'Great Directors at Work'

by Kirk Woodward 

[Kirk, who, ROTters will know, is a longtime friend, has been a prolific contributor to Rick On Theater since its inception in 2009.  He’s written on many topics, mostly theatrical and musical (but not exclusively), and since one of his many talents is as a director, a number of his ROT posts have been about directors and directing.

[Kirk’s directorial articles for this blog include “Kirk Woodward’s King Lear Journal,” 4 June 2010; “Directing Twelfth Night for Children,” 16 and 19 December 2010; “Saints of the Theater,” 30 December 2011; “Reflections On Directing,” 11, 14, 17, and 20 April 2013; “Evaluating A Director,” 1 March 2017; “Thoughts On Rehearsals,” 26 December 2017; “George Abbott,” 14 October 2018; “On Directing Shakespeare,” 1 March 2019; “Directors You’d Rather Not Work With,” 25 June 2019; “The Producer and the Play,” 20 July 2023; and “A Directing Experience,” 13 and 16 October 2023.

[It goes without saying—but I will anyway—that many of Kirk’s other theater posts, in particular, his performance reports, also draw on his directorial experience.  All told, Kirk’s contributions to ROT number something over a hundred.

[Kirk’s current post, “Great Directors at Work,” is a report on the book of that title by David Richard Jones.  It’s a run-down, according to Jones’s lights, of the directorial careers and techniques of four prominent stage directors: Konstantin Stanislavsky, Bertolt Brecht, Elia Kazan, and Peter Brook.  As significant as this book is—I’ve had a copy in my library for many years—Jones isn’t all that well known.  I couldn’t even find his birth year listed anywhere.

[David Richard Jones is professor emeritus of English at the University of New Mexico, where he also taught courses in the Department of Theatre and Dance.  He taught Shakespeare as well as modern and contemporary drama at UNM since 1971.  He’s also devised educational programs involving humanities lecturers and booklets for high school teachers at professional theaters in New York and New Mexico.

[Jones was the founding artistic director of the Vortex Theatre in Albuquerque (1976-78); Vortex, a purveyor of classic contemporary, and cutting-edge theater, is Albuquerque’s oldest continuously-running black box playhouse.  He was also the founding artistic director of Will Power, the Vortex Theatre’s summer Shakespeare repertory launched in 2010, and of the New Mexico Shakespeare Festival in 2014 and 2015. 

[Also a freelance theater director who’s directed over 50 productions of classics, contemporary plays, musicals, and operas in English and Spanish, including productions in Mexico and Venezuela, Jones’s directing experience includes professional, community, and educational productions of many Shakespeare plays, including three versions of Hamlet, two of As You Like It, plus King Lear, Macbeth, Romeo and Juliet, Titus Andronicus, and Much Ado About Nothing.

[In addition to Great Directors at Work (University of California Press, 1986), Jones is the editor of New Mexico Plays (University of New Mexico Press, 1989), an anthology of then-recent original dramas by New Mexican playwrights.  It presents a contemporary vision of the modern New Mexican landscape in plays by native New Mexican dramatists (plus one 20-year transplant) that all take place in New Mexico and are about subjects and characters New Mexicans might know.

[When Kirk observed, “Some productions today . . . seem to be more about the director than the playwright,” he added that “Jones does not decry this situation.”  This suggests that Jones put great store in directorial “independence and power,” which can be seen, perhaps, in the descriptions of some of his Shakespearean productions.  From the pages of the Weekly Alibi, a news, arts, culture, and entertainment newspaper and website in Albuquerque:

The Vortex Theatre’s version of the play [King Lear (2008)] takes place against the backdrop of World War II.

The Vortex version of Much Ado About Nothing [2010] is set in the Roaring ’20s.  Think flappers, bon vivants, martinis, cigarettes and lawn games.  Think The Great Gatsby.

Jones’s production [of Hamlet (2016)] incorporates modern props and dress in order to “eliminate a layer of interference between the audience and the play” and this is done holistically.  Cell phones, for example, are incorporated not as an afterthought, but as an essential vehicle to pushing the plot forward, potentially rife with meaning.

[Those notices were generally mixed: some of Jones’s directorial choices worked for the reviewers and some didn’t.  That’s about par, I’d say.]

At the conclusion of a production of Antigone by the ancient Greek tragedian Sophocles (c. 497/6-406/5) about which I have written elsewhere in this blog (“A Directing Experience,” posted on Rick On Theater on 13 and 16 October), the cast gave me, as associate director, a book called Great Directors at Work, presumably not because I am one, but in order to help me become one.

In any case I have found the book to be of unusual interest. Published in 1986, its author is David Richard Jones, now professor emeritus at the University of New Mexico, who has taught both English and Theatre Arts there. (It’s published by the University of California Press.)

Jones wrote his book while the prestige of the field of directing was on an upswing that continues to this day:

I am inclined to accept the historical fact that directors have become central to modern theatre and then to consider a corollary, that modern theatre is no doubt more sophisticated and more artistic for that change.

Since he wrote that sentence, directors have become even more central to the theatrical experience, certainly in the United States. Jones revels in that fact:

Today’s personally expressive, independently creative directors testify to the historic reality of this drive for imaginative freedom, that is, to the most self-consciously artistic impulses within the ranks.

Some productions today – even of plays written long ago – seem to be more about the director than the playwright. [For what I consider an example of this, see my report on Tennessee Williams’s The Glass Menagerie as staged by Sam Gold, posted on 8 April 2017. ~Rick] Jones does not decry this situation:

At least in the United States, it seems that the director has moved a desk into the playwright’s workroom, the better to channel inspiration from the beginning.

So “directorial authority” comes down to independence and power.

If sufficiently old-fashioned (like myself), one can argue that on the contrary “the play’s the thing,” and the Dramatists Guild would agree (sometimes in court), claiming that a director’s primary function is to make sure the author’s work itself is faithfully presented. Jones demurs:

How can a director be said to create if the assignment is merely to stage someone else’s play? That is not creating to a very meaningful degree, is it?

Jones relates the idea of “power directors” and their work to other issues:

We disagree in a muddled way about whether directing is an art, about what the art consists of, about what its kinds or “isms” might be, about its vocabulary, and about much more that is equally important to a sophisticated treatment of the subject.

For example, he pleads for a more robust vocabulary to describe a director’s work – for a better definition of “director” itself, for a canon of examples of directing that can serve as models, for precision in the use of words like “style,” “image,” and “presence.” He offers suggestions for some of these, but primarily he is more concerned that we understand that directing today is “an activity that no longer depends on preexistent literature.” He feels this is for the better:

I am inclined to accept the historical fact that directors have become central to modern theatre and then to consider a corollary, that modern theatre is no doubt more sophisticated and more artistic for that change.

With the courage of his convictions, he claims that

1880-1980 is the third great age of Western drama, an era comparable or superior to the eras of Sophocles and Shakespeare in such respects as duration, number of productions, cultural reverberation, and artistic achievement.

For me, sneaking in the words “artistic achievement” in the above quotation is begging the question. However, Jones sees the history of directing as progress:

So “directorial authority” comes down to independence and power. The independence I describe is not only from script or collaboration, but just as importantly from dead traditions and bad habits, from rotten cliches, stale thoughts, and poor assumptions about what theatrical art can or cannot be.

Perhaps. To objections, Jones says that he’s talking about the present situation, and that if we don’t like it, we should change it – which of course is easier said than done. In any case, I found much of the material in this book to be a revelation, because its “main event” is a stimulating discussion of four productions by four directors: Konstantin Stanislavsky, Bertolt Brecht, Elia Kazan, and Peter Brook.

One problem with such a discussion is that theater is an ephemeral art. Some aspects of it can be captured with video recording, but by its nature such recording is selective – it can’t include every aspect of a theatrical performance.  Jones avoids this difficulty by centering his work on his four directors’ written examinations of the plays they stage (also utilizing reviews, journals, and other artifacts).

What in the book was revelatory for me, then? In the case of Konstantin Stanislavsky (1863-1938 – Jones’ spelling of his name), the production Jones chooses to write about is the famous Moscow Art Theatre’s production of The Seagull by Anton Chekhov (1860-1904) in 1898. This production established the MAT as one of the leading theaters in Russia (and subsequently in the world).

I assumed this Seagull presentation was a Stanislavsky production. In fact he directed fewer than half the rehearsals for the play. Equally surprising, he spent a month and a half in isolation working out a detailed plan for the production. What’s surprising about that?

Today, at least in the United States, Stanislavsky’s name is associated with mental acting work, in particular the technique of emotional recall promoted by Lee Strasberg (1901-1982) at the Actors Studio in Manhattan. Stanislavsky certainly focused on similar work during much of his career.

However, in his rehearsal plan for The Seagull, Stanislavsky focused almost entirely on physical actions, to a level of detail hard to believe, except that we’ve got the written notes to prove it. For example, at the beginning of Act 3 of the play:

Jumping to his feet, he runs to Miss Arkadina; speaks boldly, forcefully, confidently. Turning round to him, Miss Arkadina looks straight into his eyes. She has understood everything. A pause. She shakes her head. Trigorin deflates completely, says in a faltering, imploring voice, ‘Let’s, please’ and sits down on a chair despondently.

Almost any actors could follow these instructions and give decent renderings of their roles, without any inner life. More precisely, “inner life” would inevitably follow as a result of these “external” instructions. Over his career Stanislavsky moved between the two poles of the internal and the external.

At the end of his life he was still exploring the effect of the physical on the emotional. Many actors shy away from this kind of work because they are afraid the results will be cliched and superficial, and certainly that’s a danger if the physical work itself is cliched and superficial. However, as Stanislavsky demonstrated, it doesn’t have to be.

Here are two personal experiences along this line. I studied acting for several years at the HB Studio in New York with Elizabeth Dillon (see “Portrait of a Mentor” by Alan Geller, posted on ROT on 30 July 2020), wonderful teacher who was thoroughly conversant with Stanislavsky’s approach(es) as she had learned them from Bobby Lewis, Stella Adler, and Uta Hagen. I brought a scene into class and I was absolutely awful in it.

Giving instructions for a repeat of the scene, she said to me, “Darling, all I want you to do is . . .” and she gave me a series of physical instructions – on this line cross to the desk, on this word pick up a pencil, and so on. When we did the scene again it worked like a charm.

Somewhat similarly, a few years ago in New York I directed a two-character one act play. One of the actors took to his part immediately and was able to take detailed character notes. The other could not “get” his role at all. So, remembering Elizabeth’s advice, I gave him physical instructions for every moment of his role. He immediately played it exactly the way I felt the playwright had intended.

To see Stanislavsky working this same way is fascinating. The use of what is sometimes called a “score of physical actions” is by no means his total approach, but it is important, and seeing his thoroughness in preparing his “score” for The Seagull is inspirational (see “Ryszard Cieślak,” 5 February 2020, and “Children of the Gods: Launching The Shaliko Company (1973),” 19 November 2021; also briefly, “‘The Stone in the Soup’ – Excerpts: Part 2” by Tom Crawley, 17 April 2011 – all descriptions of an actor using a score). It encourages me to prepare more diligently in my own directing work.

On, then, to Bertolt Brecht (1898-1956), well known for his plays (including Mother Courage and Her Children, first performed in 1941), his theory of the “alienation effect” (as it is often translated in English), and his thoroughgoing Marxist orientation. (For comments on Brecht’s concept and the translation of the name, see “Short Takes: Word Origins & Other Derivations: Verfremdungseffekt,” 4 July 2010.)

Jones, referring primarily to Brecht’s production of Mother Courage in Berlin in 1949, uses as his text an enormous “model book” that Brecht created for that production, called Couragemodell 1949. Brecht’s idea was to make as complete as possible an account (including the script, numerous notes, and abundant photographs) of a successful production that other directors could follow.

Whether the model book has ever been used in that way in productions beyond Brecht’s own company (the Berliner Ensemble) is not clear to me. However, it is a remarkable resource for learning about how Brecht worked, and Jones’ account of it clarifies many aspects of Brecht’s work.

In the first place, he makes it clear that whatever Brecht’s theories of theater may have been at a given time (like Stanislavsky, he was given to clarifying, expanding, or just plain changing his ideas as he felt necessary), as a director he did not promote his theories in front of his casts. He discouraged discussion in rehearsal. “Brecht would say that he wanted no discussions in rehearsal – it would have to be tried,” wrote the director Carl Weber (1925-2016), who worked with him.

What Brecht did instead of promoting ideas is fascinating: he worked in extreme detail (as did Stanislavsky on The Seagull) and he focused that detail on individual moments in the play, avoiding generalizing, and shaping each moment of the play as if nothing followed it,

freezing a motion or condition; stopping the action for a closer, longer look; isolating a detail or moment or element or shading and then expanding it into meaning, into an image.

One of Brecht’s co-workers said that Brecht achieved his results by accumulation of “a large number of details, some of them very small.” Obviously this approach takes a great deal of time to prepare a play, and Brecht knew this, writing in the model book that

The pace at rehearsals should be slow, if only to make it possible to work out details; determining the pace of the production is another matter and should come later.

Jones says that there is actually little in the model book about the pacing of the entire play, certainly no indication of whether it should be “slow” or “fast” at any point. It should be true, Brecht insisted, conforming to the reality of the moment and also reflecting (as was second nature for Brecht) its social meaning.

Meaning conveyed through specific detail was fundamental to Brecht’s theatrical art, and he insisted on it from his earliest days as a director. . . . He placed one thing after another until a final conclusion was obvious.

In other words, Brecht deeply embodied his ideas in behavior. “Without details there are no ‘concepts’ in  Brecht’s theatre, no themes, no broad intellectual perspectives or messages,” Jones writes. I and others have often referred to productions as “Brechtian” without understanding Brecht's approach, and I am grateful to Jones for clarifying this point, and a great deal more.

Because Jones’ book is so full of worthwhile information, I will not go into equal detail about the last two directors he covers in his book, Elia Kazan (1909-2003) and Peter Brook (1925-2022). However, it is worth noting that all four of the directors discussed in the book are workers of astonishing thoroughness, all highly intentional in their work.

Elia Kazan was the acknowledged leader in direction on Broadway beginning with his work with the Group Theatre in the 1930s and moving through the next two decades, until he abandoned the theater for movies.  Kazan was a director with energy and confidence:

. . . he was always his own director, always his own man. In his words, “I work on the premise that the audience will like to see what I like to make.” From the mid-1940s until the early 1960s, no American theatre director could point to a more distinguished career as justification for such artistic self-assertion.

Kazan describes his working method in three steps:

1.  “I put terrific stress on what the person wants and why he wants it. What makes it meaningful for him. I don’t start on how he goes about getting it until I get him wanting it.

2.  Introduce the actor to “the circumstances under which he behaves – what happens before, and so on.”

3.  “I will say nothing to an actor that cannot be translated directly into action.” “The life of a play is in behavior.” “I try to find the physical behavior without preconception on my part if possible, but from what the actor does to achieve his objective under the circumstances.”

One notices that, although Kazan’s tone is firm, he leaves room for what the actor brings to the role. Directors may be tempted to think that the actor can do nothing without them. Kazan did not make this mistake.

The material of my profession is the lives the actors have lived up to now.

At the same time his preparation is thorough:

Kazan has said that directing is “half conceptual, the core of it – you get into what the events mean, what you’re trying to express,” and half executive, “just work. But if you are careless with the first stage, you make something which is flaccid at its center.”

Jones uses the first production of A Streetcar Named Desire (1947) by Tennessee Williams (1911-1983) to examine how Kazan worked, and the story is thrilling. It includes tensions among actors, close and careful work with the author, and self-confidence when everyone around the play doubted its success.

Kazan was particularly known for the energy his productions displayed. The critic Eric Bentley (1916-2020), who had major reservations about Kazan’s work, wrote:

Things move fast in a Kazan show. So fast you can’t see them. If anything is wrong, you don’t notice. If a false note is struck, its sound is at once covered by others. One has no time to think. “Drama isn’t time to think” the director seems to be saying, “it’s action that sweeps you off your feet.”

However, Jones makes it clear that while Kazan was committed to the use of powerful strokes in his productions, he didn’t make a fetish of them, realizing that they had to be grounded in the script itself:

I tried to think and feel like the author so that the play would be in the scale and in the mood, in the tempo and feeling of each writer. I tried to be the author.

Jones recounts times where Kazan literally “tried to be the author,” particularly with the plays of Tennessee Williams that he directed, but he denied that his intention was anything beyond putting on stage what the author had in mind – in a memorable phrase, “turning Psychology into Behavior.” In his late novel The Under-study (1975) one of his characters puts it this way:

The great plays were not great because of cleverness. Today it’s all experiments in style. What counts and what endures is meaning, theme. What you have to touch in an audience is their fundamental concerns, what’s worrying them now and always will, even if they don’t know it, the mind’s despair, the heart’s hope.

In the beginning of this article I noted Jones’ enthusiasm about the idea of the director as the primary artist of the theater. In Kazan’s work we can see a certain weakening of the playwright’s claim to be the major source of inspiration of a production. Peter Brook (1925-2022), Jones’ fourth and last subject, is a major director whose relationship to “texts” is even more fluid.

The play that Jones uses to illustrate this point is Brook’s famous Royal Shakespeare Company production of the 1963 play by Peter Weiss (1916-1982) entitled The Persecution and Assassination of Jean-Paul Marat as Performed by the Inmates of the Asylum of Charenton Under the Direction of the Marquis de Sade, usually and mercifully referred to as Marat/Sade.

(I almost wish Jones had used Brook’s famous 1970 production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, which I saw first in London and then in the United States. Brook set the play in a box-like set and used circus techniques as the physical “language” of the play. It was I suppose the greatest production I’ve ever seen; it was dazzling but it never lost sight of Shakespeare’s play.)

Brook’s Marat/Sade began its life as a workshop on the subject of madness. A workshop, Jones says, is “a form of research,” frequently inspired by “a widespread dissatisfaction . . . with realistic acting and dramaturgy.” Jones suggests that the questions posed by Brook’s and similar workshops are:

How could Western theatre rediscover an expressive style beyond realistic portrayal of behavior?

How could the actor’s whole human mechanism be liberated to achieve this new expressiveness?

How could theatre distinguish itself from the more popular and automatic dramatic media?

How could actors and directors relate to the audience?

The ultimate goal of such workshops could be said to be “a theatre of sound of movement,” which, note, is not necessarily the same as “a theater of plays.” The relationship of performance to text, the proponents of the workshop approach posited, was something to explore – as the director and workshop leader Charles Marowitz (1934-2014) wrote, “as material that could be reworked and rethought” –  and not something to take for granted.

Brook said that his rehearsals had two parts, “looking for meaning and then making it meaningful” – again, to create content and then to apply it to a play. The process is strenuous; Brook’s workshop for Marat/Sade led the great actress Glenda Jackson (1936-2023), then at the early point of her career, to say that “we were all convinced that we were going mad.”

The resulting production was dazzling, validating Brook’s approach at least for the play he was working on.  Brook’s was not the only approach; other productions around the world took different approaches, again suggesting the idea that the “text” of the play was just that, a framework to be filled with content.

One should note that Brook’s work was never experimental in the sense of being tentative or vague. Brook began as a “conventional” director, and Jones stresses that he knew all the tricks:

For Brook, the problems of variety and pace were great opportunities. He has always preferred contrasts to similarities and jangles to chords, and he has theorized that variety is a necessary or structural element in modernist theater. . . . Brook’s career offers many proofs of his contention that pace is the “one god whom we all serve – whether in musicals or in melodramas or in the classics.”

But it was his determination to recreate the theatrical experience from the bottom up – to start completely anew every time, every production – that made him an icon in theater circles. The “workshop” was a fundamental instrument in his attempts, and videos of some of them can be seen on YouTube, for example at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YCmgkfEWN6s.

Is Brook’s approach widely used today? My impression is that it is not, certainly not extensively, partly because of financial restraints. In the United States the salaries of members of Actors Equity, the actors’ union, are carefully regulated, and there is no volunteering.

At the same time a workshop by definition is not a performance, so its capability for raising money is limited, and it usually has to be financed by grants and donations, which are not necessarily easy to come by. However, Brooks’ influence is not limited to one approach, and Jones looks at his work from other angles as well.

In this review I have tried to single out some highlights of this useful and provocative book, but I have barely scratched the surface. I personally have found the book inspirational; I intend to apply many of its insights to my own work if I possibly can. I would think that any director would benefit from reading this book; so would anyone interested in learning more about the countless variables that go into a theatrical production.

[When I read “Great Directors at Work,” I had a number of responses, mostly in support or illustration of Kirk’s comments on the book and Jones’s ideas about directing.  I’ve collected some of those reader responses to append here, at the end of the posting of Kirk’s report, just to continue the conversation.

[First, however, for ROTters who’ve been following the serialization of “National Endowment for the Arts: A History, 1965-2008,” which I’ve interrupted to post Kirk’s report: I’ll be publishing the next installment, Chapter 7, “What Is to Be Done?” on Thursday, 30 November.  I hope that you’ll all come back to ROT when I pick up that thread.

[When Kirk remarks, for instance, on the rise in significance of the director after Jones's book came out (1986), I thought of the establishment of the stage directors’ union, the Society of Stage Directors and Choreographers (SSDC – now the Stage Directors and Choreographers Society, or SDC) as a manifestation of this. 

[Though SSDC was founded in 1959 and Broadway producers recognized it in 1967, it wasn’t until eight years later that the union won the important litigation establishing that its members are employees. This set the precedent on which SDC bases its authority, affording it the recognition as a significant force in the theater.   

[Coincidentally—or maybe not—at about the same time, theatrical director Geoffrey Shlaes (1951-2016) launched the American Directors Institute.  ADI, founded in 1985, was intended to inform both theatergoers and members of the theater fraternity who aren’t directors what directors do, and to facilitate networking among directors and artistic directors and give them a forum for exchanging ideas about and techniques for directing.  ADI was dissolved in 1992.  (In the interest of full disclosure, Geoff engaged me in 1986 to launch and edit its newsletter, which I entitled Directors Notes; I turned the editorship over to a successor in 1988 before I went upstate to take a teaching job at a State University college.)

[When Kirk quotes Jones on "directorial authority," and equates it with “independence and power,” I remarked that Vsevolod Meyerhold (1874-1940) wrote in Vs. Meyerhold: On the Theatre (1912; as quoted in Alma Law and Mel Gordon’s Meyerhold, Eisenstein and Biomechanics: Actor Training in Revolutionary Russia [1996]) that "the director [is] the 'author' of a theatrical production."  The innovative Russian director went on to explain: “He creates the performance text, determines its overall style and himself works out every stage action.”

[One reaction I had was to a turn of phrase Kirk used that relates to a pet peeve of mine: “begging the question.”  I note it here just to record my delight in its (correct) appearance on Rick On Theater.  My note in Kirk’s text was simply “Hooray!” because almost everyone who uses this expression—it often appears on TV on both news and commentary shows and in scripted series—misuses it.  I was delighted to see that Kirk didn’t. 

[As Marilyn vos Savant (b. 1946), the super-intelligent columnist (“Ask Marilyn” in Parade), explains that begging the question is a logical fallacy “also known as ‘circular reasoning’; it refers to the error of basing one’s conclusion on an assumption, often a form of the conclusion.” 

[Kirk was referring to the statement by Jones that the century between 1880 and 1980 was “comparable or superior to the eras of Sophocles and Shakespeare” with respect to its theater, for a list of reasons concluding with “artistic achievement.” 

[It was this last criterion that Kirk branded begging the question because for Jones to include it in his list, he had to assume that there’s a universally accepted standard of judgment by which the theater of the period would merit being labeled artistically significant.  There isn’t, so it’s just Jones’s opinion, and he uses it as evidence that the century’s theater was an “artistic achievement.”  That’s circular reasoning based on an assumption.  (The other three criteria are measurable or observable.)

[Vos Savant adds that the misuse “became so common that the term began to acquire a new meaning: ‘raises the question,’ followed by a question.”  The correct use of the phrase, the columnist points out, “is a complete statement.  No question follows.”  (On 8 April 2014, I added Savant’s column as a Comment to a blog post called “Words on Words,” 1 February 2014.)

[In regard to Kirk’s remarks on the "alienation effect," I referenced my comments on the Verfremdungseffekt and the translation of the name in "Short Takes: Word Origins & Other Derivations" (4 July 2010).  Readers can call it up themselves (Rick On Theater: Short Takes: Word Origins & Other Derivations), but I want to reiterate my objection to the common English rendering of the term.

[Kirk notes that Verfremdungseffekt, a word Brecht made up, “is often translated in English” as ‘alienation effect.’  That’s true, but it’s really a misleading expression.  Brecht never wanted to alienate the audience in the sense of making them unfriendly or hostile.  What he wanted was to let the spectators see ideas and images to which they’d become accustomed as if they were new and unfamiliar.  Brecht devised several techniques to de-familiarize what audiences were seeing so they would actively contemplate it anew, with a untainted perspective.

[The German verb verfremden doesn’t really exist, except in Brecht’s specific usage. Ver- is a prefix that sometimes means ‘to become . . . ,’ especially when affixed to an adjective.  The adjective fremd means ‘strange’ or ‘foreign,’ so, verfremden (-ung is the German gerund suffix, comparable to ‘-ing’ in English) would mean ‘to become strange’ or ‘to become unfamiliar.’  As slightly awkward as it is, I prefer “defamiliarizing effect” as a translation for Brecht’s word.

[Sticking with Bertolt Brecht for another moment, Kirk brings up the Brechtian tactic of invoking the “large number of details, some of them very small.” in his plays.  This is also the process of hyperreal theater—though the performance style is different.  In my post on "Hyperreal Theater" (16 January 2021), I compared several specifics of hyperreal style to Brechtian practices, though I didn't include this one.  Perhaps I should have.  It’s the attention to very specific detail in the characters’ behavior as well as the physical environment that creates the illusion of hyperreality.

[When he begins his report on Jones’s discussion of the work of Peter Brook, Kirk expresses the wish that Jones had chosen to analyze Brook’s celebrated circus-infused Midsummer Night’s Dream. On 6 November 1988, theater critic, producer, playwright, writer, and educator Robert Brustein (1927-2023) published an essay in the New York Times’ "Arts and Leisure" section called “Reworking the Classics: Homage or Ego Trip?"  In it, he examines “the reinterpretation or ‘deconstruction’ of celebrated classical plays,” dividing them into “the prosaic simile and the poetic metaphor.”

[In the essay, Brustein calls Brook’s Midsummer one of "two fine examples of metaphorical theater" (the other is his 1962 Beckettian production of King Lear for the Royal Shakespeare Company), his label for the work of directors "attempt[ing] to penetrate the mystery of a play in order to devise a poetic stage equivalent—. . . since the director 'authors' the production much as the author writes the text." (Note the near-quotation of Meyerhold’s assertion I quoted above.) 

[I posted Brustein’s essay on ROT on 10 March 2011, and previously wrote a commentary on the article, "Similes, Metaphors—And The Stage," posted on 18 September 2009.]

A History of Dramaturgy: The Origins

 

[On 30 December 2009, I posted “Dramaturgy: The Conscience of the Theater,” a look at what was then still the newest profession in the theater, and little prognostication about where the profession might be heading.  That was almost exactly 13 years ago, and though I’ve posted a few more pieces on Rick On Theater that touch on dramaturgy, I haven’t posted another entire article on the topic. 

[I figure it’s about time I did, and it strikes me that the most apt subject is the history of the profession.  As it happens, that results in a two-fer, because the history of dramaturgy splits neatly into two parts.  Below is the early history of the profession, which took place in Europe, mostly Germany, in the 18th and 19th centuries.

[Following “The Origins” will be “The Modern Era,” focusing on dramaturgy in the United States.  As you’ll learn, that only began in the latter third of the 20th century.  It’s recent enough that I was around to see the end of its beginning.  (That’ll make sense when you read Part 2.)  In fact, I was a close observer, as you’ll see.]

The profession of dramaturgy in the United States is still a relatively new idea; it has yet to be definitively described in either theory or practice.  Even now, whatever definitions exist are ad hoc, each dramaturg often writing the job description as he or she goes along. 

According to a survey taken by the American Theatre Association (ATA; 1936 [as the American Educational Theatre Association] – 1986), a dramaturg is a theater (and sometimes opera, film, and television) professional involved in play selection, casting decisions, research, directing showcases, attending out-of-town auditions, writing or translating plays, producing new-play series, supervising workshops and play readings, and editing support materials.

The dramaturg’s responsibilities are many, depending on the talents of the person holding the post, the needs of the theater, and the inventiveness of the artistic director.  Dramaturgs may often also take on a number of quasi- or non-dramaturgical responsibilities such as public relations, teaching, fundraising or, even, acting.  

They can be educators, adapters, translators, historians, researchers, editors, in-house critics, playwright’s advocates, conduits for new scripts, play doctors, and outside observers at rehearsals ready to set the artists back on track if they get diverted.

They can serve as resources for production directors and designers, and in a different context, for the company’s artistic director.  They can assist publicity directors and press reps as well.  Dramaturgs help keep everyone on the same page.

Though ‘dramaturgy’ is often used to mean ‘the craft of playwriting,’ I’ll be using it here exclusively to refer to the dramaturg’s profession.  The variant spellings ‘dramaturge’ and ‘dramaturg’ are used interchangeably by many writers.  

The former spelling, which is French (and consequently pronounced with a soft g) and is really a synonym for ‘dramatist,’ is less common; I’ll use the latter, German spelling, which, first, is closer in meaning to the function discussed here and, second, is the name used by the professional association, Literary Managers & Dramaturgs of the Americas (LMDA, founded in 1985).

The terms ‘literary manager’ or ‘literary adviser,’ though sometimes defined slightly differently from ‘dramaturg,’ will generally be used as a synonym for it here.  The staffs of few theaters include both a literary manager and a dramaturg—Washington, D.C.’s Arena Stage lists both positions on its staff—and the work they perform frequently overlaps.  

Dramaturgy in the United States first appeared in 1908, when director Winthrop Ames (1870-1937) of New York City’s New Theatre (62nd Street and Central Park West on Manhattan’s Upper West Side) recruited New York Sun drama reviewer John Corbin (1870-1959) as literary manager.  His salary was a whopping $10,000 a year, equivalent to about $324,000 today!

In 1910, Corbin resigned in frustration over the strain of reading as many as 2,000 scripts a year—more than five plays every day over 365 days.  The theater accepted unsolicited scripts—an announcement to that effect appeared in newspapers—and most of what he read, he affirmed, he declared “impossible,” and then he had to find a diplomatic way to phrase the rejection letter.

Even in his short tenure at the New Theatre, Corbin was credited with contributing to the troupe’s highly artistic productions, demonstrating the value of a literary manager in residence.  The position of literary manager, however, was abol­ished, and Ames’s New Theatre Company ceased operations in 1911 as a result of financial failure, and the building was demolished in 1930.  No other such position was established with any prominence in an American theater for over half a century. 

It wasn’t until the late 1960s and early 1970s that the first full-time dramaturgs since Corbin were employed by professional U.S. theaters.  Since that time, a large number of resident theaters have hired dramaturgs or literary managers; some even have small staffs and internships in the field.  

Historically, the field of dramaturgy was initiated in the 18th century European theater.  It was common practice for theater companies to have a resident dramatist who composed plays for the troupe, translated foreign plays, or edited classical works that had casts too large for the company. 

The company playwright in the French-speaking troupes was called the dramaturge, and other European theaters used the French term as well.  So, the dramaturge developed into the forebear of the modern dramaturg.

The German form of the word was first used in Hamburg, Germany.  A consortium of 12 businessmen formed the Hamburg National Theater (Hamburger Nationaltheater) and the de facto director of the theatre was Abel Seyler (1730-1800), a Swiss-born theater director and former banker.  They hired playwright and critic Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (1729-81) as resident dramatist in January 1767.

Lessing demurred, explaining to the theater’s manager, Johann Friedrich Löwen (1727-71), who was also a stage director, that he couldn’t write plays on a schedule.  Löwen devised a plan for Lessing to write criticism of the company’s productions to be published in a journal put out by the theater, a sort of precursor to the newsletters or subscriber magazines many U.S. theaters publish, with the idea that Lessing’s commentaries would draw theatergoers.

By 1767, Lessing had attained a reputation for both his criticism and his playwriting.  Löwen believed that having the dramatist’s name on the theater’s staff, it could take advantage of his prestige and respect to attract audiences.  Lessing, on the other hand, was in such impecunious straits that he was prepared to take any job that paid him a salary.

Of course, Löwen expected Lessing to pen laudatory descriptions of the National Theater’s work, but the playwright and critic expressed his honest opinions of what he saw.  The new dramaturg, it seems, saw himself not as a tout or a shill, but an enlightener or aesthetic educator.

Lessing’s criticism was aimed not only at the prospective audience, the potential theatergoers of Hamburg, but at the artistic leadership of the Hamburg National Theater.  In the epigraph to Joel Schechter’s essay “Lessing, Jugglers, and Dramaturgs,” the author quotes George Bernard Shaw:

It was Lessing, the most eminent of dramatic critics . . ., who was reproached by [German poet and literary critic Heinrich] Heine for not only cutting off his victims’ heads but holding them up afterwards to show that there were no brains in them.

Needless to say, the dramaturg’s efforts weren’t appreciated at the theater.  He found that his advice was largely ignored, and he got into disputes with both actors, who didn’t welcome his critiques, and spectators, who found his efforts to criticize their taste and understanding insulting. 

Both he and Löwen resigned in the summer of 1768, and the National Theater closed in 1769 due to financial failure.

While at the Hamburg theater, Lessing wrote a series of 104 essays on theater based on his work at the theater.  The pieces were written between April 1767 and April 1769, continuing after he left the theater, and were published in 1769 as Hamburgische Dramaturgie or Hamburg Dramaturgy, which popularized both the word and the practice of dramaturgy.  (An English translation was published in 1890, but it omits nearly 30% of the text.  A new, complete rendering was issued in 2014.)

Over the ensuing 200 years, dramaturgy in Germany became an established and important theatrical function.  Later German dramaturgs included writers and directors such as Ludwig Tieck (1773-1853), who helped bring German literature out of Sturm und Drang into Romanticism; Otto Brahm (1856-1912), founder of Berlin’s Freie Bühne (Free Stage), and Bertolt Brecht (1898-1956), who served as dramaturg for Erwin Piscator (1893-1966) before developing his own plays and productions.

Lessing’s failure had little deterrent effect on the dawning of the profession of dramaturgy.  After the publication of Hamburg Dramaturgy, several other volumes on the subject followed.  In 1778/79, Otto Heinrich von Gemmingen (1755-1836; known as Heinrich while his father, with the same name, was called Otto), from an illustrious family—he was a baron, as was his father who was also a judge—published Mannheimer Dramaturgie (“Mannheim dramaturgy”). 

Having started with amateur dramatics in Heilbronn, where he spent his childhood, at 19, von Gemmingen moved to Mannheim, the seat of the Elector of the Palatinate, and soon came to the Elector’s attention. 

Appointed a chamberlain, a courtier responsible for maintaining a nobleman’s household, he took advantage of the expanded cultural scene in Mannheim and began to prepare himself for a literary career.  He was introduced to the Enlightenment at this time as well.

Meanwhile, by 1777, von Gemmingen was appointed supervisor of educational institutions and the theaters, a post once offered to (and turned down by) Lessing.  He also became friends with young Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-91), who was in Mannheim. 

In 1778, the new Mannheim National Theater was opened and von Gemmingen was offered the post of dramaturg.  He began translating plays into German and earned a reputation as a drama critic.  In 1778 and ’79, he wrote criticism and essays on theatrical theory for a theater journal; the pieces were collected in 1780.

He moved on from translation to writing original plays, including one, now lost, which he co-wrote with Mozart.  In 1779, von Gemmingen had his greatest stage success with Der deutsche Hausvater (“The German house father” or “The German father of the house”), in which the esteemed German actor Friedrich Ludwig Schröder (1744-1816), who later became a great friend of the author, starred.  The play was highly praised by Friedrich Schiller (1759-1805) and many critics and literary experts believe it influenced Schiller’s own Kabale und Liebe (Love and Intrigue; 1784).

Hausvater made von Gemmingen famous almost overnight; it played in German theaters all over Europe and remained in some companies’ repertoires for years.  He went on to write several other successful plays, but he left Mannheim and moved on to other pursuits.  He fell into heavy debt and died impoverished and almost forgotten.  Today, his name is hardly known.

In 1788-89, Baron Adolph Knigge (1752-96) published the journal Dramaturgische Blätter (“Dramaturgical pages”).  He had started an amateur theater in Hanau, Germany, in 1777.  He wrote several plays (the titles of which I wasn’t able to track down!), published in a two-volume edition titled simply Theaterstücke (“Theater pieces” or, simply, “Plays”; 1779-80).

Knigge, who was born Adolph von Knigge, but as a staunch supporter of the French Revolution, dropped the aristocratic von after the nobility was abolished there (though it appears on some of his books depending on the editor and date of publication), was a prolific writer on topics social and political, until his early death—apparently from “nervous fever and gallstones”—at the age of 43.

Heinrich Christoph Albrecht (1762-1800) was a German philologist, someone who studies language in oral and written historical form and applies the methodologies of textual criticism, literary criticism, history, and linguistics.  With no apparent ties to the theater, in 1791, he published the journal Neue hamburgische Dramaturgie (“New Hamburg dramaturgy”).  It only ran 16 issues.

Even after the demise of the Hamburg National Theater and the rejection of Lessing’s attempt to raise the artistic standards of both the theater’s repertoire and the Hamburg audience’s viewing habits—both of which are within a dramaturg’s job description, though a lot of tact and patience is generally required—the hiring of dramaturgs around the German-speaking world continued apace, except in Hamburg, which balked at a reprise of the experience.

(When I was doing a supervised research project for a dramaturgy course in grad school in 1984, I proposed offering some discreet in-house assessments of the work of the theater where I was serving as literary advisor.  My expectation was that this would be much very informal and entirely private—no public consumption of my opinions—but in the margin of my project journal, my teacher wrote: “Look, however, what happened to poor Lessing when he tried it!  This takes the most acute diplomacy.”)

There was still prestige to be gained at theaters which had a man with Lessing’s reputation and stature on the staff, and it provided the theater with a source of knowledge of playwriting and dramatic theory that gave them not only access to new plays—playwrights attract other playwrights—but a person with the expertise to evaluate scripts and nurse them from the page to the stage.

Also, having a playwright on the staff, even if he couldn’t turn out producible new scripts on demand, he could supply the company, becoming less and less dependent on classics and popular standards, with new plays of quality.  Even Löwen in Hamburg knew the value of that: in the dramatist’s brief stint as dramaturg, the National Theater produced four of Lessing’s plays, including the 1767 première of Minna von Barnhelm.

Far from permanently queering the pitch for dramaturgs in the German theater, Lessing seems to have stoked the eagerness for them.  Not only were they being hired, but they were finding their advice heeded.  (I suspect that the crop of dramaturgs that came behind Lessing knew not to come on like gangbusters and applied some finesse to their suggestions.) 

By the turn of the 19th century, the dramaturg had become a permanent and vital member of the German theater’s staff.  Many theaters have the split dramaturgical set-up to which I alluded briefly earlier, with a production dramaturg who works with the director and other artists in rehearsal and a literary dramaturg, what we’d call a literary manager or literary adviser, who deals with the selection of the repertoire, finding and evaluating scripts, and pretty much all text-based matters.  The dramaturgy departments of these subsidized companies comprise staffs of up to 12 full-time dramaturgs.

Along with the new dramaturgs, a whole herd of new writers was getting their work done on German stages, including Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832) and Heinrich von Kleist (1777-1811), who made débuts in Dresden at the Court Theater courtesy of Tieck’s dramaturgy.  Karl Immermann (1796-1840) brought classics by William Shakespeare (1564-1616) and Pedro Calderón de la Barca (1600-81) to Düsseldorf’s Stadttheater in 1835.  At Berlin’s Freie Bühne (1889-94) and Deutsches Theater (1894-1903), Brahm premièred Henrik Ibsen (1828-1906), August Strindberg (1849-1912), Émile Zola (1840-1902), and Gerhart Hauptmann (1862-1946) late in the 19th century.

Ironically, even with their new-found acceptance and influence in their theaters, these later dramaturgs often had the same disputes with actors and theatergoers that Lessing had and which, in part, scuttled his residency in Hamburg. 

Brecht was so bold as to demand in 1925, when he was one of the literary advisers at Max Reinhardt’s (1873-1943) Deutsches Theater in Berlin (where Brahm before him had served as manager), that the theater management cede all decision-making authority to him so he could shape the company’s repertoire to suit his own theories—and exclude all but his own plays.  The management rejected his demand.

Like Lessing, Brecht was more successful as a playwright that he was as a dramaturg.  He did get to run his own theater, the renowned Berliner Ensemble, established in 1949, just a few weeks after the founding of the German Democratic Republic itself after World War II in what was then Soviet-controlled East Berlin, capital of the GDR.

At the Berliner Ensemble, Brecht himself, now the theater’s artistic director, used dramaturgs extensively.  Indeed, my first dramaturgy professor at New York University was Carl Weber (1925-2016), an actor and dramaturg at the BE, and assistant director to Brecht.  The great playwright and director made the dramaturg his closest conceptual collaborator, giving them a significant say in all artistic considerations.

Dramaturgs in Germany, following on the Lessing debacle, have become integral to the success of the rep theaters in a country where nearly every town of any size has at least a Stadttheater (municipal theater) and often also a Stadtoper (city opera) and a Städtisches Orchester (municipal orchestra).  These aren’t community theaters, even in the small cities.  

(I lived for two years in a city of 100,000 residents, and it had a theater, an opera company, and an orchestra of very high quality—Germans take their culture very seriously.  The orchestra and the opera troupe were both bases for American artists to come and gain experience they couldn’t get in the States.)

[Thus endeth part one of “The History of Dramaturgy.”  On Tuesday, 3 January 2023, I’ll post part two, “The Modern Era,” which picks up in the 1970s (with a few quick warm-up trips to the early 1900s and a little after). 

[I’ll be focusing on the United States, but there’s a brief side-trip to Britain.  So we not only jump from the end of the 19th century to the last quarter of the 20th, we hop over half of Europe and across the Atlantic Sea, as Claude sings in Hair.. 

[I don’t know why I did that last reference.  It has nothing to do with anything.  I just felt like it was time for a song cue!]

"Unopened": 'A Pray by Blecht'

 

[The third installment in the New York Times “Unopened” series is the paper’s co-chief theater reviewer Jesse Green’s report on the demise of the Broadway plans for a musical with the unlikely title of A Pray by Blecht (and no, that’s not a typo).  It ran in the “Arts” section of the Times of 5 November 2020; the online version of the story was posted on 2 November under the headline “A Golden Team, a Terrible Title and a Show That Vanished.”

[As I observed in the introduction to the second installment of “Unopened,” the individual articles in this series aren’t connected (except by the common theme), but reading them all gives a (dismaying) picture of the traps and hurdles that have scuttled more than a few Broadway-bound endeavors.  I recommend, for those who are just joining the series, going back to parts one and two, posted on 26 February and 1 March, to read about the founderings of Lone Star Love in 2007 and Face Value in 1993.]

“A TOP TEAM, BUT THE SHOW VANISHED”
by Jesse Green

Would you like to see a new musical from the people who brought you “West Side Story”? For better or worse, you probably never will.

How do you top “West Side Story”?

If you’re Leonard Bernstein [1918-90], Stephen Sondheim [b. 1930] and Jerome Robbins [1918-98], the answer is: You don’t.

Well, you try. Ten years after the composer, the lyricist and the director-choreographer of that show (along with its book writer, Arthur Laurents [1917-2011]) changed the musical theater with their contemporary take on “Romeo and Juliet,” they rejoined forces to develop another project.

The idea was Robbins’s. He thought that one of Bertolt Brecht’s Lehrstücke, or teaching plays, could make a good musical, being short and pointed and fable-like. In 1967, he asked Sondheim to read “The Measures Taken,” the first in a collection of four translations, for possible adaptation. When Sondheim balked, finding the material too inert, Robbins told him to read the next play in the book.

That one, “The Exception and the Rule,” is about a rapacious oil merchant (read: capitalism) who races another merchant across a desert to win a lucrative deal. Accompanying him are a guide and a porter; when the three get lost, and the porter (read: exploited labor) tries to help the merchant, the merchant misunderstands the gesture and shoots him. Naturally, being of the ruling class, he is acquitted: Self-defense, the judge decides, applies even if the threat is imaginary.

Sondheim, eager to work with Robbins, whom he called “the only genius I had ever associated with,” thought this story might work, even though he found most of Brecht [1898-1956], and especially the teaching plays, “insufferably simplistic.” In his book “Look, I Made a Hat,” he wrote that there was “too much Lehr in each stück” — too much teaching in each play — “to hold my attention.”

Indeed, his attention waned after “taking a stab” at two songs. Giving up, he suggested that Robbins get Bernstein to write both music and lyrics. But Robbins instead asked Jerry Leiber [1933-2011], the word half of the pop songwriting team of Leiber and [Michael] Stoller [b. 1933], to work with the maestro. Though the odd couple did complete some numbers, the show stalled out. Most do, usually for their own good.

But “The Exception and the Rule,” as it was then called, had a gleam of possibility that kept it from dying completely. Perhaps it would be an exception itself, as “West Side Story,” which almost fell through several times, was in its day.

What looked like the key arrived when the playwright John Guare [b. 1938], then known for surreal way-off-Broadway comedies, joined up with a great idea for the adaptation.

The story would now take place in a television studio where the Brecht play is being readied for broadcast. The tension between the star actor playing the merchant (who was to be white) and the supporting actors playing the guide and porter (who were to be Black) would parallel the class paranoia of the inner scenes, while adding an element of racial paranoia to the mix. Sondheim, noting that the Brecht would be chopped up by scenes set in the present, “and thus not be so relentlessly Brechtian,” rejoined the team.

By April 1968, a New York Times theater column trumpeted a January 1969 opening for the new musical. Later that year, the producers announced that the Broadway star Zero Mostel [1915-77] would play the lead. It seemed a mere glitch in its inevitable success when, in October, the show, budgeted at $600,000 [$4.6 million today] and now bearing Bernstein’s awful Spooneristic title “A Pray by Blecht,” was postponed until the following fall.

[Spooneristic is a word I haven’t heard much lately, so if you’re unfamiliar with the expression, it means ‘having the form of a spoonerism.’  A spoonerism, according to Wikipedia, “is an error in speech in which corresponding consonants, vowels, or morphemes are switched . . . between two words in a phrase.”  

[An example, from one of my middle school teachers, is “duddy stubble hall” for “double study hall” (which is where I first heard the word spoonerism—my teacher called herself out on it).  An intentional spoonerism, from comedian George Carlin (1937-2008): “Don’t sweat the petty things and don’t pet the sweaty things.”  

[The speech error is named after William Archibald Spooner (1844-1930), an Oxford don and ordained minister who was renowned for mixing up the syllables in spoken phrases.]

And then: nothing.

It was so dead that Bernstein, nine years later, describing it as “a big wonderful show that could have been,” got its title wrong. He called it “The Measures Taken.”

What happened? According to “Look, I Made a Hat,” in which Sondheim relates “almost all” of the tale, the golden collaboration was “no fun at all”; he stepped away again after he and Bernstein, who treated him as if he were “still an apprentice” from “West Side Story” days, wrote eight songs. Robbins quit soon thereafter: In the middle of auditions, he excused himself to Guare and Bernstein, left the theater and took off in a cab to Kennedy Airport.

Perhaps it is better that some shows should die so that others might live. After “A Pray by Blecht” collapsed, Sondheim went on almost immediately to write “Company,” “Follies” and “A Little Night Music.” Guare’s 1971 play “The House of Blue Leaves” jump-started his career. Bernstein and Robbins would each return to Broadway, albeit with mixed success, while continuing to excel in classical music and ballet.

Yet it was Robbins, the runaway, who couldn’t let the idea die. In the spring of 1987, at Lincoln Center Theater, he directed a multiweek workshop of a new version of the show called “The Race to Urga.” Sondheim attended only two rehearsals, which (he recalled in an email) were inchoate and disorganized.

“I couldn’t tell anything about it,” he wrote, “except that it seemed (as I’d always thought it was) self-consciously Important instead of spontaneous and exuberant, which is the chief saving grace of any Brecht play (and was Brecht’s intention).”

Guare, who provided the necessary new lyrics, recently declined to comment on the experience, having “closed the door” on it ages ago.

One person was happy to comment, though: Zero Mostel’s son Josh [b. 1946]. In the 1987 workshop, he was cast (after Kevin Kline [b. 1947] apparently withdrew) in the role originally intended for his father.

By the time the show was performed for invited audiences in May of that year, he recalled, Robbins had given up on the white vs. Black theme; Joe Grifasi [b. 1944] played the guide and Thomas Ikeda the porter, still unfortunately referred to as the “coolie.” But Brecht’s warning about the dangers of unlimited power remained — and not just in the coda, during which planted actors rose from the audience to sing about revolution. Robbins himself was a warning about unlimited power.

“Working with Jerry was torture,” Mostel said. “Thomas Ikeda literally passed out in my arms in rehearsal, from exhaustion. At our last show, Bernstein fell down the stairs trying to get out of there. Jerry was nasty even to Guare, a very sweet guy. He was so controlling and paranoid he wouldn’t tell us what time the performances were until right before they started.

“But I have to say the songs were brilliant. And the book was one of the best of any musical I’d been in. Some friends brought a 6-year-old to the show, and he said, ‘Is that all?’ — which is a pretty good review. It should have moved forward, and the reason it didn’t is that no one could stand Jerry.”

That’s a shame; a musical exploring the prerogatives of class (and the power imbalances inherent in the theater) would be exceedingly timely now. At one point, Sondheim has a police officer sing proudly of his beat, “Thirty natives and all so quiet,” to which his partner replies, “Thirty-seven before the riot.”

That’s a lyric that needs no alteration to work as satire, or tragedy — or at any rate a stageworthy bit of Lehr — in 2020.

[Readers of Rick On Theater may note that I’ve mentioned the Brecht play The Measures Taken in a number of posts.  It was produced in New York City by the experimental theater troupe Shaliko in 1974 and I used it as an illustration in my discussion “Acting: Testimony & Role vs. Character,” posted on 25 September 2013. 

[After try-outs in Washington, D.C., and Philadelphia, the groundbreaking Broadway production of West Side Story opened at the Winter Garden Theatre (at 50th Street and Broadway) on 26 September 1957 and ran 732 performances before closing on 27 June 1959, a year and nine months later. 

[The production was nominated for five Tony Awards in 1958, including Best Musical (WSS lost to The Music Man), and won two (Best Scenic Design for Oliver Smith and Best Choreography for Robbins; the production also won Carol Lawrence, who played Maria, a Theatre World Award.

[Unlike the other Broadway attempts that didn’t make it to opening covered by this series, A Pray by Blecht was never even seen by a public audience.  The Lincoln Center workshop, performed as The Race to Urga before an invited audience, occurred in April and May 1987.

[Next in “Unopened” (7 March): “The Bob Dylan musical that tried to find a way—way before ‘Girl From the North Country.’”]

Bertolt Brecht and the Mental Health Players

by Kirk Woodward

[Frequent guest-blogger Kirk Woodward keeps contributing the most fascinating articles on theater and several other topics.  This time around, he’s reporting on a group that uses theater “to depict realistic scenarios involving mental health issues,” according to its website (http://www.mhanj.org/mental-health-players/).  It’s an education outreach program intended to teach audiences about mental illness in a dynamic and direct way that bypasses the clinical jargon and academic atmosphere of lectures, texts, and even documentary films.  Kirk got to know the program’s director and got involved with the group and felt that it was an experience worth writing about and disseminating on ROT.  But leave it to Kirk to find a unique take on the experience: he sees it as profoundly Brechtian.  I’ll let him explain that, but I’ll add that it adds a dimension to what was in any case an unusual encounter.]

“I’m not asking you to sit back in your chairs and enjoy the show. I’m asking you to sit on the edge of your chairs and think about what you’re seeing.”

Bertolt Brecht (1898-1956), the German playwright and director, could easily have spoken those very words as a summary of his theories about plays and how he wanted audiences to experience them. However, the words were spoken instead in August 2014, in a recreational room at a New Jersey YMHA, by a man named John Rogers, then the Interim Director of the New Jersey Mental Health Players (MHP).

John Rogers is a retired high school guidance counselor and a fine actor. I have seen him in several plays at the Union Congregational Church in Montclair, New Jersey; I wrote about one of those plays, Paul Claudel’s The Tidings Brought to Mary, in this blog (see “Religious Drama,” 19 January 2014). I knew him slightly, and our sons know each other. 

When John sat next to me at a production in the same church of five Chekhov one-act plays, he mentioned that he was leading a group that performs short improvised plays on mental health subjects. He invited me to talk with him further about it, and I met with him a few days later. The upshot was that both my friend Martha Day and I signed up for the program, which began with two training sessions.

According to a history provided by the group, the Mental Health Players began in Elmira, New York, in 1978, and members of that group created eleven troupes in New Jersey. Predictably, as the structure and approach of mental health organizations changed, so did the Mental Health Players. Their numbers shrank in the late 1990s, as responsibilities of their parent organizations increased; eventually there was only one group left in New Jersey, in Somerset County.  

However, starting in 2002 the entire program was refunded and reconceived to “focus entirely on presenting real life accounts of individuals showing the signs and symptoms of a variety of mental illnesses and disorders.” Its aim became to have at least fifty trained players, giving at least five community educational performances per month. The presentations are given at no cost to the host organizations at such locations as universities, hospitals, assisted living residences, and community centers.

Here’s how the MHP works. When an organization signs up for a performance, it indicates what topics might interest its audience the most. The performance might be for “consumers” – persons who have, and/or may have been treated for, mental health issues – or for more general audiences. In either case, John Rogers creates two scenarios for the event, each for two actors, each intended to last about six to eight minutes, followed by a discussion period with the audience. The entire presentation, with both scenes and both discussion periods, takes about an hour.

John writes a new scenario for each event; he doesn’t recycle earlier ones, although he may modify scenes from past performances that have worked well. Each scenario dramatizes at least one mental health issue; often, because of the complexities of life, it actually will dramatize two or more. The two actors in each scene discuss the scene on the phone in advance, making sure they’re focused on the issues and in agreement on the logistics of the scene, like where it’s taking place and what objects it might require. There is no rehearsal except that the actors meet to run through the scenarios right before the event, and then they perform them for the audience. A scenario may have actual lines in it, but they are meant to be suggestions indicating points to be made, rather than things the actors must say.

The scenarios are structured, John says, like a three act play – except that he “interrupts” the actors after the “second act,” at a logical stopping point in the action, and in “Act Three” the performers, still in character, discuss with the audience what the audience members have seen, what they think about it, and what they recommend to the “characters” to do. Not until the end of the evening do the actors introduce their “real” selves.

Martha and I found John’s training sessions for the program challenging and interesting. The scenes, obviously, are improvised, but they have definite points to get across. In fact each actor is instructed to identify at least three symptoms appropriate for the character’s mental state, and to make sure these are clearly presented in the play. (For example, a character in a scene about depression might demonstrate frequent tiredness, loss of interest in activities, and too much or too little sleep.) The entire performance has two aims: to help reduce the stigma associated with mental illness, and to help people think about steps that they themselves could take toward recovery.

A few technical details: 

• The troupe discourages yelling and screaming as a part of scenes; those may grab attention, but the scenes aim to demonstrate behavior, not to carry the audience away emotionally. 

• During the question-and-answer period, the actors are not supposed to “continue the scene” with each other, although they stay in character; they are urged to direct their responses to the audience members, not to each other. (The temptation for actors to keep on acting with their partners is very strong.) It is the audience that needs to change, not the actors-as-characters. 

• Actors are requested not to take part in scenes that represent mental health challenges they themselves are currently facing. A sufferer from severe depression should not do a scene about it.

• Given the opportunity to have the lights in the auditorium turned off so the audience can focus on the actors, John says no. We’re not doing conventional theater, he says; we’re giving a presentation. (See below for more on this very Brechtian approach.)

If I may put it this way, the aim of the Mental Health Players is realism but not reality. Another way to say this is that what the MHP does is not the same as psychodrama. Eric Bentley, in his book Thinking  About the Playwright (1987) gives a fascinating account of the theatrical techniques that the late Dr. Jacob Levy Mareno used in group therapy, with actual patients conceiving of scenes and participating in them (sometimes assisted by professionals), in front of an audience. The primary aim of Dr. Mareno’s work was the healing of the patient, but of course the audience was invited to grow too. Bentley suggests that the central purpose of the experience was education. Although a performance by the MHP’s may not necessarily be immediately therapeutic, it does share with psychodrama the purpose of educating its audience, and thereby of changing it.

A few days after our first training session Martha and I went to see the performance of the MHP that I described at the beginning of this piece. There were a table and chairs for the actors in the front of the good-sized recreation room; those pieces made up the entire set. John Rogers began and ended the evening for the audience of perhaps thirty people by ringing a small bell and explaining that it symbolizes the Mental Health Bell, weighing 300 pounds and on display in Virginia, forged in 1953 from chains and shackles that mental patients had worn in “insane asylums” in the 1800s.  

Then John invited the audience to watch the play, as described above, and the actors began.

About three minutes into the first scene, an audience member began, too – she began to comment on and respond to just about every line the actors spoke, and she continued for the rest of the evening. Participatory theater! The actors incorporated what she said as best they could, but she was overwhelming, and she was equally active during the discussion periods that followed each of the two scenes. John Rogers did his best to give others a chance to talk, and of course then the lady talked to them. John told us afterwards, both amazed and amused, that in his thirty-five years in the program, that had never happened before.

John brought two people in to watch the scene Martha and I brought to our second and final training session. The theme of the scene was depression, and Martha managed to represent just about the most depressed person I’d ever seen – very effective. Afterwards John led the discussion in the direction of steps for recovery – how could Martha be helped in her situation? Alone with us again, he pointed out that I had left out anything that would help the audience realize the relationship in the scene – that we were supposed to be brother and sister, not, say, a married but separated couple. (John’s critiques were always generous but accurate.) I also realized that I had been vague in my own mind about which symptoms we wanted to demonstrate, and that I would have to spend more time becoming familiar with the facts about different kinds of mental illness.

Notes on my first three performances:

Martha and I both presented our first scene – not the “depression” scene - to the public, along with four other actors in two other scenes, at a center for developmental disabilities, where an audience of 35 to 40 patients ranged from high-functioning to the extremely disabled. Throw out that idea that this is not psychodrama – the plan was, this time only, for us to present the scenes, then for members of the audience to participate in “replays” of them. This worked about as well as one would expect – not very well – but John used every strategy in his arsenal to get the varied audience members to join the scenes, and to get value out of them.

A week later, Martha and I repeated the “depression” scene for a crowd of 200 at a conference on church and mental health in a large Baptist church. One of the speakers had written a book suggesting that church isn’t enough for dealing with mental illness – you wouldn’t expect a preacher to heal your broken leg! John wrote that thought into the scene, and Martha, who in real life is a preacher, walloped it with such force that it left me, at least, stunned. I imagine she gave the conference something to think about. 

And a week later found us at an assisted living community for an audience of fourteen. Since we presented three scenes this time, John plus the six actors meant that we were half the number of the audience. No matter – we got intelligent questions and suggestions, and that’s what we’re after.

What, now, do the Mental Health Players have to do with Bertolt Brecht? In the invaluable book Brecht on Theatre (1964), its editor John Willett includes a well-known chart that shows clearly how Brecht’s ideas of theater differed from conventional theatrical approaches. A few of the antonyms are that conventional theater “implicates the spectator in a stage situation” – it feels it has succeeded when the audience is “involved.” Conversely, Brecht’s theater, Brecht hoped, “turns the spectator into an observer,” which is the posture the MHP audience is invited to assume. Conventional theater “wears down [the audience member’s] capacity for action” – a really good play “puts us through the wringer.” Brecht, on the other hand, hoped his theater “arouses [its] capacity for action,” and the MHP troupe aims to bring its audience to take action, by changing attitudes toward mental health issues, by supporting treatment programs, or even by seeing a specialist.

Not all the comparisons on the chart apply to the Mental Health Players; one reason is that Brecht wasn’t thinking of short scenes but of full length plays. But is it possible for a full-length play to sustain Brecht’s approach? The jury is still out on that question, but the results are not promising. Mother Courage and Her Children, perhaps one of Brecht’s best-known play, is gripping, no matter how much it tries to keep us off balance in our responses. We participate in it emotionally. We follow Mother Courage, we get to know her family, we empathically share in her predicament. Brecht knew this; he himself noted that he had seldom seen his theories succeed in practice. 

But the MHP has achieved what he had difficulty achieving. “The spectator stands outside, studies . . . [is] made to face something, brought to the point of recognition… [the human being] is [seen by the audience as being] alterable and capable of being altered . . . .” This is not to say that audiences aren’t involved in the scenes the MHP present; they should be, and Brecht might not argue. He was perhaps really looking for an additional dimension in theater, and the MHP demonstrate that such a dimension is possible.

Would the technique that the Mental Health Players use work for other kinds of purposes – political, say, or religious? Probably so, in theory, but the difficulty is that there are numerous political and religious points of view, and therefore numerous potential kinds of audience, and, ordinarily, purpose-driven theater ends up being presented to an audience that’s already primed to agree with it. This is notoriously the limitation that political theater in particular faces. 

But the MHP has a subject that we all have in common and that we’re all interested in – ourselves. Most of us are concerned with our own mental health; most of us want to improve our own lives; some of us even want to help people who are close to us, who are struggling with mental health issues of their own. “The proper study of mankind is man,” Alexander Pope wrote, or, to put it another way, you can’t go wrong by talking to people about themselves. 

One final note: many of us now working in theater grew up in a generation that read Jerzy Grotowski’s book Towards a Poor Theatre (1968). The title, not to mention the book, serves as a reminder that no matter how complex other media become, theater is at its heart very simple: a couple of actors with a story worth telling, a space, and an audience do the job admirably – as I’ve seen in the MHP for myself.

[After I read “Bertolt Brecht and the Mental Health Players,” I remarked to Kirk that it was too bad MHP hadn’t been around when I appeared in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest in grad school and directed a stage adaptation of Anton Chekhov’s Ward 6 Off-Off-Broadway in New York.  I could have used someone, I told Kirk, with knowledge of both theater and mental illnesses.  (It would also have been helpful back in college when Kirk’s and my university theater put on Peter Weiss’s Marat/Sade and I played one of the asylum inmates.)  For Cuckoo’s Nest, in which I played the doctor, the cast made a visit to a state psychiatric facility and later had a question-and-answer session with a mental-health professional; for Ward 6, I brought in a psychiatrist to talk to the actors and he tried to diagnose the illnesses of each patient and describe some typical behaviors.  But these pros, as generous and interested as they were, weren’t theater people and couldn’t really help us with stage behavior.  (For Marat/Sade, we essentially improvised our own disorders and developed behaviors with the help of the director.)  MHP, of course, wasn’t established to be a resource for actors and directors who are working on plays about mental illness, but they are nonetheless people with one foot in both camps: mental health and performance.]