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

Theatre 153
The director may spend a year or more preparing and
staging a production, and then more years restaging it in
different theatres, in cases where the production begins
in one theatre and then moves on to others—as Avenue
Q, which began at the Eugene O’Neill Theater Center
in Connecticut, then transferred to the off-Broadway
Vineyard Theatre, and then to the John Golden Theatre
on Broadway, and then back off-Broadway, this time at
the New World Stages; all four of the stagings directed
by Jason Moore. The recent smash hit Aladdin began its
journey in 2010 and saw its premiere in Seattle before
moving to Utah, St. Louis, Toronto, and finally, in 2014,
Broadway. Throughout this process, elements of the play
were constantly in flux—cast members, design choices,
musical numbers, lyrics, and lines of dialogue all shifted
with new locations and artistic choices—but the same
director, Casey Nicholaw, remained at the helm.
This extended process of directing a play, then, has
two quite different periods. The first, and ordinarily the
longest, is the preparation period. The second, normally
shorter, is the implementation period. We shall look at
these in the rough order that they take place—“rough”
because the ordering of events may be quite different
from one director to another, and from one production
(or theatre organization) to another.
THE PRE-PREPARATION PERIOD
During this period, the director becomes excited by a
play. She or he reads and re-reads it, and begins to conceptualize
a production, first dramaturgically (what is the
story that I want to tell?), then intellectually (what are the
ideas I want to promote?), aesthetically (how do I want
this play to look, sound, and feel?), and personally (who
do I think might be spectacular in these roles?). And at
this point, the director might begin to think, Who might
produce it?
The producer is basically somebody who can turn the
play into a performance. He or she may have the authority,
and/or the money—or knows the people who might
be able to provide the money—that would help acquire
a theatre, some designers, actors and crews, and legal
rights to perform this particular script. The producer
may be the head of a college theatre department, or the
artistic director of a regional theatre or theatre festival,
or even a professional Broadway producer; and she or
he might even be the person who proposed the play to
the director. In any event, the pre-preparation consists
mainly of discussions—normally not in a theatre but
more often homes and offices, in e-mail exchanges and
telephone conversations, at meetings in coffee shops and
restaurants and theatre lobbies—between the would-be
director and would-be producer until an agreement, tentative
or solid, has been reached. And then the preparation
itself begins.
THE PREPARATION PERIOD
The preparation begins by re-reading the play and taking
notes. Many of these notes come from the pre-preparation
thoughts and discussions, but many incorporate
what has already been determined: the expected theatre,
the anticipated budget, the potential actors and designers
who might be interested and pursued.
Preparing the Text Once the play has been chosen,
the next steps will focus on developing its working text.
In many cases, and certainly if the play is still under
copyright, the text is simply the author’s version as published
and licensed.* If the play is not under copyright,
however, it is in what is called the public domain, and the
director is free to make any textual changes she or he
wishes, such as cutting, adding, or revising lines for the
new production. This process is particularly prevalent in
the current era, when the average length of stage productions
is closer to two hours than the two-and-a-half to
three hours that was common in the past century. There
are probably hundreds of Hamlets produced every year,
but very few (if any) will include all of its 4,072 lines,
which would take at least four hours to present in its
entirety. The vast majority of today’s Shakespearean productions
are therefore cut, these days, usually by 5 to
15 percent of their original length. (In one striking example,
the celebrated Shakespeare director Peter Brook cut
one-third of Hamlet to produce a lean, two-hour-andtwenty-minute
version.) Older texts are altered in other
ways, too: archaic words may be replaced with more commonly
understood ones, scenes may be rearranged or
eliminated altogether, and characters may be combined to
reduce cast size. These revisions hold a potential danger—
audience members familiar with the play may consider
such productions as distortions of what they had come to
see—but general audiences rarely notice them and, when
they do, may be more grateful than disappointed.
Along with changing the script, directors may change
fundamental aspects of a play’s dramaturgy—sometimes
with shocking results. Indeed, more slimmed-down and
radical adaptations of classics are becoming almost common.
The director Charles Marowitz led this movement
*American copyright law currently covers an author’s work
until seventy years after his or her death.