Director of stage ...

This is where I would say something pompous about the value of theatre in today's society, new voices, darkened rooms and how a director fits into the grand interface of American theatre. But to engage in such grandiloquence (exactly) feels disingenuous.

I have a problem with American theatre. 90% of it, I feel, snarkily, is meant to congratulate its bourgeois audience on their sentimental morality. 10%, maybe less, truly attempts to create seismic collisions of pitted souls and present actual quandary to its audience, that it might truly provide some grist that we can only mill by living out our lives with this new equipment for civilization issued us by a confounding night in the theatre.

The problem this presents for me and my career is that I'm only satisfied when the stage is awash in blood and body parts at the end of the evening, and that is very unpopular. I like dark, dark comedy. The kind that lifts people's eyebrows as they laugh while gasping through clenched teeth. The kind that makes people shudder to think about what made them laugh the night before.

American stage directing is in crisis. Just as we do not go to the theatre to admire an actor have an emotion, but, indeed, to have the emotion for ourselves, we do not go to the theatre to admire a director have ideas in front of us. We go to have the ideas. An informal poll of about 30 actors I worked with this last summer placed the average percentage of directors that don't suck around 8%. What is wrong with us?

My professor Liz Diamond use to tell us that the best productions are those that leave the most ideas still standing. This requires intense discipline. A discipline involving getting yourself, your preoccupations and your obsessions out of the way. When i first began directing, the rehearsal process was a practice of identifying every question that needed answering and moving on as quickly as possible. But as time went on I began to realize that such haste was locking out possibilities and have since endeavored to identify questions, and then their possible answers, but to resist choosing an answer. Instead letting all the possible answers marinate within the actors for when they are on stage, when they could then choose. This, paradoxically, has led to far more specific work.

I think a theatrical event has 4 dimensions: language, transaction, time and space. And within these 4 dimensions are 4 planes of conflict that we must be aware of in every moment of stage time: between a character and themselves, between a character and other characters, between a character and the world of the production, and between the world of the production and the world of the audience. These dimensions can be played off of each other, in chords and single notes, to create something truly hypnotic. A kind of hot jazz with time and space, language and transaction.

With a touch of restraint -- knowing what to leave out to compel the audience to project their own experience onto the proceedings -- it's my belief that this can lead to an awareness of every possible decision at our disposal in the rehearsal process.

 

... film ...

For someone emerging from the theatre, film adds two and a half dimensions to the act of directing. The half is that the requirements on the actors is completely different. Then, the story-telling agency provided by control of the camera and thus the audience's eye is endlessly fascinating. And finally, the act of juxtaposing images and perceptions, i.e. editing, is perhaps the world's most powerful artform. All of these additional dimensions serve to relieve the actor of their duty to be overly expressive.

If, in the theatre, we watch as actors wage emotional warfare by trying to make eachother feel conflicting emotions, film presents the challenge of depicting emotions as they actually happen in a human being. Micahel Caine says that if stage acting is done with a scalpel, film acting is done with a laser. Film acting leaves much more room for the audience to project their own emotions onto the performance. Humans are imperfect, and with the exceptions of the extremely hot-blooded and articulate, clumsy in their expressiveness. This clumsiness is an endearing virtue in film acting, but an hindrance on stage.

I won't dare hold forth here on camera angles, but an example of how useful they are is the following scenario. If your actor begins a shot faced away from the camera, and then slowly turns towards us, and if you push the dolly in on the actor while they turn, and if the actor and the camera stop moving at the same time, the audience will assume the actor has just figured something out. Without the actor having to do any more than merely actually figure it out. The camera reads your mind.

And when principal photography is over, the editor then picks up the reigns of the audience's perception of the proceedings by juxtaposing events and points of perception. The power of these decisions was demonstrated by the "Kuleshov Experiment" in which the same footage of the expressionless face of an actor is cut with a plate of spaghetti and then with a woman in a coffin. Audiences marvelled at the actor's ability to convey the subtle nuances of hunger and sorrow when in fact it's the exact same footage of an expressionless face. We provide the hunger and sorrow ourselves.

 

... and opera.

Opera is, frankly, the shit. It has the ultimate gesamptkunstwerk. My friend Gip Hoppe accurately describes opera as the only hallucinogenic art form. Vowels drudge up emotions, and to be in the room with a virtuosic opera singer is the emotional equivalent of when Tom (of Tom and Jerry) would float toward the pie in the windowsill riding on the smell.

The best place in the world to spend a day in the sitzprobe of Le Nozze de Figaro. There I said it. (And I know I'm supposed to not like Mozart, but screw you, opera snobs).

By the way, in the opera world, they say "toi, toi, toi" to mean good luck, a la "break a leg". It is supposed to be the sound of spitting on someone.