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Diane Paulus with her Tony Award for directing Hair.
The artistic director of American Repertory Theater spends more time with SD.
Diane Paulus had a lot to say, above and beyond her words on the Porgy and Bess revision. In our two conversations with her she held forth whether commercial concerns affect her work, why she challenges presentation conventions, and even had some advice for directors starting out. All this and a slideshow of images from the Broadway production of The Gershwins’ Porgy and Bess after the jump!
Are there commercial considerations that you even think about coming to Broadway from the ART, or do you just ignore them?
ART is driven by a mission. We’re a not-for-profit theatre, which means we’re mission-based. That’s the definition of not-for-profit. If your mission-based work sells a lot of tickets, that’s great. It’s not that you can’t have great box office, but our mission at the ART is to expand the boundaries of theatre through work of the past and new work of tomorrow. It’s a great mission and what I’ve devoted myself to as a director with every work I do. What is theatre? Where do you find it? Who are the artists who are theatre artists? Working with someone like Serj Tankian or doing The Donkey Show in a nightclub where people stand. Turning everything on its head, saying that the theatre can look like this. The theatre can look like a rock show, it can look like a nightclub. You can do a show like Hair and have 300 people dancing on the stage at the end of it. All those rules can be broken. That’s what drives everything I do at the ART, not only the work I’m directing but producing. I don’t do everything there. I do a few shows. I’m curating and nurturing artists.
And then, if that works feels like it can sustain a larger audience and it feels like the work should continue, can you meet the demand that you need on Broadway? You have to have that keep of audience for a show, otherwise it doesn’t work on Broadway. With Hair that was very much the focus. It was not creating a show for Broadway, but we created it for the Public Theater. Then it was just thrilling that we had the opportunity and there was a connection for the audience, that made us feel like this show could have a longer life and more people could be exposed to it. That’s the great thing about Broadway, because in the theatre you’re in limited runs. You work for years and years on a show and then it’s over. The great thing about Broadway is that you can share your work with a wider audience.
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How do you balance your roles as artistic director for the ART and as a director?
It’s challenging, but one feeds the other. Because I’m a working director, a practicing director, I think a little differently when it comes to how I contribute to a marketing meeting or how I think about the finances of the theatre in the budget. There’s the art side and the business side and they tend to be separated. It’s very powerful when as a director I can say, “No, let’s not spend that much on that dress. Maybe that’s not really where the money should go.” It’s not a theoretical discussion. I’m a director and I can tell you that not all directors always want to spend a lot of money, so for me it’s been very exciting to be able to function as an artist and then also lead an institution to think differently about business and theatre and business and art. That’s why I took the job, because of my interest in how I could change the model of how we think about these two sides.
How do you balance those two sides within yourself and do you ever get frustrated knowing that you sometimes can’t have pure artistic expression in a piece because certain things might not rub an audience the right way?
I don’t think that way, to be honest. I’m sure certain artists hit that crossroads, but the very first thing I think when I take on a project is the audience. Who’s the audience for this? What’s the partnership going to be on this one with the audience? What’s the event? It’s never like, “I wish I could do this, but I can’t go there because that will rub an audience the wrong way.” It’s all about what the work needs. I’m a great believer that the audience is smart and wants to be challenged and wants to be pushed. That does not equal making esoteric, elite work that is on the art pedestal of refinement. When we did Sleep No More at the ART, it was about 40 rooms of an installation and in New York it is about 90 at the McKittrick Hotel.
How do you find audiences reacting to that kind of experience, where there are so many different places to go?
In Boston they lost their minds. That was the riskiest, most artistic show. It was my first season at the ART. It wasn’t in my theatre, it was in an abandoned public school in Brookline without a lot of accessible transportation. No seats. You were given a mask and had to walk around this building in your own time and space. That’s the definition of avant-garde, right? That was the most popular show at that time and sold more tickets than any other show in ART history and why? Because audiences went wild because they couldn’t figure it out. It wasn’t that it was pandering. You had to see it twice. You would go through the whole thing then go down to the bar, which is very much a part of the experience and find your friend who you were separated from and say, “Did you see the snake in the bathtub?” They would say, “What snake in the bathtub?” Then you put your mask on and went back into the installation. You could never get the whole thing. Most people see it at least twice. We have a 60% return rate on that show. It was so interesting to me as a producer that the show that was by far the most popular show drove people crazy and that’s what drove the audience demand on that show.
What was it like doing a show in Monaco in 2010?
That was amazing. It was the world premiere of an opera that was a collaboration between ART and MIT and it had robotic technology in it. We had robots in the show as well as opera singers, a chorus of 40 people from Monaco, students and dancers. We had Alex McDowell, who was the production designer for Minority Report and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. It was amazing and it was under the auspices of Prince Albert.
Could you give us the Cliffs Notes version of your theatrical background?
I was born and raised in Manhattan, so that was a huge part of my life. I studied ballet and piano and danced as a child with the New York City Ballet. I did theatre and saw all the shows that were happening in town in the ‘70s on Broadway. All those great musicals were my childhood and then I went to Harvard. I was thinking I wanted to go into politics because it was the 1970s in New York and I saw how terrible New York was and just thought it could be a better place. So I went to Harvard thinking I wanted to be the Mayor of New York. I was still doing a lot of theatre. I was acting and started directing in college and I just realized the theatre was my love and my passion and made me feel the most challenged, not only intellectually but emotionally and physically. I felt I could work hard into the night and it was never a problem or a drain. No matter how hard you had to work, it was always through passion. When I graduated from Harvard, I went to acting school at the New Actor’s Workshop, which was just starting. It was a school that Mike Nichols founded with the late Paul Sills, who was a great mentor of mine and George Morrison. I did that for two years and then started a theatre company under the guidance of Paul Sills. He was the founder of Second City and his mother Viola Spolin wrote Improvisation for the Theater.
You’re talking about Project 400?
After New York I started a theatre company in Wisconsin and that group transformed and morphed into Project 400. It started in Wisconsin and moved to New York. Then I got my MFA at Columbia, where I studied with Anne Bogart and Audrey Derbonne. Project 400 continued after my grad school and we did The Donkey Show. I also taught at Barnard and NYU and guest-taught at Yale and now I am a Professor of the Practice of Theater at Harvard. After graduate school I started directing and I was doing things like The Donkey Show downtown with my theatre company. I was also starting to direct opera.
Early on you were bringing popular music into classic shows like The Tempest and Phaedra and modernizing them. The Donkey Show was and is a disco-friendly rendition of A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
I always had this interest in looking backwards to great text as sources, but I was also very interested in music and pop music in the theatre and how music could be used in different ways.
What was it like working with Serj Tankian and Steven Sater on Prometheus Bound?
That was extraordinary because Serj is such a generous, concerned artist and he’s so talented. He’s got such a diversity of sound up his sleeves, so it was like a dream. You’d go to studio in L.A. and he’d go, “How about this? We could try this.” He has so many songs and samples and outtakes and he is very collaborative. I think it was his first real theatre production. Steven translates ancient Greek and we had always wanted to work together. He had such a strong take that Prometheus Bound was the first prisoner of conscience in a human rights way and Serj has a huge human rights angle to the work that he does. He has a great relationship with Amnesty, so we partnered with Amnesty on that. That was really powerful.
When did the Oberon venue—which has staged Prometheus Bound, Cabaret with Amanda Palmer and The Donkey Show—open at the ART?
That was when I first came to the ART in 2008. We had a black box second stage and I just had a vision about how we could use that space in a more vibrant way. I was looking when that space felt like it had the most energy. They had had a few cabaret shows there and I just thought the nightclub could be the second stage of the 21st century. I was interested in creating a permanent installation in our second stage that created a different environment in relationship between audience and spectator where there’s social interaction that’s part of the experience, that there’s no fourth wall, that it’s an immersive environment. We got a full bar so that we could drive another revenue stream there and just create an alternate culture of theatre behavior because I’m a big proponent of that. We think the theatre is going into an auditorium, sitting in a chair that’s bolted to the floor and being quiet and looking at your program. That’s not the definition of where theatre begins and ends. If you look historically to the roots of theatre, theatre is ritual across time and festivals.
There are so many other ways in which theatre has manifested itself, so I got interested in what I could change at the Loeb Drama Center, which is the big, 600-seat auditorium with the seats bolted to the floor. What can I change more aggressively if I said, “Look here, here’s a spot box. It’s now a nightclub with a coat check and you can have a drink in your hand when you’re watching a show. You can come with a group of six friends and keep talking with them during the show.” All of a sudden the rules are broken and there is an opportunity for a new form to emerge. That has been the mission at Oberon, which is to push the form into a new space of nightclub theatre. How can the experimental black box of the 1970s become a new kind of venue in the 21st century?
There’s a line that you’re walking here. When I go to standard Broadway shows these days, I find that people don’t know how to behave. They don’t shut up and want to focus on what’s going on onstage and there are some shows that demand that. Rock of Ages has drinks served at the show and the problem is that people get drunk, which has led to unruly behavior at a couple of shows. I guess it depends on the environment.
If you’re going to serve drinks, you have to be willing for people to get loud and noisy. That’s not sending the right message to serve drinks then kick them out when they start to get rowdy.
A show like Prometheus Bound is different in that respect. I mean, it really depends on the venue in terms of how you are going to push the format without it being like Shakespeare’s time, when people were very unruly in the audience.
That would be my fantasy, to really see a Shakespeare play the way it was done in Elizabethan England at the Globe Theatre.
Really?
God, yes! To be in the pit, to be in a mosh pit, not like the re-creation in London where everybody behaves like a good theatregoer. Can you imagine what would’ve been like to be on the floor of the Globe with people having sex and eating beside you and Queen Elizabeth up there in the balcony? I mean, that’s life. That was when the Globe Theatre was a microcosm of life.
It makes you wonder how much were the people at the show getting the message. Even today, I wonder how much people are really paying attention anymore. I find it interesting that most of the shows that still do well on Broadway are big musicals. God Of Carnage was one of the few dramas that played for a year. Why do you think that is?
I think there’s more of an audience for musicals. Music is popular. Music cuts to your heart. Music is a very visceral form. I think shows that use music have that appeal across ages, across language. It’s just a broader appeal. That’s not to say that as a result they don’t have as powerful a message. People get passionate about musicals in a way that creates fans and fans are what drive shows. Any good sport team knows that. You’ve got your fans and I think the more we can get audiences to feel that passionate the better. The death of theatre is when we say, that’s a piece of art, it’s good for me and I should see it. If I fall asleep during it or not doesn’t matter. I’m there for my cultural injection. No, the more honest we can be...to me, it is about being alive and there and present. Obviously not all theatre allows that kind of behavior. Each show has its different rules. At Hair, people sing along and put their hands in the air. We’re working all night to break down the fourth wall, so why can’t people behave that way? But it’s hard. People have assumptions of the way you should behave at a Broadway show.
What advice would you give to an upcoming director who wants to get to where you are?
You have to identify your passion. I always tell directors, what interests you about the theatre? You can’t just say that you like theatre and do theatre. What interests you about theatre? Theatre covers a big spectrum of ideas. Who are the artists that you admire? What is the kind of theatre that you like? What makes it tick inside of you? What do you want the theatre to be and do and change? I always say to young people, don’t rest on the assumptions of what theatre is. The only reason why The Donkey Show succeeded is because we rehearsed it in a free space at Columbia University after I finished graduate school and we did it at midnight on Fridays and Saturdays in a space downtown that wasn’t even the theatre. You have to find ways and certainly have to do your work. Your work has to be unstoppable.
That’s how I started, doing shows in community gardens on the West Side—the blocks of land that the community takes over and makes into gardens. I staged my first Shakespeare play in one of those gardens. I did my first show after I studied acting in the studio of the school at the New Actor’s Workshop. I asked the school if I could use the studio after hours. You have to be resourceful, be an entrepreneur and have to have your passion. You can’t just say that you want to do theatre because you want to be a good director. No, why do you want to be a director? What you want to do for an audience? What is your interest in it? Really, interest—that word very specifically.
What else is coming up for you?
Of course we have our whole season at the ART coming up, which is very exciting and it was just announced that I’m directing a show for Cirque du Soleil. It’s their 2012 tent show that will open in Montréal in April. It’s been an incredible experience to be part of Cirque du Soleil and learn from this incredible company. It’s a show that’s been inspired by women. We have the greatest women acrobats from around the world in the show -- from China, Russia, America, Spain -- just an incredible company of top class athletes that has been thrilling for me and an amazing team up here.
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