“Is he getting in your way?”
“Listen, if you need me to run interference for you, just let me know.”
“She’s not coming to all the rehearsals is she?”
“Just be sure he knows to stay quiet at the back.”
“Wait, who invited her to the production meeting?”
My earliest directing experiences were for a small theater company I ran myself, so when it came to personnel issues, it was just me yelling, “You’ll never work in this town again” or begging, “Joey, please just stop touching Mark,” or calmly explaining, “Really, it’s better if just one person gives acting notes.” When I started directing freelance, I was thrilled to discover this Artistic Director person standing around with directing and management skills and an irresistible need to help out. How handy, a mediator.
In a business that values both collaboration and emotional availability, I suppose we shouldn’t be surprised at a high rate of, ahem, personnel issues. Difficult actors, temperamental designers, indifferent technicians, power-crazy directors … you know what I’m saying. But there’s one role in the process that is apparently so predictably problematic that many artistic directors I’ve worked with have thought it necessary to preemptively protect me from them.
The quotes above are a small sampling of kind attempts by artistic directors to protect me from – [cue dangerous music and a dramatic pause] – the living playwright. I can hear you all shudder with shared understanding. (Well, except the playwrights, who are now maniacally pulling on their hair, and squealing, “What? I knew it! Bastards!”)
And see, it’s that maniacal way you pull on your hair and squeal that requires us to keep the rehearsal schedule secret from you.
There, that shut them up, didn’t it? Anyway, back to the point. Well, that is the point. Why do playwrights behave so badly when we let them in the room? I giggle now at the memory of 20 minutes spent listening to an actor and a playwright negotiate the trade of a “the” for an “and” in the text, but it wasn’t really funny then, just ridiculously uncomfortable and dull, which interestingly, is precisely how some might describe most conversations with playwrights.
My husband, a playwright, who does maniacally pull on his hair every time we have this conversation, says they behave badly because we put them in a box and take away all their power. Our downstairs neighbor has a new puppy, and when they put him in his kennel, he squeals maniacally for hours on end, so I guess I know what he means. (But the puppy also pees on the floor. Maybe that’s not relevant. I’m just saying.)
Building a better bucket brigade
There’s an inherent challenge to the playwright-director relationship, right? It’s the first handoff of power in the bucket brigade of making a show, and until the director showed up, the playwright had his play all to himself. But now here’s this director, with a “vision,” whatever the hell that is, and while the playwright had to come up with that whole story and all those characters from nothing, the director has to come up with all the production details and personnel. So they both get to play god, and you know, Western societies tend to be big on just one god, so yeah, someone ends up squealing.
Forget the god metaphor—really, we’re all too emotionally needy in the theater to be plausibly playing god, so we should probably stop that. Let’s go with the bucket metaphor: a big, heavy, stainless steel bucket filled with a hot, oozy, stew of dialogue, character and plot. Oh, and some lumps of stage directions floating on the surface. – So the point of a bucket brigade is efficiency. And it’s the handing off that makes it efficient. Which means people have to let go. All efficiency is lost if two people carry the bucket together. And, clearly, playwrights sometimes have a hard time doing that.
Something I’ve gradually learned despite my control-freak nature and my obsession with efficiency, though, is that you can’t get that lumpy stew cooked up properly if you don’t know what the ingredients are, and only the playwright knows that. Interestingly, no amount of tedious, uncomfortable discussions with my playwright husband taught me this. It was a composer whom I never met who taught me this.
Assumptions about competence
I was directing a musical scene as a student in the Wesley Balk Institute with Nautilus Music-Theater. Directing musical theater was already the deep end of my discomfort zone, and this song was an experiment from another workshop, unconventional in structure, mysterious in subject, with totally non-narrative lyrics, and neither composer nor lyricist around to explain. The sheet music was handwritten with lots of notations well beyond my high school band education in music. When I asked the musical director what these notations meant, he explained them all and still neither of us understood why some of them were there.
If I’d been directing a text-based scene, I might have been tempted to ignore the bizarre notations and dream up some story or “vision” to just lay on top and make it work. But, out of my element, I was forced to assume the composer knew what he was doing (more than I did). So we worked through the music as though everything on the page was there for a reason. And here’s what we discovered: the notations that seemed most out of place were the secret to the whole thing. Once we figured out why the most inexplicable elements were there, we figured out what the song was about.
Translating this back to the more familiar territory of a straight play, I realized that when Pinter writes, “pause,” all good directors say, “Hey, that probably means something.” But when a socially awkward playwright who isn’t famous and has mismatched socks writes something we don’t understand, if it’s a stage direction we ignore it and if it’s a line, we start negotiating to cut it. (And our really dirty secret is that if we can’t cut it, we’ll just have the actors face upstage and say it really quietly.)
Hmm, there is some kind of basic assumption about competence going on here: that until a playwright has won a Pulitzer or been produced on Broadway or died and been rediscovered, we can’t imagine they know as much about making a show as actors and a director do.
A radical idea
But what if we assumed the playwright of the play we are directing actually put everything there for a reason? That they could do more than write dialogue for actors to say, but knew a thing or two about structure, stagecraft, mood, and rhythm? Then even if we choose to implement a different stage direction than they wrote, we’d probably at least want to ask why that stage direction was there in the first place. And if a line seems out of place, then we might consider that we don’t fully understand the universe that is, after all, defined by all the lines in the script.
Sure, a lot of playwrights do just write dialogue and are clueless about the rest, and plenty write crap that really shouldn’t be on stage. But if you think that about a playwright, maybe don’t direct their play. Maybe write your own. Or find a playwright who does know what they’re doing. And anyway, until you talk to them and hear their explanation for the inexplicable stuff, you’ll never know whether they’re brilliant, stoned, or just plain stupid.
I suppose it would be nice if they didn’t squeal maniacally, but maybe we need to let them out of the kennel and into the room so we can develop a shared vocabulary. You know, like when artists collaborate.
And sure, I suppose we’d be more likely to trust they know what they’re doing if they didn’t look like they haven’t left the house in a while, but hey, wouldn’t actors be easier to work with if they weren’t such quivering balls of emotion, and wouldn’t directors be more pleasant if they weren’t such control freaks? And if we lock all the artists who are socially awkward, emotionally needy, or control freaks out of the rehearsal room, then the stage manager will be sitting in there alone.
Anyway, I have to admit I find wild hair and mismatched socks kind of sexy. So, these days, I ask the friendly Artistic Director to keep the Marketing Director out of the room, and I invite the playwright on in.
I mean what’s the worst they’re going to do, pee on the floor?
