Robert Cohen - Theatre, Brief Version-McGraw-Hill Education (2016)

Theatre 145
In Ariane Mnouchkine’s Les Éphémères (Ephemeral Things), actors often double as scenery shifters. From a squatting or
kneeling position, they silently wheel large “chariots” (wheeled platforms, usually circular) on and off the staging area—an
alley between two banks of audience seats. Atop the chariots, the company’s twenty-seven actors (including children)
perform seventy-five roles in the twenty-nine loosely interrelated scenes of the two-part production that proved the
sensation of New York’s 2009 Lincoln Center Theatre Festival. Shown here, a Jewish girl, wearing a cross and disguised
as a Christian during the Nazi occupation of northern France during World War II, is being questioned by a German officer.
Or is she being interrogated? We cannot be certain, but we see every possibility and contingency going through the
characters’ minds. In addition to moving the chariots, the scenery shifters provide a nonspeaking chorus of witnesses
to the seemingly ordinary but often tragic events the play depicts. Mnouchkine provided the production’s concept and
direction, but the play was “dreamed upon, invoked, evoked, improvised and devised” by the entire fifty-member company
of the Théâtre du Soleil (Theatre of the Sun). Everest Canto de Montserrat designed the scenery. © Stephanie Berger
twentieth. Yet today the role of the director has become
so significant that many critics and theatergoers speak
of the current stage as a “director’s theatre.” And many
directors, particularly in Europe, have become world
celebrities more famous than the actors they direct.
The director’s evolution, however, is not simply the
rise of one member of the theatrical production ensemble.
The emergence of the director has coincided with
an expansion of the theatre’s scope from a national to
a global art form. As the theatre has expanded geographically,
it also has grown stylistically, from a limited
repertoire to a nearly unlimited palette of creative
possibilities. When crafting a production today, artists
can draw from a vast world of resources that span three
millennia, six continents, and an ever-increasing host of
new technologies. As the theatre has experienced this
explosion of possibility, the director has come into focus
as the figure responsible for unifying its widened palette
of artistic elements. And the role of director has risen
accordingly to become a vital force in creating unique,
tightly focused, and well-shaped productions.
TEACHER-DIRECTORS
In the earliest days of the theatre and for some time
thereafter, directing was considered a matter of instruction.
The Greeks called the director the didaskalos,
which means “teacher,” and in medieval times the director’s
designation, in all the various European languages,
was “master.” The underlying assumption of this early
directing, then, was that the (almost certainly male)
teacher had already mastered his subject and was simply
required to teach the current conventions of acting
and design to his less-experienced colleagues. The earliest
directors basically passed along the techniques of
“correct” performance technique within a given style.
Often the playwrights themselves served as directors: in
Molière’s play The Rehearsal at Versailles, for example,
the seventeenth-century playwright-director depicts himself
staging one of his own plays.
The teacher-director reached a pinnacle of influence
during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, partly
in response to the remarkable fascination of those times