"Don’t Say 'Macbeth' . . . And other superstitions, traditions and secrets of the theater world"

by Juan A. Ramírez

[On 14, 17, 20, and 23 August 2020, I posted a four-part series called “Ghosts, Curses, & Charms: Theater Superstitions” on Rick On Theater (the link is to the first installment).  Three months ago, in T, its magazine dedicated to fashion, living, beauty, holiday, travel, and design coverage that’s published 11 times a year, the New York Times published an article on a similar topic, but also covering some of the personal traditions in which theater folk engage behind the scenes. 

[Juan A. Ramirez’s article on some of these peculiar customs (including some I covered in my post) was published in T: The New York Times Style Magazine on 17 November 2025; it was posted on the paper’s website as “Don’t Say ‘Macbeth’ and Other Strange Rituals of the Theater World” on 8 November.]

Pulling back the curtain on the theater world’s strange rituals and enduring superstitions.

You may not have realized it, but there’s little chance you’ve heard anyone whistle inside a theater. In the old days, sailors often worked the ropes backstage, bringing to show business codes like command whistles. So a whistle meant as a compliment, or to get a person’s attention, might have landed a piece of scenery on someone’s head.

Theater is full of these customs — many arising, like most rituals, from hazy origins. Still, show people hold on to them. In an industry that hopes to conjure the same wonder every night (with wildly different results), there’s comfort in tradition, especially if it reaches back decades or even centuries. Some, as the 56-year-old Broadway wardrobe supervisor and costume designer Patrick Bevilacqua [The Great Gatsby (2024-Present)] says, are “rituals of consistency” — the private fist bumps or helpful Listerine sprays during a backstage quick change, which must be “choreographed within an inch of its life” to keep the show running smoothly. Others are spiritual; according to the actress Lea Salonga [Miss Saigon (1991-2001): Tony for Best Actress in a Musical, Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Actress in a Musical, Theatre World Award; Stephen Sondheim’s Old Friends (upcoming in April)], 53, “any practice where everyone can see each other as human” is necessarily grounding.

Some are individual: The actor Hugh Jackman [The Boy From Oz (2003-04): Tony for Best Actor in a Musical, Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Actor in a Musical, Theatre World Award; ], 56, last seen as the lead in “The Music Man” [2022-23] on Broadway in 2023, buys scratch-off lottery tickets for each production member every Friday; occasionally, someone wins a few hundred dollars. Some are secretive, like stealing costumes after a show closes, while others are blared through the house, as when stage managers announce on loudspeakers before a performance, “It’s Saturday night on Broadway,” a reminder that the wearying workweek is almost over.

Length dictates quantity: Longer-running productions are more likely to develop more idiosyncratic traditions. This means that in New York, Broadway is more ritualistic than Off, and musicals outmatch straight plays for the same reason. The 64-year-old actress Amra-Faye Wright [Chicago (1996-Present)], for example, has for about a decade been painting murals each season backstage for “Chicago,” the second-longest-running musical in Broadway history [the current production has run 11,105 regular performances (as of 16 February)], which opened in 1975 [until 1977] and has been up since its 1996 revival [Wright was in it 2006-24]. All agree that London is more laid-back, despite having some quirks, such as everyone in the cast and crew banging on the windows facing the National Theatre’s interior courtyard on opening night; or the Baddeley cake, an intricately decorated and frosted dessert that varies from show to show but has been served with punch at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, every Jan. 6 since 1795. It’s named after Robert Baddeley [1733-94; best known for playing Moses in Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s The School for Scandal], an actor who played minor roles there and who in his will bequeathed funds for the annual festivity.

As the 43-year-old British director Michael Longhurst [artistic director of London’s Donmar Warehouse theater (2019-2024; directed Broadway transfer of Tony Kushner’s Caroline, or Change (2020-21), which originated at Chichester Festival Theatre); nominated for Tony for Best Revival of a Musical, Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Revival of a Musical] says, most are “a mix of the practical and superstitious.” Actors tell one another to break a leg — maybe because “good luck” is gauche; maybe because they’re an understudy wishing a principal would just bow out; maybe because a theater’s “legs” are the thin drapes that frame the stage, which you’d cross if receiving an ovation; or maybe just because they know it’s a phrase they ought to keep alive.

It’s like when the actress Patti LuPone [Evita (1979-83): Tony for Best Actress in a Musical, Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Actress in a Musical; Anything Goes (1987-89): Drama Desk for Outstanding Actress in a Musical; Gypsy (2008-09): Tony for Best Actress in a Musical, Drama Desk for Outstanding Actress in a Musical; Company (2021-22): Tony for Best Performance by an Actress in a Featured Role in a Musical, Drama Desk for Outstanding Featured Actress in a Musical; Theatre World’s John Willis Award for Lifetime Achievement (2021)], 75, was given some of Ethel Merman’s [1908-84] jewels by the wardrobe supervisor Adelaide Laurino [1929-2003] to wear in the Broadway musical “Evita” in 1979. She didn’t just steal them because . . . well, who wouldn’t? She stole them because, as she says, “these will be passed down, but [the recipient] won’t be given the information that will be lost to time.”

Cards From the Neighbors and a Telegram From Bette Midler

It’s grueling work to get a play ready, which is why there’s a collective sense of celebration when a new show opens. For the past few decades, the casts and companies of Broadway productions have signed cards bearing their shows’ logos, then sent them to the newest show on its opening night. What were once couriered over were later faxed and are now sometimes sent as PDFs that are printed out by stage managers. While some shows keep them up throughout their run, most are displayed about as long as Christmas cards.

Aside from these well wishes, companies can expect gifting tables backstage full of presents from their producers and admirers and from one another. These can range from bottles of Champagne and homemade cookies to elaborate offerings like branded bomber jackets, tote bags and alarm clocks. Before the pandemic, Tiffany key chains featuring a show’s artwork would often be distributed in New York. The American actress Marisha Wallace [Aladdin (2014-Present); Something Rotten! (2015-17)], 39, who works mostly in London, says that British openings are not “as extravagantly gifted because U.K. people aren’t really gifters.” She learned this when she showed up to “Dreamgirls” in 2016 [Savoy Theatre, West End, through 2019] with T-shirts and personalized mugs for everyone, only to receive cookies in return. (Brits do, however, enjoy closing-night gifts.)

Personalized presents, as always, are the most appreciated. Salonga, who will return to Broadway in the Stephen Sondheim revue “Old Friends” next spring, remembers her first starring role (at 9 in 1980 as Annie in the musical’s Manila premiere), when her aunt gave her a small brass elephant. She now collects these figurines in her dressing room, pointing them toward the stage for good luck. The actress Tracie Bennett [End of the Rainbow (2012): Tony nomination for Best Performance by an Actress in a Leading Role in a Play, Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Actress in a Play, Theatre World], 63, still marvels at the books — some filled with recipes inspired by the production — that Denis O’Hare [Take Me Out (2003-04): Tony for Best Featured Actor in a Play, Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Featured Actor in a Play; Sweet Charity (2005): Drama Desk for Outstanding Featured Actor in a Musical], 62, gave to his co-stars in Sondheim’s posthumous Off Broadway show, “Here We Are,” last year at the Shed [2023-24] in New York: “He didn’t need to do it,” she says, “and that’s the point!”

LuPone, a self-described “instinctual archivist,” keeps many opening-night tokens in a curio cabinet at her Connecticut home, including an “Evita” death mask and an egg filled with small wooden statuettes of the actors from the 1987 revival of “Anything Goes” and mounted on a music box. The 46-year-old actress Mandy Gonzalez [In the Heights (2008-11): Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Ensemble Performance], now appearing in the Broadway revival of “Sunset Boulevard” [2024-Present], has long kept two significant gifts: a Western Union telegram sent by Bette Midler [b. 1945], for whom she used to sing backup, the first time Gonzalez originated a role on Broadway, in 2002’s “Dance of the Vampires” [through 2003]; and an iPod engraved with a message from Yoko Ono [b. 1933] for the 2005 premiere of the musical “Lennon” [2005].

Another backstage tradition was started by Alyce Gilbert, 81, who in 2007 became the only wardrobe supervisor to be honored with a Tony [Tony Honor for Excellence in Theatre], along with the late dresser Bobbye Sue Albrecht. Gilbert’s first Broadway show was the memorable run of “A Chorus Line” at the Shubert Theatre in 1975 [through 1990 (6,137 performances)]. When Bob Fosse’s “Dancin’” [1978-92 (1,774 performances)] stole several of that production’s members three years later, she and Albrecht procured a glass candy jar, spelled “Dancin’Wardrobe” on its lid with stick-on letters and took it next door to the Broadhurst. “It was the first time anyone had sent something that was really for the wardrobe department,” Gilbert says. Almost five decades later, she’s sent a jar to most musicals, and some plays, on their opening night. Filled with peppermints — they’re good for the throat and, unlike chocolates, won’t stain costumes — the jars remain in the wardrobe department for all to enjoy; crew members take them home, or to their next show, upon closing. Bevilacqua, the wardrobe supervisor for Broadway’s “The Great Gatsby,” says that collecting them has become an industry badge of honor.

You Must Touch the Robe

One of Broadway’s most regimented traditions has an impressive musical theater pedigree: In 1950, a chorus member on “Gentlemen Prefer Blondes” [1949-51]. took a robe from a fellow chorine and sent it to a friend who was opening that night in the ensemble of “Call Me Madam” [1950-52] starring Ethel Merman [1908-84; Call Me Madam: Tony for Best Actress in a Musical; Hello, Dolly! (1964-70): Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Performance; Special Tony Award for her lifetime contributions to show business (1972)]. The recipient later added a cloth cabbage rose from Merman’s costume to the pale pink robe and gave it to a chorus member in the next opening musical, “Guys and Dolls” [1950-53], and an informal ritual was born. Since they traveled so quickly from contract to contract, Broadway dancers were often called “gypsies,” so the similarly itinerant garment was called the Gypsy Robe until 2018, when members of the union Actors’ Equity Association voted to rename it the Legacy Robe. [See my post “The Gypsy Robe” (4 November 2012).]

Equity had taken over the robe’s distribution long before then [1982], codifying the rules when it became obvious it was being improperly handled or accounted for, awarded based on popularity or bogged down by heavy additions such as shoes. These days, the robe is presented on the opening night of a Broadway musical to the ensemble member with the most Broadway chorus credits. An elaborate ceremony — which occurs half an hour before curtain, with the entire company (and past recipients) invited to attend — is led by the robe’s previous caretaker, who recites an Equity-written speech before revealing its new keeper. Once outfitted, that person circles the stage counterclockwise three times as each cast member reaches out to touch the robe for good luck. Then there’s a dash through the theater as the recipient visits each dressing room to bless the production.

The performer Jeffrey Schecter, 51, held back tears while receiving his second robe when a revival of “Once Upon a Mattress” [2024] opened this past August. [Schechter received his first robe, then still called the Gypsy Robe, for Fiddler on the Roof (2015-16).] Katie Webber, 43, who presented him with the robe that she’d received for “The Great Gatsby” [2024-Present] says the tradition not only honors the performers who form the backbone of any Broadway musical but also speaks to the profession’s unsteady, nice-work-if-you-can-get-it nature: “The longer I’m in this business, the more I’m shocked I’m still working.”

The wardrobe supervisor oversees the application of their production’s panel to the robe, which often bears the name of its recipient and includes signatures from all cast members. Bevilacqua says he likes to incorporate costume trims so that “in 100 years, people can see these were the fabrics we were using.” Once a robe is filled up, it’s archived by Equity, although a few of the 35 or so robes have been retired to the Lincoln Center Library for the Performing Arts, the Museum of the City of New York and the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History. The robe that Schecter recently received had denim patches representing the down-home sensibilities of the previous season’s “Shucked” [2023-24], and there was also a black panel from the 2023 “Sweeney Todd” revival [through 2024] on one of the robe’s floor-length sleeves with a line on it from the show in blood-red yarn: “At last, my right arm is complete again.”

Falling Pigs, Dollar Fridays and Other Diversions

All productions must find ways to make coming to work every day fun and surprising. The wardrobe crew on the 2024 Tony-winning play “Stereophonic” [2024-25] started an odd tradition in which cast and crew members take turns dropping a five-inch-long silicone pig down the four flights of the John Golden Theatre’s stairwell when the actors receive their five-minute “places” call before the second act. Many people begin lending libraries of favorite books. During his ongoing stint in the musical “Hadestown” [2019-Present] the actor Jordan Fisher [Hamilton (2015-Present); Dear Evan Hansen (2016-22); Sweeney Todd (2023-24)], 30, also created his own more unique communal space: a stageside calibration station that acts as a type of shrine to which the company contributes crystals, stones, toys and flowers. According to Wallace, many London companies play a game in which everyone affixes a baby picture to the wall and then attempts to guess who’s who.

But the most widespread — and lucrative — activity is Dollar Fridays, a raffle that Bevilacqua half-jokes is “where we make our money.” The rules are simple: Someone (typically the production stage manager) passes around a kitty before the Friday evening performance; anyone is welcome to pitch in a dollar or more with their name written on it. Variations occur: Whole dressing rooms can enter as a unit, and famous actors are known to chip in extra. The winner is announced later in the evening — some productions do it during intermission — usually by the person organizing it. Certain shows allow participants to use Venmo. “But then,” laments the 43-year-old former “Stereophonic” stage manager, Erin Gioia Albrecht [A Strange Loop (2022--23)], “you can’t spread the dollar around the Theater District.”

A Bright Light to Ward Off Accidents — and Spirits

A ghost light is an exposed bulb that the head electrician or another crew member leaves center stage after hours so that nobody falls and hurts themselves in the dark. But for those with one foot in the supernatural world — and, as Albrecht says, “it’s certainly a superstitious industry” — the light is there to keep evil spirits away . . . or to provide friendly ghosts with a pleasant overnight experience. Many believe that every house on Broadway, the West End and beyond is haunted by any number of specters: the theater’s original owner, making sure that things are running smoothly; an aggrieved actor, still out for that final bow; a doomed showgirl, cursed to remain in destiny’s chorus. [Refer to my post on “Ghosts, Curses, & Charms,” referenced above: Part 1 explains the ghost light, and Parts 3 and 4 recount many theater ghost legends.]

Gonzalez, who starred in “Hamilton” from 2016 to 2022, recalls going into the cavernous Richard Rodgers Theatre to collect her belongings shortly after Covid-19 shut down Broadway for 18 months [March 2020-June 2021]. “The ghost light was the only light on,” she says. “Even though we were in a pandemic, I was proud the tradition stayed — one day we were going to reopen, and we needed good vibes.”

Other Curses and Hauntings

“I don’t even mind a poltergeist,” says LuPone, who believes she was haunted by Eva Perón’s [1919-52] ghost throughout multiple runs of “Evita.” In the world of pretend, she adds, “everything that goes along with the theater — the magic, the superstitions — just enhances one’s performance.” But even for nonbelievers, there’s charm to be found in eerier traditions. Salonga, who doesn’t consider herself “one of those people that attracts supernatural beings,” would nonetheless offer a greeting while walking backstage at London’s Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, to whichever ghosts might be haunting it, including the so-called Man in Gray, a mysterious figure with a cloak, sword and tricorn hat who supposedly roams around there. [Salonga has been at the Drury Lane twice: she premièred Miss Saigon there in 1989-99, winning an Olivier Award for her performance, and she returned for Lea Salonga in Concert at Drury Lane on 26 June 2024.]

Wallace learned the hard way that even practical customs can turn metaphysical. When Michael Ball [b. 1962], her co-star [as Edna Turnblad] in the 2021 London Coliseum production of “Hairspray,” caught her whistling backstage, he warned of bad times to come. No sailors dropped any beams on her head, but most of the cast soon came down with Covid, forcing the musical to temporarily close. And Gonzalez admits that she’s not sure whether “Dance of the Vampires” bombed (it closed just over a month after opening) because of the material or because she didn’t touch the Legacy Robe during its ceremony.

Perhaps the industry’s best-known bylaw is that, unless acting in Shakespeare’s early 17th-century play, one should never say the word “Macbeth” inside a theater — otherwise you risk ruining the current production. The origins of this are predictably murky. The play traffics in things that might very well incur a hex — witches, hauntings, grisly murders — but one possible source could be the simple fact that, in an era when most theater companies operated in repertory (performing a rotating selection of popular works), “the Scottish play,” as the piece can be safely referred to, was a guaranteed moneymaker. If your season was failing, it might be time to stage “Macbeth.”

The way to lift the curse — which LuPone enforced during a 2008 revival of “Gypsy,” when its director and playwright, Arthur Laurents [1917-2011], accidentally uttered the word during previews, after which a cast member broke their pelvis — is for the perpetrator to exit the theater, turn three times, spit over their left shoulder, swear, then say a line from another of Shakespeare’s works or knock on the theater door to be allowed back in.

Shakespeare, in fact, invites a fair amount of shibboleths. As Longhurst says, “If your repertoire is classical or Greek plays, you begin to connect to the ancient rituals.” A few years ago, the director learned of a site-specific one at Shakespeare’s Globe in London: All shows there must end in a newly choreographed jig — or chance a calamity. Longhurst was skeptical when directing a production of John Ford’s 17th-century play “’Tis Pity She’s a Whore” in 2014 (“You finish and everyone is dead, and it’s like, ‘Well, now we get up and do a dance?’”) but appreciated the creative challenge and came to see it as a way to counteract the show’s grim finale.

That’s hardly the only jinx that verges on the comical. Rumor has it that Daniel Frohman [1851-1940], the early 20th-century producer-manager of Broadway’s Lyceum Theatre [1886-1909], would wave a white handkerchief from his office overlooking the stage whenever his overacting wife, Margaret Illington [1879-1934], needed to rein in her performance. Some actors, in flashes of ego death, still admit to seeing that hankie today.

[Juan A. Ramirez is a New York-based Venezuelan-American writer and critic focused on film, theater, and all forms of pop culture, as well as queer issues.  His writing has been featured in the New York Times, New York magazine, T: The New York Times Style Magazine, them, INTO, HuffPost, DigBoston, Exeunt NYC, Theatrely, and the Huntington News.

[I didn’t cover the personal back-stage traditions of theater folk in my “Ghosts, Curses, & Charms.”  I had some practices of my own that I tried to keep up, however.  At the first theater at which I worked in New York City, I began bringing in brownies for my castmates.  I guess I did it about once a week during performances, and each batch was a little different.  The first tray were simply straight chocolate brownies, but when those went over well, I got adventurous.  I made mocha brownies by adding coffee to the batter, and chocolate-mint brownies.  I put peanut butter drops in one batch, and I even added a taste of brandy to one.  (And no, I never made pot or hash brownies.)

[I didn’t keep that up, though.  That theater was just a couple of blocks down from my apartment, so it was easy to bring the tray of brownies with me, but later I worked at theaters all over Manhattan—and a couple in New Jersey.  I retreated to an easier treat.  

[There were a couple of unusual toy stores in my neighborhood, and another shop that sold craft items from indigenous people from all over the world.  I looked for small gifts that either seemed evocative of my fellow actors and the director, or ones that seemed to match the characters they were playing—hopefully with a little humor.

[That got hard to keep up, so in the end, I finally just bought assorted mini-bottles of liquor.  One of the liquor stores near my apartment sold the little bottles like the ones served on airplanes.  That turned out not to be much fun, either to shop for or to give; there was no imagination in it.

[I also made it a practice for opening night to send the cast a telegram, following the old tradition of years ago.  I think the first ones I sent were actual Western Union telegrams, but then I learned of a service that just did opening night theater telegrams.  The messages came on special forms with colorful designs specifically reflecting show business, and the service, whose name I no longer remember—I’m sure it’s no longer operating anyway—guaranteed delivery just before curtain.]

'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.]

'The Producer and the Play'

by Kirk Woodward 

[As readers of Rick On Theater will probably know by now, Kirk Woodward, my friend and a prolific contributor to this blog (author of or contributor to 122 posts to date), including the post with by far the most views of all 1,120 since I started ROT, is an avid reader.  Many of his posts are book reports, as it were, or reports on his responses to various books on many topics.

[Well, Kirk’s back now with an examination of a relative oldie, Norman Marshall’s The Producer and the Play from 1957.  Marshall was an actor and ultimately a director with, as Kirk observes, “a sharp eye on his profession.”  He also had strong opinions about the theater in the United Kingdom, the Continent, and Russia/the Soviet Union of his day, as you’ll see.

[It’s worth noting that Kirk, among the other topics on which he’s blogged on ROT, has written a number of times on directing and directors.  See his posts “Directing Twelfth Night for Children” (16 and 19 December 2010), “Reflections On Directing” (11, 14, 17, and 20 April 2013), “Evaluating A Director” (1 March 2017), “On Directing Shakespeare” (1 March 2019), and “Directors You’d Rather Not Work With” (25 June 2019).]

Reading a collection of the theater reviews of the brilliant writer Kenneth Tynan (1927-1980 [see Kirk’s post on 29 September 2021]), I found a reference to a book, just published when he wrote about it, called The Producer and the Play (1957, republished with additional material in 1975) by Norman Marshall (1901-1980). It sounded charming and although it is out of print, copies can be obtained inexpensively, which I did.

Marshall was a director with a fine career in England, directing experimental and more conventional productions, working with the Old Vic, and instrumental in the establishment of the National Theatre of Great Britain. But he has a sharp eye on his profession and he provides a balanced and sometimes critical view of fashions in directing.

The word “producer” needs clarification. When the book was written (in England, so there are differences between my spelling and his in some quotations in this article), in British theater a “producer” was what we would call a director; the usage had substantially changed by the republication of the book in 1975.

Marshall points out that for a long time “producer” was an accurate word for a director, because the same person – for example, an actor-manager, someone who both ran a theater and starred in its productions – was likely to have a big share in both functions. In any case, in The Producer and the Play it makes sense for readers today to substitute the word “director” for “producer” wherever it occurs.

The Producer is not a comprehensive history of directing, even beyond the fact that it was written in the 1950’s. It does not consider theater in the Western Hemisphere at all; Marshall said that to do so would simply have made the book too long. So its focus is on directing in Britain, continental Europe, and Russia and the Soviet Union.

Also, with the exception of a part of one chapter, it doesn’t talk much about the methods that directors use to achieve their results. It is more a book about those results, then, than about how they are achieved.

Marshall organizes The Producer in terms of large themes: the early history of directing; experiments in directing; the Russian Konstantin Stanislavski (1863-1938) and his approaches to directing; methods of staging the plays of William Shakespeare (1564-1616); working with different theater configurations; working with playwrights; working with actors.

This concentration on themes makes the book useful despite its age, because the principles Marshall describes as he goes along can be applied to the work of directors at any time. I would describe his general line of thought as something like this (my words, not his):

Directors can be plotted along a spectrum. At one extreme are the technicians, the directors who tell the actors where to walk and stand on stage and don’t do much else. These are the “journeyman” directors who see their responsibility as “putting the play on its feet.”

At the other end of the spectrum is the director who’s a dreamer, a theorizer, a visionary. This director may or may not be able to do the practical work of getting a play on stage. [Kirk affirms that this is the same as what Eric Bentley dubbed the director with a “Bright Idea.” That term is discussed in several past ROT posts: “The Glass Menagerie” (8 April 2017; that post’s afterword includes a brief discussion of Bentley’s phrase and refers to the essay in which he coined it); “Directors You’d Rather Not Work With” by Kirk Woodward (referenced above in the foreword); “The Orchard” by Kirk Woodward (7 July 2022; another discussion in the post’s afterword)]

Marshall devotes a good deal of space to a discussion of Gordon Craig (1872-1966), whose theoretical works have had great influence but whose production designs were often impossible to achieve.

Between these two extremes, directors make a series of choices that range between carrying out the intentions of the playwright, and implementing their own ideas of how the play ought to be presented.

The effect of descriptions of hundreds of these attempts to transform plays is often comic, because a significant number of them are wild – as is also the case in our own day. The various approaches could go in two directions, toward less on stage than might be expected, or toward more, often much more. Both can make the mind spin.

Having some sort of director for a play – whether formally or informally – is, according to Marshall, a natural thing. “It is impossible,” he says, “even to get up a charade at a Christmas party without somebody taking charge and giving directions.”

But, he notes, “in the theatre, until about a hundred years ago, these directions needed to be only of the simplest kind, and did not require a specialist to issue them.” The American actor William Macready (1793-1873) astonished his casts by insisting on rehearsal, a thing they never did and over which they almost threw a strike. For decades what we would think of as “real directing” took place primarily in musical halls and “pantomimes,” elaborate British Christmas plays.

Times have changed, a process that Marshall tracks, and it’s hard to think of a theatrical production that doesn’t have a director – but Marshall’s book illustrates that given enough time, people will try anything where directing goes, even doing without it. (An example is the three productions of Shakespeare’s Richard II by the British troupe Anərkē Shakespeare in 2018-2019).

Much of the history of directing can be described, using the terms loosely, as a struggle between “realism,” a more or less literal representation of ordinary ways of living, and, for lack of a better word, “anti-realism,” which, as Marshall puts it, “should not attempt to reproduce an exact image of the locale of the play, but must seek to give the illusion of imaginative truth, not actual truth.”  

Sometimes, however, the “struggle” was within a director. The German director Max Reinhart (Germany was and remains a hotbed of directorial ideas), who lived from 1873 to 1943, worked for a realism of scenic effects, but on a gigantic scale, to the point where they sometimes began to overwhelm the plays for which they were created.

At the same time he staged plays, for example by Bernard Shaw (1856-1950), that were unquestionably realistic – although Shaw himself preferred a bravura form of “realism” influenced by opera and by declamatory activities like public speaking, Marshall writes that Reinhart

was at heart a realist – but an imaginative realist. His best productions united a modified form of stylization with a realism which was merely literal.

Not all directors on the anti-realist side were so restrained. Attempts to create an “anti-realist” theater – which very definitely continue to our day – take us toward the visionary side of the directorial spectrum, some of them pretty far toward the extreme. Gordon Craig, already cited, called actors “puppets” and dreamed of a theater that could do without them. Craig called for

An art which will exceed in stature all other arts, an art which says less yet shows more than all . . . . I prophesy that a new religion will be found contained in it. That religion will preach no more, but it will reveal. It will not show us the definite images which the painter and sculptor show us. It will unveil thoughts to our eyes, silently – by movement – in visions.

Craig was inspirational for many theater artists, but clearly the “how” of his proposal is at best extremely vague. To create a non-realistic theater, though, directors did create productions that provide plenty of examples of daring, experiment, and plain old craziness.

Marshall is not a fan of extremes in direction.  His opposition is not absolute, although he does write, “I have never been able to discover any good, logical reason for [the] extreme anti-illusionist method of production.” He describes how early in his career he worked with a director who could not stand the regular trappings of theater:

At one time, in his determination to make certain that the audience was under no illusion that they were ‘spying on reality’, he removed the side walls of the proscenium so that throughout the performance the audience could see the actors waiting to make their entrances, the stage-hands standing about, the electricians at their switchboard, the prompter with the book in his lap, the furniture and props for the next scene stacked in a corner. 

What problem was this director trying to solve? Marshall writes that “I find it hard to believe that any audience ever becomes entirely unconscious of the fact that they are in a theatre watching an impersonation of reality.”  

Others, however, cared a great deal about that question. The German director Erwin Piscator (1893-1966), who greatly influenced Bertolt Brecht (1898-1956), “was dressing his actors in harsh, angular costumes which were deliberately at variance with the lines of the human body, so that the players seemed more like robots than human beings.”  

Another example from a production Marshall saw, also about the work of a notable director, Vsevolod Meyerhold (1874-1940):

The actors, grotesquely dressed and made up as drolls and buffoons, somersaulted, swung on trapezes, and depicted excitement by means of handsprings and flip-flaps. Naturalistic speech was forbidden; they shouted, chanted, intoned, and chorused. The stage was bleakly lit in a glare of harsh, white light from floodlights hanging immediately above the setting in full view of the audience. As slapstick entertainment it was immensely exhilarating, though in the end one became wearied by its crudity and noisiness.

In discussing such examples Marshall makes an important point: many such instances of excess were appropriate at the time they were created, but sometimes were retained when their raison d’être had evaporated. For example, discussing a production by the German director Leopold Jessner (1878-1945), Marshall writes that

Jessner was greatly influenced by the work of the Russian [directors]. No doubt his elementary symbolism would have been an aid to the new Russian audience in the years immediately after the Revolution, but it was scarcely flattering to the intelligence of the Berliners and did great disservice to authors by over-simplifying characters and their motives.

Describing another such director, Marshall writes that

He was one of those [directors], familiar enough in England today, who feel they must ‘do something’ with a classic. Whether what they do is in accord with the author’s intentions matters little provided it is something nobody else has done with the play before.

Marshall points out that audiences simply were not always interested in experiences in theater meant to challenge them “for their own good.” Such experiences would not, and did not, last in an environment in which

the audiences, who plainly preferred those theatres where the acting was warm, human, and lifelike to those where the individuality of the actor was suppressed and the part he was playing reduced to an abstraction.

Marshall makes it clear how many of the theatrical innovations attributed to Bertolt Brecht were actually created by earlier directors, including minimalist scenery and the use of “white” lighting with visible light instruments:

Many features of [Brecht’s production of Mother Courage and Her Children] were simply the old, familiar anti-illusionist devices which the revolutionary theatre of the ’twenties used to enforce Meierhold’s dictum that “the actual world exists and is our subject; but this play and this stage are not it.”

Brecht felt that more traditional kinds of staging act as a sort of “narcotic” for audiences, putting them in a dulled trance state. Marshall comments, and I agree, that

I have never seen an audience remotely resembling Brecht’s description, though perhaps they are to be seen on the first night of an excessively boring play.

One of the things I like about Marshall’s book, though, is that he is eminently fair to the directors whose work he describes. After his comments about Mother Courage he continues,

It was very like the best kind of naturalistic acting in the English theatre. It was controlled, exact, economic in the use of gesture, devoid of any suggestion of over-playing, but vividly effective.

He carries this even-handed attitude throughout the book.

His discussion of the “system” of acting, and its impact on directing, developed by Konstantin Stanislavski is fascinating because it traces the shifts and turns of Stanislavski’s thought over the years, variations that were not clarified by the books he wrote. Marshall writes that his books

Have been so much written about and talked about that it is generally believed that they were the basis of Stanislavski’s “system.” This misconception has resulted in [directors] and actors with an insufficient understanding of his teachings wasting an appalling amount of rehearsal time in woolly, confusing discussions, and using up their energies outside the theatre in irrelevant games of make-believe.

Again, Marshall roots Stanislavski’s approaches to acting and directing in what was happening in his time, pointing out for example that the “realism” of some his productions was a way of trying to make it possible for actors to perform in the way he wanted:

Stanislavsky believed that if the actor was constantly picking up and handling trivial, everyday things, the casualness and seeming unimportance of these little bits of business would not only subconsciously influence his movements and gestures but would also make him instinctively aware of the falseness of a stagey inflexion or intonation.

I could easily devote an entire article to Marshall’s insights on Stanislavski’s work. Similarly there is a book’s worth of insight in the two chapters he devotes to the many ways Shakespeare’s plays have been staged, beginning with their original productions at the Globe Theatre in London – about which we know very little beyond drawings and inferences in scripts.

After a period of neglect, Shakespeare’s plays began to be performed in “acting versions,” in which “the texts were cut and rearranged to avoid constant changing of the elaborate scenery that was now being provided for them.” This cutting and rearranging was ordinarily done by the lead actor of the production:

The English theatre was so wretchedly poor that the public had become accustomed to going to the theatre because of the star rather than the play, and they demanded to see as much as possible of the star during the evening.

Whole speeches or even scenes were cut in order to allow pageantry and spectacle. A reaction set in in the late 1800’s, urged on by the drama criticism of Bernard Shaw, instituted by the Elizabethan Stage Society of William Poel (1852-1934) and other amateur groups, and in the early 1900’s professionally solidified by three productions by the director Harley Granville-Barker (1877-1946), a close associate of Shaw’s.

As the Twentieth Century proceeded, a decidedly unornamental style of Shakespeare production took over, typified by the Old Vic company, whose process Marshall describes as “Use all the bits and pieces of scenery you can lay your hands on and then fill in with curtains.”

Today productions of Shakespeare’s plays use a myriad of approaches, and as Marshall points out, “any new form of stagecraft . . . must inevitably at first seem over-obtrusive simply because of its novelty.” Costuming a play in “modern dress” instead of period costume began around 1925 as something practically scandalous, and today a play by Shakespeare may be “set” in any time period from prehistoric to light years from now.

“All too often,” Marshall writes, the director’s “inventiveness is used not to enhance the author’s meaning but merely to surprise the audience or to satisfy his own wayward sense of humour,” “a dogged determination to be original at all costs, even at the cost of the play,” in what the writer T. C. Worsley (1907-1977) describes as the “Wouldn’t it be fun (just for a change) school of production.”

Marshall devotes much of his discussion of Shakespeare’s plays to the question of how his verse should be spoken. He feels that special training is a necessity, that it is not possible simply to speak the verse in an everyday way (the prose is another story).

Regarding the famous, maybe even over-famous speeches in Shakespeare’s plays, Marshall points out that “the opera singer does not attempt to sing a famous aria in a way it has never been sung before: he simply strives to sing it better than it has ever been sung before, with “proper regard for its sense and its rhythm.” He gives numerous examples, of course, of the opposite.

I have mentioned that Marshall himself is a director, and one observation about Shakespeare production in particular that he gives is one that perhaps it might take a director to make:

The most important members of the audience at any Shakespearian performance are those who are seeing the play for the first time. These are the people the [director] should have in mind all through his rehearsals.

Marshall shows a similar kind of insight in discussing types of stages. For example, in theater-in-the-round, in which the audience is seated around all four sides (it’s not usually actually “round”) of the playing space, some plays gain by such close proximity to the audience but

There are often practical difficulties which make some plays ineligible for this sort of production – for instance, if a staircase or a window is an essential part of the action, or if it is necessary to have a high piece of furniture, or an upright piano, which would obscure the view of the stage from a part of the audience.

The quest for novelty in staging may sometimes exceed the bound of common sense. Marshall notes that

Nowadays so many hard things are said about the “peep-show theatre”, as it is often contemptuously described, that one marvels how it has existed for nearly three hundred years and that so many masterpieces have been written for it.

An ever-present danger for a director, Marshall makes clear, is doing either too much to a play in production, or too little. “The creative [director] can often turn a thin play into a rich entertainment, but he can be a menace to a good play,” Marshall writes. Concerning classic plays from earlier eras, he offers this practical advice:

So it is the [director]’s task to make the most of the scenes and characters which age has not withered and to use the rest as material out of which he re-fashions something to the taste of his audience. What he cannot profitably use, he must, whenever possible, discard.

There is a great deal more of value in this stimulating book; I have tried to provide a sampling. It continually raises the question, “What is the right way of directing?” and resists any easy answer. Directors are in a sense a mid-point in which a number of factors meet – a play, actors, designers and technicians, but also history, culture, and trends and tendencies in theater itself.

One of the excellencies of the book is that it helps us realize – and I admit I had not – that when a director tries something “new” the odds are that the director is reacting to something, responding to it. None of the remarkable oddities that Marshall describes developed in a vacuum. They were responses.

The word “new” is in quotation marks because the chances are good that whatever the director’s approach, someone has tried it before, or a version of it.

So the search for novelty is not “the answer,” and neither, necessarily, is doing a thing the way it has always been done. A director perhaps is a person who tries to do one thing well, and then the next, and so on, using common sense and anything else they bring to the experience, knowing that their work will always be, quite literally, work in progress.

[Even casual readers of ROT will have noticed that many of the topics covered by Norman Marshall in The Producer and the Play and on which Kirk has reported here, have also been mentioned in some of the past posts on this blog.  I won’t cross-reference them—because, first, there are too many such posts and, second, this one’s not about my opinions or other people’s, it’s about Marshall’s ideas and Kirk’s take on them—but ROTters who’re interested can spot-check the many play reports or examinations of theatrical practices. 

[The point is that Marshall focused, at least in Kirk’s reading, on many theatrical issues that continue to be present on the stages of the 21st century, even 50 years and more after he wrote about them.  I think, for example, of Marshall’s thoughts on directors who put “less on stage than might be expected, or .  . . more, often much more.”  Have a look at my reports on an Off-Off-Broadway production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream from a troupe called the Pointed Stick Theatre as an example of the former set-up and Washington, D.C.’s Folger Theatre’s shipboard Much Ado About Nothing for the latter).

[In a different vein, when Kirk cited Marshall’s quotation of Vsevelod Meyerhold that “the actual world exists and is our subject; but this play and this stage are not it,” I thought of what I wrote in my essay on Tennessee Williams’s “Plastic Theater” concerning painter Hans Hofmann’s advice to his students.  Hofmann (1880-1966), an Abstract Expressionist, was an influence on Williams and he held that “an artist mustn’t simply copy nature, but must create an artistically imagined reality which requires the careful and deliberate manipulation and juxtaposition of the elements of the artwork.”

[ROTters will most likely know that I’ve posted quite a few articles on experimental theater director Leonardo Shapiro (1946-97), including both descriptions of his productions, examinations of some of his stage techniques, and, most recently, a biographical profile on him.  Some of what he did in production or advocated in his artistic philosophy aligned with some of the ideas Marshall wrote about in The Producer. 

[For instance, Kirk quotes a description of an “anti-realistic” production on which Marshall worked with “a director who could not stand the regular trappings of theater.”  I observed that Shapiro often applied to some extent many of the same techniques that Marshall disparaged, as I note in several of my reports on his productions.  Finally, in the last paragraph of the post, Kirk states that perhaps directors know “that their work will always be, quite literally, work in progress.”  This was a firm notion of Shapiro’s, who viewed all his shows as productions in progress.  A performance, he affirmed, was a “snapshot” of where the company was at that particular moment—but not definitive.

[A further note about the name of the theater profession in question here.  Max Reinhart would have been called a Regisseur, the German word for a theater director.  It’s borrowed from the French word régisseur, which literally means someone who administers, manages, organizes, or is responsible for something. 

[(The German word Direktor, from English, refers to the head of a company or an agency.  Dirigent is a more Germanicized word with a similar meaning, and is often used to mean the conductor of an orchestra or the captain of a sports team.  Despite their similarity to ‘director,’ neither word is used to mean the artist in charge of a theater production, film, or TV show.) 

[The Russians use the same French word, режиссер (rezhisser) for the theatrical position.]