A Director’s Gut and Craft Robin A. Eriksen Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Fine Arts in the Theatre Department of the School of the Arts Columbia University May 1st, 2017 Robin A. Eriksen – re2313 A Director’s Gut and Craft 3 Six Questions 3 Breaking an entry 5 Finding the Anchor 5 Finding the Necessity 6 Inspiration 7 The Music 8 Birch Trees and Pando 9 Munch and Stuff 11 Poetry 12 The Prelude to the Fugue 12 Characters and Actors 13 A Multiway Mirror 13 Casting 15 The Makeover 21 Working with Designers 24 The Set 24 The Space 25 The Symbolic, Imaginary and Real 28 The Lights 29 The Costumes 30 The Props 30 Meeting with the Designers 31 The Director as a Leader 31 The Four Pillars 31 The Parents 36 The First Read 37 Adding Music and Dance 44 Balancing Poetry and prose 45 Text and Style 46 The ‘Associative Effect’ 47 !1 Robin A. Eriksen – re2313 Rehearsals 48 Table Discussions 48 Hands On, Hands Off 50 Confidence and Relaxation 51 Three Roles 53 Applying the Roles 56 Conclusion 60 Turning the page 65 Bibliography 66 Books 66 Web 66 Appendix A 67 Appendix B 68 !2 Robin A. Eriksen – re2313 A Director’s Gut and Craft I was sitting on the subway from Queens to Manhattan, on my way to audition for Columbia, thinking about what they would potentially ask us to do. “What if they ask us to choose a text?” I thought, “What would I choose?” A poem by Mary Oliver popped into my mind out of nowhere. It was a poem I knew well, and one I had been quite fond of a few years earlier. Throughout the rest of the day I couldn’t get the poem out of my head. I couldn’t shake it. So when Anne Bogart asked us that day to choose a text and stage it, even though I tried to look elsewhere, the poem by Oliver had attached itself so firmly in my mind and gut that it left me no choice: I had to do it. One year later I heard about a playwright, his name was Charles “Chuck” Mee. After discovering that all his plays were available online, I figured I should check out his work. I downloaded a few plays, and decided quickly to make a play called Summertime my first read. I finished it in one sitting, and didn’t think in that moment that it was anything more than a fairly good play. It was only in the coming days, weeks and months that I realized that the play had made an impression much deeper than I first thought. I couldn’t shake it. The story, the text, the images it had provoked kept popping into my mind. It attached itself so firmly in my mind and gut that it left me no choice: I had to do it. At least twice during my time at Columbia the unshakeable idea has become the beacon to follow. Looking back on both instances, I’m thrilled, grateful and humbled by these minor obsessions, and proud of my gut for embracing them. Six Questions Summertime by Chuck Mee is a multifaceted beast, and while the play is saturated with issues one must be aware of when choosing to tackle it, it also presented itself to me with a number of challenges I had not foreseen. These challenges and trials forced me into quite a bit of searching !3 Robin A. Eriksen – re2313 and exploration, both in form, process and approach. In addition they allowed me to experiment with and study questions I had been grappling with during my time at Columbia – six of which I’ll be presenting in this dissertation. Three of my central questions revolve around the form in which I tend to work, in other words they hone in on the creative part of being a director. The remaining three questions regard a notion that has fascinated me throughout my time at Columbia, one that I will continue to explore in my career, that of the director as a leader, and the execution of good leadership in the rehearsal room and process. The creative questions are the following: 1) In what way can we help the audience hear an abstract or complex text as if it was conversational? 2) What can emerge from combining different forms of text with “commercial” entertainment and “pop culture” references? 3) Based on the notion that abstract and concrete can not truly exist without the other, how can one achieve a successful result when working with both an abstract text and an abstract form? The leadership questions are: 4) How can we as directors create the absolute best conditions for the whole team (actors, designers, stage managers, etc) to succeed? 5) What do the dynamics of control mean in a rehearsal process? 6) In what way must the director change his/ her focus throughout a process? This dissertation is part memoir, part contemplation and part result of accumulated studies. My goal with the following text is both to accurately reflect the process of bringing Summertime by Chuck Mee to life, and to challenge myself to organize my thoughts about central topics I have been and still am grappling with as a stage director. Over the following pages I will describe the process of working on Summertime by Charles Mee, and in doing so hopefully touch on and explore the questions at hand. The thought !4 Robin A. Eriksen – re2313 is to not have the questions themselves guide the structure of the text, but rather to let experiences and theories from the work put down in the process guide the exploration, and then hopefully the sum of it all will allow for answers to emerge. Breaking an entry When I started working on Summertime, several months before we started rehearsals, I thought I had a good vantage point, having read the play and already juggling clear ideas about aesthetics and deeper meanings. I was wrong. There was a connection between the text and myself that was clear as day, but for some reason I couldn’t seem to fully enter the text in a way I had gotten used to doing with other scripts. What I mean by this is that I found myself not able to translate the text into theatrical, or even non-theatrical, situations in my mind. The text remained words on the page. William Ball speaks about the movie playing in your mind when you read the play (Ball 1984: 93-96), Michael Chekhov offers imagination exercises to enter a scene or situation (Chekhov 2002: 21-28), none of which were happening for me. While reading the script I found myself occasionally jotting down thoughts, questions, and ideas, but they were mainly intellectual, and not thoughts that were sparked by a deep communication with the text. This went on for a long time. Finding the Anchor Before leaving New York for the summer, I was playing around with a thought that it would be fun to use references that my generation ties to its teenage years in order to access something in the way we view topics like love, commitment, romance, etc. Because of this somewhat loose thought, I was able to leave my designers with a starting point, asking them to draw inspiration from the 90’s in their design. Beyond this they didn’t have much to go on, mainly because I !5 Robin A. Eriksen – re2313 myself didn’t have much to go on, and so followed a summer filled with endless conversations between the designers and myself, each conversation with a new large idea to base the play on. I had for a while tried to use the three steps I had learned from director Liesl Tommy when she came to Visiting Directors in 2015; 1) What is the story? 2) What is my connection with the story? 3) How do I connect the audience to this story? Because I couldn’t seem to find what the story was, the two remaining steps were redundant. Simultaneously I was working with an approach Brian Kulick once presented to us “Can you gather the whole play in one active sentence?” And after much trying, I was able to come up with something I found to be close to the core of the piece. Reading the play one night an image popped into my head where the characters were trying to grasp a slippery piece of soap. Using this image I boiled the play down to the active sentence “A play where 13 people each try to grasp that slippery bar of soap called love.” This then became the anchor for the piece, and is ultimately what informed most of the big decisions. I was still not able to envision the text and the situations, but at least the intellectual understanding of it had lead me to find an anchor. Finding the Necessity This anchor-line offered more than just a starting point for big decisions. It allowed us a more focused perspective into why this play was important today. I like to think that part of why the play spoke to me in the first place was because it touched on 1) something I myself needed to deal with, and 2) something going on in our world today, needing addressing. When putting together the copy for the play, we decided to end it in the following way “As [the characters] search, one by one, they discover they may not know how love works at all.