Category Archives: interviews

interviews, moving, the chorus, TV

Going to California

Driving to SF / Menlo Park with Kersti today, via the 5 to the 505 to the 80 to the 680 to the 880 to the 84/Dumbarton Bridge. Bay Area!!! It’ll be very surreal to see Stanford again.

Everything I own on the planet is now down to 9 boxes.
2 books,
2 files,
1 videos/dvds
1 cds
1 photos
1 weirdly shaped objects
1 papers I need to sort through (usually this is more like three, so I’m proud of that.)

Interviews proceed well – talked to Shigeru yesterday, Rob Kendt and Jeff Hatcher the day before. Next week I have a very full slate of interviews plus trying to check in with SFMT, TJT and EMMA – so we’ll see how that goes…

I babysat Rosalee yesterday and we watched Fraggle Rock, and I felt a strong identification with Gobo’s Uncle Travelin’ Matt.

I also checked in with THE LITTLE MERMAID after she was asleep – I’ve always thought that maybe my chorus obsession came from “Under The Sea.” There may be some connection there, but upon watching the number again, I’m not really sure. The movements their choruses do are much more linear and flowy, like lines, than groups.

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directing, interviews, quotes, theater

A Moon For Daniel Sullivan

It’s not that Slate has no theater coverage, just sporadic coverage, mostly centered around New York. They’re doing better than many news sources. There’s an article every few months. They cover the Tonys. They mention Spring Awakening. Obviously I think there’s more writing to be done on the topic, and more coverage of the regional world, but at least they’ve started.

I particularly enjoyed segments of Daniel Sullivan‘s diary during MOON FOR THE MISBEGOTTEN, in 2000. The whole thing‘s worth reading, but here are a couple of good excerpts from the life of a stressed freelancer:

Daniel: 5:00 p.m.: A meeting with set designer John Lee Beatty on another play, Spinning Into Butter, by Rebecca Gilman. To be produced by Lincoln Center Theater in the summer. We sat in the theater and talked about where things should go. The play takes place in an office in a New England college. John Lee said, “What do I do so it won’t look boring?” He always gets right to the point. I was at a bit of a loss. “Windows?” I said. “Oh!” he said, surprised. But he always acts surprised by even the dullest idea. He’s very nice. “Maybe it should be a very tall room,” he said. “How tall?” “16 feet.” “That’s tall. Do they have rooms that tall in New England?” “Victorian rooms are tall.” “But Victorian doesn’t give you the typical New England school.” And so it went for an hour or so. I don’t know what initial design meetings are like for other directors, but this is par for the course for me. And at the end we agree to meet again soon since neither of us knows what the hell we’re doing.

And again:

Daniel: “The press department calls to ask where they should seat the chief theater critic of the New York Times. I suggest a local restaurant. “No, really, where?” I suggest Row J. “Why J?” “Because if he’s any closer he’ll see the side light we haven’t been able to hide.” ”

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interviews, theater, writing

The Crossover Interviews

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.

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