Day Fourteen at the LCT Directors Lab

I started the day observing the first table session of a workshop to adapt an early 20th century play by Ernst Toller. The play is now largely unknown (thought Toller is not entirely forgotten -- I did a piece about him for actor and cello at the Joyce Soho). The director, who is not a member of this year's lab, spent most of the hour giving the background of the period, Toller, the play, his search and process finding it and his dramaturg, etc. He talked most of the time, and then the actors read the first five minutes of their working draft before the first break. Observing lab members left the group alone for the remainder of their rehearsal.

George C. Wolfe, director, producer, writer... was next. He talked about "Caroline or Change", "Mother Courage", "Jelly's Last Jam", "Angels in America" and some of his close colleagues. Wolfe talks quickly most of the time, riffing on phrases for repetitive emphasis, using his hands liberally and performatively -- he efficiently elicited laughter, "oos", "mms" and "ahhs" from the group. On directing, he spoke about connecting to a play's rhythm and finding its path of inevitability. On actors, he said he likes working with smart, opinionated people. He's quite comfortable with "crazy" people and their "monsters" and messy processes. He likes mixing it up and is unafraid of conflict, and "luring" the cast into his world of the play. He is consciously located in the politics of his time and his life -- in the theater and in America -- never playing the victim, and enjoying the power of his ability to be magnanimous and create his career on his own terms. He seems quite confident in his own paradigms of process and personality. He gave excellent advice in response to a lab member's question about how to navigate the tricky waters of directing a play one has written one's self. His personality is very much like the personality of his productions: pragmatically generous, discursive, entertaining and extroverted.

After lunch, our guest was the playwright Sarah Ruhl. Ruhl was refreshingly unassuming, non-dogmatic and precise. If Wolfe is an extrovert, Ruhl is an introvert: comfortable with others, but circumspect about her own process as an artist. The topic of her informal chat was "expressionism" which she immediately subverted by saying each artist reflects life as each perceives it. I interpret this as meaning that her own subjectivity is at the center of her work. She doesn't like formal readings or workshops, preferring to hear her plays read aloud in her "living room." She likes directors who ask perceptive questions, or even have little to say about her work -- as opposed to those with a "take", though she seems quite open to seeing strikingly different productions of her work. It was clear that she writes to her own standard. She does not pre-plan her work dramaturgically. Notably, she will often un-revise a script if she thinks changes have been made mistakenly for the sake of a particular production (usually the first or second). A writer's writer, she likes people better than institutions, and prefers co-operation over flashiness.

In the evening, lab directors representing non-English-speaking countries assembled as a panel to share with the rest of us something of what theatre is like, variously, abroad. We heard a bit about the theater history and current scenes in Germany, Italy, Israel, Zimbabwe, the Philippines, Finland and China. In each country, the relationship of the theatre to government, funding, culture, political history and audiences is markedly different -- and one can also trace interrelated trends over the last forty years or so. What should strike us most is that our relative reverence for the playwright in English-language theater is not the case everywhere else. One could also feel palpably the way in which the state of the theater in any particular place, irrespective of the work of any particular artist, reflects the current cultural issues of that place. It could have just been an impression created by the format of the evening, but it felt to me as though most of our "international" lab members have clearer, more objective views of their own cultures, and why the theater scene is the way that it is in each, than we have of ours in America. Listening broadly to descriptions of theater abroad, one hears "theater & culture" or "theater & politics". While this is true here, too, I want to say that we should become more conscious of American "theater & business", a reality we take too much for granted as fact, rather than as a cultural phenomenon. More on this, perhaps, in a later post.

Other activities generated by lab members have or will include a discussion about the challenges women directors face, how to find work as an a director, and speaking Shakespeare as directed by Peter Hall. In addition to the Toller play, another project is being workshopped this week. Both will culminate in presentations before the week is out.