A Conversation with Director Leigh Silverman

Of Niches, Meta-Theatricality, and the Role of the Director:
A Conversation with Director Leigh Silverman
by Tom Pearson

Leigh Silverman and I met after what was a long day of interviews for me, and a long day of rehearsals for her, directing a reading of Eric Gansworth’s Re-Creation Story for the Native Theater Festival here at the Public. A little punchy on both our parts, we started jokingly but quickly got into some serious questions about the relationship between the director and the play, and about race, gender, and Neil Gaiman.

Leigh: [Laughing] Are you going to ask me what it’s like to not be Native working on the Native Theater Festival?

Tom: [Laughing] I can if you want, but I wasn’t going to necessarily start or even go there, but if it informs something one way or another, that’s fine. I thought maybe we’d start with… Well, you just finished a rehearsal. How was it?

Leigh: It was great. You know, we have some interesting challenges with this piece because we have a playwright who’s written an autobiographical play, but he’s not playing himself in the piece. We have an actor who’s playing him, and yet the piece is really his [Eric’s] first stab at playwriting, so there’s a lot of interesting energy of a writer, a real writer, writing a play about himself, a fictional actor trying, who just met this writer for the first time, trying to play this man, a group of other actors who are trying to assume twenty or thirty different characters in a piece that starts out being about one thing and sort of switches directions half way through. And, you know, doing it in two and a half days, it’s challenging.

Tom: Quickly, for people who don’t know you, could you tell us a little about yourself, the work you do, and give a sense of who you are coming into this process?

Leigh: Sure. Well it’s really interesting, not that I’m really interesting [laughing]. It is interesting because I feel that somehow the niche that I have found myself in, in a very interesting way, is with these kind of autobiographical meta-theatrical plays about race and identity, and certainly the plays that I’ve done here at The Public, Well by Lisa Kron and Yellow Face by David Henry Hwang, are both plays that dealt with a writer who wrote a play, where like the first line of the play is, “Hi, I’m Lisa Kron” or “Hi. I’m David Henry Hwang.”

Tom: Well went on to Broadway, right?

Leigh: Yeah, Well we did it here [at the Public] in 2004, and then it transferred to Broadway, and you know, Yellow Face, which we did last season was really terrific. You know, we extended for three weeks here at the Public, and it was a Pulitzer finalist and won an Obie and all sorts of things. I think when Oskar called me and asked me if I wanted to look at Yellow Face, you know, he said “I think you’re going to be the perfect director for this.” And I thought, “What on earth is this play about that I would be the perfect director for it? I mean what’s my niche that I’ve fallen into?” And then I read it and I was like, “Oh, that’s the niche!”

T: And now you have another one…

Leigh: [laughter] And now here I am working on Eric’s play, which also covers very similar themes. I mean, I think for me, I am interested in plays that are big and stylistically adventurous and deal with really political, big, global issues, but that are also incredibly personal, and, like Well and like Yellow Face, this play really grapples with a relationship with a parent in a very intense personal way and is also a very big beautiful, sweeping attempt of a writer, who’s a character in the play, to tell this story, the creation story.

Tom: When you start talking about “this is your niche,” suddenly, in some ways, I think people find their niche and it’s a relief, but at the same time, there is a little bit of a panic that sets in, an “Uh oh! Can I get out of this, or am I stuck in this for the rest of my career?” Do you ever feel that?

Leigh: [laughing] Well, not until you just said it that way. You know, I guess that I feel like after we did Well, I got like fourteen plays about people and their mothers, and so I think when you do something that’s successful people send you a lot of other plays like that. And I think there are worse things to be known for than big, epic, political, personal, autobiographical, meta-theatrical work. So in some ways, I feel like it’s exactly the kind of work that’s interesting to me, you know, work that keeps unfolding and is surprising and deconstructs and has a lot of big content and struggles with itself the whole way through. I feel very grateful that if this is the niche that I’ve fallen into, that it’s so challenging to me.

Tom: And there’s something cool about the work being so structurally complicated, that the question becomes: “Who can handle this? We need somebody who’s really got the touch.”

Leigh: Totally. I, actually for the first time in six years, am going to direct a revival in Seattle next month, and it’s crazy. I think, “Wow! This is such a conventional, well-made play. There’s a fourth wall and the people just talk to each other on stage.” It’s so well made it just feels like a vacation practically.

Tom: With this particular play [Re-Creation Story], everything seems to make sense why the match was right, but then after you’ve taken this on, what becomes your point of entry into the work?

Leigh: I really think that it is my job, you know, sometimes I’m really emotionally connected to the work; it’s very personal to me. The personal points of entry are different than what people would expect. And I think that there is always a way in if the play is good because that means the play is universal. And so people used to ask me all the time… I did this play of Tanya Barfield’s called Blue Door, and it was two African-American men, and it was the story of four generations of African-American men and their family, and people used to say to me, "Why you? Why are you the right person for that? Why did you want to direct that play?" And I thought that even though I’m not an African-American male, well, what I understood about that play and how to tell that story… There are things about that play that were incredible personal to me. Really, any play, it’s my job to actually stand outside of the play and tell the story and if there’s something about me that automatically makes me an outsider anyway, I think it’s actually helpful in a certain way to have that certain kind of bird's eye view of it. And, I mean, that is really the job of the director. I think that the plays that I have felt the most sensitive too, personally, or attached to, or felt that it was my story, I don’t know that I did such a good job, because I think that there is a way in which a director needs to stay on the outside of something. So, both I think you need to have really specific contact points and ways in and ways to feel really invested in it emotionally, but it’s not my job to be the emotional one. It’s really the actors’ jobs, and it’s my job to tell the story. And so I always want to stay both totally inside of it and make all of the right decisions about it, but also to be able to be outside of it enough to guide it. You have to be able to sit in an audience of people reacting to it, in all their ways, and it’s really why the actors can’t see the audience. It’s better not to know. It’s a constant dance when you are a director to be inside and outside the process all at the same time.

Tom: As you’re talking, I’m thinking that it makes perfect sense to see you paired with Eric, whose voice is so strong in this piece. It’s so Eric and so very distinctly a male point of view, especially concerning his relationship with his mother, and I think it feels very complimentary to have a woman direct this play and add some checks and balances in a way.

Leigh: Yeah, you know, we’ve been sort of engaged over email and on the phone, and we had never met until yesterday in the lobby. It’s funny because the first thing he said to me was “You’re not at all what I thought you were going to look like.”

Tom: What does that mean?

Leigh: Yeah, I don’t know if that’s good or not. It’s so funny, particularly in this kind of very short process. It’s such an intense relationship, and so much trust has to build so quickly. What’s really great about Eric is that he has a very strong point of view, and because he hasn’t done this before, he’s completely trusting because he sort of has to be. It’s funny, he said to me last night: “I’ve never had a first day of rehearsal before.” So interesting, so to have someone who’s so smart and accomplished but has never been in the theater world. And I was looking at him today and thought he must think we’re a bunch of freaks. We’re, like, moving all the music stands around. I think it must feel he’s in an alien culture. It’s lovely because he completely knows everything about everything and is so accomplished, and his writing is so sophisticated, and he’s been doing it for so long, and yet, it’s fun to say, “No, it’s like this.”

Tom: In terms of the play, and it’s something Eric and I talked about too, you’re looking at the Haudenosaunee creation story. That’s big stuff. That has a lot of cultural weight and there are a lot of accountability issues for engaging in a story like that. One thing that I think is a useful device and I see him employing in the play is a lot of self-referential material. Now, how does that material and those devices used throughout the play… Do they present more of a challenge as a director or do they make your job a little easier to have those references in the work?

Leigh: It’s both. I mean in comedy, in particular, it’s always a little helpful because it lets the audiences off the hook. Like if someone makes a big speech and then says, “God, I always make big speeches,” it’s a relief to the audience. But it’s hard, because the part that’s sort of great and then the part that’s sort of hard about it, is that there’s a lot of Eric’s personality written into this character of Eric. And so, to have somebody else playing that is a hard thing to teach someone how to do. Eric’s own personal humor, his own personal quirkiness and eccentricity is written into the play. I think that’s where the challenges really come in. It’s interesting because Lisa Kron and I have done four productions of Well, and there have been twelve productions this year. There’s a production running on the West End right now, and you know, Lisa, to have someone playing her after she’s played the role for so long, it’s hard for her. You know, David Hwang was never in Yellow Face. He wrote that part for Hoon Lee to play, so there’s a lot of jokes in the text because David is not an actor and never would be an actor. And I think it’s really different when you have someone who actually is a performer, and Eric is a performer too, but it’s a tricky line.

Tom: It must be interesting to have the character that you’re directing and the character that this actor is playing in the room together.

Leigh: Well of course, I say “You know, Eric,” and both the actor and the real Eric both says “Yes?” [Laughter]. And I’m just like, “Oh God! No, I mean Billy, when you’re saying this as Eric,” you know. [Laughter] It can be a little confusing.

Tom: Your show Re-Creation Story is on Saturday night, so you have a couple more days, and you just started today. Do you know if there’s a plan for the work beyond the festival?

Leigh: I have no idea. I’m sure Eric will… Hopefully, this won’t scar him too badly, and hopefully he’ll feel energized by it and galvanized to keep working.

Tom: And what other projects do you have coming up that we can look out for?

Leigh: Well, my really exciting project this year is a musical called Coraline that I’m doing in the spring that David Greenspan wrote the book for. It’s based on a young adult book called Coraline by Neil Gaiman. And Neil Gaiman is kind of this groovy author of the Sandman series and Beowulf [screen adaptation].

Tom: Yeah. We have some Neil Gaiman on our shelves.

Leigh: Yeah. Neil Gaiman is a cool guy, and he writes this book called Coraline, and we are doing this adaptation of it, and it’s really wild! The music is by Stephin Merritt of the band the Magnetic Fields, and he’s an amazing Indie pop/rock guy, and the whole thing is composed on toy piano, and prepared piano, and regular piano–and it’s just a wild, wild piece, and I’ve been working on it for a couple of years. And I’m very excited to have that happen. It’s, like, the anti-musical musical. There’s not a single song you can sing to or dance to in the whole piece, but it’s like people ask me, “How did you get involved with that?” And I’m, like, “Yeah, I know I’m no where near cool enough to work on it.” But it’s really going to be a great show.

MCC Theater at the Lucille Lortel Theatre will present the world premiere of Coraline May 6 through June 20, 2009. More details at http://www.mcctheater.org/.