SDC Journal Winter-Spring 2017

JOURNAL WINTER/SPRING 2017

TAZEWELL THOMPSON THE WORK I MUST DO BROADWAY ASIA WITH

JOHN RANDO + MARC ROUTH

DIRECTING AT THE LA PHIL

JESSICA KUBZANSKY, MATTHEW McCRAY + KITTY McNAMEE PEER-REVIEWED SECTION

DIRECTORIAL COURAGE IN IRAN + MORE 1

WINTER/SPRING 2017 | SDC JOURNAL

OFFICERS

Pam MacKinnon PRESIDENT

John Rando EXECUTIVE VICE PRESIDENT

Leigh Silverman VICE PRESIDENT

Oz Scott SECRETARY

Michael Wilson TREASURER

EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR

Laura Penn COUNSEL

Ronald H. Shechtman HONORARY ADVISORY COMMITTEE

Karen Azenberg Pamela Berlin Julianne Boyd Danny Daniels Marshall W. Mason Ted Pappas Susan H. Schulman

SDC EXECUTIVE BOARD

SDC JOURNAL

MEMBERS OF BOARD

MANAGING EDITOR

Christopher Ashley Walter Bobbie Anne Bogart Jo Bonney Mark Brokaw Joe Calarco Rachel Chavkin Liz Diamond Marcia Milgrom Dodge Sheldon Epps Michael John Garcés Liza Gennaro Wendy C. Goldberg Linda Hartzell Anne Kauffman Mark Lamos Kathleen Marshall Meredith McDonough Ethan McSweeny Robert Moss Robert O’Hara Sharon Ott Ruben Santiago-Hudson­ Seret Scott Bartlett Sher Casey Stangl Eric Ting Chay Yew Evan Yionoulis

Marella Martin Koch FEATURES EDITOR

Elizabeth Bennett GRAPHIC DESIGNER

Elizabeth Nelson EDITORIAL ADVISORY COMMITTEE

Jo Bonney Graciela Daniele Sheldon Epps Liza Gennaro Thomas Kail Robert O'Hara Ann M. Shanahan Leigh Silverman Evan Yionoulis SDC JOURNAL PEERREVIEWED SECTION EDITORIAL BOARD SDCJ-PRS CO-EDITORS

Anne Fliotsos Ann M. Shanahan SDCJ-PRS BOOK REVIEW EDITOR

Travis Malone SDCJ-PRS BOOK REVIEW ASSOCIATE

Kathleen M. McGeever SDCJ-PRS SENIOR ADVISORY COMMITTEE

Anne Bogart Joan Herrington James Peck

SDCJ-PRS PEER REVIEWERS

Donald Byrd David Callaghan Kathryn Ervin Liza Gennaro Ruth Pe Palileo Scot Reese Stephen A. Schrum

Joie Miroux INDEPENDENT SCHOLAR

Lisa Rafferty DIRECTOR + PLAYWRIGHT

Seret Scott DIRECTOR

SDCJ-PRS ASSISTANT EDITORS + PEER REVIEWERS

Thomas Costello Emily Rollie WINTER/SPRING 2017 CONTRIBUTORS

Tazewell Thompson DIRECTOR + PLAYWRIGHT + LIBRETTIST

Amile Wilson CHOREOGRAPHER/DIRECTOR

Chris Coleman

Peter Zazzali

DIRECTOR

UNIVERSITY OF KANSAS

Ernest A. Figueroa DIRECTOR/PRODUCER + FOUNDER, DIRECTORS LAB WEST

Joey Frangieh DIRECTOR + DESIGNER

John C. Green, Ph.D. COLUMBIA COLLEGE CHICAGO

Jessica Kubzansky DIRECTOR

Yue Liu PRODUCER

Matthew McCray DIRECTOR

Kitty McNamee CHOREOGRAPHER/DIRECTOR

SDC JOURNAL is published quarterly by Stage Directors and Choreographers Society, located at 321 W. 44th Street, Suite 804, NY, NY 10036.

SDC JOURNAL is a registered trademark of SDC. SUBSCRIPTIONS + ADVERTISEMENTS Call 212.391.1070 or visit www.SDCweb.org.

Annual SDC Membership dues include a $5 allocation for a 1-year subscription to SDC JOURNAL. Non-Members may purchase an annual subscription for $24 (domestic), $48 (foreign); single copies cost $7 each (domestic), $14 (foreign).

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

PRINTED BY

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Sterling Printing SDC JOURNAL

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WINTER/SPRING CONTENTS Volume 5 | No. 3

FEATURES 15

Rhonda Miller FORGING A NEW PATH FOR DANCE STUDIES IN HIGHER EDUCATION

BY ELIZABETH

BENNETT

19 Sensing the Wonder FAMILY AUDIENCES AT THE L.A. PHILHARMONIC WITH JESSICA KUBZANSKY, MATTHEW MCCRAY + KITTY MCNAMEE

23 Broadway Asia ITH JOHN RANDO + W MARC ROUTH INTERVIEWED BY

YUE LIU + HOWARD SHERMAN

30 COVER

Tazewell Thompson:

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PEER-REVIEWED SECTION

A Case Study of Directorial Courage: An Iranian Director's Subversive Production of Lorca's The House of Bernard Alba

BY JOIE

MIROUX + PETER ZAZZALI

THE WORK I MUST DO

EDITED BY ANNE

BY SDC JOURNAL

ANN M. SHANAHAN

FLIOTSOS +

BY SDC JOURNAL WINTER/SPRING 2017 | SDC JOURNAL

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Chris Coleman workshopping Astoria, which he adapted + directed for The Armory in January 2017 PHOTO Kate Szrom

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IN YOUR WORDS

What I Learned...Chris Coleman CURATED BY SERET

5 FROM THE PRESIDENT

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BY PAM MacKINNON

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FROM THE EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR

BY LAURA PENN

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hy I Cast That Actor W Ernest A. Figueroa

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PRE-SHOW / POST-SHOW John C. Green, Ph.D.

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SCOTT

SDC SCREEN TO SCREEN

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Pam MacKinnon

Consortium of Asian American Theatres + Artists

SDCJ-PRS BOOK REVIEW

The Unity of Music + Dance in World Cultures

By David Akombo REVIEW BY AMILE WILSON

THE SOCIETY PAGES

The Broadway Legacy of George Abbott Chicago Academic Associate Gathering Annual Membership Meeting

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SDC FOUNDATION An Interview with David Roberts,

16th Annual Gala Performance of The 24 Hour Plays on Broadway

SDC Foundation Director inish Line F in 20 Questions Joey Frangieh + Lisa Rafferty

BY SHELDON

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EPPS

SDC FOUNDATION AWARDS REVIEW

The Joe A. Callaway Award The Zelda Fichandler Award The “Breakout Award”

49 Tazewell Thompson PHOTO Richard Termine COVER

PREVIOUS Wing on Wing at Walt Disney Concert Hall, with Delaram Kamareh as Siren/soprano + Stacey Tappan as Siren/soprano PHOTO Mathew Imaging

SDC FOUNDATION

#RememberingZelda

The Theatre Hall of Fame Awards Circle Repertory Company Day Bicoastal Board Meeting + Los Angeles Membership Meeting

The Best Worst Thing That Ever Could Have Happened Hairspray LIVE! SDC Holiday Open House + John Everson Retirement Celebration + Gian Carlo Menotti

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FROM THE PRESIDENT Rehearsing when the world goes crazy is both a blessing and a curse. It is a blessing to go to work, to be expected at a certain hour and have to move forward, even though one’s first instinct might be to pull down the shades. It’s a curse because it can feel as if the room itself is in denial to the events of the day, pretending that it’s business as usual in order to meet ongoing deadlines. That we gather on yet another day, creating a story for future consumption that likely will not be rewritten per se but will be heard differently from the day before, can feel rarified and nutty.

On November 8 and November 9, I was in rehearsal for my musical Amélie, a very open-hearted show about a young woman coming of age.

November 8 was a celebratory day, with younger associates wearing the “future is female” shirts, political buttons; someone had brought in flowers. We changed our hours to accommodate people’s voting. There was a lot of laughter. From our rehearsal hall windows, we watched voters lining up at a polling place. Confident, cocky New Yorkers all.

The next morning, as we approached full company quorum, I spoke about the election results with a quaver in my voice about feeling grateful for the room, about our day together, my fear for where our country was heading, and also about empathy. Craig Lucas, our book writer, spoke about activism and dangerous art. Adam Chanler-Berat, my male lead, spoke with tears on his cheeks about how important working on a show about a young woman felt to him on that day in particular. Phillipa Soo, my female lead, spoke about community. Sam Pinkleton spoke about remembering to breathe through the workday and grounding our voices as we processed what we could not control.

Songs sounded different all day. Over the week, younger colleagues asked if this had ever happened before. What was one supposed to be doing?

Now, as president of our Union, I want to ask of our Membership, what are we supposed to do in this moment? Directors and choreographers are leaders. Our day-to-day work in rehearsal halls, classrooms, and meetings is all about leading communities of the moment into action—building stories. How do we use these skills at this uncertain and likely dangerous time? Labor unions are vulnerable, as right to work legislation will likely flourish under the next president and Congress. Freedom of speech and assembly will likely come under further attack. Changes in health care laws may affect our health care plan’s costs. Diversity and inclusion in our field and the arts generally are more important than ever.

A few days after the election, outgoing SDC President Susan H. Schulman led a discussion at the Annual Membership meeting positing that the Union should step into political action. We are a national organization with large reach and a passionate Membership, many of whom are already or eager to become more involved, more educated in policy, more aware and plugged in. The new Board and I, along with Laura Penn and SDC staff and new Director of SDC Foundation David Roberts, are heeding this call. Much discussion is being had about what political actions we should take to strengthen the Union, giving voice to the concerns that directly affect our Members. We are rapidly trying to put these conversations into concrete action. The Journal is a platform for discussion and education, and the Editorial Advisory Committee plans to ensure these pages are infused with the passion and engagement so many of our Members share, inspiring others to join in our efforts to protect and build a civil society.

Please stay tuned—and, as importantly, reach out. Get involved in the Union. Raise your voice beyond your rehearsal hall or classroom or meeting.

In solidarity,

Pam MacKinnon, Executive Board President

Amélie rehearsal hall, Nov. 8, 2016 LEFT TO RIGHT Sam Pinkleton, Jordan Laffrenier, Craig Lucas, Amanda Phelan, Katie Spelman, Morgan Green, Pam MacKinnon + Nathan Tysen PHOTO Heath Calvert

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UNITE EMPOWER PROTECT

FROM THE EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR

April 2017 will mark 58 years since the founding of Stage Directors and Choreographers Society. While not an anniversary that calls you to celebrate big, it does remind us that 60 is right around the corner—and yes, we have begun to talk about how to mark SDC’s sixth decade.

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Anniversaries provide an opportunity for celebration and for reflection, for evaluation and for dreaming. When we were planning the 50th, we knew that if all we did was throw a great party, we would fall short. In considering that milestone year, we found our focus in the words Unite, Empower, Protect. Words matter.

Words can make the difference. These three words, some seven syllables, have had such an impact on SDC. They are beacons on the horizon guiding us forward. They are filters through which we make daily decisions. They inspire us to find new ways of strengthening the community and in doing so give us the power to make the creative and personal lives of directors and choreographers better so that they— you—can give theatregoers something delightful, enlightening, challenging, and at times comforting.

The imagining of the SDC Journal came from the 50th Anniversary Initiative. The capturing of your work, in words on the page, is hard and yet critical to archiving your legacy as well as shaping the future. As we put the finishing touches on the 19th issue, I am once again knocked out and inspired by your reach and your impact.

This issue—an issue which combines winter and spring—tells of stories staged hidden in hallways in Iran, in concert halls and opera houses, and onstage in major venues in Beijing and Shanghai... Our Peer-Reviewed Section, under the leadership of Ann M. Shanahan and Anne Fliotsos, takes us on an eight-year, sometimes harrowing, journey to stage The House of Bernarda Alba in Tehran.

The Founders would likely have been intrigued by John Rando’s recent experience in China directing for Broadway Asia, which once focused almost exclusively on touring U.S. productions, but now works in partnership with Chinese theatrical producers and is beginning to create new musicals in China with worldwide aspirations. An exploration of Pace University’s BFA in Commercial Dance, led by Rhonda Miller, reveals a new path for dancers and choreographers entering this increasingly transmedia profession. Speaking of transmedia, Jessica Kubzansky, Matthew McCray, and Kitty McNamee share their experiences directing symphonies for the young at the LA Philharmonic.

My mom is a vocal coach, so my childhood was filled with musical theatre and opera. I can remember being about eight or nine years old when she would gather all the kids from the neighborhood on a sunny afternoon. We dutifully sat in a circle on the shag carpet in our living room as she would tell us about Lieutenant Pinkerton, Isolde, the Dutchman, or Magda Sorel. She would gently guide us into the stories while deftly dropping the needle in exactly the right spot—the powerful aria, the dissonant chord, the heartbreaking duet. No one moved, even as we were terrified. There was a restless night’s sleep—or two—in twin beds throughout the cul de sac as kids tossed and turned hoping never, ever to cross paths with Turandot. All that to say I have a soft spot in my heart for opera and for our cover story Tazewell Thomspon’s passion for the form. My first experience of his passion for stories of scale and their power to transport us deeply into another world—or, as he says, “the assault and explosiveness to the sense”—was when I saw his Mother Courage in 1999.

Finally, we have our Founder, Gian Carlo Menotti. He was one of those relentless artists who gave us a body of work that lives on today. Menotti once said of himself, “I should have worked harder in my life.” Can you imagine what the world would be like if everyone worked with the ambition of a director or choreographer?

In solidarity,

Laura Penn Executive Director

WHAT I LEARNED…

IN YOUR WORDS What I Learned...

Why I Cast That Actor

BY CHRIS

COLEMAN

CURATED BY SERET

Pre-Show / Post-Show

SCOTT

I remember acting in a one-act in undergrad. A senior director was at the helm, and our directing professor, Pat Cook, had come in to assess our progress. She told him he’d missed the event at the play’s climax. This was Baylor, maybe 1981. My director was crestfallen; but I was curious. Later, I asked Mrs. Cook, “How did you know that?” She responded, “A lot of practice.”

20 Questions SDC Screen to Screen

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Pat was a brilliant professor, the most affecting teacher I’ve encountered, and I was in awe of her gifts. Sitting in class with her was like “reading the text by flashes of lightning,” to paraphrase Coleridge. She was unpredictable and sexy and perhaps a bit mad. And I assumed that she had that insight about the play’s climax because of a particular genius.

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

So. It was even more of a revelation when I actually took her directing class and realized that there was craft beneath the witchcraft. That there was a way of looking at a play (“taking it apart like a Swiss watch” was her phrase) that allowed you to see how the whole thing actually worked. That your choices could be, in fact were required to be, grounded in a fundamental understanding of how the play functions in terms of its overarching idea. And that pinpointing what action the primary characters take under greatest pressure was the absolute key to understanding the core of the play.

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

That was the lightning flash for me. And has remained so.

In the midst of all the brilliant ideas from designers, the inspiring impulses from actors, the revelations that come spilling from my own imagination in the middle of the night, the guiding bedrock is that way of looking to the play’s action. Keeps me sane.

ABOVE Pat

Cook with students

CHRIS COLEMAN joined Portland Center Stage at The Armory as artistic director in 2000. Before arriving in Portland, Chris was the artistic director at Actor’s Express in Atlanta, a company he co-founded in the basement of an old church in 1988. Chris returned to Atlanta in 2015 to direct the world premiere of Edward Foote at Alliance Theatre (Suzi Bass Award for Best Direction, Best Production, and Best World Premiere). Other recent directing credits include the Off-Broadway debut of Threesome at 59E59 Theaters, a production that had its world premiere at The Armory. Chris has directed at theatres across the country, including Actor’s Theater of Louisville, Oregon Shakespeare Festival, ACT Theatre (Seattle), The Alliance, Dallas Theatre Center, Pittsburgh Public Theatre, New York Theatre Workshop, and Center Stage (Baltimore). A native Atlantan, Chris holds a B.F.A. from Baylor University and an M.F.A. from Carnegie Mellon. He is currently the board president for Oregon’s Cultural Advocacy Coalition. Chris and his husband, Rodney Hicks – who is appearing in the new musical Come From Away, which opens on Broadway in March – are the proud parents of an 18-lb Jack Russell/ Lab mix, and a 110-lb English Blockhead Yellow Lab. For the past three years, Chris has had the honor of serving as the director for the Oregon Leadership Summit.

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outside the rehearsal room, she joyously ignored my self-imposed barrier by inviting me out with the cast and engaging me in frequent conversations. During rehearsals and performances I had the joy of seeing Jessica bring so much more to the role than what was on paper.

Less than a year later Jessica invited me to see her in TheatreWorks’ version of Romeo and Juliet. Someone else had seen what I had seen. Jessica’s Juliet made me understand Juliet as if I had never seen the play before, and even though I had nothing to do with the production, I took the opportunity to pat myself on the back for my keen casting and directorial eye. Oh, and I congratulated her as well.

Jessica Chastain in Sacramento Theatre Company’s 1997 production of A Christmas Carol

WHY I CAST THAT ACTOR

ERNEST A. FIGUEROA On Casting Jessica Chastain in Richard Hellesen & David de Berry’s musical of A Christmas Carol at Sacramento Theatre Company Perhaps the temporary nature of what we do is why we so greatly appreciate longevity in our field, or perhaps it is that we are so steeped in dramaturgy we long to see the outcome or resolution of the plot, or maybe it is simply human nature to want validation that the choice we made was as brilliant as we think it was.

As one of my first professional theatre jobs I was privileged to serve as the Associate Artistic Director at the Sacramento Theatre Company (STC) when they presented the 10th anniversary of the Richard Hellesen/David de Berry musical version of A Christmas Carol. As this marked one of my first professional regional theatre credits, I was honored to be asked to direct. Any nervousness I might have had manifested itself as extreme diligence. Casting, though not at all predetermined, benefited from a great familiarity with the work by the local professional actors who had contributed their considerable talents over the years to this production. In addition there had been a massive transition at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival that season, and longtime resident actors were pouring down over California like a spring snowmelt.

Actors, good and great, were there for the asking. But the real surprises came in casting the young talent. STC had a reputation of attracting stellar young local actors. I had seen pictures of a young Tom Hanks on the stage and knew any young actor with talent would naturally gravitate to the theatre.

Still, even though Dickens offers a variety of iconic and well-defined adult roles, those for young people are not nearly as dynamic. However, the eldest Cratchit daughter, Martha, in her brief scenes clearly demonstrated a devotion to family and a strong work ethic, as well as a playful spirit. The character surely could benefit greatly from an actress who could tap into her own sense of sensitivity and compassion.

It was then that Jessica Chastain walked into the room. At no more than 17 she was everything you hope a young actress will be: beautiful, devoted, enthusiastic, and incredibly talented. But there was something else. It was that intangible “thing,” that “thing” you see in young actors, a recognition that there is and will be so much more. In addition to all of this she also turned out to be very personable, and though I normally made it a rule to not socialize with the actors

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A year later I found myself back in Los Angeles, and, to my surprise, Jessica moved there as well. One day she surprised me again by asking me to give her feedback for her audition to Julliard! As I watched her audition in my small Pasadena apartment, all I remember thinking was how wonderful and focused she was. I may have given her a direction or two on pacing, but I take absolutely no credit.

Fortunately for me, my career continued to advance at a steady pace, and by the time Jessica did her final project at Juilliard three years later, I just happened to be in New York as a Drama League Fellow working at the Roundabout Theatre. At her invitation I was delighted to attend her student performance of The Seagull, and again I saw a performance that was touching, beautifully professional, and mature.

When we both returned to Los Angeles we kept in touch but only as sporadically as our equally demanding careers would let us. I tried to cast her in A Touch of the Poet, but by that time others had also begun to take note of her talent. In fact, she was eager to let me know that for the much-anticipated production of Salomé, Mr. Al Pacino himself, or “Uncle Al” as Jessica had come to refer to him, chose her to play the title role. Wow. Fast-forward years later to a cold November day. Hurricane Sandy had ravaged New York, and although many Broadway shows had closed for a few nights, this performance of The Heiress went on. This, well, now not-soyoung director stood patiently outside the stage door at the Walter Kerr for the leading lady to finish graciously greeting each and every audience member and fan. After the last fan left, I stood there and just said “Jessica.”

I was greeted with an immediate look of recognition, a shout, and a long, sincere hug which was 20 years and 3,000 miles in the making.

1 My morning ritual…Showering is a time to think, problem solve, and hum tunelessly.

I once solved a casting problem for a production of Hamlet while showering, when it dawned on me that the most interesting actor for the title role was in fact the actress I had originally thought of for Ophelia. It was the first time I cast a woman in a traditionally male role, a decision that paid off handsomely, and I have subsequently repeated. Over breakfast I absorb the news from NPR or BBC World News. Weekends are determined by my work schedule but include time for exercise, dates with the New York Times and the New Yorker, and music, music, music!

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PRE-SHOW / POST-SHOW WITH

JOHN C. GREEN, PH.D. COLUMBIA COLLEGE CHICAGO

On my commute, I read/listen to…Since arriving in Chicago in 2009, my wife and I have lived in the Loop. My wife is an ESL teacher, and her building is a couple of blocks from the Theatre Center, so most days, weather permitting, we walk to work; each day taking a slightly different route, reading the traffic signs, commuter patterns, light playing off the fabulous architecture, and listening to the symphony of the city as it roars into life. It’s always fascinating and ever changing. Before going our separate ways we stop at Peet’s Coffee, where we have become part of a group of regulars, very Cheers!

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If I could, I’d go back to…Moscow, 4 July 1897, and sit at a table adjacent to Stanislavski and Nemirovich-Danchenko, witnessing their 18-hour marathon conversation that gave birth to the modern actor and ensemble theatre. I was reminded of their epic encounter on each occasion I met with a group of colleagues from LISPA, the LeCoq-based school in Berlin, over a three-year period during which we discussed a dream project of creating an international degree in physically based devised theatre.

Our initial meetings took place in restaurants in Berlin, London, and Chicago, and resulted in the creation of an M.F.A. in European Devised Performance, which Columbia College is launching in fall 2017, in partnership with LISPA.

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A performance I wish I could see again…Impossible to narrow down to one: Peter Brook’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream; Deborah Warner’s Titus Andronicus; Steven Berkoff’s Hamlet; Robert Cohen’s dance pieces for London Contemporary Dance Theatre; Theatre Complicité’s The Master and Margarita; Song of the Goat’s Songs for Lear; the Philip Glass operas Satyagraha and Akhnaten; Pina Bausch’s Café Muller; and everything ever presented at the London International Mime Festival.

5 I’m embarrassed to say I love…/Guilty pleasure…Herb Alpert! Growing up in England, the best job I ever had as a student was working in a record store. I remember vividly taking the first delivery of the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s and cutting my teeth on classical music, but somewhere in the background Herb Alpert was always playing. I have always maintained a soft spot for Herb. So when the going gets tough or nostalgia bites, Whipped Cream and Other Delights provides solace.

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My Netflix queue says I would love…

To actually subscribe to Netflix, which I don’t; too busy with work coupled with a residual guilt from childhood about watching too much television. Given the choice, I’d rather spend quality time watching films in a cinema, and as I live only a few blocks from the fabulous Gene Siskel Film Center, that’s where you will find me.

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I am actually watching…Reruns of Luther on PBS. I taught Idris Elba acting in my last year in London before moving to the States.

It was his first year: a cool cat with bags of personality and an easy, nonchalant charm, hungry to learn. One of those students who you know instinctively is going to make something of themselves.

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I’m reading or I want to read…

Richard Dadd: The Artist and the Asylum by Nicholas Tromans, in preparation for my next production, a stage version of Angela Carter’s play for radio, Come Unto These Yellow Sands, her imaginative account of the life and fairy paintings of the Victorian artist Richard Dadd.

Following a long tour to the Middle East in the early 1840s, Dadd succumbed to a psychotic illness and murdered his father. He spent the rest of his life in lunatic asylums where he continued to paint, producing minutely detailed canvases depicting fairy scenes inspired by Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Some scholars have suggested that Dickens based his unfinished Mystery of Edwin Drood on Dadd’s life, so that’s on my Christmas reading list, along with Zadie Smith.

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To wind down, I…Make a cup of tea and put on some music. No not Herb, usually something Baroque, or Philip Glass; John Coltrane and Johnny Hartman; Melody Gardot or Madeleine Peyroux.

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FINISH LINE IN 20 QUESTIONS

Finish Line PHOTOS Maggie Hall

On April 15, 2013, two bombs exploded near the finish line of the Boston Marathon, injuring over 200 people and killing three. In March 2017, Joey Frangieh and Lisa Rafferty’s Finish Line, a new piece of documentary theatre inspired by these events, will be presented by the Boch Center in association with Boston Theater Company (BTC). SDC Journal asked JOEY FRANGIEH and LISA RAFFERTY about the process of creating this new work together. Enjoy.

20Q • 20Q • 20Q • 20Q • 20Q Describe Finish Line in two words.

LISA | Powerful and profound.

JOEY | Honoring heroes.

Whose idea was it to turn the bombing at the 2013 Boston Marathon into a theatre piece, and why?

JOEY | We both had the idea to use theatre as a way to respond but had different reasons. My inspiration came about a week after the marathon. I was sitting in a coffee shop reading the news, and I couldn’t help but realize that the terrorists were quickly becoming international celebrities. At that moment, I was moved to create a piece that,

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instead of focusing on hatred and atrocity, honored and remembered those we have lost while showcasing powerful stories of resilience and bravery. April 15, 2013, was one of the worst days in Boston’s history, but what came out of that day, the strength and bravery of so many and a community full of support, is truly remarkable.

LISA | We came at the idea from separate angles. My inspiration came when one of my students at Bridgewater State University emailed the night of the bombings to say his National Guard unit had been called up. For my theatre class the next morning, I wanted to talk about his work helping law enforcement and offer the students a means of processing the events of the previous day. I shared the concept of documentary theatre as a powerful way to give voice to what had happened.

How long have you been working on this project?

LISA | Over two years.

JOEY | We started discussing the project in July 2014 in this little sandwich hut on the Boston Common. Since then, I’ve been a firm believer that the best ideas are born over food.

Have either of you ever run the marathon? What about any of the actors, designers, or crew members?

LISA | Some of the cast members are runners—although not necessarily marathon length. [I’m] not a runner at all, but Joey has a big announcement!

JOEY | I’ve had the pleasure of meeting so many incredible people who, after being injured in the attacks, decided not only to recover but to grow stronger and run, so I decided to try running myself. Before this decision, the extent of my physical activity was moving from the couch to the fridge and back. When I first got on the treadmill, I ran exactly 0.4 mile and had to stop because I was out of breath. I rewarded myself with a snack. The next day, I went back to the gym and ran 0.6 mile. I kept this up for a few weeks and then shared my progress with one of our interviewees, Paula McLaughlin, who works for an incredible organization called Hale Reservation. Hale seeks to close the extracurricular opportunity gap between low-income students and their higher-income peers with a summer camp program. This was six months ago. Now, I’m very excited to say that I will be running the 2017 Boston Marathon on behalf of Hale Reservation. I actually attended Hale as a child, and I feel fortunate to run the marathon while raising money to make it possible for more children to have the same amazing experience I was able to have as a child.

In what way(s) is this “documentary” theatre as opposed to just “theatre”?

LISA | It’s verbatim from interviews conducted with those who were impacted on April 15, 2013, directly or indirectly. This is not a fictionalized account—this is not dialogue that was written by us. This is the actual words of the people who were there, and those whose lives changed that day.

JOEY | Every word in the script has been said by an interviewee. Our entire team interviewed over 90 incredibly brave individuals. It is a documentary because this piece of theatre is merely a platform to showcase these powerful stories that came directly from the mouths of real people.

Tell us about the process of developing this play.

LISA | We worked together to conduct over 90 interviews, along with a team of volunteers that included journalists, theatre professionals, and others. We had a group of volunteers who painstakingly listened to the audio to create verbatim transcripts from those interviews.

From there, Joey and I put together a script and held workshops in July 2015 and January 2016 with invited audiences that included interviewees. We met at Panera roughly a billion times to have discussions, make edits, [and] continue to shape the script. Then we had a three-week developmental run in April 2016, which sold out.

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JOEY | We were lucky enough to speak with runners, survivors, doctors, police officers, journalists, and many more. Each interview was audio recorded and then very carefully transcribed. Our team took the time to transcribe each interview word for word with accurate punctuation to best reflect the speaker’s exact phrasing. We then went on to the script development phase. The entire Boston Theater Company team rallied together and spent two years crafting this script through workshops, readings, and fully staged previews.

Our third and final phase is the world premiere this March. I consider what we are doing very similar to a curator in a museum. We didn’t write anything new. We simply collected stories of real people and structured them into a play.

Who were your key collaborators?

LISA | Each other, with support from BTC staff and our dramaturg, Bridget O’Leary.

JOEY | Any success of this show is because I’m lucky enough to be surrounded by an army of fierce women, from my co-creator to dramaturg Bridget Kathleen O’Leary, associate producer Jo Williams, publicist Michelle Chapman, and my associate Maggie Kearnan.

Finish Line and BTC would be nothing without its incredible team!

How did you create the script? Did you do interviews, work from news transcripts, or both?

JOEY | Every word in this script is from an interview that our team conducted. All of the firsthand accounts have impacted the script whether they made it into the final version or not. The common threads and themes throughout the interviews shaped [it].

LISA | In addition to the interviews, we used news accounts, books, and other sources as background research.

What has it been like to work on something like this—an event so painful and so recent, in the community in which it took place?

LISA | It has been a privilege to share these stories and offer a platform for these voices.

It is a unique experience to have the actual people in the audience whose stories are being told. Our first workshop was located steps from the marathon finish line. The developmental run shows happened during the weekend of the 120th marathon—we had a performance on the anniversary. This experience of telling these stories verbatim from the people who lived it is like nothing I have ever worked on in theatre.

We are so grateful that the response from the interviewees and the larger audience has been so positive and appreciative of the work.

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JOEY | Developing this play has been the most humbling and rewarding experience, especially within today’s political climate. I feel very fortunate to be able to go into work every day and dedicate my time and energy to a piece that showcases the power of love, even in the most trying of situations. Of course it is a difficult story to tell, but it is one that needs to be told. Finish Line is not my story to tell. It’s not any single person’s story to tell. It is a story of the 26,000 runners who entered the race in 2013. It is the story of the 500,000 spectators who cheered on the side. The 646,000 Bostonians. The 6.7 million people who live in Massachusetts. The 318 million people who live in the United States. It represents a city, a state, and a country that refused to allow an act of violence to define it. The weight of this story is what continues to propel me forward.

Has this project presented you with any particular challenges?

LISA | We could have created a Nicholas Nickleby–length piece with all the amazing interviews we conducted. To let go of some of the stories has been challenging at times, but it’s important that everyone know that all the interviews infused and inspired the play.

JOEY | Every part of my being wanted to make this play 12 hours long. We have a database of over 90 firsthand accounts, and all of these stories have significantly impacted the piece.

Picking and choosing what material to use has absolutely been the most challenging part.

Any high-water marks?

LISA | The performances last April, on marathon weekend and on the anniversary, with interviewees in the audience and at the talk-backs, were inspiring, thought provoking, wonderful.

JOEY | I keep playing the same scenario over and over again in my head of our opening night. I’m sitting in the Shubert Theatre. I look down and see that I’m wearing a tie (which I do not know how to put on). I look next to me and see my potential date (who must know how to tie a tie). I open the playbill and see the names of everyone on the Finish Line team…

I’m most inspired as a director when I look at that list on opening night and see how many people have come together to create one piece of theatre, and this particular list on this particular opening night will be something very special. In addition to the cast, crew, stage managers, designers, and workshop teams, we have interviewees, transcribers, and countless volunteers who have donated their time, talents, and bravery. More than 300 people came together to create this piece of theatre.

Finish Line is about the power of community, and the story was created by just that.

Joey, you are a director as well as a projection designer. Did you do both on this project?

JOEY | I am very honored to be directing this piece, and I am equally excited to not be designing it. I don’t think I would ever direct and design the same piece. I rely heavily on my designers with any show I’m directing and wouldn’t want to give up that collaboration by doing both on the same production. Designing has been a big part of my life over the past few years. It has opened many doors and given me a chance to be quite literally in the room where it happens (pun intended). Last year, I was lucky enough to assist on the design of two Broadway shows being directed by two of my directing idols, Jerry Mitchell and Stafford Arima. I wouldn’t give up that opportunity for anything, but while I enjoy designing, my passion is directing.

What was it like for you two to collaborate as directors and creators of the piece?

JOEY | We’ve supported one another throughout the process and been a sounding board for each other from the very beginning.

When we first started, it was just Lisa and me.

Now, we have an incredible team working to world premiere this production.

LISA | We are very lucky that we share an artistic vision and that we complement each other in strengths and weaknesses. The piece is stronger because of our shared, and sometimes conflicting, approaches. When we worked together on the developmental run, we were creating the production at the same time as continuing to evolve the script. We had a tiny budget—so we were doing a lot of the hands-on work ourselves. I was finding costumes, Joey was helping with the set, we worked closely with our staff on every aspect of the production. It was classic small, nonprofit theatre work—fulfilling and exhausting.

How have audiences responded to the play?

LISA | Over and over again, our audiences have shared with us their connection to the material, their interest in the untold stories presented, and the appreciation for the message of recovery and resilience that comes through all the voices. They are responding to their fellow Bostonians who lived through the horror, directly or indirectly. There is a lot of pride here for our first responders, our law enforcement members, our superb medical facilities, the Boston Athletic Association staff and volunteers, and the many civilians who reached out to save lives, lend a hand, offer compassion and kindness. It was Boston’s finest hour, in many ways, and the audiences get to share in that feeling and be witness to these powerful first-person accounts.

JOEY | The stories of these incredible people have resonated with many patrons. While this piece is about the events in Boston, the theme of love being stronger than hate, showcasing heroism and bravery, is universal. This is why I think a lot of people have been responding positively to these real-life stories.

What is something you learned from this process that you would like to share with others?

LISA | I am so passionate about documentary theatre. I’m in my fourth semester of teaching a writing seminar in documentary theatre at Bridgewater State University. It is heartening to witness students creating dynamic, interesting plays about a range of experiences in the human condition. What I would like to share with others is that if you have a story to tell, documentary theatre can be a powerful creative tool. And I love to teach how to make it happen.

JOEY | Love trumps hate. Through the many discussions with so many incredible people, I was constantly reminded of the power of love. Many went to the Boston Marathon to cheer on friends and family and left on stretchers. What these people went through is unfathomable. For many, the scars and injuries will never heal, but their positivity and resilience is unlike anything I have ever encountered. It’s humbling.

What is special about the Boston theatre community?

JOEY | We are a small but mighty community that works together. I cannot count how many times I have reached out to other artistic directors for advice and help since I started BTC, and now I am very blessed to call many of them my friends.

LISA | It’s just big enough to hold a tremendous amount of talent in all levels of theatre, but small enough so that everyone knows each other, or it feels that way.

Is there a question you wish you had been asked?

JOEY | I’ve been lucky enough to speak to a lot of young artists and students. Many of them ask me, “What motivates you?”

When I walk into the Finish Line rehearsal room, I always pause for a moment. I look around and see the incredible cast and a ferocious stage management team. I think about the two organizations, BTC and the Boch Center, that have come together to share this story and the more than 300 people who have worked tirelessly over the past few years to create this single piece of theatre.

LISA | If memory serves, it’s Joey’s turn. And dinner would be grand, too!

My name may be at the top of the playbill, but all the names beneath it have skill sets above and beyond mine. I have truly never felt more humbled. To be a director in a room full of people who inspire me and to be a part of something so much bigger than myself encourages me every day to hold myself to a higher standard and demand only the best from myself.

Lisa, what is something you’d like to ask Joey?

LISA | ”Did you have any idea of what the impact of Finish Line would be?”

Joey, do you have a question for Lisa?

JOEY | Whose turn is it to pay for drinks?

LISA | What’s our next production going to be?

Want to meet at Panera?

JOEY | I’ll see you there!

What’s coming up next for you creatively?

We had no idea about the depth and breadth of this experience—for our interviewees, transcribers, creative staff, BTC staff, and for us.

But these are stories that must be told, and we truly believe in the power of theatre to shed light, to heal, to bring a community together.

JOEY FRANGIEH is the Artistic Director of Boston Theater Company (BTC).

Come March 2017, he will be the youngest person to ever direct at Boston’s historic Shubert Theatre when he directs Finish Line: A Documentary Play About the 2013 Boston Marathon. The work is created from interviews pieced together by Frangieh, Lisa Rafferty, and BTC. Recently, he worked as the Assistant Projection Designer for the Broadway productions of Allegiance and On Your Feet. Joey was the resident designer for the Boston Theatre Critics Association for the past three years. Joey is proud to be a Member of Stage Directors and Choreographers Society. www.JoeyFrangieh.com Boston-based playwright and director LISA RAFFERTY is the cocreator of Finish Line: A Documentary Play About the 2013 Boston Marathon with Joey Frangieh of the Boston Theater Company.

She started her directing career in her hometown of Montclair, NJ, and continued once she moved north with many plays and musicals in and around Boston. She has written, directed, and produced four comedies in the MOMologues series, which have been performed around the U.S. and the world. Lisa teaches theatre at Bridgewater State University and is the producing director of the prestigious Elliot Norton Awards. Her latest documentary play is SHE DID ALL THAT—Betty Ford: Speaking Out, Saving Lives. She is a proud Member of Stage Directors and Choreographers Society and the Dramatists Guild.

JOEY | I have two upcoming projects that will workshop in 2017. Stay tuned!

LISA | I have created a documentary play about the life of an extraordinary First Lady—SHE DID ALL THAT: Betty Ford—Speaking Out, Saving Lives. A benefit staged reading performance will be happening at the Company Theatre outside of Boston in February. I hope to bring it to Michigan and New York.

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SDC SCREEN TO SCREEN SDC Screen to Screen is a special online conversation offered exclusively to SDC Members working in academia and their students. SDC Screen to Screen uses free teleconference technology to create a bridge between the present and the future by connecting today’s renowned directors and choreographers with tomorrow’s.

Each class is held via Google Hangouts, and begins with a brief conversation between a guest director or choreographer and a moderator.

This is followed by at least 30 minutes of Q&A with professors and students from invited universities.

On Thursday, October 6, Howard Sherman sat down with SDC President Pam MacKinnon for the first-ever SDC Screen to Screen. Students from Case Western Reserve University’s B.A. and M.F.A. theatre programs, with professors Jerrold Scott and Ron Wilson, and from Webster University’s B.F.A. theatre program, with professors Dottie Marshall English and Doug Finlayson participated in the conversation.

Here is a brief excerpt. Enjoy.

STUDENT 1 | Since theatre is such a conversational, collective art form, how much prep do you do going into rehearsal, and how do you balance wanting to be prepared for rehearsals but not wanting to be too rigid and not be able to mix with the ideas of your other collaborators?

PAM | Yeah. That’s a good question. I mean, I read the text a lot, a lot, a lot, a lot. Also, there are usually a lot of “stepping stones” before you actually get in the room with the actors. There can be auditions, design meetings, maybe meetings with the playwright, meetings with producers, and you prepare for each of these mini deadlines before you are 100 percent, every day, hour after hour driving the bus.

So—you’re absolutely right. Come in prepared, prepared, prepared—but I feel really strongly to also let stuff be alive for that day, and see where the room can go.

Now, different plays demand different levels of...It’s a series of choices, and ultimately, I’m responsible for those choices. It’s an ongoing thing, and the strong choices put forth by people who feel at once challenged but also relaxed enough to participate [are] the best, right? And you slowly...as deadlines occur— as tech comes, or a run-through is about to happen, or an audience starts coming—you just start to repeat, and I start to demand that we repeat what works. And if stuff still—if sections still aren’t working, that’s my call to figure out how to rehearse it differently, or throw out what

HOW TO SIGN UP

we’ve built for something new. Is it a rewrite?

Is it a different costume? Do you, God forbid, have to fire an actor? There are a lot of different moments. And that’s on me. But the moment to moment, in the stream of it all, you’re hoping that you’ve built this room that wants to participate, and generate.

STUDENT 2 | Hi, um, so, it’s a little general, but I was wondering about what you think your greatest challenge has been as a director to your career or your work, and how you’ve kind of dealt with that and evolved in your work through that?

PAM | I’m a freelance director, so I go from job to job. So it is about cobbling together a career. That’s a financial challenge. And, also, in cobbling [things] together, I sometimes wish that producers and artistic directors would talk amongst themselves and figure out my schedule, because as a freelancer, I will say yes to a handful of things, and then hopefully they fit into the calendar. Sometimes they don’t, and that can be just heartbreaking. I’ve certainly had to step away from projects because something else has overlapped, and then [I’ve made] a big decision.

The logistics of the career, at times, are a big challenge. The joy is being in the room; getting in the room is sometimes a big challenge. And it used to be—much more than right now, knock wood—it used to be getting in the room was all about, “I know I’m a director, and the world doesn’t know it yet!” But now the logistics of putting it together so it is humanly possible in 3D, living time can be a great challenge. Theatre is a live-time, face-to-face art form, so you have to be available. That can be very hard.

Now, I also just said it’s a joy to be in the room, and of course sometimes it’s not a joy to be in the room. Sometimes it is so hard. I mentioned the word “chemistry.” Sometimes, you don’t have chemistry, but there you are, and you’re going to be with people for the next six to eight weeks.

It’s part of my job to make sure that people are all focused on the external work at hand. But at times, it becomes very, “Ugh, why?” Sometimes in a creative way, “Why can’t we figure this out?

Why is this so hard on the page?” And other times, it’s like, “I don’t get on with this person, but I have to suck it up for the next few months.”

STUDENT 3 | Hi. We’re about to start rehearsing Clybourne Park. I just wanted to ask you if you had any major pitfalls, or had any challenges specifically that would be helpful for us to hear about? Or, conversely, any great discoveries, or tips, or any of that kind of thing?

PAM | Just go really deep with it. It’s a very funny play, and it’s a very heartbreaking play. Mine the author’s intent that even though he has sort of...

Like especially act two, there is something of like a semicircle meeting that maybe would never last as long as it does, or maybe would never even take place, but take it as that is true. Just mine the truth of it. There is something almost post-apocalyptic, absurdist, about sitting in this living room of a house that’s about to be demolished with lawyers on either side, and they commit to [trying] to be polite. And they keep on trying to reset, even though they start saying horrible things. But just keep on playing it for its honest truth, which is hard. And what we found is that sometimes audiences—and especially in a larger house like Broadway— would start to want to make it really funny, and want to tease out the humor. But you have to play it for the high-stakes, honest room that it is.

STUDENT 4 | You’re working on a show right now that’s based on a movie. How do you find a balance between people’s expectations from the movie and the show that you’re trying to create, and using your own creativity.

PAM | It’s also a huge switch in media, right? You go from [film] to a musical. The movie Amélie is close to a lot of people’s hearts, but I haven’t come across that many even fans of the movie who can point blank tell me what the story is.

It’s a movie that lives in emotional and visual memory, which is great for us, because there is a story. It is a coming-of-age story—[she] starts as young girl, becomes a young woman, and moves to the big city, leaving her family. [She] uses her imagination as a protective shield, and ultimately recognizes that she has to challenge herself and open a door in order to obey the love she feels when she meets this young man.

So it’s a small story, and we’re leaning into the bones of that, and leaning into the specific and idiosyncratic point of view that this young woman has, and obeying that—which is fun, for me—that the filmmaker used very strange dramaturgy. The story breaks rules a lot. So, for instance, in the movie, we see animated claymation characters, maybe five times. He starts out with a very neutral narrator, who then disappears for an hour-twenty and then comes back. We don’t meet the leading man until the 50-minute mark. I mean, there are a lot of, “Well, that’s stupid,” kind of dramaturgical tent poles, which, I think, has given us really fun license to say, “Okay, we can use some of this weird dramaturgy, but also we’re allowed to make up weird rules as well.”

Due to the complex scheduling involved, SDC Screen to Screen sessions are currently organized on an as-needed basis. SDC would love to add you and your school to the list of interested participants. Email Marisa Levy, Member Services Coordinator, at MLevy@SDCweb.org to express interest in the program. Please note the institution with which you are affiliated, the name of the class(es) you feel would benefit from this opportunity, and the approximate number of students you could guarantee.

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FORGING A NEW PATH FOR DANCE STUDIES IN HIGHER EDUCATION

BY ELIZABETH

BENNETT

Four years ago, dancer/choreographer RHONDA MILLER launched a new program for undergraduate study at Pace School of Performing Arts in New York City. The BFA in Commercial Dance combines strong ballet-based technique with a curriculum tailored for the 21st century.

In addition to ballet, students study hip hop, acting, and singing, as well as the technique of performing on and creating dance for the camera, marketing and branding, and the business of being an artist.

Miller created the program not only in response to hearing and seeing what students needed during workshops she taught all over the country, but also as a result of her own years as a teacher and choreographer working in theatre and the commercial dance world. Recently, Ms. Miller spoke with SDC JOURNAL Features Editor Elizabeth Bennett about her own path and the new one she is creating for dance students of the 21st century.

Dance Out Loud c/o BFA in Commercial Dance at Pace University’s School of Performing Arts PHOTOS

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The program that you founded at Pace University is titled Commercial Dance. Can you tell us what your definition of the term “commercial dance” is?

The program is a BFA in Commercial Dance.

But the students earn a liberal arts education with this program as well. My definition of commercial dance is a program that is rooted in the traditions of ballet and some modern, but I wanted to make sure that the students were exposed to many different genres of dance, acting, and singing so that they could compete in the commercial world.

So, basically, it’s a branding. It is an allencompassing dance degree! That’s really helpful.

I think that there may be some people who, when they hear the term “commercial dance,” might think that it just pertains to commercial theatre productions. But it’s clear from your bio, and from the testimonials of your students, that it’s a much more broadly drawn term.

Exactly. I want the students, once they graduate, to be able to implement themselves into the East Coast dance community, whether it be working as part of a company or on Broadway. The premise of the program is that they are ready for pretty much anything!

One of the components in the program that is very, very exciting is that we have a Los Angeles component. We go out to Los Angeles for three to four weeks each year and we take classes with the choreographer Mandy Moore. She teaches dance and choreography for the camera for us. So the students not only understand how to work with a live theatrical production, but they also understand the differences in their jobs as a dancer or choreographer on camera.

That’s invaluable experience. Was your own original grounding in the kind of local dance studio or local ballet company?

Yes. I’m originally from Charleston, West Virginia, but grew up in Baltimore, Maryland.

I went to a studio there and studied ballet, tap, and jazz. That’s all we had. As a young dancer, I had a strong love of musical theatre.

I performed in a lot of dinner theatre and thought that what I wanted to do was dance in musicals.

My parents would bring me to New York to study. I felt really fortunate to learn from people like [Broadway dancer and choreographer] Ronn Forella, Charles Kelley, and [Broadway Dance Center teacher] Frank Hatchett. So I was exposed to master teachers at a young age. My parents didn’t know what they were doing, but they helped expose me.

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I went on to earn a BFA from the University of Utah, where I studied ballet and musical theatre. My master’s degree in directing and vocal performance is from Oklahoma City University.

After I finished my master’s degree, I moved to Los Angeles with the desire to become a choreographer/teacher. I became intrigued by the different approach to dance there. For a long time, I had practiced the craft of dance in relation to storytelling/theatre dance, knowing that whatever I created would have to have the intention of storytelling. L.A. choreographers were not necessarily telling stories; they were obsessed with musicality, and the approach to choreography is driven by music rather than narrative. It has an edgier look—more like a commercial style of jazz.

In L.A., I was co-owner of EDGE Performing Arts Center [in Hollywood] and L.A. Danceforce dance conventions. I choreographed a lot of commercials, television, and film work while I lived there. After a while, I got my musical theatre bug back, so I moved back to New York. I was fortunate enough to work with Jerry Mitchell. By that point, he had choreographed Rocky Horror and You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown, and his career was just about to kick; this was before Hairspray.

I was asked to create a piece honoring him for the Élan Awards. He liked it so much that he asked me to work with him as one of his choreographers on Broadway Bares, and I worked on that for eight years. I’ve choreographed numerous musical theatre productions for regional theatres and cruise ships, and I still continue to do it—as I can.

What was the impetus for creating the Pace University program? Did it come out of holes that you saw in your own training or what you had experienced as a working professional?

I’ve taught master classes all over the United States while still working in the commercial world in Los Angeles. In my travels for teaching, I saw young dancers who grew up in the commercial world of dance. They wanted to further their education and continue in dance, but most of the programs out there are primarily ballet or modern based. That’s terrific—but there was a void in helping a student continue his or her education, grow in all areas of dance, let them mature, and teach them how the business works.

How did the relationship with Pace come about? Did you approach the university?

It was interesting. It was through my friend and colleague Amy Rogers, who runs the musical theatre program there. I was teaching musical theatre and jazz as an adjunct for her faculty. As time went on, the chairman of the department at the time, Dr. Ruis Woertendyke,

noted that dance was very popular. So he said, “Well, why don’t you write your own program?”

And I said, “Okay.”

When this opportunity presented itself, I said to the school, “My suggestion is that we don’t do another regular dance program that’s only ballet or modern based. I feel the void needs to be filled for the commercial dancer who wants to learn modern and wants that to be a component of their life, but they want to work in the commercial field, be it Broadway or TV and film.” Luckily, Pace has an outstanding business program and comes from more of a business mind frame, so they “got it.”

It took a little over a year to write the program and then it had to be approved by the state of New York. I didn’t sleep much. I wrote a lot of syllabi. So I spent a lot of time doing things that I didn’t know how to do and having really nice guidance from people at Pace. I had a wonderful colleague, Lauren Gaul, who helped me tremendously in organizing and establishing the program. She has been a good friend and she’s on my faculty. We make quite a nice team down there.

My entire faculty is world renowned and quite celebrated as well. Plus, we have had many wonderful guest artists. Jerry Mitchell has been down to teach. I’ve had Chloe Arnold, Andy Blankenbuehler, Chase Brock, Marguerite Derricks, Robbie Fairchild, Brian Friedman, Mandy Moore, Tiler Peck, and Sonya Tayeh, to name a few.

You said that the students are coming from a commercial background. So many choreographers and dancers have similar backgrounds: they came from community-based dance studios or they started in musical theatre and branched out from there. Is that fairly typical of the students you’re seeing as well, or what’s the commercial basis that they’re coming from?

Primarily, they’re coming from the dance studio world. And then one of the things that has become a tool—and I’m not sure whether it’s a great tool, but it’s a pliable tool—are dance conventions. The studio dancers and their teachers go to dance conventions to bring in new information for themselves. That has become a huge business, as we know, but it’s been a great stepping stone for these dancers to broaden their knowledge and exposure from their hometown studios to wonderful master teachers and choreographers.

Can you give us a thumbnail sketch of what the dance convention experience is like?

Basically, what happens at a dance convention is that the company that owns it, or the person who owns it—for example, New York City Dance Alliance—brings out six to eight teachers from all different styles of dance:

ballet, theatre dance, tap, modern and/or contemporary, all different styles of jazz, hip hop. Students take classes all day long—from about eight in the morning until three or four in the afternoon—with master teachers who are at the top of their craft.

It gives the student the chance to come to one location and study with many different teachers. It’s a weekend of study, but then it also broadens the child’s knowledge and opens their eyes to many possibilities.

There is a generation of aspiring artists, aspiring dancers, singers, choreographers, and directors, who are exposed to dance through television shows.

I’m wondering if a large percentage of your students have been influenced by those shows. What’s the extent of that influence in how they think the industry operates or how their careers will go?

Well, I would say that a very large percentage of these students have been completely influenced by television shows that are out there. Of course they want to reach those goals of being on television or maybe being a choreographer for So You Think You Can Dance. That show has opened up a whole other realm of dance. The students get so excited about wanting to either be on Broadway or to dance with their favorite musical artist or be in films, and so they come to the school with those dreams.

Do you have to combat the impression that some of the shows give that dancing and choreography is a piece of cake, that it’s a breeze?

We do. We all have to teach the students to be persistent. They have to be excellent at their craft, but they also have to understand how to navigate the business. One of the things that we do heavily at Pace is teach them that it’s more than just dance. We teach them how to navigate the business of New York and L.A. I think that that was another aspect of higher education that was missing. Yes, we can train these kids to dance. But once they’ve learned how to dance, they don’t know how to move around the business. That’s part of what my job is—to teach that as well.

It seems like that is an important thing for any teacher teaching at the undergrad level—to teach students how to market themselves. It’s not enough to just have the talent.

Absolutely. We are working with the kids to make sure they have a website by the end of their freshman or sophomore year.

The students are so funny. They want to work.

They want to do summer work. They want to go to L.A. They want to book a couple of commercials. The students at Pace are very ambitious. And while they don’t quite understand how important all of the branding

and Facebook and all of that is—which is such a different component than when I grew up!— we’re talking about it now so that they can utilize it to make themselves more commercial and more employable.

But it’s interesting to look back at my career and all of the different components in my life, and I’m basically bringing it all together and bringing my West Coast, L.A. life and my experiences from New York and putting them all together and making this program as strong as I can make it for these students.

So many people have had a mentor who reached out a helping hand and pulled that person along. Did you have someone like that for you?

I did. It was a combination of people, but one of the people who has been so important in my life is Jo Rowan. She guided me from about 14 years old and really focused me in getting stronger ballet technique. She brought me to teach with her at Oklahoma City University when I was getting my master’s. She guided me and taught me a lot about teaching and perseverance, and I owe her a lot.

There are several other people. Roland Dupree—who was a dancer in the Hollywood studio system—from years and years ago in Los Angeles. Carol Connors is another wonderful woman. She was actually my first jazz teacher, and she is phenomenal.

I’m also grateful to Donna Drake, who teaches acting at Pace. I first worked with her for Broadway Cares in 2007 and have [had] numerous shows—Mary Poppins, Cats, Anything Goes, All Shook Up—with her since.

Donna taught me to look past the dance steps and look at everything that’s going on. To look at the full picture on the stage. This has helped open my eyes to making the dance fit better into the show or the song.

Does it feel as though you’re giving back to 140 students a year what you learned from your mentors and the course of your career?

Yes, I feel that very strongly. It’s hard to see where you’re going while you’re in it because now you’ve lived a little. You look back and you see this road map: “Oh, my gosh. Well, this led me to here and that led me to New York and somehow I met Jerry [Mitchell].” Then you take all of your own experiences and the knowledge that people have given you.

One of the things frequently asked in the industry is the question of “Why would you need a BFA to do musical theatre? Why don’t you just go out and do it?” We very often hear that applied to dancers and choreographers. Did you encounter any of that kind of attitude when you were putting the Commercial Dance program together?

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There are some people that have that belief.

I did not run into that situation at Pace at all with the administration. They want people to be well-rounded individuals and have half a brain so that they can basically navigate life.

I’ve had to talk to some students who think, “Oh, I’m just going to move to L.A.” When I’ve discussed that with them, I say, “You don’t even understand how this business works. You’re just going to jump into this pool of people and spin your wheels and not understand that you have to have relationships with casting directors and you have to have a proper agent and you need to know all of the business aspects of it.”

When you have that conversation, a lot of them really stop and think, “Oh. Well, I never thought about that.” I run into it periodically, too, from professionals that never went to college.

What are they looking for besides the opportunity to be on TV? Are there particular areas that they’re more interested in than others?

It’s fascinating. The students at Pace want to be strong enough—and we make them strong enough—to do company work, to have that strength underneath them. Mostly contemporary works; not for ballet companies.

They’re very realistic that they’re not going to be ballerinas and, you know, that’s not where their passion was. Because they have to sing and take acting in my program, a lot of them aspire to be on Broadway, at least in the ensembles.

They really want to dance with their favorite musical artists. They want to tour the world, and that’s one way for them to do it and be paid quite well. They’ve watched Dancing with the Stars, Smash, and Glee, and they want to be in those types of TV shows as well. They want to do it all, which is great.

Are they interested in doing commercials?

Oh, yeah. They understand the type of money they can make.

One of the things that we do when we spend time in Los Angeles is learn about how the energy has to be very different while you’re on camera. We spend about three or four weeks working with the camera, project after project.

Our students study Dance for the Camera and Choreography for the Camera. With the choreography class, they learn how to shoot a commercial. We give them a product and allow them to create their own commercial.

They have to create the storyboard and invent creative ways to move the story along. They shoot it and then study their own work, and they learn by seeing. We also bring in the

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production company Another Good Sandwich, which films the student projects.

Mandy Moore teaches our dance and choreography for camera classes in Los Angeles. She was my assistant years ago, at first on commercials for Toys“R”Us and Chrysler, and we’ve had a really strong friendship. She loves teaching; she’s been a master teacher all over the country. Because she has done so much in her career, she can really hone in—cut through the extraneous information—and give it to them straight up.

Mandy gives them all different scenarios: commercials, dancing on a Disney show or Nickelodeon show, dancing with Pitbull. They get to see themselves on camera and figure out how they can improve and how to hit their marks. So the Dance and Choreography for the Camera courses are invaluable to my program.

It sounds as though the students need to be aware of the technical aspects in terms of what the camera angles are.

Exactly! There are so many different components on TV than when you’re on Broadway. You get many different cameras and maybe a Steadicam coming around you, and you have to hit this mark and know which camera is shooting you.

And if you’re doing any kind of animation, that’s a whole different process. Mandy taught something about it last January. She was really able to show [students] different examples from Dancing with the Stars: “Oh, see the dancer didn’t look exactly where I needed her to look because now she looks like she’s not looking at the animated character that’s there after we film everything.” It’s exciting. The fun part is watching and listening to my students.

They say their heads swim after the first couple of days when they’re learning about this.

What have been some of the most surprising things that you have learned as you put together the program and implemented it? What are you finding in terms of the students’ needs and their expectations or preconceptions about the business?

I feel that I’ve been pretty on point up to this point in time with the subjects and information that we’re providing. I want to continue to stay ahead of the game, if possible.

What do you think is the most compelling factor that drives most of the students to the program?

I think what entices them originally is that Pace is in a major city—New York City. A lot of students want to come to New York or L.A. But then there’s the diversity of the program itself.

There aren’t very many other programs that have ballet, aerial arts, acting classes, and vocal classes within one program.

My advice to any students or any parent looking to help their son and daughter decide is to look at the curriculum at each university so that you really do understand. Do they get jazz classes more than one semester? Do they get tap? Do they get vocal work? Sometimes you don’t know what you’re looking for in a program, but you really have to pay attention to the curriculum.

How do you manage to do your own work outside of what you’re doing with the program?

Well, that’s the tricky part. I’ve had to turn a couple of projects down just because of timing.

But Pace is proud and wants its professors or instructors to continue to work in the industry.

They want us to be out there in the real world because it brings the practical knowledge back to the students. So, I’m very careful about everything that I choose.

I just filmed a commercial here in New York city. That’s pretty easy to do if it’s in Manhattan.

Going off to all the different regional theatres makes it a little complicated, sometimes.

Do you bring your students into some of the projects that you do?

Yes. I’ve done a couple of shows at different regional theatres where I’ve been able to hire five, six, or seven at a time. So it’s been really fun.

What a great opportunity for them.

It’s fun. And they get to see you in a different light as well.

I still travel, mostly because I like the energy of always teaching different students. When I go out and teach on a weekend, I teach anywhere from a seven-year-old all the way up to college kids. It keeps me fresh and inspired.

Are there particular things you’re learning from your students that feed that freshness?

Yes. One of the things that the students inspire me with is finding new ways to explain things so that they’ll grasp the information quicker.

You think, “Oh, I’ve got to be getting this across,” and sometimes they’ll just stand and look at you like they don’t know what you’re talking about. But their enthusiasm helps me to learn a new way to describe something.

Their energy is making me a better teacher.

They’re so inquisitive, and they want to know.

I find it inspiring to make me teach better and to try to stay on top of the current dance styles and trends. You can’t just sit back and rest on your laurels. You have to keep pushing. They’re making me a better person and a better teacher.

MAIN Wing on Wing at Walt Disney Concert Hall, with Mecca Vazie Andrews as “First Mate” + Doug Harvey as “Sal” PHOTO Mathew Imaging

The Planets at Walt Disney Concert Hall, directed by Matthew McCray, with Stephanie Burden as “Loona” + Michael Faulkner as “Simon” PHOTO Paul Cressey Photography

SMALL

SENSING THE WONDER

Family Audiences at the L.A. Philharmonic L.A. Philharmonic Music Director Gustavo Dudamel holds a philosophy that “music is a fundamental human right.” That spirit is infused through the Phil’s ongoing commitment to youth orchestras, neighborhood concerts, and family programming. In particular, the Toyota Symphonies for Youth series has put to work some of L.A.’s busy theatre directors and choreographers, giving them a chance to work on projects where they expand their skill sets by creating staged concert presentations for the Phil’s magnificent, Frank Gehry-designed home downtown at the Walt Disney Concert Hall. SDC JOURNAL was recently in touch with three Members who have worked with the L.A. Philharmonic on family programming. MATTHEW MCCRAY, KITTY MCNAMEE, and JESSICA KUBZANSKY shared their thoughts on the experience of working with live musicians and in the format of a staged presentation.

Would you please describe some of the work you’ve staged at the L.A. Philharmonic?

MATTHEW McCRAY | Earlier this year I staged a short play that was performed in between the movements of The Planets, by Gustav Holst. The piece was for two actors: one of them was a planetary scientist, and the other was a “visitor” possibly from another planet. The narrative of the show explored the differences of astrology and astronomy, and the things that inspired Holst. While it

was created for a middle-school audience, it explored some fairly deep philosophical questions about the universe and human existence. The goal of the play, which was woven between musical movements, was to help the kids contextualize and receive the music.

KITTY McNAMEE | I have been fortunate enough to create many new productions for the L.A. Philharmonic. The productions range from movement-centric pieces with minimal text to fully scripted narrative dramas. Jessica

Kubzansky and I collaborated on several productions of Esa-Pekka Salonen’s Wing on Wing and Berlioz’s Symphonie Fantastique. We also worked together on Firebird: Diaghilev and Stravinsky.

As a director/choreographer, I staged Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra and Finding the Patterns in Music—Minimalism.

I choreographed Bolero: Ravel’s Dance for Orchestra, Tchaikovsky Fest, and Minimalist Jukebox.

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JESSICA KUBZANSKY | I’ve had the privilege of creating and then remounting pieces that I’ve made over time, so I’ve had six opportunities to make work for this amazing series. The pieces have included Wing on Wing, which was written by Bryan Davidson with a score by former L.A. Philharmonic Music Director Esa-Pekka Salonen; Berlioz’s Symphonie Fantastique, with a book written

by Tom Dulack; and Firebird: Diaghilev and Stravinsky, written by Leon Martell. All of them were choreographed by Kitty, as I obviously love our collaboration.

How did your relationship with the Phil originate?

MATT | My relationship to the Phil came about through Debbie Devine, a friend who had been a director for their education department for years. The Planets was my first project with them, but I’ll be working with them again this January!

KITTY | Jessica Kubzansky asked the Phil to bring me on board as choreographer for Wing on Wing. Thank you, Jessica! I’ve had the pleasure of creating with Jessica for many years. I treasure our collaborations.

JESSICA | Someone at the Phil reached out to me to direct a piece around Esa-Pekka Salonen’s orchestral piece Wing on Wing. It was only the third piece of the theatre/music collaboration that the Phil was making as part of the Toyota Symphony for Youth. It was the first project I did with the Phil, and it was an extraordinary experience in every respect.

Salonen wrote Wing on Wing as a tribute to the Walt Disney Concert Hall, a Frank Gehry building. The Phil hired Bryan Davidson—who is one of my favorite playwrights and whose play War Music I had recently directed at the Geffen Playhouse—to create a piece that would illuminate the music for several busedin school performances of approximately 4,000 kids each, as well as a public Saturday morning concert open to all.

This was an astonishing piece of music and an enormous endeavor. I’ve never spent so much time, nor had so many production meetings, nor had to understand the mores of an entirely separate culture, for what amounted to a half an hour of performance. And I’ve rarely been so richly rewarded by the outcome.

Were concert stagings or work with a focus on live music part of your background?

MATT | Actually, my music background precedes my theatre background. My father is a choral composer and conductor. I grew up hearing classical music in the house every day.

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As a kid, I was very involved with choir, band, and orchestra (French horn). So while classical music is certainly something that I am familiar with, this was the first theatrical concert of this nature I had directed.

KITTY | Most of my experience has been working with music to accompany dance or theatre/opera. There are a few notable exceptions: “Sondheim’s 75th” at the Hollywood Bowl and a commission by Erato Philharmonia to create dance for their concert of Mahler’s Fifth Symphony at the Mayan Theater.

JESSICA | I have always been passionate about music in theatre and often incorporate music “non-traditionally” in my work. Whenever I can afford it, I’ve included live accompaniment, and in every sound design, I work with composers who create work for the piece. I’ve incorporated music events in “straight plays” and turned a lot of work into plays with music.

I’ve also had the privilege of directing the world premieres of some very unique and unusual musicals. One of my favorites was Nick Salamone’s and Maury McIntyre’s Moscow, a musical about three men who are trapped in a theatre and forced to perform Three Sisters every night. That sounds very campy, but it’s heartbreaking—about purgatory and resilience—once you realize you’re never going to get to Moscow.

Did you have any preconceptions about the work of a staged concert presentation?

MATT | I didn’t have any preconceptions, mainly because I was invited to attend one of the Toyota Symphonies for Youth performances prior to being hired to direct one. That helped me to understand what it was and the kind of approach I should take to it. As I suspected, the most important thing for me was to remember that the goal of this event is music education. I was staging a play, but it was intended as an enhancement to the leading character, which is the music. If the actors or action ever became a distraction from the music, or if the ratio of play to music was ever out of balance, we brought the focus back to the music. The Phil was clear about this from the beginning.

KITTY | I was pretty open-minded going in, which proved to be a blessing. There were a few surprises. I did not anticipate that the actors could not make any sound “over” the music. I thought I would be more restricted choreographically due to the space constraints—instead, that proved to be a positive creative challenge.

Learning to negotiate the hierarchy and dynamics of the orchestral world was the biggest shift for me.

How are the presentations structured?

MATT | Our presentation looked like a hybrid of a symphonic concert and a scientific lecture that was presented all over the hall. The script was structured to go back and forth between the symphonic movements and scenes from the play.

KITTY | The work always starts with the music. The text and movement are created as connective tissue bridging the music and audience. The structure of each piece is really informed by the genre or style of music being explored. If we are working with minimalist music, the approach, directorially and choreographically, will be minimalist in style. One of the reasons that I love working on these productions is that they are each so unique and we have an opportunity to create a theatrical experience from the ground up each time.

JESSICA | One of the joys and challenges of making a work for the Philharmonic is that the creators have to have a profound understanding that the music is primary. Unlike in theatre—where music is often created to serve as underscore, background, or in some way is subservient to other story elements—at the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the music is the story and the orchestra is never an underscore of any kind.

For the Symphony for Youth concerts, the idea is that the music will first support the storytelling so that when the kids have a chance to listen to the piece a second time untrammeled by the play going on around it, they will have a richer, deeper understanding of the work they’re hearing.

With Wing on Wing, the play Bryan created to illuminate the music was directorial candy and a joyous theatrical thrill-ride. It revolved around the premise that the conductor shows up to conduct a concert and no one can find the music. The musicians threaten to leave if a piece of music doesn’t show up within 20 minutes. As the conductor vamps, explaining that the hall is designed to look like a ship in full sail, a boy in the audience, young “Sal” (aka Esa-Pekka Salonen), raises his hand to ask what the building sounds like, and then “Frank Gehry” pops up to challenge the boy to go on a perilous journey of the imagination to bring back what the building might sound like.

A ship appears in the grand organ loft, furls down a rope to Sal, who clambers aboard, and the ship and the music take off. The boat sails past alluring sirens who call up an enormous storm, and young Sal is carried underwater with no idea how to get home. He meets some wise fish who eventually show him the way back to dry land. Sal arrives back in the Walt Disney Concert Hall with a musical score seconds before the musicians are about to

pack up and leave. Instead, they stay and play the new score.

What is the process of putting together a Toyota Youth Symphony presentation? Is it different from the other directing work you do, for adult and/or youth audiences?

KITTY | The process really does vary, depending upon the demands of the show, yet [it] is always extremely collaborative.

Production at L.A. Phil is very hands-on, as they curate each new production from a musical standpoint. They rely heavily on writer, director, and choreographer to illuminate and, most importantly, create an emotional entry point into complex and sophisticated music. Also, at the very end of the process, live orchestra—a vital and unpredictable element— is introduced. During rehearsals, we work with recordings, which may or may not be matched by living, breathing players. There is only one onstage orchestra rehearsal. We have to process a lot of information in that rehearsal and apply it very quickly.

As both director and choreographer, I loved building these pieces with the writer from the ground up. Jessica and I have, luckily, had many opportunities to collaborate with writers Leon Martell, Cody Henderson, and Bryan Davidson, and designer Susan Gratch.

JESSICA | For Wing on Wing, we hired six dancers, an actor/dancer for the First Mate, Young Sal, plus two other actors to play Sal’s mother and Frank Gehry. We also were working with a game conducting fellow who, while a brilliant conductor, was not necessarily an actor (and for whom English was a second language), two sopranos, and several orchestra members who had text to read regarding musician union rules, et cetera.

I had heard that the limitations of time were significant. As it turned out, I had ample rehearsal time with my actors, but there was one rehearsal that Jamie and I shared—the orchestra rehearsal—and I only had 30 minutes of that rehearsal to run a cue-to-cue and to rehearse moments in which actors and musicians interacted. It was extremely fast. It felt like a Sitzprobe and a lighting tech rehearsal compressed into a very short time period. Fortunately, we did have quite a bit of tech without the performers to clean everything up.

KITTY | My first step is to immerse myself in the music. I love learning as much as I can about the composers and context of the piece.

Next: story and script development with the production department at the Phil to engage with their vision for the production. Casting is key, particularly with the dancers. There are a lot of incredibly talented folks in L.A. I like to dig in and see who is the best fit for each production.

The time it takes varies per production. We typically have three to four weeks to develop the script, stage, and choreograph. Most of the technical considerations are focused on supporting the musicians and maestro; our key elements must support the most important aspect of the production—the playing of the music. Our technical time in the hall is very limited. Estimating the scale and threedimensionality of the hall while in a small rehearsal space takes a lot of imagination!

How much time does preparation take, and what kind of technical considerations do you have to keep in mind?

JESSICA | The initial challenges for Wing on Wing ranged from securing the three characters’ seats in the house, how to hide a giant ship’s sails in the orchestra loft, how far up an aisle on the upper levels the architecture of the building would allow us to use a follow spot, figuring out how to get onetime ushers to open the doors for six dancers with six-foot-tall fish puppets, the timing and torturous routes dancers with the puppets had to take between levels, whether or not actor/ dancers were allowed to stand on plinths in the architecture of the hall, and the constant challenge of being sure that the people sitting in the highest seats (six floors up) still had an amazing view of the story. There were also radically different union rules and an orchestra culture that had to be understood to succeed in this venerable institution.

MATT | Overall, the preparation was very similar to how I prepare to direct a musical.

I listened to the full symphonic recording and read through the script. I worked with playwright Leon Martell on rewrites and revisions for a month prior to rehearsal. The conductor, Jaime Phillips, flew in from the UK days prior to the concert. He and I had one meeting, and he sat in on a few rehearsals with the actors to get a sense of the play.

Finding mutual time to rehearse with the actors and a busy conductor and the sopranos, as well as finding two minutes during the orchestra’s single precious rehearsal to coach the players through their text, was just another one of the ways in which flexibility was required for the process for Wing on Wing. And, of course, because the use of the actual Disney Concert Hall itself was at such a premium, Kitty and I were rehearsing in spaces

Meeting Esa-Pekka Salonen and getting to know Wing on Wing conductor Joana Carneiro and all the subsequent conductors I worked with, as well as the orchestra members, was initially nerve-racking and then heartwarming.

And making work in that hall, which is both a vast cathedral but also a warm and welcoming space, creates its own rules of engagement.

that could not possibly approximate distances people would have to travel, heights for wielding huge poles, and more.

Is your experience of staging for young audiences different from the work you do for adults?

KITTY | Integrating dance and text in unexpectedly fluid ways is fascinating to me…creating for young audiences provides an amazing opportunity to explore this.

Bringing dance with live orchestra to so many people, especially youth, and allowing them to experience it as something that is accessible—not mysterious and out of reach— is remarkable.

JESSICA | It’s not different in that I approach all rehearsal processes with the same basic philosophy—adjusted, of course, for each given circumstance. For me it’s especially important to teach the next generation that theatre is a vital experience that they need to keep having. For that reason, I try to do at least one piece a year for young audiences.

I love that young audiences don’t lie. What I call the “wriggling bucket of Catawba worms” will tell you in a heartbeat if you’ve retained their attention or lost it. They’re also open to the true impossibility of theatre. If your theatrical rules make sense, no matter how invented the world you’re in, they are completely onboard the ride.

The Walt Disney Concert Hall is an artwork in and of itself. What is it like to work in the space? Are you conscious of the hall’s architecture in relation to your staging?

MATT | It’s so beautiful! I was fortunate that the calendar allowed me time in the hall prior to tech because using the hall theatrically is tricky. I wanted the hall to feel like outer space, and part of my methodology was to stage the play in as many pockets of the hall as I could; however, to get an actor from one exit to another entrance would sometimes take more time than an entire symphonic movement.

To use the hall in this manner, I needed to rehearse the backstage crossovers and factor in possible issues such as keycard access for doors and the hazardous nature of introducing high-heels to all those steps!

KITTY | It’s a wonderful place to work! The building has an incredible flow from rehearsal space to backstage to the house. The level of professionalism is refreshing. The dancers are always thrilled to be treated with such respect (and to have their own dressing rooms!).

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The architecture has a tremendous impact on staging. My knowledge of the space and its limitations/opportunities has developed over time. The majority of the choreography has to be set within a five-by-forty-foot strip of space just downstage of the orchestra. Maximizing the potential of that space is exciting. Having audience members on all sides challenges the performers to step out of their proscenium comfort zone and get three-dimensional.

It’s initially challenging and ultimately very liberating. Punching out from the stage and into this three-dimensional world is really fun for me.

JESSICA | There’s nothing like the Disney Concert Hall. There just isn’t. For that reason, the set is always just the hall itself.

For Wing on Wing, my first production there, I don’t think the use of the hall as a theatre space had yet been pushed to such a large scale. So we had long, really exciting design meetings with Bryan and our amazing team: choreographer Kitty McNamee, costume designer Ela Jo Erwin, lighting designer Rand Ryan, and puppets and props designer Susan Gratch. Discovering how to articulate the piece in these very unique, splendid, but difficult staging parameters essentially required us to storyboard every beat of how the piece would be realized.

Chief among the staging challenges is that the audience in the concert hall is 360 degrees around the orchestra. What constitutes “downstage” in a 360, where there is still a proscenium-like stage, but people are behind it?

With Wing on Wing, the stage of the concert hall was almost entirely taken up with the 125-piece orchestra required to play the piece, leaving a very narrow four-foot-wide strip of stage at the “downstage” edge, where there was a constant negotiation between bumping speakers and musicians with bowing arms.

This forced the creative use of the only other available playing spaces: a front aisle below the stage, a large center aisle halfway up the floor-level audience, and all other aisles and staircases, knowing that sight lines will cut off some audience from some action almost inevitably. Staging had to be done first on paper with a map of the concert hall to understand egress, access in and out of stairwells, et cetera.

All of this is to say that it was an enormous amount of work. It was also one of the most splendidly satisfying pieces of theatre I have ever had the privilege to make.

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Have you had similar experiences with work at the Hollywood Bowl?

KITTY | I choreographed “Sondheim’s 75th” at the Hollywood Bowl. It was a very different experience. The scale is—needless to say— incredible and influenced my approach to the choreography. We were able to break out of the proscenium there as well by pushing the dance out onto the pasarale, which was very exciting. Engaging with the demands of each space in a fresh way is one of my favorite things!

If you have staged multiple projects for the Phil, how has your understanding of the space, the audience, or the convention of working with an orchestra evolved since the beginning?

MATT | I will be doing my second piece for the Phil this January. I definitely feel like my prior experience will work to my advantage, and I’m very excited, obviously.

KITTY | As my understanding of orchestra culture grew, so did my confidence in creating for [it]. Working closely with production at the Phil—especially Megan Swan—opened my eyes to the capacity that orchestral music has to impact young people, if they are given a way to access it. Megan produced many of the shows. She bridged the educational and production aspects of the orchestra and was a great risk taker! We definitely pushed the limits of flying bodies, players, and instruments coexisting in the same space! Over time, the orchestra grew to trust that what we were creating would enhance the audience’s experience of the music and not distract from it.

JESSICA | It has gotten much more comfortable as everyone has had multiple experiences…I think everyone trusts and understands each other better.

In recent presentations, I have been able to ask for the lighting to be more theatrical. The Phil has continued to improve its theatrical lighting capabilities over time and eventually invested in more powerful stand lights for the orchestra so that the general lighting around them could be dimmed much more significantly. In Wing on Wing, it was very difficult to make the lighting dramatic and allow the orchestra to see their music.

As an artist working in Los Angeles, are there similar opportunities for staging concerts that are available at other cultural organizations—maybe museums or parks?

MATT | I’m sure there must be, but I don’t know of them. For the past two summers, I have also worked with a symphony in Pasadena called MUSE/IQUE, conducted by Rachael Worby. The events I’ve done with Rachael were more of a mash-up and collage than The Planets, which had a single narrative story.

KITTY | In my experience of L.A., this opportunity is extremely rare. I have had the opportunity in other cities, with Chicago Symphony and Manhattan School of Music. In my concert dance work for Hysterica Dance Company, Los Angeles Ballet, and National Choreographers Initiative, I could never afford live music. I had to rely on recordings, even for special performances at libraries or museums.

Working with a live orchestra in any capacity is a luxury.

What’s the greatest pleasure you have found in staging work for young audiences?

MATT | A beautiful thing happened with The Planets. The music is sometimes very introspective, calling on the audience to let it wash over them. Our event started off in a fun and high-energy way. The actors got kids laughing, but midway through the piece, the tone shifted to engage them on a deeper level.

Once this happened, the silence and stillness in the hall was notable. In the final movement of the piece, “Neptune,” you could feel the kids listening more deeply to the music and thinking about the introspective thematic content related to human existence. That was very fulfilling.

KITTY | Sitting in Disney Hall surrounded by thousands of young people thoroughly engaged with classical music is pretty magical!

JESSICA | Most profoundly, to be able to experience the piece through the audience’s eyes; to witness the wonder of an entire concert hall of children and grown-up children.

It is true every time I’ve done a piece there.

With Wing on Wing, to see that sense of discovery as the ship appeared in the organ loft…to see them horrified as the impossibly high soprano sirens called up the tempestuous music that made the dancers—with leaps and lifts in narrow, narrow spaces—tear the ship to pieces and carry Sal away. To witness their awe as the fish puppets soared under the sea, and then once Sal has returned with the music, to experience the entire Disney Concert Hall full of people sitting rapt by just the power of the music. It was a huge endeavor. And I’d keep doing it for the rest of my days.

c/o Broadway Asia PHOTO

BROADWAY ASIA JOHN RANDO + MARC ROUTH WITH

INTERVIEWED BY YUE

LIU + HOWARD SHERMAN

JOHN RANDO As musicals such as Rent and Hairspray attract big audiences in Beijing and beyond, new opportunities are opening up for American theatre artists to create work in China.

Over the last two years, Tony Award-winning director John Rando worked with Broadway Asia on a large-scale musical for Chinese audiences. Jay Chou’s The Secret is based on a 2007 film of the same name that was written by, directed by, and starred Taiwanese pop star Jay Chou. Broadway Asia hired Rando and bookwriter Marc Acito to adapt the film for the stage—using Chou’s pre-existing song catalogue—for production in Chinese, to play in China.

SDC Journal covered the project in two related interviews. Before departing for production rehearsals in China, John Rando met with Howard Sherman to describe the origin of the project, how he approached its development, and what he was expecting once rehearsals began. Yue Liu spoke with Broadway Asia’s Marc Routh, who discussed the logistics and viewpoint from the producer’s end.

HOWARD SHERMAN | How were you approached about this project?

JOHN RANDO | The key player in this whole theatrical relationship with China is Broadway Asia, which is run by Marc Routh and Simone Genatt. They are two very exciting producers who for many years have been working overseas in Asia, primarily in China, and are deeply familiar with the way things work there and how productions happen.

About five or six years ago, Marc invited me to help develop a production over in China of an American version of The Peony Pavilion, a classic Chinese opera. We went there to

try to turn it into a Broadway musical. Maury Yeston was writing the music. After a workshop in China, The Peony Pavilion never came to fruition, but my appetite for working in China had been whetted.

For Jay Chou’s The Secret, Broadway Asia created a relationship with GBE, a film company that has some 20 films under their belt. They’re an excellent film company and they were ready to branch out into musical theatre. They partnered with Broadway Asia to create nine musicals, including some big titles, like Peter Pan and Kung Fu Panda.

Marc [Routh] asked me about this particular project and asked if I knew Jay Chou’s music. I said no. Jay Chou is also an actor. He’s in The Green Hornet and Now You See Me 2.

I listened to his music. I was completely compelled by it. I thought, “This is really cool music, this is smart stuff.” I learned that he was originally a classical pianist. He’s a consummate musician as well as composer.

Then I saw the film The Secret. The film is a sweet, touching romantic comedy. I told Marc, “I think it’s worth a try. Let’s see what we can do.”

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This all happened very quickly. It’s one of the fastest musicals I’ve ever done. Marc [Routh] hired a playwright, Marc Acito, to do the book.

Marc’s initial task was to take the story from the film and figure out how Jay’s songs could fit. In November 2015, there was an initial script.

The way we [worked] was [that] Marc got all the lyrics translated into English. He had the screenplay, but essentially what he had was the subtitles from the film, and he created the book in English. The initial song translations were very literal, so they were almost impossible, at times, to understand. Since then, we’ve learned how to translate and make them make sense.

The Secret takes place in a high school. It’s senior year, which is like our freshman college year for China. It’s a story about a teen boy, Xianglun, who’s spending his senior year where his father teaches. He had been in another school, but his mother passed away, and he has come back home. He’s a brilliant pianist, but he’s struggling with the loss of his mother.

It’s basically a boy-meets-girl [story]: he meets a girl under an old piano at school and falls in love. Only trouble is he doesn’t know that she died 20 years earlier from an asthma attack. It’s very sweet, romantic, funny, and very touching.

The film has no songs, just a theme song and classical piano pieces. We’re doing this interesting thing where we’ve created essentially a jukebox musical. We’ve taken songs from Jay’s catalogue, taken his film’s plot and characters, and smashed these two things together. This is stuff that we do here in the U.S. all the time; this is the first time this has ever happened in China. They’re deeply excited about it, especially the youth.

We had our first trip to China in January 2016.

We collaborated with casting agents who put together a cast. The actors that we initially had all came from two prominent musical theatre acting schools in Shanghai. The energy that these kids have is really remarkable, especially in terms of the musical theatre.

I had two weeks for the first reading. We knew that this first reading was not a guarantee that [a production] was going to happen. It was a reading, and we were just seeing what we had.

I sat down in first rehearsal, exhausted and jet-lagged. Marc Acito and I had just arrived.

The cast had been working [for] a week before we got there, just to get the music going. I said, “You know, what would be really helpful right now is if you just sang every song, sang the entire story, what you’ve learned. I just want to hear it.” So they sat down and sang it.

I started to notice, “Oh, there are the actors singing the song, but then off on the side, the other actors are all singing these songs.

What is that?” It kept going. I realized in that moment that this truly is popular music. These are twentysomethings, early twentysomethings.

I recognized that they love this guy; they love this music.

Instantly, we started to make changes. Because we basically followed the story of the film, I said to Marc, “What we need is two plot lines.

We need an A plot and a B plot.” We just talked about classic musical theatre structure.

There was a fantastic secondary couple or love triangle that needed more songs. We put those in place. And by the time these two weeks were done, we had what felt like a pretty strongly structured musical with these amazing songs in it. And funny. And touching.

We presented a reading, after two weeks, to Mr. Zhang. At intermission, he walked up to me, grabbed me by the shoulders, and said, “I can’t believe you’ve done this. I cannot believe this is happening.” They immediately started talking about when we [could] do it. So, with Marc and Simone from Broadway Asia, we structured the rest of the year leading up to the rehearsals that begin on November 1. We did another three-week workshop in the late spring where we developed songs and did all the choreography. Then we went back again to do more development work, and casting work, et cetera. This next trip is the big trip. That’s the calendar.

While I was there, some of the students were working on a production of Rent. They were dying to know what Hamilton was like. They knew many American shows that had opened in recent years. Some of them have visited, others have learned just through CDs and through the internet. To them, the American catalogue and American musical theatre is really the standard.

HOWARD | Who else is on the team?

HOWARD | Is Jay Chou involved?

The challenges of putting up a big musical in China are extraordinary. There is, of course, the issue of not speaking Mandarin. But also what we might be used to is very different over there—simple things, like spike tape, how furniture gets marked on the stage, and other stage management issues.

JOHN | He has approval over everything we do [and] his manager, Mr. Jun Rong Zhang, is one of the major producers.

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JOHN | The set designer is Beowulf Boritt. Costumes is David Woolard. The choreographer, Zach Woodlee, from Los Angeles, was a choreographer for Glee and he recently did Grease Live. He’s a great choreographer and a fun collaborator. Jay’s music and Zach are a perfect match.

Those challenges make it also really hard and complicated. Everything takes longer because of translation. You’re always translating. You translate forward, translate back, and it keeps going back and forth until finally you arrive at the thought that you think—you hope—is the thought that will help. But that’s why I wanted to be there. I like that kind of challenge.

HOWARD | Given that you are an American creative team working on a show that is a Chinese story with Chinese music, how much of the process is simply telling the story the American way and hoping that Chinese audiences come with it? And how much of it is about you and Zach, in particular, and Marc, adopting some of the Chinese storytelling stage tradition, even in these 15 years that Western musicals have been seen in China?

JOHN | We—Marc and, I think, Zach too—can only do what we know well, and we try to treat it that way. We’re taking young artists— because it’s primarily a young cast. There are two characters that are older, but everybody else is twentysomething, either fresh out of school [or] still in school. The nice thing about that is that you really can not only work with them but you can mold their technique, mold their performance.

You’re trying to create what we have here, which are triple threats: singers/dancers/ actors. Sometimes the singing is stronger than the dancing; sometimes the acting is stronger than the singing. In so much of the Chinese tradition—prior to, let’s say, 15 years ago— many actors were very specialized. Just actors.

Just singers. Just dancers. It’s only recently— and this is the generation that we’re working with—they are being trained as triple threats.

Time travel is very common in Chinese story telling. So we had to work hard on making sure our time travel logic was making sense.

Also, in our show, there are some things that we need to reference in work with our Chinese counterparts to figure out if we are doing the right thing. For example, there’s a high school graduation at the end of the story. What do they do [at a] high school graduation? Do they wear a cap and gown? What do they wear? We learned they wear corsages, so there are some details in terms of everyday life.

What the producers over there are way more interested in is us just making sure we get that normalcy. These are real people. That was a big liberation for us because that allows us to just tell our story.

HOWARD | Do you have a Chinese dramaturg or someone in an equivalent role?

JOHN | My assistant, Wencong. I rely heavily on him in terms of what Chinese high school life is like. How do the boys talk to the girls?

How do girls talk to boys? What do they do? Since it’s a romantic story, we need to know these things. Then, needless to say, our counterpart producers [are] deeply involved in that kind of discussion.

In this particular case, it’s remarkably less different than I thought it was going to be, which I’m very happy about. It’s basically parents missing or loving their children, the children coming of age and owning their identity as a lover, or their identity as the class clown, and so on. It’s a very similar world.

This kind of coming-of-age love story can be universal.

HOWARD | Would you say that the development of this show is similar to other musicals you’ve worked on? Beyond the translation issues, have there been other steps you’ve had to take that make it somewhat different?

JOHN | I’ve been joking a lot; right now, it’s easier for me to get a theatre in Beijing than it is to get a theatre in New York City. There’s more real estate in China. That’s definitely very different. Literally, after the first reading, we essentially had a theatre. How could that be?

Here it takes 19 readings and several movie stars later to get yourself a theatre.

That said, the resource material is superb and fun. The music of Jay Chou is completely stageworthy. Many of his songs are stories in themselves. Either they carry tremendous wit— hugely funny songs—or they carry great depth and great passion. Needless to say, that’s really helpful in musical theatre.

HOWARD | In taking these very well-known pop songs that everybody can sing, using music from the existing source, is the music rearranged or re-orchestrated so that it serves a different emotional need than it might have as a stand-alone song? Do you have that flexibility?

JOHN | The simple answer is yes. And it comes from three people. We have Jared Stein, our music supervisor and arranger whose work has been really extraordinary. On top of that is our Chinese conductor, Jiang Chenwa, who I believe to be China’s best musical theatre conductor. He has been incredibly helpful in terms of taking what Jay Chou wrote and turning it into theatrical moments. So songs exist as they do in the recordings. Some songs exist in portions but then get integrated with dialogue; some songs begin the way they do but then metamorphose into something that helps us tell a story—whatever that might be, whether it’s slowing down, speeding up, or reducing instrumentation from what the ear might originally know. Also on our music team is the incomparable Ethan Popp, our orchestrator.

Jay’s songs are sung by female characters [and] ensembles as opposed to just men. Different characters have particular songs. Jay Chou has a song and, translated, it’s called “Simple Love.”

He sings about how crazy the world is and all he really wants is just simple love. That’s all he’s really looking for: just simple love. It’s a very popular song. It’s also a song that I really am fond of. It’s sweet; it’s fun; it’s light; it’s got something in it.

At the end of the first act, all these relationships—there are four different relationships happening between these high school students—get confused because one of them happens to be a girl from 20 years earlier, and no one can see her.

How this works is that the girl is in this old music room on campus, and this music room is going to be torn down in the present. But back 20 years ago, she finds this antique sheet music called “The Secret” under the piano, and she plays it. And on it, it says, “If you play this music and open your eyes, the first person you will see will be your destiny.” So she plays the music and, of course, she moves forward in time and that’s when she meets the boy, Xianglun. The music is the conduit through which time travels and, essentially, music is the force that brings these two lovers together. It’s so music theatre…so perfect.

So, backtracking a little bit. “Simple Love,” the song that I was talking about. At the height of the drama, where they’re all going crazy, I said, “It’d be hilarious—wouldn’t it be brilliant if they start singing ‘Simple Love’ right now? They’re arguing, they’re arguing, and then at the chorus, they all unify and sing ‘Simple Love.’ I think it’ll be really fun.”

Early on in the first reading, we were working on it and then again later in the lab. No one was around—just the five actors, myself, the music people, and Zach. Then we did it for the first time in front of other actors and some of the producers, and it was hysterically funny.

[We thought,] “Oh my god, that’s a great way to use that song at this moment, and use it contrary to what anyone would imagine it be.”

That kind of thinking, that kind of surprise— “Oh, they’re using that song to do that”—will be exciting for fans of Jay’s music. It’s not dissimilar to the fans, say, of ABBA, when they saw Mamma Mia: “Oh, I never dreamed it could be done like that.” So there are maybe three or four moments like that in the show where we’re using these popular songs in ways that no one ever dreamed of.

One of [Jay Chou’s] biggest rock ‘n’ roll hits is a song called “Nunchucks.” It’s about learning the nunchucks. We couldn’t really figure out how to do it, but we knew it had to be in the show. Our comic duo guys play rugby, and we thought, “Oh, god, it would be funny if we

could somehow do a rugby match and use nunchucks during the rugby match.”

So we created a competitive environment.

The song sounds like they’re going to war; it sounds like these two teams. We choreographed a wonderfully hilarious rugby match in which, eventually, one of our underdogs pulls out a pair of nunchucks. But he’s terrible, of course; he can’t really do it.

He’s all show and no go. So it’s that kind of “contrary to popular belief” use of the songs that, I think, is also surprising to Jay Chou or Chinese audiences.

HOWARD | Before you went over for that first reading, did you have actors read the script in English over here?

JOHN | No, we didn’t have time. The script came to me and then, basically, I gave a few notes, it came back, and then a week later we were on our way. It was really, really crazy. The first time we actually heard the script was in Chinese, and we’ve never heard it in English.

We’ve only heard it in Chinese. We talk about, “Oh, wouldn’t it be cool if we could do this in English?” I would argue that the music is very worthy of an American audience. It’s such good stuff. This might be a way to bring his music to America.

HOWARD | What’s the scale of the production?

Are you building this for 500-seat houses, 1,000-seat houses, 3,000-seat houses?

JOHN | Well, large houses. 1,400, 1,600—that kind of thing. They have to be; there are minimal, minimal small houses for musicals.

Many of the theatres have been built in recent years. Again, there’s no focal point of theatre in China. For example, in Shanghai, one part of the city has a theatre, and then you have to drive an hour to get to another theatre.

It’s a big city. There are 26 million people in Shanghai. It’s probably the most important theatrical city in China, but the theatres are spread out and not a centralized thing.

The other interesting complication is that, in China, it’s a different system for actors. They sign contracts with theatres as opposed to signing contracts with a commercial producer, or with a singular producer, or with a theatre for one show. Here in the United States, an actor might have a contract with the Old Globe Theatre and do a production there for three months, and then sign another deal to do a show at Playmakers, and then come to Broadway, et cetera, and then maybe a yearlong contract on Broadway. Chinese actors, for the most part, sign a contract with the theatre, and they have a three-year contract, or they have a six-year contract.

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c/o Broadway Asia PHOTO

is what GBE and Broadway Asia are—have to make a deal with that theatre. So actors don’t have managers; they have theatres, and then the theatres set the price, and the theatres also charge for the use of the actor.

It can become unbelievably expensive and almost impossible. Finding actors to do these kind of productions—which are, say, a sixmonth contract or a one-year contract—is complicated and different. We had this issue on our show; we had been working with a very young actor—a couple of them—because we met them through the school. They were seniors when we first started to work with them, and they already had contracts with a theatre in Shanghai.

Essentially, it’s like coming out of Juilliard and you don’t sign with a manager, you sign with a theatre. Or you sign with a film company, and they have you for so many years.

HOWARD | It’s the old Hollywood studio system.

JOHN | It is exactly like the Hollywood studio system.

HOWARD | How much time will you have with the show once it begins its performances?

JOHN | We have six weeks of rehearsal. The first week is music and dance only, and then

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I arrive, and then we have 12 days of tech, which is basically on a Broadway schedule.

But we have a limited preview period; we only have two weeks of previews. [On] a Broadway schedule, we would have three, maybe four weeks. That’s hard. That’s tricky.

Then it opens, and I [will] have two things in place. I have my associate, who’s been with me the whole way, and he will do the maintenance of the show. We also are thinking about hiring a resident director, an American. So we’d have the American version of me, and the Chinese version of me, maintain the show through its first season. What we’re waiting on is to see the impact of the show, how much travel it’s going to have. We expect it to have a lot of travel. Shows don’t last that long in one place.

I think there’s only one show that’s lasted more than a year in a singular city. It’s called Shanghai Bund. It takes place in Shanghai, and it’s about gangsters during the ’30s. It’s based on a very famous Chinese film. That particular show is the only one I know of that had a year in one place. It’s not like Broadway. These shows have to find their audiences. They have to travel to find their audiences.

HOWARD | Early in your career you had a Fulbright to study theatre in Italy and Germany.

What was that experience, and how does that experience influence the work you’re doing now, admittedly in a different country?

JOHN | I had studied German and Italian, and I got a degree in humanities—not in theatre. I believed I wanted to be a director but felt I needed a broad-based education.

While I was studying—this was in the late ’70s, early ’80s—part of my process was reading a lot of European theatre journals. There was one called Teatre Heute—Theatre Today—a German journal. I would go to the library every month and study and look at the imagery and recognize the directors.

I got completely hooked on what was happening in Europe. Seeing imagery of Mnouchkine’s work…seeing all this different imagery…Giorgio Strehler’s work in Italy… these were people that I admired as a young wannabe director in an academic institution. I had a very good relationship with my German teachers, and they had a very fantastic relationship with a small theatre in Germany.

I worked with them and wrote a Fulbright application to study at the University of Freiburg, and at the same time work at this theatre. That has had a lifelong influence on me. Travel and studying the theatre of other cultures and the impact of theatre on culture around the world has always been part of my rubric.

From this, there are two lessons. One is the universality of theatrical language. That “Oh, it’s remarkable what plays here can play elsewhere.” Also, the disconnect of that as well.

c/o Broadway Asia PHOTO

What plays well here maybe will not play as well there. There’s kind of a double thing.

Jump cut to today and me being in China.

Needless to say, the travel, the international experience, the working with foreign actors and foreign artists…it’s thrilling to see how artists work the process. Just what I explained to you about the studio system over there. It was such an eye-opener.

But there’s also the sense that what I have to offer works, but not always. What’s going to be useful? What’s not going to be useful? How to help that? Those kinds of things are really fun. What’s funny to me may not necessarily be funny to my Chinese counterparts or Chinese audience. Communicating and collaborating, trying to figure out what is it about this that can be better, that they can laugh at and laugh with?

So the roots of the travel and the understanding of the cultural theatricality back in my youth are definitely paying off now. If you’re a young director reading this article, this is key: travel, learn more, because it can pay off later. And theatre is an international art form. It has to be.

MARC ROUTH YUE LIU | How long has Broadway Asia been developing this new work, Jay Chou’s The Secret?

that way, and he was also ideal because he is so popular. Those two things together made it the right thing.

MARC ROUTH | I would say about two years.

It’s actually remarkably quick. We’ve been talking about a project using the Jay Chou songbook, and when we actually decided to do a musical based on this film, The Secret, it was only September of 2015. So, for the development of a musical, it’s very, very, very quick.

To be honest, we searched for a while to choose the proper material for the show, whether it should be an original musical. We didn’t want to confuse Jay Chou’s audience by choosing Jay Chou’s The Secret, where they might think he would be in it, because that’s not the idea. But eventually, what we found was that the marriage of the songs, because he wrote and directed and starred in that movie, the sensibility of the movie is very keyed to his style, so that the songs fit really perfectly. It was amazing, like a glove with a really easy fit.

I’ve been working in China and in Asia for over 20 years. We were always very excited by the power of Chinese pop music and how that might allow us to broaden the musical theatre audiences by tapping into that power. When we were looking for projects with our new partner, Global Broadway Entertainment, which is producing Jay Chou’s The Secret, we brought this up. I’ve listened to a lot of Chinese pop music, and one of the big challenges is that a lot of the music is very similar and ballad heavy.

To be able to have a kind of variety that you need to sustain a musical, with up-tempo numbers and comedy numbers as well as romantic ballads, we needed a songbook or a series of songs that really had more variety than most pop singers. Jay Chou was ideal in

YUE | Could you give us a little bit more information about the producing structure and your work with GBE, Global Broadway Entertainment?

MARC | Global Broadway Entertainment is a new entity. [The chairman is] Ivy Zhong. She is an established film producer, originally with Galloping Horse, which was the company she was a major executive with and [has] now branched out on her own. She was very excited about the possibility of getting a live entertainment division.

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We’re actually running two shows almost simultaneously. In addition to Jay Chou’s The Secret, we’re opening a huge immersive version of Peter Pan. GBE also produced a show on their own without us, the wedding show—Where Is the Groom? It’s a bit like Tony n’ Tina’s Wedding.

YUE | Are there any Chinese artists on the creative team for Jay Chou’s The Secret?

[For Jay Chou’s The Secret,] Broadway Asia is the executive producer, and Global Broadway Entertainment is the producer. Essentially, our job is to manage the creative process. We put together the creative team in conjunction with John Rando, of course. And I am managing the process; in addition to serving as executive producer, we’re serving as the general manager for the production.

YUE | But what about the culture gap? How do we solve those problems like culture or language barriers?

GBE is responsible for providing the financing, helping to deal with the venue issues, and generally providing on-ground supplementation of the requirements of the production. But because they’re financing the production, they’re ultimately responsible. It’s like Broadway Asia is the captain of the ship, but GBE owns the ship.

YUE | You’ve been producing internationally for a really long time. With Jay Chou’s The Secret, how did you decide which American artists you wanted to work with?

MARC | Having produced not only internationally, but also in New York and on Broadway, we have long-standing relationships with a lot of these artists. John Rando specifically is somebody who we have worked with multiple times through the years. I think he’s an incredibly talented artist. He did the development for a Chinese production for us that actually was never ultimately produced, but we went through a workshop stage of a new musical based on The Peony Pavilion, which Maury Yeston wrote.

And then he worked on another international project for us, Siddhartha. We were the executive producers for [the] production. It’s an Italian musical based on Siddhartha that John Rando directed for us in Italy, and then we mounted it at the Edinburgh Festival. It recently played [in] Mexico.

In any case, we’ve done that project with him, and John is also directing Smokey Joe’s Cafe which we are producing on Broadway next year.

It’s definitely challenging to work in this market in China. I think that [John] is on the same wavelength as us about the challenges and also the fact that we really enjoy cultural exchange. It is very fulfilling. When we succeed, we feel we’ve doubly or triply succeeded because it’s a bit daunting.

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MARC | It’s really an all-American team and a Broadway team, a group of artists [attracted to John]. It’s the first time that a new Chinese musical has been created by a team like this.

MARC | It is challenging. We rely on our Chinese partners to give us feedback for everything from whether the jokes are working to whether they’re moved or how they feel. It is a little crazy. We were in rehearsal the other day, and I know that we were dealing with some of the crew moves. One of the [Chinese] crew guys who was using the script as his guide to do certain cues was saying, “Well, the actors weren’t actually saying the words exactly as written on the page.” John said, “Well, we’re going to have to tell them they do have to say the words exactly on the page.”

But it wasn’t something he could know. If it was in English, of course, he would have been able to hear that, but [in this case,] he couldn’t.

So we have to keep double-checking. And translation is a really interesting process.

[We have to do the translation] back and forth [multiple times] to make the language sound conversational and make sense. It isn’t just a translator translates and that’s the end of it. We really have to have the cast feeding back to us what it means to them so that they understand it and so that it’s in the right colloquial language.

YUE | How many translators were used? What kind of service did they provide?

MARC | There’s a main translator for the script.

John has a terrific bilingual assistant, who is also a director in his own right. And every department has a translator, or they have a key staff member, who is bilingual.

YUE | Are they professional translators in China, or are they theatre people?

MARC | I don’t think we have the kind of professional translators who translate for the UN. Sometimes that would be great. [Translators] are expensive, and I don’t know that they’re necessarily right for us because, a lot of the time, the language is very technical. If we can find a bilingual person, who works in the theatre, that’s going to be much better for us than even a professional translator in some cases.

Definitely, a phrase lost in translation certainly occurs to us on an hourly basis. It is very [challenging] because we’re not only dealing with language translation, [but also] cultural

translation. I’m sure you’re aware that a lot of translators edit—they don’t translate exactly because they’re making allowances for cultural differences. So, a very blunt comment by an American doesn’t get translated, or a very blunt comment by a Chinese person doesn’t get translated. They tend to make nice.

Sometimes that’s a bad thing because the intensity or the passion or the sincere need isn’t really expressed.

YUE | So Jay Chou’s manager, Global Broadway Entertainment, Broadway Asia, and also the bookwriter all got involved in this process?

MARC | Yeah, I would say that. When we were trying to convince Jay’s manager to go forward with this project, I wrote a treatment where I integrated the songs into the story of Jay Chou’s The Secret. When we hired Marc Acito, the book writer, that was one of the things I gave to him, but I said, “You don’t have to use this at all. This is just what we pitched, so go crazy.”

He listened to all the music and came up with his ideas about what worked better. Then John read it and responded to it. We made further adjustment[s]. The show has evolved, as musicals do. We went through a reading and then a workshop and now our production.

With each step along the way, we’ve refined the musical choices.

YUE | How many readings and workshops did you have?

MARC | We had a reading and then a workshop. Now we have the production rehearsal process, and songs change during each of those phases, including a new song that was added for the production phase that was not in either the workshop or the reading.

And so we’ve just been refining those choices and making the story work.

The beauty in this case is that we have all these songs prewritten that we can turn to. At one point, we thought we might have Jay to write a new song specifically for the musical, but it turned out we didn’t need that, and we were able to find what we needed in his catalog.

YUE | Where did the reading and workshop take place?

MARC | We did both in Shanghai; now we’re rehearsing in Taicang, a suburb of Shanghai. It’s about an hour from Shanghai proper, and it’s got its own rehearsal space and grand theatre, which is perfect for us. We’re both rehearsing and then teching the show in that one venue, and there’s a hotel right in walking distance, very convenient.

YUE | Who was invited to the reading and workshop?

c/o Broadway Asia PHOTO

MARC | We did the reading with the Shanghai Dramatic Arts Center. They helped us put it together, and we used some of their performers. [We invited some] internal friends and some of their staff [to] the first reading.

We did the workshop in Daning, which is one of the districts in Shanghai. They also have rehearsal space in their theatre.

And the people at that presentation were some Daning Theatre staff as well as our internal people. There were also some of Jay Chou’s [promoters], who will be involved in presenting some of the tour dates for the shows. And our team, our U.S. creative people.

YUE | Did the government review the production?

MARC | I don’t think specifically. They do have to read the script to give us the permit to actually perform it. I haven’t heard any issues with that so far. I assume that is happening smoothly.

YUE | Did you receive any financial support from the government?

MARC | No. It’s actually all privately financed in this particular case.

YUE | The reading, workshop, and rehearsal all took place in Shanghai. Why are you going to open the show in Beijing?

MARC | Honestly, we would have opened in Shanghai if there was a venue available at the time, but we actually had a window of time that probably was driven mostly by John Rando’s schedule. This was the slot he could give us, so we had to open in this window. And when we put it all together and looked for a theatre that was available at this time, we were able to squeak by and get this Beijing venue, because we finish our technical rehearsals and

our previews in Taicang, and then we have just enough time to get the show in and get it up now in Beijing.

YUE | Tianqiao Theater, right?

MARC | Yeah, Tianqiao. Exactly.

YUE | Yes, it is a good theatre.

MARC | Oh, it’s beautiful. We actually opened another show there this summer, called China Goes Pop, which is a show we did with the government, which basically takes pop music and pop culture and wraps it around traditional Chinese art forms, like acrobatics and face changing and shadow puppetry and stuff like that.

YUE | Interesting. Is that a musical?

MARC | No. It’s more like a nonverbal performance piece. It’s in the vein of Stomp or Cookin’ or Tap Dogs. It does tell a story but doesn’t use words to tell it. It’s a love story all done through the acts, the acrobatic acts, the shadow puppetry, the face changing, and all that kind of stuff.

YUE | After you open in Beijing, is the show going to tour around China?

MARC | Yeah, it opens in Beijing, and then there’s a few weeks’ break before it opens in February in Shanghai. We haven’t announced the rest of the tour dates, but we expect it to tour for years in China. Also, his fan base extends to other Asian countries; we expect to play in Korea and Japan and Singapore and other Asian territories.

To be honest, we’re really happy with the show, and we think that it might actually have a life translated into English in the Western market.

We’ll see. I can’t say that for sure yet, but we think that’s possible.

YUE | That would be wonderful because there are many international students from China and Asian immigrants that knew Jay Chou and are big fans of his music.

MARC | Yes. It’s good. It’s good music. We’ve all become fans in the process.

There are so many people who have grown up with him—he’s the soundtrack of their lives. Our cast is in their twenties, and they’ve all grown up with his music. When he came to rehearsal, they were just wild-eyed. It was amazing.

Every time I see [the show], I cry. I walked into the rehearsal yesterday, and they were running the end. I literally had been there 90 seconds, and I started crying. The music just fits so perfectly with the story that we’re telling. It’s a little bit different than the original story, but I don’t think I’ll spoil it if I say that everyone’s reunited in the end, and it’s a happy ending, It’s very moving [and] emotionally satisfying.

YUE | Yes. I’m really intrigued. I think I have to go back to China and see it.

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COVER Tazewell Thompson’s work as a director is prolific, with more than 75 production credits at venerable companies including Actors Theatre of Louisville, the Goodman Theatre, Guthrie Theater, Manhattan Theatre Club, Oregon Shakespeare Festival, and the Public Theater. In recent years, he has written award-winning plays and garnered numerous playwriting commissions. What the theatre world is probably less aware of is the director’s lifelong personal and professional engagement with music. An early love of opera has led Thompson to stage operas for companies all around the world. Recently, Thompson shared his thoughts about the craft of working in a dramatic form of stories sung through.

One of your earliest successes was with a production of the Aaron Copland opera The Second Hurricane. Could you tell us a bit about that production?

In November 1985, I directed my first opera, The Second Hurricane, in New York City—my hometown. It was part of a month-long celebration of Brooklyn-born Aaron Copland’s 85th birthday. There were performances of Copland’s work all over the five boroughs, from Lincoln Center to Carnegie Hall to schools, churches, and basements, and other venues large and small. I had heard about this event two years earlier. I had found and purchased a recording at the Strand Bookstore of the opera and became obsessed with wanting to stage the piece somewhere.

I approached the organizers of the Copland celebration and Boosey & Hawkes—the publishers and owners of the copyrights— for permission to produce and direct, and I negotiated the rental fees. I was given permission to be a part of the Copland

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festival—provided I raise funds and find a space on my own. I began a campaign of contacting friends and associates of Copland and librettist Edwin Denby to create the props and backdrops and furniture pieces for the opera. They included Willem and Elaine de Kooning, along with Red Grooms, Robert Wilson, Larry Rivers, John Cage, Alex Katz, Pat Steir, and others. They came forward to honor their friends and supported the production by contributing artworks, scenery, and props for the opera. I wrote letters to large and small organizations and corporations; it was my first venture into producing. Con Edison gave $500; the NEA’s Opera Division gave $20,000. Willem de Kooning donated a painting toward the fundraising.

In my research, I discovered the opera premiered in 1937 as a concert at the Henry Street Settlement in Lower Manhattan. I was able to rent the Settlement and give the opera its first fully staged production. I restored an aria and a ballet cut from the original and was permitted to rewrite the libretto. The

production was a major success. It was also my introduction to directing opera and meeting with and working closely with Aaron Copland.

At his home and studio in Peekskill, New York, I was granted close-up observation as Copland demonstrated on his piano the stories and ideas behind segments and scenes and arias from the opera. He talked of his special fondness for The Second Hurricane and how he hoped the opera for young voices might gain new popularity. He was excited by the fuss of the citywide celebration for his 85th birthday.

“I am a native New Yorker. From Brooklyn.

Nice to have a big party in my backyard,” he said. We spoke at great length of The Tender Land, his only other opera. I directed that at Glimmerglass in 2010.

Please describe for us the process you have in preparing for an opera. Is that different from your preparation for a play?

Endless hours of listening to the score and rereading the libretto over and over. Research!

I always collect stacks and piles of visuals. I

The Tender Land at The Glimmerglass Festival PHOTO Karli Cadel/The Glimmerglass Festival

THE WORK I MUST DO do the exact same approach when I direct a play: I find music that I can associate with wherever the play’s environment is set. That music becomes my listening device feeding my imagination as I read the play and develop images.

In my rehearsal hall, research of photos and artwork overwhelms the walls, and I refer to them often in the staging. I reinforce and demonstrate what the singers already know from the music in terms of how a psychological gesture or movement can express so much.

When you’re directing opera, are you led most by the music or the libretto?

I love big operas with large choruses. I enjoy movement in unison with big groups and telling stories through the subdivisions of groups, bringing out and encouraging individual moments from the chorus as they continue to remain connected to the whole.

More intimate scenes are treated no differently than I would approach a two- or three-hander in a play.

Both. They are symbiotic. The music provides the emotion, the setting, the atmosphere, the soul of the composer, and the temperament of the characters. The libretto provides the concrete meaning of the language of the opera, the narrative.

Unlike directing a play, I spend no time around a table discussing character and motivations and meanings underneath the libretto. During the first couple of days, I interject during the maestro’s sing-through rehearsal my impressions, and then we are on our feet no later than the third day of rehearsal.

The time to rehearse an opera is much shorter than for a play. Understandable. Singers report on the first day “knowing their lines,” the score, by heart. A day-after-day rehearsal schedule of singing needs to be confined and carefully planned out; otherwise a singer will have very little to give vocally as the stage and orchestra rehearsals approach. Today’s singing

artist is called upon to do so much more: act their roles convincingly; dance; learn combat; perform from impossible heights and depths on outrageous scenery, wearing sometimes outlandish costumes; all the while singing at the top of their unamplified God-given lungs in all kinds of languages over the gigantic sound of a great orchestra.

In addition to Copland, you’ve directed operas written by a huge range of well-known modern composers, from Poulenc to Benjamin Britten to Philip Glass. Are there particular qualities or issues that you are drawn to in the work you choose to direct?

Great stories. Unforgettable characters. Brilliant music. Operas that have contemporaneous relevance. An ability for me to find something new and compelling with the telling and presenting of the opera that hopefully will captivate and leave a lasting impression on an audience.

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Lost in the Stars at The Glimmerglass Festival PHOTO Karli Cadel/The Glimmerglass Festival

You’ve explored the Gershwin opera Porgy and Bess in multiple stage productions as well as directing a televised version of your production. What most appeals to you about that particular piece?

remember a time when a rehearsal hall was filled with constant laughter and delicious carefree experimentation and practical jokes. I so wish to direct more Gilbert and Sullivan.

A community that I recognize personally and culturally. A humble people loving and living and thriving and surviving; a community of hope and pride and determination. And, of course, that impossibly timeless, magnificent, memorable, classic score full of great standards recorded by a variety of great musicians. It is a supreme masterpiece.

We wanted to ask you about the experiences you’ve had with directing operas that had particular resonances with the locales in which you were working. When you directed Porgy and Bess for the New Orleans Opera Association in 2010, was there a different resonance in that city, given that it was still recovering from Hurricane Katrina?

For opera houses at the box office, it is what A Christmas Carol is for theatres across the country. Always a sellout, deservedly so.

What are the joys and challenges of directing an opera with the kind of verbosity as Gilbert and Sullivan’s Patience?

No challenges. Only great joy. I’m not a fan of comic opera. But I love Gilbert and Sullivan. I love everything about the wacky cloud-cuckooland, Theatres of the Absurd & Ridiculous, outrageous world of G and S, the thrilling patter songs, hilarious language, and the memorable melodies. Patience—a blatantly clever, ever-enchanting, and fantastically silly satire of the Aesthetic Movement—was extraordinary fun to rehearse. I cannot

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The city was in recovery. The audience was aware of the parallels of the great hurricane in the opera. However, like the denizens of the opera, the resilient spirit of the people in the city is what I recall most. There was an involvement from an audience that was not merely holding tickets. Not eavesdropping or gawking, but attending and witnessing truth.

Their truth. Their experience. They surrounded the event unfolding on stage in a very personal, meaningful way.

And with your 2011 production of Kurt Weill’s Lost in the Stars in Cape Town? What was the impact or meaning for you of directing an anti-apartheid opera in such a historic place? How did audience members react to it there?

[It was] one of the great experiences of my life as an opera director. Imagine directing Lost in the Stars in the place and all the settings and circumstances that inspired it—South Africa—with South Africans! [It is] a work about deep and wide racism—apartheid— that unfortunately speaks to us [as] vividly today as it did in 1951. A great work of social and historical significance carried aloft by a masterwork score. The work is a shattering, gut-wrenching, intimate tale of the struggle of the quest of two fathers to recognize, know, and accept each other in the difficult chasm of the apartheid system, with themes of personal heartache and pain, compassion and understanding, reconciliation and forgiveness, and moral transformation—all set against Kurt Weill’s magnificent score.

Many members of the company had experienced firsthand the cruelties of the apartheid system. They knew this tale personally. They were passionate to tell the story. The audience was unlike any audience I’ve ever experienced in opera or theatre.

People stood up and shouted at moments of conflict. Waved handkerchiefs at passengers leaving on an ill-fated train trip. Sobbed openly at the trial scene. Laughed at moments of deception and irony. Cheered loud and long at the ending. Unforgettable. I must also add: to be in Africa, the land of my ancestors, was

Dialogues of the Carmelites at The Glimmerglass Festival PHOTO George Mott/The Glimmerglass Festival

particularly and personally special and moving to me.

You’ve had some strong influences in your life who were associated with performing. What are the different ways that these people in your life led you to the path you’re on now?

I was made a ward of the state of New York and sent to the cloistered confines of a convent when I was eight years old; taken from my parents, deemed unfit to care for me. My father played alto saxophone. I hardly remember his playing. My paternal grandmother had dreams of a musical stage career. So I suppose deep in the marrow of my bones, while I was an egg in my mother’s belly, was an unbeknownst wish to express myself in the world through the arts somehow, some way, some day.

My greatest childhood influence came from the nesting, nursing, nurturing, protective, and loving guidance of the good sisters of Saint Dominic’s Convent in Blauvelt, New York. I had many “mothers” during my seven years’ stay.

It was the nuns who very early on, like any mother would discover in their child, realized that I had artistic leanings. I was entwined with music constantly, on a daily basis. Everything was sung: morning prayers at rising, at meals, and, of course, during daily Mass. I was a choir boy and an altar boy. I read music very easily.

Through life at the convent, I entered and won oratorical contests citywide and statewide.

I knew all the great hymns and Gregorian chants. I was soloist for the great feast days of Christmas and Easter. I know practically every song written to honor Saint Patrick!

Then, of course, there was Latin. I was an altar boy responding in Latin to Father Farrell’s prayers in Sunday Masses and all other events at the altar; separate advanced religious instructions with reading, writing, and Latin in conversation! The roots of Latin were an incredible kick-starter for me in directing opera some 25 years later in foreign languages.

the page and in the empty space. Among the many bouquets Zelda threw my way, I caught, grasped, and devoured the reading list of plays and authors I should want to know.

For almost 30 years, wherever I was in the world, Zelda advised and guided me through my career with tender and tough love. I will remember, love, and miss Zelda forever.

What was the first opera you heard or attended a performance of?

I was encouraged to elaborate on the stories I made up to entertain my “siblings.” I never performed in the plays because I was a natural comedian and caused chaos at rehearsals when I disrupted the proceedings by showing off with impressions of the nuns and volunteer workers and breaking up the casts with laughter.

I heard many an opera at the convent. Sister Benvenuta, who possessed a beautiful voice, played long-playing records of the warhorses: Carmen, Aida, Madame Butterfly, The Magic Flute, and others. It was literally “Greek to me,” but oddly seductive and thrilling. Wherever I am in the world and I hear certain operas, I am immediately transported back in time to the memory of hearing Sister Benvenuta’s wonderful scratchy Longines Symphonette long-playing records opera series.

Many years later, my dearest friend and mentor and new mother figure, Zelda Fichandler, brought me to Arena Stage in 1987 as an Associate Artistic Director. I attribute solely to Zelda everything I know about the work of a director with actors and designers and how to unlock the puzzle inside of a play on

The first opera I attended was the famous John Dexter production at the Met of Dialogues of the Carmelites, where the curtain rises and dozens of nuns are spread out on the floor in the form of a cross. I had a standing-room ticket five levels way up, behind the family circle. I burst into tears at the image of the WINTER/SPRING 2017 | SDC JOURNAL

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Appomattox at Washington National Opera PHOTO Scott Suchman for WNO

cross and the true story of the 16 Carmelite nuns of Compiegne and their courageous act of sacrifice and martyrdom, for refusing to denounce their vocation during the French Revolution Reign of Terror. It left an indelible mark on me. It is my favorite opera.

In 2002, I directed my own production at Glimmerglass Opera, and subsequently at New York City Opera and later Vancouver Opera.

I never tire of the piece. It always leaves me weeping, shaken, inspired, and enthralled.

What continues to draw you—as a creator and audience member—to the form of opera?

The assault and explosiveness to the senses from astounding music and the fun challenge of making a world and inventing visuals and adding real dimension to sometimes outsized human beings.

Over the last 10 years, an increasing number of opera companies have hired directors thought of as theatre artists to helm opera productions. Why do you think this is? What do you think the crossover brings to both forms?

It’s the smartest, most innovative move that opera companies have made in a decade.

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Opera is theatre. Who better to interpret the form but directors from the world of theatre?

So often, audience members—and artists!—draw lines between theatre and opera. What do you feel the similarities are? How do you feel about the recent shifts in the forms that seem to be bringing them closer together?

No difference to me at all. Never has been.

You’re continuing to expand your experience with opera as well as your artistic skill set and are writing a libretto! Are you comfortable describing the Glimmerglass Festival commission to us?

I can say this: Francesca Zambello, artistic leader of both Washington National Opera and the Glimmerglass Festival, commissioned me to write an original opera. My own story.

Not an adaptation. It involves a black family and community torn apart by the shooting of an unarmed teenager by a police officer. It will have its world premiere summer 2019 at Glimmerglass. Jeanine Tesori, the most prolific and honored female theatrical composer in history, will write the music. I will also direct.

What are the different modes of thinking employed when you are writing an opera compared with directing one? Or is the director in you helping to write the libretto, too?

The director in me is playing a very strong key role. The writer is constantly editing and being tough and ultra-precise about locating the exact words needed to get my point across.

At times it feels like I’m trying to get through an overdue term paper, but most of the time the work is extraordinarily fulfilling. Lots of fun; a great new disciplined way of working; and for never a moment do I not realize how fortunate I am to have this opportunity Do you have any advice for artists who want to pursue careers as directors, librettists, and composers for opera?

Have an absolute: “I cannot live another day unless I do the work I must do as an artist in the world of opera.”

Listen to recordings. Read the librettos. Rent DVDs of opera. Attend opera productions if you can afford it. Assist directors. Write something every day. Distill it the next day.

Keep a journal of images. Adapt a one-act play into a libretto.

Light candles for your journey forward as a flash on the road ahead and a hope that the flame will reach a higher source that guides and watches over you. I’m wishing you my own good luck.

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In the peer-reviewed section of SDC Journal we pursue SDC’s mission to further knowledge of the crafts of directing and choreography in the United States and globally.

In this issue our authors offer unique insights into the practices of a courageous experimental director in Iran. Despite the strict censorship of the Iranian government, Ali Akbar Alizad aimed to direct a production with explicit social-political themes, borrowing inspiration from a variety of Western directors and layering their techniques to create his own subversive approach to Lorca’s provocative play, The House of Bernarda Alba. As the following description and the evocative production photos testify, Alizad’s production powerfully critiqued political tyranny, oppression of women, and censorship in Iran through complex, covert cultural exchange with Western directing practices.

INTRODUCED + EDITED BY ANNE

FLIOTSOS + ANN M. SHANAHAN

The House of Bernarda Alba at Entezami Theatre, Tehran, Iran, 2014 PHOTO Hanieh Zahed

A Case Study of Directorial Courage: An Iranian Director’s Subversive Production of Lorca’s The House of Bernarda Alba

BY JOIE

MIROUX + PETER ZAZZALI

Bernarda Alba: “In the eight years this mourning that will last, the wind from the street shan’t enter this house.” (Lorca 21) Written two months before his brutal death at the hands of Spain’s Francoist regime in 1936, Federico Garcia Lorca’s The House of Bernarda Alba simultaneously addresses themes of authoritarianism and the oppression of women. Set on the rural estate of the titular character, the play centers on Alba’s tyrannical treatment of her five daughters, with the youngest (Adela) responding to the repressive situation by committing suicide. Bernarda’s “house” is a site in which individualism and freedom are rejected in the context of a patriarchal society in which a woman’s self-worth is attached to her husband. Having lost her second husband, Alba orders an eight-year period of mourning over the household, a decree that disallows her daughters the right to freely express themselves or make personal decisions. Denied their individuality, the young women are casualties of her hard-hearted dictums and unwavering commitment to tradition. It is a domestic sphere rife with subjugation and death.

A reaction against the totalitarianism of Francoist Spain, Lorca’s play and its sociopolitical themes continue to resonate today, as noted by Spanish theatre scholar Gwynne Edwards, who posits Bernarda Alba “as the expression of a fundamental and universal conflict between those life enhancing and life denying that have been at the heart of human experience from time immemorial” (Lorca xxix). Thus, the play can be seen as a call for sociopolitical change in the face of dictatorial rule, a theme germane to Iranian director Ali Akbar Alizad’s decision to stage the work in February of 2014. Alizad explains:

The eight years of mourning in The House of Bernarda Alba reminded me of all the fear and misery cultivated by the eight years of [Mahmoud] Ahmadinejad’s presidency. I wanted to showcase the damage that he had caused, specifically those related to women’s rights and their oppression and exclusion from the sociopolitical discourse of our country.1 Just as Ahmadinejad’s regime terrorized Iranians from 2005 to 2013, Alba likewise lords over her daughters for a period of eight years. This contextual similarity between the play and the Iranian dictator prompted Alizad’s courageous endeavor.

Our aim in this essay is to shed light on the creative and personal courage of one of Iraq’s most provocative stage directors by presenting his working processes in the context of a subversive rendering of the play that tacitly criticized the Ahmadinejad regime. We begin by providing a contemporaneous overview of Iran’s sociopolitical situation, before examining Alizad’s approach to staging Bernarda Alba in a production that was as daring in its theatrical form as it was in its controversial content. In doing so, we address his multifaceted approach to rehearsals, which included techniques from Bogart, Brecht, Stanislasvky, Meisner, and Wilson.2

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Alizad’s Bernarda Alba in Context Alizad is currently a lecturer in cinema and theatre at Tehran’s Art University, where he received his BA and MA during the 1990s. He began directing professionally in 1991 with Iran’s Aeein and Leev theatre companies, before founding 84Theatre in 2006, an organization dedicated to producing and reimagining the work of foreign playwrights in political ways. Indeed, Alizad sees theatre as a catalyst for social change, with his cause especially focused on Iran’s negation of democracy, censorship of free speech, and marginalization of women. For example, under Ahmadinejad, he witnessed “the brutal censorship of art works, books that didn’t get a publication permit, and the Ershad patrol arresting women for breaking Islamic codes,” thereby inspiring Alizad to adopt a Theatre for Social Change model, albeit one created in the key of subtlety and coded meanings.3 Ahmadinejad was the sixth president of the Islamic Republic of Iran and arguably the most controversial in the nation’s history. In June of 2009, a majority of Iranians voted to end his vile administration, which was fraught with draconian restrictions and censorship. Hopes were high for a change in power, as people voted in great numbers. Less than two hours after the polls closed, however, devastating news overcame the country: Ahmadinejad was reelected with over seventy percent of the vote, an outcome mired in chicanery and fraud. To confirm the rigged election, Iran’s state-sponsored television declared it a landmark victory for Ahmadinejad and his coercive government. During the subsequent four years, his regime reached its highest levels of totalitarianism and brutality, with the Iranian Guard executing protestors, imprisoning political activists, shutting down media outlets, and censoring artistic activities. Similar to the environment of Bernarda Alba, a wall of isolation enveloped the country. Entangled in an austere situation with little tolerance for civil disobedience or criticism of the government, the entire country silently mourned those who had sacrificed their lives for freedom and democracy.

Outraged by the eight years of oppression during Ahmadinejad’s presidency, Alizad initially tried to produce Bernarda Alba in 2011 as a deconstructed work of political subversion.

He saw Lorca’s play as a way to expose the atrocities of Iran’s dictatorship, stating, “I was looking for a play that could articulate and demonstrate the pathetic sociopolitical condition of Iran.” He commenced rehearsals in July of 2011 in an obscure warehouse with the intention of performing the work at Tehran’s Shahid Bheshty University. A few months

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into the process, Alizad received notice from an “anonymous caller” that “the warehouse was to be destroyed and had to be emptied immediately without further explanation,” thereby canceling the production for the near term. Implicit in this unforeseen circumstance was the Iranian government’s censorship of a production deemed unacceptable for public consumption on the grounds that it challenged Iran’s authoritarian leadership.

Censorship is a way of life in Iran. “Its existence is undeniable,” Alizad claims, as restrictions against artistic expression are implemented through shutting down productions or exhibits, banning literature, and the overarching threat of arrest and imprisonment. In fact, we had to take precautions throughout our interview process for fear that Alizad’s words in print might somehow get back to Iranian authorities and result in his detainment. Arguably, the government’s most egregious atrocities in recent history occurred during its crackdown against the Green Movement in 2009, when protesters challenged the fraudulent results of Ahmadinejad’s reelection. In response to the fraud, scores of political activists comprising the Green Movement protested Ahmadinejad’s alleged victory, causing many of them to be detained, imprisoned, and tortured. Iranian officials responded to the uprising by shutting down the epicenter of the movement, Tehran University, in an attempt to prevent protestors from organizing and presenting their message.

The gates to the university were blocked off and “hundreds of officers stood guard” as part of the government’s attempt to “block passersby from seeing anything inside” (Worth and Fathi).

The government’s thwarting of democracy and free speech was common throughout Ahmadinejad’s presidency, with the most heinous crimes occurring on the heels of his reelection. In one such instance a twenty-yearold undergraduate, Ashkan Sohrabi, was “shot three times in the chest during a peaceful demonstration” (Worth and Fathi). In a more publicized tragedy, Neda Agha-Soltan was cast into international martyrdom when her brutal slaying at the hands of the Iranian National Guard was captured on a disturbing YouTube video.4 Having perished during a peaceful protest, the twenty-six-year-old came to represent the Green Movement’s cause against the brutal authoritarianism of the Ahmadinejad government.

Alizad was determined to remount Bernarda Alba in a way that reflected Soltan’s courage, stating, “For me, Adela’s character in The House of Bernarda Alba symbolizes Neda’s resistance, her rebelliousness, and the fight for the rights of Iranian women.” After the shut down of the

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warehouse, determined to resume work on Lorca’s play, Alizad commenced rehearsals in 2013 at the Entezami Theatre of Iran, where he would ultimately present the production eight months later. Though the political risks were palpable, he remained steadfast in challenging the brutality, censorship, and oppression of Iraniansespecially womenat the hands of their government. Alizad explains, “I wanted to address issues of torture, both physically and mentally, within the power structure of the Islamic government of Iran and the effect it has had on Iranian women.” Thus, the stage was set for his remarkable and courageous use of theatre on behalf of social justice.

Approaches to Staging A seventy-seat blackbox space, the Entezami was an ideal venue for the theatrical experiment that Alizad attempted with Bernarda Alba. For fear of governmental retribution, the production was not publicized and there were no reviews. Nonetheless, roughly one thousand spectators attended the production, which was performed in Farsi and ran for seventeen performances during February of 2014. Alizad claims the reception was “generally mixed, with some spectators shocked by the production’s coldness...Many thought it to be powerful, moving, innovative, and successful in questioning the Iranian government’s treatment of women.” Audiences responded to Alizad’s Brechtian approach, which connected Alba’s treatment of her daughters with the atrocities leveled against women and protesters by distancing viewers from the action enough to critically analyze its political content.

Despite his goal of challenging Iran’s sociopolitical circumstances, Alizad had to be sensible and guarded in his aesthetic choices.

Claiming to use “hidden messages displayed in an alternative manner,” he exposed the “patriarchal and cultural hegemony” of Iranian society by departing from the realism implied

by Lorca’s introductory stage directions and by applying a variety of subtly contradictory approaches. In addition to Brecht, he used techniques from Bogart’s Viewpoints, Stanislavsky’s Method of Physical Actions, and Wilson’s imagistic theatre. Alizad states: I selectively applied each of these techniques to the rehearsals and throughout the process I came up with my own system of directing. By stripping the play of its realism, we could get at the idea of the work, which was to display the misery and fear that Iranians experienced under Ahmadinejad.

The House of Bernarda Alba at Entezami Theatre, Tehran, Iran, 2014 PHOTO Hanieh Zahed

Krapp’s Last Tape Jelle IJntema

PHOTO

The Theatre of Image: A Physical Approach In the rehearsals that began in the warehouse in 2011, Alizad and his cast explored Lorca’s play by creating separate acting areas strewn throughout the space: a bedroom for the girls, a dining room, and Alba’s office. Using a technique resembling cinematic montage, he staged the script in a nonlinear format, stating, “everything would happen simultaneously and the people would be able to move freely in the warehouse from one scene to another and choose what to see and what not to see.” His staging was intended to empower audiences into making personal decisions regarding spectatorship: each theatregoer would in effect have agency in choosing what to see, a subtle juxtaposition to the censorship of the Iranian government. Moreover, his plan to depart from the play’s linear dramaturgy in favor of deconstructing the text would presumably disrupt the audience’s expectations of seeing a conventionally rendered production; this too would be a subversive attempt to undermine the hegemonic machinations of tradition, theatrically and otherwise. Ultimately, Alizad was ordered to cancel the production on the cryptic grounds that “the warehouse needed to be destroyed.”

In 2013, with the Ahmadinejad regime having ended, Alizad again sought to produce Lorca’s play. In the two years following his thwarted attempt to do so, he had only staged Krapp’s Last Tape with members of 84Theatre Company. Thereafter, some company members emigrated abroad while others were conscripted into the Iranian military, thereby leaving Alizad unable to cast Bernarda Alba with his usual collaborators. Instead, he chose to work with students and amateur actors in his second attempt.

The House of Bernarda Alba in rehearsal, 2013 PHOTO Alizad

The House of Bernarda Alba at Entezami Theatre, Tehran, Iran, 2014 PHOTO Hanieh Zahed

The House of Bernarda Alba in rehearsal, 2013 PHOTO Alizad

After a well-attended round of auditions in July of 2013,5 Alizad and his cast applied Bogart’s Viewpoints, Stanislavsky’s Method of Physical Actions, and Brechtian Gestus towards an embodied engagement of Lorca’s text. From the beginning of the process, he conceived Bernarda Alba as a script requiring performers to have a physical connection to each other and the playing space. Because the actors did not know him or his way of working, he used Bogart’s techniques to facilitate an artistic language and working process that “created a harmonious company.” The ensemble spent WINTER/SPRING 2017 | SDC JOURNAL PEER-REVIEWED SECTION

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three weeks exploring Viewpoints such as tempo, rhythm, and architecture in developing a synergy between their individual movements, the space, and Lorca’s text. Viewpoints were crucial to this process, insofar as they liberated the actors to physically engage the production’s mise-en-scene in conjunction with Alizad’s vision for the play. In Viewpoints, her co-authored book with Tina Landau, Bogart argues that her approach “leads to greater awareness, which leads to greater choice, which leads to greater freedom” among the ensemble and its joint relationship with the audience and performance space (Bogart and Landau 19). Instead of conventionally commencing rehearsals with a table read, blocking, and scene work, Alizad challenged the cast to focus on their bodies, movements, and kinesthetic connectivity in exploring the text. One such exercise included his prompting them to enact a scene without speaking by solely communicating through body movements relative to the architecture of the playing space. At the next stage of the process, he gave the actors dialogue from the text and asked them to improvise the corresponding scene, explaining, “I did not let them interpret the scene logically or psychologically. They had to make discoveries based on their physical movements and spatial relationships.” In using Bogart’s Viewpoints, Alizad effectively “[created] an ensemble and [developed] a physical vocabulary for the world of the play” (Bogart and Landau 121) in departing from Lorca’s realistic style towards exploring an embodied, deconstructed aesthetic.

Once the actors established their physical investigation of the text, he employed elements of Wilson’s imagistic theatre.

Alizad rehearsed each scene not by reciting the dialogue or through psychoanalytic examination of the characters, but by layering the playing space with a storyboard and corresponding images. In asserting, “Everything said on the stage verbally needs also to be shown visually,” Alizad echoed Wilson’s aim of coalescing the spoken word with theatrical images. Undertaking an imagistic aesthetic while continuing the physical foundation of his process, Alizad incorporated the interrelationship of the actors’ bodies as theatrical images that helped to shape the playing space. “What I learned from Wilson was his idea that the visual aspects of theatre should not be subordinated by language,” shared Alizad, “but instead be expressed through images that included the physical expressions of the ensemble.” This balancing of the visual and physical inspired Alizad’s experimentation:

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We began rehearsing a scene with a cold reading from the text. Then the process of realizing and visualizing the scene through images would start. We narrated the scene with bodies, facial expressions, movements, and gestures. We would keep repeating this process until I could ensure that the silent images were capable of narrating the story without the need for words.

Only after undergoing this lengthy process of visually constructing each moment of the scene did Alizad allow the actors to speak their linesone at a timein stating, “It was after we had ensured the self-sufficiency of the visuality of the scene that we would finally start adding the text.”

The Theatre of Words Alizad did not eliminate textual dialogue, but instead reconfigured it within a physical and imagistic aesthetic. In distinguishing his work from Wilson’s predominantly nonverbal ethos, he included elements of Stanislavsky’s Method of Physical Actions. As Sharon Carnicke posits, “the mental and physical exist as an indivisible whole” (186), and therefore, a Stanislavskian actor’s emotional life cannot be divorced from his physical experience. In what at the time was a revolutionary approach to exploring a character, Stanislavsky insisted that every script consists of actions arrived at through the text and subtext. Therefore, a “score” of actions is best discovered through an improvisatory analysis rather than extended discussions at the table (190). Without eliminating the significance of language, Stanislavsky’s system consists of improvising the scene by instructing the actors to use their own words in exploring the text. Calling this approach “active analysis,” he implemented these improvisations until the actors connected to their character’s given circumstances. Stanislavski posits, “While at first the actors trace only the play’s broadest outlines, as rehearsals progress, they assimilate more and more of the exact demands of the text: the images, style, and manner of writing” (Carnicke 197).

After improvising scenes, Alizad worked closely with Lorca’s words. In doing so, he posed Stanislavksky-based questions to the actors towards forging their identification with their respective characters:

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As a woman right now and in such a place like this house are you really willing to endanger your life because of a man?

Imagine you were free and could leave your mother’s house, what would you do? What would you do if after you got home from rehearsal tonight, your mother informs you that you are not allowed to leave the house anymore.

By asking these questions, which are consistent with Stanislavsky’s so-called “Magic If,” Alizad wanted his ensemble to create truthfully rendered, multidimensional human beings.

Indeed, he claims, “Whenever I thought an actor was not telling the truth, I would provide circumstances that made her think about the situation more seriously and honestly.”

Only after eliciting an honest response to his queries did Alizad and his cast begin to explore subsequent units of action. Although a timeconsuming process, this approach allowed the actors to craft their characters in service of Lorca’s play, and by extension, Alizad’s vision for the production.

In accounting for the spoken drama, Alizad also incorporated the work of a Stanislavsky disciple, Sanford Meisner. He explains, “I wanted to bring Meisner’s exercises into the psychophysical process to open the actors up to one another’s listening and affectation.”

According to Alizad, the repetition exercises caused the actors to overcome mental and physical blocks that can compromise an intuitive connection to their character. In reappropriating the repetition exercises, Alizad hoped that he and his cast could differentiate honest and artificial responses relative to the play’s given circumstances. He recalled, “Sometimes the actors blushed or even teared up because of an honest exchange during the repetition exercises. It was at these moments that I could point out what had previously been superficial for a scene.” Although his approach was effective, in assuming the dominant role as the arbiter of truth in these exchanges Alizad was contradicting the ethos he wanted to communicate through his production: the oppression of women at the hands of patriarchal authority. Indeed, the very use of Meisner raises questions about male determinism in the rehearsal studio, a theme eloquently raised by Rosemary Malague in her book, An Actress Prepares: Women and the Method, in which she argues “participants are not really free in the repetition exercises. . . .

If repetition is meant to release impulse, what does it mean when the only impulse it reliably releases is one of frustration and aggression?”

(133-34). In a decidedly patriarchal society like Iran’s, women are socially positioned as inferior to their male counterparts and oppressed on a daily basis. Because they are constantly marginalized, Iranian women are likely to unconsciously internalize their subordination in accordance with the hegemonic dictums of a patriarchy. This theme, of course, is at the center of Lorca’s play in that it depicts women internalizing their oppressed position in Spanish society, thereby perpetuating their subjugation.

While Alizad claims his production “empowered Iranian women’s liberation by resisting the status quo,” such subversion, as admirable as it was courageous, must be seen in the context of a rehearsal process that at times reflected

The House of Bernarda Alba at Entezami Theatre, Tehran, Iran, 2014 PHOTO Hanieh Zahed

the very hegemonic tropes Alizad and his cast sought to question.

After making sure the actors knew their characters and given circumstances, Alizad finished his process by employing Brecht’s verfremdungseffekt, stating, “personally, I do not like realistic acting, or in other words, the Method, so common in the American theatre. . . . I always like to create a critical distance between audiences and the stage action.”

As Brecht explains, “[alienation] depends on the exposition demanded by the entire episode, and this is where the theatre has to speak up decisively for the interest of its own time” (201). Thus, using the alienation effect is contingent upon the sociopolitical conditions of both the play’s world and that of the audience. Accordingly, Alizad departed from the script’s realism, which lends to empathically identifying with the characters, and instead he took a distancing approach to didactically present the theme of authoritarianism. Relying on their reasoning, audience members became “observers standing outside” the action of the play as opposed to becoming empathically engrossed in it (Brecht 37). By de-familiarizing the drama’s central theme, Alizad positioned audience members as active partners, encouraging them to think critically in reflecting upon their own sociopolitical condition relative to the characters in Lorca’s play. As Brecht states, “the new alienations are only designed to free

socially conditioned phenomena from that stamp of familiarity which protect them against our grasp today” (Brecht 192). By producing Bernarda Alba for an audience beset by the oppression of patriarchal religious and cultural traditions, Alizad was able to freealbeit temporarilyhis actors and audience from these beliefs and behaviors in favor of an intellectual critique of Iranian society.

Alizad began by directing the actors to speak their lines as if they were commenting on them, or as Brecht asserts, “acting in quotation marks,” towards achieving the critical distancing he sought for his production (17, 142). In order to achieve this exchange, he posed matter-of-fact questions about the weather and such to prompt them to find didactic connections to the characters and given circumstances. For example, he asked the actors to utter their text while adopting a third person perspective. He explains, “I would ask them to describe their emotions before running their lines. For instance, the actress who played Adela would say, ‘Adela enters the room and while angry, she says: ‘Stop staring at me.’ ” Such an approach is directly applicable to Brecht’s “Exercises for Acting Schools,” in which he utilizes techniques ranging from conjuring tricks to coolly reporting on a scene to unlodge the actor from empathically identifying with his character (129). Other Brechtian devices Alizad employed included “asking the actor to encounter the

spectators and address them directly, using microphones to didactically present the dialogue, transmitting the stage action with a camera and TV monitor, and delivering monologues while employing long, unnatural pauses” (Alizad). He also added “a sort of cold, coarse and crude violence to the acting,” as demonstrated at the end of the performance, when one of the servants rubbed her bloody hands on Bernarda’s mouth in a highly stylizedor Gesticmanner to symbolically echo the trope of political violence that has beset Iran for decades. Brecht describes theatrical gestus as the “gist” or prevailing “attitude” underscoring a sociopolitical message of significance to a given audience (42). Existing as a stylized acting gesture or an illustrative element of the mise-en-scene (placards epically referencing the play’s events or chapters), Alizad’s use of stage blood was delivered in a Brechtian way.

Perhaps Alizad’s most significant use of gestus was evidenced by a TV screen in a haunting reference to the death of Neda Agha-Soltan. At the end of Act One, Maria Josefa attempts to flee, prompting Alba to order the servants to lock her up. Upon being apprehended, Maria screams, “I want to leave this place Bernarda!

I want to marry by the seashore, by the seashore!” (Lorca 45). As she writhes in pain, one of the servants captures the exchange with a video camera transmitting grainy images of the action to a monitor in what was a codified

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reminder of Agha-Soltan’s assassination. Alizad explains this choice as “wanting to make a reference to Neda’s brutal and unjust death.”

Indeed, the infamous YouTube footage of Agha-Soltan’s bloodied face and lifeless body remains seared in the memories of Iranians.

Alizad was determined to “reenact her death on stage!” He echoed her brutal murder again at the performance’s conclusion by directing the actor playing Alba to enter with a bloodridden face after discovering the death of her daughter (Adela) while declaring: “She, Bernarda Alba’s youngest daughter, died a virgin. Did you hear me? Silence, I said!

Silence!” (Lorca 117). With Alba’s appearance suggesting a savage animal having just eaten its prey, Alizad presented her as a soulless dictator not unlike Iran’s contemporaneous leadership.

The House of Bernarda Alba at Entezami Theatre, Tehran, Iran, 2014 PHOTO Hanieh Zahed

Conclusion Towards the end of his life, Lorca confessed Bernarda Alba was based on horrors that he witnessed while visiting his hometown of Valderrubio: In the house next door lived Dona Bernarda, a very old widow who kept an inexorable and tyrannical watch over her unmarried daughters. They were prisoners deprived of their free will. And I observed them. It was a silent and cold hell in the African sun, a tomb for the living under the harsh rule of a dark jailer. And so was born… The House of Bernarda Alba…

(Lorca xxii ).

Similar to Lorca, Alizad witnessed the dark and torturous time Iranians endured throughout the eight years of Ahmadinejad’s regime.

Determined to prompt critical and subversive action against Iran’s totalitarianism, which even under Ahmadinejad’s successor, Hassan Rouhani, remains “a very sad experience,” he continues to produce controversial work that imperils him and his colleagues. At the time of this article’s publication, Alizad hopes to stage Harold Pinter’s Mountain Language and fears that “[it] will be censored for its sexual and political subtext.” As he did with Bernarda Alba, Alizad plans to use a variety of techniques ranging from Bogart to Brecht towards creating a politically subversive production that questions Iran’s cultural traditions and oppressive government. Using cross-gender casting, for instance, he wants his audience to critically consider Pinter’s play that centers on the Turkish imprisonment of Kurdish rebels, all of whom are men. In doing so, he echoes what Sue Ellen Case describes as “reading against,” or disrupting “historical and cultural codes,” most especially those pertaining to a patriarchal society (15).

Similarly to his Bernarda Alba, Ali Akbar Alizad continues to courageously pursue social change in a country where institutionalized oppression makes freedom and democracy risky endeavors.

WORKS CITED

Alizad, Ali Akbar. Personal Interview with Joie Miroux. 20 March 2015.

Bogart, Anne, and Tina Landau.

The Viewpoints Book. Theatre Communication Group, 2005.

Brecht, Bertolt. Brecht on Theatre. Translated and edited by John Willett, Hill and Wang, 1964.

Carnicke, Sharon Marie. Stanislavsky in Focus.

2nd ed., Routledge, 2009.

Case, Sue Ellen. Feminism and Theatre.

Routledge, 1988.

Holmberg, Arthur. The Theatre of Robert Wilson. Cambridge UP, 1996.

Lorca, Federico Garcia. The House of Bernarda Alba. Translated by Gwynne Edwards, Methuen Drama, 1998.

Malague, Rosemary. An Actress Prepares: Women and the Method. Routledge, 2012.

Rivkin, Julie, and Michael Ryan. Editors. Literary Theory: An Anthology. 2nd ed., Blackwell, 2004.

Worth, Robert F., and Nazila Fathi. “Thousands Defy Iranian Authorities in Protests and Clashes at Campuses,” New York Times, 8 December 2009, p. A1.

END NOTES

1 All references to Ali Akbar Alizad are from Joie Miroux’s interview with him, 20 March 2015.

2 Alizad’s multifaceted directing style can be likened to what theatre scholar, Sue Ellen Case, calls "guerrilla actions"—multiple approaches to breaking hegemonic control of the means of production. For more on Case, see her text, Feminism and Theatre (New York: Routledge, 1988), 132.

3 In referencing the Ershad patrol, Alizad was citing Ahmadinejad’s henchmen who harassed and arrested women for donning makeup, being scantily dressed, or failing to cover their hair, all practices inconsistent with conservative interpretations of the Quran.

4 To view the graphically disturbing slaying of Soltan, see youtube. com/verify_controversy?next_url=/ watch%3Fv%3D76W-0GVjNEc (accessed 4 April 2016). Neda Agha-Soltan was a university student shot in the chest and face during an anti-government protest in Tehran on June, 20th 2009.

5 Alizad cast seven percent of those that auditioned. It was clearly a competitive process.

CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS Published quarterly by Stage Directors and Choreographers Society (SDC), the peer-reviewed section of SDC Journal serves directors and choreographers working in the profession and in institutions of higher learning. SDC’s mission is to give voice to an empowered collective of directors and choreographers working in all jurisdictions and venues across the country, encourage advocacy, and highlight artistic achievement. SDC Journal seeks essays with accessible language that focus on practice and practical application and that exemplify the sorts of fruitful intersections that can occur between the academic/scholarly and the profession/craft.

For more information, visit: http://sdcweb.org/community/sdc-journal/sdc-journal-peer-review/

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The first section of the book focuses on Africa and presents case studies on Cameroon, Nigeria, Cote d’Ivoire, South Africa, Botswana, and Democratic Republic of Congo. Each chapter is less than ten pages in length and highlights one specific genre of dance and music per country. Other types of dance may be mentioned, but usually only in their historical connection to the primary genre covered. Akombo’s strengths as an academic show clearly in this section, where he explains the nuances of language and history in a clear and comprehensible format.

SDCJ-PRS BOOK REVIEW The Unity of Music and Dance in World Cultures

By David Akombo

MCFARLAND, 2016. 276 PP. $40 PAPERBACK.

David Akombo’s The Unity of Music and Dance in World Cultures fills a crucial gap in the study of dance throughout the world. Although a significant amount of scholarship has been devoted to classical ballet, disappointingly little addresses the rich heritage of tribal dance and music throughout Africa, Southeast Asia, and other parts of the world. Akombo provides a well-structured and meticulously documented examination of these often overlooked regional traditions. By considering dance and music as intertwined expressions of individual cultures, Akombo scientifically examines the relationship between the two fields. His premise is that dance and music are not only interdependent, but are truly inseparable, “a composite whole to coexist and complement each other in an attempt to complete the human sphere” (2).

The book is divided into six sections, each with a geographic focus: Africa, the Americas, Asia, the South Pacific, Europe, and the Middle East.

Inside each of these sections, chapters examine the specific dance and music of a country or region. The chapters follow a fairly standard structure beginning with a brief history, often addressing geography and other influences, before providing an overview of artistic forms and a concluding analysis. Each chapter ends with a list of bibliographic references.

Section two devotes sixteen chapters to the Americas, beginning with the Caribbean then moving to North America, Central America, and finally South America. For the average American reader this chapter will likely contain the most familiar, though nonetheless illuminating content. For example, Akombo’s brief, seven-page treatment of Hula dance and the six pages devoted to Swing remind the reader of the cultural basis for all dance, even for cultures one knows relatively well.

Section three covers Asia with seven chapters on music and dance in India, the Philippines, Mongolia, China, and Japan. In this section Akombo’s music expertise risks obscuring the dance focus of the book. In the chapter “The Dances of China,” only five broad and largely uninformative sentences are dedicated to indigenous dance, while the rest focuses on music. Although the author devotes several sections to Western influences in contemporary Chinese dance, those sections lack the same rich information of the pages devoted to music. Similarly, the chapter on Japan provides little insight regarding the country’s dance or movement arts. With the significant differences between Noh, Kabuki, and other performance genres, one would expect more content devoted to Japanese dance.

The final three sections examine dance in the South Pacific, Middle East, and Europe.

Included in this section are chapters devoted to Aboriginal dance, two chapters devoted to ballet, and two others devoted to traditional Irish and Spanish Flamenco dances. The sixth and final section covers the Middle East and includes three chapters devoted to Afghanistan, the Saray Court Dance of Turkey, and Iraq, covering regional dances largely overshadowed by the popular Turkish Dervish dance in similar studies.

The reader will appreciate the depth of research in this catalog of dance and music across cultures, written to serve as a brief, scientific overview. While these features make the book easy to use as a reference guide, its encyclopedic nature can make reading somewhat dry. Akombo does not delve into great detail on each particular dance, and while the book contains some narrative, there are many sections that focus on delivery of facts rather than story or analysis.

Akombo is clearly a musician who explores dance through his expertise in music. This approach helps shed new light on the development and meaning of movement in the featured cultures and allows for commentary on instrumentation and rhythmic patterns that could have easily been overlooked. In some cases, the reader may miss inclusion of descriptions or images for the culturally specific musical instruments mentioned in various chapters; the inclusion of such images would have been a very helpful visual aid.

Likewise, it is disappointing that the book refrains from a formal conclusion concerning the relationship between dance and music.

Akombo argues in the preface that “every dance goes with some form of music as music goes with some form of dance notwithstanding the culture-specific definitions of the two” (2).

This statement begs for additional concluding commentary to tie the cultural examinations of dance and music together.

As a whole, The Unity of Music and Dance in World Culture is a concise and useful addition to the burgeoning field of ethnokinesiology, the study of dance in culture. The brevity of each chapter is both the book’s strength and its weakness, because while serving as a consolidated resource, each chapter leaves the reader somewhat unsatisfied, feeling as if much is left out. While this may make it a frustrating read for some, it serves Akombo’s purpose, providing a brief overview of each culture and then a list of references for additional research.

The diversity of cultures represented is quite impressive considering the books small size. At only 276 pages, The Unity of Music and Dance in World Culture gives a whirlwind tour of the globe, granting the reader a brief glimpse into each culture and piquing curiosity for further research.

AMILE WILSON

CHOREOGRAPHER/DIRECTOR KINETIC ETCHINGS DANCE PROJECT AT HAPAX CREATIVE ARTS

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Lelund Durond Thompson PHOTO

AN INTERVIEW WITH

David Roberts

SDC FOUNDATION DIRECTOR

SDC Foundation Committee Chair SHELDON EPPS sat down with newly appointed Foundation Director David Roberts to talk about his vision and leadership strategies for the future of SDC Foundation.

SHELDON EPPS | In a theatre company, you can sometimes tell what good shape you’re in by the people who want to be around you, the people who want to work with you—the people who want to collaborate with you. I have to say that because the Foundation is in such a good place right now, the candidates who came along for the director job were of an exceedingly high caliber.

It was a great field, and I’m so happy that through that process, you emerged as the right casting for this role. So won’t you tell us a little about what was attractive to you in this position and working with the Foundation when you saw that the job was available?

DAVID ROBERTS | Well, it’s a very unique organization in terms of its relationship to the Union, its relationship to the Union Membership, and, within that, the larger context of the relationship of directors and choreographers to the rest of the theatrical environment. All of those things were quite interesting to me. I have a management and producing background in nonprofit theatres.

Writ large, I really see that as curating an organizational experience. There are the artists that you work with who are the primary drivers of the actual mission in the work that we do, but the other players in that environment are your board of directors, [who] are your first circle of support in terms of volunteers, and it’s your staff that really facilitates the work being done. And, of course, the audience, and so the communications with the audience—that’s traditional marketing, PR, and wraparound audience services—all these elements, if executed well, become part of the ecology of a good organizational experience.

More specifically, my experience previous to this was as Managing Director of the Classical Theatre of Harlem. It is a 16-yearold organization, an identity-specific cultural institution, and a small theatre. By “small,” I mean it has a budget of just now approaching $1 million. But its impact on its community is incredible—and when I say community, I mean the community that it serves in terms of its audience, but also the community of artists that has built up around it and that it gives opportunity to. And so I’ve taken all of those experiences with me. Previous to that, I

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was a Managing Director of another classical company, The Pearl Theatre Company.

SHELDON | Both are very admirable companies, with great reputations in both cases.

DAVID | Yes. From my point of view, both from a personal and professional standpoint, it’s all about those relationships. It’s about the mission. It’s about driving the art forward. In both of those institutions, the relationship with art and artists was well regarded. In the case of the Pearl Theatre Company, it has been one of the few resident companies, certainly in New York, that has survived the last 25, 30 years, and that’s important.

Another resident company format that I came from, prior to the Pearl, was SITI Company, Anne Bogart’s company. Again, very company driven. I think those experiences of being close to the art, of having a background of training in the art—it’s a background of relatedness.

It allows me to communicate with my collaborators. There are all those qualitative metrics in play in terms of how any individual artist engages with any particular institution.

SHELDON | Well, you used a phrase, which I liked very much, which I use often—you used the phrase “community of artists.” Oddly, though SDC is a Union, and the Foundation is obviously a Foundation, I do feel that both represent a community of artists, one on a sort of contractual business level and another on a level of more greatly exploring the art form and elucidating what it is that directors do.

So I am assuming that that was something that was attractive to you in this position— the opportunity to work with the particular community of artists—that is, Union Members—be they , as you just mentioned, directors, choreographers, et cetera.

DAVID | Absolutely. I touched on that sort of unique relationship between the two institutions, but it really comes down to how does that operationalize itself? How does that look and feel in the real world?

SHELDON | How does that look and feel in the real world?

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DAVID | We’ll discover that together, won’t we?

SHELDON | We’ll try.

DAVID | My shorthand for it is that the Union exists to protect and serve the Members, and the corollary for the Foundation is that it exists to invest and reinvest in the artists and art form at the core of SDC, because it really is the community saying with their time and attention—and dollars, in some cases—that, “We want to give back. We want to pass along knowledge.” You see that from our early career, mid-career, all the way up to our seasoned, established artists, who come back time and time again for talks or workshops. You see it again in the quality of applicants that we receive for the Observership pool, who want to be in “the room where it happens,” as the saying goes these days.

It’s a competitive process and, from what I’ve seen already, there’s an eagerness for the community to connect and to share information and experience. Theatre, for millennia, has been a journeyman-style career path, where it’s not something you can just go to school for and get a piece of paper, although there are many good programs that do that. But even those programs rely on the mentor-mentee relationship. It relies on a personal network, personal relationships, and the work of the Foundation to help facilitate those activities and connections is critical.

So that sense of potential and possibility was interesting to me as the position came up.

Being able to be part of an organization that helps guide careers, and, along with the Board, to amplify that impact, to be a catalyst for helping those relationships to thrive and to grow.

SHELDON | I’ve seen an incredible amount of growth and evolution of the Foundation over my time, first as a Board Member and, over the last few years, as Chair of the Foundation committee—a lot of growth in terms of expansion of services to Members all over the country, not just in big cities, but in smaller cities and even in smaller communities. I think that the Journal has become certainly a route to that and a way for us to have conversations with Members in all parts of the country.

SDC FOUNDATION I’m really proud of where the Foundation is right now, and I think that is one of the reasons that we attracted wonderful candidates and eventually wooed and courted and won you over to join us as [Foundation] Director.

I know it’s early days, but what do you see as both the opportunities and challenges that the Foundation faces going forward?

DAVID | I think there are many opportunities here. I think that nonprofit organizations are getting more and more complex. Thankfully, the Foundation has a 50-year history in terms of how it has served its constituencies.

There’s always room for improvement and for refinement of programs and analysis of data, et cetera.

But in terms of the services that we offer, I see the opportunities as an expansion of the good programs, the signature programs that we have. Are there ways to deepen the connections between the mentor and mentee?

Are there ways to—and this is the age-old problem within the arts—how can we better compensate those participants, because [a] life in the arts can be a hard one?

So when you have folks who are pursuing what is lifelong education, in many cases— and I’m thinking specifically about the Observership Program right now—then it becomes important in terms of what those stipends look like. Can we make [the] pool of participants look more like America? Can it be more diverse? Can it be more equitable?

Those are places [where] we’re looking to improve the service that we provide.

I think that we stand in a critical moment, technologically, with all the advances in programming that you noted, [and] the beautiful evolution of the Journal and its collaboration with both the Union and the Foundation, in terms of being of service to the community. I’m hoping that we can expand on our digital footprint, ways of having communication with our constituents that [are] not just unidirectional but as a dialogue.

SHELDON | To hear from the Membership, “What will be helpful to you? What would be advantageous to you?”

DAVID | Exactly.

SHELDON | I think that’s a great area [in which] to explore ways to make it a conversation rather than an address to the Membership.

DAVID | I think that’s good for the health of the organization.

SHELDON | I think it’s good for the growth of the art form because we should not necessarily assume that we know the answers.

So I think trying to explore ways to, as I said, talk with rather than talk at the Membership— that’s going to be really valuable.

DAVID | It’s critical. I had the good fortune to be able to go to Los Angeles and meet some of the Membership out there, participate in the bicoastal Board meeting that we recently had, and one of the things I mentioned at our Member gathering was that there is a perception that the Foundation can be New York-centric and that we are really dedicated to this being a national organization. There were lots of nods in the room.

SHELDON | I’ve seen those.

DAVID | So there’s a real desire for us to have a presence and impact and, of course, leveraging organizational relationships and partnerships becomes essential to that as well. For example, there’s Directors Lab West, who are doing exemplary work out there.

SHELDON | Hosted by Pasadena Playhouse.

DAVID | Yes, and there’s an opportunity there for a greater collaboration. I spoke with their representatives about what that might look like and what they were dreaming of and thinking of, and there are ways for us to do that all over the nation. Leveraging institutional relationships is a great goal for the future.

The Foundation is an operating Foundation that runs programs. I’m interested in looking at ways we might expand upon that, bringing into our conversation other foundations that are perhaps more grant-making foundations. I think there are opportunities for us possibly to do some re-granting or to be in conversation with the philanthropic community [about] the needs of artists—and directors and choreographers, in particular—within the arts field so we’re amplifying the message of what this community does for the art form and what they need from the philanthropic community to really make these careers and the opportunities within this career thrive.

SHELDON | I think in connection with that, you bring up a good point. There is an assumption that, because of the name, the Foundation is fully funded by the Union.

While, in fact, the Union does make a very generous contribution to the Foundation every year, it is not by any means the total budget, and the Foundation is not sitting on a great, big endowment that is throwing off an income stream to fund the programming.

So there are a lot of people who think that we are a fully-funded-by-somebody, grant-making organization that’s just here to give money away and support programming, and Lord knows, we’re happy to support programming and want to have more programming, as we have stated, that we can support.

Do you have thoughts about not necessarily how we accomplish that, but how we more successfully get the word out there to the Membership, to the field, to those who admire and appreciate the art and craft of directing and recognize [the] necessity of what we do about our fundraising needs, about our funding needs?

DAVID | Well, I think it’s important to communicate, both to stakeholders internal and external, the value of what we do so people will fund the “it.” If they fund the programming, they fund the mission. Once they understand what that is, I think we can be very transparent and open and articulate about how these things get funded.

Certainly, within the philanthropic community, foundations understand the difference between an operating foundation and a grantmaking foundation. But it has to be said in our grant proposals. I think it’s important for our Members and our individual donors to know that their gifts of any size make an impact, not just monetarily, but those are some of the other metrics that, for example, a government funder will look at or that a foundation funder will look at. “How big is your constituency?

What percentage of those give back to the organization?” So there’s a case to be made for every level of person who is engaged with the Foundation that, you know, your show of support, be it $5 or $5,000, really can help.

SHELDON | Or $500,000.

DAVID | Or even $500,000! But a collective show of support could help move the needle for a city funder, a state funder, or the NEA, or a grant-making foundation to say, “Yes, there was a buy-in from within this community for this organization and this mission to exist and, for that reason, we too are willing to pony up.”

And I think there are other ways that we can diversify our income streams as we look at our recognition events, our awards, where we’re looking at lifetime achievement and we’re looking at excellence within the craft.

There are opportunities for us to connect to corporate sponsors who certainly recognize the value and the craft and the art form that our directors and choreographers are putting out into the world.

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SHELDON | I think also, in that regard, we can look to some naming opportunities for some of the programming. We were just talking a moment ago about theatres that are named after people, corporations, whatever—but why not the "David Roberts Observership Program"? Some of our fellowships are certainly named for well-known Members.

But I’m thinking about corporate sponsorship, giving corporations the naming opportunity to support individual programs, as well as the Foundation itself.

DAVID | And there is conversation within the nonprofit field these days about, “Should that be in perpetuity?” Well, that doesn’t necessarily have to be, either. We can name this for five years, we can name this for 10 years. We want our programming to be relevant and to serve a purpose. We want to be sure that we don’t lock ourselves into specific programming that perhaps won’t serve the Membership 10 years, 20 years out. Perhaps there’s new programming that needs to happen in that time.

So I think there are ways to have a conversation and communicate to potential donors because they’re also in it for a reason. They’re also involved and invested in the forward movement of, in our case, the Foundation, for very specific reasons.

Knowledge of that comes about through sustained conversation and through getting to know the donor and their relationship to the mission. Again, it’s not transactional. It really is about the relationship. I know I keep going back to that, but it’s important.

SHELDON | Everything we do is based on relationships, isn’t it? And community.

I see it in everything I go to see at the theatre, but I’ve recently seen a couple of productions that emerge[d] so strongly from a director’s vision or a director and choreographer’s vision.

Occasionally, we have talked on a Board level and in SDC Journal editorial meetings about the idea of both a greater understanding of what it is directors and choreographers do and a greater celebration of that, in a retro kind of way—to get back to that time in the theatre when directors were star names. You would go and see a show because it was a Bob Fosse show. You would go and see a Harold Prince musical or George Abbott production, for that matter. Not so much for the aggrandizement of the name, but for recognition of the fact that that thing called theatre has a necessity to have directors and choreographers involved as much as writers.

We’re delivered a stack of papers that then has to be given life in a very visual, vocal,

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aural way. Do you have thoughts about how to use the Journal and Foundation activity to do that more? You mentioned it a bit with the awards that we do and spotlighting particular Members, but as a craft, do you have thoughts about more ways to accomplish that?

DAVID | At the risk of seeming to go around this the long way, we exist and serve a very particular slice of the theatrical community.

But within that, I think it’s important that we not become an echo chamber, that we share that programming; for example, we share attendance to the talks, the One-on-Ones and symposia, not only with the Membership, the Associate Membership, and the Observership class of whichever year we happen to be in, but that some of those programs are also open to the general public.

And a lot of them are currently public, but people may not know that. This gets into the communications and the marketing strategy because for us to say this to each other is important in how we continue to articulate the impact of choreographers and directors on the art form. That’s great.

We can come up with some shared language and some shared ways of talking about the value of directors and choreographers, but unless people within the acting community know our value, and the designing community know our value and are sharing that language about us within their respective professional communities, we will not get the impact we desire. It is just as important that the greater population—that is, audiences at large— understand what we bring to the art form.

I think when you say a Bob Fosse show, most laypeople would know exactly what that means, and in their minds, they’d have a style of the Chicago choreography in their head, they’d know what that meant. I think we would be hard-pressed today, if we were to go out on 42nd Street, and say— SHELDON | [A] contemporary choreographer’s name, to have that name emerge with a clear image from an audience background. That’s true.

DAVID | So that really is about communication, with the small “a” audience and the capital “A” audience, and it’s going to be ongoing work. I don’t think that there is one answer to it.

So that two-way communication by using the new media and technology tools to our advantage will be a part of that. I think conversations across organizations, sister organizations, will be critical to that same conversation and always, always listening to

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our Membership in terms of what they need, what they want, what they’re hearing out in the world, what conversations they want to have.

SHELDON | The point you make about inviting theatre lovers into our activities as well as Members is a vital one. We did an event at Pasadena Playhouse a couple of years ago where I worked with a symphony director, and we coached singers on Broadway audition material. She coached them from a musical aspect, and I coached them from an acting aspect, and, literally, I had three of my board members come up to me at the end of the event, after 15 years, and say, “Oh, now I understand what you do.” So exposure to the process, exposure to conversations or actual events where that kind of work is taking place, can be valuable [and] certainly can lead to celebration of what we do, but specifically celebration of what we do in terms of support to the Foundation. If people get it and know that it’s vital to the process and that it’s sexy and attractive and deserving of support, then I think those dollars can come our way so we can keep the mission going and keep expanding the mission and keep growing and glowing!

DAVID | Exactly. Again, it’s a 50-year-old organization, so we’re doing something right, but an organization can never sit on its laurels.

It always has to be in conversation with the people that it serves.

SHELDON | We’ll be hearing from you a lot, I hope, over the years. That’s one of the advantages of your being with us. But [is there] anything immediate that you can think of that you want the Membership to hear from you?

DAVID | I’m one month in right now, but already I feel the sense of community within the Foundation, within the Union at large, and I’m just thrilled to be a part of it and to dig in and get to work on behalf of our directors and choreographers. I see a lot of great potential for the future—amplifying the message and amplifying knowledge to the community as a whole about what we do. And by “we,” I mean what it is directors and choreographers do for the theatrical landscape. It’s exciting to be a part of it.

SHELDON | I hope that this conversation has elucidated the reasons I’m very happy you are with us. We, as a Union, as a Foundation, are so fortunate that you’ve come to provide your knowledge, your passion for the work, and your creativity to the Foundation and SDC. DAVID | Thank you, Sheldon.

SDC FOUNDATION AWARDS REVIEW

INTRO BY YUE LIU On Monday, October 24, 2016, over 100 SDC Members and theatre community professionals gathered at the Laurie Beechman Theatre to celebrate the 27th Annual Joe A. Callaway Award Ceremony.

Co-hosted by Callaway Award-winner Jack O’Brien and Finalist Josh Bergasse, the evening featured performances from Trip of Love and Futurity as choreographer James Walski (Trip of Love) and director Sarah Benson (Futurity) accepted the awards for Choreography and Directing.

The ceremony also honored Directing Finalists Lila Neugebauer (Kill Floor), John Gould Rubin (Turn Me Loose), Bartlett Sher (Oslo), and Rebecca Taichman (Indecent), and Choreography Finalists Martha Clarke (Angel Reapers), Connor Gallagher (The Robber Bridegroom), David Neumann (Futurity), and Sergio Trujillo and Darrell Grand Moultrie (Invisible Thread).

REMARKS “On Directing”

BY BILL

CASTELLINO O’BRIEN

AS READ BY JACK

Permit me to attempt a “job description.”

Directors study ink on a page—then look at the empty space and imagine.

We embark on a daunting journey of interpretation via text, color, light, gesture, and collaboration. We fill in blanks, ask and answer questions, manage personalities, follow our intuition, depend on hard-won technique—and make up stuff.

We invent a unique and complex visual and aural language that supports the words and sounds and the silent space between.

We attempt to collage these and other elements into a beautiful, handmade, living work of art called “theatre.”

First presented in 1989, the Joe A. Callaway Award recognizes excellence in the arts of stage directing and choreography during the New York City Off-Broadway theatre season, and is the only award given by professional directors and choreographers to their peers for work on a specific production. The award selection committee seeks exceptional work, which, in its sensitivity, imagination, and clarity of vision, exemplifies mastery of the craft of theatrical storytelling.

At our best, we raise the bar of creativity, invention, and expression—and leave the time from curtain up to curtain call changed, blessed, respected, and provoked.

The 2015–2016 Callaway Committee was comprised of Sue Lawless, Chair; Jonathan Cerullo, Vice Chair; Edie Cowan, Secretary; and Jack Going, Richard Hamburger, William Martin, Barry McNabb, DJ Salisbury, Amy Saltz, and Clinton Turner Davis; with Robert Moss acting as SDC Board Liaison.

TOP Josh Bergasse, James Walski, Jack O’Brien + Sarah Benson at '16 Callaway Awards

The Callaway Award is peer given. We directors know better than anyone how complex and sublime and indescribable our jobs are. Which is why this acknowledgement—given by our peers—is such a profound honor.

RIGHT TOP

'15–'16 Callaway Committee

SDC Board Executive Vice President John Rando

RIGHT MIDDLE

PHOTOS

Walter McBride

Jonathan Cerullo, Bill Castellino + Sarah Bierstock

RIGHT BOTTOM

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Eric Rosen, Lisa Portes + Aimée Hayes

Chay Yew Michael Halberstam

Established in 2008, the Zelda Fichandler Award is SDC Foundation's first award devoted to the regional theatre. The award, now in its ninth year, recognizes the extraordinary impact individual artists can have on their home communities within the national arts landscape, and is given on a rotating basis to artists working in specific regions across the country.

The 2016 Fichandler Award Committee was chaired by Casey Stangl and included Kimberly Faith Hickman, Aditi Kapil, KJ Sanchez, and Roche Schulfer. The 2016 award recognized SDC Members living and working in the Central Region.

For her accomplishments to date, promise for the future, artistic vision, and deep commitment to Chicago, Lisa Portes was selected as the 2016 recipient. She is the first freelance director to receive the award.

Aimée Hayes, Producing Artistic Director of Southern Rep, and Eric Rosen, Artistic Director of Kansas City Repertory Theatre, were selected as Finalists.

On Sunday, October 29, the 2016 Zelda Fichandler Award Ceremony was held at Steppenwolf Theatre in Chicago. SDC Executive Director Laura Penn introduced the Finalists.

REMARKS

BY LAURA

PENN

Thank you, everyone here at Steppenwolf, for hosting us this evening. This time of year is always really special to us at the SDC Foundation because this award has become so valuable not only to the people who receive it but to the people who help to figure out who to give it to. This year, with Zelda’s passing, it is pretty poignant.

Last week, I was in D.C. at Arena Stage. I had been asked to participate in a celebration of Zelda’s life. It was an honor, to say the least.

There was a little bit of what I shared then that I feel might have some meaning for us this evening.

In 2008, the Stage Directors and Choreographers Society was on the eve of its 50th anniversary. It had been founded by a tight group of Broadway stars but had grown to become a national force supporting directors and choreographers all across the country. We challenged ourselves at that time to find a way to really mark the anniversary, to demonstrate a tangible way in which SDC had come to represent the field and was a national organization.

It was decided that SDC Foundation, the notfor-profit foundation of SDC, would establish an award to recognize an outstanding director or choreographer who was making a unique and exceptional contribution to the theatre through their work in the region. It would be named for Zelda.

Zelda was a leader among leaders. She loved directors—directors with expansive vision, with unrelenting passion, who pursued their craft with tenacity, always setting the bar higher and higher. Directors with drive and determination to bring something into being. Zelda was deeply committed to inspiring those who followed in the footsteps of the Founders, and with all her heart wanted to shore them up as they faced the daily challenges of their chosen ministry— requiring that they, as she and her peers had, demand the best of themselves and those around them.

Over many months, working closely with Zelda, we developed the criteria. The award would not be for lifetime achievement; it would be to honor an artist for both accomplishment to date and promise for the future. We would witness an artist in the center of their artistic life, working with the same passion and dedication as the founders of the regional theatre movement— founders such as Margo Jones, Bill Ball, Tyrone Guthrie, and Gordon Davidson.

INTRODUCING…

THE “BREAKOUT AWARD”

Presented annually by the Board, The Breakout Award will recognize an SDC Member’s work on a production or productions that signal a shift in a career and the beginning of critical recognition in the Off-Broadway arena. SDC Board Member Evan Yionoulis presented Ed Sylvanus Iskandar with the inaugural Breakout Award for his direction of Charles Francis Chan Jr.’s Exotic Oriental Murder Mystery and Sojourners.

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The award would recognize remarkable artists dedicating themselves to a community over a long period of time and transforming the region’s theatrical landscape through that commitment.

The award would be for work that is hard, for work that is necessary, and it would encourage these artists and others who follow to carry on and ensure that dynamic, extraordinary directors can thrive while creating great theatre all across the country. In honor of Zelda, it would be for courage and bravery. And in her word, not mine, it would not be for “sissies.”

Since its establishment in 2009, there have been eight winners, 21 finalists, and hundreds of nominations. Some knew her well and are here with us this evening. Others are artists who otherwise may not have had an opportunity to sit with her, to speak with her. And in the years ahead, there will be many more who, through this award, will take with them a bit of her spirit and the responsibility to carry on.

I like to think it brought her joy to get to know these artists and that she appreciated knowing SDC would join with many others to carefully steward her legacy.

I do know over the past decade it was this award that inspired her in many ways to keep writing.

Many of her essays were a result of connecting directly to this award; in fact, her last public speech was in 2011 at the Fichandler Award that was presented in Washington, D.C. In 2009, when we announced the award, Zelda wrote a speech that was delivered by Jane Alexander at our gala, as Zelda wasn’t feeling well that evening.

The speech was way, way, way, way, way too long, and so we had to make some cuts. When I looked back a few weeks ago and was preparing my remarks for Arena Stage, I found a Zelda file and I went through some stuff and found a paragraph that had been cut. And Lisa, [with] you, and to you, Eric, and to you, Aimée, I’d like to share it this evening. It seems even more appropriate than I thought. Here’s Zelda: “We are each an original. We come into the world at the cost of alternate ovulations, alternate lives, really. The chances of our being our parents’ son or daughter is in the vicinity of one in ten million. The fundamental identity that we are born with may or may not at all suit the identities of our mother or father; we may even be born into the wrong house or even into the wrong destiny. But if we have the talent to create a beautiful thing that wouldn’t be there but for us, we are blessed. And in addition to repairing the world, we have the opportunity to repair ourselves, make ourselves whole, a project that can engage us for a lifetime and for which, I believe, we have landed on Earth.”

On behalf of the SDC Foundation Board, congratulations, Lisa, Eric, and Aimée.

ACCEPTANCE REMARKS

BY LISA

PORTES

First of all, thank you all for coming out. I’m turning a special birthday this year, and it looks like I won’t even have to throw a party—all my favorite people are here tonight! I’m so happy you all came. Thank you to Laura Penn, Danny Gorman, Peta Coy, Adam Levi, and all the good people at SDC and SDC Foundation. Thank you to the SDC Membership. And THANK YOU to the Fichandler Committee: Casey Stangl, chair; Kimberly Faith Hickman, Aditi Kapil, KJ Sanchez, and Roche Schulfer, who had the kooky idea to give this award to an oddball, freelancing, bicultural teacher and director.

And a HUGE thanks to my comadre, Juliette Carrillo for nominating me. What an honor to join the illustrious list of past recipients, including Michael Halberstam and Charlie Newell from Chicago, and to share this award with Eric Rosen and Aimée Hayes, who change their communities every day.

I want to thank Chay Yew for his kind words of introduction. Chay and I first met at a TCG conference in San Francisco. I was recently out of the gate and mouthing off at a very well-known and powerful artistic director at a session. When we left that session, Chay pulled me aside and said, “You are right, BUT…you need to be a little more subtle about it.” Great advice that I keep trying to take.

Thank you to Steppenwolf Theatre for hosting this evening in your beautiful, hip new space! I also just want to say a word about the dazzling Anna Shapiro, who is SLAYING in her first season as Artistic Director. Anna and I have known one another since we were directing toddlers just out of grad school. She was the education director at the La Jolla Playhouse, and I was running an alternative site-specific theatre company in San Diego. One of the great things about reaching this special age is seeing my friends, like Chay and Anna, take the reins of leadership and shape the national conversation.

Shortly after I met Anna, I had the pleasure of meeting Martha Lavey. She was adjudicating the NEA/TCG Career Development Grant for Directors—and can we all make a commitment to support those grants that nurture and promote emerging directors? There are very few, and they are crucial to the development of the next generation. Anyway, I was a finalist and then a recipient, and that was the first time Martha gave me a leg up. When I moved to Chicago, she was the first call I made. And from that point onwards, Martha shaped me, not so much because she hired me—which she did and for which I’m grateful—but because she answered every email I sent and met with me whenever I asked—literally, whenever I asked— offering invaluable guidance, frank (I mean really frank) feedback, and genuine advocacy. I can honestly say that I—amongst so many here in this room—owe my artistic life in this city to Martha Lavey. Thank you, Martha.

And can I just shout out for a second to Hallie Gordon? The Artistic Director of Steppenwolf

for Young Adults who brought me in to direct that most infamous play, This Is Modern Art? Hallie, you are the bravest, most unrelenting and mission-committed artistic director I know.

You’re a rock star.

Man, this is a theatre full of the nastiest women!

Speaking of nasty women: let’s talk about Zelda Fichandler, a restless woman who, in her twenties, looked at the world around her, decided it was ridiculous that professional theatre was centralized in New York, founded Arena Stage, and pioneered the regional theatre movement, which would create professional theatre for communities across the nation. Not only that, but she was the first to integrate audiences in Washington, D.C. and integrated the Arena acting company in the early 1960s.

Todd London calls her “a genius of inclusion.”

She was a true game changer. One of the things that previous recipients of this award said they valued most was getting to spend an hour with Zelda on the phone or in person. I’m sad I have missed her but deeply honored to carry forth her legacy in every way I can.

I’m going to give some more thanks and then share some thoughts.

First of all, I want to thank my family: my husband, the brilliant Carlos Murillo, and my two amazing children, Eva and Carlitos, whose love, patience, and support give me something to live up to every day. I want to thank my mom (who is here), my dad, and my stepfather and stepmother for giving me the wild-ride upbringing that made me who I am—more on that in a sec.

I want to give thanks to The Theatre School at DePaul University and especially to our dean, John Culbert, who has fervently supported my and so many of my colleagues’ professional careers while equally fervently advocating for the excellence of our students’ training. I don’t know how he does it, but in creating that balance, he has created a culture of artistic excellence all the way around. I want to thank my colleagues on the faculty and staff from whom I have learned so much over the years, and give a special thanks to my students and alumni, who inspire me every time I join them in the classroom or the rehearsal hall or hear about their wild successes.

This is the first time this award has gone to a freelance director, so I want to acknowledge all the freelancers: those of us who, like hermit crabs, carry our missions on our backs, looking for a host. And hats off to all the artistic directors like those here tonight: Martha, Anna, Hallie, Chay, Tim Sanford, Charlie Newell, Michael Halberstam, Eric Rosen, Aimée Hayes, Sean Graney, and Tara Mallen—who make room for passionate directors who forward their beliefs one show at a time.

I want to shout out to the Latina/o/x theatremaking community who, in a moment when Latinos are the fastest-growing demographic in the nation and at the same time [are] more

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under siege than ever, have done what my people do best: grassroots organize—in this case, to build bridges of empathy and understanding through storytelling. I want to shout out to the Alliance of Latinx Theatre Artists (or ALTA) here in Chicago, founded

by Ricardo Gutierez and Tanya Saracho, and spearheaded now by Isaac Gomez, Nancy Garcia-Loza, and a whole crew of dedicated people who build community and awareness and create kickass art every day. And the impact that the national network and think tank The Latina/o Theatre Commons—founded (in 2012) and led by a collective of the most committed, inspiring theatremakers from around the country—has made in its four short years is nothing short of breathtaking.

Recently, I was reading an article in Vanity Fair, the interview between Doris Kearns Goodwin and President Barack Obama. In it, they are talking about President Lincoln, and Lincoln’s quote—“Every man is said to have his peculiar ambition.” And President Obama is saying that when you are young, your ambition is general—it’s essentially to prove yourself—but as you get older, “that’s when your ambitions become ‘peculiar.’”

I started off as an aggressive, ambitious showoff for sure—my dad has given me hell for choosing this career, and being a pathologically driven family, I was for damn sure going to show him! At the time, I was directing primarily work written by women and people of color, often women of color, in fact—because, as a bicultural woman, those were the stories and dramaturgies I was most drawn to: stories that had at their center women and/or people of color and whose structures reflected the nonlinear, almost cubist experience of that particular lens. As I’ve become older, what started as just an organic connection to stories has become my “peculiar” ambition: to help create an American theatre that reflects the fullest possible “We” in “We the People.”

Okay, so that’s noble. Sounds right. Something we should all aspire to, of course, blah-de-blah.

But when the rubber hits the road, it’s much more challenging. I mean, when you think about it: why, exactly? It seems like checking boxes—all this inclusivity. It seems political rather than artistic. It feels artificial.

So let me tell you a story: I am the daughter of a Cuban exile sociologist and a U.S. Army Air Corps brat psychologist (my mom, who was actually born in Highland Park when her dad was stationed at Fort Sheridan). I grew up between the college towns of the Midwest and the major cities of Latin America. Bob Seger and Celia Cruz, my friends. My brother and sister have blond hair and green eyes. There’s this picture of the 50th wedding anniversary of my grandparents on my mom’s side—it’s a sea of blond, and way down in the down left corner, there’s this dark-haired, olive-skinned young woman (me). You can just hear the sweet ladies who discover that picture in an attic somewhere: “Isn’t it nice they invited Juanita the maid?” My siblings and I can’t even

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agree on the pronunciation of our last name: I say “Lisa Portes [POR-TEZ]” or “Portes [PORRRR-TEZ],” depending on who I’m talking to. My brother, who has embraced the legend that we are descended from the French, is “Charles de Portes,” and my sister is “Andrea Portis” (like “tortoise”). My folks divorced and remarried, he to a Mexican intellectual and she to a rock ’n’ roll promoter from Shelby, Nebraska. I married a Colombo-New Yo-Rican, his brother married a Colombian woman, his other brother a woman from Egypt, and his sister married an Irishman. My sister married a stoic Wisconsonian. Together, our children are Samantha, Olivia, Kerabanía, Eva, Carlitos, and…

Wyatt! I grew up in the conflict and confusion, as well as the great love and empathy born of difference, I mean real difference. For me, it’s not a question of inclusion—it’s status quo.

So, okay, I get it. Okay, Lisa, but you can’t just change the American theatre because that’s how you grew up! But here’s the thing: more and more people are growing up like me. You’ve all heard the statistics: by 2050, we will be a majority-of-color population. My students can’t even check the boxes anymore, they’re so mixed in terms of ethnicity, gender, sexuality—you name it. The dramaturgy of our very country is now one of intersectionality— it’s not a side note, not a special project.

Intersectionality and poly-culturalism are the new status quo. If our theatre is to reflect its time and shape its future, we need to forward that reality, not once in a personal or institutional season, but in some way on every project we present.

Because to quote that most-quoted Puerto Rican, “This is not a moment, it’s the movement.” In this election year [and even moreso post-election], we are fighting for the very soul of this country. We are fighting in a very real way over the question: who are we? Who is an American? I understand the criticism of Hamilton, that by black- and brown-washing history it runs the danger of making us comfortable with how this country was actually formed. Okay, fair enough. But to me, the vision of this country that Lin-Manuel Miranda posits—a world in which leadership and decision-making power, the power to shape the nation, is in the hands of many kinds of people—that’s the more important thing.

Because in manifesting that vision onstage in front of our eyes, that production changes our image of what power looks like—what our country looks like. The power of theatre, the power that each of us holds in our hands, is the power to make manifest our vision of Who. We. Are. And, in so doing, like Zelda, change the game. Thank you.

LISA PORTES is a Chicago-based director, educator, and producer dedicated to expanding the circle of Americans reflected on our stages.

She heads the MFA Directing Program at The Theatre School at DePaul University and serves as Artistic Director of Chicago Playworks for Young Audiences. A co-founder of the Latina/o Theatre Commons (LTC), Lisa served as Artistic Producer of the LTC Carnaval 2015, a festival of new Latina/o plays. Her work has

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been seen in Chicago at Steppenwolf Theatre, Goodman Theatre, Victory Gardens Theater, American Blues Theater, Silk Road Rising, Next Theatre, and Teatro Vista; regionally at Cincinnati Playhouse, Guthrie Theater, South Coast Rep, and the Kennedy Center; and in New York at Playwrights Horizons, Soho Rep, New York Theatre Workshop, and the Public Theater. Lisa is an alum of the inaugural SPARK Leadership Program supported by American Express and the Joyce Foundation, and administered by TCG. She is a past recipient of the NEA/TCG Career Development grant for directors, as well as an alum of the Drama League Directing Fellowship program, and a current member of the TCG Board. Recent projects include the world premieres of This Is Modern Art by Idris Goodwin and Kevin Coval (Steppenwolf Theatre) and TRANSit by Darren Canady (American Blues Theater), as well as the Cincinnati premiere of Disgraced by Ayad Akhtar (Cincinnati Playhouse). She lives in Chicago with her husband, playwright Carlos Murillo, and their two children, Eva Rose and Carlos Alejandro.

Since joining Southern Rep Theatre in 2007, AIMÉE HAYES has focused on new play development, producing and directing many writers during her tenure, including Andrew Hinderaker, John Biguenet, Eric Coble, Zayd Dohrn, Catherine Filloux, Jim Fitzmorris, Ross Maxwell, Tarell McCraney, Peter McElligott, Peter Sinn Nachtrieb, Joe Sutton, and Steve Yockey. As Producing Artistic Director of the company, she has also overseen the incorporation of a new slate of new play development programs into Southern Rep’s Lagniappe Series, including its new collaborative model, 4-D, for directors, dramatists, and dramaturgs evolved from the 6×6 and 3×3 playwriting program; Debauchery!, the Orleans’ only live, ongoing soap opera; and The New Play Bacchanal, a biannual two-day new play festival that honors a new play by a female playwright of color with the Ruby Prize. At Southern Rep, Hayes has directed the regional premieres of Airline Highway, Detroit, Venus in Fur (also at Geva), Red, Speech & Debate, Grey Gardens, The Lily’s Revenge (as co-director), as well as numerous Tennessee Williams full-length and one-act plays. Hayes has served as the Chair of the Governance Committee and at-large Board Member for the Theatre Communications Group (TCG).

“What has happened in the last 10 years is beyond a gift. I have been given an opportunity to make my life’s work in the most unique culture in America. From producing Universes’ Ameriville to Taylor Mac’s The Lily’s Revenge to this fall’s epic Airline Highway by Lisa D’Amour, I am committed to working with diverse voices, educating and professionalizing the field in New Orleans proper, and finding local playwrights who can speak to our world here. All of these signposts are relevant for an artistic director’s journey, but what of my directing craft? How have I emerged or changed as a theatremaker?”

ERIC ROSEN is a director and playwright, and has been the Artistic Director of Kansas City Repertory Theatre since 2008. He was formerly the co-founder and Artistic Director of Chicago’s About Face Theatre.

World premieres under his direction include Venice (KC Rep, CTG, Public Theater), Clay (AFT/Lookingglass, CTG, LCT3), Roof of the World (KC Rep), A Christmas Story: The Musical (KC Rep, 5th Ave), M. Proust, and Theater District (Steppenwolf/About Face).

Other directing credits: Goodman, Hartford Stage, CenterStage, St. Louis Rep, Cincinnati Playhouse, Chicago Shakespeare, Melbourne Theatre Company (AUS), Prince Music Theatre, the O’Neill, and Sundance. His plays and musicals include Lot’s Wife, Venice (with Matt Sax), Dream Boy, and Winesburg, Ohio (with Andre Pluess and Ben Sussman). His work has been acknowledged with numerous Joseph Jefferson awards and nominations, and he was inducted into Chicago’s LGBT Hall of Fame. He serves on the Board of Directors of TCG and holds a doctorate in performance studies from Northwestern University.

“I am guided by the vision of leaders like Zelda Fichandler, whose directive to create world-class theatre in communities away from New York has guided my career.

Taking on the challenge of reinvigorating a 44-year-old LORT theater gave me a whole new sense of purpose: to build the Rep into both a major national platform for the most diverse and exciting writers and directors, and at the same time catalyze a renaissance that has transformed Kansas City theatre into a significant hotbed of creative activity for artists across the Midwest.”

PAST WINNERS Jonathan Moscone of California Shakespeare Theater in Orinda, California (2009) Michael Halberstam of Writers Theatre in Glencoe, Illinois (2010) Blanka Zizka of The Wilma Theater in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania (2011) Bill Rauch of Oregon Shakespeare Festival in Ashland, Oregon (2012) Charles Newell of Court Theatre in Chicago, Illinois (2013) Joseph Haj of PlayMakers Repertory Company in Chapel Hill, NC (2014) Tim Dang of East West Players in Los Angeles, CA (2015) Lisa Portes in Chicago, IL (2016) PAST FINALISTS Tracy Brigden, Peter Brosius, Juliette Carrillo, Jeff Church, Chris Coleman, Steven Cosson, Richard Garner, Loretta Greco, Aimée Hayes, Rebecca Holderness, Jane Jones, Kwame Kwei-Armah, Preston Lane, D. Lynn Meyers, Bonnie J. Monte, Ruth Pe Palileo, Dámaso Rodriguez, Eric Rosen, Kimberly Senior, Howard Shalwitz

MAIN Arena Stage co-founder Zelda Fichandler in front of the company’s first theater venue The Hippodrome, the week before the theatre’s opening on August 16, 1950 PHOTO c/o Arena Stage

Current Arena Stage Artistic Director Molly Smith + former Artistic Director Doug Wager at the memorial service for Zelda Fichandler at Arena Stage at the Mead Center for American Theater on October 24, 2016 PHOTO Cameron Whitman RIGHT

Executive Director Laura Penn speaks at the memorial service for Zelda Fichandler at Arena Stage at the Mead Center for American Theater PHOTO Cameron Whitman

RIGHT BOTTOM

PAST FICHANDLER WINNERS + FINALISTS#REMEMBERINGZELDA “When I was in college and just beginning to understand that there was this job called ‘artistic director’ and there was a type of theatre called ‘regional,’ I learned about this amazing woman at Arena Stage and I said, ‘That’s what I want to be.’ Groundbreakers like Zelda are responsible not only for paving the road for other women in the theatre like me, but women in general. We would not have a woman as a presidential nominee right now if it wasn’t for Zelda Fichandler and the other powerful women of her generation.”

TRACY BRIGDEN, City Theatre Company,

Zelda Fichandler Award Finalist

“To be honored as a finalist for the Fichandler Award was an unexpected and extraordinary event in my life and career. The moment I had to stand on the stage of the Arena next to Zelda Fichandler was overwhelming. It is chiseled in my heart as a deep and abiding memory.

To stand near this pioneer who created a new world of theatre, theatre that resonated around this country in the beginning and today, was inspirational and deeply humbling. For me to have a career is only possible because she blazed the trail, led the way, and never stopped pushing the boundaries. I will serve her memory with my work for the rest of my life.”

D. LYNN MEYERS, Ensemble Theatre, Zelda Fichandler Award Finalist

“I cannot overstate the influence that Zelda Fichandler had upon my life. I had my first theatre-going experiences at Arena Stage in Washington, D.C., while growing up there.

Zelda introduced me to my artistic mentor, Garland Wright. With The Acting Company, she produced my professional directing debut.

And, most important, she shared precious hours with me on the phone upon my receiving the SDC Fichandler Award in 2013, regaling me with what I must do NOW! “A quote from my acceptance speech: ‘Zelda’s example taught me primary lessons of inclusion, of community, of the need for stories that must be told.’

“And I love this quote from Zelda, found in Todd London’s glorious An Ideal Theater: ‘What is on our stages is who we are, and the way we look at ourselves, each other, and at our world. The psychic engine (it is a biological law and not a metaphor) requires inputs, returns, in order to generate new impulses. The artist requires that he hear his own voice, at best a highly intricate process because to hear it, he must often turn away inside and pretend he’s not listening so that the voice makes itself heard and does not sound because it is being poked at.

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Next to impossible within the cacophony of these institutions of ours. So the directors, the conductors of the collective creativity, supposedly the fount for the energy and spirits of the Thing, getting and spending lay waste their powers. Dust fills their brains and mouths and when it does not, it is because they use up half their gut to keep it from pouring in.’”

CHARLES NEWELL, Court Theatre, Zelda Fichandler Award Winner

“The first LORT show that I directed was at Arena Stage in 1993, shortly after Zelda had stepped down as Artistic Director. It was an adaptation of Dickens called A Community Carol, featuring members of Arena’s and Cornerstone’s acting companies and an equivalent number of first-time actors from the D.C. communities east of the Anacostia River.

Zelda saw an early preview of what was still quite a messy endeavor staged in the theatre that bears her name, in the round, and I still remember her words of encouragement that she wrote me and that we posted for the cast and crew. There had been a technical snafu involving a giant wall of boxes, and she said, ‘You’ll eventually work out the physical boxes, but rest assured that the spiritual boxes are all in order.’ And she was right. She was president of the TCG Board when I first joined it, and she opened each meeting by talking about what was happening in the world and how it connected to our field. I found it exhilarating and have always tried to model that sense of connection in my own leadership. When I was lucky enough to win the award that bears her name, I had a long phone call with Zelda. It was one of the most inspiring conversations I’ve ever had with a fellow artist and arts leader.

Her clarity was stunning, about what it meant to be nonprofit and a resource to one’s own community and to devote one’s life to art. There is no doubt about it: we all stand on Zelda’s shoulders.”

BILL RAUCH, Oregon Shakespeare Festival, Zelda Fichandler Award Winner

“My years in Washington, D.C., were formative for me, and a huge influence was going to Arena Stage. I specifically think of Zelda Fichandler’s invitation to Liviu Ciulei for Arena to host his take on Midsummer Night’s Dream.

Ciulei’s idea revealed the stakes of love are psychologically savage. The magic in the play causes the lovers to employ near sadism. Ciulei lit a fuse unlike anything I’ve ever experienced among the students seeing a Shakespeare field-trip matinee while I was an instructor at Ellington School of the Arts. We all had a singular, unforgettable experience in Zelda’s theatre that day. The tactics got so rough that it created total bedlam in the audience. I’m sure Zelda loved our teens making a link from Shakespeare to sex and mating.

“Let me add that Fichandler’s programming that same season included the new form of theatre Bill Cain created with Stand Up Tragedy, and just a season later, Pintilie’s The Wild Duck, productions that influenced how I directed from that point forward. Pintilie treated the

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Krieger Theatre as a found space, stripping it to concrete, and had the audience enter by flashlight from a side door, as voyeurs, to look at the fragile fantasy life of the Ekdals.”

JEFF CHURCH, Coterie Theatre, Zelda Fichandler Award Finalist

“I met Zelda once and, like the American theatre, was never the same again. They say legacy is something you work at but never see. I think Zelda proves that incorrect.”

KWAME KWEI-ARMAH, Center Stage, Zelda Fichandler Award Finalist

“In an address to students at Tisch, Zelda Fichandler said, ‘Adopt an attitude of curiosity that will lead you into the work rather than away from it.’ What a gift! This idea drives me to seek new collaborators in different theatres in unfamiliar cities. It is an idea that buoys me when receiving feedback from collaborators, critics, and audiences—our curiosity gives us boundless possibilities and an expansiveness of heart. Zelda Fichandler lives on in her inspiration.”

KIMBERLY SENIOR, Zelda Fichandler Award

Finalist

“As a recent recipient of the Fichandler Award from the Society of Directors and Choreographers, I am saddened by the loss of the woman whose leadership initiated America’s regional theatre movement. We are all grateful for her vision that tens of thousands have been a part of for decades and [in which] many have invested their lives.

“This is a quote from Zelda Fichandler: ‘Theatre must be of its times, of its audiences and their concerns, as well as, of course, of pressing interest to its artists.’

“We stand on her shoulders, as master storytellers and visionaries, and we channel our inner Zelda to advance her vision for the next generation of theatre practitioners and audiences. There is a sea change happening right now in America. I know Zelda would say, ‘Let us not just see change. Let us lead the change.’”

TIM DANG, Artistic Director Emeritus, East West Players, Zelda Fichandler Award Winner “I remember Zelda the night Blanka Zizka was honored as the third recipient of SDC’s Zelda Fichandler Award. I was tasked with introducing Zelda to the audience, which was no mean feat, having never met her up until then. I spoke about some of her many achievements, most notably that our regional theatre movement in America was birthed by her, along with such pioneers as Nina Vance and Margo Jones. I am still struck by the fact that these incredible women made so much possible for so many of us. I couldn’t thank her enough then, nor could I thank her enough now.

“At the end of the evening’s ceremony, Zelda sought me out, grabbed my hand, and pulled me down to her. ‘I want to get to know you better, young man.’ Well, I didn’t get to know her better, and I am sorry for that. But she paid

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me the greatest compliment for saying what she said. And not just because she called me ‘young man.’ She’s a superstar, in my book, more so than most movie stars. So I consider myself really lucky to have had that moment with her. I’ll never forget it, nor will I ever forget her.”

JON MOSCONE, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, Zelda Fichandler Award Winner

“When I came to this country at the end of the ’70s, Zelda Fichandler had already built the Arena Stage into a large regional theatre. For this young refugee, with an idealistic idea of the possibilities of pure, unadorned theatre, influenced by Grotowski’s ‘poor theatre’ theory, her Arena Stage seemed to represent mainstream and establishment; something quite foreign and distant. But, of course, at the time I didn’t know anything about Zelda or the Arena. I merely held my firm youthful opinions based on very superficial impressions. And then, later, in the early ’80s, I started to visit and was astounded that it was here at the Arena Stage— through Zelda’s programming—that I was invited to reconnect with my Eastern European aesthetic and experience productions of Yuri Lyubimov, Lucian Pintilie, and Liviu Ciulei. “‘The fabric of the thought that propelled us was that theatre should stop serving the function of making money, for which it has never been and never will be suited, and start serving the revelation and shaping of the process of living, for which it is uniquely suited, for which it, indeed, exists,’ Zelda insisted in her speech during the 2011 Zelda Fichandler Award ceremony. By then, I, too, had achieved my maturity and been reevaluating where I was in my work and for what the Wilma truly stood for. Similarly to Zelda’s notion, I was reaffirming for myself that the only way to go forward is to create supportive conditions at the Wilma, under which the art can blossom. ‘The new thought was that theatre should be restored to itself as a form of art. Perhaps we should simply call ourselves art theatres,’ Zelda continued in her speech. She was right, but we have to do more than calling ourselves art theatres. We have to insist on art being the focus and reason for our existence, and we have to make it happen, as Zelda did during her lifetime, which is the more difficult part. But what kind of art? In the former Czechoslovakia, my native country, playwright Jan Topol, who was forbidden from working in theatres for over 20 years, wrote: ‘I don’t want anything else than to freely testify about human existence, how I recognize it in myself, and in others, and I comfort myself that there’s a purpose to it, and hopefully not only for me.… The lovers of art and lovers of the truth exist, and why not to count them as our audience? People say “bring beauty,” but—it was Socrates who had already insisted—only the truth is beautiful. However, not everybody loves that kind of beauty.’ To face the truth and to search for the truth, which seems to be escaping me just when I think I have reached it, is not easy, and it is an ongoing, never-ending effort, which, as Mr. Topol says, not everyone appreciates. But Zelda did. Zelda loved the beauty of the truth in art. And her legacy will be with all of us and will continue to insist on creating art that contains the beauty of the truth.”

BLANKA ZIZKA, Zelda Fichandler Award Winner

THE SOCIETY PAGES SDC MEMBERS @ WORK + PLAY

Asian American Directors Panel @ CAATA

Roberta Uno

October 1 – 9, Consortium of Asian American Theatres + Artists (CAATA) produced the National Asian American Theatre Conference and Festival in Ashland, OR. The week-long ConFest hosted on the Oregon Shakespeare Festival campus featured a keynote address by Roberta Uno; an Asian American Directors Panel with Jeff Liu, Evren Odcikin, Desdemona Chiang, SDC Board Member Eric Ting, Meena Natarajan, moderator Andy Lowe + Snehal Desai; and a number of performances and presentations directed and choreographed by SDC Members.

The Broadway legacy of George Abbott was celebrated the evening of October 14 at the St. Regis Hotel by University of Rochester alumni and friends. Mr. Abbott, a 1911 graduate of the University, was remembered through a program of stories, anecdotes and songs featuring his widow Joy Abbott, Professor of Musicology and American Musical Theatre authority Kim Kowalke, and veteran Broadway music director Robert Billig. Pictured above is a scene from the event as well as a post-program celebratory shot with Joy, Professor Kowalke and Robert Billig with special guest William Ivey Long. During the program, plans were announced for a new theatre on the Rochester campus. PHOTOS Tom Starkweather

On October 29, SDC Board Members Anne Kauffman + Chay Yew, Executive Director Laura Penn, former Associate Director of Member Services Jennifer Toth, SDC Journal PeerReviewed Section Co-Editor Ann M. Shanahan + Chicagoarea colleagues working in academia gathered for an intimate evening at the home of Robert Falls.

Audrey Francis, Patricia Skarbinski + Kendra Holton

SDC Board Member Chay Yew, Robert Falls, SDC Executive Director Laura Penn + SDC Board Member Anne Kauffman WINTER/SPRING 2017 | SDC JOURNAL

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November 14 was a night to remember, with SDC Members celebrated at events across NYC. It began with the Annual Membership Meeting, held at The Lark Theater, with over 60 Members + Associates in attendance. Susan H. Schulman gave her final State of the Union as President, and presented John Everson with the SDC President’s Award for his extraordinary service to SDC and its Members over the past 32 years. Julie Arenal and Paul Lazarus were recognized for their years of Board Service, and Treasurer Michael Wilson made a special report. After announcing the 2016 Executive Board Election Results, then-President Schulman was surprised by a musical tribute filmed by SDC Board + At-Large Members thanking her for her extraordinary dedication and service over the past three years, and SDC Board Regional Rep Robert Moss made some remarks to commemorate the occasion.

Later that night, at the 16th Annual Gala performance of The 24 Hour Plays on Broadway, SDC Vice President Leigh Silverman was honored with the Artistic Inspiration Award. In her acceptance speech, Silverman stated, “…To all the young theatre artists here: use your voice. Please use your voice. Refuse to be silenced. Make the work. Turn your rage into action. Find your inspiration. Find your resistance and resilience. Hold it close. Get loud.”

John Everson + Susan H. Schulman

Leigh Silverman PHOTO Howard Sherman

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That same evening, Susan H. Schulman + Michael Wilson attended the Theatre Hall of Fame Awards to witness the induction of Phylicia Rashad.

The 24 Hour Plays Artistic Director Mark Armstrong PHOTO Katie Simmons-Barth

Phylicia Rashad shares her Theatre Hall of Fame Medal PHOTO Aubrey Reuben

Marella Martin Koch PHOTO

On November 15, a Circle Rep Plaque was unveiled in a public ceremony at 99 Seventh Avenue South in Sheridan Square, the theatre’s home for 20 years. Judd Hirsch emceed the ceremony, which included remarks by Craig Lucas, Danny Irvine, Peter Schneider, and Denise Yaney. SDC Executive Director Laura Penn announced the establishment of a joint bequest by former SDC President and 2016 recipient of the Tony Award for Lifetime Achievement Marshall W. Mason. Proclamations were read noting that “November 15, 2016” would henceforth be known as “Circle Repertory Company Day.” At the conclusion of the ceremony, Judith Ivey and Cherry Jones unveiled the plaque together.

December 5 saw the second Bicoastal Board Meeting, followed by a Los Angeles Membership Meeting.

Members tuned in online and in-person to enjoy an interview with new SDC President Pam MacKinnon and Craig Lucas.

Craig Lucas, SDC Secretary Oz Scott, SDC President Pam MacKinnon, Nora DeVeau-Rosen + East West Players Artistic Director Snehal Desai

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The original cast of Merrilly We Rolly Along at the premiere of Lonny Price’s The Best Worst Thing That Ever Could Have Happened PHOTO David Gordon

Kenny Leon + Bernard Telsey at NBC’s Hairspray LIVE!

Lonny Price’s film The Best Worst Thing That Ever Could Have Happened, about the making of Hal Prince, Stephen Sondheim + George Furth’s Merrilly We Roll Along and the impact the show had on the lives of its young performers, was released to critical acclaim on November 18.

On December 7, NBC aired Hairspray LIVE! directed by Kenny Leon and choreographed by Jerry Mitchell.

On December 9, SDC Members, staff, and industry colleagues came together for the SDC Holiday Open House + John Everson Retirement Celebration.

Leslie Hoban Blake, Bill Castellino + Marcia Milgrom Dodge

John Everson

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Melissa Maxwell + Seret Scott

Members + SDC staff toasting John Everson's retirement

“

c/o Bettman and Getty Images

I felt that the artist should become part of society—a needed member of society— rather than just an ornament. ”

Composer, librettist, and director GIAN CARLO MENOTTI was born in 1911 in Italy. He wrote his first opera at eleven years old and trained at the Verdi Conservatory in Milan and the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia.

At Curtis, he met composer Samuel Barber, who would become his life partner. They collaborated on several operas with music by Barber and libretto by Menotti, including Vanessa, which won the Pulitzer Prize, and A Hand of Bridge.

Over the course of his prolific career, he wrote music and/or libretti for many operas, ballets, choral works, and other orchestral pieces. His full-length opera The Consul, set in an unidentified totalitarian state in Europe, won the New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award for Musical Play of the Year and the Pulitzer Prize. He won his second Pulitzer Prize for The Saint of Bleecker Street, set in New York City’s Little Italy. He also wrote the first opera for television, Amahl and the Night Visitors, for NBC. His play The Leper urged tolerance for homosexuality.

Known for directing his own work, he staged acclaimed Broadway productions of his operas, including The Telephone, The Medium, The Consul, The Saint of Bleecker Street, and Maria Golovin.

He was awarded a Kennedy Center Honor in 1984, and named “Musician of the Year” in 1991 by Musical America.

Driven to deepen the relationship between a society and its artists, he founded the Festival of Two Worlds in Spoleto, Italy, in 1958, which he guided until his death in 2007.

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