Artistic Differences

I finally read this article.

My gut instinct is to side with the director, of course. The fact that the artistic team waited until tech to "dismiss" the guy suggests sketchiness on their part. If they had that many problems with his work throughout the process, they should have fired him much earlier.

The fact that the playwright is directing the most recent production of the play also gives me pause. She may be one of those playwrights who never really believes that anyone truly "gets" their play as much as they do.

I've had a few experiences like this. Not quite to this extent and never with money involved, but they were both pretty traumatic for me. Absolutely educational, but nonetheless, traumatic.

The first was one of my first out-of-school directing jobs. I was working with a playwright who was finishing her MFA at Columbia. She was a difficult personality to navigate. Her play was about Asian teens and I was one of very few non-Asians involved with the production. She decided at some point that this meant I wasn't really getting her play - somewhere around the middle of the rehearsal process.

I left rehearsal one night and headed for the subway. Things had been slightly tense that day, she was interrupting me more and more as I was working (she was in the room the whole time) and it was starting to make me snap at her.

Playwrights need to know that they can't do this. It breaks down all trust within a rehearsal room. Actors are suddenly getting direction from multiple sources and they don't know who they are supposed to listen to. And frankly - a director is the person in the room who should be communicating with the actors. That's what I went to school to learn how to do. I let you do your job, now you let me do mine, okay?

I got to the subway platform and checked my voicemail service (remember voicemail services?) from a pay phone. Playwright Girl had left me a message. "Citymouse, I have decided that I am just going to direct my play myself. We won't be needing you anymore."

I was livid, as I'd already put umpteen hours into getting this play up. I also knew that she had no real sense of what it would take to pull the show together. She was a good playwright, but would have been a problematic director as she was an extremely defensive person with lousy communication skills. I was hurt too. I'd invested heart as well as time into the show, and by now cared a lot for the actors and for the play as an independent entity.

By the next day her advisors had nixed the idea. I was back in the evening for rehearsal, I don't even remember if we ever actually talked about what had happened, but the tension was certainly thick for the rest of the process. The group ended up kind of divided - some people sided with Playwright Girl, some sided with me, but it was all completely submerged. The show was nearly all women (plus female stage manager, dramaturg, advisor) so collectively, we must have had nearly three hundred years of experience being passive aggressive.

All in all, it was disappointing.

So, you would think I would have dodged the bullet when the situation nearly replicated itself about five years later.

The best thing I can say about the second incident is that the split happened earlier in the process and this time I ran far, far away from the morass the minute the playwright called and said (again, in a voicemail, this time after the FIRST REHEARSAL) "I am just going to direct this play myself because I am really the only person who completely 'gets' this play".

Lesson learned.

I will say this. As rationally as I can look at each of these situations, as clear as I can be about what forces were at play that were completely beyond my understanding and control, there is still a little part of me that thought each time, "Maybe this is happening because I am not good at what I do".

The fortunate antidote to that thought are the several writer/director relationships I have been involved in that have worked famously and lasted over several productions.

The chemistry won't always work. It's a relationship like any other.

But how tough it would be to then see your story plastered all over the New York Times. Ouch.