Vint” (Chekhov), 132–33 Vint (Mamet), 133 Visit of the Old Lady, The (Dürrenmatt), 10 Vitenberg, Lena, 113 Vivian Beaumont Theater, 33, 70, 142; backstage space at, 105; as a challenging house, 114–15; The Coast of Utopia production, 102–19, 108, 118; The Sisters Rosensweig production, 97 Vogel, Paula, 195, 203 Volansky, Michele, 209 Voltaire, 153, 284n6 Waiting for Godot (Beckett), 16, 142–43 Waiting for Lefty (Odets), 3, 8 Walker, Alice, 76; “Looking for Zora,” 67 Walker Art Center, 33 Wall, Cheryl A., 77 Walsh, Paul, 284n6 Warburton, William, 44, 46 Warner, Deborah, 221 Warrilow, David, 206 Washburn, Anne, Shipwreck, 192

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Washington, Mary Helen, 67 Wasserstein, Lola, 93–94 Wasserstein, Wendy, xii, 18, 63, 84–101, 206; awards won by, 90, 96, 97; career of, 90, 94, 96, 97–98; critics and, 90, 98; on cutting a play, 92–93; dramaturg’s role with, 84, 86, 88, 91, 92–94, 98–99, 101; ending her plays, 92–93, 95–96, 98, 99, 198; feminism and, 97, 98; names of leading characters, 91; Phoenix play commission, 86, 91; playwriting, themes, and ambitions of, 89–90, 94–95, 97, 98–99; rewrites and, 88, 98; traditional narrative arc of, 88–89; at Yale School of Drama, 84, 93 —works: An American Daughter, 98–99; The Heidi Chronicles, 94–95, 97, 99; Isn’t It Romantic, 91–92; The Man in a Case, 133, 135; short play for Love’s Fire, 138; The Sisters Rosensweig, 96–97, 100; Third, 95, 99; Uncommon Women and Others, 84–86, 90–91 Weather Pilot (Heidenreich), 236 Weber, Carl, 179, 185 Weigel, Helene, 238, 239, 246, 253 Weill, Kurt, 247; Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny, 245; Street Scene, 66; The Threepenny Opera, 198, 243 Weiss, Peter, The Investigation, 37 Weitzman, Ira, 21 Welcome Table, The (Baldwin), 65 Weldon, Fay, xii Welles, Orson, 81–82 West, Cornel, 77 Weston, Jack, 224 What the Wine-Sellers Buy (Milner), 70

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INDEX 316

“When I Was Rich” (Brecht), 245 When We Dead Awaken (Ibsen), 195 White, George C., 15, 84, 85 Whitford, Bradley, 224 Whiting Awards, xiii–xiv Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf ? (Albee), 192 Wiest, Dianne, 64 Wilder, Clinton, 192 Wilder, Thornton, 10; Our Town, 222; unproduced one-act plays, 65 Willett, John, 238, 239 Williams, Samm-Art, 14, 24, 133–134 Williams, Tennessee, 4, 10, 89, 192, 199; The Glass Menagerie, 199; The Notebooks of Trigorin, 65; A Streetcar Named Desire, 272 Williams, Vanessa, 75 Wilson, August, 4, 12, 14, 18, 24, 49, 96, 192, 199 Wilson, Edmund, 20, 107 Wilson, Lanford, 14, 87, 192, 207; attending performances, 23; Balm in Gilead, 207; The Gingham Dog, 207; Lemon Sky, x, 23 Wilson, Robert, xii, 171–72, 187, 192, 199; advice to actors, 186; CIVIL warS, 173–74; Danton’s Death production, 187; Death Destruction & Detroit, 174; The $ Value of Man, 173; dramaturgs working with, 188–89; early vs. later work of, 187; Einstein on the Beach, 173, 177, 179, 186; Knowles and, 171, 173; A Letter to Queen Victoria, 171, 187;

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The Life and Times of Joseph Stalin, 171, 187; Müller and, 174, 185, 186, 187; Müller’s Hamletmachine and, 172, 176–89, 180, 204; rehearsal process, 176–77, 179–80, 180; searching beyond the words in the plays of, 171–74; Threepenny Opera production, 187; unconscious storytelling of, 172 Winer, Linda, 90 Winfield, Paul, 70 Wisdom Bridge Theater, 135 Wolfe, George C., 25, 130, 224 Wolfe, Thomas, 19, 200 Wolfe, Tom, Bonfire of the Vanities, 223, 225 Wood, Audrey, 14, 199 Wright, Garland, 172 Wright, Richard, 67, 68, 81, 280–81n7 Wulp, John, 175–76, 185 Yaegashi, James, 148–49 Yale School of Drama, x, xi, 84, 93 Yarmolinsky, Avraham, 132 Yee, Lauren, 99 Youmans, Bill, 163 Zaks, Jerry, 199 Zoo Story (Albee), 192 Zora Neale Hurston (Hemenway), 66 Zuber, Cathy, 109 Zuckmayer, Carl, 244, 278n14 Zurich Schauspielhaus, v, 10, 247; Brecht and, 245 Zweig, Stefan, 244

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