Of all the arts and crafts associated with the theatre biz the one I find most confounding is directing. One reason is that the director’s practical work is largely invisible, occurring in private rehearsal spaces with the actors and other creative team members before public performances begin. Another reason is that it seems there are as many approaches to directing as there are directors.
Last week for me a curtain was pulled back, casting some light on this alchemist-like profession. The occasion was a one-hour interview with Bart Sher at the Dramatists Guild in New York. (Interview was recorded and posted on the Internet.)
For a decade Sher was Artistic Director of Intiman Theatre in Seattle. Since decamping to Lincoln Center Theatre in 2008 and becoming its Resident Director, he has helmed a number of hits in New York and established an A-list reputation there.
Sher favors a maxim that comes from ancient Indian dance: “Where the eye goes the hand follows, where the hand goes the heart follows, and where the heart goes the essence is born.” He sees his work as pulling apart the essence from the heart. He says that as the director of a play he wants to give the audience the heart but not too much essence. Let them find the essence, the truth, on their own.
He describes his approach as very rhythmic: “The most important part that I do is look for the rhythm of the piece, to try to get that pulse going, to find where the rhythm releases.” Sher always seeks to identify what he calls the “operating principle” of the play, the core that captures the play’s internal rhythms, its internal structure.
As to his rehearsal process he says, “I change my mind a lot. There are directors who try to create the impression that they know everything and they’re trying to lead [the actors] to that thing they know. That’s not how I work. I work with what are the questions we are asking, and how are we building [the play] together so we’re all inside the same conversation by the end?” The actors then don’t get panicked, he says, because they don’t feel they have to get things right right away. They can explore things; they can pull back and try another direction.
He reached for painting to help explain, saying he’s more like an abstract expressionist who builds up layer on layer to eventually arrive at some cosmological meaning, as opposed to making a figurative painting which is more literal and real, less layered. (Not all figurative painters would buy Sher’s distinction.)
As a result of this process of building up layers, “All the best work with the actors comes at the end of the rehearsal process, in the last eight days,” Sher says.
“When you direct, the real territory is not on stage, it’s not what the audience is getting, it’s the grey area in the middle which is all the suggestion of what is really going on,” Sher says. “And if you properly lay in the grey area, you give the audience an opportunity to do its work. That’s what you learn from Chekhov, all the things that are under the surface.”
In rehearsal Sher encourages actors to invent secrets, a tactic that he credits Stanislavski with. By secrets Sher means backstory details that are known only to the actor (though he may share them with his fellow actors and director). A secret can create a substrata that animates the actor’s character and the overall play.
(Writers do this too. Many salient details of a character’s backstory do not come out in a play though they certainly inform that character’s thoughts and actions.)
Sher explains his process with the author of a new play: “There are directors who will tell the playwright ‘You need a new scene here in the second act because’ and they give precise reasons why. I really need to work on the script and dig into the scenes for a period of time before I have anything to say [to the writer] . . . What you learn from working on Shakespeare is that you can’t change the text. If you don’t understand something you have to keep pushing into the text to see what is there. I believe that the starting point with a new script is to look at it the same way. You don’t know what the play’s deeper assumptions are until you’ve spent time with actors looking at it. . . You have to be patient with yourself and your opinions of the writing. Even the writer may not yet know all the things they need to know about what they’ve made.” (Like most playwrights I’ve had the fulfilling and almost magical experience of actors and directors teaching me things about my play that were really there but I had been unaware of.)
Every playwright would benefit from learning more about how a director thinks and so would be well served by watching this interview. In the hour-long discussion Sher and the Dramatists Guild have provided a valuable glimpse at the alchemy a director tries to perform.
Sidebar: Sunday evening, June 9, Sher will find out if he wins a Tony Award for Best Direction of a Play for his work on Golden Boy. A hit for the Group Theatre when it premiered in 1937, Clifford Odets’s Golden Boy was remounted this past winter on Broadway. In his New York Times review Charles Isherwood described Sher’s production as blistering and galvanizing. Sher said in the Dramatists Guild interview that what he most admires about Odets is his deep training in naturalism and how he then lifts the story into the poetic. Golden Boy is also up for seven other Tony Awards this year.
