What Am I? Part 1

George Hunka had such great questions, I thought I’d stage a mock interview between George and myself. Imagine it’s one of those celebrities-interviewing-celebrities that crop up in, say Interview magazine or something. Except neither of us are celebrities. And no one would buy a magazine that had an interview this navel gazing. So maybe it's more like My Dinner with Andre.

Anyway, it is also very very long. I've actually only answered one question of his so far. So I'm going to post my answer to one question every day until we get to the end. Hope this doesn't bore you to tears. It's just that, well, I've thought a lot about this, and I have a lot to say, and not all of it is that well organized.

I also find that when I talk about myself as a director is when I can get simultaneously self-effacing and incredibly arrogant. Let me just say this as a disclaimer: I wouldn't do this if I didn't think I might be good at it, and I don't think that's anything to be ashamed of. Sometimes I think we like our artists filled with doubt and self-loathing. I have plenty of that, in spades, but I also have the side of me that thinks rather highly of myself.

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Anyway, here we go:

GH: I think I have a pretty good idea of what playwrights do, and I’ve got an inkling of the imaginative processes of actors; but, to me, the imaginative life of the director is a question mark.

IB: I find that fascinating, considering we’ve worked together twice, and I know you’ve worked with other directors. Why does it seem enigmatic to you? Is it that I have a habit of arriving at rehearsal and saying “I think this is going on” and you just have no idea where the impulse came from? Or that director’s don’t talk about process in rehearsal as much as actors? Like, an actor will say “right, gotcha, I just gotta find a way to motivate that” and you go “ah yes, this motivation thing is part of their process” but you just never hear a director articulate out loud what that process is?

I am lucky right now to be working with Les Waters, who I consider one of the most imaginative directors working today—he’s directed a lot of Chuck Mee and right now has Finn in the Underworld up at Berkeley Rep. And I will say that he’s very vocal about his own process and where he is in thinking about any given moment at any given moment. Perhaps I need to model that behavior more.

Also, directing is a very very young art form, so the standards and practices are much less codified. SO my answers to this quesiton are going to be wildly different from anyone else's, I would suppose. And hope.

I will say that I think directors are much more vocal about their process with designers than they are with anyone else, because the designer is usually in on the process so much much earlier than any one else, and the designer helps shape what it is that is the director’s vision. I think the fact that neither show we’ve worked on has had any designers might help explain why this process is opaque.

GH: How do you see yourself as a creative artist?

IB: Let me preface this by saying that I don’t think all directors do. One director I very much admire in DC said to me once that the director’s primary function (in America, specifically) is not as a creative artist but rather as an interpretive artist. They make the text come alive on stage, and that's it.

The woman who gave me my first job in New York was a director named Josie Abady (who had since, sadly, died). Josie and I were having dinner after seeing Dinah Was… and we were taking apart the show (as you do), and I commented on how bad the staging of the musical was, that Dinah was center stage the whole time, and this made the show visually uninteresting. Josie said that she felt it was because too many people approach directing as an art when, in fact, it is a craft and thus, having neglected his or her craftsmanship, the director would make such a lame decision as having the lead actor never leave center stage.

I disagree. I think both the craft elements and the interpretive elements are important, but surely our job is also creative and is also an art, right? I mean, otherwise anyone could do it. You’d just need to learn how to put all the pieces together, and then anyone could go out and stage a play. And I’m sorry, but I don’t think everyone can do what I do. That’s okay—there’s plenty of things that I can’t do that other people can do. I don’t really believe that everyone can do anything. That’s probably the worst aspect of liberalism—the idea that we’re all somehow the same. We’re not. Of course we’re not. Now the conservative ideology is also horseshit because it says that some things that people can do make them better and therefore they have the right to degrade everyone else. And, wouldn’t you know it, but the things that get degraded, the jobs that aren’t “worth much” are the very things necessary to keep our world running. We call it “unskilled” labor. This is because no one wants to pay people what they’re worth. A janitor or a nurse is much more important to our society than Jonah Goldberg. But we pay Jonah Goldberg a hell of a lot more to sit on his ass, gain weight, and ruminate about how letting corporations gut salaries is going to improve the world.

We all have value, but we’re not the same, we come from different backgrounds and different histories and have different innate talents and learned skills and all sorts of things. That doesn’t mean that I have more value as a theater director than my Uncle does as a math professor or the people I worked with in the bookstore have or anything. It just means we’re different. And it diminishes all of our achievements to say that anyone has the ability to do anything.

Anyway, to get off of my rant for a second, I see my job as both interpretive and creative. As Peter Brook said, no text speaks for itself. I think my job is take the various elements we have—the text, the performances, the set etc. and help those things become this fully realized ephemeral creature called The Play. We make a big mistake in theater by confusing The Script with The Play. The Script is the foundation, or the stem cell. Or, as Simon Callow writes about it, like a piece of music score where you only have some of the notes and you’re not sure what key its in. It’s just words. It’s not the finished thing. We have this ridiculous idea of “Serving the Text”. Bullshit! The Text serves the Play! As should everyone else! I didn’t serve your text for In Public if I had, I would've kept all of the stage directions, even if they didn't work in the context of the Source. Just like you were serving The Play when you rewrote portions of The Script to make it clearer to perform.

We do have, or at least have had a real problem of people serving their own egos instead of the ultimate Play to be performed. This has caused a “serve the text” backlash which is, frankly, inane. It places the writer above everyone else in the creative process whereas we all have our own distinct role to play. I think I’m very very respectful of writers and of plays, but I don’t for a second think of them as higher status in the rehearsal room or anywhere else. We are equals with very different jobs.

The director is there to create an environment in which this particular stem cell could become a hand or a foot or a brain. To create an experience for the audience. Everyone comes together to create a Play. The Director is the voice of The Play in the rehearsal process.

So I see my job is two ways: as an impetus towards creation and as a shaper of creation. The first one is easy to explain by example:

You go into a meeting with your designers, and you talk about what you think this Play is. What direction its headed in, what artists you see or music you hear when you think about the play, etc. Then a conversation starts between you and the designer, hopefully one of many conversations. Eventually a design will come out of that, and that design in the creation of the designer, but it started with the director’s impulses and ideas towards a text. When I did First You’re Born I knew that, for me, this was a play about alienation and isolation—about isolated characters rising above their alienation to find love. I also knew that I wanted it to have a fairy tale feel—that it needed to feel not-real but very true. And that Belle and Sebastian would feature prominently in the soundtrack. And all of the design kind of came from that. At the same time, the impulses and ideas of the designers shaped my approach towards the characters and the staging.

And in volume of smoke, my favorite piece of staging in the entire show was ripped off wholesale from an exercise I had Daryl do. But at the same time, that idea never would’ve happened if I hadn’t given him the exercise. I think this is why it’s hard to see where a director’s job starts and stops, and what it is exactly that we do. So much of it is about encouraging the creativity of other people.

As the shaper of creation, this is when you have encouraged other people to be creative—now you have to shape it. The play must have some sort of unified style, or lack of unified style, but it has to be a choice. So in In Public we have these four kind of naturalistic people and this one character who crops up in every scene and is kind of, you know, kind of crazy. So I had a conversation with Darian in which he was worried about being strange and I told him to take the leash off because “other people are weird” and then would pull him back when he needed to be pulled back. All of the specific ideas for those characters, however, came from Darian. I didn’t tell him be a bitchy queen in this scene or whatever, I just let him follow those impulses and shaped it when it needed shaping which, in his case, was rarely, simply because he's an imaginative guy with good impulses.

But yes, the reason why it is strange is that the most creative thing a director can do is create an environment in which everyone can be creative. And that environment is the rehearsal room. And then you feed off that creativity. So it’s a continual give-and-take, if you’re lucky. It’s a kind of mobius strip of art. Or something.

I think as well that the most important, the most helpful thing a director can do for a Script in helping turn it into a Play is figure out what the hell its style is. In other words… how should it be performed and how should it look? What is the vocabulary of your production? A dayglo set isn't going to work in every context, but it hit the vocabulary of First You're Born. I didn't come up with a day-glo set, but I had to know, intuitively, I suppose, as a director that that fit the vocabulary. Sometimes you argue with your collaborators about what that vocabulary is. And that's fine. That's collaboration. But someone has to make that decision. In Public needed to feel as realistic as possible. And we spent a lot of time in rehearsal trying to figure out what in the hell that means. Ultimately, though, the only person who is in a position to say “yes, that’s in the vocabulary, no, that isn’t” is the director, simply because they’re the only ones not doing anything and therefore they have a more objective ear and eye.

Comments

[Freeman]

I really appreciate this, Isaac. Interesting stuff, and illuminating. Thanks for it.

[Dorothy]

I think as well that the most important, the most helpful thing a director can do for a Script in helping turn it into a Play is figure out what the hell its style is.
Oh my god ,YES!!!!
I agree so much with this. You see so many productions that are done in the *wrong* style and it makes you really really wonder what the hell the director was doing !

Also, you did a show with a Belle and Sebastian soundtrack ? !!!!Oh my god, I love you more and more ! No seriously, thank you for sharing all this , because it's really good stuff. And yay for you for having a healthy mix of self confidence and doubts. I find that too many artists these days ( esp theatre ) are either huge egotists or completely self deprecating . That makes me want to talk to no one !!!

[Jonathan Warman]

Isaac-

I run a director's e-mail list, namely directorslist@yahoogroups.com (which I'd love you to join). Can I repost your "interview" to the list, as I think it'd generate a lot of good discussion...

Cheers,
Jonathan Warman

[isaac]

Jonathan,

Absolutely you may reprint it, just please prominently post the URL of the website (http://parabasis.typepad.com) at both the beginning and end and tell them that I invite everyone to comment publicly on the entry or to e-mail me privately at parabasisnyc@yahoo.com with their thoughts and comments if that feels more comfortable. The more thoughts we have in this conversation, the better.

And yes, I'd love to join your group. E-mail me at parabasisnyc@yahoo.com and we'll set something up.

[Desdemona]

Issac,

I think there's one point that you nailed right on the head--that "the most creative thing a director can do is create an environment in which everyone can be creative." What people don't teach or emphasize enough in directing is the art of managing people. Because that's exactly what theatre is--the art of human relationships. We can write plays about ghosts and puppies and robots and whatever, but in the end, it's humans relating to other humans on stage in front of yet another group of humans. Terrifying.

I am curious about your thoughts on stage directions... and I think this was posed during Lab this past summer, but never really flourished into a full discussion...

What is the difference in value between dialogue and stage direction in a piece of text? I know directors who immediately get out their red pens and scratch out all the stage directions before the first read through. Yet they will agonize for days at the idea of changing a single word of dialogue. Why is this? Is it because we think that the playwright is stepping into our realm when they tell us how the play "should look"?

I try to honor as much of the playwrights stage directions as possible--not because I'm there to "serve the playwright," but because I believe that it has as much significance as the dialogue. If The Text is the source or groundplan of The Play, then it stands to reason that the director should make every effort possible to realize everything in it, no?

I directed Beckett's "Play" many years ago--and we all know that the man was a Nazi when it came to obeying his text and direction. I think directors might come to find that within strcture, there is much liberation. It frees the director to start working on nuance and detail.

Would love to hear more thoughts on this... when does playwrighting become play-directing?

[George Hunka]

Desdemona, as a playwright I sort of agree with you, and as a playwright I absolutely don't. There's a sense in which the _kind_ of text that's being performed is of utmost importance. When a Beckett play, in which form is intimately tied to content and both form and content are extraordinarily idiosyncratic, is done, I think that the director may have a higher responsibility to the stage directions that a playwright provides. Beckett provides these because he believes them part and parcel of the spoken text as part of the totality of the aesthetic experience he seeks to express.

And later in his career Beckett did indeed take care to direct his own texts of course, or work with Alan Schneider and Peter Hall, who respected the stage directions not necessarily because they were unimaginative directors but because they shared with Beckett a similar directorial aesthetic, at least when it came to the presentation of Beckett's work.

(And, by the way, the man was not a "Nazi" when it came to the staging of his own plays--that's a cruel thing to say, especially about Beckett, not to mention inaccurate. Both the Knowlson and the Cronin biographies, as well as his correspondence with Alan Schneider, indicate that the man approved innovative stagings of his plays and texts all the time, such as the Mabou Mines productions of his work. His estate may be a different matter, but to call him a "Nazi" in any context is grossly abusive to his memory.)

[George Hunka]

My apologies, Desdemona, for my vehemence in my reply--on a second reading, I recognize that your "within structure, there is much liberation" is a defense of stage directions (at least in the case of Beckett), not a call to red-penning them. I guess I've just been the subject of too many speeches from revisionist Beckett directors. Isaac isn't one of them, by the way, but he has taken the soapbox in my living room on the subject occasionally.