I’ve had several people mention to me now that I’ve assisted a lot of different artists, and that the shows I’ve worked on don’t always seem to match up with the kinds of plays I choose to direct myself. It’s true.

When I’m directing, I tend to gravitate towards, you know, choruses, rhyme, the macabre. But that doesn’t mean I don’t have a hell of a lot to learn from working on Moliere, Shakespeare, a one-woman show about Golda Meir, a new play, an adaptation – all that and more.

I think it’s my own graduate school, this year of assisting on productions that are unlike my own. In a way, I think I’ve sought out things I couldn’t have imagined directing myself.

It’s like the exercise of making yourself write a poem in a style you’d never use. The exercise is going to teach you things about both that style and your own, much more than you’d learn from just writing in the style with which you’re already comfortable.

(revision of post prompted by the law of shorter paragraphs on the internet)