THEATER: Director's Cut

You’ve seen it before, maybe in the movie The Goodbye Girl or on the TV series Slings & Arrows. A high-concept director thinks he or she can improve Shakespeare’s Richard III by making him gay, or “update” Romeo and Juliet by not allowing the lovers to touch. You might have even had such a director ruin a night out at the theater yourself.

But more than likely, if you’re a regular Berkshire theatergoer, you’ve seen the opposite—a director breathe new life into a work that you thought time had passed by; or helped a playwright stage a world premiere that had a special sheen from the get-go. The area has been blessed by theaters run by first-rate directors themselves—Nicholas Martin at the Williamstown Theatre Festival (WTF) in Williamstown, Massachusetts; Julianne Boyd at Barrington Stage Company (BSC) in Pittsfield, Massachusetts; and Tina Packer at Shakespeare & Company in Lenox, Massachusetts. And although Kate Maguire at the Berkshire Theatre Festival (BTF) in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, doesn’t mount plays herself, she’s always had a keen eye for attracting directorial talent.
Which begs the question—what does a director do? It’s a bit like asking what a baseball manager does. And the answer is pretty much the same: whatever it takes to forge a winner.

We put this question to four directors here this summer: Tony Simotes at Shakespeare & Company; Anders Cato at BTF; Amanda Charlton at WTF; and Jesse Berger at BSC. This season Simotes and Cato will be directing a pair of classics, Othello and Ghosts, respectively. Berger revisits a play with a rich but less-hallowed history, Sleuth, and Charlton helps Melinda Lopez launch a new play, Caroline in Jersey.

Of all these projects, Othello (July 3-September 6) carries extra … well, let’s say weight instead of baggage. Not only is it directed by Packer’s successor as artistic director, Tony Simotes, but it features Michael Hammond, the man who had reportedly been anointed to succeed Packer, as Iago. Throw in John Douglas Thompson, fresh off a roaring success in New York as the Moor, and you have the ingredients for more than a bit of psychodrama.

But then, Shakespeare & Company has always encouraged its troupe to use their life stories to explore the characters onstage, often making for vivid, psychological portraits. This same threesome, along with Merritt Janson as Desdemona, staged Othello just last season, though Simotes promises that it won’t be the same, partly because of the company’s psychological approach.

Simotes says that he and Hammond have spoken at length about what happened. “We go back to the early days of the company, and our friendship is really important to us,” he says. “The great thing about being in Shakespeare and Company is we’re not perfect people. We’re people who are friends and have gone through life’s changes together. Loves blossom. There are divorces and remarriages. And my love for Michael is completely intact, and I can’t wait to work with him.”

Packer helped develop a process at the company called “dropping in”—asking actors to summon their own experiences and relate these to the Elizabethan text. Simotes, who calls himself one of Packer’s first guinea pigs, uses a similar method, but adds some of his own movement-based flavoring to the mix.

The result can be a bristling rage or lyrical tenderness that cuts across the centuries, making the text seem less musty. Anders Cato achieves similar results at BTF, where he seems to have nailed down the late-nineteenth-, early-twentieth-century slot with scintillating productions of George Bernard Shaw and August Strindberg. This year he adds Henrik Ibsen to the mix with Ghosts (August 11-29), starring Randy Harrison.

In one regard, Cato’s challenge is the same as Simotes’s—to make Ibsen seem like the kind of guy with whom you’d like to have a drink at Bistro Zinc. Cato has an additional weapon in his arsenal, though—he’s also adapting the text with James Leverett. And it isn’t that Cato, who’s been at BTF every year since 2002, is only a Stockbridge classicist. In previous seasons, Maguire has signed him up for Terrence McNally’s Love! Valour! Compassion! and David Mamet’s American Buffalo, along with bringing Shaw and Strindberg productions to life, so he’s adept at R-rated Americana as well as staging Scandinavian classics.

But it’s his work with the actors that allows these plays to speak to a twenty-first-century audience, and if Cato doesn’t use a system as structured as dropping in, the psychological element is still paramount in his process.

This is the third time Cato will have collaborated with Harrison, and the way he describes how the two approach the main character in Ghosts is emblematic of how Cato works with actors in general. Cato says of Harrison, “He takes enormous risks with the work, and that’s what we need with Osvald,” the tragic figure who confronts his mother with a lifetime of secrets and lies. “It felt important to have an Osvald with strong vitality and not just some gloomy presence.”

There are other kinds of ghosts in the theater, those that filter into the audience’s consciousness from so-called “definitive” productions or, more commonly in our cinematic age, from subsequent film adaptations. Shakespeare is so often performed and filmed that productions aren’t usually haunted by screen versions. Nor are there really any such ghosts for Ghosts.

Sleuth, on the other hand, is another kettle of specter. Shakespeare and Ibsen obviously lend themselves to a variety of interpretations. The works of playwright Anthony Shaffer? Not so much. Let’s face it: Sleuth is a time-tested theatrical thriller, and there are only so many ways one can mount this play.

“I’m not reinventing the wheel,” says Jesse Berger, who’ll be directing Sleuth (July 16-August 1) at BSC. “I’m putting a new hubcap on a trusty old one.” In other words, you don’t pump up what ain’t flat. Sleuth not only has a long theatrical life; it’s also been made into two movies, first in 1972, when Laurence Olivier played the older man trying to upend Michael Caine as the young lover; and then in 2007, when Caine switched roles to do combat—both psychological and physical—with Jude Law.

There are times when it’s counterproductive to pretend that movie versions of plays don’t cast a shadow over the theatrical ones, and this might be one of them. Perhaps the most important part of directing Sleuth is in the casting. “I think you try to find great actors suited for the parts,” says Berger. “We have so many great actors to choose from, and it’s really finding the balance between the two [in this case, Charles Shaughnessy and Jeremy Bobb] as much as casting individual parts.” But, he adds, the two movies “give you a good feel for how to cast.”

And as long as we’re on the subject of ghosts, there’s a real one in the cast of characters for Melinda Lopez’s Caroline in Jersey to close out the Nikos Stage season (August 5-16) at WTF. The new work is about a woman on the verge of a nervous breakdown who moves into a dilapidated apartment and finds there’s a ghost in the machinery—the refrigerator, to be precise.

Amanda Charlton will eventually have to turn her attention to working with the actors as well, but for a new play the focus is on collaborating with the playwright, Lopez. Charlton, a Williamstown artistic associate, says that when she’s taking on a new work, she hones in on what the playwright wants to say and then works with her or him to find the best way of saying it. In this case, she’s already gotten a pointer or two from her boss, since artistic director Nicholas Martin has been a huge champion of Lopez, having staged the world premiere of Sonia Flew at his former digs, Boston’s Huntington Theatre Company, in 2004.

As Lopez looks ahead to working with Charlton, she looks back to Martin’s contributions to Sonia Flew: “He asked me if I could recommend some books to brush up on the history of the period we were looking at, and I said to understand Cuba, you need to listen to music, and I gave him some CDs,” says Lopez. “He intuitively understood everything about me and the play—and, in fact, ended up using some of that music I first gave him in the production. So that kind of shorthand with a director is really invaluable.”

Charlton has also had a number of terrific mentors in the serious business of comedy making, having worked with Martin, Gip Hoppe—a director and playwright from Cape Cod—and Woody Allen. Martin has always had a particular flair for comedy, and Allen, of course, is no slouch in that department either. Charlton says that the most surprising thing about working with Allen was watching him watch the watchers. “He would watch the audience in previews and give the actors notes based on how the work played with the audience. He was really open to hearing how the audience responded and making changes to get better laughs.”

Charlton, like her colleagues, is particularly keen on how set design influences the pacing and overall feel of the play. “At this point my idea is to make it a very realistic set,” she says. “What’s surprising is that the ghost comes out of different parts of the set, so it would be designed to give you the feeling that he’s walking through walls.”

Simotes, meanwhile, has brought considerable pageantry to his productions, as evidenced in 2006’s Merry Wives of Windsor. Though Merry Wives was at Founders’ Theatre, he’s been particularly intent on capturing the magic of the outdoor productions at The Mount, Edith Wharton’s onetime residence in Lenox, where Simotes has shone in the past.

That isn’t so much the case with Othello, though, which has a leaner, hungrier look. “When I look at Othello,” says Simotes, “it’s like a poem, and the poem that I wanted to put on that stage has little adornment. I wanted everything on that stage to be acutely integral to the story itself, so I cut all I could in terms of costumes and scenery. I said to the actors, ‘Do not let the audience off the hook. Force them to deal with the issues of this play. That was my challenge. Merry Wives had dancing and singing, and if I could have brought those ninety-foot pine trees back to the property, I would have. I didn’t want any of that here. I just wanted a bench and two actors.”

Cato’s challenge is different: “The main tack one has to take with an Ibsen and Strindberg play is to show they’re not gloomy. They can’t be. At least with Ibsen, you have to find the life in the details, to find the passion, the humor. They’re really about the characters,” he says. “I think they’re like [Anton] Chekhov a bit. The characters are fighting for freedom in ways that hold them back—by lies, betrayals, traditions. They’re struggling for their lives.”

One way that Cato cuts through what might seem like the oppressive atmospherics of turn-of-the-previous-century plays is to focus on the set. “Even with Shaw,” he says, “I have tried to do away with heavy walls and solid structures, to make it more about the ideas, to make it more about the actor onstage presenting these ideas and the relationship of the actors to each other. It’s not about the curtains and the bookcase and the heavy Victorian setting weighing down the story.”

For Berger, it’s less the set than the pacing. The one thing that’s changed since 1970, when Sleuth first premiered, is the audience’s set of expectations. “I think our minds are used to scenes jumping along faster,” says Berger. “In film language anyway, the speed of cutting has increased greatly, so there are nips and tucks I’m looking at if things get discussed too long. It’s not that we’re smarter today, if anything we’re less intelligent,” he laughs, “but we’re used to making quick adjustments about plot.”

Even for a crowd pleaser like Sleuth, the job is more to upend audience expectations than to play to them. Says Cato, “The director’s work in the theater is always about asking actors to take more risks. If they don’t have revelations about who they are then the audience won’t either. And if there’s none of that, why go to the theater at all?”

You could argue, though, that sometimes the director’s work is about asking the people they’re working with to rein it in rather than to let it out. Lopez recalls a cut that Martin wanted to make to Sonia Flew. “The play got dark and intense, and he kept calling it ‘the Lorca section,’ and finally, finally, finally I agreed to cut what he wanted. He kept insisting we didn’t need it. When the play was produced again in Miami, I put the section back in, but when I saw it in production, I thought—Oh god, totally unnecessary—Nicky was right.” (JULY 2009)

 

Ed Siegel is a former theater and television critic at the Boston Globe. He is a regular contributor to Boston’s public radio station, WBUR-FM, and the Globe’s op-ed page.

THE GOODS
Othello
Jul 3-Sept 6
Shakespeare & Company
.
Lenox, Mass.

www.shakespeare.org

Sleuth
Jul 16-Aug 1
Barrington Stage Company

Pittsfield, Mass.

www.barringtonstageco.org

Caroline in Jersey
Aug 5-16
Williamstown Theatre Festival
Nikos Stage
1000 Main St.
Williamstown, Mass.

www.wtfestival.org

Ghosts
Aug 11-29
Berkshire Theatre Festival
83 East Main St.
Stockbridge, Mass.

www.berkshiretheatre.org

From the top: Tony Simotes (right) directs Michael Hammond as Iago (front) and John Douglas Thompson as the title character in Othello at Shakespeare & Company. Photo by Kevin Sprague, coourtesy Shakespeare & Company

Shakespeare & Company’s Tony Simotes, courtesy Shakespeare & Company

Barrington Stage Company’s Jesse Berger, courtesy BSC

Berkshire Theatre Festival’s Anders Cato, courtesy BTF

Williamstown Theatre Festival’s Amanda Charlton, photo by Stephen Sanders

Amanda Charlton directed Daniel Gerroll and Thomas Sadoski in Dissonance on WTF’s Nikos Stage in 2007, photo by Joan Marcus, courtesy WTF