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

152 Chapter 6 The Director
Director Elizabeth LeCompte’s 2011 production of what was called “The Wooster Group’s version of Vieux Carré,”
adapted from the 1977 play by Tennessee Williams, retained much of Williams’s original text, but wholly reconceived
the play in a mixed-media contemporary environment. Premiering in Strasbourg, France, in 2009, it has since played in
New York, Los Angeles, Antwerp, Amsterdam, and Toronto. © Photo by Franck Beloncle
director who is charged with inspiring these impressions
and ensuring their simultaneity.
Today’s director understands realism and antirealism
and feels free to mix them with impunity. At the beginning
of a production, he or she faces a completely blank
canvas: not a single gesture has been notated, not one
design element has been decided upon, and no line has
yet been spoken by an actor. The play lives wholly in the
imagination of the director. And the tools at the director’s
disposal for translating this imagination into reality
are nearly infinite: not only the underlying conventions
of the time but also all those of the past, which can be
revived for novel effects and stunning juxtapositions.
The theatre of today allows for varieties of artistic and
historical combinations. Shakespeare can be presented as
a modern chamber piece, Greek tragedy as a kabuki spectacle,
the theatre of the absurd as vaudevillian buffoonery,
and romantic melodrama as campy satire. Actors
can play multiple parts—of both genders—in a play, and
their scenes can be performed on stilts or in water-filled
fish tanks. Nothing, in short, is taken for granted. But
this liberation can also be a restriction of sorts. When
anything is possible, how does the director know where
to start? After all, regardless of the choices the director
makes, these decisions still have to create a unified
whole. Philosopher-playwright Jean-Paul Sartre said
about the whole of modern life that “man is condemned
to be free,” and in today’s theatre, the director’s freedom
in the face of almost limitless possibilities leads to an
anxiety that is both chilling and thrilling in its challenge.
The Directing Process:
Step by Step
Directing a play is a long process and does not begin
when the director walks into the rehearsal room for the
first time.