It is high time I tied up the loose ends of the last two day of the lab... (You can read more about these two days in previous posts.)
On the final Friday morning of the LCT Directors Lab, a group gathered to discuss theater in the UK and Canada. Lab directors from each of our English-speaking cousin-nations talked with about 20 of us. In Canada, like the country as a whole, theater is divided into French (Montreal & Quebec) and English (Toronto et al), but new French plays are usually translated and done in the western part of the country, too. The relevant history of Canadian theater is all post-WWII. Our Canadian representative felt that the English speaking theater in Canada is generally too conservative (too many of the American “one-word-title plays like Proof, Doubt, Wit”), and ironically obsessed with both Canadian identity and the plays of Shakespeare and Shaw (in terms of its biggest festivals). Nevertheless, there is a great number of companies in Toronto, as well as several good seasonal festivals of newer and experimental theater in Montreal, Toronto and Quebec that are worth researching.
We are all familiar (or so it seems) with the ancient history of theatre in England, and with London’s West End and The National, and that there are a variety of healthy regional theaters, too. Scotland has its own national theater now, and similar efforts have been taking place in Wales. Of interest to me was learning that dramaturgs in the UK only work on new writing (directors of classics are expected to be their own “dramaturgs”), that in the current climate, the playwright is still preeminent, and that “new writing” is really almost its own genre (like “comedy” or “drama”, for example). Also, there have recently been tentative experiments with corporate funding, though mostly that is frowned upon, still being almost taboo in the UK. There are a few exciting new companies with a more European, non-playwright-centered, theatrical sensibility, like Kneehigh from Cornwall.
Although it wasn't discussed in the lab, the Royal Shakespeare Company has been undergoing a transformation in recent years. I recently heard the artistic director of the RSC speak, but that deserves its own blog entry later this week.
On Saturday morning (our last day), we had a couple of sessions, small groups and then large, with visiting playwrights. These discussions were open-ended, and mainly focused on where playwrights' and directors’ work overlap, both in terms of copyright and control; and also in how to negotiate a complex process of collaboration. There was general consensus that a director of new play should respect the playwright’s intent by asking good questions rather than suggesting solutions, and that a playwright should not intervene in the process between directors and actors... nothing earth-shattering, but good to hear out loud... A kernal of understanding began to emerge: that playwrights and directors need better forums to find each other and to form alliances to bring new work to theater companies and producers--and that they should remain loyal to one another in the process.
Most interesting to me was the way in which this last group of guests to the lab seemed like outsiders, sometimes trying to argue points and network—impulses many of us had given up at least a week before—and it was poignant to begin to understand how rare it is for a large group of people to spend enough time with one another to develop their own internal sense of respect and unspoken rules of civility and listening...
We had a final little gathering related to the logistics of keeping in touch and being ongoing members/alums of the lab, and a pizza party, and then people started leaving. There were a couple of dramatic exits (a plane to Germany, a life at home with kids), and then the usual devolution of individual goodbyes and relatively anonymous departures... and the sidewalk lingerers, and the inevitable Malvolio-like response to the ending of one particular lab journey.
BUT, in the evening, a certain core gathered again, like a multi-headed downtown phoenix rising from uptown ashes. At Drop Off Service, and then at 7A in the east village, the most social and connected among us clung to the lab-time incarnations of our new friendships. Many of these friendships will survive, but will change and evolve. For an evening, we held on to the moment, and an intense moment it was: reveling for several hours in the happiness of full fellowship: true peers celebrating a shared experience.
Anna D. Shapiro was our last guest, in the afternoon of our last day. Like Bartlett Sher before her, she urged us to leave New York City to develop as artists. For those interested in "making it big," this advice, having come now from the two directors to win Tony Awards this year (before they won), ought not to be dismissed out of hand. On the other hand, both were well-positioned to gain additional notoriety at prominent regional theaters, but on the other hand (if you have three hands), both are distinctive for their seeming ability to maintain an independent outlook while supporting the popular institutions for which they work. It's also worth noting here that young artists in New York City may be developing something different these days -- something "post-dramatic" -- than either Sher or Shapiro ever would have (more on that in a future post).
The majority of the lab members seemed to love Anna. She is blunt and immensely caring, in both respects just like her direction of August Osage County. In response to at least two of the younger lab members' questions, she zeroed in on them personally as if to make a psychological impact: don't think about "career", don't think about "regions" ("we are all Americans"), all these "distracting threads"... which she seemed to be cutting through deliberately with a pair of psychic scissors. One member of the lab asked her about the challenges of being a woman in a traditionally male field. Her response was as self-empowering as it was up-to-date. She said that it had not been an issue for her, and in her view, there is no longer an issue of gender discrimination generally for women directors, at least not for white women: there are groups that have it far worse, and she implied, in harder circumstances than in the educated world of the theater. Nevertheless, our culture and the media still "fetishize" women: on the first day of the New York rehearsals for "Osage County," a reporter asked her who her favorite designers were. Anna replied "why, the ones I'm working with on the show..." "No," the reported explained, "I mean your favorite fashion designers.." (!)
Anna's emergence into the commercial limelight is quite recent and she is coping with all the new "noise" in her life while maintaining a hold on herself, turning down the inevitable onslaught of work offers that do not speak to her sensibility. Both distinctively and universally, Anna described her impetus to direct as "the nebulous of like" while gesturing to the center of her body. This nebulous of like is simply what you (one or she) "like". It is personal, real, literally embodied in one's self, and one's right as an artist: to like what one likes. The challenge as a director, according to Shapiro, is to articulate that "like" to one's self and then communicate it to others, that is, to stand for your artistic intuition in the world and to get others to understand and join you in common purpose. She is an ensemble director first and foremost.
As a director, Anna also very much sees herself as a leader, and insisted that a good director is a prepared one – and one that leads a cast of committed actors with a clear articulable vision right from the start. In fact, she writes an "address to the cast" to read aloud at the first rehearsal of each project she directs, and requires her directing students at Northwestern University to do the same. Other approaches, she said, are "wrong!" (though could be accomplished in different ways, she then admitted). She is a relatively young director, and is so independently minded that I sense that at some point in the future she will abandon her own current approach, since most serious artists go through phases characterized by letting go of their need for control as their mastery unfolds.
Anna also demonstrated she believes passionately in acting, ensemble, community and (again like Sher) that our country is at a crossroads in a time of crisis -- and, interestingly, that August Osage County was not the most meaningful of her current projects in that respect.
Later that morning and in the afternoon, we attended presentations of two projects that were in rehearsal this week, the adapted Ernst Toller play, and a new play about a group of Gen-X friends who had lost a member of their circle. These projects were not directed by lab members, but are projects Anne was interested in shepherding and/or having us observe. The relative merits of these projects aside, at this point in the lab, I think we were all pretty tired of watching "presented work".
In the evening, Bartlett Sher came to speak with us. Bart's smart: an autodidact who really knows his stuff and is a study in contradictions. Like all of our director guests so far (except the totally unpretentious Aubrey Sekhabi), he was at least unconsciously concerned with presenting himself as a possible model and iconoclast, albeit in a down-to-earth way. His advice: learn & see as much as you can, work as much as you can, and stay out of debt. He seems to have followed his dicta, traveling and studying abroad, directing prolifically and returning to study consistently throughout his career, amalgamating his skills as an "interpretive" rather than as a "creative" artist. He even made a pilgrimage at age forty to learn about speaking Shakespearean verse from the English icon Peter Hall, who Sher criticized for his bland staging, but softened by claiming that Hall "is not interested in" staging. Like our final guest, Anna Shapiro, Sher advocated getting out of New York City, where the work of emerging directors is placed under too much scrutiny in an atmosphere in which it cannot be fairly appreciated. He also urged that we become artistic directors of institutional regional theaters: Sher himself runs the Intiman Theater in Seattle. A self-styled "rebel", Sher clearly enjoys taking risks that pay off in success. He also stressed the value of failure: an early disaster drove him from the Big Apple to California, and eventually to assist Garland Wright at the (old) Guthrie. Twice, he said, ambitious projects at his own theater seemed as though they could have caused bankruptcy. He also advocated for artistic directors to hire new directors and new designers as often as possible.
In Sher's early career and to this day, he claims to be highly influenced by the Polish neo-avant-garde artist and director Tadeusz Kantor. As a student of Kantor, Sher's work is theatrical and visually creative, often incorporating eclectic design styles. Having worked all across the country and increasingly the rest of the world, Sher is literally and intellectually peripatetic.
Sher is political, at least internally, and sees America in a state of crisis. Having moved more into the mainstream with productions of Light In The Piazza and the current revival of South Pacific at Lincoln Center Theater, Sher finds the political meaning in even his most popular successes (South Pacfic's themes of race relations resonate perspectively with the phenomena of Barak Obama). Contemplating his new challenges at the world's largest and most established theaters and opera houses, Sher says he sees all work as "site-specific". By this he means not only is any theater a kind of found space, like a parking lot, or an empty warehouse, but that every theater building has its own cultural "residue" and its own "semiotics" in relation to its audience in the present moment. Sher's choice to reveal the orchestra under the stage in the otherwise pit-less Vivian Beaumont, and (bucking current Broadway practice) to use old-fashioned full instrumentation and acoustic, non-miked sound are (I surmise) attempts to incorporate an awareness of physical surroundings and cultural circumstances into the production.
A pithy slogan to describe Sher might be "know who you are before you sell out." He said as much about himself. Sher's own emergence into national prominence was based partly on a series of four productions sponsored by several different theaters of Sher's take on Shakespeare's Cymbeline; Sher was able to work on his eclectic version (cowboys, Noh, etc.) for an extended period of time, until it became the first (?) American production of Shakespeare to be presented by Britain's Royal Shakespeare Company. Nevertheless, when asked by a lab member if institutional regional theaters could do anything to support longer, more exploratory rehearsal processes, Sher answered flatly, "No. Just get it done."
More on British and Canadian theater, Anna Shapiro, playwrights & directors collaborating, thoughts on international stuff and the future (and partying) ...coming soon...
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