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Which One?
Apr. 30th, 2006 08:47 amSome discussions of "process" happening around the theatre blogs. Good. This is interesting. Though for years it was a general rule of mine to beware of any director who feels compelled to talk about "my process." Often a guarantee of someone with no original ideas, following rules learned in college, or someone who had an early success with one show and is going to direct every show they ever do exactly the same way as that successful show.
But the discussion does have value among reasonable people, and it seems to be reasonable people discussing it now. I'm sometimes asked about my process, certainly. To which the only answer I can give is . . . which one?
Because, to a certain extent, every play, every group of actors, demands a different process. There are general practical ways of working that don't change, and certain approaches that will be similar on similar plays, but every play requires you to be a different director. What kind of director does this play NEED?
Isaac Butler uses the metaphor of being half of a songwriting team with the playwright. Joshua James has used the metaphor of the playwright as architect and director as general contractor. Both good ways of looking at the job, and both ways I've approached different plays (never, of course, literally thinking that going in, but as I understood the job later, on reflection).
My favorite playwright as a director is Richard Foreman. I've directed eight plays of his in eleven productions. In all but one case, I have done as Richard suggests strongly one should do when directing his plays -- removed everything from the published text but the dialogue, and created everything else around the dialogue from scratch, with no reference to or regard of Foreman's own staging. In these cases, I was certainly a "co-songwriter" with Richard, and the finished production as much "an Ian W. Hill play" as "a Richard Foreman play." Richard's words have been a starting point, an open landscape in which I could project myself, or fall, finding something personal I needed to express that my own words could only have done in a way that would have been too . . . direct, too "hit-you-over-the-head."
On the other hand, when Richard gave me his 1966 play Harry in Love (a manic vaudeville) to direct, I was a GC, no question. The play is a three act "boulevard comedy," written with hopes of Broadway production (which it came very close to having). A Jewish middle-class NYC apartment living room. Six neurotic characters lobbing hysterical laugh lines at each other. Richard compares it to a Murray Schisgal play (I also see similarities to Bruce Jay Friedman), and gave it to me primarily, I think, because he finally just wanted to see what it would be like on its feet, and because he thought I'd be good as an actor in the title role of Harry. The play is a farce, carefully constructed and modulated, with every beat in the script needing to be both followed strictly and made clear in the staging for the play to work at all. It is also, as the subtitle suggests, increasingly "manic," and the snowballing "out-of-controlness" of the characters must be carefully, very carefully, modulated so that the play itself doesn't slide into chaos. My job here was to stay out of the way of the play, and support it properly so that it worked. Any insertion of personal style would hurt the production (though of course, there is still a personal style to how actors are directed and blocked that is unconscious and can't really be fully analyzed or described, it just happens).
What does the play need from me? How much me does it need? Is it, this time, a sponge that needs me to fill in all the empty spaces with myself to make it whole? Or is it a perfect jewel, and my job is to do nothing to it but to polish it and display it, share it?
Of course, you can be wrong about what a play does or doesn't need from you. Some time after directing Mac Wellman's Harm's Way I realized that I had seen the play as a pointillist painting with too few dots, and my job had apparently been to put in the rest of the dots to make the picture, what the play was trying to be, visible. Later, I realized that there was a good possibility that I had seen a picture in those dots that wasn't really there, that was made solely out of my own obsessions and concerns, and which I forced the production into being, when I should have been just intensifying and enlarging the dots that were already there. Maybe, maybe not. I'm still very fond of that production, I'm just not sure I did right by the play (Wellman liked the production, so maybe I'm overthinking this . . .).
I sometimes think of my job as theatre director in terms of pop/rock record producers. Am I Roy Thomas Baker or Ken Scott or John Cale this time? Or am I Tony Visconti or Brian Eno? Shadow Morton or Sam Phillips? Or, perhaps most satisfyingly, am I Brian Wilson or George Martin or Phil Spector?
(for those less rock-geeky, let's just imagine a sliding scale from "accurately and clearly recording the sound of the group" to "acting as collaborator with the group or as master planner/organizer of the group")
And sometimes the approach to a play changes radically midway through the process. The change that occurred as I was directing the 1880's temperance melodrama Ten Nights in a Bar-Room was perhaps the most radical -- a silly play that I had taken on as director for a lark, because I found the dated American theatrical language charming and interesting, and because I also, egotistically, believed I could take this piece of tripe and through the "brilliance of my directorial style" turn it into a fine piece of entertainment for an audience (I was younger, I was starting out, I wanted to show off). Instead, over the rehearsal process, through the collaboration of a particular cast, in a particular space, at a particular time in our lives, it became, though some strange alchemy, a deeply personal, moving, terrifying, and unforgettable work of art. It's still perhaps the piece that I get the most complements on to this day, it's very likely the best piece of theatre I've ever made, and yet I never feel quite as "proud" of it as I do of other works, for while the show couldn't have happened without me and is definitely "mine," I feel more as if I acted as a channel, a conduit, for a huge collection of ideas and personalities that were in the air -- I just focused them and put them into this work for a time.
(this begins to sound worryingly "supernatural" . . . no, I don't believe in the Divine, I don't believe in the supernatural, and I generally don't believe in the "paranormal," though I keep an open mind, but what happened on Ten Nights was the kind of nuts-and-bolts craft that can only be described in the terms of the ethereal)
In the end, the text, to me, is a chair. I've been given a drawing of a chair and told to make it real. The rules in making this chair real are:
A. The chair must function (people should be able to sit in it without it falling apart)
B. The chair should be comfortable (it should not be unpleasant to sit in)
C. It would be nice if the chair looked good and was well designed aethestically.
The most beautifully designed chair in the world is still a BAD CHAIR if you can't sit in it without it falling apart.
Guitar virtuoso Robert Fripp used to tour with a group of his students as "The League of Crafty Guitarists." All of the students had to be of an extremely high and proficient quality as musicians to accompany Fripp in these performances. They would sit onstage -- 10 or 12 of them, maybe -- in a semicircle of matching ergonomic chairs with matching Ovation acoustic/electric guitars and play richly textured compositions (with, I believe, a small element of improv). On one tour, Fripp assigned one of these students, who was just as skilled as all the others, to sit onstage with the whole group, in the same chair, with the same guitar, at every performance, and never play a note for the entire tour. This student's job was "silence." This student served as a reminder to the others of the value of not always being present with the note you could be playing, just because you could play it, but to only be present with the notes you should be playing. What is necessary.
And calling for what is "necessary" is not a call only for the minimal, the stripped-down, the bare. Sometimes what is necessary is a giant, godawful mess of elements, thrown every which way, loud and sloppy and undisciplined. But to be aware of the necessity of all of it.
If you are directing a production, you must then be operating under the precept that you are necessary for this production, or you wouldn't be there.
Why are you necessary for this production? Answer that "why," and follow it to the necessary process for this production.
I am necessary for my current show, That's What We're Here For, because the show as it exists now is simply a loud voice screaming in my head its need to become real. Unfortunately, the voice is screaming so loud, I can't make out the specific words it's using to describe what it is really supposed to be. My process for this show flies in the face of all the ways I have ever believed directors should work, but I have to follow it, because if I don't there is no show. With the help of the cast and our work together, the voice will become clear, and become real, by June 17 when we share it with outsiders.
Then, there will be another show, Vaclev Havel's Temptation, to open in October. And I will figure out why I'm necessary for that production, and the process to make the show work, when it comes time to.
More along these lines soon, I think . . .
But the discussion does have value among reasonable people, and it seems to be reasonable people discussing it now. I'm sometimes asked about my process, certainly. To which the only answer I can give is . . . which one?
Because, to a certain extent, every play, every group of actors, demands a different process. There are general practical ways of working that don't change, and certain approaches that will be similar on similar plays, but every play requires you to be a different director. What kind of director does this play NEED?
Isaac Butler uses the metaphor of being half of a songwriting team with the playwright. Joshua James has used the metaphor of the playwright as architect and director as general contractor. Both good ways of looking at the job, and both ways I've approached different plays (never, of course, literally thinking that going in, but as I understood the job later, on reflection).
My favorite playwright as a director is Richard Foreman. I've directed eight plays of his in eleven productions. In all but one case, I have done as Richard suggests strongly one should do when directing his plays -- removed everything from the published text but the dialogue, and created everything else around the dialogue from scratch, with no reference to or regard of Foreman's own staging. In these cases, I was certainly a "co-songwriter" with Richard, and the finished production as much "an Ian W. Hill play" as "a Richard Foreman play." Richard's words have been a starting point, an open landscape in which I could project myself, or fall, finding something personal I needed to express that my own words could only have done in a way that would have been too . . . direct, too "hit-you-over-the-head."
On the other hand, when Richard gave me his 1966 play Harry in Love (a manic vaudeville) to direct, I was a GC, no question. The play is a three act "boulevard comedy," written with hopes of Broadway production (which it came very close to having). A Jewish middle-class NYC apartment living room. Six neurotic characters lobbing hysterical laugh lines at each other. Richard compares it to a Murray Schisgal play (I also see similarities to Bruce Jay Friedman), and gave it to me primarily, I think, because he finally just wanted to see what it would be like on its feet, and because he thought I'd be good as an actor in the title role of Harry. The play is a farce, carefully constructed and modulated, with every beat in the script needing to be both followed strictly and made clear in the staging for the play to work at all. It is also, as the subtitle suggests, increasingly "manic," and the snowballing "out-of-controlness" of the characters must be carefully, very carefully, modulated so that the play itself doesn't slide into chaos. My job here was to stay out of the way of the play, and support it properly so that it worked. Any insertion of personal style would hurt the production (though of course, there is still a personal style to how actors are directed and blocked that is unconscious and can't really be fully analyzed or described, it just happens).
What does the play need from me? How much me does it need? Is it, this time, a sponge that needs me to fill in all the empty spaces with myself to make it whole? Or is it a perfect jewel, and my job is to do nothing to it but to polish it and display it, share it?
Of course, you can be wrong about what a play does or doesn't need from you. Some time after directing Mac Wellman's Harm's Way I realized that I had seen the play as a pointillist painting with too few dots, and my job had apparently been to put in the rest of the dots to make the picture, what the play was trying to be, visible. Later, I realized that there was a good possibility that I had seen a picture in those dots that wasn't really there, that was made solely out of my own obsessions and concerns, and which I forced the production into being, when I should have been just intensifying and enlarging the dots that were already there. Maybe, maybe not. I'm still very fond of that production, I'm just not sure I did right by the play (Wellman liked the production, so maybe I'm overthinking this . . .).
I sometimes think of my job as theatre director in terms of pop/rock record producers. Am I Roy Thomas Baker or Ken Scott or John Cale this time? Or am I Tony Visconti or Brian Eno? Shadow Morton or Sam Phillips? Or, perhaps most satisfyingly, am I Brian Wilson or George Martin or Phil Spector?
(for those less rock-geeky, let's just imagine a sliding scale from "accurately and clearly recording the sound of the group" to "acting as collaborator with the group or as master planner/organizer of the group")
And sometimes the approach to a play changes radically midway through the process. The change that occurred as I was directing the 1880's temperance melodrama Ten Nights in a Bar-Room was perhaps the most radical -- a silly play that I had taken on as director for a lark, because I found the dated American theatrical language charming and interesting, and because I also, egotistically, believed I could take this piece of tripe and through the "brilliance of my directorial style" turn it into a fine piece of entertainment for an audience (I was younger, I was starting out, I wanted to show off). Instead, over the rehearsal process, through the collaboration of a particular cast, in a particular space, at a particular time in our lives, it became, though some strange alchemy, a deeply personal, moving, terrifying, and unforgettable work of art. It's still perhaps the piece that I get the most complements on to this day, it's very likely the best piece of theatre I've ever made, and yet I never feel quite as "proud" of it as I do of other works, for while the show couldn't have happened without me and is definitely "mine," I feel more as if I acted as a channel, a conduit, for a huge collection of ideas and personalities that were in the air -- I just focused them and put them into this work for a time.
(this begins to sound worryingly "supernatural" . . . no, I don't believe in the Divine, I don't believe in the supernatural, and I generally don't believe in the "paranormal," though I keep an open mind, but what happened on Ten Nights was the kind of nuts-and-bolts craft that can only be described in the terms of the ethereal)
In the end, the text, to me, is a chair. I've been given a drawing of a chair and told to make it real. The rules in making this chair real are:
A. The chair must function (people should be able to sit in it without it falling apart)
B. The chair should be comfortable (it should not be unpleasant to sit in)
C. It would be nice if the chair looked good and was well designed aethestically.
The most beautifully designed chair in the world is still a BAD CHAIR if you can't sit in it without it falling apart.
Guitar virtuoso Robert Fripp used to tour with a group of his students as "The League of Crafty Guitarists." All of the students had to be of an extremely high and proficient quality as musicians to accompany Fripp in these performances. They would sit onstage -- 10 or 12 of them, maybe -- in a semicircle of matching ergonomic chairs with matching Ovation acoustic/electric guitars and play richly textured compositions (with, I believe, a small element of improv). On one tour, Fripp assigned one of these students, who was just as skilled as all the others, to sit onstage with the whole group, in the same chair, with the same guitar, at every performance, and never play a note for the entire tour. This student's job was "silence." This student served as a reminder to the others of the value of not always being present with the note you could be playing, just because you could play it, but to only be present with the notes you should be playing. What is necessary.
And calling for what is "necessary" is not a call only for the minimal, the stripped-down, the bare. Sometimes what is necessary is a giant, godawful mess of elements, thrown every which way, loud and sloppy and undisciplined. But to be aware of the necessity of all of it.
If you are directing a production, you must then be operating under the precept that you are necessary for this production, or you wouldn't be there.
Why are you necessary for this production? Answer that "why," and follow it to the necessary process for this production.
I am necessary for my current show, That's What We're Here For, because the show as it exists now is simply a loud voice screaming in my head its need to become real. Unfortunately, the voice is screaming so loud, I can't make out the specific words it's using to describe what it is really supposed to be. My process for this show flies in the face of all the ways I have ever believed directors should work, but I have to follow it, because if I don't there is no show. With the help of the cast and our work together, the voice will become clear, and become real, by June 17 when we share it with outsiders.
Then, there will be another show, Vaclev Havel's Temptation, to open in October. And I will figure out why I'm necessary for that production, and the process to make the show work, when it comes time to.
More along these lines soon, I think . . .
