Or hear the play from its source by having the playwright read it to you. Unplug the telephone, don’t answer the door, just sit and read it through. At the end make notes or comments, very simple ones... “Opening a bit boring.” “Don’t get the bit about the will.” “Last bit very moving.”
This time let yourself wander: Think about the look of it, the sort of actors you’re going to need, whether the problems you saw the first time round are solving themselves.
A production of Chekhov’s Three Sisters designed by Francis Bacon might be fun, but it probably wouldn’t help the cast or the audience any.
You’ll always be pressured by the workshops, but hold them off as long as possible. Your ideas will certainly change as you get to know the play better.
Skip the scenes you are not in and concentrate on your own lines. This often gives you a more vivid idea of the character and helps in casting.
“I know every word of this text by heart” is a favorite director’s boast, but it can restrict your imagination. It’s the actor’s job to remember his lines, not yours. Sometimes just guessing how a scene goes can make you think more freely.
You may be asked —or may choose —to direct a play that for any number of reasons you don’t think is very good. In such cases it is better to focus and build on the play’s virtues than attempt to repair its inherent problems.
Every good play has a basic “will she or won’t she...,” an essential question about the central character(s) that keeps the audience interested, a question around which all the action revolves. Think of Shakespeare’s Hamlet: Will the prince avenge his father’s murder? Ibsen’s A Doll’s House: Will Nora keep her secret from Torvald? As the director, you must understand what primarily keeps the audience interested in the ongoing action.
Legitimate questions to ask of any script: How are these characters suffering? What are they doing to resolve their suffering?
As Aristotle taught us, we know people primarily by what they do. What others say about them, or what they say about themselves, may or may not be true.
It’s not everyday life on stage, but something more: something extreme, defining, life-changing.
What is the source of these special circumstances? Arthur Miller said, “The structure of the play is always the story of how the birds came home to roost.”
That is, the consequences of something someone once did always come back to haunt the characters in the now of the play. These acts from the past permeate the story; they threaten the ordinary circumstances and values of the characters’ lives, and they force choices to be made.
As Edward Albee said, “That’s what happens in plays, yes? The shit hits the fan.”
Whether the characters accomplish what they set out to accomplish is not critical. What is important is that their intentions are clear —that they go about their struggles, encounter obstacles, and make moment-to-moment choices about what they need to do to achieve their goals. Their choices in the face of clear and compelling circumstances are what make them interesting if not heroic; characters either change their circumstances or are changed by them.
The audience witnesses each character’s journey and vicariously goes along with them: “I agree with that.” “What did he do that for?” “Now that was an interesting thing to do; I never would have thought of such a clever tactic.”
Towards the end of the play, as the audience anticipates an impending collision or miracle coming, they won’t care about what happens nearly as much as they’ll care about how the characters react to what happens. Again, the emotional journey is more important than the destination.
In all the best material, the outcome is inevitable and inherent in the opening moment and in every moment in between. From the audience’s perspective, this can only be understood and appreciated backwards, after the play has run its course. The audience, if they choose, will see every element was essential; every moment from the first to the last contributed to the final resolution or explosion.
This is really about you, as the director, aiming for elegance — the absence of anything superfluous. (See 96 . Every object tells.)
This fully cohesive quality is easy to describe but hard to create. Nevertheless, it is critical for the director to identify the unifying structure of the play to which every subordinate element contributes.
Not more than a dozen words should do it. This is what the whole shooting match is aiming at, so:
What is the first impression the actors and the design should make on the audience?
What should their final impression be as the play ends?
How do you propose getting from A to B?