I began my series of short interviews with a bunch of theater professionals, mostly folks from my days with Bill Rauch, today.
The first one was with Tony Taccone and it went very well. He’s had such an interesting career (here’s more about him in Ellen McLaughlin’s 2006 American Theatre interview), and so many of his projects have been explicitly political. One of the anecdotes he shared was about the Eureka getting burned down by an arsonist who objected to an anti-apartheid piece they were staging.
If the others are half as interesting as him it should be a great article. I’ve read a lot of interviews with Tony before – he’s a great communicator on behalf of the field – but I’ve never heard this stuff about him directing his very first show at Colorado Shakes before, or his transition from acting to directing. I love it.
The moment of time at which we transition from one field to another, one skill to another, from amateur to professional, defines us for the rest of our careers.
I’m hoping this can be a springboard for THE FIFTH WALL or for some other, longer series.
Here’s my warmup spiel:
As you know, I worked as Bill Rauch’s assistant for two years, during which time I observed a lot of working theater professionals, and also came into contact with many of Bill’s students and younger people in the field. Working as an assistant director at OSF, I felt that there was an interest in and need for some anecdotal research in what I’m calling “the crossover period” – moving from being a student or early-career professional to a fully professional theater artist.
So I’ve put together a couple of questions on the subject, which I’m asking to a wide variety of folks in the theater world – designers, directors, educators, administrators. I’m hoping to put this together into an article which is anecdotal and interesting, but also just reveals the wide variety of paths people take towards careers in our field. I want to dispel the idea that there is just one path or timeline towards a fixed point, and show how much change is inevitable.
My goal is to eventually have this reach publication, but I will send your answers to these questions back to you before they are shown to anyone else, so you can correct anything that doesn’t seem right to you.
These are the questions I’m asking. Kersti helped me narrow it down.
0) Where are you from (where were you born), and where do you live now?
1) What is your current job or profession, and what is a typical day for you? (Also mention what production you’re working on now, if any.)
2) What was your first professional job in theater – the point at which you were able to support yourself from your theater work? How did you get this job, and how long did it take you?
3) Talk about one interesting change or setback you encountered on the path from that first job till now – something you didn’t expect. Did you ever work in other fields, or have to take non-professional work after first crossing over to the professional world?
4) If you could give yourself one piece of advice as a young theater artist, what would it be? Is there a particular city or company you would recommend, or a strategy – or just a piece of information you wish you had?
These next are the bonus questions, which I didn’t get to with Tony and I don’t expect to have time to include with most folks.
5) Did a particular mentor or teacher play a role in your becoming a professional theater artist? Do you teach now, yourself?
6)) What is a project you would like to work on in the future, or an area of the theater world into which you would like to cross over?
I was supposed to speak to Jeff Hatcher this AM but we missed each other, and I’m going to call Cliff Faulkner in half an hour.
Dara Weinberg 