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“The greatest enemy of beauty is prettiness.” -Meyerhold For my brother Table of Contents INTRODUCTION ............................................................................................................. 2 WHY I AM A DIRECTOR........................................................................................................ 2 NEGATIVE SPACE .............................................................................................................. 4 DESPICABILITY .................................................................................................................. 6 DRAMATURGICAL CONTEXT ....................................................................................... 8 INTRODUCTION ................................................................................................................. 8 THE DISCOVERY OF MARTIN MCDONAGH .............................................................................. 8 MCDONAGH’S BIOGRAPHY ................................................................................................ 11 MAJOR PRODUCTION HISTORY .......................................................................................... 13 HISTORY OF THE REGION OF CONNEMARA ......................................................................... 14 LEENANE, CO. GALWAY, IRELAND ..................................................................................... 18 THE LEENANE OF MARTIN MCDONAGH ............................................................................... 19 FOUNDATIONS OF THE PRODUCTION ...................................................................... 35 PRODUCTION DIARY .................................................................................................. 41 DESIGN .......................................................................................................................... 41 REHEARSALS .................................................................................................................. 47 EVALUATION OF PRODUCTION ................................................................................. 89 APPENDICES ............................................................................................................... 94 (A) BIBLIOGRAPHY.......................................................................................................... 95 (B) EXCERPTS FROM COMMUNICATIONS BETWEEN MYSELF AND MR. MCDONAGH ................ 96 (C) EXCERPTS FROM MY JOURNAL FROM MY TRIP TO IRELAND.......................................... 108 (D) PHOTOS OF THE SHOW............................................................................................. 112 (E) COSTUME SKETCHES & LIGHTING CHEAT SHEET......................................................... 118 (F) MY THEORIES .......................................................................................................... 119 (G) BRIEF AUTOBIOGRAPHY........................................................................................... 120 Introduction My thesis production at the Yale School of Drama was an odyssey inwards. My yearlong grapple with The Lonesome West by Martin McDonagh grew to contain everything I had ever discovered about theatre and came to require everything I knew about myself as an artist. Before moving into my analysis of the production itself, I feel it is important to frame the discussion with three key points: the first is why I am a director, significant here because this will probably prove to be the last production I will ever direct stemming from this reason; the second are two artistic ideas with which I have been obsessed over the last few years—Negative Space in Performance and Dwelling in Despicability—for which this production provided a proving ground. Why I am a director Peter Parker had his spider and I had my father's grave. In 1980, when I was six years old, I stood at the yawning hole my father would be lowered into and understood infinity for the first time. The forces of significance and mortality came into my understanding at that moment, way too early in life, and all the pain of the universe shoved its way through my six-year-old soul. My uncle grabbed me The Lonesome West by Martin McDonagh Thesis Casebook by Brendan Hughes 2 and turned me from the burial, realizing that I was reeling from the visual of that mouth in the ground. But I told him to turn me back, because I needed to look, and what I saw when he did has influenced every decision I have ever made since, most profoundly, my decision to be a director. Everyone, including the folk singer trying to play, was staring at me in silence. And I felt searing, white-hot shame. My memory of the year following that moment is gone, erased somehow. But since coming-to a year later, I have had the uncanny ability to hear what people aren't saying. I have a torturous clairvoyance for subtext, and an overly keen intuition for secret parts of relationships I'm not involved in. That moment of white-hot shame was like the bite of a radioactive spider, which left me with a strange skill I will spend the rest of my life grappling with and trying to understand. When I began directing in high school, I finally found a place I could communicate and engage with people on the level of subtext and private intentions. I could stop pretending to be ignorant of what I am not supposed to know. I could listen to the rhythms and the breath and the consonants and be open about what I divined. In short, I could dwell in the dimension in which I belong. The Lonesome West by Martin McDonagh Thesis Casebook by Brendan Hughes 3 Negative Space Since coming to Yale, I have undergone a massive transformation as an artist. Most of the development in my thinking has followed one epiphany I had towards the end of my first year: the audience does not go to theatre to admire an actor having an emotion; the audience goes to have the emotion. The same can be applied to playwriting and directing: the audience does not want to admire a playwright having an idea, or a director exploring a concept, the audience wants to have the idea, and to form their own concepts. The pursuit then becomes both Taoist and Platonic; get out of the way of the thing itself. This is not to say that a production cannot be highly stylized and conceptualized, quite the contrary, the most formalist of productions can soar, so long as there is an engagement with the audience through “windows” intentionally left open around powerfully realized, resonant imagery. In discussing this concept with Avery Brooks, when I served as his dresser for the Yale Rep’s production of King Lear immediately following my thesis, he told me that Miles Davis always said, “Jazz is about the notes left unplayed”. This realization has put me on a somewhat quixotic quest to define Negative Space in Performance. It lives in The Lonesome West by Martin McDonagh Thesis Casebook by Brendan Hughes 4 deadpan; it lives in the effort on the part of a dramatic character not to cry; it lives visually in physical manifestations of negative space; it lives aurally in the deliberate setting up and breaking of conventions in chord progressions and melodies. In short, it is the virtuosic denial of visceral release for the audience, leading to compounded excruciation, and ultimate euphoria, when the audience members grant themselves permission autonomously in sync with the event, or in glorious counterpoint to it. My real search for this definition may in fact have begun years ago, in 1997, four years before I would come to the Drama School, when, sitting in the audience of a performance of Eugene Ionesco’s The Bald Soprano directed by my friend Dave Dowling, I blurted “I can’t take it!” amidst unceasing tidal waves of laughter at the gigantic pause in the center of the play. I had seen the opening performance, at which the scripted pause lasted a good thirty seconds before the actors continued the dialogue. On this closing night performance, however, the pause lasted five full minutes. And the audience ate it up. Waves and waves of laughter took hold of the crowd as the actors absolutely refused to move forward, and the audience gleefully tumbled through a giant window of negative space in front of them. It was heaven. The Lonesome West by Martin McDonagh Thesis Casebook by Brendan Hughes 5 Despicability During this production, I felt a certain vigilance towards what Liz Diamond describes as the need, particularly on the part of younger actors, to appear attractive on stage. This Facsimilation of Attractiveness is created from an aggregate of that which is palatable, admirable and good-feeling in the estimation of the actor—like playing dress-up with only the heroic features of a character’s personality. This leads to murky conflict (as conflict is ugly), playing at “states of being” instead of action, and theatre at the mercy of the humility (or lack thereof) of the artists involved. Therefore, if actors are encouraged to dwell in that which is despicable, they will develop a keen thirst for conflict, and compel audiences with an exquisite command of what the French call joli-laid, or “beautiful ugly”. I was deeply blessed on this production with a company that shared my convictions about performance. These four actors were so game to shed that which was beautiful that I sensed a certain relief in discarding the Strassbergian shackles of American acting. I began experimenting with ways to subvert this in directing Marcus Gardley’s playwright thesis, earlier this year. During run-throughs,