Day Fifteen at the LCT Directors Lab

Today's itinerary included a visit by Jack O'Brien, attending the Broadway musical Passing Strange, and a session on Anne's "international initiative."

Jack O'Brien may be a Svengali of theatrical love, but he's pretty convincing. Not content to sit and answer questions, when he felt that he was even slightly losing his audience he stood and conducted the remainder of his visit on his feet, performing his advice. He is an "old school" director with all the colorful contradictions of his mentor's generation's style of grandiose humility: that mentor was Ellis Raab. He is an aggressive director who serves. He trusts texts he believes in, but his embrace of his own theatricality is a dominating force. He claims total "innocence" as an artist, but he craves intimacy in his creative relationships. He cooks for actors and makes choreographers he works with live with him; he acts assertively to efface his own authority. He made it his mission to exhort us to believe in the theater as he does: theatrically, comprehensively, intelligently, inexorably.

Passing Strange is strange: an amalgam of gentle rock concert, narrative sketch, sung commentary, fun physicality, faux-Brechtian conceits and heavy-handed lighting. The overall effect is strange: sporadically stimulating and casually disconnected at the same time. Like a great deal of new commercial musicals it is not especially lyrical and contains no real dance. The staging is physical, amiably abstract, and intentionally self-conscious. Like all American musicals about being American, it is a search for authenticity catalyzed by love and melodramatic loss, and if one is in a bathetic mood, one can surely be moved. The show is not what one thinks of as "commercial" though there's no real reason it shouldn't be (compared to so many other offerings in recent years), save that its format is not likely to be what tourists expect from a Broadway show. But Broadway is a megaphone for disseminating ideas into the mainstream culture: in this context, Passing Strange encourages the emerging revival of upcoming post-war communitarianism, and continues the blurring of our image of what it means to be "black".

Former Lab members from Ireland, India, Egypt, South Africa, Italy, Korea, Denmark, the Netherlands & Romania, among others, joined us for an open-ended and somewhat overwhelming discussion about the potential intersection between religion and international theater exchange. Current lab members spoke little, but perhaps tomorrow's session will bring more dialogue and focus.

A large troop of us went to the Emerald Inn and the social die-hards among us ended the evening relaxing into our new friendships. We are clearly gearing up for a big party on Friday night.