Derrick Sanders: Words First

This Wilson specialist finds gold in the text and the actors

By Jonathan Abarbanel

And, lo, August Wilson gave unto Lloyd Richards, who passed the torch on to Marion McClinton and Kenny Leon, who verily anointed Derrick Sanders.

The reality isn’t as biblical as that, but nonetheless August Wilson in his lifetime developed a core of directors associated with his work over the long term. Just as Toscanini derived his authority as an interpreter of Verdi and Puccini because he had known and worked with both composers, so theatre now has a short list of directors who can pass along their personal knowledge of Wilson and his work to coming generations. Of that short list, Derrick Sanders is the youngest and most recent addition.

Related Links: August Wilson Century Cycle (TCG Books)

Mentored by both McClinton and Leon, Sanders worked with them and Wilson himself on the premiere productions (and the Broadway stagings that followed) of Gem of the Ocean and Radio Golf. But Sanders had come to Wilson’s attention 10 years ago, when the fledgling director was an MFA student at the University of Pittsburgh, moonlighting at Pittsburgh’s Kuntu Repertory Theatre. When Sanders moved to Chicago in 1998 to found the Congo Square Theatre Company (of which he remains artistic director), Wilson blessed the endeavor by allowing Sanders to stage The Piano Lesson as the troupe’s first production, and then coming to see it.

Congo Square put itself on Chicago’s theatrical map more quickly than any new troupe since the young Steppenwolf Theatre Company 25 years before, producing a combination of Wilson plays and new work by other African-American writers. And in the past year, Sanders has jump-started his national career through his well-received staging of King Hedley II at the Signature Theatre Company in New York.

Declared New York Times critic Charles Isherwood, “With this gritty, strongly cast production King Hedley II seems to have found the rhythm it largely lacked when it opened on Broadway in 2001. As staged by Derrick Sanders…the new production moves more comfortably from casual dialogue into dense monologue…. In Mr. Sanders’s smoothly cadenced staging, the give and take among characters shooting the breeze fluidly glides into the long, often scorching arias.”

Sanders’s career may always be tied to August Wilson, but his ambitions are equally dedicated to new works by other playwrights, and to forging for himself broader directing opportunities. When Peter Brook brought his condensed Hamlet to Chicago Shakespeare Theater in 2001, Sanders was his assistant director. In conversation he frequently expresses his admiration for Shakespeare, Shaw, David Mamet and Tennessee Williams. It isn’t coincidental that, like Wilson, all are playwrights of language, for text is Sanders’s alpha and omega. He’s adamant that if you can’t find it in the text, it ain’t there.

“Some actors, even directors and audience members, come in with an idea of what an August Wilson play is, an idea of what the characters are,” he says. “But these characters aren’t southern blues archetypes—these are grounded, individual characters, and you have to take them that way. You can’t start off with a mindset that they are archetypes that exist throughout black culture—although there are elements of that, because the cultural aesthetic demands it. But August has already done that part in the language.”

In directing a Wilson play, Sanders asks his cast to act simply and begin by just saying the words. “It’s like any great writer who writes in a rhythmic pattern—Mamet, Shakespeare. If you trust the language, then the characters will come out—the beats will reveal themselves. And the heart and the love and the pain of the characters will manifest itself, even more so than if you think that you’re smarter than the writer or smarter than what he’s put down on the page. I’m kind of a purist in that sense. With Mamet and Shaw and August Wilson—and Carlyle Brown is another one—you’re getting it all on the page. You have to trust the language.”

Sanders varies his philosophy when he works with playwrights to develop new works, recognizing that sometimes the definitive text has yet to emerge. In the decade of his professional career, he’s worked with such writers as Javon Johnson, Chadwick Boseman, Lydia Diamond and Caridad Svich. Indeed, Johnson and Sanders were MFA students together in Pittsburgh, where they, along with playwright Mark Clayton Southers, were dubbed “the Pittsburgh Three” by Post-Gazette critic Christopher Rawson. When Sanders started Congo Square, Johnson was a co-founder.

Suiting his text-based approach, Sanders likes to start rehearsals with several days around the table talking things out with the actors. “They have a lot of ideas to bring to the table,” he says, and it helps build ensemble spirit. So talk first, then work: “When we are up on our feet I feel like it should be about action.” But talking things out is a particular challenge in Chicago where only three weeks of rehearsal are common. (Off Broadway at the Signature, Sanders had three weeks of rehearsal plus three weeks of previews.) In Chicago, he says, actors “have to get their homework done. Working in a LORT theatre leaves you a little bit more time for exploration in the room, to try different directions. Under the CAT contract you just have to go raw for the vision and keep plugging away.”

Sanders acknowledges lessons he’s learned from McClinton and Leon. “Oh, from Marion I learned patience, and I learned how delicate the process is, and how powerful soft suggesting can be. From Kenny I’ve learned honesty, to talk about where you’re coming from, and also a lot of the basics of being an artistic director. Kenny Leon is one of the great politicians of our time, and I learned a lot in terms of how to work a room, how to build an ensemble—he’s a master of those things.”

Sanders does relatively little cultural or historical research when he approaches a play, and he isn’t driven by visual imagery. His relative disinterest in design elements may be a product of working in smaller theatres with limited budgets, although his experience as assistant director at the Goodman Theatre and on Broadway has exposed him to the big leagues of design. Those elements, he says, “can add such a beautiful, eloquent note to your production—a stroke of eccentricity, a stroke of magic. But the true reason for being there is the words and the actors. You strip all the stuff away and it’s the words and the actors. You can draw an emotion from just pen and paper.”

Sanders’s career and reputation to date stem almost exclusively from African-American theatre, but he and his Congo Square colleagues are discussing the inclusion of work by white authors a season or two down the road, and he believes his audience would accept the expanded repertory. Nonetheless, if Sanders has an aesthetic conflict about anything, it is on this topic. Diversity, he says, “is just a card being played by most theatres; they really could care less about diversity, and I don’t know how much audience members really care.”

He follows that potentially cynical comment immediately by saying, “I do see my generation and those beyond having to change, because we represent the generations that haven’t seen Jim Crow, that haven’t lived in that kind of world. So if you don’t integrate, if you don’t diversify, if you don’t look at these classics from a broader perspective, your theatre will die. You’ve heard me mention Shaw, Tennessee Williams, some of the other great writers I would love to approach. Am I mad at the American theatre for not allowing me that opportunity? No! It’s their table—but in theory, it’s everybody’s table.” There’s no question that Sanders’s place at that table is secure—and he’s making space for others with the ambition and audacity to join him.

Jonathan Abarbanel is a critic and arts journalist based in Chicago.