Pay No Attention to that Woman Behind the Curtain! (Thoughts on Directing, Part 2)

The theatre director's hand should be invisible, as though the playwright's words are flowing effortlessly from the page to the stage.  Throughout the rehearsal process, a good director must nudge and inspire the actor from within, rather than domineer and control from without.

This invaluable credo is central to the excellent book A Sense of Direction, by William Ball, which I mentioned in my earlier blog entry on theatre directing. Indeed, the Wizard of Oz quote graces the very first pages.

So, from the beginning, I understood that a good director must not be a puppeteer -- and must not hold too tightly to whatever initial vision he or she formed upon first reading the play. What appears on the stage must arise organically, a product of the director's unfolding vision and the actors' intuitive creativity.

The director shapes and prunes, and always keeps faith in the actors, no matter how awful things get in rehearsal. And, when this is done gently and seamlessly, sometimes even the actors are not entirely aware of the director's work, and can find themselves believing the finished performance would have emerged all on its own.

*  *  *

"What did you make of that last play?" I asked a fellow theatre company member as we headed out of an evening of one-acts.
"Which one?" she asked, searching her mind for images that she had seen less than 10 minutes before.
"The thing about the woman in the bar... in Scotland? She meets this weird drunken guy...?"
"Oh right!" she said and paused.  "Not much!! I mean, what was that?"
"That was Life and Death -- the same play I directed a few months ago. Which you liked..."
"It was? No fucking way."

But, yes, it was. It was. In every fucking way.

Earlier that year, I had been given this spare, tense script about a vulnerable American tourist who is beset, seduced, frightened and charmed by a tortured charismatic Scottish nobleman in Edinburgh.

My two actors: Lee, a slight young woman with a hint of toughness, and Greg, a stocky, good-natured 30-something guy from Staten Island.

Lee immediately had a sense of the character's vulnerability and curiosity.

Greg, on the other hand, had no clue whatsoever. In the initial read, he started overacting, hunched over like a slightly deranged Jack Nicholson with a hint of Peter Lorre.

"Um... Let's try it again," I said, "And just sit up straight in the chair. And don't worry so much about acting. Just read the words for sense."

Now he gave me a more straight-backed Jack Nicholson.

"OK," I said afterwards, "That's getting there. And it's good that you're getting a sense of the dangerousness of this character. But remember, she's not running away, so he is charming her, right?" Greg agreed. "So, once again, don't worry so much about acting, just put in the back of your mind how you might talk to a woman you're interested in."

Now he stared at her relentlessly and even seemed to be salivating a bit.

"OK, let's take a break," I said.

Greg went for a cigarette and Lee pulled me aside, shaking her head, "This is really creeping me out!" "I know, I know," I sighed, "Give him a chance."

"Have you ever seen My Favorite Year?" I asked Greg after rehearsal.

"The thing with Peter O'Toole and the Jewish guy?" he asked.

"Yes. Yes, that's the one. Before our next rehearsal, can you watch that and pay special attention to Peter O'Toole's performance? Because, remember this character isn't American, so he should be..."

"You mean kind of faggy-like?"

"Um... yeah...."

"Sure. No problem."

So Greg watched My Favorite Year and came back with a respectable embodiment of an upper-class Brit. We tamed the creepy leering and punched up the properness and things started to work.

But he was still having a hard time with the character's many transitions.

As he is charming and seducing the woman, he delves into increasingly angry and resentful diatribes about his brother being killed in "The American War" (i.e. Vietnam). Then he switches in to charming-mode, and then into dangerous seduction (OK, we kept a bit of the initial creepy leer after all :-> ), and then he goes back into Vietnam-War-anger, then he wistfully reflects on his life in Scotland and then back into charming, and then seduction, and around and around...

And Greg couldn't tell one beat from the next.

So I bought a box of crayons and color coded the script: pink for charming, red for seduction, light green for the early stages of the Vietnam diatribe, and darker green as his anger intensifies, then light blue for the reflective bits, and so on.

I had him monologue about the brother and about the war, about sex and love. We went through the script and found active, riveting verbs for each beat, layering moments of tension and suspension which gave the whole thing a beautiful roller-coaster feel.

In short, I practically breast-fed the guy.

And through it all, there was Lee....

She did well enough responding to what he was now giving her, but since I had to focus so much on him, I was not able to help her develop her character.

Even on opening night, she was working with generalities like, "I'm in Scotland to escape..." From what? Why? What do you want?? We never figured it out. She did well enough because she was a good actor, but I did her a disservice....

The upshot?

The playwright LOVED him -- and hated her. (And she didn't care much for me either.)

It turned out that the piece was semi-autobiographical, and the playwright made the mistake of expecting to see an onstage re-enactment of her own experience with some real-life Scottish weirdo.

She expected to see her own anguish, frailty, desire, frustration, confusion, etc. played out in Lee's eyes. To the playwright, this was a story about the woman. And, perhaps because she was telling her own story, she believed the vividness in her mind's eye would come across in the text, but it didn't.

As the play is written, the woman is just a foil for this bizarre man; to artificially make it her story would only dilute the drama.

Anyway. Everyone loved it. And everyone LOVED Greg.

Lee and I stood aside as exiting audience shook his hand and slapped his back. He continued to receive praise -- and additional roles -- for weeks and months after the show.

And the theatre company loved it so much there was talk of entering it in the Samuel French festival for Best One-Act Plays. And they decided to remount it a month or two before the festival. But this time, without Lee -- and without me.

The playwright cast herself in the woman's role and got some friend of hers to direct the incomphrehensible mess that appeared on the mainstage that summer.

The result was bad. It was worse than bad.

It was instantly forgettable.

But What I Really (Didn't!) Want to Do ....

... is direct.

When actors whine that "what they really want to do is direct," they are talking about film -- where, in these days of the auteur, the film director is seen to exercise complete control in realizing his or her vision.

Indeed, an auteur -- as a director of signature-style films -- (Jim Jarmush, Woody Allen, Tim Burton, the Coen Brothers, etc.) can be more of a star than any given actor in his (yes his, more often than her) films.

Not so in the world of theatre directors.

"im in theatre class," [sic] pleaded a student on Yahoo's message board, "and i need a famous theatre director and i cant find anything......so please help me........."

Needless to say, the Wikipedia list of theatre directors provided by a thoughtful respondent yields very few recognizable names -- at least to those who aren't in theatre. And the few notables belong to directors who famously crossed over to film: Orson Welles, Mike Nichols, Laurence Olivier, Bob Fosse, and the like.

When I first joined a Manhattan theater company, in my early 20s, with little training and questionable talent, I had less of a clue about exactly what a director did than our young Yahoo poster. Like much of the average audience, I was quick to assign the finished product on the stage entirely to the actor and writer.

As far as I knew, the director made sure everyone knew their lines and didn't trip over the furniture.

And even in my first few one-acts, it didn't seem like the director did much -- other than the lines-and-furniture thing.

This, it turns out, was because those few directors just weren't very good.

This particular company did not actively seek directors; their bread-and-butter was young out-of-towners hungry for any -- and I do mean ANY -- NYC stage experience. So we all auditioned, paid $100 and were guaranteed a role.

If we wanted more roles, we had to do stuff for the company: stage manage, run lights and sound, build sets, clean the theater, run the box office, create flyers and programs -- and direct.

So many of the directors were just actors who were grudgingly putting in hours so they could get their butts back onstage.

And then I was cast in a sensitive, two-person drama about a jilted wife reuniting with her fanatical ex who had run off with a cult.

I was completely lost.

Thankfully, I had a director who had actually studied directing, and who wanted to pursue a career in directing. And she was brilliant!! She helped me understand the meaning and intention of each beat, to clarify and solidify my performance, and create a moving drama.

Slowly, it became clear to me how crucial good directing was -- and how very difficult it was, first to grasp the meaning of the play, and then to guide the actors towards the fullest, richest telling of the story.

About a year later, I was given my first one-act to direct. And, happily, I came across ACT director William Ball's outstanding book A Sense of Direction, which not only gave me essential tools for directing; it changed my understanding of acting as well.

It also seared into my brain the maxim that The Director is Always Responsible -- no matter what, with no excuses; the finished product is the director's responsibility. You can never, ever blame the actor. (Admittedly, a few times I've wanted to blame the writer, but even there, a badly written play can be directed into something worth watching... more on this in another entry).

This uncompromising acceptance of responsibility at first seemed daunting, but ultimately I embraced it as both a challenge and even an act of unconditional love.

I had once heard that to truly love a thing, you can fully -- without delusion or denial -- see it in its current and perhaps flawed state, and you can also see its most beautiful, most fully realized potential. In short, you can see what it wants to be. And through love (and more than a little sweat and tenacity), you can guide it to that fruition.

And I think that many of the actors understood this about me... that no matter how hopeless things sometimes seemed in rehearsal, they knew I had faith in them, in the play, and in the creative process itself, and so they had faith in me.

I soon began to love directing (though, diva that I was -- and still am -- still sought the spotlight when I could), and within a few months I was given my first full-length play.

To this day, the playwright -- who has been produced throughout the US -- considers that production among the best of his work.

He recently wrote, "Some things about that little production I’ll never forget -- some things you don’t even know about -- like my sister’s reaction. She’s passed away now. She came up from Florida to see it. She had no idea what I was up to. I can still see her leaning against the wall afterward, across the room from me, mouthing the words, wow, wow, wow -- blown away."

And many other playwrights have felt the same. Even after I left the company, I had been sought out to direct more work for satisfied playwrights.

And even though I know -- and they know -- exactly how much the director's hand is responsible for what the audience sees... sometimes I forget.

And so do they....

Sometimes, even as the audience cheers, and friends are slapping their castmember pals on the back... I can't help thinking, "Could this have been done without me....?"

To be continued...