EVEN IN ARCADIA: CONFLICT, CERTAINTY AND SELF-PERCEPTION WHILST DIRECTING TOM STOPPARD’S ICONIC PLAY

A Thesis Submitted to the Temple University Graduate Board

In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree MASTER OF FINE ARTS IN THEATRE DIRECTING

by Elizabeth J. Carlson May 2015

Thesis Approval:

Ed Sobel, Thesis Advisor Head of Directing, Department of Theatre

ABSTRACT

This thesis is a partial documentation of the process of preparing and rehearsing

Temple University Theatre’s 2015 production of Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia, and the ways in which the process was artistically challenging and personally transformative. It is a demonstration of the manifold procedure of discovering action through language in the rehearsal process, the essential relationship of language to behavior in all collaborative practice and both the embrace of constructive conflict and the fundamental exercise of self-reflection as the primary catalysts for artistic development.

ii

For Mark, my audience.

iii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Thank you to Ed Sobel, Doug Wager, Bob Hedley, Peter Reynolds and Michael Kaufman

for generous guidance, support and encouragement throughout the process,

to David Girard, for being a loyal companion on this leg of the journey,

and to Gabriel Guerin without whom, nothing.

iv TABLE OF CONTENTS

Page

ABSTRACT ...... ii

DEDICATION ...... iii

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ...... iv

CHAPTER 1: WHAT IS THE MEASURE OF ARTISTIC GROWTH? ...... 1

CHAPTER 2: ARCADIA’S ELLUSIVE ESSENTIAL BEAUTY ...... 4

CHAPTER 3: LANGUAGE AND ACTION ...... 9

The All-Important First Day ...... 10

Indside-Out/Outside-In ...... 22

Past Process: Outside-In ...... 24

Present Process: Inside-Out ...... 29

CHAPTER 4: AT THE TABLE ...... 32

CHAPTER 5: FORM AND CONTENT ...... 42

Compromise and Surrender ...... 44

Attention and Intention ...... 49

CONCLUSIONS ...... 59

WORKS CITED ...... 63

APPENDICES

A. DIRECTOR’S NOTE ...... 64

v B. INDIVIDUAL RESEARCH TOPICS ...... 65

C. ARCADIA GROUNDPLANS ...... 66

D. PRODUCTION PHOTOS ...... 68

vi CHAPTER 1

What Is The Measure Of Artistic Growth?

“We shed as we pick up, like travellers who must carry everything in their arms…” (42)

To be an artist is to be in motion. To be always in the process of becoming. To encounter the world with a beginner’s heart and an open mind. In this state of constant motion and boundless influence: what is the true measure of artistic growth? In our linear, binary conception of development: from small to large, from few to many, from here to there: how do we begin to quantify artistic progression?

As an artist, one must be constantly in pursuit of new languages, new processes, new ways of seeing. By adding to our inventory of instruments, we gain new entry into our work. We not only see what is new and newly possible, but we see our past work more accurately and our future work holds transformative potential. By learning to wield these new tools, we sharpen our ability to use and evaluate all our other tools. Nothing is ever lost; it is only shifting in and out of focus, or along a hierarchy of usefulness depending on the task. I am choosing to measure my artistic growth, not in the inches and miles of movement along a linear path towards a finite goal, but by the diversification of my skills and an ever deepening understanding of myself.

When I began graduate school I thought of myself as an artist who was more akin to a choreographer than a director. I have always been attracted to the astonishing possibilities of bodies in space, and my training was a nearly exclusive enforcement of

1 that predilection. I valued physical precision, innovation and experimentation above all else in my work, and would often give preference to acrobats and dancers over actors when casting an ensemble. I never began a process without introducing a new physical skill-set out of which the ensemble would build the corporeal vocabulary of the world of the play. I chose to work with scripts that bowed easily to a robust physical manipulation; even those that seemed to be couched in pseudo-realism, I bent and maneuvered into expressive movement pieces.

I believed fully and absolutely in the generative genius of the ensemble. I felt my role was to create the structure, introduce vocabulary and then let the ensemble invent everything else. If that meant the work lost its focus, so be it. I was concerned with the kind of ensemble dynamic that would enable intensely physical, theatrical work. I would avoid using the text as a measure of the effectiveness of the choices, often allowing the ensemble’s goals to rule independently of the play.

It was not an intentional mistrust of the text, but the physical, experimental work of the ensemble was often given preference over a deep investigation into and loyalty to the fundamental requirements of the play. It was a way to make the text subservient to my primarily physical work. It was a way to appear to be taking risks without leaving the comfort of my familiar processes and products. I have always been intensely conscious of my lack of training as an actor. Most directors I know are confident in guiding an actor’s process because that is where they, unlike me, started their work in the theatre. I wanted to disguise my shortcomings, which I felt were primarily a lack of fluency in the

2 vocabulary of the actor, and this lack of confidence lead to wariness, not only of text but of actors and their processes.

Arcadia was therefore a contentious thesis project for me. It is a play that demands an absolute trust of language, will not tolerate directorial embellishment and imposition, and necessitates the humanizing process of the actor for the play to be palatable, let alone comprehensible. It is a play that is verbally and intellectually, rather than physically acrobatic. It forced me to re-frame my skills and my perceived strengths while also confronting my textual and actorly insecurities head-on. For me, Arcadia was about trust: trusting language and the processes of the actors, trusting that experimentation had a place in the more subtle work of text analysis and that the discoveries would be just as thrilling, trusting that the value of my work was not in wild impositions on the piece, but in creating the space and the process that allows the truths present in the text to emerge on their own terms.

For me, trust is not a simple, finite state-of-being. It is a constant process, an arduous struggle. What follows is a documentation of the conflict I found myself in with

Arcadia, both as a play and in the process it demanded from me. It is not a neat, comprehensive analysis of how my work on the play resolved itself into a completed, satisfying product. Rather it is an honest record of the struggle in the process. How I learned not to avoid, but to embrace the liminal state of being in conflict as a necessary catalyst both for personal artistic growth and for a more active and intentional relationship to the process of making work.

3 CHAPTER 2: ARCADIA’S ELUSIVE ESSENTIAL BEAUTY

Certainty, Presence And The Search For Truth

“It’s the best possible time to be alive,

when almost everything you thought you knew is wrong.” (52)

I began my work on Arcadia in a state of resistance. I had a specific vision of myself as an artist that was being jarringly contradicted by being asked to do this piece as my thesis project. Arcadia is a play that I love; I love reading it, I love seeing it performed, I have never had the inclination to direct it. It was a play for a ‘different kind’ of director: the kind of director who sits at the table and expounds on ideas for hours at a time, not for me who always has a body-first process, who believes in the primacy of corporeal discovery. I was feeling misunderstood, under-appreciated, and supremely sorry for myself, when it was brought to my attention that I was not being asked to direct

Arcadia because I would be good at it, or even because I would enjoy it. It was precisely because the piece is not susceptible to my usual, comfortable set of directorial tools, that the project was an invitation to growth and transformation.

Even as an admirer of Tom Stoppard as a dramatist and Arcadia as a play, I struggled to locate the essential beauty of this piece: that is, the thing at the core of the play that you, the artist, believe that your particular audience needs to experience. This was a disconcerting realization, as I am a firm believer in the essential artist/audience exchange: I believe we make work to be in productive conversation with the community

4 we are in. I have never, even as a fledgling director, struggled to answer the question: why this play here and now? It seemed to be a play that was neither strongly rooted in my artistic voice nor in the needs of the community I was in service of. The justification for the work kept coming back to me as: you are doing this play to do this play, a raison d’etre although prevalent, I abhor. I felt an overwhelming desire to dismiss this uncertainty of purpose, grit my teeth, and decide that my work on this play was just another in a long line of assignments, nothing more. It would be easier to ignore my inner conflict with the play than engage with it, even if that meant being complicit in the muddling of the true north of the production.

I was reminded of the most useful advice I ever received as an artist: follow your nausea. I have always understood this phrase to mean: in all things, confront your terror, there is something worthwhile lurking underneath it. In the past, my artistic terror has consisted of being afraid of the size of a project, or an unfamiliar form. In this instance my terror was that this play would mean nothing to me and even more: that I would have nothing to bring to it, a much deeper and more insidious fear.

Terror often manifests as resistance, and I have grown accustomed to recognizing and addressing that terror-as-resistance mechanism in actors and collaborators. However

I always imagined myself to be too in tune with my own terror to ever allow it to go so far as to cripple a project before it had even begun. But that was exactly what I was doing: letting my fear, in the cunning guise of an aloofness to the material, keep me from being open to the lessons that this piece and the foreignness of its process could teach me.

I had lost sight of the essential humility at the core of all artistic processes; the reason for

5 art making that is rooted in questions not in answers. Deeply connected to my understanding of terror as the divining rod of artistic growth is the poet Rainer Maria

Rilke whose words came ringing back to me as I lashed out for comfort in certainty.

…have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don’t search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer. (Rilke, 30-31)

That self-protective instinct to dismiss that which nauseates and terrifies, to dismiss the disorienting questions, is a difficult one to resist. This was by no means the end of my struggle with an enthusiasm for the play, but facing my terror head-on was an effective start to finding the question in the play that was worth asking, the question in the play that was lurking underneath my terror. As it turned out, what I found at the core of this play was, perhaps not surprisingly, deeply related to my own struggle with it. I was in search of an answer that I could give, rather than a question I could live in.

We assume that certainty is the end goal of all our endeavors: in our constant pursuit of knowledge and human progress, a definitive, irrefutable answer is so often the objective. Cognitively we understand the impossibility of absolute certainty, and yet we grasp for it relentlessly: why? In Arcadia, we encounter an array of characters in varied pursuit of this destination, with certitude ultimately being connected to one’s purpose and place in the vastness of the universe. The play itself is structured as a century-spanning mystery, in which the tension between what actually occurred and what it is possible to know with any certainty is the sole privilege of the audience who witness both worlds

6 unfold in tandem. We get to laugh at Bernard, and his unshakeable desire for his answers, when he declares: ‘I’ve proved Byron was here and as far as I’m concerned he wrote those lines as sure as he shot that hare’ (94). In the special circumstances of the world of this play, we are given a comedic glimpse of Bernard’s folly with our omniscient knowledge of even the minutest details of the past.1 We are conversely shocked and devastated when we discover, through Hannah, that what we are witnessing is the last night of Thomasina’s life, a perspective that lends a greater poignancy to her waltz with

Septimus at the end of the play. This is a perspective we are privileged to have in the theatre: we cannot have it in our pedestrian, chronological encounter with existence.

For our actual experience of the unknowable past, the fleeting present, the uncertain future: we are presented with Hannah’s response to the chaos of existence, which faces the mysterious while succumbing to neither apathy nor despair.

It’s wanting to know that makes us matter. Otherwise we’re going out the way we came in…If the answers are in the back of the book I can wait, but what a drag. Better to struggle on knowing that failure is final. (80)

It is a view of the world that offers neither simplistic answers nor surrenders to futility. Though what we desire to posses is impossible to achieve, yet we try. And the true beauty of our existence lives somewhere in the tension of that contradiction. It is difficult to be alive in the chaos and question one’s place and purpose, not for the sake of the answer but for the experience of being present, of being on the journey. The essential beauty of Arcadia, birthed from my own vain struggle for certainty, was to truly ask: how

1 Bernard makes this assertion just moments after it has been revealed to the audience that Augustus, Thomasina’s younger brother, actually shot the hare that is attributed to Lord Byron in the game book. 7 can we be both present and purposeful in the chaos and contradiction of being alive?

How do we embrace that expansive desire that stretches our capacity for questions rather than the narrowing impulse that that shrinks our infinite potentials by fabricating inflexible answers? How can we be present here and now, when both the previous moment and the next moment are uncertain?

To live this question is difficult in practice: the desire for the comfort of absolute answers is always at the door. My resistance to the play was inextricably connected to a certain and inflexible vision of myself as a maker: I knew who I was in relationship to the world at large; I knew what I did well. I was an artist who thrived on the discovery and articulation of contemporary resonance in dated material, an artist whose hallmark was intensive ensemble work and immersive theatricality, an artist who only spoke when she had something to say worth the hearing. To do justice to Arcadia seemed to require me to be someone else.

Maybe everything I thought I knew about myself as an artist was true and valuable; maybe it was false, unexamined or incomplete. To question one’s concrete identity is an insecure place to find oneself. It is to risk being suddenly discovered as a fraud. It is the nausea-inducing leap of faith in which you may fall, but you may also fly.

Rather than my thesis project being a comforting reinforcement of all the things I thought

I knew about myself as an artist, this process was going to force me to question and confront my certainty, to see the possibilities in my terror, to stand on the precipice and not know.

8 CHAPTER 3: LANGUAGE AND ACTION

The Interconnectivity Of What We Say And What We Do,

In The Play And In The Process

“What a faint heart! We must work outward from the middle of the maze.” (41)

I needed a concrete starting place from which I could engage my terror and, knowing that the language was going to be of primary importance, I began my own work there. I have directed Tom Stoppard before and have found it necessary to create a glossary for myself and all the collaborators that includes definitions, translations, and pronunciations: the initial step towards excavating the text. This is part of my process of understanding and beginning to deal with every word in the play, and it is an extremely helpful resource for actors beginning their text work.

However, I was conscious in this process, with young actors and dense text full of complex ideas, not to mention a setting and (for half of them) a century that is completely foreign; a more inclusive dramaturgical task was going to be essential. I believe that one of the most important values that one can instill in young actors is a sense of personal responsibility for the play. Too often is the case that young actors (and even some more experienced actors) will treat the director as the source of all knowledge about the play, and therefore not only the arbiter, but the birthplace of all choices. For some directors this is comforting: to have actors who are willing to be automatons for one’s singular vision of the play. I am wary of an art-making process that is comfortable or solipsistic. In the

9 past I have been baffled and frustrated by actors who seemed to bring nothing to the table, waiting to make a strong choice until they had been more-or-less told exactly what to do. What I have learned is that actors, and all collaborators, need to be invited and encouraged to bring their whole selves to the process. That invitation cannot simply be a verbal one: too often directors ask for actors to function as collaborators in words, but in action and behavior, hear and respond only to themself in the process.

I want a room full of actors who chase after their own curiosity and generate choices based on a thorough relationship to the text and the world of the play. I want actors who delight in being their own dramaturges. Arcadia, in particular, is a play that toys with our desire to know. It therefore struck me as wise to set up that expectation, or rather, invitation to be partners in the process of discovery. In fact, one of my primary objectives at the outset of this project was to be intentional about empowering the actors

(as well as the entire team of collaborators) to be generous, generative contributors to the process in all its facets.

The All-Important First Day

At the first rehearsal for any project one is faced with the blunt or delicate task of setting the tone for the entire process. I was fortunate to get one full Saturday with the ensemble prior to the three-week break that preceded our official rehearsal period. It was the end of the fall semester, the actors had been cast very recently, and I did not want to put any undue pressure on this day by calling it or treating it as a traditional first rehearsal with all the expectations inherent in that dreaded, nerve-wracking day: the presentation of

10 directorial concept, unveiling of designs, dramaturgical expositions, and finally the dry and dreary table read.

One of the things that a traditional first day of rehearsal sets up is an expectation for the completed product. This is not necessarily a negative thing, it gives everyone a sense of the goals for the production and generates a certain excitement and enthusiasm that is essential. What a first rehearsal also does, in a more subliminal, but no less affecting way, is demonstrate how the process will unfold. It lays out the hierarchies: who will do most of the talking and have most of the ideas, by whose yardstick all choices and discussions will be measured. This traditional first rehearsal structure demonstrates to the actors that they are on the bottom of the pyramid: if they keep their mouths shut and do as they are told, they will be allowed to say the words of the play in the way a director wants them to, wearing a pretty costume on a dynamic set; not much better than walking props executing the vision of another. We demonstrate that we, the production team, are way ahead of the actors, that we have not only articulated most of the problems before they even became involved, but we solved them without their help.

I know of no directors who set up this atmosphere intentionally. I think, as with many dangerous things, it emerges from a lack of intention, attention and an assumption that because this is the way that things are usually done, it must be correct, or at the very least, harmless. It comes from the misguided idea that what we say has a greater weight than what we do: I may say that this is an ensemble process where everyone should feel encouraged to contribute, but spend the whole rehearsal talking about my vision and

11 choices. That is an incongruity that is not lost on actors. They know that actions speak louder than words: it is the core principle of their work.

I wanted to be intentional about what I was going to do on this all-important first day and how I was going to do it. I designed it to be a day of skill and ensemble building, a day whose focus is not the product, but an intentional day to set the precedent for how the work would unfold. I wanted to set out my expectations for a collaborative process.

I believe it to be more effective to set an example of these expectations rather than talk about them too extensively. There is potentially an even greater risk of perceived inequality that can stifle actors in an academic rehearsal room as academic theatre has a more explicit hierarchy. Directors in academia are often teachers during the day (a few of the actors had been students in my class in the fall semester), which implies a division of knowledge and a power structure before one has even begun. I was, in the case of

Arcadia, particularly fearful of allowing this stratification to gain any footing. Given my insecurities about how to approach this kind of process and my conflicted relationship to the material, I knew I would be relying heavily on the full investment and input of the actors. I needed them to be my partners in the room if this play was to find its life and resonance in our hands.

Instead of implicitly reinforcing the hierarchy that the director is the most significant collaborator by being the primary voice in the room, I filled the day with the voices of others. I wanted to throw a kick-off party for the process at which I was the host and not the main entertainment, a day that invited actors, in actions, to contribute to the process.

12 We began the day with a soft start: we had coffee and fruit and doughnuts and spent a half hour just meeting one another. I was conscious of the fact that about half of these actors I had worked with extensively in the past and had very close relationships to; with many of them I had been through a full production process and they knew how I worked as well as I knew how they worked. The other half of the cast I had never worked with at all. Some of them I was truly meeting for the first time (outside of an audition) on this day. I wanted to take some time to intentionally even out that disparity before launching into anything even resembling work.

I made sure that I spoke to everyone in the room, actors, assistants, everyone. I welcomed them, called them by their name, learned something about them; such a small but meaningful act. How often, in the urgency of the limited time of our work do we forget to do this? I have been guilty of forgetting that the work of the theatre is not only technical, physical and craft-based, but also vulnerable, social and human.

Once we were full of coffee and doughnuts, and all the actors and stage management had properly met and mingled, Maggie Anderson, our choreographer arrived for our first dance lesson. Although only four of the twelve actors in this play have to be able to waltz, and it would have been easier, and probably more efficient to have Maggie teach just those four actors, having the entire cast (and most of the stage management) learn to dance accomplished several essential things from my perspective.

First, there’s no surer way to break the ice at the beginning of any process than by having people dance together: it requires a collaborative concentration, a willingness to fail as well as humour and grace in the face of the unknown. These are, coincidentally, my core

13 values for an ensemble: and while one can easily talk about them, they are much better understood through experience.

Every rehearsal process, especially in an academic environment, is as much about skill development as it is about the quality of the finished product. It is in everyone’s interest that all the collaborators are in a process of growing and learning rather than stagnating. In this instance, not only is social dance a valuable skill for any actor to have, the physical listening required in such an activity is infinitely applicable to the work of an actor, and a skill I have found to be occasionally wanting in the undergraduate acting community.

Another of the innumerable benefits of Maggie’s dance work with the whole company was that it took the pressure off the actors for whom this work was particularly intended. There was a marked difference in the natural aptitude for dance between the two pairs who would eventually have to execute it. Having the entire ensemble, including two of our assistant stage managers, involved in the process of learning, took some of that comparative pressure off the actors: they were not two pairs measured against one another; their minds worrying their way forward to the performance. The focus was on the ensemble, the process. It was a way of showing, in practice, that it was not the time to be thinking about product; it was an invitation to relax and just be present in the moment with the work.

This all-in ensemble approach is not a magical cure-all for anxiety and self-doubt in individual actors; the evidence of their experience rebels against such a judgment-free environment. Even in this work, the actors for whom the waltzing was more foreign took

14 every opportunity they could find to apologize for their perceived ineptitude. They apologized to Maggie, to each other, to me. As much as I reminded them not to apologize, as much as they participated in the safe-space, they needed further proof in habitual action in order to make it stick. As with the reshaping of any habit, there is no quick fix, it requires consistent reinforcement. I realized that in setting up this precedent,

I would have to be very careful to consistently keep up my end of the bargain, or I could loose the benefit of this work very quickly. It was my responsibility to prove to them, over and over, that this was not a room that claimed to be about process, but was, in fact, about results.

We followed up our physical work with Maggie by having Diane Gaary, our vocal coach come in for a basic dialect workshop. Much like the work with Maggie, this was a time of general skill building for the entire ensemble. Though there would eventually be distinctions in dialect between the two time-periods, we began the work with the basic building blocks useful to everyone. And although both Diane and I were aware, to some extent, of the actors who would need more specific work and instruction and those with more experience, this work intentionally singled no one out. It was a free and open exploration of basic tools, with the purpose of putting the actors on a footing to drive their own dialect work over the break.

There is an innate tendency for perceptive actors, particularly on the first day of rehearsal, to compare themselves to their colleagues, and to carry this picture of themselves, for better or worse, through the rehearsal process. Part of this is a human tendency, and in many ways, it is unavoidable. What I wanted to be conscious of in this

15 process was not to allow that initial comparative hierarchy to emerge from the first day: that typically becomes a hierarchy of previous experience and ‘successful’ initial impulses. These kinds of first judgments leave some actors feeling helpless, and ultimately promotes laziness in those who see themselves at the top of the heap on the first day. If hierarchies were to emerge in my rehearsals for Arcadia, I wanted them to be based on things that the actors had absolute control over: hard work, perseverance, and attention to detail, not innate talent or extent of experience. It is my desire to create a room in which thorough preparation, a gracious and generous attitude, and a tenacious work ethic are the highest virtues. This is a large part of my reasoning for spending this day giving the actors tools, and trying not to give them implicit or explicit invitations to perform.

This is also part of the reason, when planning this day, that I was not sure whether

I wanted to do a read-through of the play or not. On the one hand, I wanted us to have a sense of what we were working on. However, there is so often an expectation to perform implicit in a first read as actors strive to prove they deserve to be there, that you have not made a mistake in casting them, and I wanted none of that pressure present. I toyed with various ideas of ways that we could encounter the text without doing a straight table read; but ultimately decided it was important to take a look, however casually, at the mountain we were about to climb together.

In reflecting on this portion of our first rehearsal, I now understand that, instead of keeping my goals for the day as the primary objective, I allowed my perception of the actor’s expectations to rule this portion of the agenda, to no one’s true benefit. Although

16 the read-through was casual, productive and revealing: it was still about performance, competence and fluency rather than a true hearing of the text of the play. In retrospect, with the objectives I had outlined for the day, it would have been more in line with those goals to do a round robin read.2 In this exercise, performing goes out the window (an actor will rarely end up reading their own character’s text), and more importantly, they get to really listen to the text in a way they will never encounter it again. They get a chance to hear their own lines in someone else’s mouth, they get to say the lines of their colleagues, they get to hear the voice of their character as it passes from vessel to vessel.

This is an instance where I allowed my doubts and insecurities to keep me from making the most effective choice for this process. I have become particularly conscious, over the past three years, of the fact that my theatre training has been non-traditional, often cobbled-together, and completely unlike the training of the undergraduate students I am currently working with. In some ways that has been an opening experience, where I have felt engaged in a positive exchange of ideas and methods; and in some ways it has caused me to self-censor my impulses and methods in fear of the perception of the

‘correct’ choice. What I am beginning to discover in practice is that this measure of correct and incorrect is neither as completely invalid as I might have once liked it to be, nor is it about an inflexible, repeatable approach to work. It is about molding the form of the work to meet the specific goals and requirements of a particular piece. The correct choice is the choice that most effectively accomplishes the objective. This requires an

2 In a round robin table read, the ensemble sits in a circle and each person, be they actor, stage manager, director or designer, reads a line and then the person next to them reads the next line, whether it be one word or a two page monologue, and so on through the entire play. 17 unflinching, simultaneous attention to the play, the ensemble, the goals you wish to achieve, and the environment you are in. These factors are in flux with every new project, so every new project should be a goal-oriented combination of methods: some tried-and- true, some experimental and invented just for the needs of the piece.

I made the choice, in this instance, to do a table read, just eliminating the table. I set out mats and pillows and assortments of chairs and blocks and benches: imposing an informality on the space to encourage an informality in this initial encounter with the text

(we would have plenty of time for more formal explorations as the process moved forward). After a very casual read-through of the play, in which actors were free and encouraged to get up and walk around, eat, roll on the floor, laugh, mess up, have no idea what they are saying, we were much better able to understand the extent to which the dramaturgical work on this play was going to be essential, as I anticipated. What I had not anticipated was that at this first, messy, silly reading of the play we would encounter the joyful essence of the play for the first time. Arcadia is a play that requires a human infusion, and for all its messiness, this reading with these actors was positively bursting with possibilities that had previously been hidden: jokes came to life, scientific concepts seemed crystal clear, relationships had spark and complexity. The comedic power- dynamic between Lady Croom and Captain Brice came out in their minute exchanges,

Chloë and Hannah’s sisterly vacillation between affection and scorn for one another was newly apparent, Septimus’ language was crowded with rakish double-entendre:

SEPTIMUS: You are mistaken. I made love to your wife in the gazebo. She asked me to meet her there, I have her note somewhere, I daresay I could find it for you, and if someone is putting it about that I did not turn up, by God, sir, it is a slander. (10)

18 It was in this reading that I was able to move from what had been a literary approach to the play and into a theatrical understanding of it; an important leap for me to make and one I was glad to have had in advance of our break before rehearsals as it allowed me to transition from thinking purely about the language on the page and start to think about the language in action.

For as much joy and life as we discovered in the read through: there was an equal if not greater amount of confusion, ambiguity, and questions. I chose not to allow the rest of the day to become a discussion of the play, I know how quickly that can devolve into actors asking questions and directors and dramaturges supplying answers, and I wanted to intentionally avoid that dynamic for the whole process if I was able. I distributed the glossary I had created with the help of our dramaturge, Kristen Scatton, which was designed primarily to clarify the language of the play, and keep the actors from the tedious work of looking up every single unfamiliar term. However, I wanted the actors to leave on their winter break charged with an essential task: to become experts on one aspect of the play. Arcadia is full of scientific theories, aesthetic movements, mathematical formulas, as well as historical and cultural context; it is a hugely intimidating task to try and understand it all.

In response to this herculean undertaking, and wanting to include the ensemble in active dramaturgy, Kristen and I, in anticipation of this first day, created a list of research topics that we thought would be helpful to a deeper understanding of the play. We then, as carefully as we could, assigned a different one of these topics to each actor based on what we felt might be illuminative to their process. For instance, to Darryl Daughtry, the

19 actor playing Bernard Nightingale, we assigned the life and works of Lord Byron. This is a fairly simple connection to make, as Bernard is a Byron scholar; and his self-perception is tied up with his idea of who Lord Byron was. For other actors topics were occasionally more broad: servant culture in the early 19th century for Joel Chrosinski, the actor playing

Jellaby; Picturesque ideals in Landscaping for Jared Manders, the actor playing Mr.

Noakes, etc.3 We termed the exercise a ‘Dramaturgical Scavenger Hunt’ asking that in three weeks, when we were to start rehearsals in earnest, each actor would be a resource to the ensemble on their topic: sending their research to Kristen to include on the dramaturgy website, and feeding in their expertise as we excavated the play during table work and beyond.

This was a new strategy for me, and it is one I intend to use again. When we returned to the play three weeks later I was surrounded, not by blank stares, but by activated actor-dramaturges who not only had questions about the play, but also felt themselves and one another resources for the answers. The benefits of this exercise came back to us over and over. For example, Bonnie Baldini, the actor playing Chloë, did the research she was assigned, but did not find it all that useful; an instance where Kristen and I did not accurately foresee what would be beneficial to her process. She therefore took it upon herself to read her way through the work of Jane Austen, not one of the topics Kristen and I had come up with. It was not something that would have occurred to me to dig very deeply into, as Austen is only passingly mentioned towards the end of the play, in reference to Chloë’s costume for the Regency dress-up party in scene seven:

3 For a complete list of research topics assigned by character, see Appendix B. 20 VALENTINE: What are you supposed to be, Chlo? Bo-Peep? CHLOË: Jane Austen! VALENTINE: Of course. (95)

Bonnie, on her own, took this textual clue and her empowerment as an actor- researcher to come back with active, astute ideas about Chloë’s behavior, desire and self- perception based on her obsession (a hypothesis constructed on the strength of the declaration: ‘Jane Austen!’ and Valentine’s ‘Of course’) with the novels of Jane Austen.

Bonnie was able to connect Chloë’s perception of herself, her environment, and her expectations for romantic entanglements to an fixation on Austen’s heroines (particularly

Emma Woodhouse and Marianne Dashwood) and ended up finding some dynamic tensions and active choices based on this research. This self-sufficiency was precisely what this task was intended to accomplish. Bonnie found an entry into the world of the play that was not only grounded in textual evidence, but she was empowered to see herself as a driver of the process. Not only were the actors not relying on me or on

Kristen for their answers, but I could ask them questions that they felt equipped to answer and explore. They were not looking to me for material, but to help shape and filter what they were bringing.

I spent most of that first pre-rehearsal day watching other people lead the work, and that was exactly the kind of environment I wanted to present to the ensemble in both word and deed: one that was structured and focused yet open to everyone’s contributions; a room where the primary impulse was not to look to me for all the answers, but to look to one another.

21 Inside-Out/Outside-In

In crafting a rehearsal approach for Arcadia, what seemed to be the obvious methodology was to separate the two casts nearly from the jump, with Colin O’Neil, who was playing Gus and Augustus, being the only actor to bridge these rehearsals. My assumption was that this separation was necessary, a way to keep the two worlds in ignorance of one another, indeed this was part of the essential beauty of the play for me: the desire that persists even in the face of the pure impossibility of knowing the past or envisioning the future. This stringent separation brought both foreseen and unforeseen benefits and pushed me towards the discovery of new tools and a reminder of the necessity of responding to the play and the actors in front of you; not relying on an inflexible mode of working.

Two essential things were intended to be accomplished by this separation: it allowed us to create from our twelve person company two smaller, more intimate and efficient ensembles and it allowed two distinctive styles to emerge without being informed or ‘corrected’ by cross-contamination with the other.

As soon as we sat down to our table work, the distinct personalities of the ensembles showed themselves. The Past (hereafter known as the A’s) were efficient, literal and antsy to get up on their feet while the Present (hereafter known as the B’s) were prone to tangents, opinions, fierce disagreements and exhaustive discussion of the text, characters and relationships. While in the table-work phase I feared an imbalance between the ensembles: the B’s were too in love with the table work and the A’s were too over it.

22 In any other process I would have hoped for a more equal mix of both those qualities: a desire to dig deeper into the text and relationships alongside a desire to get up and see how it moves. In my experience, having a mix of these sensibilities in an ensemble encourages a moderate approach, particularly in the determination of how much time is spent on table work. It occurred to me that perhaps, on this project, moderation was not what was required. I felt compelled to honor the dichotomy that was emerging: both because the structure of the play asks that one begin with a clear distinction between these two worlds and because it presented a possibility for a dual experimentation in methods. I made the conscious choice to let the personalities and preferences of each sub-ensemble drive the processes. It was my suspicion that it was not entirely the personalities and processes of the actors that was triggering this separation, but rather something in the text of the play that was causing this distinction to emerge.

The two processes continued to diverge, until it felt as though, from day to day, I was preparing rehearsals for two completely different plays that just happened to be rehearsing at the same time, on the same set. It was an extraordinary experience to have to simultaneously develop two, nearly opposite approaches to what is ultimately the same play.

I know many directors who chose to pre-block a play before getting it on its feet in rehearsal. I have never been a subscriber to this approach. It has been my experience that if you come at a scene with a pre-determined idea about how it moves, it will close you off, however unintentionally, to the offerings and instincts of the actors. Even if you let the actors work through the scene first, you will always gravitate towards the picture

23 of the scene you had in your mind before the actors fed in their essential knowledge of the play and the characters.

I prefer instead, to shape the play organically, bit by bit. The actors physical instincts are given priority in the first phase, with very little adjustment from me: at this point I typically chose to feed in observations, questions and encouragement towards further searching. I will have a plan for what the climactic or essential moment of each scene will look like, but I try to stay as open as possible to the generative potential of the actors’ bodies and impulses. I quickly learned that this was neither a complete theory nor a fail-safe approach.

Past Process: Outside-In

Not surprisingly, the A’s completed their table work first and were ecstatic to get on their feet in rehearsal. I had some very loose ideas about how the play might move, and after all their enthusiasm about getting up from the table, I had high hopes for how the physical life of the play would begin to form from their instincts and impulses. It was a great surprise to me then, that as soon as we got up on our feet, we seemed to be dead in the water. Everything that seemed clear at the table was now muddied and false, and we all had a general feeling of being physically stuck: having the impulse to move and nowhere to go or having no justifiable to reason to move at all.

This is not a unique or unusual problem and I attempted to free us up by encouraging a clarification of what each character might want within the given circumstances versus what they fear to loose. I tried to further clarify the space and what

24 was immediately behind our three doors and what it might mean to each character. I asked questions, and the actors had lively, ready answers, based on a thorough reading of the text: a misunderstanding of objective, stakes and the nature of the space did not seem to be our problem at this stage.

My knee-jerk reaction to this dilemma was: just impose some blocking, it will relieve all our anxiety in the present moment. However, that solution did not answer the question of what was missing from the equation nor did it show a lot of trust in the actors or the process. I needed to find a process-oriented, text-driven solution, as it was far too early to be hypocritical.

I was reminded of the last time I directed a Tom Stoppard play, something I had not done much thinking about in the lead-up to this process since Arcadia and

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead seemed worlds away from each other on their surface. And yet, in both cases, it is a mistake to approach the play as realism, and that seemed to be what we were coming up against: actors whose physical vocabulary was restricted to the realistic; and that realistic physicality being at times incongruous to the nature of the text.

During our rehearsals for Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead the actors in the titular parts were struggling with what I find to be the most delightful section of the play: the questions game.4 The text simply would not connect to the bodies of the actors; lines they knew would disappear from their heads and the entire scene, that seems to jump off the page when you read it, was saggy and boring in practice. The solution to this

4 Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead by Tom Stoppard (1967) Act One, pages 33-34. 25 particular problem presented itself in the appearance of our combat choreographer, arriving to work on another scene, but happening upon us when we were running up against the brick wall that this scene had become. I was at my wits end, and desperate to try anything, so I asked him to teach us to fence: the rules, the moves, the footwork, and the myriad possibilities of a physical duel. It was transformative: all of the sudden, the language was connected to need and need was connected to the body. This game of questions turned into an all-out duel, with a strict set of physical rules that complimented and illuminated the verbal rules. Winning the game was not a purely intellectual activity, it was a physical contest as well.

At the time, I saw this as a solution rooted in collaboration: to welcome the expertise of another in search of the most effective solution, as well as a triumph of the body over the language. I had not recognized the problem we were up against as a symptom of an incomplete understanding of the given circumstances of the play.

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are not functioning in a realistic world, they are functioning in a heightened reality governed by a different but no less specific set of rules: we had actually been in search of the clues for what those rules were. As I compared this experience to my dilemma with Arcadia, I began to see the similarities in the problem and possibilities for encountering it.

The characters in the Nineteenth Century portion of Arcadia are operating under a complex set of theatrical rules that we had yet to fully uncover. Kristen had given us some excellent research related to the given circumstances in a realistic sense: what were the rules of status and manners in this time and place that are affecting the physical lives

26 of these characters and their relationships to one another, and the actors were incorporating these into their work. So what was missing?

Arcadia starts out as a kind of Comedy of Manners: complete with all the anticipated stock characters and situations. As in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are

Dead, these characters are operating in a highly theatrical reality: one in which their desire and their fear is not as easily veiled, as it often is in a realistic situation; one in which characters’ comic contradictions are blatantly exposed. So how does this change our approach to the physical life of this portion of the play?

I decided to set out some physical rules, based on what we knew from the text, for each sub-section of scene one. As it turned out, even a very simple physical rule was transformative to both the scene and the actors’ understanding of the rules of the world, how they go about trying to get what they want, and what might be in their way. It was about the external physicalization of the internal fear and desire, it was about the contrast between what the characters say and what they do.

For example, there is textual evidence that for all Mr. Chater’s talk, he is deeply afraid of an actual physical confrontation in defense of his wife’s virtue.

SEPTIMUS: …Sir -- I repent your injury. You are an honest fellow with no more malice in you than poetry. CHATER: (Happily) Ah well! --that is more like the thing! (Overtaken by doubt) Is he apologizing? BRICE: There is still the injury to his conjugal property, Mrs Chater’s -- CHATER: Tush, sir! BRICE: As you will -- Her tush. Nevertheless -- (44)

I translated that core contradiction into a simple physical rule: every time

Septimus takes a step towards him (however conciliatory and non-threatening those steps

27 might be), Chater takes three steps away. Ian Monaco (Septimus) was charged with trying to get near Mr. Chater, and Chris Cavone (Mr. Chater) was charged with trying to keep the table between them: a very simple game.

What resulted was really delightful: not only did the actors now have physical stakes to play, they understood the degree to which they could allow their bodies to communicate the subtext of the scene, and in so doing, they discovered much of the subtext that had not even been considered before. Even better, from a rehearsal room management perspective: the actors continued to invent and refine the rules of the game without my needing to micro-manage their every move. It was a framework in which they could explore the dynamic of the scene without getting physically stuck or too locked into blocking that is not based on an in-the-moment truthful relationship to the given circumstances.

Creating an external, physical structure inside which to make discoveries, what I am calling an outside-in approach to the text, ended up being supremely useful to the A’s.

It suited the actors’ desire to be in physical exploration with action and text as well as my desire to create a framework, but not to impose; to build the physical life of the play in partnership with the actors. The actors kept playing within the rules and refining them, I came in and offered suggestions, asked questions and gave a little shape where it was necessary. What evolved was a physically precise staging, that I honestly could have created and imposed on them from the beginning, but because they had generated it and made choices based on their own discoveries, they owned and fully justified the physical life of the play in a way that is often missing in the stilted staging of a non-naturalistic

28 play. In this way I was able to take a tool that I had grown to rely on: exacting rules of physicality, and both understand why and in what circumstances it is useful, as well as adapting it from an arbitrary trouble-shooting crowbar to a text-based, purpose-driven precision instrument.

Present Process: Inside-Out

The present day half of this play was an entirely different matter. I honestly believe these actors could have done table-work on this play for two months and not tired of it. They were intent on discovering as much as they could intellectually before even attempting to work in space. When we did finally drag ourselves up from the table, they were quick to stop and talk whenever a moment was not clear, or they did not ‘feel right’ about where they were or what they were doing.

It was not that they were not discovering physically in space, but they were not in an exuberant, by-the-seat-of-their-pants physical exploration, the kind of exploration I am most comfortable with. They were connecting thought-to-thought, moment-to-moment, action-to-action. Wanting to string the beads together as they worked, not at the end or incidentally, but cumulatively and purposefully. If something spontaneous in the moment worked, they wanted to know why it worked. It was a much more painstaking, intellectual progression in the beginning, a method that, several years ago would have been hugely frustrating to me. But in this process I was surprised by how much I loved and looked forward to it.

29 As a formerly physicality first theatre-maker, who was admittedly uncomfortable with actorly processes, this intellectual, hyper-verbal approach to the work with the B’s was something I had never trusted. I had always thought it encouraged actors to do too much thinking and not enough doing onstage. I excused my avoidance of such work by maintaining that that was the actors’ homework, in the rehearsal room we put that work to the test in space.

I believe in the very core of my being in the essential directorial value of: Don’t

Talk Too Much. What I realized in this inside-out approach that the B’s took was that all this verbal processing and debate was a form of warm-up, training, and preparation so that they could make spontaneous discoveries together in the moment and be able to recreate them; to build the cohesive, multi-faceted relationships required by the play.

These actors were engaged in plenty of action, but it was never arbitrary, never unexamined. They were doing their thinking now, and doing it collaboratively, so that later in the process they could be fully alive in the moment.

When I had many of my first conversations about the play with designers, students and colleagues; I was surprised by how many people were confused by the actions and relationships in the present portion of the play; how many people told me they ‘preferred’ the past story line to the present. What I discovered in the process of working on both is that Stoppard is employing, similarly to our rehearsal methods, two different types of storytelling. For the A’s the language was often contrapuntal and contradictory to the action: making for a more immediately and viscerally comedic experience; for the B’s the language is a screen, through which action is often disguised

30 or deflected; the comedy is primarily verbal and intellectual while the action is largely sub textual, requiring excavation and illumination by the actors for clarity. In performance, I found the opposite preferences to be true: audiences responded more fully to the present-day story line, relationships, and characters as they were full of a life- blood, though perhaps not as immediately comedic as the past, but deeply and recognizably human.5

The A’s were choreographing a dance, the B’s were orchestrating a collision: the preparatory needs of these two forms of theatrical event are very different. When the discoveries came for the B’s, they weren’t lightning bolts, like the A’s. They were careful, considered, reasoned: but no less truthful and alive. That is what surprised me most of all: that out of this intellectual exploration arrived moments with real visceral punch.

5 This is a gross over-generalization, as one of the structural tools Stoppard employs is a gradual shift, or merging of styles as the play progresses, and we begin to see the past shed its formal, external comedic structures for the more deeply complex and human. I use this example only to demonstrate the initial polarization of the two worlds. 31 CHAPTER 4: AT THE TABLE

Testing Action Against The Text

“It can’t prove to be true, it can only not prove to be false yet.” (78)

One of the primary goals I set for myself on this project was to trust the text, trust the playwright, trust that the language could be the exclusive source of action. Even if that meant I felt lost or ill at ease during the process. I needed to test the hypothesis that the action is rooted in the language and the language is rooted in action: if only you have the patience and tenacity to find it, and not impose it. One of the critiques of this play that

I kept running across, and one of the critiques one hears frequently of Tom Stoppard as a dramatist, is that his plays are all ideas and no heart. Tom Stoppard is ‘a primarily cerebral writer’ (Clapp) ‘whose plays begin in the library’ (Lawson) is a common refrain.

I have directed plays by Tom Stoppard before and although I do believe that his work is often geared a little strongly towards an audience of the initiated,6 heart-less they are not. I have found it easy, as a director, and for actors, to get wrapped up too singularly in the ideas of the play and, those being large and intricate, forget that it is the human experience expressing need in action through language that actually gives these plays their resonance. The wit and wordplay, the science, philosophy and aesthetics are the

6 Many Tom Stoppard plays, including Arcadia, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, The Invention of Love, Travesties, etc. operate in such a way that an audience with a threshold of prior knowledge (on wide-ranging topics, depending on the play, from classical scholarship to Dada) can more fully appreciate all the intricacies of the jokes and allusions in the play. 32 packaging: what is truly beautiful is the universal human experience bubbling up inside these big ideas.

That active, seething humanity is not always the first thing that jumps off the page in a Tom Stoppard play, and even the most well-intentioned theatre-makers, of whom I have certainly been one, fail, for one reason or another (be it laziness, ignorance or hubris), to truly excavate the text. If the text is not carefully analyzed, it reveals few or none of its secrets, leading one to impose actions, choices and heightened theatricality to disguise the ‘weakness’ of the text. If the text is not excavated, an ensemble finds itself skipping over essential, if subtle or sub-textual, transformations and facets of character, relationships and plot, and even amidst the complex verbosity of the characters, they seem flat and fake with no trace of human complexion and contradiction. Far from being the fault of the playwright, the responsibility is on the director to plot a course of diligence or laziness, and this trickles down to designers, actors and eventually is received by an audience who can only respond to the incarnation of the language as it is presented to them. I was determined, in this process, if we should fail to fully activate the text, it would not be for lack of trying or failure to understand that that was our primary task.

During the B’s table work we spent a lot of time examining the nature of the relationships between Hannah, Valentine and Bernard. What is the source and quality of everyone’s attraction to Hannah? What is the nature of her desire and resistance? In scene four, Valentine has a big, gorgeous speech to Hannah about physics and the mysteries of the universe; it is one of my favorite speeches in the play. But what is the action of the

33 speech? He is not lecturing her for a whole page; that is neither interesting nor supported by the full text of the scene or the play.

In the audition process (and one of the reasons these actors were cast) Kevin

Murray (Valentine) and Kyra Baker (Hannah) made some remarkable discoveries in treating that text as an awkward attempted seduction: the speech was suddenly full of tension, humour and stakes; absolutely lecture-free.

As we began rehearsals, we were still very attached to the results of that choice, but, while it had worked in the audition (a time in which it is can be rare to see an actor playing any kind of action at all), we were all aware that we needed to go back to the text and attempt to, as impartially as possible, find the evidence for or against that particular choice.

One of the first major questions that arose in scene four was, after an attempt by

Valentine to explain the complex mathematics of Thomasina’s primer to a bewildered

Hannah, we arrive at:

HANNAH: And the diagram, what’s it of? VALENTINE: How would I know? HANNAH: Why are you cross? VALENTINE: I’m not cross. (Pause.) When your Thomasina was doing maths it had been the same maths for a couple of thousand years. Classical. And for a century after Thomasina. Then maths left the real world behind, just like modern art, really. Nature was classical, maths was suddenly Picassos. But now nature is having the last laugh. The freaky stuff is turning out to be the mathematics of the natural world. HANNAH: This feedback thing? VALENTINE: For example. HANNNAH: Well, could Thomasina have - VALENTINE: (Snaps) No, of course she bloody couldn’t! HANNAH: All right, you’re not cross… (48-9)

34 We were immediately interested in the source of Valentine’s irritability. Hannah is not always an infallible source of information in this play, for example, during her sparring with Bernard in scene two:

BERNARD: What’s he doing, Valentine? HANNAH: He’s a postgrad. Biology. BERNARD: No, he’s a mathematician. (27)

As it turns out, Bernard, the newcomer, is correct and the “well in possession”

(22) Hannah is incorrect. In this instance, we found Stoppard’s clue to whose perception of the situation is more accurate to be in his use of the word ‘snaps.’ Valentine, it would seem from this stage direction, is upset by something, we assume something that we see happen onstage. We backtracked to the beginning of the scene to see what we could uncover. The initial suggestion was that Hannah eventually wears down Valentine with her relentless questioning, leading him to loose his patience and snap at her.

It was a justifiable explanation, Hannah’s lines at the beginning of this scene are principally short questions followed by explanations from Valentine. We read through it with impatience as a catalyst for the snap and it was playable, but very general and very negative. To go with this choice would seem to fully disprove the discovery we were testing, which is not in itself a reason to reject it, but it also went against much of what the rest of the play seemed to be telling us about these characters and their given circumstances: primarily that they have an easy enough relationship that they choose to consistently inhabit the same work space, freely share ideas and information, and have ongoing, private jokes.

35 We were still missing something, so we kept interrogating the text. Is Valentine indignant at Hannah’s implications of Thomasina’s genius? That had no traction. I encouraged us to look for something specific that Hannah does or says that might irritate

Valentine, and it popped out to Kevin almost instantly. Just a few lines before the exchange that ends in the snap:

VALENTINE: I thought you were doing the hermit. HANNAH: I am. I still am. But Bernard, damn him… Thomasina’s tutor turns out to have interesting connections. Bernard is going through the library like a bloodhound. The portfolio was in a cupboard. (48)

This is new information for Valentine. In that moment he realizes that all of these things that Hannah is newly obsessed with, that he has been struggling to help her understand, were actually given to her by Bernard. Bernard who is passionate and charismatic, who has come into this house and instantly charmed his mother and sister, and who, perhaps most importantly, works in Hannah’s field. In that moment, this utopian arrangement he has taken for granted seems to be legitimately threatened by

Bernard. What could be a stronger trigger for a snap of jealousy and a potential call to action that could catapult us into the rest of the scene?

This seemed like a very good lead: one that illuminated what was immediate and specific not only to Valentine’s decision to try to seduce Hannah today but also the language he uses to do so, placing the vocabulary of his field in relationship to the content of hers:

VALENTINE: …People were talking about the end of physics. Relativity and quantum looked like they were going to clean out the whole problem between them. A theory of everything. But they only explained the very big and the very small. The universe, the elementary particles. The 36 ordinary-sized stuff which is our lives, the things people write poetry about-- clouds-- daffodils-- waterfalls-- and what happens in a cup of coffee when the cream goes in-- these things are full of mystery, as mysterious to us as the heavens were to the Greeks. (52)

We continued to follow the thread of this discovery to the next moment in the play. After Valentine snaps at Hannah, far from shutting up and leaving him alone,

Hannah continues to interrogate him (another strike against the theory that her questioning is what sends him over the edge) except that her probing takes a different form. Instead of asking him questions related to her curiosity about Thomasina, she flips her line of inquiry to Valentine’s work.

As previously noted, in scene two there is evidence that Hannah has limited knowledge or understanding of Valentine’s field in spite of the amount of time they seem to have spent together. In fact, she does not actually know what Valentine’s field is.

Perhaps it is out of embarrassment for having been corrected by Bernard, perhaps it is a conciliatory gesture in an attempt to cajole Valentine, perhaps it is genuine interest in

Valentine’s work sparked by his explanation of Thomasina’s primer, perhaps it is all three. Whatever the reason, there is strong evidence in the text that this is the first time

Hannah has expressed interest in Valentine’s work. Another reason why Valentine might feel empowered to take some kind of bold action today of all days.

As Hannah questions him, Valentine makes a great effort to put the vocabulary of his field into a language she can comprehend, eventually ending up with a musical metaphor that she understands:

VALENTINE: …It’s all very, very noisy out there. Very hard to spot the tune. Like a piano in the next room, it’s playing your song, but 37 unfortunately it’s out of whack, some of the strings are missing and the pianist is tone-deaf and drunk -- I mean, the noise! Impossible! HANNAH: What do you do? VALENTINE: You start guessing what the tune might be. You try to pick it out of the noise. You try this, you try that, you start to get something -- it’s half-baked but you start putting in notes which are missing or not quite the right notes… and bit by bit…(He starts to dumdi-da to the tune of ‘Happy Birthday’.) Dumdi-dum-dum, dear Valentine, dumdi-dum-dum to you -- the lost algorithm! (50)

Suddenly, having reached this common understanding, the exchange shifts yet again from Valentine’s explanations into a heated, passionate debate over whether or not

Thomasina could have been using this recently discovered method far before it entered common practice. This rapid-fire dispute culminates in Valentine’s monologue, and given the textual evidence for the dominoes of action we had uncovered thus far, we agreed that our initial impulse about it had some validity. But we were still faced with the abrupt end of Valentine’s speech; there was still space in the text of the scene for all our theories to be disproved.

Our next set of discoveries was perhaps more related to what is not being said than what is, as Stoppard sets out an interesting series of silences after Valentine’s speech. The first is right after he finishes speaking:

VALENTINE: …The future is disorder. A door like this has cracked open five or six times since we got up on our hind legs. It’s the best possible time to be alive, when almost everything you thought you knew is wrong. (Pause.) HANNAH: The weather is fairly predictable in the Sahara. (52)

Hannah is unable or unwilling to immediately respond to this outpouring from

Valentine, and when she does come up with a response it is not in reference to the last

38 thing he said, but something he mentioned earlier in that speech, as though perhaps she has stopped listening fully at some point. What is happening in that pause? The scene goes on:

VALENTINE: The scale is different but the graph goes up and down the same way. Six thousand years in the Sahara looks like six months in Manchester, I bet you. HANNAH: How much? VALENTINE: Everything you have to loose. HANANAH: (Pause) No. VALENTINE: Quite right. That’s why there was corn in Egypt. (Hiatus. The piano is heard again) HANNAH: What is he playing? (52)

A facetious exchange followed by a ‘hiatus’ and a complete change of subject.

When we played these beats that infectious, passionate energy that had been born from the building blocks we had discovered, just fizzled out for no apparent reason and the actors kept artificially manufacturing that beat change: it is in the text, we just did not know what was causing it to happen. The clue came a couple of pages later, after Bernard comes bursting in and Hannah gives him the evidence she has discovered, supporting his theory, for the moment, that Lord Byron may have killed Ezra Chater in a duel:

BERNARD: Charity. Charity… ‘Deny what cannot be proven for Charity’s sake!’ HANNAH: Don’t kiss me! VALENTINE: She won’t let anyone kiss her. (54)

What, at first read appeared like an off-handed gibe or an oblique complaint, was now, based on the revelations earlier in the scene, a seemingly more immediate expression of need. If Valentine’s jealousy of Bernard leads him to an attempted kiss that is missed, fumbled or rejected, and then in comes Bernard full of verve, and he also tries

39 to kiss Hannah (only he does not require a page-long monologue to get up the nerve)

Valentine’s “she won’t let anyone kiss her” is suddenly full of actionable possibilities. It also gave a possible explanation to another bewildering passage later in the scene, directly after Bernard exits in search of Chloë, Valentine says to Hannah:

VALENTINE: My mother’s lent him her bicycle. Lending one’s bicycle is a form of safe sex, possibly the safest there is. My mother is in a flutter about Bernard, and he’s no fool. He gave her a first edition of Horace Walpole, and now she’s lent him her bicycle. (55)

It is now a very pointed, yet veiled, warning of Bernard’s behavior to all the women in the house, as though to say: Hannah is just another woman that he is using to get what he wants.

Our analysis of this scene was building a complex web of action that had yet to be contradicted by the text, and which we would certainly not have discovered in a purely physical exploration. There was such a joy of discovery in the process; it was like a treasure hunt for action. And where, on the surface, this seems like a talk-heavy scene, in which the action that moves the play forward does not happen until the very end; what we found instead was a scene crammed full of action, immediate stakes and tension. In fact,

Valentine’s “she won’t let anyone kiss her” got the most consistent, vocal audience response out of any moment in the play: gasps, giggles, groans, the responses varied, but it was always a visceral response.

This seemed to demonstrate that we had, through the screen of complex ideas, discovered, exclusively in language, a universally understandable series of actions. In the past I might have taken that initial impulse from the actors, accepted it, and moved on.

40 But an intensive interrogation of the textual evidence (of which the above explanation has only been a small sample) revealed a dynamic, human complexity that both re-affirmed the initial impulse and made it even more taut and truthful.

41 CHAPTER 5: FORM AND CONTENT

The Importance Of Clarity And The Evils Of Compromise

“Because there’s an order things can’t happen in.

You can’t open a door til there’s a house.” (83)

I used to work with designers like I worked with actors: we would get into the space together and explore, imagine, experiment and improvise physically, collaboratively. The designers would be a functional active part of the ensemble in the room, discovering right along with us. We would be in a process of invention in which elements were made to be flexible and malleable. In which the delight of a breakthrough over-ruled the annoyance of additional work. In which ‘no’ was the only outlawed word in our vocabulary. I had the joy and benefit of growing up as a theatre-maker in an ensemble-driven environment where this kind of flexible, collaborative exchange is possible and encouraged. I only recently discovered that this utopian arrangement, far from being unusual, is nearly impossible and usually discouraged in any other setting.

When directing a main stage production in the previous season at Temple, at first

I balked and rebelled at the inflexible structures and deadlines I encountered working in this conventional, yet foreign to me, environment. How could one make work that was truly innovative, responsive to process, and dynamic by making all these finalized decisions up-front? Who were these designers whose only consistent vocabulary seemed to be ‘no’ and ‘we can’t’?

42 I made an immediate judgment: this type of process, however ubiquitous, is an inferior process to the one I have developed. And, in the way of many a self-fulfilling prophecy, the product that resulted from this process was absolutely disastrous, with design elements competing for prominence and utterly failing to support the story-telling.

Despite the unsuccessful product, or more accurately, because of it, I felt vindicated: it was Exhibit A in defense of my superior process and more progressive training.

And yet, here was a really fantastic piece of theatre, that I was otherwise very proud of, that had been significantly damaged by a botched design collaboration. In reality, it did not feel all that much like a victory. If this was, indeed, the way that most production processes unfolded outside my utopian ensemble bubble, then I was going to have to figure out how to engage in this type of collaborative process. I needed to uncover a way to participate within the rigid structures that I had no ability to control and still emerge with high-quality design work that supports a discovery-driven process and a clarity of story telling.

One of the things that is most universally, humanly valuable about being a director, from my perspective, is the fact that you never get to blame anyone else with impunity. All decisions, actions and atmospheres lead back to the director’s direct engagement in the process. It is impossible to truly be a victim of anyone but yourself.

How you are able to adapt and respond to the specific needs of each process; how you are able to extract the best work from each collaborator even though their vocabulary is necessarily unique to them and different from your own. There will always be factors outside of the director’s control, but how you deal with those factors is truly the measure

43 of your competence and your work. I took this question of process and product into my work on Arcadia, not with a sure solution in mind, but with a sincere desire to engage fully in the structures of this type of process to see what I could discover about my own work and process.

Compromise and Surrender

The design process for Arcadia got off to a disjointed start. We did not start, as a design process often does, with an essential question, an image, a shape, or a set of objectives. Our design process was catapulted forward by the time-sensitive requirement of designing a new theatre space in collaboration with another director/designer team whose production would have to use the same space shortly following our run. I found myself sitting with set designer, John Eddy, making a slap-dash list of essential, non- negotiable elements of the physical space before we had fully established our artistic goals for the production. We were making our list based on our initial, unexamined impulses for the script. This is not a terrible exercise as it allows you to articulate your gut instinct from your initial encounter with the play, but it certainly will not sustain a whole design process. A fault we would have to go back and remedy, as the weeks went on.

John’s first spatial impulses were about shape and iteration: fractals in architecture, shapes that were both organically and mathematically beautiful and infinite.

My initial impulse for the space was that it needed to be both formal and intimate. Formal in the sense that Stoppard is playing with our theatrical expectations: he rolls out the play

44 like a farce, complete with complex sexual entanglements, double entendre, characters just missing each other and mistaken identity. He ropes us in with the promise of a witty, lighthearted romp, and only once we are deeply in does he confront us with the big ideas about the death of the universe and the meaning of life. The space therefore should support both this initial theatrical formalism, but also allow the audience to be close enough to the play that the humanity is immediate and palpable when the complex ideas start flowing.

For John and me, that combination of the formal and the intimate combined with the organic, mathematical and infinite seemed to express itself best in space as an amphitheater: giving the formal benefits of proscenium mechanics and stage pictures, while also keeping the audience in the room of the play, as they act as the completion of the shape that the set begins. We were feeling positively about the ways our ideas about the space were evolving with the essential questions of the play when we scheduled our meeting with the other director/design team.

What we found in meeting with the other artistic team was, the director, Doug

Wager, had a very clear idea of what was required for his piece as well: nearly the opposite of what John and I had decided was needed for Arcadia. Doug’s production of

Thornton Wilder’s The Matchmaker required massive moving sets, the reverse of

Arcadia’s intentionally simple, static, single location. Doug felt that it was essential, for these moving sets to work, that the space be an alley set-up, allowing sets to roll in through the loading docks. So we sat there with our opposite needs. Neither of our desires

45 took precedence over the other, we were simply trying to figure out how to effectively share space for two pieces and two aesthetic visions that had little tangible compatibility.

Our initial approach seemed like a logical one, we would compromise. We took our two visions of the space and combined them. What we ended up looking at was a proscenium space that allowed for rolling scenery to come in through one loading dock, with a thrust tacked on and the audience sitting on three sides of the thrust.7 It was a true and absolute compromise of the two competing sketches. We left the meeting to mull over this proposed solution.

What I realized in thinking through this proposed space and discussing it with my mentors, collaborators and colleagues was that the compromise actually made the space less effective for both productions. I had to re-think my assumptions of the effectiveness of compromise: instead of selecting the stronger or most feasible of the two ideas, we had watered them both down so that the space was no longer functional or effective. I was lead to reflect on all the times I had made compromises in my work, and was less able to clearly understand the consequences. Perhaps these little aesthetic compromises, the ‘a little of this, a little of that’ approach in order to make everyone ‘happy’ were actually sabotaging the overall quality of the work. Maybe I was using compromise as a defense against what might be fruitful, informative conflict.

This is a fairly simple idea, what becomes difficult is how to handle it in a practical situation, such as the one we found ourselves in. As collaborators independent of outside circumstances, John and I had found a space we thought would be the most

7 For John Eddy’s rendering of this compromise in space, see Appendix C. 46 functional for our production of this play. We had designed the space more or less as

Stoppard describes it in the stage directions, more or less how every other production of

Arcadia has been arranged. I was so certain that we were ‘correct’ in our conception of the space that I had not taken the time to consider the merits of the space as Doug and his team proposed it, or how it might challenge me or expand the possibilities of the play in space.

When I really looked at an alley ground plan in relationship to Arcadia I was confronted by the dynamic possibilities and terrifying challenges it presented. The audience was still completing the space, just in a different way than we had previously imagined: they truly became the absent walls of the room. We could still accomplish our ultimate aesthetic goals of formal and intimate, artificial and organic, we just had to re- think the way to accomplish it. That particular space provided me with the immense challenge of staging an intellectually dense comedy in a space, which, by its very nature, requires that not every audience member will see every moment in the same way. It was not my initial impulse, but our initial impulses are not always right, and they are never the only possibility. It was not my ideal for the play, but it was a good challenge, and was not that my overall goal for myself in this production?

I was faced with the choice to either fight for my idea or surrender to Doug’s. In order to arrive at the most effective solution it could not be about whose solution it was, and it could not be about a watered-down compromise that made both teams feel like they were getting a little of what they wanted. It was about making the most dynamic decision for both productions. In this situation I could not speak for the needs of Doug’s

47 production of The Matchmaker, but I could begin to conceive of my production of

Arcadia in the space he proposed. I decided to relinquish my claim on the set-up of the space and agree to work with the other team’s original proposal.8 Not out of a desire to avoid conflict, as I have been guilty of in the past, but from a desire to continue to dwell in the unknown, in the difficult, in the new.

I have found, particularly in design processes that there is a tendency towards the ownership of ideas and the defending of these ideas is sometimes based less on the merit of the idea than whose idea it was. When I look back on a rehearsal process, it is not often that we can remember whose idea was whose. We are constantly measuring choices against the text, the space and one another. If one idea does not work it is rejected and a new idea takes its place. If we got excited about a choice early in the process, and the rest of the work does not support that choice as we move forward, it is easily rejected or transformed. This has a lot to do with the fact that the actors’ tools are malleable and constantly in flux.

As much as I desire a similarly malleable, discovery-driven relationship with the design process, the reality is that some decisions, perhaps made with only your early hunches about the play, are final and inflexible. The designers’ tools tend to be, by varying degrees, inflexible in nature: time is finite, money is finite, sets once built and lights once hung and costumes once sewn are difficult, expensive and time-consuming to change.

8 For John Eddy’s final alley ground plan for Arcadia, see Appendix C. 48 This can cause the design process to be a process of defensiveness rather than discovery. This puts a lot of pressure on the team to know and articulate the metrics by which you will evaluate design proposals early in the process, as there is typically not a lot of time and space to evolve these criteria. I was fortunate in this process to work with an extraordinary group of attentive, generous designers who taught me how to see conflict as opportunity and what it means to continually discover even within the inflexibility of a traditional design process.

Attention and Intention

I began the process by establishing a few basic rules and criteria for the work. I was interested in exploring the ways in which what I had articulated as the essential question of the play: this tension between certainty, absolute truth and the unknown might manifest in the physical world. Much of this is already contained in Stoppard’s descriptions of the theatrical mechanisms of the play, but I wanted us to be in pursuit of the ways in which we could highlight this tension in space. I started by articulating what I thought were the telling aesthetic and structural elements in the text of the play that might guide each design element. For example, in Stoppard’s opening stage direction he writes:

…Nothing much need be said or seen of the exterior beyond. We come to learn that the house stands in the typical English park of the time. Perhaps we see an indication of this, perhaps only light and air and sky. (5)

To me, this suggested ambiguity of what exactly lies outside the French windows of the play was key to understanding how the set design could assist the physical articulation of the play’s fundamental tension. This outdoor space, about which so much

49 is debated and discussed over the course of the play, is ultimately uncertain in that it is completely unseen by the audience. The characters’ descriptions and opinions of the garden, though conflicting, become our only avenue for understanding what lies beyond.

Conversely, what is inside the house: the furniture, the floor, the props are concrete and hyper-specific. Yet they carry their own ambiguity, a quality the audience discovers as the play goes on. What seemed like perfectly appropriate, specific physical elements for the world of 1809 also turns out to be perfectly suited to the needs of 2015. Even what one thought was unshakeable fact, when seen in a different context, can be equally justifiable.

In contrast to the intentional ambiguity of certain elements of the space, the costumes take on a great responsibility, assisted by lights, in establishing absolute time period. In the transition between scene one and scene two, nothing changes in the physical space of the play. Instead, an actor costumed for one time period exits and another actor costumed for a contrasting time period enters, and does not say a word.

This is a jarring moment, in which the uninitiated audience’s expectations are completely subverted. The responsibility for this entirely visual transformation is on the costumer.

Establishing this division of labor with clarity was a necessary step in collaborating with generosity. As with every collaboration, there were times when we brought conflicting ideas to the table, and instead of making a taste-based judgment or a gut-instinct decision, we were able to measure our choices against the criteria we had established and agreed to at the outset. In this way it became less about rejecting and

50 accepting the ideas of a particular designer over another, but about how faithfully we could stick to our objectives.

After we established these very loose but essential goals and rules, the designers came back with their own unique concepts: things that never would have occurred to me to ask for, but were still in line with the overall goals of the production we had agreed to.

John Eddy brought in an idea for the set that contained massive architecture, but only the essential pieces of it, eliminating its realistic but unnecessary elements: it was at once utterly concrete and entirely suggestive, a nod to the certain versus uncertain dichotomy we were after.

Jeff Sturdivant, the costume designer brought a color palate for the costumes that was rooted in nature: since the physical garden was ambiguity and what the characters say about the garden was to take primacy, he ran with the human connection to the natural world. He designed a palate in which the characters are the unseen garden. With his costume designs Jeff conjured a metaphor for the human desire to know that was rooted in our relationship to nature. In our mythic connection of the desire for knowledge to the natural world: The Tree of Knowledge in the Garden of Eden, the apple that clocks

Sir Isaac Newton on the head leading him to articulate his theory of gravity. Nature holds all the secrets we search for and, as we are an inextricable part of her natural order, so do we. This tension between the outbound and the inbound search for knowledge, though born from an external aesthetic justification, helped us continue to refine the lens through which we were looking at the entire play.9

9 This is dichotomy is significantly reflected in my director’s note, Appendix A. 51 It was here that we ran into our first collaborative conflict: both Jeff and John had established vibrant and very similar palates for their designs. Jeff’s were reflected in fabric and John’s in paint treatments on the walls and floor. As we sat down together to look at these designs, it was instantly apparent that these two palates were in a kind of conflict: they were both trying to take responsibility for bringing the garden indoors and though a great impulse, when they both did so, it became utterly overwhelming and diffused the effect each designer was trying to achieve.

There was an impulse towards compromise that instantly arose, and, even learning what I had learned of the evils of aesthetic compromise while negotiating the space set-up, I found myself entertaining the idea. However, I could now recognize it as an impulse towards maintaining a positive interpersonal dynamic rather than an impulse towards the most effective story-telling choice. I knew it was going to come down to selecting one designer’s idea over the other’s if the quality of the product was going to take precedence over individual attachment to one’s own work. In a situation where we had not taken the time to establish goals and roles, this decision would have come down to my personal taste. I would have been forced to select the design I ‘liked’ better and the

‘losing’ designer would have been left to make a significant adjustment while feeling that

I undervalued his contribution to the process.

Fortunately, we had established and agreed to a set of criteria at the outset by which to evaluate our work. It was not simply me, as the director, accepting or rejecting the work of the designers, it was the group, holding ourselves to our own standards.

When we went back to our criteria, it became very clear that the costumes should take

52 responsibility for this palate and that sets should back off the intense colors and find something more neutral, more ambiguous. This is not to say that there was no pain or frustration in the necessarily violent act of choosing, even when the choice comes from the group and not an individual. Making this choice meant that John, after spending an enormous amount of time and energy on his paint samples, had to go back and completely re-do them. Which he did with absolute generosity, but I realized in this early conflict that I needed to be intentional about my attention to the designers’ process. Not to avoid conflict and not because they need to be micro-managed or coddled, but because

I have the ability to save them time and energy by being intentionally present in their process. Together we have a greater ability to arrive at more effective choices more efficiently. And I can learn a lot through observation of their work that will make my future relationships with designers more fruitful.

This is not about being over a designer’s shoulder telling him what to do or making ‘corrections’. It is about seeing and understanding their work in progress, about keeping the conversation going outside of production meetings, which are so often about reporting and not about exploring. I wanted to understand the problems they were facing that were leading them to the solutions they were proposing or the time and effort it took to create that paint sample that we were perhaps going to end up rejecting. I discovered that understanding the work of someone whose discipline is so different and yet on whose work one is utterly dependent would transform what we were able to achieve together as an ensemble of collaborators.

53 One of the primary drawbacks to a graduate theatre program that is not intentionally interdisciplinary is that this empathy for and understanding of one another’s process is not one of the values being instilled in the students. After two and a half years and countless projects, including one previous main-stage production, I had never felt the invitation to really visit the scene shop or the costume shop. It felt invasive to drop-in unasked, and the designers I had worked with up to that point had re-enforced that impression by always offering to bring their work to me, or with the embarrassed excuses of having nothing ‘finished’ to show if I poked my head in to see them in process.

I realized after this first, relatively minor creative conflict, that it was entirely my responsibility to show an interest and appreciation for the process through my behavior.

This is how I could have the hands-on, exploratory design process that I so desired, that I felt was so superior. Instead of inviting the designers to my playground to play, I needed to go to theirs. I did not need to be particularly invited into these processes: if I brought interest, questions and enthusiasm rather than judgment and critique, I would be jubilantly welcomed.

I started by just making sure I walked past the scene shop and the costume shop every day, said hello and asked what they were working on. Not just the designers, but also the shop assistants and the undergraduate students, everyone who was contributing their time and skill to realize the work. It was amazing how just a little expression of interest and enthusiasm opened the floodgates of communication between the entire team of collaborators.

54 Instead of waiting for weekly production meetings, which are notorious for too many voices and not enough time, we were able to address almost all issues in the moment. Overlooked details came up before they became problems because we were sitting on the set in progress or looking at a particular garment being built, and anticipating rather than being reactive. I was able to take the time to appreciate the supreme details of Jeff’s costume designs, because I saw every piece well in advance of the costume parade. I was able to anticipate and avoid problems with set pieces, or a miscommunication about a prop because I was a witness to the work in progress.

Comparing this process to the last process I was involved in at the very same institution, I was truly made aware of the degree to which not only is collaboration built on trust, but that that trust is built brick by brick, earned action by action. I am prone to being extremely conscious of the manner in which I interact with actors, thinking of them as fragile artists, easily destroyed; while taking much less care in my treatment of designers; thinking of them as resilient technicians, with thick skins and short memories.

In this process I learned that the opposite is just as often true.

With a small amount of effort and a little moxie, the entire tenner of the collaboration was lifted. The best evidence for which was the degree to which every single designer and I were on exactly the same page when we got into tech. The costume parade, a time that can be full of surprises, extensive notes, and frustration as it is often the first time a director sees the costumes and there is little time remaining for major (or minor) changes, was full of joy and exuberance. Instead of giving Jeff my notes in a massive outpouring of gut-response, we were in a continuation of a conversation we had

55 been having every day for months. I did not give him a single note, as none of these garments were surprises to me. Any adjustments that came out of seeing the actors in costume, in space came out of a conversation between Jeff, the actor and me. It was not about the aesthetic or storytelling of the design itself; we had been working that out in the shop. It was about comfort and functionality for the actor who would have to move through space in the garment.

Similarly, having visited John in the scene shop and Amanda Hatch in the props loft nearly every day, there was very little miscommunication that was possible. It also added to our mutual excitement, as the end results were unveiled of ideas we had formed and shaped together, bit by bit. It was an extraordinarily positive, stress-free tech because the process had been ruled in equal measure by firm, clear intention for the ultimate goals of the piece and generous, exuberant attention to all the pieces in progress.

This is not to say that there were not problems to solve in tech. The beauty and challenge of theatre making has much to do with the sheer amount of disparate elements that must come together very quickly to function as a whole. Some of these elements allow for pre-tech troubleshooting, as I have described with sets and costumes. Some elements always come in at the last minute, and must be responded to as such.

In planning the transitions between scenes in the rehearsal room, I was planning transitions for a proscenium production of Arcadia, not the production I was actually directing. I was still, unknowingly, attached to the kind of rhythm that lends itself to a more formal proscenium production. I had therefore initiated a confused vocabulary with

56 Liz Phillips, the lighting designer and Michael Kiley, the sound designer, as to what the nature of these transitions would be.

As we went through the cue to cue with sound and lights we built the transitions: one scene ended, there was a transition, and the next scene began. When we actually got to a run of the play we realized that this was destroying the rhythm and tension of our production, not to mention lengthening an already long play with transitions in which nothing transforms in the space. They were disastrous, and based on an old reading of the play that was no longer valid. I had no clear idea of how to fix them, and I was getting contradictory feedback on what was wrong with them from observers outside the process.

The only consensus being that they did not ‘work.’ It felt like we could neither keep them nor entirely eliminate them, and we were down to the wire on time.

Here is the moment, in the back of my mind, I was sure was coming, eventually: when the collaborative revelry would break down, and we would find ourselves in a battle of defending our choices over the successful execution of the product. I had not clearly understood or articulated the vision and purpose of these transitions and was about to pay for it. I was sure I was going to have to, in the midst of this beautiful, congenial tech, destroy the collaborative trust I had worked so hard to build by back- pedaling on a choice we had taken the time and effort to fully-execute.

I was shocked to discover, rather than the defensive rejection of the problem or the responsibility for it, as I had experienced in my last Temple main stage when asking for changes from designers late in the process, these designers were more than willing to acknowledge and tangle with the problem. We realized we were, at the very least, over-

57 executing what the task of the transitions was and we ended up re-cuing every transition in a flurry of urgency and purpose. Both Liz and Michael contributed quickly and fiercely to the fundamental re-shaping of the vocabulary. It was a true discovery for me, whose natural inclination is to be in avoidance of conflict of all kinds, that we take the time to build these collaborative relationships, not to avoid conflict and problems, though that is often a side effect, but so that when the conflicts arise we can attack them with generosity and not self-protection.

58 CONCLUSIONS

The Conflict Inherent in the Search for Self

“If knowledge isn’t self-knowledge it isn’t doing much, mate.” (65)

There is a marked difference between artists who ask questions and artists who know the answer. I strive to be an artist who is humble enough and brave enough to articulate the questions and not protect myself with the comfort and safety of answers.

That is an enormously difficult thing to achieve, and what I realized in the process of working on Arcadia was that rather than passivity, to work in the realm of pure question and true risk-taking requires constant attention.

A truthful, question-based artistic process requires decisive articulation through action. In action one sets the metrics by which the work is measured. In action we prove or disprove the words we say to our collaborators and to our audience. To be in motion as an artist is to be in action. I realized the dangerous degree to which I often resist decisive action in process; I have been confusing decisiveness with artistic tyranny. I have embraced a nurturing, all-inclusive, exploration-driven process, which has served me very well and is an essential element of my identity as an artist. But, I have developed this persona partially in reaction to the ubiquitous, ego-driven director who always seems to have a corner on the answers. I fear becoming that person to such a degree that I have allowed it to cripple the development of my unique, decisive artistic voice. Rather than abolishing my directorial ego, my ego has emerged in more insidious ways: in fear and

59 rejection of the unknown, in timidity towards articulation and decision-making. I have been forced to confront my tendency to use my obstinate vision of my process and my sense of its superiority as a mask for my own insecurities and an excuse for a lack of clarity and specificity.

To be myself as an artist is to be at once humbled by the genius of the ensemble and articulate in the face of the unknown. These two things are necessarily in conflict with one another and it is not the avoidance or smothering of that conflict that makes for effective work: rather it is facing the conflict with honesty, generosity and attention. In this process I have had to encounter my specific artistic tension: between the gentle humility in the seeking and the violent decisive act of choosing the path.

I have not arrived at a rejection of the forces that have molded me; on the contrary, my predilections and methodologies are part of the fabric of who I am as an artist and, in a world full of the pretensions of certainty and security, why I choose to make theatre. Working on Arcadia has allowed me to see my process, not as something concrete and inflexible, or myself as a maker as confined to a singular mode and form; but as an artist who contains the capacity to adapt to the unknown and neither fear nor reject it. I have taken the time to evaluate my assumptions and my prejudices: rejecting some in favor of a more balanced view, integrating others. This is a process of self- reflection and discovery that can never truly be finished.

One of the dynamics we encountered working on Arcadia was that the present- day story-line goes largely unresolved: there is no neat, satisfying ending for Hannah,

Valentine, Chloë, Bernard and Gus. They, like us, go on: wearing their scars, adjusting

60 their expectations, pursuing their questions. I have yet to achieve the neat resolution with this play that one might expect at the conclusion of rehearsals and after presenting the piece to an audience. Despite an illuminative process, the discovery of breathtaking moments of truthfulness, and the stunning, goal-driven achievements of all the collaborators, I am, appropriately, left with more questions than answers. I still question whether this is the kind of theatre that I have the heart to make; whether Arcadia is the kind of story I have the heart to tell. I still yearn for a kind of theatre that is larger in theatrical scale, more explicit in physical expression and more generously targeted to an audience of the uninitiated.

But instead of this process being the unwavering evidence for an unaffected artistic view; it has been a transformative experience in which I discovered a kind of strength I did not know I had. I discovered that myself in conflict with material and process was not the negative thing I had imagined it to be. Myself in the violent act of articulating into the unknown was not tyrannical. As a director, I did not fall in love with

Arcadia; and that is neither a complaint nor a failure. Falling in love with the play was never the measure of success. To live the questions, as an artist, is not to succumb to helplessness or to excuse vagueness: to live the questions is a full-bodied confrontation of all that is complacent and assumed. A constant engagement in conflict that must not be avoided and need not be resolved.

To follow my nausea, to face my terror is to be in productive, proactive conflict with myself as a maker. Is it possible to question my place and my purpose, and to not need the answer to move forward, only the next question? Arcadia invited me to dwell in

61 that beautiful uncertainty. A step that is only the most recent movement in a never-ending dance of evolution and change that I will be engaged in for the rest of my journey as an artist. Not an ending, but ever a new beginning.

62 WORKS CITED

Clapp, Susannah. "The Hard Problem Review – Tom Stoppard Dodges the Big Question." The Guardian [London] 01 Feb. 2015: n. pag. Web. 13 Mar. 2015.

Lawson, Mark. "Tom Stoppard: 'I'm the Crank in the Bus Queue.'" The Guardian. The Guardian, 14 Apr. 2010. Web. 11 Mar. 2015.

Rilke, Rainer Maria. Letters to a Young Poet. Ed. Franz Xaver Kappus. Trans. Stephen Mitchell. N.p.: Merchant, 2012. Print.

Stoppard, Tom. Arcadia. London: Faber and Faber, 1993. Print.

Stoppard, Tom. Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead: A Play in Three Acts. New York: S. French, 1967. Print.

63 APPENDIX A DIRECTOR’S NOTE

To know. To be certain. To find all the answers and solve all the mysteries. This aspiration keeps us in a constant process of reaching backwards into the past and looking forward into the future. Our destination being the elusive prize: Truth. And yet, try as we might, we will never fully comprehend the past we build on or the future we work for.

The one is full of the unknowable and unsolvable and the other is chaos, disorder and noise.

But perhaps our object should not be an arrival at certainty. Perhaps it is the desire and not the destination that gives us purpose. Instead of ever vacillating between the past and the future, the real destination is to be present in this moment, in this place. Maybe everything we are looking for has been here all along.

This production is lovingly dedicated to my friend and mentor Mark Hallen, who taught me how to be present.

Liz Carlson, Director

February, 2015

64 APPENDIX B INDIVIDUAL RESEARCH TOPICS

Dramaturgical Scavenger Hunt These are suggestions, places to start from. If your curiosity and the text lead you to something else, that is great! Follow your interest!

Thomasina/Mikayla Determinism, 2nd Law of Thermodynamics

Septimus/Ian Newton’s laws of motion, Fermat’s Last Theorem

Jellaby/Joel Servant culture, early 19th century

Chater/Chris Early 19th century British literature (focus on Romantic poets)

Noakes/Jared Picturesque ideal in landscaping English gardens, early 19th century

Brice/Grant Dueling and the British aristocracy (19th century)

Lady Croom/Ashley Classical English gardens, early 19th century

Hannah/Kyra Caroline Lamb

Chloe/Bonnie Chaos Theory

Valentine/Kevin Iterated algorithms, 2nd law of Thermodynamics

Bernard/DJ Lord Byron

Gus/Augustus/Colin British aristocracy (19th, 20th, 21st centuries)

65 APPENDIX C ARCADIA GROUNDPLANS All Renderings courtesy of John Eddy

Initial Matchmaker & Arcadia Compromise Groundplan

This is the initial compromise for the theatre configuration we considered. It has a proscenium-type playing space (top of the image) as well as a the elements of an alley configuration: facing seating banks, with a central playing area (center of the image).

66 Final Arcadia Groundplan

This is the finalized groundplan for Arcadia, a true alley set-up with facing audience banks and a central playing space.

67 APPENDIX D PRODUCTION PHOTOS All photos by Luis Fernando Roderiguez Courtesy of Temple Department of Theatre

Thomasina (Mikayla Cleary) confronts Septimus (Ian Monaco) with her curiosities.

68

Captain Brice (Grant Struble) challenges Septimus (Ian Monaco) to a duel on Mr. Chater’s (Chris Cavone) behalf.

69

Valentine (Kevin Murray) uses his enthusiasm for the mysteries of the universe to get close to Hannah (Kyra Baker).

70

Septimus (Ian Monaco) and Thomasina (Mikayla Cleary) waltz on the eve of her seventeenth birthday.

71