Jack in the box, p.1
Jack in the Box, page 1
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Table of Contents
A Note About the Author
Copyright Page
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This is for
“My Little Family,”
Jeremiah Maestas and Lynn Marie Marvis,
who, despite all odds,
got me this far
Backing My Way Forward
We dive in—being something of an introduction (with serious apologies to you, Dear Reader)
1.
This book is beginning to give me fits. Wouldn’t you think I’d have a fair idea of how to approach it? I mean, over fifty years of nearly continuous directing … “I have done the state some service, and they know’t,” as Othello reminds us. It’s hardly my first time at the rodeo, and I’ve even published one book already—okay, perhaps not at the top of the New York Times bestseller list, but nary a day goes by without someone referring to Jack Be Nimble, its charm, its insights. It’s hardly as if I intentionally made a rude noise in public.
* * *
Well, I keep trying. At this stage, I feel I have or should have a lot to say. I have “been taught by masters,” as my previous book bears witness to, as well as having spent something like twenty-five years as the artistic head of one of the country’s finest and oldest theatres—the Old Globe in San Diego. Days go by, months go by, and “time’s winged chariot” ceases to be a useful quote and now looms as a warning: It’s now or never, kid.
So the revelation, the confession:
To write usefully about any profession, one has to begin with the assumption that the subject itself allows defining—can, indeed, be defined. “How to Raise a Barn,” let’s say, and “Making Your Own Rocket,” and even “Macramé for Fun and Profit” lend themselves to a one-two-three-step process promising some degree of information and technique, but directing for the theatre?
We now recognize that this so-called profession we identify as “directing” is largely an invention of the last century. Prior to that, any degree of direction was usually supplied either by the author himself or by some magisterial and authoritative actor/manager of whatever small production company might be filling the bill. A story is told of as recent a theatre star as Dame Edith Evans, who, essaying once more one of her major roles, was accosted by a young man running back and forth in the stalls near the footlights trying in vain to get her attention as she spoke instructions or suggestions to the other members of the cast. “Dame Edith! Dame Edith!” he called. She stopped and looked down at him. “Yes?” she replied in that imperious tone. “What is it?” “You see,” the young man stuttered, “I am the director!” “Never mind,” she answered. “We’ll find something for you to do!”
Even when I was at the university, on the cusp of embracing a fatal attraction for the theatre, most bona fide directors I knew about at the time had come from the ranks of stage management; men and women whose job it was to stand in the wings calling cues for lights and music, entrances and exits, but who basically just “stood and waited,” as Milton might suggest, with an unobstructed view of how things sorted out in such a way that they might even replicate them, or at least point out an error in judgment or blocking, should the occasion arise. Those candidates for this new category of personnel required to put on a play or an opera had grasped, by way of observation, some simple knowledge of what worked and what didn’t, and what they might lack in imagination was, at the least, supplanted by endless repetition of what they’d seen others do more or less correctly, finally adding up to a semblance of craft, I suppose.
* * *
But then, as cream will rise to the top, the inevitable began to happen: participants with some further sparks of creativity began to emerge, mainly men at first, but not always … who began to bring something “fresh” to the game, and their efforts began to affect routine performances thanks to the historical impact of a star’s personality—actors like William Charles Macready, Edwin Forrest, Alla Nazimova, Eleonora Duse, Sarah Bernhardt, creatures of such power and appeal that their presence alone was enough to guarantee an audience and a successful evening. Suddenly, other names began to emerge who weren’t actor/managers: Max Reinhardt, Sir Tyrone Guthrie, Konstantin Stanislavsky, David Belasco, Peggy Webster, Orson Welles—names with their own Shavian “spark of divine fire” that began to be identified by the public as figures able to guarantee something above and beyond a star performance. And for the most part, they no longer appeared onstage.
And so a “profession” was born … or was it? Because there seemed to be a distinct difference between those who had observed and could replicate efficiently, and these others with something more to bring to the table. And a mastery of the former skill didn’t necessarily guarantee acceptance in the second category. Any ordinary workman assiduously practicing his craft might be expected, after a period of time, to attain a degree of comfort in dispatching his duties. He’d probably get reasonably better over time, right? And yet the truth was, if a director happened to drop the creative ball, he probably wouldn’t get another opportunity. And even if he did, the stakes rose precipitously. So somehow, “How to Direct” didn’t seem to follow the same trajectory as “How to Build a Bloody Good Birdhouse.”
2.
I have never been able to shake the feeling that directing doesn’t qualify as a regular profession. I’m not saying anything one way or the other when I suggest that I never took a single course in directing from any institution. And yet here I am: I direct. For a living. What did happen was that instead of studying a text in class, I found myself serving as someone’s rehearsal assistant, sitting silently and taking notes for men and women who could direct … who did direct … and who did it extremely well, and often and what’s more, for profit. And that was the way I learned. Not necessarily by watching them triumph, mind you, but just as often by watching them fail, and fail believing, as I did, that they were doing a bang-up job. Which, to me, simply implies an alternate way to learn, in the way that metalworkers and smithies and furniture makers and major chefs over the centuries have been taught. They’re just there: watching over and over until it sinks in. If it ever does.
3.
Here’s the deal, and no surprise: there isn’t just one way to direct any specific production. Just think about that, because how many productions of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, or All My Sons, or Sam Shepard’s Buried Child have been mounted over just the past ten or twelve years—and none of them even remotely similar. Different designers, different actors, different music, different interpretations. In some cases, as in the recent productions of Ivo van Hove, the Belgian director, the creators go so far as to take liberties with the narrative itself, much to the consternation of some, and the evident delight of others.
In other words, there is no “right” way to do it. It is a methodology, and you simply have to find your way in and out, and people either like it (“Wow! A sensational hit!”) or they don’t (see Rotten Tomatoes about nearly anything). “It’s a mystery,” which is the charming way Tom Stoppard slyly puts it in his lovely screenplay for Shakespeare in Love. Try as we may, the result is either lightning in a bottle or it isn’t, and if it isn’t, there isn’t a damn thing you can do about it. Open and close, I suppose. But when it works—oh, when it works!
4.
I’m not going to suggest that rules don’t exist in the field of directing, because of course they do. And equally, I have no wish to disparage the educators and instructors the country over who stand before classrooms and workshops and drum into eager young minds the values of “upstage,” “downstage,” the grace suggested by a triangle, or the remarkable power that can be attained by simply turning one’s back to the audience. The legendary George Abbott knew areas of the stage he had deduced had more “power” than others, and even late in his life could astonish younger players and associates by demonstrating them—why a speech that is delivered, for example, down right of center might be far more compelling than one delivered standing in the exact center of the stage. There are rafts of young directors working today who have never considered the endless possibilities of negative space. So yes, of course, there are basics and principles to be considered, learned, and evaluated. By all means, have at it! There are textbooks good, bad, and indifferent with which one can arm oneself—the more the merrier, say I. But the moment one stands in a rehearsal room, and the text has been explored, and the words have been examined, and the references all have been carefully appended—one stands facing living, breathing, expectant actors, all with their own dreams, ideas, conceptions of what might or should or could happen—in such moments, philosophy wilts and theory retreats, and one finds oneself saying, quietly, something like “I think, when the curtain rises, you are standing just about over here,” and off you go! Borne aloft by your own instincts, your own imagination, your own sense of bl
* * *
I feel as if I’m stalling, if not staving off the inevitable: what follows is, more or less, a compendium of lessons learned and not learned over the last more than fifty years, ranging from technical specifics (if but a few) to adventures and misadventures, collaborations, encounters, triumphs, and failures, along with portraits of the various astonishing relationships that a life in the theatre can offer. All are intended to convey aspects of this most mercurial and indefinable of callings in the hope that you and I, Dear Reader, might put this book down finally with a more nuanced understanding of the craziness that is a director’s life than we might have found in our beloved, well-thumbed, if probably inadequately revealing textbooks.
1
“What Is It You Actually Do?”
A response to the interviewer’s inevitable opening inquiry
Rehearsal, The Coast of Utopia, Lincoln Center Theater, 2006
1.
It’s a fairly simple question, although not always voiced in this blunt way: “What is it you actually do?” someone inevitably queries. Most people have no idea what responsibility a director has borne in the evening they’ve just experienced. I’m convinced that most critics have no idea. I’ve been praised for a lighting designer’s contribution, and condemned for a writer’s lack of skill. And while we’re at it, the truth must be faced: I don’t think a lot of directors even know exactly what the hell we’re doing, either. Meanwhile, we, ourselves, are professionally obsessed with how others function. Remember, directors almost never witness one another doing the work, as opposed to actors or dancers. During the Globe years, there was considerable excitement and enthusiasm generated from the board of directors, having to do with the fact that at this point we were sending productions to Broadway on a fairly consistent basis—and there emerged a kind of tacit understanding that if I ever would permit members of the board to “sit in” on rehearsals, they’d be willing to pay considerably more for the privilege. But I was adamant. Back at my genesis, my North Star mentor, Ellis Rabb, had declared all rehearsals to be off-limits to anyone not performing in the production or directly involved. He felt there was never enough time accorded the expensive, deeply private process of rehearsing: our most personal time should remain sacrosanct. Otherwise, actors unsure of their progress, being observed, would strain to “perform” too early, and possibly destroy the process by which they could comfortably be able to disappear into their character.
This is true, by the way. I’ve experienced it over and over: you’re having a wonderful time digging away, solving this problem, debating that, and you put the damn thing together with all the new changes, along with the rewrites, and even a good song, let’s say, where something ordinary had been a placeholder, but up till then, it’s been just you and the actors and your staff in the room. Now, in this case, either your producer, or the business manager, or, for all I know, the goddamn dog walker comes in and plops down, and suddenly everything before you becomes shallow and stupid and dull and disappointing. How can that be? It was so good this morning! But the presence of just one outsider, like a virulent virus, poisons everything, and all you can see now is how miserable you are at pretending to do something others assume you are effortlessly expected to accomplish. It’s hell!
See what I mean? Directors don’t know everything. Too often, it feels like we don’t know anything!
So what do I do, in fact? In reality, what happens is you stand before a situation in which something is presented to you. You’re afforded a challenge. Like catching an enormous ball. And you respond. You come up with a vision of some kind. That is, if you respond to the material at all, and one must, or it’s doomed. You sort of feel that since you relate to the material at hand, you might as well try to be helpful.
So away you go. You cast. You design. You assemble a team with the support of your producer, or your company, or your friends. But are we talking about a “method”? I wonder. If it works, if you are at all correct, the play survives. It may be thought to be a success, or even a smash, or, at the very least, acceptable. And if that’s the case, you may well get asked to do another one. Because you’ve essentially caught the ball and thrown it back into the void. And in doing so, you’ve unquestionably learned something. Discovered something. Found yourself standing in the exact center of it all and created a way through, and though it kept changing, evolving, emerging as you proceeded, damned if you weren’t right! So, okay, fine: you directed! But as for a methodology? I’m beginning to think that’s something others presume.
Back when I first began, I recall sitting at a table with a piece of paper upon which I had sketched my ground plan, and using chess pieces as representative of actors, I moved them here and there, murmuring the text, of course, while writing down in my script an idea of actual blocking! I kid you not! I used pawns as players (eschewing the use of the king, queen, and bishops, as perhaps getting dangerously literal).
Then, during the one single experience I ever had doing summer stock, I found myself facing the actress Tammy Grimes with that very same chess plan, saying confidently, “Tammy, you enter over there!,” only to hear her interrupt with an abrupt “No, I don’t think so!” while offering no further explanation. After a polite pause, I went on: “Then, I guess, you can enter over there, through that door,” which elicited the same immediate response: “No, I won’t.” Another pause. Me: “Well, that third door is the bathroom, so I guess we’re going to have to choose one of the others.” And out the window went my rehearsal plan.
2. BLOCKING
Well, all right, why not begin with blocking? It is, after textual analysis, probably the first task facing a director and a cast, and it’s important. Some directors block beautifully, in such a way as to make the stage always exciting without ever calling attention to it. Others appear to pay no attention. And damned if they don’t often get away with it, too. Ellis Rabb blocked magnificently, with the skill and ease of a born choreographer. Two actors or twenty; it didn’t matter. He swooped, he sculpted, he coddled, and the stage inevitably emerged beautiful to behold. Conversely, Stephen Porter, his directing alternate in APA-Phoenix, the touring rep company he’d created, who basically directed productions that didn’t necessarily appeal to Ellis, hardly bothered to block at all, his forte being the background, scholarship, and an enormous fund of knowledge he brought to every aspect of the play. But blocking? There was a moment once while he was rehearsing a production of The Importance of Being Earnest when the actors, not having heard from him in some time, peered out into the house to find him fast asleep! Being experienced professionals, as well as discreetly fond of Stephen, they continued to block themselves, and never brought it up.
But a stage with more than two people on it needs to be composed or at least considered in such a way that the actors aren’t stacked (standing directly in front of one another so as to be hidden from any portion of the audience), and even with just two people, the most realistic of works needs someone actually thinking of how the proportions of the stage can help or hinder the way an audience receives the play. Even in the case of a sustained monologue, or a one-person play, you can’t leave the actor simply standing there for longer than the audience finds the tension interesting. You move your actors, or you lose your audience. One wonders, as I often do, just how Shakespeare’s soliloquies might have been originally staged. I have always believed that the existential emergence of English as the spoken glory it has become must have been a ravishing experience for Shakespeare’s contemporary audience, unused in their daily lives to such sumptuously spoken language as appears throughout his works. It must have been rather like going to a jazz concert today … experiencing the various sounds of his verse as opposed to Christopher Marlowe’s or Ben Jonson’s, or anyone else’s.
