An Interview with Director and Playwright Emily Mann on Working with Albee

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chapter 9 Interview: The “Composer” and the “Conductor”: An Interview with Director and Playwright Emily Mann on Working with Albee

Linda Ben-Zvi

Abstract

Emily Mann—playwright, director and, for twenty-six years, head of the McCarter the- atre in Princeton, New Jersey—has directed three Edward Albee plays, including the world premiere of Me, Myself & I. In this interview, the first she has given concerning her work with Albee, she talks about their close collaborative and trusted relationship over three decades and provides scholars, critics, and general audiences with invaluable insights and information about the complexities of the process by which an Albee text ultimately becomes a performance. She also describes in detail the Albee plays she has directed as well as the playwright’s direct input into each production process, and she compares the experience of staging his works with that of directing other play- wrights, including Tennessee Williams and Anton Chekhov, two writers Albee admires and cites as influences.

A director who establishes a close, collaborative, and trusted relationship with a playwright and is identified with the writer’s work over time can become an invaluable resource for those interested in gaining insights into the complexities of that process by which text ultimately becomes performance. For audiences, what is relevant is what they see on the stage, not how the work evolved: results not process. For critics and scholars, however, what happens when a play moves from the hands of the playwright to those of the director and the many people involved in production raises questions whose answers can provide significant insights into the creative process. For example, how and by whom were actors selected and prepared to successfully inhabit the characters they played; how and by whom were suggestions made about cuts or additions to the script, changes and reordering scenes, scenic design, light- ing, and the endless, small details that breathe life into a play? If we are fortunate, the playwright and/or the director does interviews, writes essays, makes notes available to researchers, and even allows the publication of letters and

Interview: The “Composer” and the “Conductor” 187 exchanges that may provide answers to these and other questions and enrich our understanding of the play as written and the play as performed. Beckett Studies is fortunate to have No Author Better Served: The Correspon- dence of Samuel Beckett and Alan Schneider, an invaluable book that details the elaborate and scrupulous preparations made by Schneider who directed the premieres of Beckett’s plays in America, and who wrote copious letters to the playwright about his working plans for their staging, to which Beckett respond- ed with succinct but detailed instructions for implementation.1 Schneider’s letters, as well as his essays and talks over the years, provide a back story of how Beckett’s plays evolved in production, and perhaps how their exchanges may have helped Beckett gain insights about the directorial process that proved useful when he later began to direct productions of his own plays in Europe. While there are critics who have sat in on rehearsals of Albee’s plays and written about them in detail,2 and numerous interviews are available in which Albee has talked about directors and his own direction of his works,3 there are no essays nor books, as far as I know, in which a director who has worked closely with Albee discusses the experience. For that reason, when Michael Bennett, the editor of this collection, invited me to contribute an essay for the inaugural issue of The Albee Review, I suggested that, instead of writing about an Albee play, or even about a topic that has interested me for some years—the staging implications of Schneider’s hand in directing both Albee and Beckett plays in America—a more significant and useful essay for this issue would be an interview with a director who has known Albee for over thirty years, has a history of working closely with him when directing his plays, and who has a deep understanding of, and appreciation for, his work. That director in Amer- ica is Emily Mann. What makes Mann so well attuned to Albee’s work is that she, too, is a playwright; she knows what the creative process entails. As Marina Carr, the Irish dramatist, whose plays Mann has also directed, explains, “She understands completely the neuroses, the hit-and-miss, the-devil-may-care, the fragility, the first cantankerousness and fleetingness of the muse we all try to nail to the

1 Maurice Harmon, ed., No Author Better Served: The Correspondence of Samuel Beckett and Alan Schneider (Cambridge, ma: Harvard University Press, 1998). 2 For descriptions of Albee directing his own plays and those of others, see Rakesh H. Solomon, Albee in Performance (Bloomington, in: University of Indiana Press, 2010). 3 For example, see Stephen Bottoms, “Borrowed Time: An Interview with Edward Albee,” in The Cambridge Companion to Edward Albee, ed. Stephen Bottoms (Cambridge, uk: Cam- bridge University Press, 2005), 231–250.