Trip Cullman

Things get funnier, the director figures, when there's clarity in the chaos

By Eric Grode

Cullman at left (photo by Ande Whyland); right, Arnie Burton, Matthew Wilkas, Johnathan McClain, Donald Corren, Peter Smith and David Turner in The Last Sunday in June at the Rattlestick (2003) (photo by Sandra Coudert)

As the booze-and-bitterness-fueled frenemies of Leslye Headland's Bachelorette lurch into various confessions, it surfaces that one character had previously helped another terminate an unwanted pregnancy. Upon learning this, a third friend rouses herself from a stupor to whimper, "You guys had an abortion without me?"

It's one of those moments when, depending on how receptive the audience has been up to that point, the theatre can become either very loud or very quiet. As a playgoer, Trip Cullman lives for these moments.

"I'm the guy in the audience who's always laughing when nobody else is," says Cullman, who directed a much-praised Off-Broadway run of Bachelorette at Second Stage Uptown this summer. "I thought the abortion line was hilarious, but others would say, 'Too much, too much!' I think I have a darker comic sensibility than a lot of people."

This sensibility was honed during a series of apprenticeships that began in 1996, when John Guare cast the Yale undergrad in a production of his Landscape of the Body at Yale Repertory Theatre. Cullman would eventually return to the Yale School of Drama as a graduate student, during which time he assisted directors Joe Mantello and Mike Nichols on Take Me Out and the starry Central Park staging of The Seagull, respectively.

"I had had Stanislavsky's Regie buch [production notebook] translated into English," Cullman recalls. "And Mike would lean over and say, 'What did he do here?' Which is not to say he necessarily listened to Stanislavsky."

Working with Nichols and Mantello, the men who directed the 1965 and 2005 Broadway productions of The Odd Couple (along with more than a dozen other comedies), instilled in Cullman a firm sense of the nuts-and-bolts side of directing, including the mechanics required for stage comedy.

"I let the actors try to find their own laughs early in the process," he says, "but once you get into blocking, it becomes very technical. You really do have to have three-quarters of your face visible to the audience when you deliver a punch line. You really can't have either the person delivering the punch line or the person receiving it move. There are so many stupid rules, and they're all true."

After graduating, Cullman went on to direct the premieres of works by Terrence McNally and Take Me Out author Richard Greenberg. But the vast majority of the 35-year-old Upper East Side native's energy has been spent developing new plays by his peers. Nearly all of these—including such well-received Off-Broadway productions as The Last Sunday in June, American Hwangap, The Drunken City and Bachelorette—have involved ensemble casts.

"Actors love to be in the room with him," says playwright Adam Bock, a frequent Cullman collaborator. "He wants the play to be good, but he also wants the experience to be good for the people who are making it. He's funny, he's generous, and he's a really thoughtful listener."

Cullman says his penchant for teasing out the interpersonal dynamics in these plays is very much a joint effort: "What happens is you sort of formulate, and then you collaborate. And then you get better. Plus, I'm not sure whether it's a bonus or a detriment, but I always blur the boundaries between rehearsals and time away from rehearsals. I remember with Dog Sees God, we were out every night until 5:30 a.m."

But while Cullman can talk about cavorting until sun-up and playing Guitar Hero in one breath, he'll slide almost instantly into a discussion of the impact that director Michael Haneke and hypernaturalist German playwright Franz Xaver Kroetz had on an upcoming project. ("What they both do really well is present behavior without psychologizing it.")

The project in question—Bock's A Small Fire, which opens in December at New York's Playwrights Horizons—marks the fifth time Cullman and Bock have worked together. Cullman calls the writer "my number one favorite person on the Earth" and refers to the drama as "a huge leap forward for Adam"—high praise for someone who is already one of the country's most talked-about young playwrights. (Bock makes more modest claims for the work: "It's an odd little play, or a sweet little play, or something.")

Before he dives into A Small Fire, about a contractor who undergoes a Job-like series of trials, Cullman will return to the Play Company, a scrappy Off-Broadway troupe where he serves as associate artist. There he will direct Edgewise, an absurdist comedy by Eliza Clark about wartime carnage impinging on a fast-food restaurant. Early 2011 will see him directing Wolf in the Window, the third entry in Adam Rapp's Hallway Trilogy, which will be performed in repertory at Rattlestick Playwrights Theater.

Several collaborators credit Cullman's success to his ability to provide clarity to the often chaotic proceedings, both on and off stage. "There's always a point in rehearsals where a sort of fog descends and you're not really sure what you have," says Mantello, who also worked with Cullman on Corpus Christi and has remained a good friend. "Trip was always very clear-eyed in those situations, which I found invaluable."

While Off-Broadway and regional theatres are lining up for Cullman's services, the more prestigious—and lucrative—commercial offers have yet to materialize. Cullman doesn't seem particularly driven to make the jump to Broadway, although some of his mentors are eager on his behalf. "I'm sort of waiting like a proud father for him to have his opportunity," Mantello avows.

Casting movie stars has become the quickest road to Broadway, but when asked to name the performers he'd most love to direct, Cullman rattled off the decidedly marquee-indifferent trio of Elizabeth Marvel, Laurie Metcalf and Linda Emond. (He did direct a production of A Steady Rain at New York Stage & Film in 2006, but a more seasoned name took over when Hugh Jackman and Daniel Craig signed on.) And mounting boldly reimagined revivals, another well-established route, seems to hold little appeal.

A rare exception to this took place last year in San Diego, where Cullman directed Karen Ziemba in a critically praised revival of John Guare's Six Degrees of Separation at the Old Globe. Guare, who has followed Cullman's work avidly since that Yale Rep Landscape of the Body 14 years ago, lists the young director among the "handful of absolutely remarkable young directors right now. All he's trying to do is listen to the text and respond to it. He has a narrative sense. That's so rare for a director, and it's the strongest gift a director can have."

Cullman, for his part, enjoyed the inherent safety net in directing an established work: "It was nice to feel that if something wasn't working, it wasn't the play's fault." And he has bold concepts in mind should any enterprising regional theatre ask him to take on The Cherry Orchard or The Glass Menagerie or Cymbeline, or virtually anything by Christopher Durang.

With the arguable exception of Cymbeline, the aforementioned plays are just as text-driven as the new ones to which Cullman so often gravitates. All the same, collaborators frequently allude to Cullman's gift for bold, encapsulating visuals. From the periscope-style configuration that turned a large chunk of Second Stage's cramped uptown Manhattan space into a giant shark tank in Swimming in the Shallows to the naturalism-gone-haywire Six Degrees set in San Diego to the tilting sidewalk in The Drunken City, Cullman says he often finds his way toward sets that "have a point of view to them. Adam [Bock]'s mantra is always 'Simple, simple, simple,' but it doesn't ever seem to work out that way."

"I've learned never to question him when he has a design idea, even when I think the idea is ridiculous," Bock says. "He listens so carefully that the play I wanted it to be is always somehow there at the end."

Six Degrees occurred during an extended California stay in 2009, during which Cullman directed new works at La Jolla Playhouse, the Magic Theatre and South Coast Repertory. The visit ended abruptly with the conclusion of the Magic production, Lloyd Suh's American Hwangap (featured on the cover of American Theatre in Dec. '09). "The day after Hwangap opened at the Magic," Cullman says, "I started rehearsing an entirely new cast in New York."

The prospect of breathing a new ensemble piece into life—and then doing it all over again 3,000 miles away the very next day—seems apt for the inventive, seemingly inexhaustible Cullman. It's easy to imagine a director of American Hwangap or maybe A Small Fire peeking over someone's shoulder decades from now and asking, as Mike Nichols once put it, "What did he do here?"

Eric Grode is a theatre critic for the Village Voice and the author of Hair: The Story of the Show That Defined a Generation, which comes out in November.

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