One of the many benefits of Dramaworks in West Palm Beach
is the diversity of their offerings outside the productions on the main stage,
in particular their ongoing educational program Dramalogue which is “a series that explores all aspects of theatre, in
conversations with or about the industry's top professionals and master artists.”
This year’s program is one of their best and last night’s Theatre
Roundtable, Directly Speaking was, for me, particularly fascinating and
relevant.
This was a live question and answer session about directing,
trying to answer the question “what, exactly, does a director do?” The participants were among the leading
directors in South Florida, Joseph Adler the producing artistic director of the GableStage, David Arisco, the artistic director of the Actors’ Playhouse at the Miracle Theatre, William Hayes a founding member of Palm Beach Dramaworks as well as its producing artistic director, and J. Barry
Lewis, Dramaworks’ resident director and who also directs plays at other area
theatres. Hayes and Lewis were the moderators of this spellbinding discussion. Between the four directors on the panel, they
estimate having some 400 plays under their directorial belts!
What impressed me was not only the content of their
discussion, but their passion as well.
These directors are devoted to their craft; it is both an art and a
process. I was also struck by how
closely directing relates to the role I fulfilled during my career, publisher.
To be one for nearly forty years required the same degree of passion.
Joseph Adler likened his directorial career to pushing that
absurd rock of Sisyphus up the hill, trying to reach the peak, but always being
condemned to not reach it and having to do it all over again. To him, it has always been the attempt to
achieve perfection, but having to settle for the act of directing as being an
ongoing learning experience. I can
relate. During my career as a publisher; the more I learned, the more I
discovered there was to learn.
The director’s role is to present the play as the author
intended and to get all the artistic aspects of a production in alignment to achieve
that purpose, stage design, lighting, costuming, blocking and movement of the
actors, not to mention the auditioning process as actor selection is as critical
as getting the actors to understand the director’s vision and to act in
harmony.
Amusingly, someone said when a play is good they commend the
actors but when it is bad it’s entirely the director’s fault! It was also said
that a leading actor’s off night is always much worse than an average actor’s
average night, especially if an actor goes “rogue,” changing interpretation after
a play opens. The production will then most
likely stray from the director’s vision of the play. And, unknown to most audiences, once a play
opens (and in the South Florida regional theatre scene that occurs in most
cases less than a month from when they first start to work on a play!), the
play is no longer in the director’s control; it is handed off to the stage
manager. So the director has precious
few weeks to get everything working together.
While there are overlapping choices of types of plays
presented at the three theatres represented in the discussion, each has its specialization
as well. David Arisco’s background in
musical theatre, as well as the size of Actor’s Playhouse’s 600 seat main stage
has resulted in more musicals while Joseph Adler’s intimate 150-seat theater in
Coral Gables’ Biltmore Hotel has gravitated to more experimental
productions. Dramaworks 218-seat theatre
is also intimate but Hayes and company have focused more on well-established
contemporary dramatic works, with some musical theatre during their summer
programs. And next week it is opening
its new 35 seat Diane & Mark Perlberg Studio Theatre on the second floor for
its also new endeavor, the Dramaworkshop, a lab for developing new plays, the
first one being Buried Cities by
Jennifer Fawcett.
All of this reminds me of my publishing days. We too
would have overlapping publishing programs, particularly in academic
publishing, but we also forged our way into unique reference programs and even occasionally
a competitive trade book (one published for a general audience). Each press would generally be known for a
particular specialty.
Unlike many commercial enterprises (and except for the
university presses most publishing is a for-profit endeavor – or at least that’s
the intent), book publishing is different as each book is a “unique product.” Plays are similarly unique, each needing a
creative team to produce it. The
director of a play is its CEO, very often involved in the selection process
itself, and then heading up his creative technical team, and the actors, to
present the author’s vision and to please his audience.
As in theatre, we had to do justice to our authors. In
publishing, our team was comprised of advisory editors (to help select the
publishable material or to develop new works from scratch), copy editors,
production editors, marketing specialists to make sure the book reaches its
intended audience, designers for promotion and for the book itself, and then
the back office business -- royalties, sales receipts, customer service,
etc. And there are similar business
requirements to run a successful theatre, including fund raising as ticket
sales themselves usually cover only about half of a regional theatre’s
expenses.
I make these observations as those were the thoughts
running through my mind listening to these great directors speak. They were talking about a creative process I identify
with although I neither have the knowledge or translatable experience to direct
a play. Ask me to produce a book, no
problem! So no wonder I’ve become a “citizen reviewer” of many of the
Dramaworks’ productions, and some other theatre productions as well. Dramalogue helped bring out the sense of parallelism
to my working life. The “invisible hand”
of the director is not so dissimilar to working with a creative publishing team.
