 The past couple of years I've been very happy to partner up with Harvardwood to try to expand our programming and expand the people who come to talk to our members and to Harvardwood members. I think it's been really successful so far and I'm looking forward to continuing it in the future. Let me please ask you at this time to at least put your phones on vibrate. You can if you want to tweet that you're here, that would be fantastic or check in on Facebook. Let everyone know that you're here. If you're interested we are streaming this live on live stream on New Play TV and you'll be able to watch the archived version starting tomorrow. If you're interested in that feel free to email the guild and I can send you the link if you can't find it on your own. Spence and Bart will be having a conversation first but we will open up the floor for questions at the end. I ask that when you ask a question please do so loud enough so that our online audience can hear you. All right. Without any further ado it's my pleasure to introduce to you Spence Porter. Thanks Terry. For those of you who don't know what Harvardwood is shame on you and Harvardwood is Harvard's officially recognized organization for the arts, media and entertainment and we are just thrilled to do these events here at the guild and thank you Terry, thank you dramatist's guild. We love the dramatist's guild and so tonight I'm going to be talking to somebody who I personally consider one of the very best directors of our time and you timed that drink of water poorly. I didn't warn him that was coming. A lot of you will remember the production of South Pacific he did a few years back I was just in the other room telling him that when I saw it I felt that I could not imagine a better production of that show and Tony Award winning production and another music was live in the piazza, another lovely show, another Tony nomination for Bart, Awakensing, another lovely show, another Tony nomination for Bart, Golden Boy running right now, eight Tony nominations including Best Director and Best Revival. This guy is good, this guy is good. He also directs the Metropolitan Opera, he was formerly the head of the Intamin Theatre for a decade. Let's start talking. So I spoke to Terry Schreiber, Terry as some of you know is I think one of the two great New York acting teachers of his generation. He is just a brilliant exponent of naturalism and a superb director himself and Terry told me that when he saw Golden Boy he felt as if he was watching the group theater and this is an even bigger compliment if you know that Terry was a protege of Harold Clerman. Wow, that's amazing. So let's start with Golden Boy. What first of all you obviously have some sort of feel for Odette's since this is your second Broadway Odette's production. Where does that come from? I don't know, I mean Andre Bishop, my boss at Lincoln Center is the one who first compelled me to look at Awake and Sing and I knew his work but not that well and I hadn't read it in a long time and I read the material and it absolutely came off the page incredibly clearly to me. I think that my, I think what I really love most about Odette's is his deep training in naturalism and how it lifts into the poetic. He's got this great balancing act between the poetic and the naturalistic, a poetic and the prose in the depth of the writing and at the same time he's always angling to try to make sense of where the metaphor can go or where he's heading for so if you take something like Golden Boy it's a sort of invented problem between the violinist in us and the boxer which is a war inside of his own psyche and yet he abused it with such believability and such truthfulness all the way through that it's a gorgeous thing and it, I was attracted to that particular story because it seemed to me to speak a lot about the problem of success and what success does to a person and how it can chew you up and tear you to bits and especially within the context of for lack of a better word rampant capitalism, there we are. And how long ago, how early on did you know you were going to be directed Golden Boy? Most of the shows that I do have to be at least a year ahead. I can't remember the exact time but the preparation time has to start up to a year in advance. And what did you do to prepare for the rectum? Well, the first stage of this particular one was spent at the New York Performing Arts Library because there was a lot of text that cuts and texts and stuff taken out of the story. I found that there were, I didn't have any criticisms of it, but there was interesting text that had been cut for whatever reasons, especially around a couple of particular areas that Waldo Dez, Clifford or Dezson gave us some permission to look at again. So a lot of time was spent with the text. Those areas really had to do with the father, his Italian, and his background, his whole educational background. They seem to be, for lack, I mean, I'm analyzing their Marxist materialist analysis. They seem to be trying to make kind of idealized peasant. And actually there was a little bit in the original writing that he talks about reading Garavaldi and Tolstoy and things like that, which we restored. And they had sort of cleaned all of that away. And this is not a complaint about it, that's writing. The Italian itself is very rough Italian, kind of like pizza pie Italian, which now when you say it feels a little awkward, so a little bit of work went into that. And I translated some of the actual lines back into Italian and put them in the show in Italian if they could sustain so that you could feel the deeper naturalism of an immigrant household in which a couple of the languages were present. And because I work in the opera, it felt to me that that was something we could sustain. And I was really working with Tony Chaloupe, who was very naturalistic about it, to really make him seem like a man who had these old world cultural values of art, beauty, what it meant to be a man that were different than what his son was facing in the 30s. And that was looked at. So that was the first step. Then the next step goes into design and goes into analyzing how to do it. And that one has particular problems. I was going to talk a little bit about that. Well, the particular problems of that show are that as Odette's was moving along, he had spent more time in Hollywood. He wrote it while he was in Hollywood, already making quite a lot of money. And so it has eight completely distinct locations, which often writers at that time would keep it. Wake and Sing is all in the same house, all in the same room. So it's a single set. So we had a lot of work to go through to how to build what I call sort of the operating principle of the piece. Often now, when you direct a play, a contemporary writer will give you a movie script and call it a play. And you always have to develop an entire mise-en-scene, which allows you to switch locations a thousand times. And there was a little bit of the beginnings of that in this. So we had to kind of spend a lot of time working through that. Plus, I always do look for, in Wake and Sing, I famously, and some people didn't like, that I flew the house out the middle of the scene. The whole house lifted up. And I pushed the play from its totally naturalistic stage to its completely poetic space at the end. And partly because it's very clear without being written in the thing that they're sitting Shiva at the end. In all the descriptions of everything, except that word isn't used anywhere. And so I stripped the space in the same kind of way. And I was looking for similar metaphors in this piece, which what that last thing was about, what the last scene was about, what happens when you get into the last locker room scene and he decides to run off and he's covered in blood and how it gets pushed into the poetic Greek slash layers of the piece. You used the expression operating principle of the play. Yes. I'd like to come back to that. Yes. Yes, there's an operating mechanism in all plays that you have to, you're always searching for the sort of internal rhythm, the internal structures of it. And so each one has its own, sometimes the space operates the play. If you look at Shakespeare's space, the great advantage Shakespeare had is that the entire space of the globe, the inner above, the inner below, dictated the writing. He could write these quick switches of scenes because it would move from below to up or down and he didn't have to ever change the set. He had a set that operated in a similar way to how a film works. So his mind is writing for a space. Playwrights just sit and write. And the ones from a certain tradition in the mid, will write the first one's in the drawing room, the second one's in whatever you have to think about the space in which it operates. So I'd always said if I was going to write a book about directing, it would be called Reasons to Go Places. Because it's really odd to a lot of what our work is. It's like figuring out how to get somewhere and how to operate the movement. And the lengths of lines, the rhythm of the text, dictates the kind of space it happens in. You've used the word rhythm a couple of times. Yes. I'm a very rhythmic person. I grew up in San Francisco. And as a young person in the 60s and 70s, I had a lot of older brothers. And they took me to Grateful Dead concerts. As a young, like a 10-year-old boy. And I thought, you know, there is this giant, unmediated cultural experience. Never mind what you think of the Grateful Dead because that's a separate thing. But it was quite an interesting dramaturgical event. Because the first act was always like a series of songs that everybody knew. And the second act was an entire experimental section in which they would go into all these places. And they had an improvisational quality to it. And they had a shared rhythm. And they would explore the rhythms of where they were going and, like, lift into whatever. And that, I didn't consciously know that I was absorbing that. So when I've got my note, and I do operas, and I do things like that. When I've got my nose to a play, I'm really listening for what I call the inward sound of the piece, the internal rhythm of it, where its pulses are, where its breath are. I can't know always in advance, but that's where my real heart is. And so it's probably the most important part of what I do is look for the rhythm. Try to get that pulse going, that rhythm of where it releases, because an audience who comes into a play is spending the first 20 minutes tuning out of the 21st century and getting away from their electronic devices and all that. So I'm always pretty happy if I see an audience member taking a short nap somewhere in the first act. Because I think it's usually about trying to reconnect their personal time signature. And there's always that click, as Josh Logan used to call it, where they click into the rhythm of the play itself. And so if you go see a Shakespeare, you'll often find the first 20 minutes you're sort of reeling from this new language and all that. And then something in the last 20 minutes, it's completely magical, because you've released the world you were in. You've fallen under the spell or the rhythm of the piece it's in. And then the poetics and internal place that you can be get changed for the end. And it's kind of shamanic work to try to get people out of their rhythm and into the rhythm of the work itself. So that when they get to the fundamental questions it's asking, they're opening up into what's possible in an opera, in a musical, in anything else. And so I find it the most important part of my job as the interpretive artist of the evening. Being here at the drama skill, I have to separate myself from the creative artists. That's a separate discussion that we can argue about over dinner. So that's why rhythm is a big part. And so if you look at something like it's always interesting when they translate Molière, because Molière is these often Iambic, they always get translated into five-foot lines with a rhyme at the end. But in the French, they're six feet. And there's a big difference between d-da, d-da, d-da, d-da, d-da, d-da, or just five. And I always look for translations that have six, because you're going to find the rhythm that might be in there, that deeper thing that's his rhythm, his sensibility, is going to find its way into something, into something. Now before you can get the audience hooked into the rhythm, you've got to get the actors hooked into this. Again, let's go back to Golden Boy. What sorts of things did you do to prepare the cast for the show? Well, the first thing you really do is I spend a lot of time in the casting process. Which I don't, when I cast a show, I don't look, I mean, there are obviously types, and there are certain kinds of people you need. But really what you're doing is a lot of diagnostic testing. Do they have the skills? Do they have the sensibility? Do they have the training? Can they verbally handle? Can they make good decisions? Are they capable of surprise? Do they bring a good mind to it? Are they an asshole? Whatever you want to find out in the middle of an audition is really worth probing to figure those things out. So collecting an ensemble is first step is good casting. The second step is the way I rehearse, the way I break down. I spend a certain amount of time at the table, but not a lot. And I do, depending on the show, I will bring people in. If it has deep historical stuff people need to know in the case of blood and gifts, we brought in all kinds of people from Afghanistan and the region and got them to really think about that way of thinking, which was so different than ours. Or in South Pacific we brought a lot of people in. Golden Boy, we knew the world largely. So we brought in a lot of people that were from the boxing world, everybody from referees to coach trainers, boxers, and just let the cast try to push their mind toward asking them questions about who they were in the world. And they got asked questions they weren't used to being asked. Do you know of any gay gangsters? That was one question, because there's famously, which is also in the notes, Eddie Fuselli, is very specifically in the notes of Odette that he is a homosexual. And if anybody ever knew it, he'd kill him. And it's classic in the group theater slash Stanislavski tradition to build some secrets in. So they were asking all these crazy questions. And there's all these things that would go into that sort of world, plus the fight world, plus the, and that's one way. And then the way I rehearse is very, very precise moment to moment to moment to moment with a lot of repetition. But I make them sort of ask the questions I'm asking, so that we're all in the same place. I don't, in the way we break down the text the way I go from moment to moment, they kind of start to tune in and realize they can use my process of the mechanics of my process to include their own questions in it. And that can be open for a lot of people. If someone like Mark Ruffalo, who is in Awake and Sing, was very slow to the process, he takes a lot of time to find his way. And then later, he starts to build up information very internally. That person can work bit by bit by bit versus the ones who are very fast, but then kind of later on haven't asked themselves the questions that Mark's asking. So it's a lot to do with the way I set a tempo for the work. That work continues, and then the best part of that work comes in note sessions when we finally get in performance and previews, where we're having a very large, very detailed, shared conversation about all of the new things are going to be discovered. Because all the best work usually comes in the last eight days, when everybody knows exactly where they are and you're starting to gather information. And then even Stanoslawski used to say, take 100 performances. And after 100 performance, you start to fall into such a closeness with it that you really do learn the rhythm. And I try to build a process which you can deepen but not broaden, which to an actress should be very clear. That wasn't me. Well, you don't want the process where they can. You have to have it where you have a shared sense of what are the actions I'm going to explore tonight. But I'm not going to change the blocking. I'm not going to go all over the place. But every night is going to be an opportunity to ask the question again with the person that's there. So you can surprise each other. And you find the answers in each other. So often my shows can get with a really great group. They get better and better and better. Because everybody each night is there to explore with good material how much further they're going to get. And so they, and I have to come in and check on it. But they usually have the great skill to keep that moving. And I try to build it with enough openness that it changes. Because I change my mind a lot. And I admit it. And I do think that there are directors who try to create the impression that they know everything and they're leading you to that thing they know. That's not how I work. I work with what are the questions we're asking and how are we building it together so that we're all inside the same conversation by the end. So to what extent do you have a sense of where you're going and not have a sense of where you're going when you start rehearsing? Sounds like there's a lot still open for you at the beginning of the process. Um, well, the best way to describe this is if you were to take a painter like Dukunig, because the reason I like abstract expressionist is because the figurative art is probably what people think of as closer to what we do in the theater. Because they're human beings in the picture, right? And you have to paint the figure. But if you take the abstract expressionist, you have layer upon layer upon layer that builds up to this, say Dukunig is my favorite, like a beautiful expression of some cosmological information. You look at it, and you're struck by how deep that is. And I think of my work as more in that world. Like we build up layer upon layer upon layer upon layer. We obviously have enough experience, and I have enough understanding of where I want the thing to go. But I'm looking to build up the layers. So if you do a scene one way, you may find that much of what you're looking at is wrong. It's not wrong, it's just not right for the character, or it's too slow, or it's too this, or it's too that. Or you go down a path with what the assumption is, and you feel that assumption doesn't work, so you say, let's get rid of that and go on. But you can never get rid of it. It's in the underpainting, as it were. And so when it's in the underpainting, then you move to a whole other choice, and you look at it all from this point of view. And then five days later, you go, OK, we're getting rid of that. Then you go over here, and you look at it all from... All that stuff goes into the jar, like wine, has sediment, and those flavors, the complexity of it builds up from there. And that is a lot of the way I describe the process, so that they're building on it, and then the actors get less panic, because they don't think they have to get it right right away. They can explore something, they pull back, they go in another direction, and I just have to juggle and maintain the deepening of the conversation. So you may find a good example of a character like Eddie Fuselli, who is the gay gangster. It's a very delicate character, because he's the most brutal and most difficult guy in the thing. He's got the most to hide, and building up the layers upon which that works takes the longest time. Now, Tony Carvella was great at that, and brave, and he had all these crazy secrets. He had his mother's watch. He had weird little rings. He had his hair in a special curl. He had all these crazy things he wanted to do, which were not all evidence to the audience, but were important to him. And I love secrets for actors. So you build all these things up, and then you go there, and then, but figuring out for someone like another actor, what they think of that, or what they're afraid of in that, that conversation becomes more complicated as you're going along. And they even say, you know, the character Moody says, you know, he scares me. He says, Yvonne Staharski's Lauren Amoon says, and he says, why, because he's queer? And she says, no, not because he's queer, but because blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And it just goes by like that. And it's a very interesting layer, because strangely, and even when you get a sense of it, you could tell the whole audience probably in 1937 figured it out. And I like when you direct, I think the real territory is not what's on stage and not what the audience is getting. It's the gray area in the middle, which is all the suggestion of what's going on. And if you lay in what the gray area is, you give the audience the opportunity to do its work. That's what you learn from Chekhov. It's all the things underneath the surface. It's all the things that are in the layers or in the subtext is as worked out as what's on the surface. And that's the area I work in, the gray area between the event and the audience. It's interesting to me that I asked about what you did with the cast to prepare for the show, and you immediately talked about the things you did to get depth in the characters. Because the reason that interests me is that when I asked the question, I thought you were going to talk about the things that you did to get the physicality of the boxing world, which you didn't even mention. No, because the truth is we brought in BH Barry. Seth Numerik is obsessed with boxing, all the guys, as soon as you start doing boxing, all the guys get out and they all do the other thing, they're fine. They're going to do it, and they're going to do great. And Seth was amazing at it. And we had another guy, Dion Mucchiato, I never say his name right. He was incredibly good at it, and they loved doing it, and they worked really hard at it. And we went to see boxing. We did all of that. I didn't have to worry about that part. What I have to worry about is all the other things that are the deeper questions. Because usually when you do rehearsal scene, you're going to do all the most result-oriented choices at first. It's going to be too loud. The joke's going to be too, you're going to be further from the truth than ever, because you're playing all the emotional results right away. Then as you move along the process, and you've unearthed all of it, it starts to get buried. And then it turns the yes at the end of the question is filled with all that information. But it isn't telegraphing, showing the results, doing all that stuff. There's my favorite maxim in the theater, which I've said before, is from ancient Indian dance. Bharatanatyam, at the beginning of the book of Bharatanatyam, it says, where the eye goes, the hand follows, where the hand goes, the heart follows, and where the heart goes, the essence is born. Heart is bhava, essence is rasa. All of the work we do is the distinction between bhava and rasa. You want the essence to be released in the audience. If the mother had just lost her child and has just gotten this news on stage, she probably shouldn't cry. The audience should be receiving that essence. And because she's unable to cry, they fall apart. But we all know that performance, she starts wailing and screaming and all that, and we just worry about her. The whole question of what we do every single show is asking what is the difference between what is the heart and what is the essence, and pulling those things apart. The same way the dancer is asking to follow into playing, dancing from the heart, not from the essence. And that's, you would call that playing a result in acting class. And that's the fundamental operating principle of how I look at acting. You can do the same with a design. A design can be filled with too much essence. You go in and you see something, it's a giant conceptual set, which is like all the gears and all the thing. You're like, well, it's just too much information. I should be able to work out that that's what it is. That kind of thing. Okay. I'm gonna switch off to another line a little bit. You work in a tremendously wide range of types of theater. How is your process, we've been talking right now about a naturalistic show. How is your process different when you're doing Shakespeare, Omo-yer, or Gouldoni? Well, okay, there's Gouldoni and there's Omo-yer and there's Shakespeare. Let's start with Shakespeare. Shakespeare, I was lucky enough to work with Peter Hall, who was a wonderful, wonderful teacher to me. And it all starts with language. It all starts with an analysis and understanding of the language, and he would break it into like three rules and you're always, all the information comes from the language. Now, that isn't meaning, there are those people who will say to you, old actors who are yelling at you like, it's just on the page. It is liquid, it's on the page. Well, that's of course true, but actually having the keys to understand what the irregularities are, how Shakespeare might be doing it, what a scene's doing, what the rhythm is, because the rhythm in a Shakespeare is different play-to-plays, writes the play he's writing. I mean, I've done like 20 of them, many of them several times, and you start to learn each one has its own set of rules based on the kind of, either the motifs or the rhythms or the, so if it's Richard II, it's more medieval and the language is much more clotted. When you get to Henry V, the language is more practical and precise, given how the politics are changing. When you get to Henry V, it's filled with bombastic, nationalistic sort of large-scale rhetoric, and then you build from there. So that's the key there. Goldone's a whole different thing because Goldone's the opposite from Shakespeare. Goldone is essentially a scenario-driven, and he was, I used to say, Shakespeare makes genius of a lot of people because with the language there, it's all scripted, but to do Goldone, you have to have enormous training and skill and say, mass work, clown work, and take that, and you are the artist who pulls these scenarios into life. So one of my heroes is Giorgio Strayler, the great Italian director in the last century, and the pillars of his company were Goldone on one hand and Shakespeare on the other because the clown work and the sort of physicality of that work versus the work of the language were the two places he built his company from. So they can be great teachers, either of them. The classics, in general, are good because they push you into looking at the world in a certain way. My other major influence is a Polish avant-garde theater artist named Tadeusz Kantor, who I did a dissertation on in graduate school and who worked in the last century and was a great experimental artist who was a painter. So my influences of painting come out of that and into how he thought about metaphor and where it works in it. And he, for me, was the best next to Brecht, the most revolutionary theater artist in the 20th century. And so I, those sources are big for me against the classical sources. So there's a lot of places it comes from. How's your process different when you're working with a living playwright who's there in rehearsal? I tend to do it as a classicist. I don't, I'm not the kind, there are directors who are like, you need a new scene here in the second act because they go through and they're very precise about that. I really feel I need to work on the piece and dig into the scenes for a period of time before I have anything to say. I have to treat it, what you learn from Shakespeare is you can't change the text, right? So if you don't understand something, you have to keep pushing into the text to figure out what is there and get inside the rhetoric enough. And I tend to believe that the starting point with a new writer is you have to look at it the same way. You shouldn't, you don't know what the sort of deeper assumptions are until you spend some time with actors looking at it. So we're doing Bridges of Madison County coming up with Marsha Norman who's the book writer and Jason Robert Brown. And a lot of the time of that work has been we've done four, three, four workshops and it wasn't until the second workshop that I said this song in the second act, I don't get it. But because I'd already worked for long enough to be able to start to say where it wasn't, the rhythm wasn't releasing for me. And now we're far enough along that we've built up enough information but we haven't even done a production. So when we do a production, that will all change much more. So even if you hear about George Abbott, you know, moving all the tiles around, you know, in a show, that usually doesn't happen until you've dug deep enough into it. That doesn't happen like just seeing what you get. And that's where I think is the difference is you have to be patient with yourself and your opinions of the writing and pretend that the writer has even, even themselves may not know all the things they need to know about what they've made yet. Now you just mentioned working on a musical. How does, how is the process different? Very different circumstances of a musical production. It probably helped to work on Shakespeare and verse before working on musicals. Musicals are elevated speech in the form of singing. And so, you know, people ask, you know, what makes a good musical? Well, something where you have to sing. You have to have a reason to sing. You know, so if it's, you know, if it's where the speaking leaves off and the singing must begin. And that's, that's the difference. It, I'm probably better at the more naturalistic musical than I am at the more stylized musical. You know, so when it becomes a big production number and a big dance thing and a whole thing, that's a different kind of work than I should probably do. I'm probably better at something like Piazza, South Pacific, the experimentation that those guys were doing. Perhaps some of the Sondheims. I get more into that version of it than 42nd Street. Not that I don't admire it and think it isn't amazing. And the vocabulary of dance at that level is extraordinary. But I'm probably better suited to where it's the heightened expression. And then I find them amazing. The interesting part is there's such a deep difference in the personalities, actors versus people in musicals versus opera singers. They're just, the worlds are vastly different. And the, my activity of what I do isn't largely different. But I do have to adjust myself in each world. You just brought up opera where it really isn't outlining a couple of the differences. Okay, you've got singers who have limited language in common to begin with. They may or may not have acting talent. They may or may not have acting training. And it's a production that won't run continuously and there will be somebody else stepping in as each cast change happens. How do you deal with all of those? Well, I mean, it's interesting. Preparing for an opera is probably the most demanding of all of them. I spent all day today working on Faust, who knows Faust, which I'm doing a year from now. And I have a friend who I've worked with a long time, Peter Still, who's nominated for a Tony for Golden Boys, a sound designer and is a great musician. He spends a lot of time with me. We go through every single note of it. It takes two to three weeks. We're halfway through who knows Faust. And you have to get inside the music first. In the same way you have to get inside the language. I have to spend a lot of time working on the music. So before I get to that singer, the singer himself, Anuna Trebko, Juan Diego Flores, whoever they are, they're going to know it better than I know it. And you have to keep in mind that that's the most heightened level of stuff. So I always say preparing them for an opera is like getting the Yankees ready for a game. When we work on a play, we work and work and work and we rehearse and rehearse and we go over and we go over and go over. By the time it moves on to the stage, we know very incrementally what's going to happen. When you work on an opera, first of all, you have no time. You do lay in all of the things you do. You stage it. You shape it in the same way. But they don't sing full out every rehearsal because they would never survive it. You don't really know the full extent of where they're going to go. The Trebko might say, oh, but you talk too much. Oh, please. And I'll say, I know, I know. Listen, listen. And we have a great relationship. But you're deepening their experience of, say, Lelizir, which she's done many times. And then when you get to that performance, they swing for the fences. They play really hard. And you have to prepare them to be able to reach to that. And you have to build an interpretation, which is going to be supportive of many people doing it so that the building blocks in that interpretation can be filled with different people. So it's an interesting question. I don't think about that. I don't think about the, like, oh, many people doing it. I think about my best version of Barbara Seville or my best version of Lelizir or Gunos Faust. And I get underneath the subtext in exactly the same way doing a play. That's what drives Anna crazy because I make her think about it in ways she's never thought about it. But that's still the same process for me. That's not how other people do opera. And opera is an amazing interpretive art form because there's extremely, you know, place interpretations where the text, where the interpretation is very far away from what the text may originally have meant. And that can be incredibly interesting. I tend to be a little bit more in the middle, like in the Strayler world, as opposed to the Steffen-Herheim world or the Klixto Beato, which is really pushing it way out. But opera is also a difficult form because many people who go see an opera will have seen 30 or 40 different productions of the same opera. And they're listening for different things, and they're looking and plumbing into different parts of it. So what they want, that's what makes the experience of it so diverse, the very conservative wing versus the extremely liberal wing. And finding a ground in the middle there is, or any ground in there is complicated. Now, when we got together before we came out here, you scribbled a few things on a piece of paper that might be interesting to talk about. And then we got talking to each other. I never asked you what you meant by them. So I'm glancing right now, and I see the words background and influences. What did you have in mind? You know, the Grateful Dead. Ah, talked about that already. Yeah, no, the Grateful Dead, Tadius Contour, Wally Schenck, that kind of world, the ones who built me up. OK, we got to that. We got to that one. And did we also get to the failed cultural diffusion? That's a much more complicated question. Tell me what the question is, so that I can answer. My biggest obsession recently, as media explodes and as so many people and bloggers and critics and everybody's in the middle of the same universe, when we do something like Golden Boy Lincoln Center, we really are trying to make contact with our own traditions. We're trying to deal with the group theater, and we do it at the Bellasco, where they originally worked. We try to explore those traditions and find that corridor. When Georgios Strahler did his many productions of Sherwin of Two Masters, he went into the Louvre, and he explored the mask tradition, and he built his own tradition again, and he tried to really connect himself in time to his ancestors. I'm finding currently in the world that it's becoming so diffuse, these lines of narrative with our past, and so blurred that it's becoming complicated. You've experienced it in the world of politics. It used to be clear what the line of our traditions were between our parties over compromise and things like that, and now it's so diffuse and blurred that no one can get a grip on it. And in a weird way, we're experiencing a similar, in the hugely transformational time we're in, where media and other things are changing so much and how we communicate is switching so quickly, and people can communicate in so many ways. The ability to concentrate and stay in contact with our own traditions without letting them blur into this diffuse blast of stuff is, for me, the biggest question. It's the place where it's the most difficult to understand where we are in that and what expresses who we are in that and who is connecting us to that. And so it affects training. It affects the questions we ask. It affects, when you go to the movies, you're like, well, what movie am I gonna go see? Cause you're looking for something that may be able to speak to the questions. I grew up in the regional theater, which used to have a very clear sense of traditions and heroes and things like that, and now it's sort of becoming so pulled apart. And I used to worry that it was me. You know, I was just getting older and I should just accept it. But I do worry for younger artists where they find themselves in the work and in the traditions of the work and where they're learning from and what conversations you can have with them. Because if I talk to a young person and I'll say, yes, if you looked at that production and in the work of Watteau and in this particular thing here, and they will say, who's Watteau? And what's those things and you're like, but it doesn't mean they don't know anything. It just means that we're not having the same conversation. And yet we're all doing the same work. And that's where it's getting diffused. And that's where I'm asking that question of myself. And without naming names or saying anything that could produce problems later, any thoughts on the role of critics in the theater right now? Well, it's one of the biggest questions of what we do is the critic has the job of holding a line of narrative together, connecting us to our past, speaking for the traditions and keeping us in contact with where we are as we move ahead. It's a very difficult job. I think, I used to talk about critics as the last collaborator. The person who explains why this production pushes us to the next place in the work. And I think whether it's an opera critic or whether it's a theater critic or critics and musicals, it's the capacity of another group helping, we'd have Kenneth Tynan, or we'd have, there's millions of intellectual writers and thinkers who are trying to help us when I was growing up that we would all read. And now it's a little hard to keep an eye on what that is and what, because we can always look to the Brits because in England they have a more cohesive culture or a more homogenous culture, so their theatrical tradition is a little easier to describe is given a little bit more street cred in terms of its intellectual nature, rightly or wrongly. But in our world, talking about American culture, talking about it in an intelligent way, connecting up who we are as diverse as we're getting it, the politics we're dealing with, these are hard critical questions to ask. The artists have to ask them and you want the critics to ask them on a political, on a cultural, on a semiotic, on a hermeneutic, on all these levels of who we are, you want that. And the bloggers all join in and so there's this giant screaming conversation going on which people are acting out their ids and egos in a million ways, but not really, but which questions are they asking? In terms of who we're becoming and which artists are dealing with that. And those are the questions that are important to continue to address. Not just that I'm the one dealing with them, I'm not saying that, saying we need in the critical community those lights, those people who are compelled and interested in trying to assess where we are in the same way the artists are trying to assess where we are, it's a critical artistic function. And that's interesting because right now you read these think pieces and it's complicated. You think, haven't I read that before? What are they saying, you know, and it's hard, it's hard. And you mentioned dealing with young directors earlier. When you deal with young directors, what advice do you give them about building a career, creating art? Well, it's funny, we talked about this. I grew up in a world where we, because I grew up in the 60s and 70s and it was a counter-cultural movement and it was filled with all kinds of counter-cultural ideas. It was the really dirty word when I was growing up was career, it was a nasty word. You weren't allowed to talk about your career and you'd be called a sellout and all these things that were really bad. Which now everyone wants to be famous and rich and they want to be told they're a genius. And I mean we have our mothers to do that I guess. And they're not important qualities to want. You know, I mean they are important, we want to make a living and I think the nature of rampant capitalism makes us so afraid because we don't have proper healthcare and we don't, that's where the English have an advantage. They're not as afraid. We're afraid, we're trying to struggle, we're trying to make a living, we're trying to get along. So the first thing I always say to a young director is stay out of debt. Because if you want to be at the mercy of capitalism, you will have large debts. And a lot of the time they go to graduate schools, they build up debts, they go to colleges, they go to all these places. And it makes the experience of what they're doing really difficult. That's one part of it. The other is, you know, you do have to to push way ahead in the future, you do have to learn your past. In whatever way you're gonna learn it, you have to become interested in that and be asking, create a dynamic relationship to the culture in which you are compelled to make connections and ask questions and find out where you are and why we're here. And these are old questions, but the fundamental questions of who am I and why am I here and what does it mean and what are we doing which are underneath all of the things we make, have to always be asked every single time. And there are many ways to do that and there are many, many, many wonderful young directors out there who are doing incredible work right now, who are asking those questions and they get, that's the place to be. And also to feel a relationship to Europe, to history because, you know, essentially we live just short enough lives that we forget everything over and over again. And it's a little bit of a problem. And so it all gets, you know, it all kinda starts, the wheel starts over again and that's where it's complicated. And now I think it's your turn to ask some questions. How would you describe yourself as an audience member when you've ever seen a show or what have you? Are you there to be obtained or to see what other people are doing or some combination? Oh my God. I'm hoping to get a nap. No, I'm kidding. I think it isn't easy for me to be an audience member. I won't kid you about that. It's very hard not to have a critical mind when I watch something. If I go and watch a piece, a theater piece and I find the floor plan like basic X's and O's to be out of sorts or I can't help myself from making these analysis of what the space is doing and how it operates. And I apologize when I do that to anybody I go see but it is not easy. My critical mind is hard to turn off. I do though think that I want the same thing everybody wants. We want to leave the theater lightened and free and open to new things and seeing the world in a fresh, joyful way not exhausted and worn out and pissed off. And both things happen but the first one less often than the second one. And I think that having those experiences I was in London not too long ago and I went to see Bruce Norris' new play, The Low Road, which is an amazing play and I went with David Gasbeck who wrote A Woman on the Verge, she was a musician for me and it was one of those great experiences directed brilliantly by Dominic Cook at the Royal Court. It was one of those experiences that was just a great, great intellectual incredibly rich, incredibly exciting experience of a great piece of theater and it's the best thing to happen and no matter what you say or how jealous you're going to be or how competitive you are all that, that's really what you want every time you go. It doesn't happen very often but it's what you want. I'd rather be on the road right now or I'm on the road right now You're not obligated to... Yes, I've been able, you know, Kinky Boots is great, I saw Pippin it's great they're all great, they're different that peak experience I'm talking about what I probably am tired of is this sort of drug impact going to the theater. The people go now as a kind of substitute for some drug experience. It's like crack and they have to kind of get off and they have to have a huge emotional experience have their mind blown and this was incredible and they have to be somehow transformed in this way. The obligation of that crack is pretty hard to live up to and I think it creates a kind of exhausted public because, you know, short of actually dropping something in their coke on the way in it's pretty intense to live up to that and I know that from being a deadhead because when you're a deadhead and you go from show to show to show to show you're comparing this peak experience with that one from that one from that one so I know the kind of addiction that goes into our seeking and then that leads to other dissonances of like well they didn't do this and it should have been that it should have been that that kind of thinking as much as we're all susceptible to it is part of the other dangerous quotient if you don't serve somebody's crack they come down even harder in their anger and, you know, that's a weird experience and New York's kind of unique that way where they're like we're all in the game of handicapping each other and it's intense that's an intense one What's been your worst and best experience for the producer? I've never done a commercial production I've only worked in non-profit supportive environments so I haven't been and I think most really good commercial producers are the ones who balance the experience of the artist against the commercial interests of the production and that's a hard line to find in these worlds so because I work at Lincoln Center I'm in a pretty good it's a pretty good environment for making something good it creates a different question about like what happens in the sort of high high-risk nature of Broadway the safer confines of Lord or of regional theater or of, you know, we all love the Brits but they live in very, very supported state subsidized circumstances which allow for a lot of risk and a lot of experimentation which is not as easy in the commercial world so I think those things have a balance they find with each other in the vested circumstances and there are great producers out there many of them are Jeffrey Richards or Scott Rudin there are a lot of them out there but the one part of our business that needs the most great people is in the producing area and the most artistic and the most sensible and the most intelligent balancing act and that is a very special art in its own I actually have two questions and they're process questions that I think about a lot and one of them is how do you balance talking with your actors about the text and about their characters and playing and getting into finding reasons to go places and the second question is how do you work with your actors and finding the deeper opportunities that performing offers to connect their own qualities and their own lives to the opportunities the second one is easy I will ask about it but I don't think you need to lay down in front of a railroad to know what it's like to be run over by one and the whole point of our work is that we put ourselves in imagined circumstances we may not have experienced and that there is some shared understanding of asking those questions you have to ask and I do pry into their lives don't get me wrong but I don't think it's germane we've all seen the experience it's like we've all seen the experience of great performances from people who are not who don't have that particular life experience so I don't that part I think that's not art we're artists so we make up things we don't know and that's the fun of what we do the first part is that you have to ask the questions of the text based on what you know is actable not just on what it means the problem that the academic gets into the depth of what it means and a lot of academic writing is unhelpful to what a director does I have to ask the questions in doable actable terms always plowing into the depth of the text from the point of view of the doing the obstacles and looking for my process is about looking for the clues in the text that are creating what am I fighting against what am I not facing so that the actor has things to do the biggest problem for actors is what is it I'm doing and what is it I'm struggling with and one great actor I worked with was Chris Jones so you're always looking for those things that push against or if you do a cis-barry exercise where you're doing text of Hamlet and eight people hold a person who talks about his father and just the pure physicality releases his voice and he just that's what we need to find in the theater is what is the doable stuff so as you're plowing into the depth of it you're looking for that and what you're struggling with and that takes a long time to name so that's why those note sessions that happen toward the end are where all of the stuff that you were asking and stumbling and making no sense of in the beginning is starting to make sense toward the end the hard part for a young director is trusting the period where you don't know what you're talking about and you're asking it in an interesting enough way that people keep trying and you maintain the trust with the actor that it's okay not to know it's okay to make big crappy choices that don't and create a generous enough authority in the room that everybody can be shitty for a long time it's when people panic and they think they're going to be bad and they don't think you've helped them and you get into that place that everything gets crazy and that's the place you don't want to be did that help you? yeah yeah sure what's your process when working with text where there is very little information about the physical world with presenting and discovering what this was and making the difference okay so again reasons to go places the physical we can have a long talk about space creating a space a space in which the envelope of the play happens if you take something like the naturalism of a way can sing we started with Boris Aronson Space the one he originally made because in fact they wrote a kind of thing in relationship to that space and actors need things to there's a lot of levels of doing there's physically doing there's the essential doing as they say in acting class so there's a literal what am I physically doing and then what am I trying to do persuade this person to I'm trying to face blah blah but the literal doing is an important one so you know having a drink cart having a reason to go down left having a reason to be by yourself having a reason to know people don't realize if say it's French Molière thing there's the person talking here and then the aside here you have to find the rhythm of that so they have that moment of doing and so I call it reasons to go places which I learned from Garland Wright because when you work on a thrust you have this giant space downstage you have to put the drink cart down in the bomb so that if it's the naturalistic play and you're doing the Noel Coward you have to get from the couch which has to be above where the people are sitting so it's not blocking them and you have to go down to the drink cart to get something while you get away from your wife who you can't stand anymore and think for a second you have stages saying I'm going to kill you but that moment of getting up and crossing down to the drink cart and considering what you're going to do is the moment where the directing happens because that's the moment where the audience gets inside your head separate from what the other person's thinking and you're always trying to find the dance which is opening people up inside of where the gray area is and you see those flights of hand that help people see and opera is a big example of that because in opera you may have a Rossini with a million repetitions and you come back around the same time over again so you have to have a whole reason to do it again and say why it's different this time and they're the greatest action exercises of all time because you've already done the scene once and now you have to do it two more times exactly the same way and you have to then rename it each time you come through and that's fun and so if your piece is more abstract you have to pick build an abstract world which gives reasons to create a physicality that builds up from there I don't know the specifics of what you're talking about but that's important Talking about moving around one of the better words Have you worked a lot with actors who have dance training? I'm obviously subject to questions and do you find that having instinctively having certain physical movements helps to fire up the reasons for the character doing whatever the character has to be doing Do you know what I'm trying to say? I don't know how you can be a great actor whether having a great relationship to your own body Dance helps Dance may be a way of releasing that if you look at Meryl Streets the mask work just the pure physicality that she always finds in everything is extraordinary Lawrence Olivier Nathan Lane the body is one of the tools through which you're carving this person so good training helps an actor be in touch with that tool it may be that they use it through dance it may be that they use it through Le Bon movement who knows what it is but you have to be in touch with your body you have to know what your body is doing otherwise it's not going to happen You talked about the importance of being in touch with culture and traditions of your field and I was interested to hear thoughts about musical theater and particularly contemporary musical theater and their connection with traditions of European theater or musical theater what's the question should they have them? and what's the nature of the musical theater's connection with its traditions well usually you know the tradition of musical theater starting in the early part of the century after Hammerstein and Cho Boat and just at least having a cursory understanding of how the form has built and evolved you know it's not going to make you a better director but you do I do think you want to stand a little bit in the corridor of what's going on often the director will have less of that understanding than a composer might composer is going to I think needs to know where they are in that I'll give an example of I'm working on a new opera a young amazing brilliant composer named Nico Muley who went to went to Juilliard he you know he we're doing an opera that's based on something that happens on the internet and there's all these characters on the internet and it's a very comp there's all these choruses that head off into the web well his real tradition that he's most attracted to is you know Thomas Tallis and Gibbons and 15th century Tudor church music and Stravinsky and like Philip Glass so these choruses that head off into the internet you know sound like the most beautiful extraordinary huge opening up of sound that could have been very appropriate in a 15th century church except that they're saying shut the fuck up you'll be sorry which is the language of the internet but very beautifully said in this gigantic sound with 60 people singing it now that's an opera version of like where does the form push itself next because we are different and this is how we communicate and this is where we come from it could be Adam Gettle who obviously his you know grandfather's Richard Rogers but he's very very much a student of where he is in the form his own voice is his own voice which is important but he knows where he is in the form better than anybody I know he's unbelievable instincts for the form that's all I mean it doesn't make a better artist of you but you know if you're Stephen Sondheim and you were mentored by Oscar Hammerstein that's helpful doesn't make Stephen Sondheim better necessarily because he was already brilliant and he has the impulse within himself to push it ahead but it is critical also for just being in the corridor is I guess the best way to think about it I think we've got time for one more yes you were talking about earlier what you were looking for when you were casting now that was for the theater but in the opera world as I understand it most of these opera singers are booked way ahead do you have anything to say about that and also how is it working with several languages which also happens when you have a cast of singers I have virtually nothing to do with the casting in an opera house they are done long enough some of the smaller roles I'll be consulted about Sarah Billinghurst at the Met is amazing casting she's one of the best eyes for casting of anybody I've ever met and she does all the cast a lot of the casting at the Met yes those are done long in advance the second part of your question it was how you were dealing with all the different languages oh I mean I have to deal with the language of my own text which is I prepare my text in a particular way which is these simultaneous translations and it takes a long time to put them together and so I'm most concerned in the room with the language in which the opera is happening often what will happen is you have very very high level of assistants at the Met who are the best directing assistants you could have each of whom speak numerous languages and so if there is somebody there and often everybody in the opera world who travels all over the world speak at least three or four languages and they are usually comfortable with English but if they aren't somebody is going to be there who speaks the language they speak I do find if there is a real language barrier it can be complicated and that can happen in any because you can think that you are being understood in one way when you aren't and that is I have run into that you have been wonderful thank you