1“What Is It You Actually Do?”
A response to the interviewer’s inevitable opening inquiry
Rehearsal, The Coast of Utopia, Lincoln Center Theater, 2006
1.
It’s a fairly simple question, although not always voiced in this blunt way: “What is it you actually do?” someone inevitably queries. Most people have no idea what responsibility a director has borne in the evening they’ve just experienced. I’m convinced that most critics have no idea. I’ve been praised for a lighting designer’s contribution, and condemned for a writer’s lack of skill. And while we’re at it, the truth must be faced: I don’t think a lot of directors even know exactly what the hell we’re doing, either. Meanwhile, we, ourselves, are professionally obsessed with how others function. Remember, directors almost never witness one another doing the work, as opposed to actors or dancers. During the Globe years, there was considerable excitement and enthusiasm generated from the board of directors, having to do with the fact that at this point we were sending productions to Broadway on a fairly consistent basis—and there emerged a kind of tacit understanding that if I ever would permit members of the board to “sit in” on rehearsals, they’d be willing to pay considerably more for the privilege. But I was adamant. Back at my genesis, my North Star mentor, Ellis Rabb, had declared all rehearsals to be off-limits to anyone not performing in the production or directly involved. He felt there was never enough time accorded the expensive, deeply private process of rehearsing: our most personal time should remain sacrosanct. Otherwise, actors unsure of their progress, being observed, would strain to “perform” too early, and possibly destroy the process by which they could comfortably be able to disappear into their character.
This is true, by the way. I’ve experienced it over and over: you’re having a wonderful time digging away, solving this problem, debating that, and you put the damn thing together with all the new changes, along with the rewrites, and even a good song, let’s say, where something ordinary had been a placeholder, but up till then, it’s been just you and the actors and your staff in the room. Now, in this case, either your producer, or the business manager, or, for all I know, the goddamn dog walker comes in and plops down, and suddenly everything before you becomes shallow and stupid and dull and disappointing. How can that be? It was so good this morning! But the presence of just one outsider, like a virulent virus, poisons everything, and all you can see now is how miserable you are at pretending to do something others assume you are effortlessly expected to accomplish. It’s hell!
See what I mean? Directors don’t know everything. Too often, it feels like we don’t know anything!
So what do I do, in fact? In reality, what happens is you stand before a situation in which something is presented to you. You’re afforded a challenge. Like catching an enormous ball. And you respond. You come up with a vision of some kind. That is, if you respond to the material at all, and one must, or it’s doomed. You sort of feel that since you relate to the material at hand, you might as well try to be helpful.
So away you go. You cast. You design. You assemble a team with the support of your producer, or your company, or your friends. But are we talking about a “method”? I wonder. If it works, if you are at all correct, the play survives. It may be thought to be a success, or even a smash, or, at the very least, acceptable. And if that’s the case, you may well get asked to do another one. Because you’ve essentially caught the ball and thrown it back into the void. And in doing so, you’ve unquestionably learned something. Discovered something. Found yourself standing in the exact center of it all and created a way through, and though it kept changing, evolving, emerging as you proceeded, damned if you weren’t right! So, okay, fine: you directed! But as for a methodology? I’m beginning to think that’s something others presume.
Back when I first began, I recall sitting at a table with a piece of paper upon which I had sketched my ground plan, and using chess pieces as representative of actors, I moved them here and there, murmuring the text, of course, while writing down in my script an idea of actual blocking! I kid you not! I used pawns as players (eschewing the use of the king, queen, and bishops, as perhaps getting dangerously literal).
Then, during the one single experience I ever had doing summer stock, I found myself facing the actress Tammy Grimes with that very same chess plan, saying confidently, “Tammy, you enter over there!,” only to hear her interrupt with an abrupt “No, I don’t think so!” while offering no further explanation. After a polite pause, I went on: “Then, I guess, you can enter over there, through that door,” which elicited the same immediate response: “No, I won’t.” Another pause. Me: “Well, that third door is the bathroom, so I guess we’re going to have to choose one of the others.” And out the window went my rehearsal plan.
2. BLOCKING
Well, all right, why not begin with blocking? It is, after textual analysis, probably the first task facing a director and a cast, and it’s important. Some directors block beautifully, in such a way as to make the stage always exciting without ever calling attention to it. Others appear to pay no attention. And damned if they don’t often get away with it, too. Ellis Rabb blocked magnificently, with the skill and ease of a born choreographer. Two actors or twenty; it didn’t matter. He swooped, he sculpted, he coddled, and the stage inevitably emerged beautiful to behold. Conversely, Stephen Porter, his directing alternate in APA-Phoenix, the touring rep company he’d created, who basically directed productions that didn’t necessarily appeal to Ellis, hardly bothered to block at all, his forte being the background, scholarship, and an enormous fund of knowledge he brought to every aspect of the play. But blocking? There was a moment once while he was rehearsing a production of The Importance of Being Earnest when the actors, not having heard from him in some time, peered out into the house to find him fast asleep! Being experienced professionals, as well as discreetly fond of Stephen, they continued to block themselves, and never brought it up.
But a stage with more than two people on it needs to be composed or at least considered in such a way that the actors aren’t stacked (standing directly in front of one another so as to be hidden from any portion of the audience), and even with just two people, the most realistic of works needs someone actually thinking of how the proportions of the stage can help or hinder the way an audience receives the play. Even in the case of a sustained monologue, or a one-person play, you can’t leave the actor simply standing there for longer than the audience finds the tension interesting. You move your actors, or you lose your audience. One wonders, as I often do, just how Shakespeare’s soliloquies might have been originally staged. I have always believed that the existential emergence of English as the spoken glory it has become must have been a ravishing experience for Shakespeare’s contemporary audience, unused in their daily lives to such sumptuously spoken language as appears throughout his works. It must have been rather like going to a jazz concert today … experiencing the various sounds of his verse as opposed to Christopher Marlowe’s or Ben Jonson’s, or anyone else’s.
But it’s equally possible that in the case of the soliloquies, nobody moved at all, and the audience, enchanted by the sound and the imagery, were held happily rapt, as if listening to music. But a modern audience, lavishly tricked and constantly teased by the endlessly restless visual cutting that happens in film and television, finds itself hooked on movement. We’ve become too lazy to simply listen without some form of accompanying eye candy. In one of my fund-raising “lectures” to local audiences during my years at the Globe, I used to employ the example of network television, suggesting that the audience go home, turn on a commercial network program, turn the sound off, and, with a pencil, tap the surface of a table each time the picture changed. That was how often their optic nerve was being poked, stimulated, tricked, even, and one rarely got through more than ten seconds of airtime with less than fourteen to twenty “hits.” One wasn’t necessarily listening; one was merely getting high on movement.
With soliloquies, which initially represented “spoken thought,” there was no real need to move, no necessity for blocking. But try it: stand before an audience at a lectern, begin reading your well-crafted twenty-minute speech, and when you glance up, you’ll begin to see glassy eyes staring back at you, heads wobbling on their stems like so many asters in an autumn breeze. You’ve lost them. They’ve drifted away. They can’t hang. As a result, I often personally forgo the lectern, moving back and forth before them in an attempt to refresh the visual picture, and occasionally even appearing to invade the “personal space” of the audience, just to scare the bejesus out of them in order to keep them alert. Don’t underestimate blocking!
Are there rules? Of course there are! I recall, in a précis of one of my own early attempts at the university, a professor calling to my attention something called “a triangle.” He was, of course, trying to discourage me from having my actors all stand in a straight line. You might think one would notice this immediately. And you would be wrong! If I close my eyes and imagine my early work, practically every memory would feature a solid row of smiling faces, regular as fence posts, stretching from proscenium to shining proscenium. And experience eventually reveals the wisdom of geometric shapes, of graceful groupings of actors, and of interesting compositions that feature profiles.
I thought a lot about it initially; now, not so much. There is often a self-consciousness to your early efforts, and sometimes that’s not a bad thing entirely, but if you’re not careful, when it comes to blocking—as the charming phrase has it—the em-PHA-sis is often on the wrong syl-LA-ble. Even in a work as as intrinsically musical as one by Molière or Mozart, which can require brave and often dance-like patterns for showing off the clothes and responding to the florid speech and rhythms, movement for movement’s sake too often supplants clarity with the self-conscious busyness of a director, and that is a temptation I feel is to be avoided at all costs. I’ve come to believe that if it’s the visual movement the audience is following, the direction is in the way, and even if it’s difficult not to want to show off, the more you direct, the less you want them to notice this aspect of the work.
So, how to proceed? If you’re lucky, eventually you might get to work on the big canvases: Shakespeare, opera … twenty actors with broadswords in Henry IV, the triumphal march of Aida—in the latter case, often more than a hundred singers and dancers, none with a single thought in their heads about the war they have just supposedly fought. Is it necessary, you ask? Time being money, the heads of most opera companies (the “producer,” in this case, not the “regisseur,” which is what a stage director is called in opera) will tell you, “No, get on with it!,” as mine did when I found myself treading turbulent water in the midst of directing Aida early in my career. But should one take the time to explain? You don’t have to; get the soldiers in rows, make them smart, efficient, attractive … march down front, turn on the tenth count to your right, and get the hell offstage! That’s the job … Yes, but what of that chorus waving from the ramparts? Again, why not give them direction? Often, in the view of management, the audience is there for the tenor and the soprano; what care they about the thoughts in the minds of the masses? My answer would be that the more you impart, and the more efficiently you create a common language, a common experience, the more the climate onstage subtly changes, and it’s my belief that the audience gets something nearly abstract, something more they may or may not consciously be able to define. And from the perspective of the chorus? Whenever I have spoken to a mass of people as if they mattered to me as well as to the story, they have given their very souls to the event. And so finally, did it matter? It did to me!
Again, back there at my genesis, my mentor, Ellis Rabb, was fearless as a creator of movement and composition, and he generously shared his intentions with me. You could tell he hadn’t given it a conscious thought, but give him fourteen, sixteen men for the Battle of Borodino, say, in his marvelous production of War and Peace, and stand back. He’d wade into the midst of the boys with a lit cigarette in his right hand, beckoning, pushing, deflecting, urging them to raise and unfurl the flags—what he could do with red silk and a wand!—and it was almost like watching a kind of traffic cop with intuitive eyes in the back of his head. There was an incident when he walked off rehearsals of the looming production of that same War and Peace, originally conceived for off-Broadway, which was now being inflated in ways more appropriate for the vast Greek Theatre in Los Angeles, where it was to open our California season. I suddenly found myself pressed into service to complete the blocking, not knowing if he’d return, or if, this time, he was seriously off in a major huff, which I must admit happened more often than we chose to report. I lay awake, panicky, the night before I was to face the troops, and when I finally got up before them the following morning, I did manage to produce some nervous Baroque version of the chaos of colliding men, some falling away, some pushing through … It was pretty dense, that much I recall. To all our relief, Ellis returned a few days later, and, my heart in my throat, I had to watch him witnessing my fledgling effort. But then, apparently not entirely displeased with what he saw, he silently rose, and by eliminating this movement, clearing for that moment, opening up space so the audience might more easily see individual activity rather than just movement, per se, he “corrected” my term paper in a way that left me both astonished and grateful. He simplified what I had determined to make look complex, and it was all over in less than three minutes, less than half the time I had so assiduously staged. Whenever does a young director get the opportunity to see how little it takes for the audience to follow what need not be elaborate, but essential, done by someone with considerably more experience and taste?
As they say, there’s no substitute for experience. Looking back on a lifetime of rehearsals, some overly prepared, several nearly improvised, I see that the repetition of years of facing a blank canvas has finally distilled in me whatever is to be required. I can immediately read the difference between a room written by A. R. Gurney, and one in Moscow in the nineteenth century, written from the point of view of Tom Stoppard. I no longer consider the objective; time has given me enough confidence that I can handle it. What I have found, curiously enough, is that there also exists, somewhere in the parallel universe, a kind of template of what is meant to happen, which, if I’m being truthful, has very little to do with me. The director must be prepared, alert, listening, and hopeful, but the piece itself also “wants” what it wants. The results should come partly from the director, partly from the active intelligence and impetus of the actors, and partly from the play itself, which appears to assert, like the natural flow of water, its own organic truth. All three of these constituents must play a part for the world to spring to something like life, but if you can find and balance the three, you have a fighting chance at delivering it. When you come right down to it, and whenever you feel confused … respect the author.
But for me, ultimately, blocking is not “where it’s at” when it comes to plumbing the hidden secrets of directing. That’s looking through the telescope from the wrong end. It’s not something you need to get right; it’s something you need to get true. You often hear an actor say, “I don’t feel like moving there. Why do I have to? I don’t know, it doesn’t feel right…”
Obviously, something has gone wrong. It might be wise to look at the game from the reverse angle, rather than try to validate personal choices, which inevitably degenerates into arguments. The actor is uncomfortable mainly because the director thinks for myriad reasons a certain move is essential to his own plan. The actor balks. Who is right? Often there is some cant about the director laying down the law … “I’ll tell you why you move there!” the director says archly. “Because of one thing and one thing only … your paycheck!”
My way or the highway, eh? For me, there can be no contest: there is only the responsibility of putting life onstage … life as everyone—writer, actor, audience, and director—recognizes it to be. Alas, people don’t always see things the same way. I can think of only two moments over the years when I was face-to-face with genuine stop-the-music adversity, both involving actresses, one at the beginning of her career, and one, to be honest, nearer the end (and neither was Tammy Grimes). But in both cases, if I conjure up their faces, they are almost identical—bilious, angry eyes staring out of their heads, wet with furious tears.
Copyright © 2022 by Jack O’Brien
