SDC Journal Spring 2014

JOURNAL SPRING 2014 | SPECIAL ISSUE

BASED ON TRUST

LINDA HARTZELL + Y YORK

IT STARTS WITH THE TEXT

GRACIELA DANIELE, LYNN AHRENS + STEPHEN FLAHERTY

THE CHICAGO AESTHETIC DIRECTORS +

PLAYWRIGHTS IN THE WINDY CITY IN RESIDENCE

DANIEL EZRALOW

SPECIAL ISSUE

IN COLLABORATION WITH THE DRAMATISTS GUILD

BACKSTAGE

DANCE CAPTAINS + MORE

SPRING 2014 | SDC JOURNAL

SDC EXECUTIVE BOARD

Susan H. Schulman PRESIDENT

John Rando EXECUTIVE VICE PRESIDENT

Leigh Silverman VICE PRESIDENT

Oz Scott SECRETARY

Ethan McSweeny TREASURER

HONORARY ADVISORY COMMITTEE

Karen Azenberg Pamela Berlin Melvin Bernhardt Julianne Boyd Danny Daniels Marshall W. Mason Ted Pappas Gene Saks COUNSEL

Ronald H. Shechtman EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR

Laura Penn

MEMBERS OF BOARD

Julie Arenal Rob Ashford Christopher Ashley Anne Bogart Mark Brokaw Joe Calarco Larry Carpenter Marcia Milgrom Dodge Sheldon Epps Michael John GarcĂŠs Christopher Gattelli Liza Gennaro Wendy C. Goldberg Linda Hartzell Dan Knechtges Mark Lamos Paul Lazarus Rick Lombardo Pam MacKinnon Meredith McDonough Tom Moore Robert Moss Sharon Ott Lisa Peterson Lonny Price Seret Scott Bartlett Sher Michael Wilson Chay Yew Evan Yionoulis

SDC JOURNAL

Published by SDC | Spring 2014 | Volume 2 | No. 4 FEATURES EDITOR

Shelley Butler

ART DIRECTOR/DESIGNER

Elizabeth Nelson

CONTRIBUTORS

Curt Columbus DIRECTOR

Alyssa Dvorak PUBLICATIONS INTERN

Liz Engelman DRAMATURG

David Esbjornson DIRECTOR

Larissa Fasthorse WRITER

Adam Lebi BUSINESS REPRESENTATIVE

Bob Moss DIRECTOR

Seret Scott DIRECTOR

Elizabeth Zimmer WRITER

SDC JOURNAL is published quarterly by Stage Directors and Choreographers Society located at 1501 Broadway, STE 1701, NYC 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, 1501 Broadway, STE 1701, NY, NY 10036.

PRINTED BY Sterling Printing SDC JOURNAL

| SPRING 2014

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THE CHICAGO AESTHETIC

SPRING

CONTENTS

FEATURES

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SPRING 2014

IN RESIDENCE

Soviet Russia, This Is Your Life!

DANIEL EZRALOW SETS A CENTURY IN MOTION DANIEL EZRALOW choreographs the 2014 Winter Olympics opening ceremonies.

BY ELIZABETH

ZIMMER

14 SDCF Takes a Look at Diversity in Southern California

BY

LARISSA FASTHORSE

A panel discussion on diversity + the role of artistic leaders.

+

16 Laura Penn on Diversity + the Role of SDC/SDCF

Volume 2 | No. 4

18 It Starts with the Text

GRACIELA

EDITED BY THE

23

COVER

SDC/DG

DRAMATIST

ased on Trust B IN CONVERSATION WITH LINDA HARTZELL + Y YORK INTERVIEW BY LIZ

ENGELMAN

28

The Chicago Aesthetic THE MYTHS AND REALITIES OF CREATING THEATRE IN THE WINDY CITY

SPECIAL ISSUE

Look for the red circle marking articles shared with the Dramatists Guild of America, Inc. Purchase The Dramatist by emailing publications@dramatistsguild.com

DANIELE IN CONVERSATION W/LONGTIME COLLABORATORS LYNN AHRENS + STEPHEN FLAHERTY

A discussion on creating theatre in Chicago with directors AMY MORTON, RON OJ PARSON + HENRY WISHCAMPER with playwrights REBECCA GILMAN, ZAYD DOHRN + KEITH HUFF.

INTERVIEW BY CURT

COLUMBUS | EDITED BY SDC JOURNAL SPRING 2014 | SDC JOURNAL

3

A LOOK AT DIVERSITY IN SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA

FEATURES Continued

34 Directors on Writers

Directors RACHEL CHAVKIN, ROBERT O’HARA, JOANIE SCHULTZ + DAMASO RODRIGUEZ answer the question: Which play, that you have not directed, do you admire and why?

EDITED BY SDC

JOURNAL

36 Writers on Directors

Playwrights LYDIA DIAMOND, ADAM GWON, CRAIG LUCAS + LAUREN YEE answer the question: Which production, by a director that you have not worked with, do you admire and why?

EDITED BY THE

DRAMATIST

38 It’s All in the Details

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ALES BY T DIRECTOR/DESIGNER TONY WALTON INTERVIEW BY DAVID

SDC JOURNAL

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ESBJORNSON

5

FROM THE PRESIDENT

BY SUSAN

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FROM THE EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR

H. SCHULMAN

BY LAURA

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IN YOUR WORDS

PENN

Two Questions for Director

Terry Berliner

CURATED BY SERET SCOTT

44 SDC FOUNDATION/ FROM THE ARCHIVES

Masters of the Stage: In Their Own Words

SDC Foundation embarks on a new

partnership with Theatre Development Fund, co-hosting the popular Masters of the Stage podcast series

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THE SOCIETY PAGES

ob Ashford directing The Sound of R Music LIVE!, 2014 Inductees to the Theatre Hall of Fame, new Drama League fellowship for women named in honor of Beatrice Terry + Spotlight on Broadway

8 How do you define the role of a

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director or choreographer?

Our Members Respond

Why I Cast That Actor BOB MOSS on casting Dana Slamp in Sylvia

COVER

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BACKSTAGE

Dionne Figgins + Jamal Story, Dance Captains

Linda Hartzell PHOTO Young Lee PREVIOUS TOP

Chicago directors + playwrights in the lobby of the Goodman Theatre PHOTO John Reilly Photography TOP OF PAGE

Moderator Michael John Garcés with diversity panelists Tim Dang, Seema Sueko + Christopher Ashley at the Pasadena Playhouse PHOTO Clarence Alford TOP OF LEFT COLUMN

David Esbjornson + Tony Walton in SDC’s Founders’ Lounge in NYC

“One of the collaborative relationships that most excites me is the dialogue between SDC and the Dramatists Guild... playwrights are unique, and the work we do with them is unlike anything else required by our craft.”

CELEBRATING COLLABORATION Collaboration, which can mean many things to many people, is the act of working with others to create something. It is the process by which we come together and share ideas and partner our individual strengths in order to reach new and greater achievements, solve problems, and enjoy kinship. Most artists thrive on collaboration—balanced, of course, with the right amount of autonomy.

Though I’ve served on the Board for 24 years, I am enjoying the fresh perspective of my new presidential post, and I am looking forward to fostering the collaborative relationships SDC has built with our peers and colleagues in the industry, our fellow unions and guilds, and the partners with which we bargain. I’m excited by the prospect of interacting with them, working to serve our individual memberships and goals, and contributing together to the health of our communities.

One of the collaborative relationships that most excites me is the dialogue between SDC and the Dramatists Guild of America, the professional association of playwrights, composers, lyricists, and librettists. Directors— and choreographers, too—collaborate with all manner of theatre artists during a production, from designers and producers to the house manager and the backstage crew. We are leaders of vast teams, be they small and scrappy or massively organized. But playwrights are unique, and the work we do with them is unlike anything else required by our craft.

I have been fortunate to experience many positive collaborations with writers and composers on new work as well as revivals.

However, I hold my time with Stephen Sondheim, on the first New York revival of Sweeney Todd, most precious. It was my first Broadway production, and I was so fortunate to have Steve available. He had been in the

UK for the production’s first incarnation at the York Theatre. What I learned from him about collaboration was so simple but very profound: it comes down to one word— generosity. Ideas are gifts, and you need to be as generous accepting a gift as giving one. I cherish the gifts he gave me and my cast and creative team. I don’t think any of us will ever forget his generous collaboration.

You will notice something special about this issue. In the centerfold is an insert containing a statement that SDC and the DG worked arduously to construct. It may seem brief, but its existence is a powerful indication of the unique work our craft demands of a director’s and playwright’s collaboration. It is a thrilling opportunity to share this piece of work with our readers, and we look forward to continuing the dialogue.

Spring is the quintessential time of rebirth. If you made a resolution for 2014, I hope you are experiencing success as you work toward accomplishing your goals. My goal this year is to revel in a deeper appreciation of our collaborative craft, to look for new ways to appreciate and understand my colleagues, from rehearsal to the board room. I encourage you to do so as well. Time and money are important resources and must be guarded, adhered to, and dealt with—but maybe there is an extra hour, a few minutes that can be devoted to the process, to imagining some new or different way of working together.

Because in the end, we really do all want the same thing, don’t we? To tell a story and to tell it in a compelling way so people will listen—so people will come out the other side a little bit different from when they went in.

In solidarity,

Susan H. Schulman Executive Board President

FROM THE PRESIDENT SUSAN H. SCHULMAN has been a Member since 1981

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FROM THE EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR Moss Hart was one of the founders of SDC. As someone who overcame a childhood of abject poverty to become one of our great directors and dramatists, he would say in many ways it was the “boldness to dream” that propelled him to the heights of Broadway.

In addition to boldness, making theatre requires agility, flexibility, and adaptability on the part of collaborators. And a good sense of humor never hurt. We have a structure—a rehearsal process, tech, sitzprobe, previews, and opening.

We have marks we set out to hit—by this day we will be done with that, by that day we will be done with this, and then someone says, “What about if…?”—one of Graciela Daniele’s favorite phrases.

Curiosity, it seems, is one of the critical characteristics you can find in many directors and choreographers. A kind of skilled inquiry. What about if…SDC and the DG strengthened their relationship with a goal of advancing the crafts and lives of their collective memberships? That could be powerful.

You have just started reading the final issue of Volume 2 of SDC Journal. And our first special issue. I was looking back on my letter in the inaugural issue in July of 2012 where I articulated some of SDC’s goals for the early years of the 21st century. Most specifically I revisited the goal “to help deepen the understanding within our own constituents, as well as the larger community, about the work that directors and choreographers do.” Your feedback and enthusiasm for this magazine is encouraging. The list of ideas to explore, artists to interview, and events to cover seems to grow exponentially with each issue. In the coming year, we have plans to grow our distribution beyond our own Membership with particular attention to the critical world of higher education. Just a dream a few short years ago, we can now imagine SDC Journal will be around for a very, very long time.

How appropriate that our first special issue should be published in collaboration with the Dramatists Guild of America, the playwrights, composers, and lyricists who are most often the primary collaborators of directors and choreographers. In this issue you will find articles and interviews co-produced by SDC and the DG, in addition to the section in the center of the magazine that Susan references in her letter. Some articles will appear in both SDC Journal and The Dramatist. Some appear in only one magazine but share the theme of collaboration and relationship. For example, you will read in SDC Journal about Linda Harztell’s longtime collaboration with playwright Y York. After that, if you would like to read about a totally different collaboration— that of playwright Tanya Barfield and director Leigh Silverman—you will need to get yourself a copy of The Dramatist. Another passionate conversation that can only be read in The Dramatist features a number of prominent artists who are esteemed Members of both SDC and the DG. Last month, Doug Wright facilitated a conversation with Emily Mann, James Lapine, and George C. Wolfe on their lives as writers/ directors. In the spirit of shameless promotion of our colleague’s publication, I encourage each of you to get your own copy of the May/June The Dramatist by emailing: publications@dramatistsguild.com This new collaboration with the DG is a great story, yet not a simple tale. Relationships between two people are hard enough. Here we have two organizations comprised of thousands of talented, ambitious individuals. It is an important relationship for us all, individually and

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SDC JOURNAL

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collectively—one with many chapters having already been written and well read, but now we look forward with great hopes for the future. I do not seem to have the right spatial acumen to guess at the number of jelly beans in a jar, so I would not dare to guess how many points of view, deeply connected lifelong partnerships, or difficult but productive collaborations, or difficult and unproductive relations exist in pairings between these exceptional artists. I will be so bold as to say that I know that the most dynamic, provocative, and fruitful work comes to life in the place where trust, respect, and rigor reside. Often, for our Members, that work with playwrights begins with a finished script or a draft, and at other times with simply an idea. But no matter where a director or choreographer engages, each artist sets out to bring his or her best to the collaboration.

SDC’s Executive Board and the DG Council can only be referred to as an impressive group. These artists find the time and energy to commit to their communities making investments, many of which will only come to fruition for future generations. The joint work most recently led by former SDC Board President Karen Azenberg and DG President Stephen Schwartz is just such work. It has the potential to make a real difference. I want to thank my colleague at the DG, Ralph Sevush, Executive Director for Business Affairs. His candor is always deeply appreciated. He is a fierce and dedicated friend to writers. I also want to thank Gary Garrison, Executive Director for Creative Affairs. Gary is himself a passionate advocate for his Members, bringing vision and ambition to the DG and its members around the country. Gary, Ralph, thank you, to you and your editor, for managing the coordination of these two issues. I know all too well this was no easy feat.

Speaking of no easy feat, as we go to press, SDC prepares for our first meeting with our newly formed Diversity Task Force—quite a lot of potential for “What about ifs?” SDC as a labor organization and a “society” believes strongly that we must represent the critical issues of our Membership. Our relationship with the DG is one such issue, diversity is another. With Seret Scott and Michael John Garcés’ leadership, we will look to explore how to create a shared vision among and between this very disparate group of individual artists who are by their very nature distinct and unique. We want to understand how we can use our stature to create broader, deeper access to jobs and positions of influence for all of our Members with particular attention to underrepresented communities such as artists of color and women. This issue contains excerpts from December’s SDCF Diversity Forum in Los Angeles, which just scratched the surface of a conversation we will likely be engaged in well into the future.

Our world has changed a great deal from Hart’s time, and still his work and his life serve as an inspiration to many. With the depth of diversity and the complexity of our national theatre today, can we find a way for bold dreams to unlock the gates for everyone, regardless of who they are or where they come from?

Laura Penn Executive Director

KAREN AZENBERG since 1989 | GRACIELA DANIELE since 1976 | MICHAEL JOHN GARCÉS since 2001 MOSS HART d.1960 | LINDA HARTZELL since 2000 | JAMES LAPINE since 1988 | EMILY MANN since 1980 SERET SCOTT since 1989 | LEIGH SILVERMAN since 2001 | GEORGE C. WOLFE since 1984 | DOUG WRIGHT since 2001

IN YOUR WORDS Two Questions We Asked Our Members...

Why I Cast That Actor Backstage

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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.

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

FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS WHY ARE SOME NAMES BOLDED? SDC Journal bolds the names of current Full and Associate Members in good standing.

The first appearance of a Member’s name is bolded within each article.

At the bottom of the page is the year that Member joined SDC.

WHAT’S UP WITH THE NAMES ON THE BACK COVER? SDC Journal runs an alphabetical list of Full Members on the back cover.

The list always picks up where it left off in the prior issue.

TWO QUESTIONS

for TERRY BERLINER

CURATED BY SERET SCOTT CURATED BY SERET SCOTT

When did you know you were a director? What did the moment look like? Feel like?

During my sophomore year in college, I started making dances; they were storytelling sort of dances where people spoke and moved. I was a dance major when I started and became an English and Creative Writing major in my sophomore year. I used whatever “language” best suited the story. I had been performing in various faculty and student dance pieces as well.

I suddenly realized that I absolutely hated being told what to do. So, I practiced how to tell other people what to do. That suited me much better.

If a mentor of yours were to see your work, where would they find themselves?

Susan H. Schulman has seen my work, and as one of my most significant mentors, she might recognize her influences in how I tell a story on the stage; how I love to do new work; perhaps how I compose a scene; how I move from dialogue to song (hopefully, gracefully); and how I pursue the theatrical event. It’s about realistic emotions but not about kitchen sink realism in the physical production. I do my homework. And I do believe I have avoided ever using a door in a musical…all thanks to her. Love you, Susan! Thank you for the gifts.

Terry Berliner specializes in developing and directing new plays and musicals. Recently she directed/choreographed Alone in the U.S. (a new musical she wrote with lyricist/composer Bobby Cronin), Next Thing You Know (2013 Jonathan Larson Award-winning new musical), Cloaked (2011 Kleban Prize and Jonathan Larson Award-winning new musical), the new musicals Roam the Ruins, It Goes Like It Goes (tribute to David Shire), and Hereafter, The Tempest, Honour, The End of Days, The Last Romance.

Broadway credits include The Lion King, The Tale of the Allergist’s Wife, The Sound of Music, The Red Shoes. Ms. Berliner has lectured at/directed for CAP21, Stephens College, SUNY - Buffalo, NYU Tisch, North Carolina School of the Arts, Pace, University of Colorado, and UMass, Dartmouth.

She has written for American Theatre magazine, Theatre Bay Area, and Theatre History Studies, and she is an Artistic Director for LeAp Onstage, a member of the Lucille Lortel voting committee, and SDC.

TERRY BERLINER since 1996 | SUSAN H. SCHULMAN since 1981 | SERET SCOTT since 1989

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WE ASKED OUR MEMBERS AROUND THE COUNTRY

How do you define the role of a director or choreographer?

I define my role as director/choreographer as an interpreter.

STACY ALLEY Assc. since 2012 | Tuscaloosa, AL

My role as a director/choreographer is to provide a safe environment for the actor to get out of his/her own way and to create a movement vocabulary that supports the dramatic intention of the scene.

TRICIA BROUK since 2012 | New York, NY

As a choreographer, whether it be a musical, opera, or straight play, I always try to be true to the book and further the story while making my actors look terrific!

ELLIE POTTS BARRETT since 2012 | St. Augustine, FL

How do I define a director or choreographer’s job in one sentence?

A director and/or choreographer’s job is to make

possible the impossible,

and then put it where everyone can see it.

JULIE PETRY Assc. since 2010 | Bloomsburg, PA

I define my role as a director as:

creating environments and moments in which others can be at their most creative.

RHYS MCCLELLAND Assc. since 2014 | Pearl River, NY

A choreographer’s job is to tell the story.

ILONA KESSELL since 2003 | Pikesville, MD

For me, the

director is the unifying factor

in the collaborative experience of creating theatre.

DENNIS DELANEY since 1994| Guysville, OH

NEXT ISSUE

What is the best career advice that you have received?

Write a brief response to SDCJournal@SDCweb.org for a chance to have your answer published in the Summer Issue.

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WARREN ADAMS since 2006 | PATTI WILCOX since 1994

WHY I CAST THAT ACTOR

BOB MOSS Bob Moss on casting Dana Slamp in Sylvia at Syracuse Stage I was heading into auditions for A.R. Gurney Jr.’s Sylvia for Syracuse Stage. The casting director (Alan Filderman) and the costume designer were hounding me to make a decision about how much “dog” would be required from the actress playing Sylvia. I didn’t know. Couldn’t make up my mind. Simply couldn’t picture it. So we went into auditions without a decision.

The first young woman to read was very pretty, sort of sexy, and offered no doggy behavior. As we were listening to her intelligent reading, it became clear to me that some canine behavior was required. I stopped her, gently, and asked if she could create some doggyness in her attack on the role. She rolled her eyes heavenward, making it clear that my suggestion was surely the stupidest thing she’d ever heard. I had no idea what she did next in her reading as I had blanked her out.

She was not the only contender to “roll her eyes.” But some women had actually thought to include some doggyness. And some who hadn’t, accepted the challenge. And so the day went. It became a kind of game, seeing how many women I could “annoy” by asking them to add some specific behavior into their audition for the leading role of a dog to be portrayed by a young woman. It could hardly have been a surprise. Could it?

In mid-afternoon, Dana Slamp came to read. I had chosen the long speech Sylvia has, when she’s out walking with her owner and she spots a cat across the street. Dana immediately went into hunter mode, sticking one leg out behind her and pointing with one hand. She was a pointer. After so many hours of grudgingly performed dog behavior, this was hilarious, and made the whole day suddenly great.

At the end of the day, it was time to make up the callback list. The first person to be remembered was Dana, of course. Isn’t that the first rule in prepping for an audition? Be remembered! (The great director Stephen Porter once said, “Sensitivity is a dime a dozen. Can they act?”)

We had been laughing so hard at Dana, we hadn’t actually noticed if she could act! But she was memorable, and in a great way. She’d made a bold, and possibly ludicrous, choice. In the callback, she easily proved herself and won the role. We luckily were able to cast three other excellent actors; and with Dana as the dog, it was, if I say so myself, a production I remain very proud of.

It was a daring gamble; I could have been one of those directors who’d rather the actor didn’t make any choices. But I loved it.

After the play opened, I went to the Lincoln Center Library and looked at the filmed version of the Broadway production. Sylvia was Sarah Jessica Parker, and she did no dog at all. So, perhaps I have to excuse all those women who, perhaps, had seen the play and took their cues from that. For me, it was essential and added a delightful element to this comedy.

Dana Slamp as Sylvia with Caren Browning PHOTO Doug Wonders BOB MOSS since 1982 | STEPHEN PORTER d.2013

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Saycon Sengbloh (center) + cast in Motown: The Musical on Broadway at the Lunt-Fontanne Theatre PHOTO Joan Marcus

BACKSTAGE with

DANCE CAPTAINS

DIONNE FIGGINS + JAMALSTORY

How do you define the role of a dance captain?

movement on the dance captain to make sure that it’s even feasible to do.

JS | There’s the practical textbook part and then there’s the realistic part.

JS | We’re scaffolding for whatever vision the choreographer has.

DF | The textbook clear-cut answer is just maintaining the integrity of what the steps, the choreography, the five, six, seven is supposed to be according to what the choreographers (Patty Wilcox and Warren Adams) want to see.

JS | The people management portion of the job involves figuring out ways to best disseminate notes in a building full of artists who are varied in terms of skill set, background, and physical dance responsibility in the show. We constantly ask oursleves, what is the best way to get the information into their bodies in such a way that it will remain there unchanged for eight shows a week? Another layer of that is crisis management. We start to build a certain level of trust with the people in the building. We’re in a middle management position, so we interface directly with stage managers in the building on various goings-on. We are in a position where people feel comfortable bringing us their concerns, their issues—not just dance related but sometimes building related. So you are basically a pillar in the building as a dance captain.

What are some differences between working as a dance captain for a musical versus working as an assistant choreographer?

DF | The dance captain usually is the body on which the choreographers are building. The assistant choreographer is actually helping the choreographer to build the material. And sometimes they’ll allow the dance captain to have input, but really they want to be able to put the

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Jamal, I understand you have left the show. When a dance captain moves on to a new project, do they reassign the dance captain role or in this case is it just you now, Dionne?

DF | In this case, they did. And they were fortunate because we have another swing, Preston, who has an extensive dance background. He knows all the material. He’s going to be the assistant dance captain solely because he’s never been a dance captain before and there is a certain level of training that needs to happen. The majority of the training, however, is really about people management. It’s how you disseminate the information and how you speak to each artist as an individual, because you have to manage people’s temperaments.

Do you have a favorite section of choreography from Motown, a number that has a personal significance to you?

DF | I personally enjoy the Supremes material. You know, it was difficult to mount and create because everyone had such a clear idea of what they think that is. Patty came in, and she had a very clear idea of what that meant to her. Mr. Gordy had an idea of what that meant to him.

Charles Randolph Wright, our director, had an idea of what that meant to him. It gives you that iconic visual of the Supremes. So that to me is some of the strongest material in the show.

JS | There’s a number in the show called “Hey Joe,” which is about Berry Gordy’s inspiration for the possibilities of doing everything he ultimately did for the music industry. The “Hey Joe” number was constructed with a boxing motif and then also good old-fashioned swing dancing. It’s an occasion where colloquial dancing meets technical aptitude. It’s one of the few moments in the show where those two things come together, where we’re dancing something that, like Motown, has a big physical history. And yet, we still approach it as people, as laymen would.

WARREN ADAMS since 2006 | PATRICIA WILCOX since 1994 | CHARLES RANDOLPH WRIGHT since 1997

The Jackson 5 in Motown: The Musical on Broadway at the Lunt-Fontanne Theatre PHOTO Joan Marcus

And so you have to bring all of your sensibilities, artistically, to that choreography.

Could you describe the collaboration between the choreographers, dance captains, and resident choreographer?

DF | Well, I’ll talk about the resident choreographer, Brian H. Brooks. We sit down on a regular basis. We’re in constant conversation with one another because we want to be effective in the way we’re managing the building. It’s very hands-on in the manner in which we work with one another, just to make sure that we’re being efficient, and the size of the show requires that we have this many people staffing it.

JS | We have a consistent level of communication with the choreographers about everything, about who’s doing what, what makes it cohesive, whether or not the partnering works, who should be paired with whom, how much rehearsal time it will take to teach this, how much rehearsal time the choreographer needs to choreograph it. Sometimes choreographers on Broadway shows move onto other endeavors. Our choreographers are much more hands-on, which can be wonderful at times and a pain at other times. Because they know far, far less about— DF | The goings-on.

JS | The goings-on. There’s just no way they can know everything without being there.

How is your relationship with the director? How much time did you spend in contact with him?

DF | Well, Charles is a former performer and dancer himself, so he definitely had input into what he wanted to see in terms of the choreography. When the show is up and running, directors and choreographers are not around as much and there’s always an assistant director or assistant choreographer that will be there in lieu of them being absent. We definitely had interactions with Charles early on, specifically in the creative process, and as a director he was very

interested in knowing about how we felt about the work. A lot of times in a rehearsal process, the only people that you’re talking to are the choreographers. The director is not really involved in the dance team.

The Motown process was a lot more hands-on than a lot of processes I’ve been involved in. So the director wanted to know how we felt, what we thought it looked like.

If you were to give a piece of advice to a director or choreographer, what would it be?

DF | I appreciate when the director and the choreographers do all their homework in advance. And that includes research. I’m used to working with the choreographers that want to come in early and want to stay late and work through the breaks, because they want to be certain that the information that they’re giving to the cast and the artist is the information that they actually want to see, and not busywork.

JS | It’s important to have a larger arsenal of tools and ideas than what you start with. I think choreographers get married to whatever concepts they have for a show. If that vision does not line up with the other parties on the creative team, then they’re without something to replace it. There’s no fallback. Then we’re all cast into a position where we’re wasting production time and watching people stand there with their arms folded.

DF | You have to be open to listening to what everyone’s idea is and then find a way to get your idea in with their ideas, so that everyone feels like their vision is coming to life. It’s very difficult to do, but that’s the art of collaboration. The work that always comes out the best is the work where everyone’s vision and everyone’s voice is being heard.

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IN RESIDENCE

Soviet Russia,This Is Your Life!

DANIEL EZRALOW SETS A CENTURY IN MOTION

H

ire a guy like Daniel Ezralow to choreograph your Olympic opening ceremony, and you shouldn’t be surprised when a young girl flies through the air holding onto a red balloon, or when a century of Russian history flashes by in Cyrillic newsprint projected on the floor of Sochi’s brand-new, 40,000-seat Fisht Stadium.

Ezralow was, after all, the original choreographer of Spiderman: Turn Off the Dark on Broadway, and of Oscar ceremonies in 1998 and 2006. He’s nothing if not a show business professional, vastly experienced in collaborating with other artists across media platforms. “I’ve had to blend into Broadway, feature film, television—and I can blend into other countries, too,” he told me last fall. “I guess this is what I do, this eclectic sense of wanting to create in different facets, different ways.”

What might surprise you is how little attention his work got in the American press, how little name-checking there was. Turns out that the role of choreographer is a “below-the-line” task that didn’t make it into most lists of those responsible for the show, which unfolded on February 7 in Sochi, the subtropical town on the shore of the Black Sea that was completely rebuilt at great cost to host the 22nd Winter Olympics. The New York Times coverage didn’t mention Ezralow at all; his hometown paper, the Los Angeles Times, did do a charming profile, and a few trade papers noticed.

His dance number, sandwiched midway in the four-hour ceremony after the Parade of Nations, took on a Herculean task: summarizing a century of upheaval and change in Russian history and culture in 12-and-ahalf minutes. Organized as a series of dreams, it stretched the boundaries of the form with every available technological trick, from huge flying set pieces to scrolling projections to phalanxes of volunteers in illuminated jackets to a kite. But, Ezralow noted, most of the spectators saw the ceremonies through the eyes of the director of the cameras, so “final cut” was out of his hands.

Ezralow, now 57, played football at University High School in Los Angeles. He came to dance late, finding his way to modern classes at Berkeley as an antidote to the huge lectures involved in his pre-med curriculum.

Moving to New York, he got a scholarship at the Ailey School, and spent three years dancing with Paul Taylor, from whom, he says, he got his sense of craft. With Moses Pendleton he created MOMIX, an “imagistic, vaudevillian” company, and later ISO; he has choreographed for Israel’s Batsheva and Chicago’s Hubbard Street

BY ELIZABETH

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ZIMMER DANIEL EZRALOW since 1995

Daniel Ezralow with USA assistants Yasmine Lee, Michael Pena + Tyler Gilstrap

companies, among others. “I had a sense of entertaining, which was a betrayal in the modern dance world,” he said. “I wanted to experiment in all these fields.”

H

e was drawn into the Olympic project by its 40-year-old director, Andrei Boltenko, who requested the choreographer of Across the Universe, the 2007 AmericanBritish rock musical and film that used Beatles music, directed by Julie Taymor. George Tsypin, the Russian responsible for the sets in Sochi who had designed Spiderman, connected the American dancemaker with the Russian executive.

Tsypin took his inspiration from the Russian avant-garde artists of the early 20th century, and Ezralow rounded up 500 performers, more than 80 percent of them volunteers. “It’s my interpretation of Soviet Russia,” he said, “playful and ebullient.” His high-tech industrial section followed 150 marching soldiers, pretending to be a fife-and-drum corps doing a series of Busby Berkeley–like drills, who were joined by 150 maidens, culminating in a ballroom scene straight out of War and Peace, three times the size of any ballet ever shown on Balanchine’s stage. It was a hard act to follow, but Ezralow did it, choreographing the “20th-century Russia section” in which the old ways were washed away in an animated sea of technological turbulence. He called it the “REDvolution.”

His instinct to entertain got full play at the Olympics, where his contribution included choreographing a huge industrial apparatus, JULIE TAYMOR since 1996

tractors, and a hydroelectric plant. “If you could lift the roof off a factory, you’d see all these parts moving without ever colliding,” he said. “Then it starts going too fast; the air explodes into an abstract piece of art, the floor explodes, leaving a corps of 40 professional dancers moving at breakneck speed.”

in Los Angeles for two weeks—my playtime, discovering my parameters. I follow my instincts, but you need a zone to play.” He took three assistants to Russia, but all the performers had to be Russian. “I hired a lot of Russian professionals and had a large group of volunteers. I looked for well-rounded dancers who can do pretty much everything.”

The tone changed abruptly, focusing on the huge losses endured by the Soviet Union in the Second World War. The dancers in that section were frozen, he said, performing at Butoh speed; their heavy breathing formed the score. Then a spacecraft, cars, and a fleet of motorcycles with sidecars traversed the huge stadium, culminating in a group wedding, a parade of baby carriages, and the original little girl, a gymnast with her own Olympic aspirations, letting her red balloon fly off into the sky.

In January I connected, via Facetime, with Ezralow in Sochi winding down from a long day of rehearsals and meetings. “Any Olympics is crucial to any country that puts it on,” he observed, “but this is very important to Russia. There’s a great energy, and plenty of money. Money is energy; if you pour it into a certain area, it comes back in amazing ways. They’ve constructed a modern-day city out of nowhere. All for one performance. It’s outrageous—people dedicating their lives. But it lives in posterity forever, watched by two billion people.

“It could mean that the entire 70 years of communism was a dream, and is gone like that! Nothing left of it. Now it’s a capitalist country. I let go of this to look toward the future.”

Ezralow began work on the project, his first in Russia though he is of Russian-Jewish descent, in 2011. “You go to a lot of meetings, through a process of vetting, talking about everything, creative think tanks at many different places in the world,” he said. “The International Olympic Committee gets involved, the countries get involved; it’s a roller-coaster ride of drama. I rode it out.” Then he spent months exploring ideas in workshops. “I worked with 10 dancers

“There’s security, there’s no time. I ask myself, why am I doing this? I definitely think I have a little light to bring to it. I’m not here to grind a notch on my belt; I’m here to bring light, to help create something that will be very inspiring. This is all a great occasion. I want people to feel that positivity.”

Ezralow met with Russian President Vladimir Putin during preparations for the ceremony.

“We had a nice little talk,” Ezralow said. “My impression was that he was very grounded; he had a very solid handshake. He seemed like a cool guy, very in his body.”

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FASTHORSE

BY LARISSA

SDCF TAKES A LOOK AT DIVERSITY IN SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA Diversity Panel at the Pasadena Playhouse PHOTO Clarence Alford

In December, SDCF partnered with the Pasadena Playhouse and East West Players to hold the first of a series of panels—”Diversity: Through the Director’s Eye, Can Southern California be a model community for a more diverse theatre?”

Laura Penn, Executive Director of SDCF, explained that although the organization has been working for diversity on many fronts, this panel is the beginning of a specific vision of diversity for SDCF that will continue with similar panels around the country, a Diversity Task Force and partnerships with other theatre organizations.

Penn sees directors as being in a key position to affect diversity in the field. “We have to be part of the [diversity] conversation,” she said.

“The centrality of directors in the theatre process as the person who touches all of the creative partners has the power to make a large impact on the field.” Penn stresses that there is much work to be done, saying, “We know that we [SDCF and SDC] are part of the solution and also part of the challenge. We need to diversify internally as an organization and externally through our Membership. We need to support the development of the next generation of underrepresented artists while simultaneously advocating for access for the current generation.”

Moderated by Michael John Garcés, Artistic Director of Cornerstone Theatre Company, the event at the Pasadena Playhouse drew a diverse audience in the theatre and online. The panel provoked lively questioning from the audience, heated discussion in the courtyard, and many responses through articles and blogs. A visible concern was the makeup of the panel itself.

Artistic Directors Christopher Ashley of La Jolla Playhouse, Tim Dang of East West Players, Barry Edelstein of The Old Globe, Sheldon Epps of Pasadena Playhouse, Jessica Kubzansky of The Theatre @ Boston Court, Marc Masterson of South Coast Rep, Michael Ritchie of Center Theatre Group, and Seema Sueko (Associate Artistic Director) of Pasadena Playhouse and founder of Mo’olelo Performing Arts Company were chosen to represent the largest theatres of Southern California.

After the discussion, Garcés responded to concerns about the lack of gender and ethnic diversity on the panel: “Do we want a more diverse panel to talk about diversity? Or do we want to talk about why the pool of artistic directors of major theatres is so homogeneous?

I think the second question is more germane, and it is more important to problematize the situation and have people see it and deal with it

than have a picture people feel better about that is not actually representative of the truth of the field.” Epps also addressed the issue of artistic leadership, saying, “Just as the work onstage must reflect the excitingly diverse dynamic of our culture and population as it now is, so must the leadership of our theatres…. This is the ‘in the closet’ secret of American theatre that needs to have clear focus, honest discussion, and once again, desperately needs steps toward definitive action and change.”

Michael Ritchie addressed the moderation of the panel. “The only thing I would change about any of these panels would be to start by discussing what we know we are already doing in our pursuit of the idea of diversity,” he said. “From there one could have a discussion of whether or not that is enough. Too often I feel like there is an assumption that there is no effort toward diversity.”

The next panel is scheduled for Chicago with Chay Yew’s Victory Gardens Theatre acting as host. Said Yew, “I’m hoping we’ll do more than just talk about diversity. Haven’t we talked it to death for the last 20 years? Diversity isn’t a concept but a reality in this country. Since theatre aims to be at the forefront and reflection of our national culture, we must come up with tangible avenues to nurture the next generation of directors and artistic leaders of color, creating an exciting heterogeneous collision of ideas and aesthetics on the American stage.”

Over the next 18 months, additional panels will be held in Seattle, Washington, D.C., and Atlanta. Penn stresses that SDCF learned a great deal from the first panel and plans to build on the format, always asking the questions: What’s working? What aren’t we doing? What more can we do? The goal is to keep the discussion focused on the role of directors in diversity while the organization works to solidify proactive steps to support its Membership in the effort.

One step is the SDC Diversity Task Force being formed and co-chaired by Garcés and Seret Scott. Said Garcés, “Unlike the panel discussion in Los Angeles, the task force will allow for a diverse response from multiple perspectives, and we will address them. It is not my or Seret’s place to define what diversity means in the context of the field. We are a Union that is here to serve the whole Membership in the healthiest, least divisive way possible.”

Kubzansky summed up the challenges going forward: “I do [think these panels are useful], if you’re in a place to listen and receive. Whether or not these panels do more than scratch the surface, they have certainly illuminated for me the ways in which people are deep inside their own trenches, and the more clear we are about what the trenches are, the clearer it may become about how to break out of them. They also make it much more difficult for anyone exposed to them to pretend they’re unaware there are problems. But of course, I’ve found them useful because we’re eagerly seeking to make things better—they could just be meaningless chatter if you’re not prepared to hear the real challenges or reexamine existing practices.”

Below are chronological excerpts from the discussion, starting with Garcés’ goals for the evening. Penn opened the Los Angeles panel with remarks that detailed the history of the diversity movement (see sidebar). The full panel discussion can be viewed online: http:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ow4n2Uru6DI&fe ature=youtube_gdata MICHAEL JOHN GARCÉS | We’re really interested in looking at this topic through the lens of the director, and of the artistic director.

Where directors can impact diversity, where artistic directors can impact diversity…where the limits of their power are, where the limits of what they can do are, and I also want to look at and talk about diversifying the pool of actual directors. I’m…interested in how we have this conversation in the context of a really, really competitive business in which a relatively small percentage of people are working at any given time, and how we talk about diversification within that and what we mean by the word “diversity.” This is not the conversation at all; it’s a conversation…We’re coming from a lot of different places. We’re gonna use the wrong words, and we’re gonna say the wrong things.

And we’ve got to work through that to actually have a conversation if we’re gonna make change happen. That’s my opinion—you can disagree, and that’s what the public comments are for. So, diversity—what do we mean by the word “diversity”?

TIM DANG | You know I think that in diversity something is conjured in a visionary’s mind… in terms of how are we going to tell this story, and who are we telling this story to. And I think it’s very important to be very inclusive of who your audience is, and I’m really happy that we have the Southern California artistic directors here because I think that Southern California is ground zero for the rest of the country in terms of what the face of the future of America is...Because the face of the future is now...

Ninety-one percent of LAUSD [Los Angeles Unified School District] is now youth of color, and do we as artistic directors have that in

mind in our vision for the future? Because that’s our future audience coming.

there are barriers to anybody participating we’re working to take them down.

SHELDON EPPS | Sixteen years ago when I started this job…I was just appalled that the richness [of diversity] of the Pasadena community, the richness of the Los Angeles community and the Southern California community, was not being reflected on this stage in any way, and certainly it was not being reflected in the audience that was coming to this theatre. So on many levels it became primary to my mission at this theatre to change that and to shake it up.

SEEMA SUEKO | [At Mo’olelo Performing Arts Company] we deliberate to select plays that offer significant roles for actors of color, and… to select plays that allow us an opportunity to engage communities that are traditionally underrepresented or uninvited to participate in mainstream American theatre.

MARC MASTERSON | It’s a never-ending process of just being curious, and I think with that comes a certain kind of openness and not knowing the answer to things. So if I can put myself in that mindset, I think I may do a better job of reflecting what’s around me in all sorts of ways.

CHRISTOPHER ASHLEY | I think one of the things that’s interesting about both directors and artistic directors is they have a unique ability to throw a party and to invite people to come together. And throwing a party that looks enough like America is, or looks enough like the community that you’re producing, is a really important and difficult thing to do.

MICHAEL RITCHIE | Well, actually, Chris…I remembered a show that we did together when I was artistic director up at Williamstown…we talked about casting, and he said to me, “Just for the record I want to cast this show as if they were my friends coming over to my apartment for dinner. So it’s going to be racially mixed…” And we set out from that point without any further discussion….

And that was one of the initial times that I had a director who just took it upon [himself] and said, “This is what I’m doing.” It turned out to be a terrific production as well.

MICHAEL G. | What are you finding…Barry, because you’re new to your community…How is that affecting your choices?

BARRY EDELSTEIN | I’m learning the city [San Diego] and I’m learning who lives there, and I’m learning who wants to participate in the arts, who is being given the opportunity to participate, who is experiencing obstacles and barriers...The Globe is the second largest theatre in California…the public-ness of the work means that it has to be available to the widest possible spectrum of who lives in the city...As the artistic director there are a lot of different groups that I’m trying to put together.

A board, audience, writers, directors, even students—because we have a training program at the Globe. And the work seems to me to make sure that every level of that institution [is] transparent and it’s open, and wherever

MICHAEL G. | So what are the obstacles?

BARRY | There is a wide range of obstacles...

The image that I come back to with my staff a lot is smashing the vitrine, getting culture out from behind glass. Getting the play out from inside the snow globe. And doing that requires a huge amount of risk and invention, and trial and error, and also asking folks you know, “How can we help you get here? How can we be more relevant to you?” It’s a big, enormous, complicated process.

SEEMA | I think one of the biggest obstacles is intentionality and the assumption that we are experts and know what the community wants and needs, as opposed to having a real conversation and curiosity. I don’t think we should assume we’re the solution to communities’ problems; rather, we need communities more than communities need us as theatres. And so engaging in authentic conversation, I think, is sort of the first step… listening.

JESSICA KUBZANSKY | I had a conversation with someone where I said, Well, I’m on this panel, and they were like, Oh God, another panel where people are gonna sit around and talk about it and no one is gonna do anything. And I said, Well, I have to say I, and by extension Boston Court, was profoundly impacted by the discussion at the last panel which I simply attended…we were clearly naive, but what we heard there taught us something important about the ways in which actors of color, exhausted by lip-service, disbelieved the theatre community’s desire to cast diversely and so weren’t showing up to audition. It sparked huge internal conversation, and we took immediate steps to adjust how we reached into those communities as a result of attending the panel.

MICHAEL G. | It’s a relatively small pool of directors of color who are working, or female directors. What are the actual obstacles to changing that?

SEEMA | I think there is mentorship and there is sponsorship, and I read an article where they said women and people of color are very good at mentorship—you know, sharing what it is we do and teaching—but what we’re not as good at is sponsorship.

CHRISTOPHER ASHLEY since 1988 | TIM DANG since 2010 | BARRY EDELSTEIN since 1995 | SHELDON EPPS since 1981 | MICHAEL JOHN GARCÉS since 2001 JESSICA KUBZANSKY since 2000 | MARC MASTERSON since 2012 | SERET SCOTT since 1989 | CHAY YEW since 2002

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TIM | I think that directors that come into East West Players…and say, you know, I would love to direct this play at East West Players; I think that’s fine and dandy…But why wouldn’t they direct this play at another theatre, even if it’s a diverse play? And in East West’s case, it’s like, will this director be able to carry that same vision to another non-ethnic specific theatre?

And that’s very important for a director working at East West Players.

BARRY | We’re producing an enormous amount of classic work, and it’s just always frustrating how hard it is to recruit directors who’ve got experience, let alone diverse directors…So my feeling is…in the same way that we’re contributing actors, in the same way that we’re doing world premieres of plays that then go on to life in the theatre, we can muster our tremendous resources to train directors...

We’re gonna throw the resources into creating that next generation of talent. We’re very, very seriously talking about that.

MICHAEL R. | I think it’s interesting that the field itself for the past 20 or 25 years, 30 years even, is focused enormously and at times almost exclusively on the playwright…

And I think one of the complications with directors that I always find is that I can read a play; I know what the playwright has written.

I can see an audition from an actor, and I can imagine them in the role. I can look at a design portfolio and discuss the design. But a

director, unless I’ve seen their work or worked with them, all I have from them is a promise…I think that’s somewhere where the field itself could probably take some more responsibility to help shape that bridge. I find that going into this field is hard for anybody; for a director it’s nearly impossible to break through regardless of sex, ethnicity, age. It’s very difficult to become a director in the American theatre.

CHRISTOPHER | Sometimes different interest groups can feel in competition with each other in not healthy ways…I think whenever people can think of themselves as not in competition with each other for progress…there is actually room for progress to be made in gender, in race, in age, in various different ways, and… there is a synchronicity about progress and not a competition.

MICHAEL G. | What does diverse theatre look like?

TIM | I think a lot of us, in particular minority communities, don’t have that relationship to a particular organization. And so how do you build that pipeline? How do you establish that relationship? I think that becomes very important. Someone then told me that you have to be careful of the gatekeeper of that pipeline, so you have to have more than just one person from one community having that access to the artistic director at the theatre. It has to become a commitment in which you are

talking to a number of people who are coming in through a certain community. That pipeline really needs to be—instead of mainstreamed, it needs to be multi-streamed.

MICHAEL R. | In the back of my mind, the phrase that I use for any given theatre season or period of time is that, because we’re so big and because we have the place we have, it’s our responsibility to provide the widest range of theatre to the greatest number of people with the deepest impact. And that’s just my statement; it’s written down nowhere...And my hope is that that’s sort of the light at the end of the tunnel, and then everything falls into place of what diversity means. Diversity of the style of theatre...

BARRY | George [C. Wolfe] used to say that he wanted the lobby of the place (The Public) to look like a subway platform, and he made that happen…I want to make the front door of the Globe as permeable as the rest of Balboa Park; that’s what I think it looks like… so that the city itself merges with the arts institution with no perceptible barrier. It’s just a transparency and a permeability; that’s what I think looks like. And I hope that ILisa will D’Amour be held Will itDavis working with playwright accountable for thatfor five, 10Cataract years from in rehearsal The at UTnow, Austin and measurable in those terms.

SEEMA | I think also really being mindful that our staffs are very diverse and representative of the communities that we serve is important.

LAURA PENN ON DIVERSITY + THE ROLE OF SDC/SDCF On December 16, 2013, at the Pasadena Playhouse in California, SDC’s Executive Director Laura Penn joined Artistic Director and SDC Executive Board Member Sheldon Epps in welcoming panelists and audience to the first diversity panel hosted by SDC Foundation, Pasadena Playhouse, and East West Players. Titled “Diversity: Through a Director’s Eye,” the conversation strove to ask and discuss the following questions: What’s working? What aren’t we doing? What more can we do? The following are Ms. Penn’s remarks introducing the widely attended and talkedabout event.

Good evening, and thank you all for coming indoors on such a beautiful night. I’d like to thank Sheldon and the board here at the Pasadena Playhouse, and their extraordinary diversity committee for hosting this evening. I want to thank Tim Dang, who was instrumental for gathering us here this evening. Thank you, LA Stage Alliance, Directors Lab West, and of course, Ellen Rusconi, Producing Director of SDC Foundation. She makes everything we do possible.

SDCF was founded in 1965, and to this day it is the only organization that exists solely to support directors and choreographers, to foster their craft and help them advance their careers. For 50 years our goals have remained unchanged: to provide opportunities to practice the crafts of directing and choreography; to promote the profession to emerging talent; to provide opportunities for exchange of knowledge among directors and choreographers; to increase the awareness of the value of directors’ and choreographers’ work; and to convene around issues affecting theatre artists, which is what brings us here this evening.

We hope that tonight will be a beginning, and by this we don’t mean to imply a beginning for a field conversation about diversity, but for the specific involvement of SDCF and SDC. Discourse about diversity has been ongoing for decades. Directors and choreographers have been participating in this conversation for years in all four corners of

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our country. But beginning tonight, SDCF and SDC join for a specific conversation about the full range of impact that directors and artistic directors can, and do, have on the evolution of our field.

It is our hope that tonight’s panelists and audience will leave this conversation having heard, thought about, or considered something new or different. Some of us have been in this room for a very long time, and we are weary of having to repeat ourselves or inspire new energy for this work. Some are new for any number of reasons, including birth order; other participants live with the challenge of diversity day in and day out with an all too deep understanding of what exactly that struggle means. Others find themselves motivated to dig deeper into their own experience, or lack of, on this topic.

While the issues of diversity are vast and timeless, much of the conversation in the American theatre can be traced back to the late 1980s. There are exceptions of a few adventuresome spirits before this: Zelda Fichandler fought valiantly in the 1960s to diversify Arena Stage’s resident company, and Joseph Papp made it his mission to bring theatre to all aspects of the public despite economic standing. However, we would be remiss to not consider larger societal markers when we think of this work—and one of those markers was the publication of Workforce 2000 in 1987, when everything began to shift. In the corporate GEORGE C. WOLFE since 1984 | ZELDA FICHANDLER since 1987

CHRISTOPHER | One of the crucial things here is being able to tolerate the messiness of the conversation about diversity…I think being able to say, the fight is worth having. It’s okay that it’s contentious, it’s okay that there is disagreement, and hopefully something more productive comes out of that disagreement.

MICHAEL R. | There are other times when you make specific choices—and I’m turning to you [Sheldon Epps] because you just did it with Twelve Angry Men, where you took a play that was classically written to be presented as a group of white men in a courtroom…you added another layer to it [by casting black actors].

MICHAEL G. | What’s exciting right now or what are you curious about?

SHELDON | It grew very much out of conversations that were going on when I needed to find a play for that slot about the Trayvon Martin trial. And then [it] really was prompted by Obama’s very moving speech on race…There was some criticism for the fact that I didn’t open it up and include Asian Americans and Latinos and all of that. I believe that there is a fine production of that play to be done in that way, and I hope somebody will do it, and I hope that I get to see it. That was not the choice that I was making. I was interested in that strict racial divide between black and white...

SHELDON | I would love for our work to reflect America more often within each production rather than in separate productions…I as artistic director need to make more choices and lean on individual directors more to make that happen.

JESSICA | They have to come with a committed passion for the story they’re telling and, most significantly, the way in which they’re choosing to tell it; a director’s compelling vision for how the world of the play is created is the most profound conversation they can have with an audience.

BARRY | It strikes me that Southern California is incredibly interesting…open to stuff in a way that even my beloved New York maybe wouldn’t be, and that’s an extremely positive thing…The future of America starts here in Southern California.

Audience and SDC Executive Board Member LARRY CARPENTER | How can directors help the conversation about diversity actually inside the conversation of a play?

JESSICA | They have to come with a commitment…And I think more passion for a vision of how to create a world of the play that is that director’s vision…

boardrooms of businesses across the country, people began to talk about multiculturalism, EEO, and compliance issues. Affirmative action came under attack. Working Mother magazine appeared just as Ms. was waning. Retail and entertainment began to think about the purchasing power of those beyond the white middle class, which was beginning to decline. Workforce 2000 explored, among other things, and I quote, “improving the dynamism of the aging work force, reconciling the needs of women, work, and family in the workforce, and integrating blacks and Hispanics fully into the workforce.” The report made predictions on a variety of topics, including that the distribution of wealth in our country would lead to serious social unrest. In the months that followed its publication, Miss Saigon arrived, rocking our piece of the world. Yet it would be many, many years before the commercial theatre sector began to understand that in addition to artistic considerations there were also vast economic concerns around multiculturalism.

After heated, passionate meetings, the Non-Traditional Casting Project was born. Actors’ Equity Association began to require hiring stats, and the non-profit theatre sector agreed, followed by the commercial sector. We all hired diversity trainers. Many theatres hired someone on staff, at times marginalized, to handle that diversity work. And some things, thankfully, got better. For one, Sheldon became Associate Artistic Director at the Old Globe. Some things changed. Some grantmakers inspired good work; others not so much.

The National Endowment for the Arts began to ask the grantee community about impact, and while many thought that was a step in the right direction, others felt that a more explicit call for multiculturalism was needed. And then we got used to it; applying and hoping for the big grant became the norm. Outreach and education programs became the common home of our diversity initiatives. Yet things on our stages did LARRY CARPENTER since 1981 | OZ SCOTT since 1991

BARRY | I think you have to be willing to be annoying. You know, certain questions just need to be leaned on again and again and again, or the conversation will stop…Don’t be afraid to keep insisting that the conversation continue.

SHELDON | Our art form should do what we are doing here tonight, which is to not ignore the need for the ongoing conversation.

America is in a terrible position of having convinced itself…that racial issues, gender issues, our differences are not a problem anymore. And they are. So when and if you can, and if you so choose to deal with that in your work as a director, or as a playwright, or as an artistic director, deal with it vociferously and loudly.

Audience and SDC Executive Board Member OZ SCOTT | I want to make sure that you continue and we don’t rest on our laurels—you know, “I did a black play this year, so I’m cool…”

It’s about being specific as opposed to forcing the diversity on something. Every time I do a play, I want to see how I can elevate that play, and diversity can elevate plays to a different level…I just want to make sure that we are specific to the play—that we protect the play, that we also protect the play with diversity.

change; we all programmed a black play in February. Some even planned an Asian play in May. We celebrated Day of the Dead—well, some of us did—and then August Wilson spoke at Princeton in 1996, and for a brief time the discourse broke through loudly. Race—not multiculturalism, not diversity, but race—was on the agenda.

We worried about diversifying our audiences, our boards, and our staff.

Then came the “dot com” bust, 9/11, Enron, the 2008 market crash, the mortgage crisis. While many theatre artists managed to advance the cause of diversity during these turbulent times, too many others were distracted by the necessary tasks of survival. Today—well, in the last couple of years—this conversation has once again gained momentum and taken center stage.

While, as of 2012, women made up 51 percent of the population, only 20 percent of the jobs in Broadway and Off-Broadway actually go to women. In many of our communities, people of color already comprise the majority, and yet they are still woefully underrepresented. We all know it’s time. In less than 20 years nationally, Caucasians will be the minority. It’s about compliance. It’s about doing the right thing, and it’s about business. But we aren’t here to discuss it all.

Although many of us know how hard it can be to separate a thread from a tapestry, tonight we’re going to try. Tonight, our panelists, each a central artist with the capacity to impact maybe the broadest range of collaborators, will begin this conversation looking through the eye of a director, of an artistic director. In this forum we will explore the current state of diversity in Southern California. What’s working? What aren’t we doing? How can we work together to increase diversity in Southern California theatre?

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This past fall, director/choreographer Graciela Daniele sat down with longtime songwriting team Lynn Ahrens and Stephen Flaherty in the offices of the Dramatists Guild, downstairs from SDC in New York City. The following is an excerpt of a warm conversation reflecting on their 30-year collaborative relationship. In a “love letter” of sorts, Graciela praises the beginning of the typical theatrical process—the words—as the three artists discuss the joys of harmonious collaborative relationships between directors and writers.

This article, and others on similar topics, appears in the May/June issue of The Dramatist, the official journal of the Dramatists Guild of America, Inc. DRAMATISTSGUILD.COM

It Starts With TheText

GRACIELA DANIELE

IN CONVERSATION WITH

Lynn Ahrens, Stephen Flaherty + Graciela Daniele in the offices of the Dramatists Guild in NYC PHOTO Walter Kurtz | MAKEUP David Terzian

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LYNN AHRENS + STEPHEN FLAHERTY

STEPHEN FLAHERTY | I just think it’s marvelous that we’re here in this room today at the Dramatists Guild doing…it’s not really an interview; it’s a conversation. I feel like we know you so well, but there are a couple of things that I don’t know about you, which I hope we’ll find out.

Should we give a brief history of how we came to get together in a room for the first time?

GRACIELA | Young and old audiences relate to a beautiful story told to a child.

LYNN | We didn’t know what it was, we didn’t know where it should go, we didn’t know much about this show that we had written except that we thought Graciela Daniele would be the perfect director because you told stories with dance and movement and we were so intrigued by your work. And so we asked Howard if he would set up a meeting and he did.

STEPHEN | Well, that one suggestion was just brilliant because the piece is ultimately about storytelling and about making sense of what happens in our lives. It’s truly an ensemble piece about a group of people. It is a group energy and just that one suggestion underlined that and really informed everything that came after that. Luckily, that was the first sentence in the entire script! Everything that came after that first sentence was informed by your directorial choice, which was so spot-on.

It surprised us because we thought we knew all the ins and outs of our little show. I’d soon find this would be the first time that I would feel that my music, combined with movement, your movement, could actually illuminate the text.

STEPHEN | It was kind of a blind date, actually.

GRACIELA | It is the other way around.

GRACIELA | I remember that day like it was yesterday.

STEPHEN | Well, not for me.

LYNN | I forget what you were working on.

GRACIELA | You know, I am such an admirer of writers and composers. I can’t write a good letter in any of the four languages I speak and I believe it all starts there. It starts in the idea, in the storytelling, in the music, which are the structure and the soul of the piece. Without you, we don’t exist. Without us you could still exist. Remember that in Shakespeare’s time there were no directors.

LYNN AHRENS | Yes. I was thinking about our history. We have done so many shows together that I really had to think back. I wanted to re-experience that first moment—it all began with our mutual agent, Howard Rosenstone.

GRACIELA DANIELE | Thank you, Howard!

LYNN | We had written a little show called Once on This Island.

STEPHEN | Which was called Ti Moune at the time.

STEPHEN | I know what it was. It was Eric Overmyer’s In a Pig’s Valise at Second Stage and it was your lunch hour.

LYNN | And you came to my loft wearing this giant white coat made of some insane kind of fur I’d never seen before.

GRACIELA | It was lamb, Tibetan lamb. A gift from my husband.

LYNN | You had only one hour. We sat you on a little chair, and we went to the piano and started singing our hearts out and playing. We were going quickly because we knew you had to get back and we said, “So, that’s all we’re going to…” and you said, “Oh, play me a little more.” So we played a little more and you said, “Oh, play me a little more,” and we started playing the whole show and you dissolved in tears, we dissolved in tears—

LYNN | I’m putting it on my refrigerator.

STEPHEN | It starts with the author; it starts with the text.

LYNN | A box of tissues.

GRACIELA | It starts with the author. It starts with the text. It starts with the music. And directors, we are interpreters. We are just interpreters.

GRACIELA | Do you remember what I said after you gave me the box of tissues? I said, “I don’t think I am the right director for you. I’m not clinical enough.”

LYNN | You know, that’s a very rare sentiment coming from a director, I have to say.

STEPHEN | Right, you couldn’t be that removed emotionally.

GRACIELA | Really?

GRACIELA | No, I couldn’t.

LYNN | Maybe not as rare as I think it is, but rare in my experience.

STEPHEN | It was such an emotional reaction for all concerned.

LYNN | It was just so fabulous. So that’s how we met and that’s how we came together. I remembered the first day of our workshop and how nervous I was. It’s terrifying when you’re handing over a piece that you’ve worked on for so long to somebody and you don’t know what are they going to do with it. But you just sat everyone down on the floor in a circle and you said, “What if we told it to a child?”

STEPHEN | Which was not in the script.

LYNN | And we said, well, sure, give it a try, and suddenly I remember my shoulders went down about five inches and I thought, “Oh, I see what it is. Now I see what it is.” You brought that to the show. The notion of telling it to a child was a huge dramaturgical gift.

GRACIELA | Isn’t that interesting, because I don’t consider myself a dramaturg at all, but when I went through it I felt very strongly that this story—being passed on as a torch to the new generation—could be more powerful…

LYNN | …than breaking the fourth wall and telling the audience.

GRACIELA DANIELE since 1976

GRACIELA | Isn’t that interesting?

STEPHEN | I think a lot of that comes from the fact of who you are, that you’re an incredibly generous person besides being a generous and inspired artist. I think also it comes from your sense of confidence. You know, I honestly think a lot of directors aren’t confident and feel unless they get this billing or get this thing, it somehow diminishes them. I’ve never felt that with you.

GRACIELA | I don’t care about those things; I really don’t. I’m just a good housewife who happens to love the theatre…[laughter] I know it sounds rather ordinary but it’s true! Each play creates a family with all the problems SPRING 2014 | SDC JOURNAL/THE DRAMATIST

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we must solve together, hopefully, in loving collaboration. In a very short time, we must deliver a beautiful baby and be proud to be its parents.

STEPHEN | I even remember at Playwrights Horizons—I think it might’ve been the third day—and you know, this is clearly an ensemble piece, but some of our children within the family are being a little prickly— GRACIELA | I remember that day. I went for coffee and you followed me.

LYNN | I followed her.

STEPHEN | Yes, and Grazie did a great acting job of doing a dramatic exit.

LYNN | She swooped on her white fur coat and went out of the building and—

GRACIELA | And we did it together.

STEPHEN | And we did it together, you and I and Willie Rosario. I would hit a pencil on a Coke can and drum the piano. That was the way that we found the rhythmic blueprint of what that dance would be and then I added music later and I had never in my life done anything like that or worked that way.

GRACIELA | I remember it very well because in the next room we had Mike Nichols rehearsing a play and every five minutes they would come and say, “Could you please be quieter?” Oh my god, Mike Nichols! We were having too much fun!

GRACIELA | I don’t usually do that. Just once in a while, for effect.

LYNN | And you know what else was interesting about that dance? We had a number that it replaced—

LYNN | It was very effective.

GRACIELA | It replaced my favorite song.

GRACIELA | I know it was.

LYNN | I got so scared and I thought, “Oh my god, we’ve just lost our director,” and I went running down the street and I saw her sipping her cup of coffee very calmly and—

LYNN | We had a beautiful 11 o’clock song and we had an 11 o’clock dance and that taught me a lot. I realized—we don’t need that number.

The audience is so far ahead of it by the time she’s singing it, the dance has already told us everything we need to know.

GRACIELA | I said, “Don’t worry. I’ll be back soon. Let’s see what the children want to do by themselves.”

STEPHEN | And of course I was the last one in the building to realize we didn’t need the number.

STEPHEN | That’s right, and I thought that was great parenting because had you not stepped in—

GRACIELA | Well, because it was…it is an extraordinary song and so moving. When she sang it the first time, I cried like a baby. I do cry sometimes. I also laugh a lot.

LYNN | You gave them a time-out.

GRACIELA | That’s right.

STEPHEN | “Now kids, you’ve got to learn to play together because we’re all part of this group.”

GRACIELA | And that was the problem. They were not being generous with each other.

STEPHEN | I also think that the amazing thing that I personally got from that experience is that you were so supportive of everybody individually and also as a collective group of artists. I am loath to present any of my work unless I know that it’s polished and it’s exactly where I want it to be. I’d much rather stay in my little room until I get it right and that’s, in a weird way, the antithesis of collaboration. I remember we knew there was going to be an 11 o’clock moment, it was going to be a dance, and I had never written just dance music for dance’s sake; I didn’t know how to do it. So I was just sort of fretting and kind of nervous about that moment and trying to hide it, of course, and you were very supportive and then

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there was the moment where you just basically pushed me out of the plane and said, “Now you have to learn how to skydive,” and—

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LYNN | That’s why we’re sitting in this room.

GRACIELA | Yes, you are right.

STEPHEN | And the other memory that I have that’s so clear…we were working on a new song for Agwé, our God of Water—I had rough material that was not in my mind a song yet and Lynn said, “Oh, just play it,” and I said, “It’s not really ready to be played,” and Grazie said, “Oh, come on, just go to the piano,” and this was in your apartment downstairs.

LYNN | And Loy Arcenas was there.

STEPHEN | Yes, our set designer.

GRACIELA | And he was the one who came up with a great idea.

STEPHEN | So it was the classic scene in a movie where the composer goes to the piano and starts playing the vamp, Lynn starts singing as the God of Water, and then Grazie starts dancing—

LYNN | And Loy goes, “I see umbrellas.”

STEPHEN | And so Grazie starts miming a samba…and all of a sudden from nothing, and from my incredible timidity, this beautiful number came alive in all of our minds in a moment. That’s why I wanted to say thank you on record for pushing me out that door, saying get to that piano, get to it, and it was… that was truly one of those magical, synergistic moments of the theatre.

GRACIELA | That’s the magic of collaboration.

LYNN | But how many of those moments there are…we’ve done I don’t know how many shows. I don’t want to jump away from Once on This Island because I could talk about it for an hour, but how about the moment in Ragtime when we handed you the script and we had written this wonderful opening number that was still evolving and in parentheses I had written “dance break” and Grazie laughed at us and put her hands over her head and said, “What’s that? What do you mean? Break from what?”

GRACIELA | Yes. Break from what?

LYNN | I had no idea how to write a scenario for dance. I had never done it.

GRACIELA | But that is not up to you. That is up to the choreographer.

LYNN | Well, now I feel I should give a hint.

GRACIELA | Well, if you have an idea, it helps.

LYNN | But what you came up with for that dance break in parentheses was I think one of the classic dance pieces in American musical theatre. I just do. You took the three tribes and you had, I think, pennies or bottle caps.

GRACIELA | Oh, with my assistant, yes. Well, there were so many people. You know, usually you have 15, 20, but I think we had 50. We kept on moving the pennies around— LYNN | You kept on pushing the pennies around and I remember watching and going, “What is she doing?” and out came this dance—three “tribes” that swirled into one confrontation and then another confrontation.

It was so amazing and brilliant.

GRACIELA | Well, I remember wondering what to do because the opening was so brilliantly written, the music, the lyrics, the introduction of all the characters, that dancing seemed superfluous. Then, all of a sudden, I thought: let’s go to the seed of this piece. What is Ragtime about, the book? It tells the story of three tribes unable or unwilling to mix, always confronting each other, always with fear in their hearts. And that’s what we did. There was not one single dance step, but I believe we told the story.

MIKE NICHOLS since 1963

STEPHEN | Well, the thing that really excited me, and this is again the movement off music, is that the way I sort of constructed the tune, where every time someone would sing the word “ragtime,” I would never go to a tonic. It would just be this little hole of nothing, this space. You took the hole of nothingness to be a group of people, groups and individuals confronting one another, like as you do on a subway or any time you’re put in a common space. You actually infused a half rest repeatedly with so much racial tension, and I thought that was so brilliant.

GRACIELA | But you wrote it in the music.

STEPHEN | But I didn’t know that I had.

GRACIELA | Ah, see, that’s what I said. That’s what I’m talking about. Writers, composers… your canvas is totally blank and you start sketching on it. We might come in and put some colors on it, but like what Terrence said one time in Ragtime, when we were discussing what a book writer does in a musical: “We just put the foundation and build a firm structure and then all of you come in and make it a beautiful building.” I thought that was a great analogy.

LYNN | I don’t know if it’s unusual but I know it’s wonderful to work with somebody that you’re so comfortable with. I mean, we’ve been working together for 30 years. And 30 years with you. You’ve been in our lives for as long as we’ve been working together, there you’ve been, and we all know how to be so comfortable that we can jump up and do a samba…or do you remember we were sitting trying to figure out J.P. Morgan…?

GRACIELA | Oh yes, yes.

LYNN | It was this crazy moment in a little office and somebody said, “Well, what if the bridge moved and came down and what if he was on it and what if he crushed the immigrants?” Everybody was sort of shouting out ideas. You can’t do that with everybody.

STEPHEN | No. GRACIELA | That is the most wonderful and exhilarating moment in any creative journey.

LYNN | That’s right.

GRACIELA | Again, collaboration. Being free to express ideas even if they are wrong. Not afraid of being wrong. That “bad” idea might take you to a good one.

STEPHEN | Well, that was the beautiful thing about working on Ragtime because you and Frank Galati worked together seamlessly and he also believed the same thing: get a group of really smart people in the room together. Everybody working on that show was overqualified because you are an amazing

director in addition to being a choreographer.

Frank is also an author. Santo Loquasto, who did the costumes, also is a set designer. Lynn writes book as well. Everybody was looking at the same thing from not only what their job description was but from what their life experience was. It was free enough that you felt that you could say anything and it would always lead to some exciting idea, or if we got stuck, we would just sit in that room together.

GRACIELA | Oh, and we did sometimes.

STEPHEN | Yeah, there would be 10 minutes of silence and then something would bubble up and it was thrilling.

GRACIELA | Well, I only like working like that.

I’ve had experiences working with directors, brilliant directors that I admire very much, but I didn’t enjoy it because there was not that kind of freedom of exploration. My favorite phrase in the theatre is: “What about if…?” I learned it from Wilford Leach, who directed The Pirates of Penzance many years ago at the Public.

LYNN | My version of that sentence is: “This may be stupid but…”

GRACIELA | Yes, yes, you say that all the time, even while giving a great note.

LYNN | Because then I’ve warned you, and if it’s good, I’ve surprised you.

GRACIELA | One of my favorite things about you is when you perform.

LYNN | Oh, it’s so sad.

GRACIELA | No, you are adorable. You make me smile, and you, Stephen, have become a great comic.

STEPHEN | I’m a ham.

GRACIELA | Well, I’d like to say something about you two that I don’t believe I’ve ever told you. Stephen, as a composer, you are a chameleon. You incarnate the soul of each piece with great respect to its period, culture and tone. Lucky Stiff, Once on This Island, Ragtime, Dessa Rose, Man of No Importance...

LYNN | And The Glorious Ones— GRACIELA | And The Glorious Ones. I mean, every single one is like it’s written by a different composer, not just you.

STEPHEN | But that’s—

these different accents, but that was part of the fun about Ragtime because it was about three entirely different communities and trying to find your musical vocabulary and voice for each of them. Then when this group mixes with that and finding musically what happens, that was really exciting.

LYNN | When we’re looking for new ideas, which is oftentimes my job, you know, I’m surfing bookstores and that sort of thing. I always say to Stephen, “What do you feel like writing next?” and I know that whatever I find, if it’s a good story, he can do it if he can get into it.

STEPHEN | It’s almost never for me about subject as much as: what did I get to do on the last piece and what have I been yearning to do?

GRACIELA | Oh, that’s wonderful.

STEPHEN | Yeah, like with Once on This Island, it’s interesting. You would’ve thought that that would have been a music idea-first piece because it has such a strong musical language, but, in fact, we had just done Lucky Stiff, which was a farce, which was oddly very challenging, I think, but I said to Lynn, “Every bit of emotional music we had to cut,” because farce wouldn’t support that. And I said, “Whatever it is, I just want it to have some sort of an emotional center.” And then Lynn happened by total happenstance to find this little novel that was set on this fictional Caribbean island and it sort of gave me license to create my own world. At the same time, just for fun, I happened to be listening to world music, but I had never thought, oh, you could actually use those rhythms as the basis of a theatre score.

So the music came second, which you wouldn’t guess.

GRACIELA | Another artist who had the same quality was Jerome Robbins. As a director/ choreographer, he always served the piece, Gypsy, Fiddler on the Roof, West Side Story. I remember writing a “love letter” to him once, saying that what inspired me the most about his work was that I could never guess who had done it, except for the fact that it was perfect.

STEPHEN | You know, I think it confuses a lot of people because a lot of people might say, “Well, what’s your style?” and style often has to do with repetition. If you did this one thing here, oh, and then you do the same thing in the next piece, but you just alternate one ingredient—

GRACIELA | Brilliant! Am I right or not?

GRACIELA | That’s right, you put your stamp on it, yes.

LYNN | You’re totally right.

STEPHEN | And you do the same thing, too.

STEPHEN | That’s sort of the fun of it for me, though. I’m like the Meryl Streep of music. [laughs] You know, you joke about Meryl doing

GRACIELA | I try because I admire that a lot, even though it’s so difficult to achieve.

FRANK GALATI since 1987 | WILFORD LEACH d.1988 | JEROME ROBBINS d.1998

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LYNN | But you do do that because, with you, it’s always the story first.

GRACIELA | It’s, unfortunately, not a common virtue.

GRACIELA | That’s correct. It starts from there.

LYNN | Well, you know we’ve talked about this—

LYNN | What is the story? Who are the characters? Who are they? What do they feel like?

GRACIELA | What do they need?

LYNN | What do they need? What are they telling you? What is that story—everything flows out of that. You do research into the world of the turn of the century or the Caribbean or Ireland or whatever it is and there it is; it just seems to lay itself out for you who those people are.

GRACIELA | And you write that way, too.

LYNN | Well, I try to be invisible.

GRACIELA | But you are not.

LYNN | I try to be.

GRACIELA | Let me tell you: you’re too brilliant and too pretty.

LYNN | No, no, if I read a lyric that I’ve written and it’s sitting on Stephen’s music beautifully and all that, but if I feel it’s too clever or I can hear a little proud moment for myself in there and it’s very obvious, I always change it. I can’t do it.

GRACIELA | I know. You write poetic images and heartfelt emotions, but never too complex or cerebral to distract us from what the character is thinking and, most of all, feeling.

LYNN | I’m very careful about it.

GRACIELA | Sometimes you change something and I wonder: why? It was so beautiful! But the change is always for the best, more human, more direct.

LYNN | You know, we just finished a show in Germany and I just mention it because it was a wonderful experience, fabulous experience, but I missed my internal rhymes so much.

They don’t exist in the German lyrics. There are rhymes at the ends of the lines where they fall and all that, everything is correct, but there’s something about…what I love to do is roll those words around in my mouth until they just come out like ice cream. I didn’t have that in German words.

GRACIELA | Another gift you have, very rare in writers, is that somehow, when I start to prepare to tell you that you should, perhaps, take a look at this paragraph, you tell me, “Oh, I’ve already cut it.”

LYNN | I’m a good editor. I know.

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GRACIELA | It is hard to let go of moments we love in our work, but it is all for the sake of the play.

would basically make up their own plays. Then after we would do that, we would kind of lasso what we learned and then that would go back on the page because it couldn’t fully be on the page to begin with; it was impossible.

GRACIELA | It was a wonderful experience. We had a great cast.

LYNN | Well, you’ve been so wonderful to me to let me whisper in your ear all the time. I mean, I always—

LYNN | Oh my gosh, John Kassir was worth the price of admission. You know, I’m still in touch with him and he just makes me laugh at every turn.

GRACIELA | I love that.

GRACIELA | He is so funny.

LYNN | I’m always on the verge of thinking, “Oh, I just have to get out of the room.” I’m such a pain, but I…that’s one of the things that I’ve always loved about our working process. I say, “Do you mind if I just sit here, and if I have any thoughts, can I tell you?” You’re so good about that.

LYNN | All of the improvisational things that he did in his audition I wrote into the show.

He’s going to pull a hand out of a suitcase and talk to the hand, he’s going to juggle, he’s going to do mime, and I made places for him throughout the show based on that workshop and based on his audition material.

GRACIELA | I want to hear what you have to say. And you are always respectful in when to say it. You never interrupt the process. And I believe two or more brains at work are better than just mine.

STEPHEN | But the funny thing about The Glorious Ones for me is that it took 13 years to write it. You know, we did our very first reading of The Glorious Ones right after we had opened and closed My Favorite Year at Lincoln Center, and you were beginning your work at Lincoln Center, and we were working on this new piece and you said, “Let’s do a reading of this show.” Whenever people talk about how long did it take you to do it from the beginning to the end, I would just say, “Well, let me put it this way: in the first reading, Donna Murphy was the ingénue.” I actually think that was a blessing that it took us 13 years, because we were able to learn about each of those characters over such a long period of time.

STEPHEN | Or me alone.

GRACIELA | Besides being a great writer, you understand theatre, Lynn. When I’m working with the actors, I’m inside of the play and can’t afford to stand back and see the detail or the whole picture until much later. Having your thoughts during that process helps me a lot.

LYNN | I’ve learned so much from you, I mean, on every show that we’ve done together— huge things and small things. For instance, on The Glorious Ones, we did that commedia workshop and I think that show would not have been as good as it was without it because I wrote for characters that were created in that room and I began to understand and see their physicality and their natures. That would never have happened if you hadn’t said, “I think we need that workshop,” and it was unbelievable.

It was so much fun and so informative.

GRACIELA | Lynn, I think for a new musical, we all need a workshop.

LYNN | Yeah, but that was a special one, though.

GRACIELA | Oh yes, because it was a language that we didn’t know and we had to discover it in action, not just talking about it or reading about it; we had to do it. We had to act it.

STEPHEN | That was the trickiest thing, I think, about that show, because basically we were writing a piece about people that improvised, which seems an impossible assignment. In a certain way, it’s like trying to find out how you would physicalize it and how these people

LYNN | And then figure out what it was about because you can’t tell from the novel, you can’t, but over the course of those years, we realized that it was about the family of theatre, how we pass it on, the ingénue gets old, the leader of the troop gets old, the theatre itself changes. That show is very close to my heart.

GRACIELA | And to mine. I love talking to you both because we have shared so much of our lives together, and we still have something to say.

LYNN | Something to say, oh my god. I mean, there’s so much more.

BASED ON TRUST IN CONVERSATION WITH

LINDA HARTZELL + Y YORK INTERVIEW BY

LIZ ENGELMAN

Jennifer Lee Taylor + Emily Hunt in Afternoon of the Elves PHOTO Windmill Performing Arts SPRING SPRING2014 2014| | SDC JOURNAL

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The Witch of Blackbird Pond PHOTO Chris Bennion

sending you the book.” And I said, “Okay, send me the book. I’ll read the book.” It was a complete stall, because I’d never adapted a book. I’d never written a play for children, and I was so overwhelmed with the possibility that I would disappoint you that I was about to turn you down.

And then, well, I liked the book, and my husband, Mark [Lutwak]—he was really on me to give this a go. He said, “You have to give it a go, you’re in a rut, try something new.” So I said yes without really having a clue how to proceed, just with this arrogant notion that whatever I was going to write was going to be a play I could be proud of.

LIZ | Linda, given that Y was playing hard-toget in your courting process, and the fact that she had never adapted before, what made you think that Y might want to adapt this book, and what kept you going through her hard-toget?

LIZ ENGELMAN | I am here with two longtime collaborators, Y York and Linda Hartzell. Y is a prolific and widely produced playwright who in the last three years alone has premiered three plays: Crash at Seattle Children’s Theatre, Don’t Tell Me I Can’t Fly at First Stage Milwaukee, and Star Girl at People’s Light & Theatre Company.

Among her many awards, Y is a proud recipient of the Smith Prize for …and LA Is Burning and a recipient of the Charlotte Chorpenning Award for her body of work.

Linda Hartzell has been the Artistic Director of Seattle Children’s Theatre and has led its education program since 1984, where she has directed more than 62 plays, over 45 of which were world premieres. In addition to her SCT productions, Linda has directed plays both across the country and abroad. Among her many honors, she has received the ArtsFund’s Outstanding Achievement in the Arts Award in 2009, and the prestigious Gregory Falls Sustained Achievement Award from Theatre Puget Sound in 2001.

I have known Y and Linda for a long time from my years in Seattle and beyond, but this may actually be the first time I’ve had the opportunity and pleasure to talk with both of you together in virtual person. I’ll begin by asking: how did the two of you first meet?

Y | It was at a conference—some college south of Seattle. John Dillon had invited Jon Klein, Steven Dietz, and me to talk to children’s theatre directors. We went to this children’s theatre conference and the first question that they asked us—we were the playwright

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panel—was, “What’s the worst experience you’ve ever had with a director?” And then it was like somebody pushed our “on” buttons and I think we went on for about an hour.

And that’s when I met Linda. I remember this lady sitting very close to the front row, looking at us all very quizzically and fiercely.

LINDA | I think after hearing funny, smart, compassionate Y speak—I knew Steven and Jon already—I thought, “Oh my gosh, I need to talk to her. I need to learn more about her.”

So I read—and please correct me if I’ve got the name wrong—I read a play that she’d written, If It Rained No Fish. Is that the title of the play?

Y | No. Rained. Some Fish. No Elephants.

LINDA | There you go. And so I opened up the play and here was the funniest stage direction in the history of mankind, and I thought, she’s so funny, she’s not pretentious, she’s imaginative; I think we should talk to her about commissioning her for something at Seattle Children’s Theatre.

I think I called you up…I can’t remember if I went to your house, and you—as you always did—treated me to some delicious vegetarian black bean soup, and we talked about what the first project would be.

Y | You called me on the phone and you started talking to me about the book Afternoon of the Elves, and I started talking you out of hiring me—that’s the way it went—and you said “No, no, I’m not not hiring you, I’m

LINDA | She’s fun to be with at parties! That’s what kept me going. [laughter] I had seen in some of her other work what I thought would be right for this first story. She finds the heart of a character, she gives a unique and a different voice to every character. Interesting patterns and idiomatic phrases that make one character sound different than the other.

She shows us, she doesn’t tell us, so the plot is interesting and moves along and you’re surprised. And she does not overwrite; she doesn’t use the play to posture about every single theory and belief in the world. I love to read editorials, but I’d rather read an editorial in a newspaper than share it in a play.

I saw a respect for the work, and I’ve seen that through every single play that we’ve done with Y here, which is eight or nine now. Most of these we commissioned. I saw a respect for the work and a respect for the audience. She doesn’t talk down to kids and she keeps her plays theatrically surprising. I saw that from the very beginning, and that’s never changed.

Y | When I look back at these 22 years of collaboration and friendship, I see myself back then as really somebody who was just beginning. I was such a beginner when I hit Seattle; I had a couple of plays, but I’d never had a commission. I’d never gone through the development process with anyone.

I’d write a play and I thought my job was to go to rehearsal and explain to everybody what they needed to do in order to make my play work. What I have learned is that this process is so much better when I write a play and I go into the room with these other people

STEVEN DIETZ since 1989 | JOHN DILLON since 1974 | LINDA HARTZELL since 2000 | MARK LUTWAK since 1996

and I am quiet. I can see more clearly what is there for people to get, and when it isn’t there for them to get it; I can see how to not blame them. Instead, blame the play, because maybe—even though it’s in my mind—maybe it’s not on the page yet. That is an amazing thing that you get to discover when you have a development process. To me, the workshop is imperative, and if I don’t get one from a theatre, I invent my own. I have to have the voices in the air and I have to have the collaborator there, not to tell me how to fix stuff, but to tell me when something is wrong or missing or when I’m going down a wrong path.

I have to say Linda is amazing at this. When we were working one afternoon on Elves, there was a scene that we kept going back to. I couldn’t figure out what it was, because it looked like all the other scenes to me and it sounded like all the other scenes to me, and having to dissect this scene was like an evolution for me. And I realized the kids—the two characters were Hillary and Sara Kate— they were not playing. They were talking about playing. And just to stay on track with this scene that wasn’t working for Linda, even though I couldn’t hear that, allowed me to develop the notion of being able to analyze a scene. I can track back to Afternoon of the Elves for that discovery.

The other thing about collaboration that I attribute to Elves was the idea that the production is also the storyteller. When you have a director who can see that we’re going from one day into the next and how we can do that with a light shift and having the character come into the scene the next morning in her nightgown, then I don’t have to write it. I can cut those 40 words. And we have achieved something elegantly and collaboratively better than what I could do on my own.

the play is active. Linda said the scene was not active, and it wasn’t that I resisted her or thought it was active. I didn’t even know what the term really meant. Because I used to be an actor, it took reading the scene out loud to myself to realize there was nothing to act; nobody’s trying to impress, nobody’s trying to overcome, nobody’s trying to connect.

There was just reflection and I don’t really like reflection in a play.

LINDA | Yes, both of us have been actors in the past. So I think we always, in the back of our mind, put ourselves up there. We expect the actors to execute what she, the playwright and me, the director, want them to. So we put ourselves in their place to see: how easy is this to play? Are there huge leaps that are being made? What’s the conflict between the two characters? And Y could see that.

Y has an honest way, not a confrontational way; she doesn’t make me play 20 questions with her as a director. We discovered how to explore and solve things together. She said, “It’s in my head, it’s not on the page.” That’s what she and I have been able to do with a lot of time and trust and finding ways to communicate. “I want you to be happy; I want it to be the play you wanted to write. You’re the composer and I’m the conductor, and together we find the music, the rhythms, the different movements, the tone. I always remind Miss Beethoven, if it’s still in your head, then the notes may not be on the page.”

Another thing that I have learned working with Y—and not to be condescending when I say

this—but I’ve learned that when you teach or when you work with actors, I’ve learned very early on with the playwright, to read them.

What kind of a person are they? Do they want a lot of notes, do they not want a lot of notes?

When is something clear, when is something hard, when is something easy?

When I’m working with Y, most times, I’m not just the director but also the dramaturg.

I’ve learned with her that in a fun, humorous, cordial way, how and when to give thoughts and notes. I’ve learned from Y to be much more concise, to find the time when it’s right to say something, when it’s right to ask a question. It used to take me five hours to get my notes out because I didn’t want to hurt her feelings, and now I think in a more direct way…and I always start with all the things that are working. We’re human beings. We need to hear what’s working.

LIZ | Do you feel as if this conversation has changed over the 22 years you’ve worked together? That the trust and friendship that you’ve built has afforded you the luxury of cutting to the chase? You mention the dramaturgical aspect of this, phrasing things in terms of questions and enabling the playwright to find what they’re trying to say rather than give them your own solution. Is it easier now to say, “Hey, that’s not working”? Is that familiarity a journey that you’ve taken together?

Y | It’s totally a journey we’ve taken together, and here’s the thing: Linda’s extreme gift is that she can identify what isn’t there, which is a miracle because how do you know what isn’t

LIZ | Talk a little bit about what that conversation looks like to get to your realizations in the two examples you just shared. For example, talking about playing versus actually playing. Is that something that Linda said to you that you resisted at first? Did you come to understand that on your own over time? What was the conversation to get you to that realization?

Y | It was the introduction of the term “active.”

I think, at that time in my playwriting life, action and activity were still intermingled in their definition, and suddenly they were no longer intermingled. A play is active when one character is trying to get something from another character in a scene; when that’s there, then no matter what they’re talking about, Debra Pralle + Kelly Boulware in the world premiere of The Mask of the Unicorn PHOTO Chris Bennion SPRING 2014 | SDC JOURNAL

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there? Also, Linda knows when you’re going to lose the audience; she knows when there’s a dip in the storytelling or the conflict, and she will identify those moments. I’d be a fool not to listen to her. It’s an evolution; I didn’t know this when we did our first play together, but when I saw it, I saw that whatever didn’t work was something that she’d pointed out. We have this trust; I’m not defensive. At least I’m much less defensive than I used to be.

LINDA | I think what develops over time is trust, and I think in theatre we know we need trust—everything we do is based on trust.

Yet sometimes we take it for granted what is required when you build a basis of trust.

It means, again, you know, 101 corny things about a good relationship, be it a romantic or working relationship. That means when things are tough, you’re going to work on it in a healthy, productive way; you’re not going to take advantage of the other person and there’s going to be patience, there’s going to be kindness, and there’s going to be respect.

I think it allows you to take time, it allows you to breathe, it allows you to be a little bit vulnerable, knowing ultimately you’re on the same page and the end result is going to be ultimately what you dreamed in the very beginning what it would be. Luckily with Y, I’ve been pleased with her scripts since the very beginning, and she’s been pleased with the end result when she saw the play.

LIZ | Trust is also helpful when you are in a disagreement, because collaboration is not synonymous with agreement. How do you negotiate disagreements? What has that looked like?

Y | I think a disagreement is often a misunderstanding. Part of the process of making a script into a production is the design process, which can be challenging and lead to disagreement. I’m not a visual girl. I don’t know what they’re wearing, I don’t know what the set looks like. But through the design process I can see if there’s an understanding of how the play is moving. If we’re going from the desert into the professor’s backyard and I see there’s a costume change, I know that there’s a misunderstanding, because no time has evolved between those two scenes. That’s why I’m interested in lighting design, costume design, and set design. The reason that I’m there is so that I can see if everybody knows how the play moves. If we disagree, I always think I’m right, but you know, you can be right and quiet; it’s actually kind of amusing to be right and quiet.

LINDA | I don’t want it to be just my idea; I want it to be something that the playwright is proud of and envisions. I’m proud to say over all the years that I’ve been [at SCT], with all the commissions we’ve done, I think everybody’s walked away going, wow, that

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was an honorable, worthy experience and we worked through the differences because we listened to each other. We were connected, we were joined at the hip; you can’t run if you’re tripping each other.

Y | I remember when we were working on my adaptation of The Witch of Blackbird Pond, which was directed by John Dillon. I’d just come off Afternoon of the Elves; in retrospect, I was incredibly lucky, because I had made this very funny, moving play. When I dove into Witch, I was so excited because I’d made this play where there had been no play, out of this incredibly vast, sprawling story that takes place over a year. The play takes place over a matter of days, and it was really fun and it was funny.

We read the play. There was just complete disappointment in the room, and I was upset and the theatre was upset and I think it actually could have been a divorce. I was flying off to somewhere and I took the play and I took the book; my husband Mark read the book and he said, “Well, you can do it, like a page-tostage thing.” I said, “I’m not going to do that.”

And then I realized I had heard very little of what was said in the room. But there was this one word, and I think it was Linda who said it, and the word was “danger.” I had successfully removed all the danger from the story, and it was that word, that word was like my way back into the play.

I don’t even think I changed the structure; I think scene for scene they’re probably identical, but the content of every single one of those scenes changed. And every element, either from the book or elements that I had introduced, became dangerous, instead of elements of joy and discovery and welcomingness—which is what I had turned the story into.

LIZ | Can you talk a little bit about what workshop means to you? There are so many definitions.

LINDA | Everything. If you need time to explore the text, we’re going to read it and give you a couple of days off to do rewrites.

If the physical world and the design is going to be helpful, then from day one I’ve worked way in advance and put the design team there, so that, as Y said earlier, if there are questions about how to make this moment work, we have the time. You have time—drop in 30-foot ropes and teach the actors how to climb up.

Then the playwright can say, “Wow, okay, great, I don’t need four scenes to explain how they’d gone up into the atmosphere.” It’s a bad example, but I’ve learned to put whole teams together way early in advance, because most playwrights love that. I used to be afraid of doing that, afraid to share too much with the playwright for fear they’d want to direct the show or dictate to all the designers how the

world would be. But I find that not to be the case, especially with somebody like Y. LIZ | For example, in The Mask of the Unicorn. Y, you have a woman transforming into a unicorn before our very eyes. Did you have a vision in your head of what that might look like?

LINDA | Do you want to tell her why we did that play?

Y | This is great. Linda’s looking for any excuse to be able to promote a play, because you couldn’t get a book anymore. You couldn’t adapt anything. And it’s still true; the movies have everything, all the titles. So Linda goes to France and sees the tapestries in the Musée de Cluny, and she calls me up and says, “Can you write a play based on the old tapestries?”

I said, “I don’t think so. What’s in them?” And she describes this woman sitting in a corral and she’s got a unicorn in the corral and she’s holding a mirror and she looks in the mirror and she sees the unicorn. I said, “I can do it.

I don’t need to know anything else, I can do it.” I didn’t even know what they looked like yet, but I knew I could do it because I’m very fascinated with the mystery of the mirror. It’s very alive in my imagination. So I’m living in this valley in Hawaii—Manoa Valley—and the winds at night, it’s like they’re going to take our house down. And this play comes to me. I love this play; it’s so outrageous, but it was also a difficult collaborative experience.

I’m very low-spectacle. Like, my idea of spectacle is that you turn on some twinkle lights. I think that is the degree of spectacle that I appreciate and want in my plays. Did you ever see Golden Child? You know how Julyana Soelistyo turns around in a circle and she goes from being seven to being 92? That’s kind of what I thought. I said, well, this is what it’ll be. It will be the actor, just the actor. Well, we didn’t do it like that. We used a puppet. And you know, you can do that on stage; you can have somebody turn around, and with lights and sounds, you can have a puppet appear.

It was beautiful. It’s not how I envisioned it, but I certainly loved and respected the choice, because the unicorn was very strong. It was a very good presence in the play.

LINDA | I feel that that’s the one play of the ones we’ve done together where I totally failed as a director working with designers. I failed because the antagonist in the play is the wind, and I was having a hard time making that present and making it dangerous and more than an offstage character. Even though the world was minimal, I think I allowed everybody to keep adding on and adding on, except for the unicorn—and this was 20 years ago—was designed to be very much like the brilliant horse in the opening of War Horse. It was a see-through skeletal puppet operated by humans. The size of a horse and operated as a

puppeteer. It was beautiful, beautiful, beautiful, but we didn’t leave the play alone and say, okay, it’s finished. I didn’t know how to say “Okay, the world is there, the world is done, let it go.”

Y | There were some terrific successes with that show and I thought that the staging was stunning. When people ask what do you want from a director, I say I want a director who’s going to reveal the subjects through staging, because that’s not the actors’ job. Their job is to play their action. There’s so much mystery and secrets in this play, and you could just feel it. You could feel it between the actors, because of the staging. I thought it was gorgeous.

LIZ | Along these lines of what’s not the actors’ responsibility and what the director helps reveal, such as subtext, you’ve mentioned that you were learning how and when to mete out information and that this play was a prime example of that. Could you talk a little bit more about this?

Y | When a play is coming from nothing, coming from air, everything you write is about discovery. Now when I do this, I call this kind of writing “blah-blah,” and I don’t even have it in play form anymore; I don’t allow myself to do that. But I did when I wrote this play.

The first scene of this play was so bulky with backstory and exposition it was like an anvil. I realized not only was it awful, but nobody was going to get any of the information because the exposition was not contained in action. It was about looking at all this, figuring out what was actually imperative for anybody to know, and then figuring out a way to get it into the action.

The other thing about Mask, which is completely the result of talking to Linda, was how much of the story we contained in the tapestries and how those tapestries were revealed, and the characters’ responses to the reveal. Many words got to be eliminated, because the tapestries were telling the story.

They were imbuing the danger.

LIZ | Y, in several of the plays you’ve written that I’ve read, there’s an outsider girl protagonist and I’m wondering what draws you to a specific work and sensibility in terms of the plays you choose to work on together, and if this is in the DNA of a sensitivity and a sensibility that you share.

LINDA | Y writes female characters in an interesting way. We know who they are because they’re a little bit of who we are, yet very different and surprising. There’s nothing wrong with being a princess, but these are not your typical princess characters. There are many layers to the characters. There have been strong female characters in most of the shows.

Y | Yeah, I keep changing the locks but the outside girl keeps getting in. I’ll tell you about a brave female. This is one of my favorite stories. Linda and I are at New Visions and Voices with Afternoon of the Elves, and everybody there is at a reading of a new play— not our play—just a reading of a new play. It’s the afternoon and it’s a musical and it’s okay.

I don’t know much about musicals, but I don’t think it’s horrible or anything, and it’s short.

Afterwards, the discussion starts and almost every person in the room starts hammering this play. I mean, really hammering. And I’m thinking, “Oh my god, are they going to do this to my play?” And this goes on for about six minutes. Linda stands up and she says, “I think everyone here is really hungry. I think that we all really need to go to dinner now.” And I just thought that is the kindest, best way anybody ever had their face slapped. It’s emblematic to me of her awareness of the room, her generosity, and kindness.

LIZ | Which leads to the question of being women artists. Is it different working with each other as women collaborators?

LINDA | I think in theatre we can be very cruel, really snide, and selfish at times. More importantly, we forget to go out of our dark theatres and see the rest of the world, be with people who are not in our tribe, who are not like us. We’ve got to do that, and not think that when a play doesn’t work, it’s their fault because they’re stupid. Y doesn’t do that. She is the smartest person in the room. You don’t get paid very much in theatre and the hours are really long. I think the best thing is to not work with high maintenance people, you know, but rather mature, generous people who make the process fun and meaningful. That’s the kind of woman she is. What I particularly like, though, [is] she’s still a girl—and I mean that in the most generous of ways—she’s still playful and imaginative and kind and loyal, the way kids are. That’s why I love having her at Seattle Children’s Theatre; that’s why I love to work with her.

LIZ | You’ve created a wonderful home and playground for her at Seattle Children’s Theatre and that is so appreciated.

LINDA | Yes, and we’re going to do another play next year, The Garden of Rikki Tikki Tavi.

All of Y’s plays are stylistically so different; she can write a dark, scary, emotional 17th-century play, and she can write a contemporary, funny, upbeat drama. She’s so versatile as a writer.

Y | I really try to get into the head of my nineyear-old characters and try to stay as honest to their points of view and their language as I can. This is what I know about humor and kids’ plays: a lot of times the kids don’t laugh.

They’re going to laugh in the Garden of Rikki Tikki Tavi, which Linda’s going to do, and I’m so glad we’re doing it next year because [it] has a lot of slapstick. But really what the kids watch is the character’s plight. When the audience is mixed, then the experience becomes mitigated and the adults will laugh in a kind of reminiscent way. So sometimes when the adults laugh, the children will then have the freedom to laugh, too. This also works the other way because kids will laugh at something that’s very silly and that will enable the adults to laugh as well.

LINDA | I think the rule that we have is: don’t ever write a joke or a situation that’s at the expense of the kids. That’s the trick of a sophisticated work; it’s for an ageless audience.

Y understands that most basic human experiences of love and betrayal and jealousy and failure can be shared by that 10- or 11-year-old in the audience. The one thing those kids are not is cynical. Sometimes you can’t have a certain form of satire because they don’t have the history, the basis.

LIZ | Is that something you learn before opening? I’m thinking of rehearsal; you probably don’t have a lot of children in the room watching.

LINDA | Actually, we do invite students in to see our workshops. I think young people are the most authentic dramaturgs.

LIZ | As a dramaturg myself, I would have loved to sharpen my skills as a kid in your rehearsal room! Even though I learned that skill later in life, I will say that so many of your productions at SCT remain my strongest memories of my time in Seattle. The Seattle community continues to be the lucky recipient of your one-of-a kind collaboration. It’s been wonderful to hear you share some of it with us.

Thank you both. This has been wonderful.

Y | Thank you, dear Liz. LINDA | Yes, thanks so much.

LIZ | Linda, you spoke about comedy and humor, which is so ingrained into who you are, Y. I wonder if children are some of the smartest audience members. Is there a different way of handling humor when you know you’re writing a play for them?

SPRING 2014 | SDC JOURNAL

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THE CHICAGO AESTHETIC

AD

n t h o e M n y o i t s h s s a n d Re u c si INTERVIEW BY

CURT COLUMBUS

a l itie s

When SDC asked me to sit down with some old friends and colleagues to talk about the theatre scene in Chicago, I hadn’t realized just how much I had missed the place. Oh, let’s be clear, it was 10 degrees below zero when I arrived, there was eight feet of snow piled on all the sidewalks, and the wind as I walked two blocks from my hotel to the Goodman Theatre sliced through my winter coat like a serial killer.

But as soon as I got to the Goodman, I remembered the warmth of the theatre makers who work in the city and the great energy of the whole scene that makes you forget the weather and love Chicago theatre. It may be the Windy City, and the Icy and Snowy City at times, but it remains one of the greatest places to make theatre in the country. The following is an excerpt of my conversation with directors Amy Morton, Ron OJ Parson, and Henry Wishcamper with playwrights Rebecca Gilman, Zayd Dohrn, and Keith Huff.

CURT COLUMBUS | One of the first things we want to grapple with is the myth of Chicago theatre. The venerable Chicago director/ philosopher Dennis Zacek always said that Chicago was always seen from the outside as a “deep dish theatre” kind of city. It arrived at your table hot, it wasn’t very complicated, but it was really filling. That sort of aesthetic profile is out there in the world, you know, city of big shoulders and an actor-oriented town. What about the myth of Chicago theatre is true, and what about it is not?

AMY MORTON | I think this myth is about the Chicago style of acting, and I find it to be kind of bull. I think non-Chicagoans put the stamp on what is Chicago or not, and we’re just sort of doing the work. I will say that I have always contended that we don’t have a lot of pressure here about fame or fortune, so the work might as well be really good. That’s not meaning to say that work anyplace else isn’t, but it certainly is something that doesn’t particularly distract Chicagoans.

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RON OJ PARSON | Having lived in New York and then coming here, I’ve seen the difference in risk-taking, like Amy says; the pressure of a review might not kill my show because it’s still going to run five or six weeks, and you can have a bad review and good word of mouth and it still sells tickets. When I got here, I saw more ensembles, less pressure, and less competition. My experience here has been a warmer atmosphere of the camaraderie, of us all being a team, that we’re going to put something together, the collaboration of the director and the playwright.

HENRY WISHCAMPER | I can’t think of another place that has as much variety in the kind of work that’s being done. Every institution is so wildly different from one another in this town. What’s exciting to me about being here is the number of companies, the fact that almost everyone I’ve met here has some form of home within a company. Almost everybody here is a member of something, and in other places you’re hired freelance. I think that really radically changes the way people go about finding work outside of that home.

REBECCA GILMAN | I have found there are more ensembles here than anywhere in the world, which is crazy. It’s really sort of fabulous.

CURT | I’m excited to bust the myth of Chicago being an aesthetically limited place, because that’s the perceived notion.

REBECCA | Henry and I were joking before this that, if we use the phrases “gritty realism” and “muscular naturalism,” we’d probably be all right—I think that’s the stereotype of the Chicago style. But it’s so much more diverse than that, and I think that there’s at least as much, if not more willingness on the part of audiences to let you try things out. If you fall on your face, they’re not fair-weather fans.

People will stick with your career and sort of let you stumble around and try different things and light on things that work for you. I’ve had people tell me about their experience with all of my plays, and that makes me know that we have this kind of relationship. I’ve never worked long term anywhere else, but I know that that’s part of what I love about working here.

CURT COLUMBUS since 2011 | AMY MORTON since 2001 | RON OJ PARSON since 2001 | HENRY WISHCAMPER since 2007 | DENNIS ZACEK since 1981

This article, and others on similar topics, appears in the May/June issue of The Dramatist, the official journal of the Dramatists Guild of America, Inc. DRAMATISTSGUILD.COM

of Cr e a ti n

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ZAYD DOHRN | I’ve only been here a couple years, but I can perhaps speak to part of the myth, which is to say that in New York there was a huge envy among playwrights about what they saw happening in Chicago. It has to do with having an artistic home and a do-it-yourself environment. I don’t know if it’s an aesthetic; it’s just a practicality that in New York you need thirty thousand dollars to put on a show.

RON | And to be able to produce it here with a little bit of money at a storefront or however you’re going to do it. I think you find a lot of that here.

CURT | It’s interesting because I encountered both Keith’s and Rebecca’s work first in storefronts. And so you guys have definitely worked your way through that system as well.

KEITH HUFF | Yeah, I came in the late ’70s.

So I actually saw the advent of Steppenwolf, but before St. Nicholas and Steppenwolf was Organic. Before that, it was sort of commercial.

Richard Burton would come to town and go to the Ivanhoe and do A Man for All Seasons or something like that.

AMY | Yeah, it was a wasteland.

KEITH | I’ve just come back from L.A., and I am so thrilled because I’m working with Jeff Perry out there; he’s directing A Steady Rain right now at the Odyssey, a 99-seat theatre. I got to rehearsal on the first day, and there he is, the

ROBERT FALLS since 1986

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founder of Steppenwolf Theatre, setting up the tables and putting the coffee out. And I said, “You know, Jeff, if I hadn’t seen you do that when I first walked in, I would have been disappointed. He goes, “Well, yeah man, it’s all about the work.” And it was really heartening to see. I don’t mean to put it all on Organic and St. Nick and Steppenwolf, because something changed here when Richard Christiansen and the other critics said it’s worth going to those little theatres; there’s something special there.

CURT | Give major props to Richard Christiansen, the lead critic at the Chicago Tribune for decades.

AMY | And Glenna Syse.

CURT | And Glenna Syse, from the Chicago Sun-Times, the two founders of Chicago theatre in a lot of ways, right?

REBECCA | Richard saw everything.

CURT | Everything. There were these long, insightful reviews and clear indications that he’d been following your work for decades.

Glenna was the same way.

REBECCA | I think among audience and critics, they are treated pretty much the same.

CURT | The audience here goes to everything.

RON | I had a little company called Onyx. I was an unknown person, it was an unknown theatre, and Martha Lavey showed up because she had heard something about it.

It’s also worth noting that the universities here, DePaul, Northwestern, these places are putting out good actors. I always encourage them to stay here for a few years.

CURT | The reason I moved here in the early ’80s was because I read a Time magazine article about Chicago theatre; it talked about Bob Falls, this young artist, buying a bunch of theatre seats and moving them into a space above a storefront. I go there and there’s Billy Petersen, this actor that I have great admiration for, hanging the fucking speakers in the grid. And I thought, I want to work here where the guy who’s the head of the company and the movie star hangs the speakers.

Perhaps that’s the way in which the image of Chicago is borne out, because it feels more like real work here and less like star pursuit.

KEITH | Yeah, and that was the big difference I saw. I did some little productions in New York; you would get no support.

But it is known as a town that’s actor centered, partially because of the ensembles. Is that a limitation at all to directors and playwrights or not?

CURT | But in Chicago the work at Red Orchid can be as significant as the work at Steppenwolf.

ZAYD | I do sometimes find ensembles to be limiting as a playwright. You definitely have experiences where you have a play and you SPRING 2014 | SDC JOURNAL/THE DRAMATIST

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Chicago directors + playwrights in the lobby of the Goodman Theatre STANDING LEFT TO RIGHT

Zayd Dohrn, Henry Wishcamper, Curt Columbus + Keith Huff SITTING LEFT TO RIGHT

Rebecca Gilman, Amy Morton + Ron OJ Parson PHOTOS

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John Reilly Photography

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have a conversation with a theatre and they say, “Not right for our ensemble,” or “Not enough parts,” or “Not the right parts.” And sometimes you wish you could bring people in. Obviously Steppenwolf and these kinds of places that have an ensemble, where they also work with writers and are developing work from the ground up, probably don’t find it limiting; it’s probably freeing because you write for people and that can be exciting. But when you come in as a writer and it becomes a barrier, that can be sort of frustrating.

KEITH | I think it’s actually expansive. If you write for guerrilla theatre, the biggest asset for a playwright is the affordable talent. We didn’t have money for a big set like at the Goodman or Steppenwolf. So we rely real heavily on the actors.

RON | I’m not a playwright, but because there is so much variety here, I would imagine you could get, “Well it’s not right for us, but let me give it to so-and-so; they have a little company,” and let them read it and then they might look at it and say, “Hey, we love it—let’s do this.”

CURT | It’s kind of like an ecology—its own ecosystem where work gets passed around and there are things that nurture other things, and it’s not just one monolith, which you can find in some other cities.

yourself.” Sometimes when I’m teaching…I see a student getting very excited about what they just did and you can see people in the room going, “Mm-mm.” And you kind of want to go, “Absolutely, celebrate yourself. Look at our winters; it’s just going to beat the shit out of you and beat out any joy you’ve got left.”

REBECCA | It’s like a Scandinavian mindset.

They actually have a word for it in Swedish, I think, which means you don’t boast, you don’t put yourself forward. I think it is tied to the weather.

AMY | Which is just psychotic if you’re in our business, which is about promoting yourself and putting yourself forward. So there’s a real psychotic nature to the work here, which I think also makes it a little more interesting.

Steppenwolf has a show running now and it’s amazing to me that even with this really bad winter, the house is damn near full.

ZAYD | [The temperature outside during] Rebecca’s opening last week was like negative 11, but it was packed.

CURT | There’s also a “slash” phenomenon here that is much rarer in other places: people who are playwrights/actor, actor/director, director/ playwright. There’s a lot of porousness. Bruce Norris, Tarell McCraney—I can name a dozen Chicago actor/playwrights.

HENRY | I think what’s exciting about actors here is the percentage of the time that they’re on stage. The number of people I know who spend thirty or forty weeks a year on stage in Chicago is way higher than anywhere else that I’ve ever been before. And a lot of them have been on stage for a long time with the other people in the cast. The dynamics that come out of that are so different from what you get used to as a freelance director elsewhere. I feel like you usually end up getting one or two extra weeks of rehearsal without having to be there, because everybody comes in ready to go essentially two weeks in.

KEITH | Tracy Letts.

CURT | That is the advantage of a standing company or ensemble, and here you have this whole city of people who have worked together.

KEITH | I started a company in the ’80s and I was the playwright, the actors were the actors, the director was the director. And then our next show came; what do we do now? We’ve all got to do different things. If we wanted to sustain the company, we had to take on those other roles.

KEITH | My sense with the actors in Chicago is that even if they’re performing at some small venue, they give it their all because audiences and the press support the smaller venues.

CURT | It’s like the Amy Morton quote that I use all the time: “We weren’t going to get rich and we weren’t going to get famous, so we just got good.”

AMY | I also think the work ethic here can be sort of insane. There’s that element of “do not get above your station; do not boast on

REBECCA | Yeah, Regina Taylor.

CURT | Lydia Diamond. It’s unparalleled.

And there are playwright/directors, Mary Zimmerman and more. Is there something here that accounts for that?

AMY | In the early days of the Steppenwolf, it wasn’t that anybody particularly wanted to direct, but if somebody doesn’t direct it, we can’t do it. I’ll do it this time, but you’re doing the next one so I can be in it.

HENRY | I think there’s something healthy about people taking on other roles to make the work keep happening.

CURT | Right, because you’re a theatre artist as opposed to a particular kind of implementer.

AMY | I’ve witnessed this plenty of times that writers or directors have come to Steppenwolf with a project and have been told no for

SHELDON PATINKIN since 1970 | REGINA TAYLOR since 2000 | MARY ZIMMERMAN since 1994

whatever reason, and they hear no from all the established theatres and get no enough and then they just go, “Fuck it, I’ve got to create my own work, so I’ll direct it.” And we’re lucky enough that we live in a town that you actually can do that and not necessarily break the bank.

But then again, it’s always a double-edged sword. Actors aren’t getting paid enough in this town, there’s not enough Equity work, etc.

CURT | In a sense, I’m hearing that the storefront theatres are a great thing and they’re also a liability, which is to say, there’s like 200-plus storefront theatres, and they’re great because of the capacity and the way that it builds an audience for all sorts of stuff.

They’re also a little bit of a liability because they’re financially limited.

REBECCA | You can be super successful as an artist working in black box theatres. You work constantly but you’re not going to make a living from it. You’re going to have to supplement your income with something. I feel like that’s true everywhere for almost everyone, and the difference is that you are working consistently in the theatre while you’re doing your day job.

KEITH | Yeah, remember when Tony Kushner had that article in the New York Times where he said, “I can’t make a living as a playwright.”

ZAYD | Yeah, that was scary.

KEITH | But as a playwright, it actually made you feel okay.

ZAYD | Yeah, he was talking about why he was also doing screenwriting. He was saying the plays themselves don’t— REBECCA | Don’t pay him enough.

KEITH | It was almost like, it’s okay to go do TV and other things.

AMY | Oh yeah, you’ve got to.

CURT | It’s essential at a certain point. Or to do the other stuff that one does, teaching, etc.

KEITH | Teaching is a big “slash” in Chicago.

Almost all the top-tier actors in the city teach somewhere.

CURT | And that originates with St. Nicholas, right?

AMY | I started there when I was 18. It was one of the only schools at that time in town that wasn’t affiliated with a college. It was the only conservatory that I remember.

KEITH | Or Columbia, too, with Sheldon Patinkin.

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AMY | But that was even later. That was later than St. Nicholas. He didn’t become the head of that department until the ’80s. So yeah, that was the first place where you could actually go learn how to act and not be affiliated with a college.

KEITH | And Northwestern. I was in the Ph.D. program in the ’90s. There was nobody there with an MFA. In fact, there was this sort of stigma. I actually had a production and I had to choose between continuing the Ph.D. program or going to do the production because they said, “You need to make a choice; you can’t be a practitioner and a scholar in the program.”

It’s great to see the way that it’s evolved.

ZAYD | I was doing a Ph.D. at Columbia University and dropped it for the same reason—because I wanted to be a writer.

AMY | Doesn’t being a practitioner make you a better scholar?

CURT | Frank Galati [is] the perfect example of the practitioner/scholar who sets a particular tone and then has his students like Mary Zimmerman, Martha Lavey, who are practitioner/scholars as well.

KEITH | But even he had a battle with Northwestern to find a place.

CURT | But there is a tradition here, Keith, to your point of the practitioner/teacher. And that may be a big part of why there’s a constant churn—because you have people teaching new generations.

AMY | When I was young, there was something so exciting about being taught by William Macy and then that night seeing him in the play at St. Nicholas, or Lois Hall, or any of those people that started at St. Nicholas. I mean, that’s a whole different way of doing it than a classroom situation. And it makes you feel like if he can actually do that and I’m watching him practice what he preaches, oh then, oh my God, it’s completely accessible; I can do it.

CURT | And there’s a kind of investment or a porousness between the stage event and the audience and the supporters and the students.

You feel like you can walk up to anyone and say, “Hey, that was a really good show.”

KEITH | I can’t help but think that that gives the people in Chicago an edge. I was telling Jeff that Steppenwolf taught me it’s okay to starve, it’s okay to just hang in for another two, three years, because the critics were coming to the small theatres; they were saying, it’s valued, it’s important. And anything that gives a theatre practitioner another extra year of courage to persist, that increases their chances of success.

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RON | I also think many directors who had achieved a bit invest in their assistants. They’re not assistants that are going to get coffee.

They’re assistants that you’re talking to about what you see, you’re getting feedback, and you’re getting help. That’s the way I look at it. And then they can go on and do their own thing because they learn as you nurture them.

That happened with me with Marion McClinton and Lloyd Richards when I had a class with him in the latter stages of his life.

Some directors don’t even know they do it.

Anna Shapiro did it to me just talking and offering advice.

CURT | How are playwrights nurtured in Chicago differently than other places or perhaps in ways that are the same?

REBECCA | Speaking for myself, there are accessible entry points for playwrights in Chicago. You can go to Chicago Dramatist and meet all the people you need to meet to get a production up, even if you’re doing it yourself.

It’s not like some secret club where you have to apply for membership. My first play here was in Forest Park and my second play was at the Goodman. When you’re talking about that vertical trajectory, it’s like, whoa, all right then.

I think that people at every theatre try to be aware of what’s happening everywhere, and they look for people they want to work with and don’t really worry about whether or not they followed some preset trajectory.

CURT | It’s also important to note, Rebecca, that you went from Forest Park to the Goodman, and then back to Forest Park.

REBECCA | Yeah, absolutely, because I wanted to work with them again!

ZAYD | I would add this about being nurtured here. I was in New York for seven years. Even if things are going well, you maybe have a play produced. And then two seasons later you have a play, and then two seasons after that, maybe…if you’re really lucky. I came here and I had two plays produced in the same season, one at Steppenwolf First Look and one at a small storefront theatre. But there was no sense of waiting your turn for that other play, which was a nice feeling after feeling like there was a line you had to get in, in New York.

REBECCA | There’s an accessibility here. You can meet the people you see on stage, the directors of plays you like. You can introduce yourself and say, “I liked your work” and “Would you talk to me for five minutes?” and they will, generally.

KEITH | I did plays for 30 years before I actually made some money as a playwright. And when I look back I think, Yeah, Chicago really did

support me in a way. If you do a play in New York or LA that is subpar or that the critics deem subpar, there is no permission to fail.

Your friends will run away because you have a stink on you and you have to start all over. This is Lloyd Richards’ thing at the O’Neill. He said, “I want to create a place where it’s okay to fail.”

This whole city is like that. I mean, yeah, we can take a bashing in the press occasionally, but next time it’s a clean slate.

RON | What I found here in Chicago is that you can see the same play produced in several theatres, even around the same time, because there’s so many, and you’ve got such a different audience for each. I would imagine it would help the playwright to see a range of approaches. I do a lot of August Wilson, and one time August said he went to see a production of Ma Rainey and they did things he hadn’t really thought about but they were kind of cool. Granted, he’d seen some where he thought, What the hell are they doing that for?

But in Chicago, small theatres, big theatres, you get an opportunity to have your plays done at different places with different visions.

ZAYD | That’s true. I’ve noticed that in New York it has to be a world premiere or a transfer of something that was a big hit. Here it’s about wanting to do that play at that moment, whether it’s been done a couple of times or never at all.

CURT | Can we talk a little bit about diversity in Chicago? One of the things that is visible to me now from a distance is that there are more women who run theatres here than almost anywhere else in the country. There’s a gender diversity that you don’t find other places. How do you all perceive the diversity of the people who are working in the field right now?

AMY | I think there’s absolutely a gender diversity that I don’t see in other places, which is really great for me. But I don’t know that I see what I would consider a healthy rate of other diversities.

RON | It has improved since I got here. Back then there was not much of anything. Now there are companies like Silk Road and efforts being made, like Steppenwolf for example, diversifying ensemble members. I don’t know if there’s a lot of growth in that area, but there are more theatres doing more plays about other cultures.

There’s also some nontraditional casting happening—not blind casting but really nontraditional casting, where plays are done with different racial makeup but it doesn’t change the sense of the play. I did The Caretaker up at Writers Theatre, and we used two South Asian actors. Some people wondered how we could do that. It was written with two white guys, and for me it didn’t

FRANK GALATI since 1987 | MARION MCCLINTON since 1992 | LLOYD RICHARDS d.2006 | ANNA SHAPIRO since 2001

change the play; it made it deeper as far as what those characters were going through with this racist guy that they’re bringing into their world. [There’s] still a long way to go, but I think more theatres are looking to open up and consider ways to do it where they didn’t before.

AMY | It’s frustrating because I think actors of other cultures will leave because you can’t get enough work here. Just simply as a director, I find it super frustrating that we have eight gazillion theatres in this town, but we can’t keep the Asian actors because there’s not enough work so they keep moving.

ZAYD | I don’t know if it’s Chicago-specific though. I cast a play with Asian roles in New York and it was impossible. We had to fly people in from LA. I think it’s really hard for some people to get enough roles to sustain a career.

RON | With nontraditional casting, sometimes they don’t think of Asian actors. They think nontraditional black and white. But I think more theatres are beginning to consider other ways they could do it. I didn’t go into The Caretaker thinking, Oh I’m going to do it with two South Asian actors. They came in for the audition and opened up.

AMY | That’s the key issue. It’s really important for casting directors and directors and artistic directors to realize there are three guys. You just need three guys. And guys, you need to see them all.

HENRY | There’s a conversation that I feel like is happening nationwide that feels very, very new to me. I’ve only been working here for seven years, but when we cast Animal Crackers nontraditionally, the conversations that felt new to me were not, I don’t think, new here. I do think that as institutions we’re aware that if you aren’t at least thinking that way, you’re going to be called on it.

CURT | Let me ask the two newcomers, Henry and Zayd: is there a new Chicago identity that you feel for yourselves since you moved here?

HENRY | I love New York and before I decided to move here, I thought I was exiting New York in a coffin. I don’t feel like I’ve been here long enough to call myself a Chicago theatre artist, but I do feel like the work I am doing since I moved here is different. And I find that to be exciting and I can’t imagine letting go of that right now.

I had been an assistant in New York for about a decade and I started assisting a lot of Chicago directors, too. I assisted Bob and he basically gave me my first job as a director, which was directing Talking Pictures. The next year I got to do a Marx Brothers adaptation. Speaking

about the diversity of the city, getting to do those two shows in one year made me think that this is the place I want to be.

ZAYD | I agree with all that. I’m just now finishing my first play that I started after getting here, so it would be hard to say whether my aesthetic or my identity had been changed. I do feel like I was welcomed. I had never had a play in Chicago in all my years in New York, and then I got here and right away felt like people were interested that I was here. It’s funny because there’s a family dynamic, which is great on the inside, and you can maybe feel insular if you’re outside of it.

Once I got here, I suddenly felt like I was in a conversation with other artists in a way that was very productive and happy for me.

CURT | Turning that to you guys, Chicago identity now means something completely different because of your national and international careers as directors and playwrights, so is there still something that stays with you, as a Chicago artist?

AMY | You get treated differently.

REBECCA | I don’t know if it’s good or bad.

Sometimes I feel like you’re a Chicago person and it’s like, “Oh, you live out there in the plains.” I’ve been lucky to have a lot of productions in New York, but I don’t know if my Chicago identity has worked for me or against me.

I’ve done here and out there, you get in a conversation with the director sometimes. You tell him you’re a Chicagoan and they know they are going to get something out of me; they think, “He’s probably trained” or “He’s probably done some Chicago theatre.” You feel good about it.

KEITH | I found that Chicago identity as a playwright has helped me in television.

Because LA is full of journeymen writers who may not be rolling up their sleeves and creating anything from scratch, but they have the ability to mimic someone’s voice. It’s really opened a lot of doors, the Chicago credits, because they feel there’s a component that we don’t have on the team. They want to add that to the team.

CURT | There’s definitely a sense out in the world that Chicago has a kind of quality that follows you. And as we’ve been discussing, it’s also that there are these really great networks of people here. When you work here, you’ve basically over time worked with everyone.

So when they’re out being successful, that transfers back. John Logan is a great example of somebody who started at a storefront theatre, then bam, he’s John Logan, and he continues to give back to Chicago in so many ways. There’s a sense that it all stays connected somehow, and I think that’s a really good thing.

RON | Love Chicago; that’s all I can say.

I was really surprised when my playwright friends in New York started telling me how hard they feel it is to break into Chicago.

Maybe we all have that same perception. And I think the New York playwrights are right. I don’t know what it is for us necessarily, but I have found that I’ve been handing plays to artistic directors for my New York playwright friends and they’ll say, “Thank you for getting me in the door.” Because maybe they feel like we’re more protective of our own or something.

HENRY | It makes sense in a way. Chicago artists don’t want to be importing all their work from New York. But when you’re in New York, you feel like, “But I could get along with you guys.”

RON | I think there’s respect, though. When I was in LA, a couple of times a few of the actors who auditioned said, “We Googled you and saw Steppenwolf on there.” So it added some respect.

AMY | When I started going to LA in the early ’90s, they’d look at your résumé and go, “Oh, Chicago—you’re a real actor.” You’d get looked at a little differently.

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RACHEL CHAVKIN is a director, and founding Artistic Director of the TEAM (www.theteamplays.org), a Brooklynbased devising ensemble whose work was just ranked Top Ten 2013 on three continents, and whose collaborative process was the subject of a featurelength documentary. Recent Credits: Dave Malloy’s Natasha, Pierre, and the Great Comet of 1812 (Kazino— commercial transfer; World Premiere: Ars Nova; New York Times, Time Out New York, and New York Post Top Ten 2012 and 2013; Drama Desk Nomination, Best Direction, 2012 Obie Award); the TEAM’s Mission Drift (sold out June 2013 at London’s National Theatre, co-produced by New York’s PS122, Lisbon’s Culturgest, and London’s Almeida Theatre, with music composed by Heather Christian); Meg Miroshnik’s The Fairytale Lives of Russian Girls (Yale Rep, Feb. 2014); collaborations with playwright/ performer/activist Taylor Mac including Judy’s extravaganza The Lily’s Revenge (world premiere, Act II, HERE Arts Center, 2010 Obie Award).

B.F.A. NYU, M.F.A. Columbia.

ROBERT O’HARA (Writer/Director) received the NAACP Best Director Award for his direction of Eclipsed by Danai Guria. He received the Helen Hayes Award for Outstanding New Play for Antebellum and an OBIE Award for his direction of the world premiere of the critically acclaimed In the Continuum. He wrote and directed the world premiere of Insurrection: Holding History (The Public Theater, Oppenheimer Award).

He directed the world premiere of Tarell McCraney’s Brother/Sister Plays (Part 2) co-production at McCarter Theatre/ New York Shakespeare Festival. His recent work includes directing his play BootyCandy (Wilma Theater) and the world premiere of Colman Domingo’s Wild with Happy (The Public Theater) and Katori Hall’s The Mountaintop (Alley Theater and Arena Stage). He is currently an adjunct professor at NYU/TISCH School of the Arts and the Mellon Playwright in Residence at Woolly Mammoth Theater.

Rachel Chavkin

Robert O’Hara

God’s Ear by Jenny Schwartz

Angels in America by Tony Kushner

I chose Jenny Schwartz’s God’s Ear. This is a play I’ve admired for years, after seeing Anne Kauffman’s extraordinary production in 2008. It’s honestly one of those productions that sticks in your mind and makes you think you may not need to direct it in your lifetime. But I began teaching with it in my second-year directing classes at NYU. And you see so many interpretations that it begins to awaken your own interpretive brain, and I continue to think about it regularly.

I chose Angels in America not only because it’s one of the greatest plays ever written but personally it helped me to find and own my voice as an artist. I was a graduate student at Columbia when I was handed a manuscript of this play through back channels I don’t quite remember, and although it was only the first part, I can remember lying in my bed and reading it straight through and weeping at the end. The play felt like my brain. It told me that not only wasn’t I alone in thinking that profundity could be found in outrageous humor but that the idea of a gay fantasia was possible. Six hours of riveting theatre was possible. This playwright was so very much alive. It was beyond magical realism; it was raw and dirty. It was messy and overwhelming. It did not apologize for its arrogance. It demanded space and time. Those were the tenets of my own writing and directing, and it is the yellow brick road that I am still following. At the time of its production I was taking a graduate seminar with the late Gerald Schoenfeld and Bernard Jacobs. They could not stop talking about Tony or the play. Ian McKellen announced its arrival at the Tony Awards. It was the play of the decade before anyone saw it, and I had the rare pleasure of having the director of its Broadway production become my mentor, George C. Wolfe.

Angels in America was a play whose entire history was a classroom to me, a textbook on what modern theatre had become. No one else on earth could have written Angels. It has a singular voice. It was not trying to be like anything other than what it was. To this day, it is the single greatest compliment when someone tells me of my own work, no one else could have done this but you. Angels helped me to embrace my own singularity. Angels in America demands “more life”… and to me, so does the stage.

I was blown away by the simultaneous delicacy and muscularity of the language. The play opens with a mother worrying over what word the doctor used to describe her son’s condition: was it “crucial” or “critical”?

It is a situation where words fail entirely. The death of a child. And yet we live in a society that is not equipped to discuss death. We have truisms. Pills. Manuals for healing, and diversions in the meantime. All the products of an effective capitalist society. But this play deals with one of the few instances that lays our high-functioning society low.

What sets this play apart, for me, from several others that have dealt with similar given circumstances is Schwartz’s handling of language and time. God’s Ear is thoroughly nonlinear—characters are caught in loops and variations—and very often the only language they have to communicate are slogans from inspirational posters or adverts. It’s emotionally realistic without needing to be formally so. The husband and wife speak across this chasm of hurt and anger, and draw their words from Hallmark cards. The daughter asks sweetly about her brother, because that’s what happens in Lifetime movies. And yet what makes the play so extraordinary is that the characters begin to chafe at the tools which society has given them to wrestle with this un-wrestleable sorrow. Their language breaks down. Mothers don’t always want to see their daughters. Fathers don’t always know more than their daughters. And relationships may or may not recover from the suddenly absent foundation upon which they were built.

The characters are exposed and emotionally volatile in ways I rarely see. The actress hands her heart to her scenemate on a platter, and then revokes it like embarrassing leftovers in the next sentence. That’s an exciting challenge for me as a director. And what I loved so much about the 2008 production was that it met this level of exposure with no sentimentality. Nothing was coated. It was as naked as the play’s language.

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This article, and others on similar topics, appears in the May/June issue of The Dramatist, the official journal of the Dramatists Guild of America, Inc. DRAMATISTSGUILD.COM

RACHEL CHAVKIN since 2010 | ANNE KAUFFMAN since 2005 | ROBERT O’HARA since 2005 | GEORGE C. WOLFE since 1984

DÁMASO RODRIGUEZ is in his second year as Artistic Director of Artists Repertory Theatre, Portland’s longestrunning professional theatre. He is a Co-Founder of the Los Angeles–based Furious Theatre, where he served as CoArtistic Director from 2001 to 2012. From 2007 to 2010 he served as Associate Artistic Director of the Pasadena Playhouse. His directing credits include work for the Pasadena Playhouse, Intiman Theatre, South Coast Repertory, Laguna Playhouse, A Noise Within, The Theatre@Boston Court, Naked Angels, and Furious Theatre. Dámaso is a recipient of the Los Angeles Drama Critics Circle Award, the Back Stage Garland Award, the NAACP Theatre Award, and the Pasadena Arts Council’s Gold Crown Award. Upcoming productions: J.M. Synge’s The Playboy of the Western World, Carlos Lacamara’s Exiles, Nina Raine’s Tribes, and Amy Herzog’s 4000 Miles. In 2012, he was honored as a finalist for the Zelda Fichandler Award. He is a proud member of SDC since 2007.

JOANIE SCHULTZ is a Chicago-based freelance director. This season in Chicago she is directing Venus in Fur at the Goodman Theatre; Northanger Abbey for Remy Bumppo Theatre; and A Small Fire at Steep Theatre. Recent work includes The Whale at Victory Gardens; fml: How Carson McCullers Saved My Life at Steppenwolf for Young Adults; Ask Aunt Susan at the Goodman Theatre; The Girl in the Yellow Dress at Next Theatre; The Kid Thing for About Face Theatre and Chicago Dramatists; Neighborhood 3 at Strawdog Theatre; and Luther at Steep Theatre. She has also directed operas including Der Kaiser von Atlantis, Acis and Galatea, and Carmen. Joanie holds an MFA in directing from Northwestern University; was a Drama League Fellow; The Goodman Theatre’s Michael Maggio Directing Fellow; the SDCF Denham Fellow; a Lincoln Center Theater Directors Lab participant; and was 2013 Co-Artistic Curator for Theater on the Lake.

' Damaso Rodriguez

Joanie Schultz

The Skin of Our Teeth

by Thornton Wilder

Body Awareness by Annie Baker

My answer to this, or some similar question, is always Thornton Wilder’s The Skin of Our Teeth. I love this play wholeheartedly, and despite a dozen years or so in positions at theatres where I have had either full control or some input affecting programming choices, the play evades me. The cast is too large or the design needs too demanding. Its status as “classic” and Pulitzer winner hasn’t prevented it from being considered not familiar enough to general audiences to be anything less than a big, bold box office risk. Part of the problem is that I won’t accept just any production; I want to live up to Wilder’s extraordinary, relentlessly relevant vision. The play is so important that it deserves everything Mr. Wilder asks of producers and directors. His characters exist “every time” and “everywhere,” and his play has the power to capture (and relieve!) the anxiety of any community in any moment. No matter how many times I consider the play, I am left in awe of Wilder’s audacity, and his innovation. The play was ahead of its time in its 1942 debut, and ahead it remains. As in Our Town, he continues to break the fourth wall, to call attention to the fact that we are seeing a play, but in The Skin of Our Teeth he establishes characters, tone, setting, and style, and then changes each on a dime again and again. “Which kind of play is this, and where will it take me next?” audience members might ask, as if plays need be one particular kind or conform to a recognizable structure. I find that audiences can still be uncomfortable when playwrights break rules, especially in one evening of theatre, let alone mid-act. In The Skin of Our Teeth, Wilder keeps us—his audience, like Mr. and Mrs. Antrobus—uncertain, on edge, and in doing so, unites us.

There are a lot of things I love about the theatre, but when I analyze what it is that always draws me in most, it is the joy of watching people.

I joke that I’m a professional voyeur, but in all seriousness, I think that watching well-written full characters collide with each other creates an empathetic experience that can be life changing. Because of this core belief, it’s probably not a surprise that I am a huge fan of Annie Baker’s work, which I was first introduced to by her beautiful play Body Awareness. She focuses this play on four characters: a college professor, her lesbian partner, her partner’s early-twenties son, who probably has Asperger’s, and a man who has made a successful artistic career out of taking photos of naked women. All of these characters, while at first they might sound cliché, are extremely complex and believable. And the desires and values of each character butting up against each other create the seemingly effortless conflict of the play. Body Awareness has a simple plot: the college professor has carefully planned out “body awareness week” on her liberal-arts college campus, and she and her partner and son house an artist whose values challenge their notions of feminism, masculinity, and empowerment. But in this deceptively straightforward story of one week in these people’s lives, each of the four characters goes on a transformative journey. And on the way, their interactions are hilarious, surprising, and incredibly moving. Upon my first encounter with this play, I was shocked by how it challenged some of my core values and planted questions in my head that continue to stick with me about artistic intent, personal responsibility, and living your ideology. The economy of plot creates a taut play in which nothing is superfluous, and the effect is that it highlights the complexity of the issues that it raises, which creates this lasting impact. I admire this play because it is so simple yet not simplistic, and while it creates a replete reality, she leaves a lot of room for her collaborators—the actors, designers, and director—to meet her halfway and fill in the intentional blanks and breathe life into her beautifully sculpted text.

Directors on Writers Which play, that you have not directed, do you admire and why?

DÁMASO RODRIGUEZ since 2007 | JOANIE SCHULTZ since 2012

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LYDIA DIAMOND’s plays include: Smart People, Voyeurs de Venus, Stick Fly, The Bluest Eye, The Gift Horse, and Harriet Jacobs. Theatres include: Arden, Arena Stage, Chicago Dramatists, Company One, Congo Square, Cort Theatre (Broadway), Goodman, Hartford Stage, Huntington, McCarter, MPAACT, Steppenwolf, and Underground Railway.

Lydia has had some fellowships and has won some awards.

ADAM GWON is a composer/lyricist whose musicals Ordinary Days, The Boy Detective Fails, and Cloudlands have been produced at Roundabout, Signature Theatre, South Coast Repertory, London’s West End, and more. www.adamgwon.com

Adam Gwon

Lydia Diamond Beneatha’s Place dir. by Derrick Sanders Last year I had the pleasure of seeing Kwame Kwei-Armah’s Beneatha’s Place at the Center Stage Theater in Baltimore, where he is also Artistic Director. It was a great evening at the theatre. I found the play so beautifully written and well executed that I left the theatre just giddy with it.

When good actors spit out witty, elegant dialogue that lives in concert with important ideas, it’s invigorating. And then throw in a well-appointed room full of beautifully attired black folks, and I’m in heaven. In full disclosure, I’d been a fan of the script through several iterations prior to having seen this production, and am a fan and colleague of its director, Derrick Sanders (whose deft staging, keen ear for dialogue, and understanding of new work showcased the play beautifully). So I had a great deal of personal investment in wanting it to be good (but you know how one’s own well-meaning, overly critical eye can skew a colleague’s play toward…“It was great, but I’ve seen her/him do better…” or whatever…?). I thought it was a great theatrical achievement, despite its having been written by someone whose work I like.

Here’s a blurb snatched from Center Stage’s website: “Inspired by Bruce Norris’s use of…Karl from A Raisin in the Sun, Beneatha’s Place picks up the story of Beneatha Younger [following her] from Nigeria to California and 1959 to today. Beneatha’s Place explores the power of identity as one woman confronts the fundamental questions of community and legacy.”

It’s Beneatha! I’m one of the legions of black women who auditioned with the monologue about the boy sledding and the gash down the center of his face…and so she would be a doctor, and so I could be an actor…or writer…and who didn’t wonder what a life with Asagai might look like?

Kwame’s well-articulated desire to be in conversation with Bruce Norris’s Clybourne Park was a conversation I’d been craving to see play out through the making of good art rather than just through cleverly crafted, premeditated sound bites, snarky online debates, and snatches of lobby and green room conversations. But then he produced both, in rep, in his first planned season…and that’s just audacious. And I think audacious is where art wants to live.

It sounds like a lot of preamble, but it’s not. It actually lives at the center of my admiration for the play and the production—how the political, and the impetus for the creation of the work, is bolstered by its aesthetic and artistic achievement. But that’s backwards…more precisely what I want to say is that there should be a much-needed shift in this paradigm…that the work itself can and should be the vehicle for the conversation. And I don’t credit Mr. Kwei-Armah with inventing this. Most of us do this every time we put pen to paper. Our work is almost always a reaction to our world, be it a provocative charge or an intimate exploration of character.

But the straightforward way in which this writer set out to do it, said he would do it, and then did it artfully, challenges and inspires me. (If the play itself had sucked, it would all have been disappointing bluster. And that would have just been embarrassing. And may even have pissed me off a little. So phew.)

A View from the Bridge dir. by Michael Mayer One of the first Broadway shows I ever saw was Michael Mayer’s revival of A View from the Bridge. There was a moment from that production that has stuck with me—when Eddie, the tragic figure at the center of the show, finally makes his fatal misstep and reports his niece’s boyfriend to the Immigration Bureau. The entire stage went black, except for a tight pin spot on Eddie’s face as he picked up the phone and spoke his damning words into the receiver. It was a total shock—the visual of that huge proscenium suddenly transformed into a black hole, this man imploding at its center. I could actually feel the gravity it created. It tugged me to the edge of my seat.

I remember that moment all these years later, not only because of the sheer theatrical adrenaline rush of it, but also because it was when I realized, for the first time, what it is great directors do. Using the unique language of the stage, they translate the events of a play into an experience that the audience can actually feel. They can make the events that happen on stage both surprising and true.

They create moments I remember not only in my brain, but in my bones.

Writers on Directors Which production, by a director that you have not worked with, do you admire and why?

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DRAMATIST | SPRING 2014

KWAME KWEI-ARMAH since 2012 | MICHAEL MAYER since 1992 | DERRICK SANDERS since 2006

LAUREN YEE’s plays include Ching Chong Chinaman (Pan Asian Rep, Mu Performing Arts), Crevice (Impact Theatre), The Hatmaker’s Wife (Playwrights Realm, PlayPenn), Hookman (Company One, Magic Theatre, Rattlestick workshops), Samsara (O’Neill Conference, Bay Area Playwrights Festival, upcoming at Victory Gardens), The Tiger Among Us (MAP Fund, Mu).

Commissions: Goodman Theatre, Lincoln Center/LCT3, Mixed Blood, Encore Theatre. BA: Yale. MFA: UCSD.

CRAIG LUCAS wrote and directed Ode to Joy at Rattlestick, the movie The Dying Gaul, and the world premiere of The Light in the Piazza (score by Adam Guettel). He won an Obie for directing Harry Kondoleon’s Saved or Destroyed. Other works include Blue Window, Reckless, Prelude to a Kiss, The Secret Lives of Dentists, Longtime Companion, and Small Tragedy.

Craig Lucas

Lauren Yee

Mad Forest dir. by Mark Wing-Davey

Blood Play dir. by Oliver Butler

Mark Wing-Davey’s New York production of Caryl Churchill’s Mad Forest remains with me as an exemplar of what a director can do to deliver the world and experience of a new play without imposing his ego on the narrative. Much contemporary theatre advertises the auteur status of the director. When I can’t see that evidence in a production of a new play, I know I am in the presence of a fine as well as humble (or ethical) artist. Mad Forest works as a series of rather brief scenes—some more realistic than others—in which the state of a nation in profound flux is communicated through action—people doing things to other people. It isn’t about the talk; it is about the behavior. It is significant to me that I can’t remember a lot of detail about the physical production, but the characters and their actions remain indelible. Count Dracula and his dog, bound together in cruel mastery and servitude! Waiting in line endlessly to buy meat. Christopher Akerlind’s lighting design did the bulk of the work in setting the scene, along with the sparseness of the set design by Marina Draghici. I could locate no photos by Googling the production, not even on the website for New York Theatre Workshop.

No matter. I remember every detail that matters to me today. That’s the miracle of theatre. It lives in the present moment and then in the mind in a later (also present) moment. That’s the true record of a theatrical event—living humans. Once the witnesses are gone, the production goes. Only those lucky ones who saw Laurette Taylor in The Glass Menagerie own that performance today. No video or photograph or description can match or recapture it. It must be experienced. Preferably without expectations or preconceived notions about the artists and the work at hand. By emptying the mind and heart, we can perhaps receive it. Anything short of that is some manner of shopping or gossiping, two delightful activities that numb the heart and deaden synapses. My husband showed me this quote from the Dalai Lama: “The planet does not need more successful people. The planet desperately needs more peacemakers, healers, restorers, storytellers, and lovers.” Plays and productions that fall under the penumbra of such a wise perspective are the ones that last for me. Mad Forest left me feeling more human, horizons expanded. It was the antidote to a news item: lived experience.

“There are two rules of theatre: 1. Get interest. 2. Maintain or increase said interest.” These words were never truer than when I saw Blood Play by the Debate Society (co-creators Hannah Bos, Oliver Butler, and Paul Thureen) when it appeared as part of the Public Theater’s Under the Radar Festival in 2013.

This article, and others on similar topics, appears in the May/June issue of The Dramatist, the official journal of the Dramatists Guild of America, Inc.

We playwrights are constantly being told to define our protagonist’s objective early on so an audience might be able to follow the story as soon as possible. I’ve even run into readers who refuse to continue with a play if they can’t tell “what’s going on” within the first five pages. Yet Blood Play refuses to adhere to this unofficial rule, and demonstrates that an elusive storyline with no easy, early “What is this about?” explanation can be utterly engaging—and ultimately much more rewarding.

Focusing on a pair of couples over the course of an evening in the 1950s Chicago suburbs, Blood Play keeps the audience in the dark for most of the play. Not until the perspective and scenery shifts quite late in the play do we realize what we have been witness to. Like the two couples in Blood Play, we spend most of the performance searching for clues amid the seemingly frivolous party games and cocktails as an undercurrent of uneasiness runs below. What will become important as the evening wears on? The intimate moment of dance between housewives Bev and Gail? Jeep’s awkward admission that, “Oh, I don’t have a girl”? Thanks to director Oliver Butler’s keen eye for detail and truthful performances from all the actors, I felt in good hands, happy to remain in the dark.

In the final 10 minutes of the play, I enjoyed one of the most thrilling set changes I’ve ever seen. The knotty pine den that we’ve spent the entire evening in is subsumed by a completely new set. A life-sized version of a backyard that we’ve only seen in miniature thus far thrusts forward unexpectedly. The set change parallels our story’s change in perspective as what we thought was important becomes swallowed up and reframed by the real storyline. The play doesn’t shine a light on what we’re looking at until late in the piece; instead, it chooses to charm the audience into going along with the story until we stumble onto the real problem, in this way reconsidering the audience experience.

Blood Play almost seems a response to the third act of Our Town, but this time making us nostalgic for these characters even before we know why or how their delicately built world is in peril. It is not until the end that we clearly see it as an examination of ordinary life moments before tragedy.

DRAMATISTSGUILD.COM

OLIVER BUTLER since 2013 | CRAIG LUCAS since 2002 | MARK WING-DAVEY since 1992

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INTERVIEW BY

DAVID ESBJORNSON

It’s All in the

Details

Tales by Director/Designer

TONY WALTON

On a cold January day in the New York office of SDC, director David Esbjornson sat down with veteran director and designer Tony Walton to explore his colorful career and to discuss the intersection of design and direction. In 1957, Walton, who was born in Surrey, England, began his nearly six-decade-long career designing sets and costumes, going on to receive 16 Tony nominations and win three Tony Awards. The following is an excerpt of their conversation.

DAVID ESBJORNSON | Tony, you’ve had a fabulous career as both a designer and director, and combined director/designer. You live and work frequently in New York and the States, but were born in England. When did you first come to America, and why have you chosen to make your career here?

TONY WALTON | While I was doing my two years of compulsory military service—much of it in Canada—whenever there was a leave of any length, I would zap down to New York.

It was the height of the Kazan/Williams/Miller period, and it was completely flabbergasting.

Probably Kazan, more than anybody, was the reason I wanted to move here because there was nothing faintly like his work in England.

Simultaneously, the designers were going nuts; they were getting more and more poetic. Boris Aronson, my idol, was doing things that looked as if they were done by different designers; but then there was something that made you think, “No, that could only be Boris.” But each thing he did at that time was totally different.

DAVID | Because he would take each project on its own merits.

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TONY | Yes. He used to say you have to start every project “as if you are a baby.” All the designers from that time had a very strong visual signature, but Boris’s approach to each production was literally starting as if he had learned nothing. There were never any overlapping techniques or stylistic things from production to production of which you could say, “Oh, that’s a Boris thing.” That became my dream: to come up with something that really only belongs to this particular production, that you can’t quite imagine functioning for any other piece. Of course, Jo Mielziner was also my god. Guys and Dolls was the first thing of his that I saw.

DAVID | Were you already a designer at that point?

TONY | No, I was just a teenager then. I saw it in London when it came over. It was actually my first unaccompanied date with Julie Andrews. I was probably 15 or 16, and she was a year younger.

DAVID | You were really young when you started working.

TONY | Yes, and amazingly lucky. On my very first production, astoundingly, I was working with Noël Coward on a revival of his musical Conversation Piece. And that came about simply because the guy sitting next to me at the union exam was set to design the show, but when he didn’t pass the exam, he recommended this young Brit designer— identified then simply as “Number 87” in the examination roll—to his producers.

DAVID | It’s amazing how something so incidental can change everything.

TONY | Yes. When I first got to America, I arrived literally two or three days after the exam had just happened, so I missed it and had to wait another year to get the chance to take it. I didn’t even know the union existed then. I just came over originally to join Julie, not knowing if I would stay. Then I got a job through Andy Warhol, who was not yet “Andy Warhol.” He was doing the shoe illustrations for the Miller and Bonwit Teller catalogues and he was a close friend of the designer for the Gary Moore TV show, Charles Lisanby, who I knew through Julie’s several performances

JULIE ANDREWS since 2005 | NOËL COWARD d.1967 | DAVID ESBJORNSON since 1987 | ELIA KAZAN d.2003 | TONY WALTON since 2004

CONVERSATION PIECE

Walton’s design for the parade scene in Conversation Piece by Noël Coward.

BARBIZON PLAZA THEATRE, NEW YORK | 1957

on that program. Charles introduced me to Andy, who introduced me to Vogue, for whom he occasionally did intriguing little blotty illustrations. I was lucky enough to do caricatures for Vogue and other magazines that first year while waiting to take the union exam.

DAVID | Your renderings are just beautiful.

They’re works of art.

TONY | Well, you’re beyond a gent. Thank you.

DAVID | Did I read that you once worked for Playbill?

TONY | Yes, I used to do all the graphics and covers for Playbill in the late ’50s. At the time they had new covers every month and gold covers on opening nights. For the opening night of the original Long Day’s Journey into Night—when I was already a Playbill employee—I’d done a caricature of the whole cast and the producers, and I was lucky enough to be invited to the opening and was sitting there in a state of excitement; but the curtain didn’t go up. And it didn’t go up, and it didn’t go up. Then suddenly all the ushers came around amidst the audience and took our gold programs back, saying they had just discovered that the gold on the covers was not quite dry and they didn’t want to risk any lawsuits over stained evening clothes. It turned out that Florence Eldridge, Fredric March’s wife, who was playing the mother, objected to the way I had drawn her nose and wasn’t going to go on stage until they literally removed every Playbill from the theatre.

DAVID | So it actually had nothing to do with the printing of the gold cover?

TONY | Nothing! I called up the great Al Hirschfeld—who I had run into occasionally during the previews of various productions— and said, “What do you do in a case like this?”

And he said, “Well, luckily enough, it has hardly ever happened to me.” And of course his caricatures were so graceful and beautiful that there was no way one could object to them.

He said the only exception he remembered had been Allen Funt. CBS was doing their annual publication about their upcoming programming, and Al had done a drawing of Candid Camera [host] Allen Funt, as a result of which he’d received a call from the CBS honcho, Fred Friendly, saying, “Allen is really upset by this caricature and wonders if you would consider doing another one?” And Al said, “Why? Why is he upset?” Apparently—as it turned out—Allen Funt was on the line too, and Al was not aware of this until he chimed in, “Because you’ve made me look like a fucking monkey.” And Al said, “Well, Allen, that was actually not really my doing. That was God’s.”

Al was such a charming and witty guy. For me there was no way of achieving his kind of grace or talent, which is one of the reasons I stopped doing caricatures.

lighting designer. He worked with Orson Welles during the amazing Mercury Theatre days and later did My Fair Lady. Julie was Eliza, of course, and Abe was always at the theatre.

He couldn’t let it go. The show was a love object for him. He’d turn up not just to check his work on the show, but to remain part of the production’s family, so he was frequently backstage. Julie had stuck a couple of my things on her dressing room walls and Abe was very responsive to them. He said something like, “You’re a painter of light, and just the kind of chap we need.” That was lovely. I think I’ve slightly modeled myself after him in some ways.

DAVID | What was your first Broadway musical?

TONY | A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum.

PLAYBILL

Caricature of Laurence Olivier in John Osborne’s The Entertainer.

1958

DAVID | One of your first professional encounters as a designer was with Abe Feder, right?

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DAVID | Describe that experience.

TONY | It was amazing. It had everything you could ever expect to run into during a Broadway adventure. Hal Prince and I were on the same bowling team, along with Anthony Perkins and, sometimes, Steve Sondheim. To my astonishment, Hal had seen a couple of things I’d done in London and Off-Broadway, and he asked me if I’d be interested in designing Forum, which he was about to produce. He said, “You need to sort of audition for Jerry Robbins, who’s going to be directing it.” I said fine. So I took my portfolio to the final run-through of Robbins’ Ballets: USA. I can’t even begin to describe to you how nervous I was. His work was so overwhelming. Plus it was in a tight rehearsal space, so you could smell the sweat. You were somehow all in it together. By the time he came up to me at the end of it, I was literally breathless and unable to speak. I had to write my answers. Then he asked to see what I had brought. Amongst other things I had the costume designs for Sam Spewack’s Once There Was a Russian, my Broadway debut. He seemed interested and asked very apropos questions: “These stripes in your design for this dress have a kind of liquid quality. How did you achieve that?” That was very encouraging because it was clear that he wasn’t just a beyond-the-horizon, unreachable genius, but he was nuts-and-bolts smart as well.

DAVID | Really perceptive.

TONY | Well, I got the job, and it was a fascinating process because despite the fact that Jerry knew the nuts and bolts, that’s not where he started. He started from: what is the nature of this creature and what kind of weather do you feel it’s in? Things like that.

Then suddenly he was gone. Ballets: USA had opened at the Italian Spoleto and was a huge success; he and his company were suddenly booked to tour all over the world and he felt he needed to be a part of the tour. Hal was still sharing office space with George Abbott, so he said to him, “Would you pick up the pieces?”

DAVID | Had you worked with George before?

TONY | Never. I was taken to meet George at his sort of Japanese summer home in Connecticut or upstate New York. It was very daunting. He seemed nine feet tall, a very erect 70-something-year-old. Younger than I am now, but at that time I thought I would never again work with anyone quite that old! When he was invited to the opening of the revival of his Damn Yankees, he was 107 admitting to 105. Still charmingly lying about his age.

He left his walker at the back of the Marriott Marquis auditorium, which has “continental” seating with no center aisle. The producers wanted him to be front and center. So there

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he was, at intermission, trapped in the middle of the third row, with all the closed circuit TV interviewers and journalists crowded around him. The first guy, Richie Rich, I think, said, “Mr. Abbott, I was just reading your bio in the playbill here. It’s just flabbergasting. I mean, what you must have seen over the extraordinary period of time since you started out. What do you think is the biggest change that’s happened in the theatre during your lifetime?” And George said, “Oh, er...electricity, I think.” And, of course, he wasn’t joking!

wonder whether—when you were reading the show the first time or listening to the music they sent you—if any imagery arose in your imagination.” He said, “Oddly enough, I’ve had an extraordinarily powerful image since I first got interested in the show.” And—as I said to myself “Hallelujah!”—he continued, “I see this willowy, rather tall, gorgeous, maybe black, maybe Asian girl with long, wavy, pale blue pubic hair.”

DAVID | Ha!

TONY | And that is the last whiskey sour I’ve ever ordered. But I actually did incorporate the idea into my costuming for the show. For the gorgeous girl who played Vibrata I made a sort of ancient Roman Olympic Games bikini, and I made the bikini bottom and her wig out of pale blue and lilac chainette fringe.

TONY | He was the polar opposite of Jerome Robbins in terms of how he worked. It was very challenging because during my first meeting, after he’d said, “Okay, let’s do it,” I asked, “What do you prefer? Do you prefer sketches or a model?” And he said, “You just do whatever you’re comfortable doing. The thing is, I won’t be here for it.”

I didn’t know what he was saying exactly. “I’m going to Florida on vacation,” he said. So I said, “Well, could I send you some stuff?” He said, “No, I’m going to be on my vacation.” I suggested maybe Hal could fly me down, just one quick trip to show him the things I had done. He said, “Are you not listening to me?

I’ll see it on the first day of rehearsal when everybody else does. It’ll be good for me. I like some levels and quite a few entrances.” And that was it.

I phoned Hal in a semi-panic and said, “What do I do?” And he said, “You know, George told me to keep an eye on you and to help as much as I can, but I have no idea what to say. I don’t really have a bead on how he’ll approach this show, but we have a piece of luck. When Robbins left, we not only had to get a new director, George, we had to get a new choreographer as well, and Jack Cole has just decided to come in and meet with the boys: Sondheim, Shevelove, and Gelbart.

He’s going to be at the Algonquin Hotel this evening; maybe you can give him a call. He might have an idea or two.” So I phoned up the hotel and Cole was just checking in. They gave him the phone right away; so I explained my predicament, and he said, “Oh, well no, I haven’t thought about it a great deal, but I look forward to meeting with you. Come to the bar in about half an hour. I’ll unpack and be back down.” So I went to the bar at the allotted time and there he was, sitting in a brightorange choli and dhoti—full Indian garb— among all the usual bar regulars in gray suits.

DAVID | Any alarm bells go off?

TONY | Yes, very much so, although I was thrilled to meet him. I remember that I ordered a whiskey sour. He said, “I know George Abbott well. I’ll help in any way I can.” I said, “I

DAVID | Well, that’s useful!!!

DAVID | So you did use his idea?

TONY | I did. Jack Cole was an astounding genius who was one of those folks who had trouble finishing anything. He seemingly thought, “If I finish it, I’ll be dead.” But he created these amazing dance sequences and then, like a half a minute before the end, they would peter out and the poor dancers would just stand there awkwardly with nothing to do.

In our opening out of town in New Haven that was really calamitous.

At that time, the show opened with a song called “Love Is in the Air,” which is a very sweet, relaxed “soft-shoe.” It didn’t survive in the show but it was Abbott’s favorite song. At Steve’s behest, Jerome Robbins came back in and somehow pulled off a miracle. Amongst many other things, he said, “You can’t start with such an inviting song and then go into baggy pants, broad, kick-ass humor. You’ve got to begin with something that prepares the audience for what they’re in for.” He asked Steve, “Did you ever consider anything else for the opening number?” And Sondheim said, “Yes, I had an ‘invocation to the Gods,’ which bade the audience welcome and said ‘We’re proud to present a comedy tonight.’” Robbins leapt at this, and improvised something along the lines of: “It’s nothing with kings; it’s nothing with crowns; it’s something with lovers, liars, and clowns.” Sondheim, of course, immediately built brilliantly on this and the resulting song, “Comedy Tonight,” went a long way toward turning the show around.

When Steve pleaded with Hal to have Robbins brought back in, Hal said, “How do we do that?

We have Zero Mostel, and other people in the show, who he named at the McCarthy HUAC hearings!” But then Hal called Zero and asked, “What would you say to our bringing Robbins back in?” And Zero said, “Well, Hal, we of the Left do not blacklist. We don’t have to eat with him, do we?”

GEORGE ABBOTT d.1995 | HAL PRINCE since 1963 | JEROME ROBBINS d.1998

“

Tony Walton is the perfect collaborator. He’s designed over a million shows for me and every one has been perfect. We would sit together and try to figure out what the story was and how to best tell it, and we would do that until we figured it out. Tony would always encourage me to think boldly. His incredible talent is exceeded only by his dedication to telling a good story well.”

- Jerry Zaks

A FUNNY THING. . .

Walton’s costume design for Myrna White as the courtesan Vibrata in A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum.

She wore a pale-blue fringe wig + bikini.

ALVIN THEATRE, NEW YORK | 1962

We were all lined up on stage in the National Theatre in Washington, when Robbins came in and headed down the line, saying graceful hellos to everybody. And anyone who was getting one of these inviting hellos immediately thought, “I’m about to be replaced.” It was a strangely dark moment.

Then Jerry gets to Zero and puts out his hand, and Zero says, “Hiya, loose lips!” Everybody, including Robbins, cracked up and that was it.

The air was cleared. Robbins’ readjustments to the show literally changed it overnight from a funny—but flailing—musical into a smash.

The point of all this is that the audience needs to learn what the particular creature that they’re about to be introduced to is. You can’t suddenly change gears at the top of the show. I was surprised when I asked if there were things he’d like to change in the set or costumes and Jerry answered, “You know, I just wonder whether the comedy/tragedy busts that you have on Senex’s portico aren’t giving the audience a tip-off that this is a comedy?

I think we should lose them.” I said, “But isn’t that a contradiction with your push for Steve to create ‘Comedy Tonight?’” He paused for a moment and then said, “What can I tell you?” I guess that’s genius.

DAVID | When you work with actors like Zero Mostel on a piece that is so vaudevillian, does that inform the clothing?

TONY | Absolutely. I was lucky to have spent chunks of my teenage life following Julie around the vaudeville houses. In England, vaudeville is called music hall. She was, from a very young age, a big star in music hall. From that she segued into musical comedies and pantomimes, before being brought to America for The Boy Friend. So, luckily her vaudevillian life was a life I had grown to know really well.

DAVID | That’s very interesting because a few years ago, when I directed The Entertainer, I tried to do some research in London and so much of the documentation about the music hall period was erased by the war. There aren’t really a lot of records left, so having a personal memory and relationship to that genre would be pretty useful.

TONY | Yes. I looked at all the research material I could for Forum, but ironically there was an accident that turned out to be especially useful. Sometime before rehearsals, Zero, unbeknownst to most of us, had been knocked down by a bus and towed along for a couple of blocks, and one leg was badly mangled—it looked like raw hamburger—so, naturally, barelimbed slave attire was out of the question.

In my Roman sculptural research, I had found images of Roman clowns in what appeared to be loosely woven, baggy pants outfits. So I designed baggy long johns for all our clowns made out of loosely knitted mohair, the fluff

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BOB FOSSE d.1987 | JERRY ZAKS since 1982

of which would conceal the huge ventilation gaps that were knitted into the garments. This ventilation was essential, because Zero was somebody who would sweat when active, even in the Arctic.

Something that I hadn’t thought through properly occurred upon the arrival of the orchestra. Zero’s first number wasn’t yet “Comedy Tonight”; it was the tricky tonguetwister “Free!” When he took big breaths at the start of the verse, little balls of mohair fluff rolled up his shoulders and into his nose and mouth. Once, I was standing in the wings, and as he came running off, choking, he grabbed me around the neck and shook me like a rag doll! We had to switch his costume from mohair to terrycloth, and every time he came off stage he needed to make a full change of long johns, as they were drenched. That was among the more surprising challenges I faced on my first American musical.

DAVID | What are the challenges when you first work in a theatrical venue and then take that work into a film? Do you have to rethink everything from the ground up?

TONY | I think the beginning approach to each is very similar, but the practical end is almost completely difference because, as a theatrical costume designer, you’re trying to indicate who a character is with the full silhouette. But with movies it’s all about featuring the faces.

The upper portion of the costume becomes crucially informational and the rest is less vital.

DAVID | I heard that for Lincoln Daniel Day-Lewis insisted that everybody be fully costumed, even though it was rather hot where they were filming, just for the authenticity of it, maintaining that truth.

TONY | Here’s an instance of that—when [Bob] Fosse started doing films, he thought he was completely at a loss; he didn’t think of himself as being confident in any filmic way. But he was possibly even more of a natural filmmaker than a stage director. He knew instinctively how to make a movie and how to show dance on film, which at that time almost nobody did. During one film we collaborated on—Star 80—he said to me, “In the bedroom setting, every piece of furniture with a set of drawers has to have something applicable to the lives of the characters in every drawer.” I said, “But there’s nothing indicated in the script where they go to search for anything.” He said, “But they might. They might in rehearsal, and I’m trying to keep them feeling believable in your faux-real world.” So, you know, if you had an envelope lying in a drawer, it had to be addressed to the appropriate character, with a letter inside that would make sense for the actor playing that character.

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DAVID | Well, that specificity is what makes people really great.

TONY | Yes. Extraordinary. It’s all in the details.

DAVID | I know that you’ve said you take each project on its own terms and as freshly as you can, but when you’re in the process of building the ideas, where do you go for inspiration?

TONY | A lot of art-related stuff. I go to books of paintings; they’re incredibly helpful. I came from an illustrative British tradition, twodimensional scenic environments, wings, backdrops, etc. I was comfortable in that aesthetic because I started out with a graphic ability that allowed me to make colorful and washily translucent imagery, which was in the vein of much English design at the time. Cecil Beaton and Oliver Messel were the masters of it.

I had an exhibition at a chic St. James gallery in London when I was still very green. The downstairs contained caricatures and the upstairs gallery was filled with set and costume designs. I went back when the exhibition was over to say goodbye to everything that had been sold, and I had a total “Eureka!” moment. I realized that everything was essentially in the same rather lightweight vein. I thought, I’m turning into this sort of cut-rate Cecil-Messel, and, though happy that I seemed able to do it, it suddenly struck me as very limiting. Simultaneously, I was getting more and more conscious of what Boris Aronson was doing in New York. So I stopped cold on my English stage designing work for a bit and settled down to do some book and magazine illustration jobs. Then I began experimenting with sort of Rorschach blots and worked into them with white until they became recognizable images. I also began modeling sets out of plasticine or clay to break down my graphic facility. One of the toughest lessons to learn is: how to stop conveying merely surface information and get to the root nature of things. There’s a Leonardo da Vinci quote I love that goes, “Look into the stains of walls, or ashes of a fire, or clouds, or mud, or like places, in which you may find really marvelous ideas.”

“

Tony Walton is—to use one of his favorite words—lovely.

I got to know him because he had been contracted to design, in fact HAD designed, the original production of I’m Not Rappport, and I had been asked to direct after Ellis Rabb quit the production two weeks before the first rehearsal in Seattle. Tony flew out to meet with me, set design in hand, and I remember being somewhat trepidatious as I had never simply been handed a design for a production. When Tony, somewhat shyly, showed me the design, I realized I was a very lucky man indeed. It was the very thing: the essence of the play itself. A meeting of minds between a playwright and a designer, unarbitrated by a director and perfectly, precisely right. Lovely.”

- Daniel Sullivan

DAVID | It’s true. I also go to art galleries, but dumpsters end up being more inspirational sometimes. You see something unusual and it takes you to places that you didn’t expect.

TONY | Where inspiration comes from is almost always surprising.

DAVID | I’m curious about what took you into directing. Was it a natural extension of your design work?

TONY | In a way it was, because you need to think in detail about the staging in order to be useful to a director. And to have some knowledge of acting, too. I had directed a lot in college, and I was quite a cocky actor/ director then. I got my first paying job in the ’50s at three guineas a week, which was about 10 bucks in those days, at Wimbledon Repertory Theatre near the tennis championship courts. I was acting in my first professional production and my sister was in it, but she got laryngitis on opening night so they threw her lines at me. I had another real reason to be nervous, because I suddenly became conscious that this audience had paid good money to come and watch us. So I uncomfortably switched from being that cockily precocious schoolboy performer into being an unimaginably self-conscious and uptight non-actor.

I went to our fabulous old actor manager, Peter Haddon, for whom Roger Rees also later worked as a scenic artist and designer, until he got invited to join a cast that was in need of crowd extras, and headed rapidly into his stellar life as a leading thespian and now director. I asked Peter Haddon if there was anything else I could do to earn my three guineas a week. He said, “We always need stagehands.” So I swung into being a stagehand for a month or two, which turned out to be a wonderfully instructive experience. In the course of that I was asked by the scenic designer to help him paint the sets, and this continued for a while until he threw the

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MOST HAPPY FELLA Walton’s scenic + costume designs for The Most Happy Fella.

LONDON COLISEUM | 1960

ELLIS RABB d.1998 | ROGER REES since 1997 | DANIEL SULLIVAN since 1971

occasional design job at me. Co-designing to begin with on the Christmas pantomimes, which had about 30 scenic changes and had to be delivered in two weeks. I was still hoping I’d eventually find my way back to being a director, maybe; but somehow my designing life sort of took over. The reason I joined the Actors Studio here as an observer in the ’50s and early ’60s was partly because there was the lure of Marilyn Monroe being in attendance from time to time. But mainly because I was still hoping I would end up directing.

My daughter, Emma, was an originator and Artistic Director of the Bay Street Theatre in Sag Harbor, and Johnny Rubinstein was about to direct something there. He suddenly got offered a well-paying TV job and had to leave. Emma asked me to step in. The first day of rehearsals was so exciting that in one of the breaks I called up Mike Nichols and asked how come he’d never shared this info. He said, “Shhh. Too many people want to do it already.”

It was a remarkably infectious experience and I had the additional joy of working with Dee Hoty, Bebe Neuwirth, Bobby Cannavale, and Twiggy’s super-gifted husband, Leigh Lawson.

DAVID | You said you can only be useful as a designer when you can think like a director, and I understand because I also feel the same way about working with designers. But some of directing has to do with the ability to manage the world that you’re creating and to make sure that everything is correct, everything is right.

TONY | Well, that’s the hardest part—getting from the dream to the final reality on stage— because there are so many other folks in the mix who are trying to keep the life in it, too. It’s tough to keep it all focused through the same lens, as it were.

DAVID | This is a good moment for me to share a few quotes from people who love you dearly. Richard Pilbrow, in the introduction to your book, says, “His laser-like focus is coupled with a ruthless determination that his vision shall be realized. It is not easy to say no to Tony Walton. A constantly jovial Tony has been likened to one of his favorite characters, Winnie the Pooh. While he’s always cozy to cuddle, a good person to hug...but argue with?

I really don’t recommend it.” Then I asked Charlotte Moore, “So what’s Tony like?” And she says, “Stubborn! You learn to be quite cautious before making suggestions to Tony.”

She said, “A small percentage of the idea he will ignore, the majority will annoy him, and the rest of it he’ll just choose to forget.”

TONY | Ha! You must have that yourself, David.

I mean, it’s constantly integral, alas, to what we do.

26

DAVID | It’s an interesting tension. One that I get nervous about sometimes.

TONY | I have to be very forgiving to myself if I know I’m not behaving appropriately. I don’t do shouting or any of that, and I try desperately hard not to be cruel, but I do have a sort of terrier thing—of hanging in there— and sometimes that’s infuriating to people.

DAVID | But I don’t know too many who have strong visions who don’t. I imagine it can be a little frustrating for people around us, when we’re working in that specific way.

TONY | Do you know the great designer Desmond Heeley? We started out in London together at roughly the same age and when I first worked with him he was the brilliant milliner for Barbara Matera, who made the costumes for the first several shows that I designed there; so, of course, everything looked fabulous. I was thinking, “Good heavens, I’m not bad at this.” And at some point Desmond said, “You are so lucky to have Barbara make your stuff. Of course it looks fantastic.” Oh, I thought, why did he say that?

And he went on, “She’s a magic creature and nobody can do what she does.” And there it was. I suddenly realized that this young girl, working out of her tiny London flat, was an actual genius, and I began to think that perhaps I was leaning on her talent in some inappropriate way. So I studied cutting and draping at the famous costumier, Berman’s, for the better part of a year, and the next big show I designed was the London production of Most Happy Fella for the incredible Frank Loesser. Now, I know what I’m doing, I thought, so I took total control of the Berman’s costume shop team and was bossy about every detail of my designs. They turned out to be 300 of the most boring costumes I’ve ever come up with. They were perfectly serviceable but there was nothing eye-catching or special about any of them...that was a very sharp lesson. One’s creative collaborators can be so crucial.

DAVID | Talk about your current piece, Transport at the Irish Rep. TONY | Well, it’s a strange piece. A new musical with a book by the Schindler’s Ark novelist Thomas Keneally, and a sometimes haunting, sometimes buoyant folk-rock score by Larry Kirwan, the leader of the New York Irish rock band Black 47. Within each little scene, it’s more or less realistic. And yet it’s conceived in quite a poetic manner in the writing and in the music. I have the most wonderful cast, but it’s a real struggle for them to discover what to do when they are not in a scene, because they are always right there on stage. It all takes place on a ship sailing from Ireland to Australia, so no one can leave. And it’s interesting to see to what extent they’re able to become

imperceptibly involved in a scene, even if they are not remotely featured in it. There are no actual cabins or anything in the set, but they need to believe—and persuade us—that they are in a cabin, or on the deck, or wherever.

DAVID | Yes, actors deal in specific choices and directors are always finding a way to provide for that process.

TONY | It’s fabulous to watch Mike Nichols work. He’s not shy of having people around him because—for him—everyone is part of a completely equal family. Anyone can contribute to the mix, so everybody feels they’re a major part of what it’s all going to end up being. There were wonderful moments in the first read-through of Waiting for Godot with Steve Martin, Robin Williams, F. Murray Abraham, and the adorable Bill Irwin. Mike did what he always does at the beginning: talking, sometimes for quite some length, about why he’s chosen to do this particular piece at this time; how it interacts with certain things in his life that are currently important to him. And at the end of this Godot-related speech of his, there was a long silence and then Steve Martin whispered, “Could we all dash home and write in our journals?”

DAVID | That’s great. I would have loved to be a fly on the wall of that rehearsal process.

You worked on Broadway and Off-Broadway. Is there a kind of philosophical resonance for you in terms of where you do your work? Do you feel like there’s been any erosion in American theatre over the past few years?

TONY | I do. Because the powerful old producers—as mad as some of them were, like Merrick and Alexander Cohen—were people who often actually did what they loved. They didn’t necessarily do what they thought might make money, and that was a major difference.

But now, for so many people, making money is the prime thrust of why they do what they do, and that’s really a shame. It can still be mostly “about the work” in the Off-Broadway and “not-for-profit” environment. So that’s where I live now. But, the underlying thinking on Broadway, whether it’s spoken of or not, is, “This has to be a hit!” So, where does that leave someone as bold, original, and unfocused on “hit-making” as Steve Sondheim these days?

DAVID | Thank you, Tony. This has been a real pleasure.

TONY | For me, too. You made it more like a chat than an interview. Thank you, David. c/o Tony Walton + The Designs of Tony Walton by Delbert Unruh Published by David Rodger in conjunction with Broadway Press PHOTOS

ALEXANDER COHEN d.2000 | BILL IRWIN since 1989 | CHARLOTTE MOORE since 2004 | MIKE NICHOLS since 1963 | JOHN RUBINSTEIN since 1988

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SDC FOUNDATION/FROM THE ARCHIVES

MASTERS OF THE STAGE In Their Own Words...

F

or decades, SDC Foundation has sponsored a variety of events, both public and private, programmed to promote the profession to emerging talent, provide opportunities for the exchange of knowledge, and increase the awareness of the value of directors’ and choreographers’ roles. In support of this mission, SDCF established in 2008 the Masters of the Stage podcast series. Designed to create free access to SDCF archives of past programs, the series features world-renowned, game-changing directors and choreographers discussing candidly why they direct, how they collaborate, and what the process of creating theatre means to them. Hundreds of thousands have enjoyed listening to these programs, and this spring, SDCF teams up with new co-host Theatre Development Fund (TDF) to relaunch the series.

“We are delighted to be co-hosting the Masters of the Stage series,” says Victoria Bailey, TDF’s Executive Director. “To be able to add something like [podcasts] with artists talking about their work and their career provides a whole other dimension that I think will deepen [TDF’s] site...and make the whole experience of going to the theatre that much richer. And if it’s richer, it has more impact, and we know that if it has more impact, they’re likely to come back. My hope,” she continues, “is that [our partnership] will elevate this part of the field.”

Approximately twice a month, SDCF and TDF will release a podcast featuring the industry’s brightest and bravest, discussing a wide range of topics and challenges of the craft. The following is a special compilation of select Masters of the Stage episodes. For SDCF’s complete archives of free downloadable podcasts and recordings of master directors and choreographers, visit TDF.org.

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JOHN HIRSCH | I’m basically interested in certain values that the society expresses

“

What I was looking for was a way of life... a place where I could affect people’s minds, people’s hearts.

I’d affect their exchange and interchange with one another, so I went into theatre as a way of life...”

LLOYD RICHARDS

“

The playwright wins basically all arguments when it comes to what the play should mean and ultimately what has to be on the stage...But if you have an idea... and the playwright disagrees, you have to keep examining.

If a thing keeps occurring to you again and again, then there’s a reason for it...”

DANIEL SULLIVAN

in many, many ways through theatre, music, politics, education. I’m mainly concerned about values; this is why I’m an artist. You know, the two things that are absolutely indivisible in my mind—I’m not in the theatre because I like to put on shows only. I’m in the theatre because I believe that what those plays say, with my help and cooperation, has a basic function in the society in which I live. As much of a function as breathing or eating. Because without ideas and without values, no civilized society survives. It is a matter of survival—spiritual, political, social survival.

HAL PRINCE | I went to work for a man who had given first jobs to Jerry Robbins,

Leonard Bernstein, Garson Kanin, and me, and a whole lot of other people. I think it was a very happy way for him to work, but I think something else; I think he thought or knew that as you get older, you have the craft, you have the experience, you have knowledge.

They have a view of now, which you could lose sight of. You don’t “could” lose sight of it; you do lose sight of it, and I think the terrible moment that I face is the moment when I really don’t understand what’s going on around me. What I live in dread of is the moment when I don’t get anything, but it hasn’t happened yet. However, I learned from him to protect it by keeping my collaborators much younger than I am. Not all of them, some of them; it can be a designer, it can be a choreographer, it can be a book writer; whatever it is, be damned sure that there’s somebody there whose voice reflects today.

In that person you have a good bargain going; you can teach that person what you know and that person could teach you what he knows and sees right now.

LLOYD RICHARDS | I wasn’t looking for security. What I was looking for was a way of

life and theatre, because I had been introduced to William Shakespeare, to the Bible…it was language, beautiful language, meaningful language, and it happened in the theatre and that’s where I wanted to be. I thought it was a place where I could affect people’s minds, people’s hearts. I’d affect their exchange and interchange with one another, so I went into theatre as a way of life...I was in my third year of college, when you have to make that decision, what is your major. I was going into law…but when I had to write that down on a piece of paper, I couldn’t do it, and I thought about it for a long time and I discussed it with my mother and, of course, she didn’t see it at all. And I chose…instead of security, I chose the way of life.

SUSAN H. SCHULMAN | I like to collaborate very, very early. On Secret Garden and

The Red Shoes I collaborated very early with Michael Lichtefeld. He was at every one of the book meetings. I had to fight tooth and nail to include the choreographer.

Everyone wants to bring him in later and that’s always too late. They say, why does the choreographer have to be there? I say, well, because they’re creating, too, here at the beginning, and we need their vision. So much storytelling in musicals is done through movement and dance, and I’m a firm believer in non-literal storytelling. I believe that music and dance contribute as much to the storytelling and scenic elements and everything else.

DANIEL SULLIVAN | The playwright wins basically all arguments when it comes to

what the play should mean and ultimately what has to be on the stage. If it’s going to be a successful relationship, that has to happen. But if you have an idea—this is my role anyway—if I feel something should happen in the play and the playwright disagrees, you have to keep examining. If a thing keeps occurring to you again and again, then there’s a reason for it and you have to keep examining the reason. You have to be an absolute bulldog about it. You have to be able to separate it from your ego. Your ego may want one thing, but whether the play actually needs it is something you have to continue to pursue. There are a hundred ways to get there; it may not be the first idea you had, but somehow that thing that you’re looking for in the play is something that you must continue to pursue. It’s not a matter of somebody wins an argument; the argument keeps changing and you have to be able to let that happen.

JOHN HIRSCH d.1989 | GARSON KANIN d.1999 | MICHAEL LICHTEFELD since 1984 | HAL PRINCE since 1963 LLOYD RICHARDS d. 2006 | JEROME ROBBINS d.1998 | SUSAN H. SCHULMAN since 1981 | DANIEL SULLIVAN since 1971

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ANNE BOGART | I think there’s such a thing as an active culture and a passive culture in

JAMES LAPINE | I had no training and

ZOE CALDWELL | If you get a really terrific group of bright, dangerous—dangerous is always

And then I realized if you tell them nothing or very little, then people get really hungry… and they start coming to you. And it’s a great thing to sort of see where everybody goes; the people do their homework, come in with what they think they should be doing and then I slowly start drawing them into what I feel my vision for it is.

rehearsal. To give the most extreme example: opera. I love working in opera because you come into this environment where everybody expects to be told what to do. I like to go over to a chorus member and say, “Would it be funnier if you guys tip the chairs on bar 62 or 79?” And they look at you…“Well, you’re the director, you should tell us.” And I said, “But you know your music better than I. Would it be funnier on this bar or that bar?” They look at you and they say, “Well, it’d be funnier if you do it on bar 96,” and you say, “Okay, ladies and gentlemen, would you tip your chairs on bar 96?” After a while, they start getting excited, like, “Miss Bogart, we of the chorus think that we should all move on this measure.” And suddenly the room changes and everybody is excited.

To create an atmosphere in a room where everybody feels heard, you have to listen. You set up an environment where people feel heard. That’s something you can’t actually fake, real listening. I think if there’s two parts of the recipe for collaboration, one is to listen and the other is to respect.

good with actors—dangerous group of actors and you absolutely force them to discipline themselves, to understand, and speak the text, it’s amazing…David Rasche, who played Petruchio in The Taming of the Shrew, was just dying to play it, but he’d never done any Shakespeare. I made him go through with the commas and the full stops and the semicolons and the colons and all that stuff, and he was so thrilled that Shakespeare wasn’t tough, that he was able to play Shakespeare. And he was so marvelous at Shakespeare because he’s a dangerous actor. He was more exciting, more thrilling because of his discovery of how accessible to him Shakespeare is.

Also, he was prepared to take risks. I find that a lot of American actors who are trained very well won’t be prepared sometimes to take risks. That’s the director’s job, to say you can take a risk, look, come…come with me, come with me and I’ll show you how easy it is to take this risk. You can’t say, “Do it,” but you can lead them.

JERRY ZAKS | I’ve always loved nuts and bolts in comedy. I’ve always loved, right from the

beginning, the satisfying aspect of sitting down and actually beginning. Blocking and imagine business, most of which will get thrown out or improved hopefully in the course of rehearsal.

The opening number Comedy Tonight achieved legendary status as the number staged by Jerry Robbins; it was an extraordinary version. And when we did the revival, one of the major challenges was what to do with the opening. Did we attempt to recreate his work? Maybe you can ask him to come in and improve on it if possible, or do we do a completely different take on it? Rob Marshall and I decided that it would be more exciting and scary to try a completely different take on it…

And on this particular night when he says “tragedy tomorrow, comedy tonight” the first time, and points to the curtain, the curtain goes up and by mistake they’d staged Medea. Someone got the program wrong. He pointed to the curtain, the curtain went up, and there was this tragic music— pa-paa-pa-pa-pa—and maidens wailing and the curtain came right back down…We found that if he just goes like this and the curtain goes up and to have the crazy maiden screaming and the curtain goes down, first of all, he can’t move. Don’t move is the first lesson. Because as soon as the curtain comes down and he doesn’t move, he gets a huge laugh…the whole bit gets a laugh because everyone is trying to figure out what is he going to do to cover this. It was a reversal of expectations…And it was a very simple thing; we found that if he smiled, it wasn’t enough, but if he made audible the laugh, the embarrassed, sort of self-conscious laugh, he would get the last laugh in the sequence and springboard him right into the verse again. Are you with me, guys? I don’t know, I take a lot of pleasure in working that out. The performer who can translate all that into believable behavior. The tricky part is making it look as though it were happening for the first time, and that’s the hard part.

RICHARD EYRE | Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller are both very, very musical writers. If you put in breaks in a line where there is no break, then you keep feeling as if you’re stubbing your toe. The Crucible is built with a number of very powerful cadences which tend to rise to a number, to detonate climaxes, which had a combination of physical and verbal energy. But actually, if you don’t detonate those climaxes, because one actor is playing their thing and taking the moment before the line, rather than playing the action or the thought through the line, then it doesn’t ignite and it drives you absolutely crazy if you can hear it.

These actors can hear it and immediately they say, oh, I see what you mean; I’m taking that moment because I’m preparing myself to say…and I said yeah, but just play it through the line and you’ll find it much, much easier. It’s that sort of work…there’s a combination of utterly pragmatic discovery and a sort of quite disciplined process that doesn’t depend on study of the text.

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that was hard. There is the language and vocabulary you have to learn. I say this to every actor; everybody comes with a different training and we’ve got the Yale people here and the Stella Adler here…So what I do in the first week…I don’t give any direction at all, basically; I just let everybody do what they want to do. When I first started, I had everything worked out. I knew what I wanted, I had written it; I knew when I wanted the line read, I knew where the emphasis on the line was.

GRACIELA DANIELE | They asked me to

choreograph and I was petrified, with twelve production numbers and all these stars. My god, the stars…simply incredible, you know? It was like Ginger Rogers, Donald O’Connor, Ed Miller, Gwen Verdon, I mean Tommy Tune… all these people that came through…I was petrified to start and then Bobby [Bob Fosse], of course, he gave me great advice: he said don’t worry about the stars too much. You just do your work, do the environment, work with the dancers. They’ll help you; they like you, they’ll help you. And they did...It worked… it actually worked. I think what he was trying to say was more than a choreographic idea; it was the editorial help that he was giving me in the sense of saying, use the best of each person. Don’t try to encourage yourself on this particular star. Just to work with them, present an environment where they’re going to feel comfortable and let them come up with the things that they have, because that’s why you’re helping them.

GEORGE FERENCZ | I think one of the most

amazing things about the Shepard sets, the whole experience—two months of rehearsals and everything else—is that I didn’t give any notes. I didn’t block the show and I didn’t give any notes. And I’d never quite done anything like that before. We found ourselves taking notes from the actors; we found ourselves taking a tremendous amount of time to turn a negative “note” into a positive reaction that would lead the actor that way. Because we were asking them to play outside the box, to go out on a wing, and our approach had to be much more radical than what you would normally put on a show. This is very tough for the actor to do, very scary stuff.

GEORGE C. WOLFE | I think you get it and then it falls apart, and then you get it again and then

“

That’s something you can’t actually fake, real listening.

I think if there’s two parts of the recipe for collaboration, one is to listen and the other is to respect.”

ANNE BOGART

“

It is not wise to be a self-indulgent, spoilt artist. It is wise to look at creativity as your work...And to keep whatever angst you have, whatever fears you have, to yourself, and to give people the support that they need.”

HAL PRINCE

“

You cannot wait around for someone to hire you...if you really believe you’re a director/ choreographer... then you should go out and make it happen.”

SUSAN STROMAN

it falls apart, because you get it and you think this is the most perfect, brilliant, phenomenal thing I’ve ever done in my entire life. Next day you think whaaat? And then it falls apart. And then you get it all back together again maybe three weeks later and you go, oh, this is the most brilliant, fabulous thing I’ve ever done; and then it falls apart.

So I don’t think you ever hit it. I think there’s a euphoria that you feel to let you know you’re right, but then it’s quickly followed by somebody screwing it up to let you know it’s not all there. It takes me a week to learn the energy level in the room. I think there are two ways to direct: either you can be a fascist and run the room, or you can learn everybody’s individual rhythm and then form a relationship with everybody’s individual rhythm and slowly pull them from where they are to where you are. It’s more draining and exhausting, but ultimately I think you have a richer project when you get to the end, because you’ve invited all of them—all of the people—all of their stuff there.

JOHN HIRSCH | The idea that my image, such as it is, is that of a classical director, which means that I’m not supposed to like corned beef sandwiches and certainly I must not direct burlesque, right, because it’s beneath me. The fact is that this particular society and this kind of commercial theatre world boxes you in, because you sell only one thing. It’s all theatre, and I personally love to do burlesque. If somebody would ask me to do a roller-skating review or whatever, I would just run. I’ve done parades, swim shows, all kinds of things…I think that it is very important that you preserve the essential vulgarity of theatre in the best sense of the word, because great works have got to have vulgarity. You know, it’s a whorehouse that we work in, in more than one way, and the work itself…The point is that the essence of theatre must not go too far away from circus or burlesque for many of these things, even if it’s terribly, terribly serious and intellectual; the connection must be there. And if you want me to be terribly intellectual about it, then I have to say that the Dionysian element is an essential ingredient of theatre, period.

SUSAN STROMAN | You cannot wait around for someone to hire you. You have to go out and

create it. That’s what I did; I went out and stirred it up. I had an idea and tried to create something.

You always have to say to yourself, what’s the worst that can happen? They’ll say no. So you have to go out and take a chance and then create it yourself. It is tricky; because it’s a catch-22 and waiting for someone to hire you as a director/choreographer…you have to have a piece of work out there. But that work can come from yourself; if you are really a creative person, you really believe you’re a director/choreographer and you have that creative thing inside you, then you should go out and make it happen.

HAL PRINCE | It is not wise to be a self-indulgent, spoilt artist. It is wise to look at creativity as

your work, just as it’s wise to show up at a 10 o’clock rehearsal at five to 10. And to keep whatever angst you have, whatever fears you have, to yourself, and to give people the support that they need. You’re telling them where to go and what to do. And you know what else? It’s wise to be honest. I’d like to end on this: if you don’t know what you’re doing, tell them, and if you do it wrong one day, come in the next day and say, I really fucked up yesterday; just forget everything I did. And you know what? Then your relationship is established with your collaborators.

For SDCF’s complete archives of free downloadable podcasts and recordings of master directors and choreographers, visit TDF.org later this spring.

ANNE BOGART since 1990 ZOE CALDWELL since 1976 GRACIELA DANIELE since 1976 RICHARD EYRE since 1996 BOB FOSSE d.1987 JAMES LAPINE since 1988 ROB MARSHALL since 1988 SUSAN STROMAN since 1987 TOMMY TUNE since 1969 GEORGE C. WOLFE since 1984 JERRY ZAKS since 1982 SPRING 2014 | SDC JOURNAL

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THE SOCIETY PAGES SDC Members @ work + play

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Members Jerry Zaks, George C. Wolfe, and Lynne Meadow were inducted into the Theater Hall of Fame during the 43rd annual ceremony on January 27, 2014, at Broadway’s Gershwin Theatre.

TOP

Honoree Jerry Zaks + Faye Fisher MIDDLE

Honoree George C. Wolfe + Seth Gelblum at the post ceremony Theater Hall of Fame 2013 Dinner at the New York Friars Club BOTTOM

Honoree Lynne Meadow + Barry Grove PHOTOS

c/o Aubrey Reuben/Playbill

The Sound of Music Live!, directed by Rob Ashford and Beth McCarthy, aired on NBC on December 5, 2013. The broadcast, adapted from Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Broadway musical, was performed and televised live from Grumman Studios in Bethpage, New York.

OPPOSITE TOP LEFT

Stephen Moyer + Rob Ashford OPPOSITE TOP RIGHT

Rob Ashford, Laura Benanti, Stephen Moyer + Christian Borle OPPOSITE BOTTOM

Directors Beth McCarthy + Rob Ashford PHOTOS

c/o Paul Drinkwater/NBC

ROB ASHFORD since 2000 | LYNNE MEADOW since 1976 GEORGE C. WOLFE since 1984 | JERRY ZAKS since 1982

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On February 3, 2014, a new fellowship honoring late SDC Member director Beatrice Terry, wife of playwright and past SDC Associate Director of Member Services Gretchen M. Michelfeld, was announced at The Drama League Awards annual gala. The fellowship was established for women writer/directors creating original work and will include a stipend and reading of a new work at the Drama League Theater Center in New York City.

During the gala’s auction, more than $75,000 was donated to the fellowship, which was funded in part by Member director Michael Mayer and Michelfeld.

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Gretchen M. Michelfeld + Michael Mayer at The Drama League Awards PHOTO Richard Termine Spotlight on Broadway is a multimedia project produced by New York’s Mayor’s Office of Media & Entertainment and the Broadway League. The goal of the project is to celebrate the profound and unique legacy of Broadway and its 40 theatres, which have helped shape the essential character of New York City.

SDC Executive Director Laura Penn has joined the Spotlight on Broadway Advisory Board, representing professional directors and choreographers working on Broadway and beyond.

“The economic impact of Broadway is significant: contributing approximately $11.2 billion to New York City’s economy and supporting 86,000 jobs, plus the indirect economic impact of tourist spending and over 12 million tickets sold annually. It’s thanks to the men and women working on stage and behind the scenes that audiences continue to be delighted and enthralled by the Great White Way.” - SPOTLIGHT ON BROADWAY SDC Members featured on the interactive website include choreographer Sergio Trujillo, director Julie Taymor, and associate choreographer Denny Berry. Hear their stories and more at WWW.SPOTLIGHTONBROADWAY.COM

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KAREN AZENBERG since 1989 | BILL CASTELLINO since 1990 DENNY BERRY Assc. since 1996 | MICHAEL MAYER since 1992 | JULIE TAYMOR since 1996D.J. | BEATRICE SALISBURY TERRY since d.2012 1995 | PATRICIA SERGIO TRUJILLO WILCOX since 1994 2004

“

The only credential the city asked was the boldness to dream.

For those who did, it unlocked its gates and its treasures, not caring who they were or where they came from.”

MOSS HART

SDC Founding Member and Dramatists Guild member was a director, playwright, screenwriter, producer, and theatre owner. Born in New York City, Hart grew up in relative poverty with his English-born Jewish immigrant parents in the Bronx and Brooklyn. He began his theatrical career serving as a director of amateur productions and achieved his first Broadway success as a playwright with Once in a Lifetime (1930), which was cowritten and directed by George S. Kaufman. Kaufman and Hart went on to co-author a series of hits, including You Can’t Take It With You (which won the 1937 Pulitzer Prize for Drama) and The Man Who Came to Dinner (1939). As a solo writer, Hart wrote plays and contributed to several musicals, including writing the book for Lady in the Dark (1941). His screenplay for A Gentleman’s Agreement received a 1947 Oscar nomination for Best Adapted Screenplay, and he also authored the screenplay for the 1954 remake of A Star Is Born starring Judy Garland. Hart was a renowned theatre director who staged the original productions of many Broadway classics, including Lady in the Dark, Camelot, and My Fair Lady, for which he won the 1957 Tony Award for Best Director of a Musical.

1904-1961

PHOTO Alfred Eisenstaedt The LIFE Picture Collection SPRING 2014 | | Getty SDC JOURNAL Images

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