Inside the Mind of the Director

For Anne Kauffman, directing is a form of crusade. Maria Mileaf craves the sharpness of narrative. A player, Derrick Sanders knows how to work a rehearsal room. While Joel Sass goes for gild and gaud, Rebecca Bayla Taichman sparks crackling electricity in the space between actors.

American directors conceive of their work differently, yet there are some fundamental necessities. For one, they need to worry about how words, ideas and bodies collide on stage. They must keep alert to the theatrical uses of negative space and positive space. And they have to be engaged in both the consequences of present choices made and the larger alchemy of the work at hand.

In the following series of appreciative critical portraits, five writers attempt to convey how five remarkable directors find their feet in other people’s shoes. “Learning about the other by being the other,” the actor and playwright Anna Deavere Smith writes in her 2000 book Talk to Me, “requires the use of all aspects of memory, the memory of the body, mind and heart, as well as the words.” Smith is ruminating here about “the spirit of acting” as “a form of travel from the self to the other” (italics hers). Yet she could as easily have been describing that act of transference called the art of directing. —Randy Gener