Day Seventeen, Part 1 (belated) - LCT Directors Lab

(June 6)

Our penultimate day began with a smaller group discussion of theater in Canada and the UK, with lab directors from among our ranks sharing their knowledge... however, I am going to write about this (and the evening's big party) in a separate post ...

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...