Michael Wilson Knows What He Likes

His penchant for classic Americana suits audiences in Hartford, and beyond

An Interview by Frank Rizzo

 

 

 

 

 

 

Two playwrights, Tennessee Williams and Horton Foote, helped define director Michael Wilson's place in the American theatre—and in life, too. One sent him out into the world to explore "the fugitive kind." The other brought him home to find a separate peace.

With boundless energy, southern charm and devoted friends (famous and not), Wilson has over the past decade transformed Hartford Stage of Connecticut's identity and reach by celebrating these two writers in a big way. First came his 10-year-long Tennessee Williams Marathon, which he launched shortly after he arrived in Hartford in 1998 at age 33 to take over the Tony-winning theatre. And this year Wilson is undertaking, in partnership with New York City's Signature Theatre Company (and with the support of a half-million-dollar grant from the Mellon Foundation), Horton Foote's enormous nine-play "The Orphans' Home" Cycle.

Wilson arrived in Hartford like a man on a mission. (He is a Baptist by birth but not inclination, he says, but the preacher gene is there.) In his first year—and without a managing director in place—he dramatically expanded the company's season. He included his own popular version of A Christmas Carol from Houston's Alley Theatre (which has since become a Hartford perennial), established a new-play reading festival and opened the theatre up to summer programming. The Williams marathon was next on tap.

During his tenure, Wilson has added luster to the Hartford Stage marquee by attracting artists such as Ellen Burstyn, Elizabeth Ashley, Olympia Dukakis, Estelle Parsons, Amanda Plummer, Jean Stapleton, Betty Buckley, Shirley Knight, Eve Ensler, Joan Van Ark and Diane Venora—a stellar list of women that has contributed to his reputation as an empathetic and trustworthy director who brings out the best in actresses. Wilson has in fact created a de facto core company of leading regional and New York actors, directors and designers—including his longtime partner, set designer Jeff Cowie.

He has also reached beyond the rich lode of the Williams and Foote ouvres to produce new work by such veteran writers as Edward Albee, Lanford Wilson and Alfred Uhry, while commissioning and nurturing a younger generation of playwrights, including David Grimm, Daniel Beaty, David Cale, Christopher Shinn, Luis Alfaro and Quiara Alegra Hudes. New Wilson-directed works of diverse styles have found future lives beyond Hartford—Matthew Barber's Enchanted April moved to New York in 2003, providing Wilson with his Broadway directorial debut; Foote's The Carpetbagger's Children was picked up by Lincoln Center Theater after its Hartford premiere. Albee's expanded version of The Zoo Story, called Peter and Jerry and directed by Pam MacKinnon, went on to acclaim in New York as well.

Unlike Williams, whom Wilson never met, Foote was an active collaborator with Wilson. The director had over the past 20 years formed a personal bond with the playwright, whom he first met when he was a student at the University of North Carolina—Chapel Hill. Other Foote properties Wilson has assayed include The Death of Papa in 1999 in Hartford and The Day Emily Married in 2004 Off Broadway.

And Hartford's past season, its 45th, ended with Wilson's exemplary staging of Foote's Dividing the Estate, which moved on to become a triumph for both artists on Broadway. In what may be his busiest year ever, Wilson also supervised Tina Howe's Chasing Manet, which runs through May 2 at Primary Stages, with Jane Alexander, while reshaping the script of To Kill a Mockingbird (which ran through April), starring Matthew Modine. The latter production became the highest grossing show in Hartford Stage's history.

Entering his 12th season, Wilson will engineer Foote's nine-play cycle as a three-part, nine-hour, twenty-plus cast event that begins in late August before transferring to the Signature in New York in late October. Foote had accomplished the editing of his nine plays into a three-show format shortly before he died, just days before the final section of the cycle was to have had its first public reading.

FRANK RIZZO: You were extremely close with Horton Foote professionally, but also personally—he considered you a member of his family. How has his death in March, just shy of his 93rd birthday, affected the "Orphans' Home" project—and you?

MICHAEL WILSON: There's no question there's a huge void now, because Horton was not only one of my greatest mentors but at times I felt like his brother, and at other times I felt like his son. That was a very blessed position to be in—to have his total trust, both in his work and other things he would share with me about his life, including what he thought about the world beyond this one.

Like his plays, those were very unclenching, unsentimental and clear-eyed conversations about the life he had lived and the people he had loved, and whom he might be able to be with again when he left us. I think we won't fully grieve until after the cycle, because we feel he is so very much with us.

What made you decide to take on a project of this size and scope now?
What makes me do it is my evolution as artistic director of Hartford Stage. You have to build to a point where you have a company behind you, and by that I mean your board of directors, major funders, the staff and, of course, the audience. This kind of a journey is going to be unlike any other that they have taken in the theatre. My hope is that the Tennessee Williams Marathon began to prepare them for this idea of an epic look at one writer's work.

Foote may be an American master, but he does not have that many plays that are as well known to a general audience.
There have only been three American playwrights in the 20th century who have attempted to write a cycle—Eugene O'Neill, who did not finish his; August Wilson, who did, right before he died; and Horton. It screws courage to purpose in the not-for-profit, professional theatre to take on an endeavor such as this. It clarifies why we are vital and necessary.

But why do this big project now? Some would say this is not the time to do it, economically speaking.
We know the production is going to cost considerable resources for both theatres. At our finance committee meeting, a board member brought up that very point. But I was pleased when a past president stood up and said, "When I die, if someone asks why I remained involved with Hartford Stage as long as I did, let it be said it was because I was able to be a part of making Horton Foote's most important work possible on stage."

When you first came here 11 years ago, you had 50 actors to work with in a single season. In recent years that number has been as low as in the twenties. Is regional theatre in danger of succumbing to diminishing expectations?
You can economize so efficiently you no longer have an audience that feels compelled to come to the theatre. That is a very real danger. We've been through some economic ups and downs, and when we've had to contract, we've always pushed against the tide to go back towards expansion afterwards—and not just out of reasons of size.

I came of age in the professional theatre working at Robert Brustein's American Repertory Theatre, and I've never forgotten Bob talking about the notion of "the McTheatres"—those theatres who just pluck so much from recent Broadway and Off-Broadway work that they are no longer distinctive entities or have an audience that feels compelled to come to the theatre.

When a theatre takes on a risky endeavor—where you wouldn't expect big numbers at the box office—oftentimes those shows indeed do well because those productions become "events."
Many feel the mere ambition of taking on a project with the theatrical sweep of the "Orphans' Home" Cycle will compel audiences to the theatre. I was in my twenties working at ART and I made a special trip to come down to see both parts of Peer Gynt at Hartford Stage with Richard Thomas in one day—at that time it was one of the most theatrical and thrilling experiences of my life. I saw Peter Brook's Mahabharata in Avignon and Peter Hall's Tantalus in Denver, Angels in America, The Coast of Utopia—I rarely missed one of these epic theatrical events if I could get there. There's nothing like being caught up in the spell of a story that spans hours of theatrical storytelling.

What I find interesting is that rarely do we in America invest resources around an American playwright telling an American story. It's usually the Greeks, or a British writer. In a way, this is Horton's American Odyssey and his search for a home.

When you first arrived in Hartford, did you imagine yourself entering a 12th season?
When I first came here, man, oh man, I thought if I can make it through a decade, won't that have been a swell thing. And I did it—and survived. I was energized and exhilarated by the experience, though at times I had my knocks, too.

I've always thought it was really important for our American resident theatres to be artistic homes, as Todd London termed it in the book he wrote for TCG. Horton Foote would have been literally in residence at Hartford Stage from January to October, not only because of Dividing the Estate but because he was also doing intense work to adapt his plays for this event. But the idea of artistic home also manifests itself in other ways—it applies for the next generation of playwrights like Christopher Shinn, David Grimm and Daniel Beaty.

When did you first meet Foote, who was 50 years your senior?
In 1987. He was giving a lecture in my hometown of Winston-Salem, N.C. I had recently graduated from Chapel Hill and was about to move up to Cambridge to study playwriting at the Harvard Summer Drama Program with Robert Auletta, who was a wonderful teacher. I had seen recently the film The Trip to Bountiful as I was preparing to leave North Carolina, and the movie was an absolutely devastating experience. I was also enamored with Tender Mercies. Horton's writing has always touched something very deep within me in terms of his stories, characters and settings, and with his belief in the resilient human spirit.

After his talk, I went up to him and told him I was trained in the theatre but had also worked in television—I was trying to get him to tell me whether I should pursue films and TV or the theatre. He said, "I don't give advice—but I can say for myself that I've had my most personal gratification in the theatre, and that's where I've always been the happiest." That stuck with me.

But at the same time I was enamored with Horton Foote, I was up in Cambridge with Brustein, where I became enamored with Robert Wilson, Anne Bogart, Richard Foreman, Andrei Serban and Julie Taymor.

You can't get much different from Foote than that crowd.
It took me so long to understand that Horton was every bit the innovator in what he was doing in his plays as Serban was taking on Chekhov, or Robert Wilson directing Ibsen.

In what way?
It has to do with this utter lack of sentimentality. It's absolutely stunning how devoid his work is of that. Also what's incredibly modern—and even postmodern—about Horton is the spareness of his language. He does not have the lush romantic poetry of a Tennessee Williams or the baroque language of O'Neill. His is more that language shaped by one of our first modernists, Chekhov—than one of our first postmodernists, Beckett. If you fuse the two and put them in the southern setting of the east coast of Texas, that's really what Foote is exploring in the immense subtext of his plays.

What is it that Tennessee Williams offered you, as opposed to Foote?
I think part of my identification with Tennessee was that I loved the magic he thought the theatre could spin for us. That quote from Blanche says it all: "I don't want realism, I want magic." And I loved the way he would spin that magic through his very inchoate, exotic and sensual settings as well as vivid characters. At the time when I first experienced his plays, I was just getting in touch with my own sexuality. Certainly, I felt Tennessee's plays gave me a cleft in the rock to hide in. Tennessee was saying it's okay, boy, to follow that feeling to go and walk on the dark side, because you're not feeling acceptance for who you are.

But Horton offered a way to come back home to family, place, church and—I've never thought about this until now—perhaps Horton and Tennessee have somehow enabled me to accept two sides of myself. I'm not saying that I'm quite at peace, or anything so conclusive as that, but it's nice to feel you don't have to forsake who you were completely growing up—that it's not one or the other, that is, the truth or a lie.

When did theatre enter your life?
It happened in kindergarten. The class play was called The Little White Rabbit Who Wanted Wings. (I cannot believe I'm telling you this.) It was about a rabbit who was not satisfied being a rabbit once he saw his friend the blue jay, who had wings—so he wanted wings. But what happened once he got the wings was that no one knew who he was anymore. That gave me my first big taste of the theatre.

While in college, you had a television internship in Los Angeles, at MTM Productions. Was that world tempting?
It was. I could have gone back to some relationships I had established in that period. When I returned to college in my junior year, I helped run an undergrad theatre and we did a video miniseries, Shadows of Dromgoole, that starred Michael Cumpsty as Dracula. It had a big cast and was very popular on public television. It was crude but impressive, and all based on my experience at MTM. But it showed me what you could do with collaboration and sheer energy.

What made you focus on the theatre?
Horton Foote. I finished Chapel Hill in '87 and then went to the Harvard playwriting summer program. Then I got hired by Rob Orchard and Brustein. I was at ART for two years and might have been there longer, but Gregory Boyd, who had been the artistic director at PlayMakers at Chapel Hill when I was there, was taking over the Alley, so he invited me to join him in that adventure.

Because of my association with ART and the Alley, which had resident companies, I've always had this sense of company and really loved what you could accomplish working with that. Even though Hartford Stage had dismantled its company years before I got there, I have attempted to put together our extended family of artists.

When did you become ambitious enough to seek a theatre of your own?
Never! Who needs it! (Laughs.) I thought, "Please God, whether film or TV, just don't let me end up in the LORT theatre movement!" Of course, that's exactly what happened.

When I was 28 in 1993, I left Houston to assist Des MacAnuff on The Who's Tommy in New York. I was associate director of the Alley, but I was based in New York City and helping to develop relationships with playwrights and directors and artists. There's that fable about the turtle and the hare—I always saw myself as a turtle.

Some would say you're perfectly cast as the hare. Or at least the little white rabbit. Certainly your career seemed to be on a fast track.
That's not how I approached it. The period in Houston with Greg was one of the fondest of my time in American theatre. If they wanted me to adapt A Christmas Carol, okay, I love that story. Direct Other People's Money? Great. Then I wrote my own play, The Kiddie Pool.

My eventual decision to leave had a lot to do with a man named Paul Broussard being brutally murdered around the corner from my porch. It was around the same time as Matthew Shepard. Paul was walking home when kids from the suburbs beat him to death. A few nights later there was a candlelight vigil that was not unlike what you saw in Milk. A year later the GOP convention came to Houston to nominate Bush. Because of where we were with AIDS at that time, I became very involved in Queer Nation and ACT UP. I was often on TV and I thought the Alley might have to let me go. They never did.

But a new political activism had been awakened in me, and I thought if I didn't go to New York, it was going to be harder to do it later. The Who's Tommy, in 1993, was my entrée. I know I could have learned a lot by recreating the production around the world, but eventually I thought I needed to be my own storyteller. I went back to Houston to direct Dancing at Lughnasa and Greg kept me on as associate director. Then the call came from my agent, the dearly departed Helen Merrill. She said, "Snoutsie!" (Snoutsie was the nickname she gave me because she thought I was always sniffing about.) "How would you like to run a theatre?" I said, "Absolutely not." She said, "Well, I got a call that Mark Lamos is thinking about stepping down from Hartford Stage." "Well," I said, "if it's Hartford Stage, I'd like to talk with them."

Was it like you thought it was going to be when you started at Hartford Stage?
Inside the rehearsal hall it was. What's hard is to realize that in Year 12 everything that surrounds the rehearsal hall is as hard—if not harder—than it was in Year 1. I guess I had hoped certain things at this stage would be a little bit more turn-key.

I think that absorbing the accumulative challenge of keeping a theatre ambitious is something you never escape. I am very engaged in fundraising, and have always been from my student days on. There's something really fulfilling to be able to go to a private foundation, donor or corporation and to be able to transmit your passion for an idea, an artist, a project, and then have them come back with the money to make that happen. The other thing I didn't realize was how much more than a service job it would be—it's also my artistic home.

Did you feel you were an orphan before?
Oh, yeah, I think all artists do. As much as we are rebels in society—that fugitive kind going against the grain of society—we want to belong somewhere.

Frank Rizzo is a theatre writer for Connecticut's Hartford Courant and for Variety.