Yale School of Drama

At the end of my second semester in the directing program at the Yale School of Drama, my professor invited me and my three classmates to write down, briefly, what we'd learned in our first year there. I had already undergone a massive transformation in my thinking about the arts and my life in them, so much so that re-reading this little assignment, which dates back to May of 2002, I can't think of anything outside this list that I learned in my second or third years. So, in all its nakedness, here is a doe-eyed documentation of my world view at 27...

I should also say here that these three years were among the best I've ever had. I formed lifelong friendships, I formed opinions (which ironically would somewhat undo my burning desire to direct plays), and I grew. A shitload.

Finally, if I were to prorate my tuition, each of the items below cost me $211.11. Worth every penny. And now they are yours for free!

Things I have learned in my first year in the Yale School of Drama.

by Brendan Hughes

  1. I must accept the fact that no matter how innovative an idea I may have, someone, probably in the 1920’s, probably in Russia, probably Meyerhold, had it first.
  2. Realism is but one of many choices, and is often the most boring.
  3. Dead center is exactly that. Downstage Left is weak.
  4. There are no such thing as transitions.
  5. Every production is contemporary on some level.
  6. Waiting for Godot was a Hiroshima for the artform.
  7. Comedy doesn’t have to be fast.
  8. Binders are expensive.
  9. When I have full coverage, I become a hypochondriac.
  10. The audience comes to have the emotion, not watch an actor do it.
  11. Strassberg fucked everything up.
  12. Everything I’ve ever directed has been crap.
  13. The Director is the author of the event.
  14. I can be a good student. I can be smart in an academic way after all.
  15. I am a deeply competitive person.
  16. My old racket of acting dim and happy to intentionally lower people’s expectations so I could wow them later no longer works.
  17. Stanislavsky’s ABC books should have been translated at the same time.
  18. Aristotle’s Poetics is like carbon. It’s in everything.
  19. Sometimes people get mad at you for no reason.
  20. Conflict isn’t the worst thing in the world.
  21. It all happened in Russia. Everything.
  22. What I used to think was directing was actually just hotwiring inexperienced actors.
  23. I must burn with the spirit of my time.
  24. If you put a person at center stage. All you see is them, if you put them in the Golden Mean, you see their visual context as well.
  25. We have the golden mean in our knuckels.
  26. Composition is 50% more important than I thought it was.
  27. I now know why Russians have a million names.
  28. Don’t rush toward conclusions!
  29. I must help actors to distinguish between what is simply a thrill or rush on stage and what serves the text.
  30. Grotesque is the mixture of Beauty and Strange.
  31. Words are eggs, the sound is the shell, the image is the yolk.
  32. I must tune the actors like an instrument. Voice and body are mine to manipulate.
  33. The shock merchants killed the Golden Goose.
  34. Organize the laughs in comedy, smatterings of giggles throughout is a messy production.
  35. In every play you direct, insert a character named “the Blue Captain” (or the “Soldier in Transit”) who never speaks, and may represent you.
  36. Don’t just save us a reading of the text.
  37. Composition=elements you compose as a delivery system to the audience. Like cigarettes deliver nicatine. Be insideous about it.
  38. Line readings aren’t so bad after all. Any actor who complains of being made a puppet is shut down by their own ego in some way, because the unspoken rule is that it’s an exchange of energy and they should be trying to top us. We riff on each other.
  39. You write a contract with the audience that you have to fulfill. Scenes have central ideas directorially, and sometimes, even if you don’t mean them to be, they become the center.
  40. Memorization is of the body.
  41. You can hear an actor’s resume in the range of their voice.
  42. The audience breathes with the actor. So when an actor doesn’t breathe enough, neither does the audience, and they evenually start yawning and fall asleep.
  43. I must learn to stop using an apologetic rhythm.
  44. You cannot direct Shakespeare’s plays until they are deeply embedded in the subconcious, which is a very concious process.
  45. There is an underground baseball fandom at the Yale School of Drama.
  46. When looking at a painting, start by finding the lines and the triangles.
  47. Ripeness is all.
  48. Help the audience go deeper. Don’t illustrate, have a dialogue.
  49. Actors must play the necessity of the language, not the understanding of it.
  50. Put sleigh bells on the exposition up front, so they know to hop on certain facts.
  51. Never provide your characters an easy escape.
  52. Bare sets demand a lot of physical life.
  53. Ideas on which everyone agrees are safe and boring.
  54. Comedy is impossible if your actors are not willing to be humiliated in front of the audience.
  55. Beware of too many framing devices.
  56. All directors secretly hate to read plays.
  57. The lines of Shakespeare are rollercoaster posts. The audience will take the ride, the actor shouldn’t.
  58. Before I came here, the theoretical history of directing has occurred to me as new ideas (which I thought were mine) in chronological order—as if I am following a strand of DNA that I was born with as an artist—and, I am now somewhere in the 1910’s or 1920’s.
  59. American theatre is stuck in the 1930’s.
  60. I deserve to be here. I’m wicked good at this.