APPROACHES TO THEATRE TRAINING꞉ THE DIRECTOR'S

PATH | EDUCATION | FEATURE | JANUARY 2018 JANUARY 3, 2018 0 COMMENTS

The Generative Generation

A make-it-new trend gains currency with audiences and academia.

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BY PAMELA NEWTON
A director is someone who chooses a play and directs it. Right?
Not necessarily. A director may be someone who collects a group of actors in
a room and throws ideas at them. She may be someone who gets inspired by
the physical dimensions of a resonant space. She may be provoked by the
exigencies of a pressing social issue. She may be stirred by the poetic
language of an ancient text. When one (or many) of these things happens, a
play or performance begins to emerge.

Directors who generate their own material in organic ways have long been
found on the margins of the theatre world, and their boundary-crossing
approaches to making work have expanded traditional notions of the director’s
job. These artists—often collaborative, always unpredictable—have also
steered attention away from traditional play texts, despite the American
theatre’s long-standing valorization of the playwright.

Consider, for example, the influential experimental works of the Wooster

Group, the venerable downtown New York troupe, which are developed
collaboratively by the company under the guidance of director Elizabeth
LeCompte. Like several of her New York colleagues—people like Richard
Foreman, who directed his own avant-garde plays starting in the 1960s, and
Anne Bogart, whose acclaimed SITI company is known for highly
physicalized performances of original and adapted texts—LeCompte skirted
the traditional directorial path and made her mark as a generator as well as an
interpreter of stage material.
With artists like these as exemplars, the generative-directing trend has been
picking up steam in recent years, finding eager practitioners and game
audiences all over the country. The concept is also making its way into MFA
programs, where a new generation of aspiring directors is being asked to
rethink the parameters of what the director’s role can encompass.

Of course, mounting a beautiful, revelatory production of an existing play—

whether by Shakespeare, Ibsen, or one of today’s hyper-talented young
playwrights—is a skill any burgeoning director still needs to learn. Just as
important, according to many contemporary academics and those who study
under them, is a willingness to engage in a process of self-discovery, to take
leaps into the unknown, to find new ways to make theatre from the void.

“The Carolyn Bryant Project” by Nataki Garrett and Andrew LeBlanc in a

workshop production at CalArts.
“I love living in the world of unexplored ideas, or looking for pathways to
explore old ideas,” declares Nataki Garrett, associate artistic director of the
Denver Center for Performing Arts Theatre Company, who is also co-director
of an L.A.-and-NYC-based ensemble known as Blank the Dog Productions.
Garrett’s current Blank the Dog play is The Carolyn Bryant Project, an
original piece about the white woman whose accusations got the 14-year-old
Emmett Till killed in Mississippi in 1955. The process of creating the work,
she says, began with one question: “What does it feel like to be Carolyn
Bryant?”
Working with her collaborator, actor Andrea LeBlanc, Garrett built the script
slowly out of a series of conversations and improvisational exercises. “We
played around inside each idea,” she says, “and when we came across
something that was remotely interesting, we scripted it. Then we used it as a
jumping-off point to get to something deeper.”

Garrett and LeBlanc also turned to historical records, literary accounts, and
documentary films about the Emmett Till case and the Civil Rights
Movement. They ended up incorporating some of this material into the script
—including the court transcript of the murder trial for the men who attacked
Till, only just recovered in 2005. “We couldn’t have written anything better
than the court testimony,” Garrett says. “The transcript is theatrical in itself.”

The documentary style of Garrett’s project is in the mold of Elevator Repair

Service, the New York-based ensemble acclaimed for its inventive stagings of
found texts, including films, novels, and court transcripts. The script for the
company’s 2013 play Arguendo, for instance, was taken verbatim from a
Supreme Court trial about the rights of erotic dancers. A text is not a
requirement, though: One of ERS’s early productions, Marx Brothers on
Horseback Salad, was inspired by the Hollywood legend that Salvador Dali
had written a screenplay for a Marx Brothers movie; ERS managed to build a
show without an extant screenplay (one was uncovered years later).
“We’re trying to find something that we want to throw ourselves into, or at, or
against, that we don’t fully understand,” ventures John Collins, ERS’s
founding artistic director. Like Garrett, Collins says he’s looking for “a
problem to solve, an experiment to conduct. I think what produces this work is
not a rigorous repetition of the process so much as a rigorous commitment to a
sort of freedom and openness. We try to get ourselves to a place of not
knowing. It’s very important that we start out on a project with the capacity to
discover that project, not with a preconceived idea of what it will be.”

Elevator Repair Service had its greatest critical success in 2006 with Gatz, a
word-for-word enactment of The Great Gatsby in its entirety. Collins says that
when the process began, “We just started trying to have an honest encounter
with the book and immediately discovered a problem: We didn’t think you
could cut this text.” So Collins suggested changing course: “Our plan became
to do the entire book—but I made that plan with what I thought was the
understanding that it would never work. It was impossible. That idea will fail.

“But my plan to have the idea fail…failed,” Collins says. Thus the seven-
hour Gatz was born.

Any director’s generative process is inextricably bound up, of course,

with the performers at hand. “Really, my medium is the ensemble,” Collins
clarifies, “so even from the beginning, ideas and inspiration about what we
might do comes from them. I’ve realized that the business of rehearsing is the
business of making mistakes, finding happy accidents, and making discoveries
that you can only make while in the midst of attempting something
physically.”
Actors are also key elements for Mary Zimmerman, the Chicago-based
director who, among other achievements, received a MacArthur “genius”
grant in 1998 and won a Tony for best direction in 2002 for her staging of
Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Unlike Collins or Garrett, though, who may begin
with a question or a problem or an undeveloped idea, Zimmerman almost
always starts with a literary text that she adapts for performance. (In addition
to Metamorphoses, past projects include The Odyssey, The Arabian Nights,
and The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci.)
Zimmerman works on the script during rehearsals, inspired in part by her
actors. Based on their physicality, their chemistry with each other, and their
special talents (can someone do a backflip and sing well?), she adjusts the
form and structure of the piece, writing one day ahead of the rehearsal where
she will put a scene on its feet.

Known for her vivid stage pictures and evocative use of light and sound,
Zimmerman calls the bodies of the actors “one finger of the hand.” The other
four fingers are the text, the staging, the scenic elements, and the music.

Zimmerman resists the term “devised,” which is often used to describe

generative work, because she thinks her use of literature as a starting point
puts her in a slightly different boat. Still, because she adapts and develops
work in the moment, she acknowledges that “all the circumstances—the space
we’re in, the personal lives of the actors and of myself, what’s happening in
the world—impinge in real time on the way the text is inflected.”

Katie Pearl in rehearsal for her play “Arnie Louise and Bob” at Trinity Rep.
As a professor of Performance Studies at Northwestern
University, Zimmerman is invested in finding ways to encourage young
directors to develop their own work. Teaching this approach presents a unique
challenge, since the whole idea is to invent new, as-yet-unexplored forms
along the way.
“Last year I decided to try and teach a course that was as closely related to
how I actually work as possible,” Zimmerman says. “I called it ‘Staging the
Unusual.’” The class was designed to allow the students to find their own
texts—a loosely defined starting point—and then to adapt them for
performance. One assignment, for example, which Zimmerman called “Epic,”
asked the students to choose a news article that included a battle, a
catastrophe, or a crowd, and to stage it.

Blank the Dog’s Garrett got her MFA in performance from California Institute
of the Arts (and later taught in the acting program there), and she remembers
assignments that incorporated a similar enter-the-world-and-make-art-out-of-it
approach. In a directing class she took with Travis Preston, now dean of the
school of theatre at CalArts, Garrett recalls, “Our first assignment was to find
something and then direct it, but the only thing is that it couldn’t be a play—it
could be a newspaper article, billboard, clipping, a sign.”

It’s not that Preston was averse to traditional directorial approaches, Garrett
notes, but that he took care to grant students wide interpretive freedom. In
Garrett’s case, this included directing a deconstructed version of August
Wilson’s Fences, complete with the insertion of outside texts and the use of
blackface.

Katie Pearl is another director and teacher who believes in giving students a
maximum of creative space. Pearl, who has an MFA in writing for
performance from Brown University and counts Anne Bogart as a key
influence, makes work with her company PearlDamour that is usually site-
specific and interactive. The first piece she created with her New Orleans-
based collaborator Lisa D’Amour was 1997’s The Grove, set in a grove of
trees by the side of the road in Austin, Texas. Composed of a series of shifting
tableaux, designed to be viewed by passing cars, the piece lasted a total of 14
hours, and the cast included Austin locals who had responded to an ad in the
paper.
Pearl, who spent this past fall teaching in the directing MFA program at
UC/San Diego, mentions that her father was a Buddhist psychologist, and,
indeed, her teaching seems rooted in a kind of Zen theatre philosophy,
stressing openness, awareness, and non-attachment.

“For me, it’s about training students to stay super present and in contact with
something that’s happening in the room,” Pearl says. “To come in with an
idea of what you want, and then be able to put that aside and see what’s
actually there, and be delighted by it, no matter what it is.”

Sometimes a director goes back to school to learn a new way of

working. That was the case with Monty Cole, now in the second year of the
directing MFA program at CalArts, who had previously had directing success
in Chicago, including an acclaimed all-black production of Eugene
O’Neill’s The Hairy Ape. What he was craving, he says, was “the ability to
generate my own material.”
At CalArts, a first-year class called “Performance by Design” broke students
into groups and told them to “make something together,” but no one was
assigned traditional acting, directorial, or design roles. “Some people wouldn’t
call what was created in that class theatre,” Cole reckons. “So they’re bending
the rules of what we think theatre is from Day 1 in the curriculum.”

Cole, together with a collaborator, Breon Arzell, is currently developing a

reimagined version of In Dahomey, the 1903 Broadway show that is recorded
as the first musical written by and starring African-Americans. Though
technically an extant play, In Dahomey is so disjointed, and ran in so many
different versions, that Cole and Arzell are essentially rebuilding it, as well as
recontextualizing the material by adding current references to black culture.

“It seems like we’re dusting off old bones,” Cole says, “but at the same time,
it’s like we’re 3-D printing new bones as well.”

In Dahomey brings to mind some recent metatheatrical Broadway shows,

whose directors also had a strong hand in their creation: In 2016, George C.
Wolfe directed and wrote a new reconsideration of the 1921 show Shuffle
Along; the same year, director Rebecca Taichman spearheaded Indecent, with
a script by Paula Vogel, which recounted the production history of God of
Vengeance, a 1907 Yiddish drama (and made it to Broadway in 2017). Cole,
who plans to mount a production of In Dahomey at CalArts in his final year,
may take some hope from the story of Indecent, which started its life as
Taichman’s master’s thesis in the directing program at Yale School of Drama.
Monty Cole directing “Kiss” at CalArts School of Theater.
Finding a certain brand of courage—to face yourself, to face your
material, to face the unknown—seems the key ingredient for success at this
kind of work. Pearl says that instilling and encouraging fearlessness—an
attitude she has trained herself to embrace—is a major goal of her teaching. “I
say to my students, ‘Think of this class like a gym, and you’re working out
your muscles. Every time you step into a devising process, you can engage the
muscles that turn it from something scary and overwhelming into something
that is energy-giving and exciting.’ Every show we’ve made has built its own
process, just as it’s built its own form.”
ERS’s Collins, who majored in English and theatre as an undergraduate at
Yale, never formally studied directing, depending instead on advice from
mentors in the New York theatre scene, including LeCompte, Foreman, and
David Herskovits of Target Margin Theater, who had also been his professor
at Yale. As an experimental director, Collins thinks his lack of formal training
may actually be an asset.

“What I took from being around Liz, Richard, David, and others,” Collins
notes, “was the importance of having the courage to pursue something that
may be difficult or may not make sense—the courage to stick to an impulse.”
After a moment he adds, “That—coupled with the ability to be your own
toughest critic.”

For Pearl, an equally important exploration is the role of what she calls the
artist-citizen. “I had gotten used to thinking of my artist self as separate from
my citizen self,” she explains, “but actually those two things can become one
in the same. And it can work in both directions—I can make work about
issues that I feel strongly about, but I can also bring my artistry into my
citizenry.”

That kind of thinking has led PearlDamour to increasingly socially engaged

pieces, such as How to Build a Forest (made with New Orleans artist Shawn
Hall), in which audience members watched performers slowly build and then
dismantle a forest made out of fabric, metal, and found objects; and Milton,
which took her and D’Amour into several small American towns—all named
Milton—where they collaborated with residents to use performance to help
them solve the problems in their communities.
She is in good company with other directors at this fraught political moment,
many of whom are thinking about how theatre can act as a form of dissent—or
at least civic engagement. Garrett’s Carolyn Bryant, which has been in
development for eight years and will be staged as the culmination of the
CalArts Center for New Performances season in May, has accompanied its
creators through the upsurge of publicity about the deaths of unarmed black
people, the birth of the Black Lives Matter movement, the election of Trump,
and other cultural shifts, all of which color the piece—and raise the stakes.

“Before, it was easier to yell into a void, because nobody was really
listening,” Garrett suggests. “Now we’re yelling alongside a bunch of other
voices that are focused on ways to get around white supremacy and cultural
inequality.”

Pearl believes it’s no coincidence that such troubled times have sparked fresh
interest in generative theatre, especially in a collaborative vein. When the
country is so divided, the job of art becomes to ask, in Pearl’s words, “How do
we bring people together in conversation? How do we create temporary
communities where you can be with someone in a way you might not be
otherwise?” She calls the impulse “a yearning toward collectivism.”

Cole sums up the value of making original, generative work even when it’s
the harder choice. “To try to make something new—which is the direction that
theatre and other mediums are going in—is a lot harder to figure out and to
support. But I think it’s totally worth it.”

Pamela Newton is a freelance writer and college writing teacher living in

New York City.