So You Want to Be a Director

moderated by Michael Bloom

When it comes to discussions of theatre training, acting—not directing—has consistently held the spotlight. The actor-centered dispute over the Method, involving titans like Strasberg, Meisner, Adler and Lewis, captivated theatre practitioners and teachers for decades.

In fact, there wasn’t much director-training to talk about. Before the 1960s, it was rare to find an established professional with an MFA in directing. Today many emerging directors still make their way by assisting more experienced directors or moving up through the ranks of a regional theatre or starting their own theatres. And an MFA is certainly not a prerequisite for a successful directing career. Yet a rapidly increasing proportion of successful early- and mid-career directors are now making graduate school their testing ground. Graduate programs vary in their objectives: some focus on developing teachers rather than preparing students for the profession, while others encourage disciples of "styles," and still others cultivate the most vanguard non-stylistic approaches. Whichever the goal, the expansion of graduate programs in directing (there are now more than 30 across the country) has enlivened the conversation about the value and ideal substance of advanced director training.

The greatest change in MFA directing programs over the past two decades has been the increase in faculty who have built substantial professional careers. With this in mind—and in response to the recent publication of books on the art of directing by Jon Jory, Mel Shapiro and myself—it seemed an auspicious time to open a dialogue about the purpose and value of graduate directing training. I moderated a conversation—across three time zones—between distinguished professional directors from four different programs: Liz Diamond (Yale University), Jon Jory (the University of Washington), Mel Shapiro (UCLA) and Hal Scott (Rutgers University). The discussion ranged widely, from the directors’ personal paths into the profession to their individual approaches to teaching. —M.B.

MICHAEL BLOOM: In terms of breaking into the field, how has directing changed since you entered it?
MEL SHAPIRO: I don’t know that it’s changed at all. I think it’s as difficult as it ever was. There are certainly many more regional theatres, and opportunities, than when I was trying to break in. But I think it all depends on having a mentor—someone who really believes in you and helps you find an entry into the profession. Without that, I just don’t know how anybody does it.

What was your background? Did you go to graduate school?
SHAPIRO: I got both undergraduate and graduate training at Carnegie Mellon. And I had a wonderful mentor, Ted Hoffman. I acknowledge him in my book. And then I curse him because he got me into teaching. He got me my first job at Arena [Stage in Washington, D.C.], and when I was fired from Arena he got me into the Guthrie [Theater in Minneapolis]. It was an extraordinary blessing to have someone like that, so when I started teaching I tried to repay that by helping students whom I thought were talented.

JON JORY: Well, I’m a lot younger than Mel [laughter]. I began during that sunrise period of regional theatre that Mel was referring to. And one of the ways, at that time, that it was possible to emerge was by starting a theatre. Now that road into the profession has changed because almost everywhere that needs a theatre has a theatre—except possibly the improbable New Orleans. It’s still possible to start a small company in New York and a few other cities, but it’s not as open a field. Now directors sometimes begin because of relationships with playwrights, or by being mentored—and sometimes by making the most of an opportunity with a production that becomes a landmark, as Kate Whoriskey recently did. Other than that, a lot of times at Actors Theatre [of Louisville] people would find their way into the theatre in almost any capacity and gradually find a way to show some work.

Were you trained as an actor or director?
JORY: I was actually spending more time in the acting and playwriting departments at Yale. I came from a theatre family, and there was the inevitable cursing of directors around the dinner table. And probably that was the early part of my training. Mel and I are a good pair in a way, because I didn’t have a mentor, really, and I feel the lack of that to this day. The progress was so much slower. It took me 10 years to learn something that somebody could have told me over a beer.

LIZ DIAMOND: I didn’t really have a mentor. I had several encounters with people who made a leap of faith when I needed it most. The first person to do that was Ellen Stewart, who gave me my first job out of graduate school. Another person who was hugely important to me was Greta Gunderson at BACA Downtown [of Brooklyn]. She created a very hot, hip environment and the press started coming. I suppose it’s interesting to note that they’re all female names at that point. At New York Theatre Workshop, Jean Passanante gave me a big break when she basically created the New York Directors Project as a result of an experience she had with me. While I was doing a workshop of a play, she put me forward to direct a full production of it. The playwright was very excited and really wanted me to do it but was quite freaked out by my lack of experience. And I said to Jean, "How am I going to get that experience?" That resonated, and she went to work and came up with grant money to offer four young directors a chance to do a show the following year. But, you know, it was not a leap from nothing to jobs. For me, it was a 10-year slog before I was really working as a full-time director and actually surviving on what I made. 

HAL SCOTT: I trained as an actor for two years prior to working in the original Lincoln Center Theater Company. Our teachers were Elia Kazan, José Quintero, Bobby Lewis and Paul Mann. I won an Obie with the first show I did, Deathwatch, with George Maharis and Vic Morrow. I worked pretty consistently up until the black revolution in the late ’60s, when all of a sudden, because of my fair complexion, I became persona non grata, and "black is beautiful" became a very literal expression. I immediately stopped working. I would go to auditions and be asked, "What are you? Are you Jewish? Are you Puerto Rican?" I finally decided to see if I couldn’t start directing, because I was having difficulty getting jobs. You weren’t going to run me out of the business—I was going to work where you didn’t have to look at me.

How did you make the transition into directing?
SCOTT: I was in Boys in the Band, and Sara O’Connor—for whatever reason I will never know—called and asked me to direct Genet’s The Blacks for the Theatre Company of Boston. Because I’d been in Gene Frankel’s production at the St. Marks Playhouse, I knew a lot about the play. It ended up being so successful that it made me think, "Oh, I can do this." But even when I began directing, I wasn’t considered black enough to be black or white enough to be white. For a long time I couldn’t get a black play to direct. I’d be directing essentially white European plays. And that’s when I set about on my 10-year restoration of A Raisin in the Sun, because there’d been an hour cut out of it when it came to Broadway originally in the ’50s. So I got Bob Nemiroff [husband of the late Lorraine Hansberry] to help me restore the cuts. And that was the first black play I got to direct.

Is it any easier for the African-American director now?
SCOTT: I don’t think so. Some major regional theatres aren’t even doing the obligatory black play that used to be part of everybody’s season. And we don’t get asked to come do the white plays.

I went straight for directing, finished graduate school and moved to New York without knowing a soul. Luckily I got a job in the literary department at Manhattan Theatre Club and started meeting playwrights. How difficult was it for you, Liz?
DIAMOND: I started to scale the wall in the mid-’80s, which was a pretty weird time to be trying to work in the theatre. I was not really part of the pioneer generation of women directors but was sort of on the butt end of that wedge. I think in some ways I came into the theatre in what you might call the dying days of New York bohemia; it was pretty much expiring because it was being starved out by the cuts of the Reagan Era, and also because of the deregulation of commercial rents. And I think that’s what has changed most profoundly. When I look at my students—they are burdened by debt at the jump. They literally cannot afford to do the kind of work that I was doing 20 years ago, for no pay in small venues, to get my work seen by critics and other theatre professionals.

Since the financial situation has worsened over the years, do you still advise directors to move to New York and try to showcase their work the way you did?
DIAMOND: If I don’t see the hunger in the student for that kind of risk-taking, the kind of artistic arrogance and chutzpah that a young talent really has to have, and probably has always had to have, then I don’t advise it. But, frankly, it’s what I look for in all of our candidates.

SCOTT: I ask candidates where they hope to be in 10 years. If they say teaching, I’m quickly disinterested. I’ve been looking, for the most part, for students 30 and over. I have a happier time with a student who has a little life on him. I think they make stronger interpreters of life. I don’t think directors who are extremely young have any idea how to develop a relationship on stage. If they were going to do Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, what would they know about marriage or the loss of a marriage, impotency, alcoholism?

SHAPIRO: Ultimately, even if a person is very gifted, they have to have the will to want to do it and survive.

SCOTT: From my point of view, if all you’re really interested in is security, then don’t even try to be an artist. An artist lives most of his or her life with very little security.

DIAMOND: After graduation I try to hook them up with situations that are related but that will keep them in food and not interfere with their need for flexibility. For instance, I’ve sent countless students to Lincoln Center Institute where they can pretty much teach part time and make a living and set their own schedules. And I try to send them to theatres where I think they’ll be given a hearing. At the same time, I try to hook them up with experienced directors who can serve as mentors, because I think, as Mel points out, in addition to the sheer learning experience that these senior artists can give to young people, they also can serve as bridges to opportunities.

I have a sense that a surprising number of today’s young and mid-career directors have actually gone through graduate training programs. As recently as 15 years ago that wasn’t the case. What accounts for the change? Is it because these programs provide a way into the profession?
SCOTT: There was a time when you could work your way up through the ranks—when Broadway stage managing was the route to becoming a director. I find students often apply to our graduate program because they’ve reached a plateau on their own and found they couldn’t get any further without credentials. And you now have more working professionals who are teaching in conservatories and colleges—people like all of us. 

JORY: And there’s kind of a gap between when a student finishes undergraduate school and, say, at around 30, when somebody says, "All right, I’ll invest $150 thousand or much more on your development." When my mother and father were acting, the number of 42-week stock companies in America was 1,400. This was in the ’20s, just before the talkies came in. They did seven years of that, if you can imagine, as leading man and leading woman. Your contract said you did 40 plays in 42 weeks, so they did 280 plays in seven years. And somebody was directing those plays.

I think it’s pretty hard now, except in the smallest venues, for anyone to take a chance on a 21-year-old who hasn’t had much experience. In that age gap, one of the only ways not to be spending most of your time waiting tables is to attend a graduate program. Even if it’s not the world’s best graduate program, it does provide you with the opportunity to practice your trade on a more or less full-time basis. 

DIAMOND: I think so, too. I would just say, "It’s cold out there." You could probably draw a direct line between the gradual withdrawal of government support for the arts and the proliferation of graduate training programs. It could have gone another way, with the profession itself providing in-service apprenticeships with funding for young artists.

I myself didn’t know how to begin. I remember thinking I was this weird candidate with a background in political science and history applying to the Columbia directing program. I didn’t know stage right from stage left. But when they said they would accept me, I was so relieved. I thought, "Yeah, I’ll have a little black box; I’ll have teachers who can tell me what the hell to do; I’ll use the Columbia University Library for three years; and I’ll start to figure out New York." 

Do you think the growth of graduate directing programs also has to do with the changing demands of directing?
SCOTT: I think that’s true. There was a time when staging a play well was all that was expected of you. Interpretation was done by the actors. But you are now expected, by whatever methodology, to direct the actor and not just create pretty pictures. 

SHAPIRO: You know, I have an odd reaction lately to all these graduate programs and really question their existence. There’s so many of them, for so few people who are going to get work. 

JORY: And yet we have this proliferation of regional theatres around the country, but in a certain sense an enormous portion of the work isn’t very good because, frankly, there aren’t enough good directors to go around. And I think the graduate programs attempt to rectify that. I do feel that there’s also a shortage of people who actually know the craft to teach in all these programs. You can’t teach pole vaulting with instructional videos. And so my feeling is, there can be as many programs as there are craftspeople to teach in them. 

DIAMOND: I just want to speak a little bit in favor of the idea of graduate school for directors. There’s something quite wonderful about the idea of a conservatory where a tradition is handed down and where all the domains that make up the great art of the theatre are clustered together. Where there’s cross-fertilizing, debating, challenging those traditions and busting them up, and everyone’s engaged in an incredibly energetic, passionate and concentrated conversation about the advancement of the form. That’s what makes me want to be a teacher. I think that that model is, in its ideal form, arguably superior to the ad hoc mentoring system that prevailed before.

SCOTT: What I set up at Rutgers was what I felt the theatres that were hiring directors wanted, which was a more traditional approach. I wanted to give students those underpinnings so they could then go out and, please God, be as inventive and imaginative as they could. 

DIAMOND: If you can’t devote yourself to learning the craft in some way when you’re young, I think it’s very hard to grow. Ideally, that’s what graduate programs should be offering. 

JORY: But graduate school used to be the Group Theatre—bringing together a group of talented people who would not only mutually inform each other but also support each other in their careers. And that seems to me to be the model we all aspire to in our graduate programs. Let me tell you a circumstance I found recently. Even before I started teaching full time, I led some master classes around the country. And I walked into a program of some reputation and spoke to the directors and asked them three questions to begin the conversation: "What’s an action?" "What’s a circumstance?" and "How does an obstacle function?" And do you know, not a single one of the eight directors in the room could answer any of the three questions. 

SCOTT: What for me has turned out to be the most important and most difficult tool for students to master is how to tell a damn story. If you can’t tell a story, then what are you? You’re just a bunch of imaginative ideas and flashes of brilliance. 

I’ve come across the same phenomenon in my teaching. Students have difficulty recognizing the structure and the types of narrative. Any idea about why that happens?
SCOTT: I have a theory about it. When I was a kid we were read to by our parents. We heard stories. And certainly in black culture, oral storytelling is part of the culture. We now ask students every year, "Were you read to as a child?" The children who are essentially post-television age are not accustomed to hearing stories. They see stories; they see pictures; they see images. It’s a different thing when you have to translate to the stage what you read on a page or hear, as opposed to something that is just visual. I don’t think storytelling is part of our culture anymore. 

Has the rise of Anne Bogart’s Viewpoints diminished the importance of Stanislavsky-based acting and directing technique?
SHAPIRO: I have to make a very clear point to my students that the notion of action has nothing to do with style or genre—that there’s action in anything, even imagistic theatre. But I feel like I’m apologizing because it’s derived from Stanislavsky. 

JORY: Right, we shouldn’t mention it. But the realistic theatre is so many things now. It’s as romantic and as poetic and as cinematic as any other form, but over a period of years the tools of the realistic theatre have gotten a reputation for being passé. And a lot of those tools were not tools of conception but tools for working with actors, and these tools are not taught often enough, and I believe it is causing us tremendous problems.

SHAPIRO: Exactly. People pooh-pooh it. They say, "You’re just teaching psychological naturalism"—whatever that is. "You should be teaching style." But what they forget is that psychological naturalism is a style. 

JORY: The point is, as far as anybody knows up to this point, it’s part of the machinery under the hood. So it’s hard to treat it as something you might or might not teach. It would be like leaving the carburetor out of the car.

SCOTT: They are tools rather than a style. You can even use those tools with Shakespeare. You just have to realize that, rather than looking for subtext, you have to direct on the line, rather than what’s under the line. But the same principles are there—needing to have an action and an objective to know what the behavior of a character is. If you’re dealing with the behavior of a human being, that’s what life is.

I’m finding that the different kinds of training intersect. I’ve had a couple of students in recent years who’ve come to me with a knowledge of Viewpoints. I know of it, but it is not the way I was trained. But when they get to the thesis production, and I allow them to take the Meisner training that they’ve had with me and add the Viewpoints, I begin to see yet another style beginning to evolve that is wonderful. I certainly didn’t want to train a generation of kitchen-sink-realism directors.

DIAMOND: John, when you were talking about that directing program of reputation, where you asked the three questions, I thought to myself, "Gee, I wonder if they came from Yale." Because one of the funny things that we face in training for the art of directing is that there is, as yet, nothing like a universally agreed-upon vocabulary for terms as basic as "action," "objective," "given circumstance," "gesture" or "movement."

JORY: Is that because of the youth of the field?

DIAMOND: I wonder. I got together a few years ago with my colleague David Chambers, and over beers we argued about our definitions of action. And we realized how symptomatic of the profession that is, that we had to wrestle these terms to the ground.

Maybe that’s partly why three of us have decided to put pen to paper. Have you ever considered writing a book, given the relativity of those terms?
DIAMOND: I’ve thought about it. But the intense fortitude it requires to actually do it is something that I seem to singularly lack. 

SCOTT: My hope is that once I retire from Rutgers this year, I’ll have the time. I’d like to write about the program I created here at Rutgers. And my agent’s been after me for years to write my own story. I’ve often thought I had to work through the anger before I wrote it, because I don’t just want it to be a work of vitriol. 

I found it much more difficult writing a book than directing. In rehearsal I always say on the first day, "I give myself complete license to totally contradict myself at all times." In a book you can’t do that. 
SHAPIRO: That depends on how many drafts you do.

Very true. For 30 years the leading American book on directing was Dean and Carra’s Fundamentals of Play Directing. Mel and Jon, I know you think it’s still useful in some ways. 
SHAPIRO: I had to study the goddamn book. We used to get spot quizzes on it. Larry Carra was my teacher. I loathed the book, but I learned the stuff, and I’m glad I did. I fought it tooth and nail, but that was only because it was a formal codification, and I had to be the rebel. But thank goodness I know this stuff, so that I was able to rebel against it.

JORY: That is a good way to put it. Even though it’s dated, in the sense that the staging there is basically meant to be apprehended as tableaux and stills or snapshots—the book on staging as a plastic art is as yet to be written. Fundamentals of Play Directing is the only book I know that really attempts to break the aesthetics of staging into practical, easily understandable units.

SHAPIRO: The other book I have respect for is the Bill Ball book A Sense of Direction, which I also think has much to recommend it in a practical way. 

I agree. I was trying to write a similar book that conveyed the experience of directing—what it felt to actually be in a room with actors or with designers. What about your book, Jon?
JORY: Actually it’s an homage to my family, because we’re all actors: my sister, my mother and my father. And really this all reflects going to the bar after the play—of course, back in those days eight-year-olds could go to bars and no one thought anything about it. We would sit at the bar after a performance and somebody at the table would say, "Does anybody have any tips for me?" and at that point the table was open for business. They were forever saying at the table, a) "Why did we lose that laugh tonight?" or b) "How could we build that laugh tonight?" or c) "Do we even want that laugh?" It was that imaginary barroom situation for directors that I attempted to speak to.

SHAPIRO: When I studied with Larry Carra, it was all very nuts and bolts. After I entered the profession, I heard directors delivering very complex, convoluted concepts for the play. You would listen to these things and think, "Oh, this guy is so brilliant, why don’t I think this way? Why don’t I have a symbolism chart?" Then you would see the work and it was as though there was nothing on the stage. They had learned how to talk a great game. And by the time I was writing my book, it did seem to me that if you have the craft, if you have the skills, if you visualize it—that’s the concept, that’s the meaning. It’s an organic piece on the stage. It’s not an essay. It’s not some verbose thing, it’s almost intuitive. How do you put your intuitions on the stage?

I like to use the word "approach," because it seems more fluid than "concept," which at times connotes a rigid intellectual framework. Do you think there’s too much focus on conceptualization in training? In the profession?
SHAPIRO: It does seem that the minute we become conceptualizers, we’re not interpreting the text, but recreating it. It becomes our text and not the authors’. Which is a whole other question. I think the conceptual "bear" got a lot of people, and we paid a price for it. We’re often missing the music of a piece.

SCOTT: I tell students that there are three types of directors: the textualists (academics who just direct the words); the conceptualists (the auteurs and the deconstructionists); and the behaviorists (who are learning the fundamentals of American realism not as a style but as a tool). That "behavior director" is what I’m training. I find that the most exciting part of directing is putting behavior that is complicated on the stage.

DIAMOND: I think that there are different kinds of directors, thank God. In very gross terms, you could have one kind of director who’s interested in mining the text for what he or she perceives it to be—what a modernist would call its essence—and believes that the task of the director is to discover that and carry it across. There are other directors who really see the text as a pretext for an independent meditation. And that can be an incredibly exciting thing to bear witness to.

JORY: If you use the text as a pretext, it demands a talent equal to that of the text. I’ve watched Anne Bogart’s work for years, but I don’t believe it’s for everyone. And I think sometimes the most disastrous evenings in the theatre, when I wish that I was on drugs, are when the talent of the person using the text as a pretext was not equal to the imagination of the text itself. I’m just a little worried about that becoming so general a usage—because the people who use it as pretext have to be brilliant writers.

DIAMOND: I don’t know, Jon. Because in a young artist there might be a desire to go head to head with Shakespeare, and even if the enterprise falls flat on its face, it can be the critical learning experience in that person’s artistic life. 

JORY: As long as they’ve also had the other experience, right?

DIAMOND: Absolutely. 

SHAPIRO: But hopefully our programs allow all this—not to demand our own personal aesthetic, but to find the instincts of the students and help them locate them on stage.

JORY: We’ve all been interpreting from day one, because in most cases the playwright isn’t in the room with you, so 98 percent of what you do is interpretation; but hopefully there are some boundaries to your work on a particular text. But there is another aspect here—the director’s politics. For instance, in Eastern Europe, when I was doing a lot of traveling there and went through the schools and watched them work with directors, over and over again the phrase would occur, "What do you want to say through the play?" And the idea that you can still work within the circumstances of the play and speak through it seems to me to be crucial, and one of the ways that we don’t become old fogies. Because really, what one hopes to give student is craft, so that they can say through the play. And what they say will be their generation’s work.

So you’re not trying, as Mel said, to force your aesthetic on students.
JORY: You’re giving them tools to realize their aesthetic.

Do you think there’s enough of a link now between the professional theatres and these training programs?
SHAPIRO: Well, we have a couple of theatres here in Los Angeles with whom we have a rather futile relationship. Their idea for a directing student is just to come down and get coffee, maybe take notes the last three days, do errands for the director. There’s very little concern and interaction on a serious level between the theatres and the students. And they proclaim to want this, but it just hasn’t been working. They have their agendas—and their own lives.

JORY: And they have their own group of directors who work for them.

SHAPIRO: We’re just of use to them when they need us.

DIAMOND: I think assisting is valuable whether or not you’re given responsibility. You’re watching a director negotiate the egos in the room, relate to the producer, make mistakes.

SCOTT: I think assisting is very important. I try to make sure that the students at Rutgers assist not just me but the other professional directors here at least once, and that when they get out they try to get jobs assisting other kinds of directors.

JORY: Just speaking for a moment for the professional side, in some of the larger theatres the problem has always been that there is an immense amount of responsibility connected with taking on the young director, because there are enormous sums of money involved and there are grizzled veterans of the field sharpening their teeth when the young director walks into the room. These larger theatres have had a series of experiences with young directors who are not crafted enough and in a sense have put their hand on the stove, so that the theatres are now quite wary. 

Anyone like to add anything?
JORY: My tragic sense of the American theatre is how few conversations about the work I have been able to have with other directors in my career. I mean, over and over again I would beg TCG to send 9 or 10 of us up to a house somewhere in the country with no agenda and provide us with good food and let us talk. And I think, in a sense, that’s part of the service we give the student. But I sure as hell wish I were your student, you know what I mean? Because I find the conversation itself with all of you to be extremely filling. And—am I wrong?—there’s very little of it available.

Michael Bloom’s productions have been seen across the country in such theatres as American Repertory Theatre, Seattle Repertory Theatre, South Coast Repertory, Williamstown Theatre Festival and Manhattan Theatre Club. He teaches directing at the University of Texas, Austin.

Liz Diamond is resident director at Yale Repertory Theatre and associate professor of directing at Yale School of Drama. Her productions have been seen at such theatres as American Repertory Theatre and Oregon Shakespeare Festival. She is a recipient of an Obie award and a Connecticut Critics Circle Award.

Jon Jory was co-founder and original artistic director of the Long Wharf Theatre and longtime producing director of the Actors Theatre of Louisville. He was the founder and, for 25 years, the director of the Humana Festival of New Plays. He teaches at the University of Washington.

Hal Scott’s productions have been seen on and Off Broadway as well as at most major regional theatres, including Arena Stage and Alliance Theatre Company. Among his many directing awards are an Obie, an Exxon Award and the Lloyd Richards Director’s Award. He now heads the MFAdirecting program at Rutgers University.

Mel Shapiro has directed productions on and Off Broadway, as well as at Arena Stage, the Guthrie Theater, the Center Theatre Group and other theatres. He was one of the founding members of New York University’s School of the Arts program and is currently head of the directing program at University of California at Los Angeles.

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