Why I direct
I direct to tell stories in the most compelling, clear, and authentic way possible. The best and hardest thing we can do is to create people and relationships that compel our audience to feel with us these moments of joy, of pain, of questioning, as if we are all experiencing it for the first time. We are conduits of story, but we are also full and holistic humans, and I encourage actors to make unique choices rather than the most obvious one – villains are vulnerable, and lovers feel rage. The theatre allows us to ask a lot of our audience: to imagine beyond the realistic, to be still engaged without clarity, meaning, or consistency. Theatre is about life, and life is not simple. A play does not have a solution; rather, it is the journey from grappling with text in table reads through closing night that creates the theatrical experience.
How i direct
No matter what our role is in the process of making theatre, we are all storytellers, telling the most compelling stories. Playwrights don’t write about anything else. In the rehearsal studio, I ask a lot of my collaborators in terms of taking part in the story-making process: we must all create the world and the given circumstances in which these characters exist. Out of that black box, out of minds and our bodies, we create the experience for our audience. I block based mostly on physical impulse, sculpted once I feel the movement is the actor’s own. I direct in simple and circumstantial terms. I never give line readings, I never ask an actor to play an emotion or a quality. People are way more complicated than that. This approach comes not only from my advanced training, but also from my continued work as an AEA actor. As a director, collaboration is the key to creation; as an ensemble of theatre-makers we must collaborate together, with the playwright, with the designers. As both an educational and professional director, I am consistently interested in moving my work in new directions: as genres develop, spaces adapt to new work, and designs become more and more digital, I am most interested in work that can adapt to this growth; this may be in the form of classic plays or musicals that can be molded to new ideas, new plays or musicals, or, most pointedly at the moment, site-specific and immersive theatre (see ‘Sketchbook Theatre’ on top menu.)
My Aesthetic
My directing aesthetic is simple: collaborate, listen, create beautiful imagery and soundscapes, and tell the story. I am drawn to plays that don't overly rely on realism. I believe that plays must be directed for a compelling reason; I believe in research, dramaturgy, and script analysis. The playwright is the original artist as is the composer; we are his conductor and her orchestra. My time in production meetings hearing and incorporating ideas from designers is one of my favorite parts of the process. I like to use light, projection, clothing, and simple suggestion of physical world to tell a story rather than lumber, if I can. I like that an audience knows that their imagination is required to finish a theatre-scape; we will not present them with the whole picture. As Tony Kushner says, I like to see the strings. I put a lot of energy into stage pictures, and on drawing audience focus - I involve my actors in this process as well, as co-collaborators. Shadows don't bother me if they highlight the light that contrasts. Backs don't bother me either - I like angles of the body rather than a line of faces.