Directors You’d Rather Not Work With

by Kirk Woodward

[As even occasional readers of Rick On Theater know, my friend Kirk Woodward is a thoughtful and longtime student of theater.  This means he’s not only conversant with the many theories of acting, directing, and playwriting, as well as theater history and the writings of scads of theater people both famous and obscure, but that he knows the practical workings of the art and craft.  Furthermore, Kirk’s a theater practitioner—an actor, director, playwright, composer, lyric-writer, and teacher —so he’s applied what he’s learned in theaters, studios, and classrooms, working with real people.  The trait that’s applicable here is that Kirk examines what he sees, experiences, and does in those venues and turns those lessons back into practice as he continues to work. 

[In this article, Kirk looks at his experiences as a director and an actor having been directed (as well as the experiences of other artists he knows) and analyzes them for lessons of not what to do as a director, but what not to do.  (At the end of Kirk’s discussion, I’ve added some of my own experiences and what I’ve discerned from them.)  What he’s compiled in “Directors You’d Rather Not Work With” is a practical guide for directors (and prospective directors) to practices to avoid and habits to break.  As a companion to this briefer look at directing, I also suggest ROTters take a look back as Kirk’s earlier four-parter, “Reflections On Directing” (11, 14, 17, and 20 April 2013); note that my afterword to the fourth installment (https://rickontheater.blogspot.com/2013/04/reflections-on-directing-tech.html) includes a list of useful books and texts on directing. 

[Here are other ROT posts concerning directing:

·         “Similes, Metaphors—And The Stage,” 18 September 2009

·         “Staging Shakespeare,” 21 September 2009

·         “Directing Twelfth Night For Children” by Kirk Woodward, 16 and 19 December 2010

·         “‘Reworking the Classics: Homage or Ego Trip?’” by Robert Brustein, 10 March 2011 [note: this post is the republication of a New York Times article from 1988; the first cross-reference in this list is my commentary on this article]

·         “Vanity, Thy Name Is Actor-Director,” 22 September 2011

·         “David Mamet On Acting & Directing,” 16 August 2013

·         “Staging Classic Plays: Traditional or Experimental? (Shaliko’s Ghosts, 1975),” 6 September 2014

·         “Evaluating A Director” by Kirk Woodward, 1 March 2017

·         “On Directing Shakespeare” by Kirk Woodward, 1 March 2019;

[As for my own directing début, I actually avoided directing for a long time.  My rationale was that I was neither smart enough nor stupid enough to try directing: not smart enough to know all I’d need to in order to stage a play, and not stupid enough to try in the face of my ignorance.  I did only what directing I had to in college and grad school (required projects for directing classes); I did no directing in the army in between, though I participated in the army’s Special Services theater program and even helped start a theater troupe in Berlin at Tempelhof Air Force Base. 

[Then, after acting in a bunch of shows in grad school and then in New York City, being directed by both good and bad (and also middling) directors, I started to feel I’d been apprenticing to a degree and wanted to see if I could do it myself at least as well as the good ones I’d experienced.  That’s when I approached Arthur Reel, artistic director of the Drama Committee Repertory Theatre, an Off-Off-Broadway showcase house for which I’d been acting since getting my MFA, and asked him to let me direct something there.  He said he’d think about it and let me know when something appropriate came up.  That process was cut short when the cast of Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest fired its director and Arthur called me to take over—a case of right time/right place—or  more truthfully, desperation!  I was not quite 32.

[When I took over the direction of Earnest, I decided on two things: first, I wouldn’t tell any of the cast that this was my first pro directing job (until the cast party after opening, when I fessed up).  Second, I did one of the “bad” things Kirk lists below: I pretended I knew exactly what I was doing, made definitive choices, and spoke with assumed authority so that the cast would feel not only that I knew what I was about, but that they now had someone in charge and looking out for the production.  At our first meeting—they ran a rehearsal for me—the actors said they all felt lost and adrift and were scared of being left to fend for themselves.  I wanted to mend that at once. 

[What I was doing, with malice of forethought, was playing the role of the knowledgeable director—I was acting in real life.  (I claim I’d been doing that all the time I was in the army—playing the role of an “army officer.”)  I hadn’t  earned this authority, however—either with this cast or as a consequence of long years of experience.  The cast apparently never tumbled to the deception because all the actors were receptive and willing all through rehearsals and when we opened, very complimentary about having worked with me.  That’s when I confessed that theirs had been my first production as a director.  They all said they didn’t believe it, but this was at the cast party and everyone was a little drunk by then.  I think they were also probably very relieved that they made it to opening!)  ~Rick]

A friend has urged me to write something about the kind of directors that one wouldn’t want to work with, and this friend has urged me to write it in the form of a “Top Ten List,” the way David Letterman used to do. Of course people who use the Letterman “Top Ten List” format belong on some sort of list themselves, and I’m not sure how to order the items in this list, either. Still, I did come up with ten. Readers are welcome to send in their own suggestions. [I second the motion. ~Rick]

Before getting into specifics, we should note that none of these categories are absolutes. The best director in the world, whoever that might be, may under pressure, or by reflex, engage in some pretty unproductive behavior. I’m hardly the best director in the world, but I should know. I do know. I’ve done those very things.

The directors I’m writing about here are theater directors. I suspect that the same ideas apply to film directors, but I have much less experience in that area.

So here are ten of what we might call directorial archetypes. There are probably more.

Note that these are essentially behavioral, not artistic, archetypes. For example, I thought about including in this list the director who can’t direct the genre of the play – specializing, say, in tragedy, but s/he drains the fun out of every line in a comedy. That’s a problem, but it’s an artistic problem, not a behavioral one.

The positive side of these negatives is that we can calculate from them what directors ought to do.

Here goes:

THE DIRECTOR WHO’S NEVER READ THE PLAY

Pretty important to read a play before directing it, wouldn’t you say? Yet within the past few years I’ve run across two directors who literally had not read the works (one a play, one a musical) they were assigned to direct.

This fact did not deter them from telling cast members what they ought to be doing. They assumed an air of authority – which obviously they had to do, since they were basically talking nonsense. Among the gambits for distracting attention from their ignorance of the play: telling the cast repeatedly how experienced they were, and saying, “I’m a minimalist” (which we might translate as “I have nothing to offer”).

Actors have a will to succeed in a play, and even with a director who’s unfamiliar with the material, they will come up with some way to act their roles. They may even save the play, from the audience’s point of view. But they’re waging an uphill struggle if the director doesn’t know the play well enough even to talk about it intelligently.

THE DIRECTOR WITH THE BRIGHT IDEA

There’s a fairly thin line between approaches to a play that are creative, and approaches that are just wacky. Neil Simon (1927-2018) offered a great example of the latter in his script for the film The Goodbye Girl (1977), in which the director of an off-Broadway production of William Shakespeare’s Richard III announces that the “concept” of his production is that the title character is flamboyantly gay, an idea utterly unsupported by the script, and an idea that offers no worthwhile results.

I first ran across the term “bright idea,” in connection with directors, in the book In Search of Theatre, by the eminent drama critic Eric Bentley (b. 1916), published in 1953, but instead of declining in importance since Bentley wrote about it, the directorial “bright idea” approach seems to have increased in influence over the ensuing decades, to the point where many of the most celebrated Broadway directors today are the ones with the most radical notions about how to stage a play – sometimes in ways undreamed of by their authors. [Kirk writes about “the Bright Idea” in “A Note About Hamilton,” 6 December 2016, and again briefly in “Falsettos,” 5 January 2017.]

Directors must use all the creativity they’ve got. But for what purpose? Surely the answer ought to be, “for the purpose of serving the play.” However obvious that may seem – at least to me – it’s definitely not the way every director works today.

Many directors these days seem to feel that plays are “texts” – assemblages of words waiting for someone to make something out of them. This approach began in some academic circles and has popularity, but surely, as Hamlet says, for a director “The play’s the thing.”

There’s much more to a play than just its words. Shouldn’t a director work to find the circumstances and actions that are implicit in the play, rather than arbitrarily invent a new set of them?

THE DIRECTOR WHO ONLY CRITICIZES

An actor looks to a director as a sort of (imperfect) mirror reflecting what’s working well in a performance and what’s not. A director who only criticizes gives actors a distorted “image” of their work – a feeling that everything they’re doing is wrong.

Related to this issue is the director who is so virulent in criticism that the actor feels (and I’d say in fact is) assaulted. My wife Pat once worked with a director who, when he didn’t approve of something, would say, “Wrong and stupid!”

                                 

Actors, like other living things (they are, you know), need to grow, both as actors and in their particular roles, and in order to grow, like other living things, they need nourishment.

THE DIRECTOR WHO ONLY PRAISES

A director who never identifies any problems or obstacles can be almost as unnerving as one who never sees anything good in an actor’s role, and for a similar reason: an actor has nothing substantial to respond to. After a while, praise loses its punch just as criticism does.

I’m sensitive to this particular characteristic because I’ve been accused of it (or accused myself of it) more than once. In my defense, I’d claim that I don’t criticize, I suggest alternatives. Maybe. Probably, though, I just praise too much. I don’t think that praise is as destructive as vituperation. But even the greatest actors are likely to want “constructive criticism,” as long as they know it’s genuinely for their good.

THE DIRECTOR WHO DICTATES EVERY MOVE

I’m always astonished by the director who tells the actors everything, from where they stand to when they breathe. Think about it: actors spend years watching performances, going to classes, evaluating and critiquing their own work and the work of others, and performing – only to be told by a director how many steps to take to the left and how to lift an arm!

Some directors seem to feel that they are the only ones who know how anything can be done on stage.

Actors don’t mind when a director is telling them something they need to know – they welcome it. But the director who gives them no room to develop on their own is conceivably overestimating her or his powers, and in any case wasting a major resource of theater – the ability of the actors.

Theater, it is often said, is a collaborative art, and a good actor can be a skilled collaborator, the exception being when the director’s ego is so large that the director feels no need for collaboration. 

THE DIRECTOR WHO USES ELECTRONIC DEVICES DURING REHEARSAL

At least twice I’ve heard of a director who spent most of the rehearsal period looking at messages on a cellular phone. This behavior is not restricted to theater directors, of course. I once attended a funeral where the presiding clergyperson spend most of the ceremony checking messages. This behavior, we understand, is almost expected these days.

For an actor it has a particular drawback, because one of a director’s best tools is a strong focus on what the actors are doing. There’s ordinarily no audience at a rehearsal; the director is the audience, and if the director’s concentration on the actor is powerful, the actor may feel challenged to dig deeper into the role than might otherwise be the case. 

THE DIRECTOR WHO’S DISORGANIZED

The limitations of this sort of director should be obvious. I have noticed that in some cases disorganization is a sign of self-admiration – “look how active my mind is! I’m all over the place!” I have noticed this in myself, actually.

In many respects a director is a manager. A director manages time – the amount of time a show has in which to come together, the time periods that rehearsals last, and the actors’ time – that is, the demands that the rehearsal schedule puts on their days.

The smaller the cast, the simpler the play, and the fewer the technical requirements of the play, the easier it is for a director to manage time, and a bit of disorganization under those conditions may not be fatal. In a complex show, like a Shakespeare play or almost all musicals, such chaos can be disastrous.

THE DIRECTOR WHOSE REHEARSALS RUN INCREDIBLY LONG

This item is a direct descendent of the previous one. One of a director’s major responsibilities is time management.

In performances sanctioned by the actors’ union, Actors Equity, rehearsal hours, break times, and off days are strictly regulated, a response to the bad old days of theater in the early twentieth century, when actors had to do what management told them and could be fired, abandoned, or otherwise mistreated at any time and without any recourse.  [For further information on this aspect of theater and acting, see my two-part article “Actors’ Equity at 100” (especially Part One), 19 and 22 June 2013. ~Rick] Those days are gone, except that they still exist, on a different scale, in community theater.

One can make the case that actors in community theater actually work harder than Broadway actors. They often have day jobs as well, which means that their total working hours are longer than a Broadway actor ever faces.

“Theater is always inconvenient.” This saying is basically true; rehearsals and performances tend to take place during times when one might rather be home watching TV. But watching TV is not the only thing people do at home, and it’s simply not fair to make volunteers wreck their lives for the sake of, say, a production of See How They Run, because the director is reckless with their time.

THE DIRECTOR WHO’S A NUT CASE

Directing by its nature attracts some odd characters, because the decision to be a person who orders other people around is in its nature a dangerous one – we see examples of this every day, and not just in the theater. Occasionally one runs into a director who’s, not just odd, but bananas.

Unfortunately, this sometimes takes the form of, basically, sadism, as in a case I know of a director who had actors redo a violent scene to the point where they were both psychologically and physically injured.

When one finds oneself in such a situation, the best advice I know is: Get out! No one “owes” a production or a director anything under those circumstances.

THE DIRECTOR WHO WANTS TO ACT EVERY ROLE (OR YOUR ROLE)

Some directors are frustrated actors. (For that matter, some directors are just plain actors.) An awareness of the nuts and bolts of acting is crucial for a director, because a director who understands an actor’s tools can make intelligent recommendations about which tools to use. So having acted is often an asset for a director.

On the other hand, many directors acquire this knowledge by first being actors themselves, but such experience isn’t a necessity. The seminal director Peter Brook (b. 1925), for example, credited all his preparation to watching plays; he was never an actor.

In any case, being a great actor does not guarantee that the same person will be a great director, and such a condition may even be a limitation – maybe a great actor could play your role better, but that’s not the point, since you’ll be the one on stage, not that actor.

In practical terms, the director who wants to act every role may – and very likely may – spend a great deal of a rehearsal performing for the cast and saying, “Do it that way.”

*  *  *  *

Weirdly, there are very good directors who have one or more of the habits listed above. For example, many good directors are extremely specific with actors. Some very fine directors have “concepts” for plays that are both off-the-wall and illuminating.  Sir Laurence Olivier (1907-1989) called the producer and successful director Jed Harris (1900-1979) “the most loathsome man I’d ever met.” Some notable actors have also excelled as directors; Olivier himself was, if not a great director, at least a very good one.

Can “bad traits” then be “good traits” where directors are concerned? Perhaps. Good directors inevitably work in ways best suited to themselves, and have limited success with approaches to directing that don’t suit them. Basically, they go with what they’ve got. If their methods are irregular, still those methods may be their road to success.

On the other hand, I can think of no good directors who neglect to read the play, spend rehearsal time working on electronic devices, have no sense of organization or time, or are just plain crazy.

Essentially all the behaviors listed here, with the possible exception of the “nut case,” can be changed. Awareness and experience both can help. Putting the play and the actors even slightly ahead of oneself is a good start.

[In reference to Kirk’s last paragraph above:  I suspect that both the “nut case” and the “Bright Idea” director are incurable.  If the Bright Idea director didn’t have that Bright Idea, what would s/he do?  That’s her/his motivation; without it, s/he wouldn’t have any reason to show up.  (Maybe that’s the only cure for a Bright Idea director.  Abstinence!)

[Kirk’s description of the Bright Idea production sounds exactly like what Joe Miklojcik (the department TD at Rutgers when I was in the MFA acting program there) referred to as ”Hamlet on roller skates”!  It also fits what I said about Sam Gold’s Glass Menagerie in my report on that production (posted on 8 April 2017).

[Also, Kirk’s comments on how Bright Idea directors treat texts sounds like a main tenet of Deconstructionism—that everything is open to interpretation and reinterpretation from any perspective; that artists (and others) don’t really own their work or ideas.  (The Situationists—see my article “Guy Debord & The Situationists,” posted on 3 February 2012—took a similar tack, called détournement, in the 1960s, but they were consciously and deliberately subverting the artists’ rights of ownership as part of their politico-socio-artistic message.  Deconstructionists simply refuse to recognize ownership of intellectual property or works of art.)

[The situation with the director who dictates every move happened at Rutgers to one of the MFA actresses in Neil Cuthbert’s Hot Potatoes with me in 1976.  I found her in the lobby of the department building, sitting on the floor crying.  (This actress wasn’t a youngster; she was older than I was and I was about five years older than most of our classmates.)  She’d gotten frustrated with Jack Bettenbender, the department chair who was directing Hot Potatoes, telling her every move and line-reading and was feeling that he didn’t respect or trust her as an artist.  I told her that he’d done the same thing with me at the start, but I learned just to ignore him and do my work and as long as I got results, he backed off.  

[Now, I have two more “bad directors” to add to Kirk’s list.  First, the one who does nothing—gives no notes, no direction (even blocking), no ideas.  I had such a director for Oscar Wilde’s An Ideal Husband at the Drama Committee (1977-78) and the cast fought back finally by holding our own rehearsals and setting the show to that point by consensus.  (I think the director’s notion had been to let us find some ideas ourselves and then winnow them down and set the best ones—but she let it go on way too long and we felt unmoored and got scared.  Either that, or she had no ideas of her own and hoped we’d come up with some she could use.)  The original director of DCRT’s Earnest (1978-79) was fired by the cast for this reason, and it became my first priority to correct this deficiency..

[The other bad director may or may not be in the “behavioral” category: the director who casts him/herself in the play.  (I have a similar issue with the playwright who directs his/her own play—though the problems this decision causes are different.)  Actors directing themselves is always problematical and difficult, but it’s also a huge ego maneuver that exacerbates the difficulties.  When I did a Macbeth in Tribeca (1981 at the Process Studio Theatre), the director also played the title role—and he was so busy working on his part that the rest of us felt neglected—and I don’t mean that as an emotional issue; our work wasn’t being attended to.  The three of us who were playing Malcolm, Macduff, and Ross (me) took the England Scene off on our own to rehearse it—and audience members, who mostly didn’t know us or what we’d done,  said it was the best scene in the production.  (We used it as an audition piece for the three of us in tandem a couple of times.)  The same director had done Much Ado About Nothing (1979) before the Macbeth—he wasn’t in that one, but I did Don John—and he (and the production) was excellent. 

                                                                                     

[I described this experience and some others—including a Hamlet starring and directed by another egotist—in “Vanity, Thy Name Is Actor-Director,” referenced in my foreword to “Directors You’d Rather Not Work With.”]