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

170 Chapter 6 The Director
Stagecraft
“This Is How It’s Done!”
Publicity photographs taken in rehearsal frequently show
a director onstage with a few actors, demonstrating
a bit of business and “showing them how it’s done.”
This kind of publicity has probably fostered a certain
misunderstanding of the director’s role among the general
public, for demonstration is only a part of directing, and
a distinctly small part at that. Indeed, some directors
scrupulously avoid it altogether.
Demonstration as a way of teaching an actor a role has
a long history in the theatre and was a particularly common
practice in those periods when directing was carried
out chiefly by retired actors. Even today, young actors
rehearsing for classical plays at the Comédie-Française
(founded in 1680) are expected to learn their parts by
mimicking the performance of their elders down to the
last detail of inflection, tone, gesture, and timing. And
many contemporary American directors occasionally give
“line readings” to an actor or demonstrate the precise
manner of gesturing, moving, sitting, or handling a prop
if they perceive that a specific desired behavior might not
come naturally.
But demonstration as an exclusive method of coaching
an actor in a role is very much a thing of the past. Most
contemporary directors make far greater use of discussion,
suggestion, and improvisation. These methods seek
to address the inner actor and to encourage the individual
to distill his or her performance out of self-motivated passions
and enthusiasms. Because they know that a purely
imitative performance is all too likely to be a mechanical
performance, today’s directors tend to rely on methods
more creative than “getting up there and showing how
it’s done.”
in a whirlwind of passion, overwhelm the actor’s own
creativity and squelch his or her efforts to build a sensitive
performance, thereby condemning the production to
oppressive dullness. For these and other reasons, most
directors today strive to find a middle ground, somewhere
between task mastery and suggestion, from which
they can provide the actor with both a goal and a disciplined
path toward it while maintaining an atmosphere of
creative freedom.
Directors need not be actors themselves, but they
must understand the complexities of acting if they are
to help their cast fashion powerful performances. The
greatest acting braves the unknown and flirts continuously
with danger (of exposure, failure, transparency,
and artifice). The director must give the actor a careful
balance of freedom and guidance to foster the confidence
that leads to that kind of acting. Directors who are insensitive
to this requirement—no matter how colorful their
storming and coaxing or how rational their discussions
of the playwright’s vision—are almost certain to forfeit
the performance rewards that arise from the great actordirector
collaborations.
Pacing The pace of a play is perhaps the only aspect
for which general audiences and theatre critics alike
are certain to hold the director accountable. Frequently,
newspaper reviews of productions devote whole paragraphs
of praise or blame to the actors and designers and
evaluate the director’s contribution solely in terms of the
play’s pace: “well paced” and “well directed” are almost
interchangeable comments in the theatre critic’s lexicon.
And when a critic pronounces a play “slow” or “dragging,”
everyone understands she or he is firing a barrage
at the director.
To the novice director (or critic), however, pace
appears to be simply a function of the rate at which lines
are said; hence a great many beginning directors attempt
to make their productions more lively simply by instructing
everyone to speak and move at a fast clip: “Give it
more energy!” “Make it happen faster!” But dramatic
pace is not determined solely by a stopwatch. Rather, it
is created on the basis of a complex and composite time
structure that incorporates many variables: credibility,
suspense, mood, and style. The pacing of a play also
incorporates the natural rhythms of life, such as heartbeat,
respiration, the duration of a spontaneous sob,
and the suddenness of an unexpected laugh. How much
time is properly consumed, for example, by a moment
of panic? a pregnant pause? a flash of remembrance? an
agonized glance? a quick retort? These are the true ingredients
of pace, and they are not subject to the generalized
speed of the director who has not first discovered the pattern
of rhythms inherent in the play.
What are those patterns of rhythms? Knowing the
play’s genre helps to answer that question. In a farce,
the audience needs almost no time to synthesize information;
therefore, farce generally is propelled rapidly,
with information coming as fast as the actors can get it
out. Political drama, on the other hand, demands of us a
critical inquiry into our own societies, and demands time
for the audience to linger over certain well-poised questions
before moving on to speedier scenes as the play’s