Back to DirectorPart 1
Director Part 2
Direcor's Processes
The director's process extends from the selection of a play for productionthrough to opening night. The director works closely with all membersof the artistic staff and some members of a theatre's administrative staff,but the bulk of his time will be spent working with actors on the textin rehearsals. The second largest amount of time will be spent in analyzingthe text, which is a process that continues and evolves throughout theproduction process and often involves extensive research.
A director and play may be brought together in a number of ways: ifthe director is a member of a theatre's artistic staff then he may selecta play himself or in consultation with the governing artistic and financialbodies of the theatre; he may be hired by a company to direct a play chosenby that company; or, he may select a play and then seek producers to fundthe production or an existing company to sponsor his work.
No matter how she has been hired, the director's next step is to workwith the text. She will analyze the plot, characters, themes, style,diction, environment, andactions. She will envision and hear parts of the play in her head.She will consider theaudience for whom the play will be presented and ask herself what inthe text will be most exciting and pertinent to that audience, and alsoto herself. This analysis and imagining will lead the director toa production concept.
The first production meeting is where a director communicatesthe production concept to set, costume, lighting, and sound designers,stage managers, producers, technical directors, and publicity managers.A more collaborative director will seek feedback, clarifications, or revisionsof her ideas from the designers. The producers, who providethe necessary funding and want to see a production turn a profit, mightalso provide input. The technical director, who will be responsiblefor building scenery and other effects and is usually familiar with thespecial needs or problems of working in the theatre space, might providevaluable advice to designers at production meetings. Publicity managersalso use the work of the director and designers, presented in productionmeetings, as they develop marketing strategies for a production.
At an early meeting, the production staff must establish a productionschedule, which sets deadlines for design approval, deadlines for setand costume construction, dates on which the lighting crew works in thetheatre, press release deadlines, program copy deadlines, and dates oftechnical and dress rehearsals.
At subsequent production meetings designers will present sketchesor samples of theirideas. The director's job is to coordinate and refine the designers'artistic ideas so that the resulting production will cohere. The directorapproves final design plans, usually presented in the form of renderings,or detailed depictions of a set, costume, or lighting effect as an audiencemember will see it. Production meetings typically occur at leastweeklyduring the play's rehearsal process. Thus, as the director shapes the playwith theactors, she informs the designers of developments at production meetings.In turn, thedesigners can respond to changes in interpretation of the play or tonew practical needs.
The director may cast actors in a variety of ways.She may hold auditions and selecta cast herself, or she may be working with a company of actors whomust be cast in the major roles, or the producers may already have a starcast in a major role, who may then have input into which other actors arecast. Depending on the play's producing organization, the directormay have to cast all Equity (professional, union) actors contacted throughtheir agents, or a certain number of union actors, or be restricted fromusing Equity actors at all.
In professional theatre, the director usually hears actors present monologuesof their own choosing at an initial audition and then holds call-backsfor actors whom she thinks she may cast. At call-backs the actorsread from the play text, either cold readings, meaning unprepared,or with time to prepare their characters, called prepared readings.Many directors structure auditions according to their personal tastes orthe unique needs of aplay; for example, a director might ask actors to improviseor tell a story in anaudition. For musical theatre, an audition typically consistsof a monologue, a song,and a dance audition. Actors may audition privately in individual sessions,in small groups, or all together -- often referred to as a cattle call.
Once the play has been cast, it enters rehearsal. The directoris responsible for scheduling and structuring each rehearsal. While eachdirector will run rehearsals in her own unique manner, there are severalcategories of rehearsal that illuminate the director's process of workingwith actors; a typical progression is from reading, to blocking, to characterbuilding, to refining, to technical, to dress rehearsals, and finally topreviews and opening night.
At a reading, the actors may simply read the play or they mayanalyze the text andcharacters as they read. In blocking rehearsals,the director sets where andwhen actors move on the stage. By this time the director willhave a groundplanfrom the set designer, which is a scale drawing of the stage from abird's eyeperspective; it indicates where all walls, doors, furniture, platforms,stairs, or other scenery is placed. The stage manager usually places tapeon the stage floor to indicate the boundaries of the set pieces for thedirector and actors to use while blocking. Some directors encourage actorsto improvise blocking based on character motivation in the stage environment,finalizing blocking much later in the rehearsal process. In
character rehearsals, actors work intensively on their characters.These rehearsals will often be held with small groups or individuals, andthe actors will depart from the playwright's text in order to flesh outtheir characters. The director clarifies points of character, orchestratesrelationships among characters, and ensures that characters fulfill theirstructural purposes within the text.
Once the whole play is blocked, characters defined, relationships amongcharactersdeveloped, and the shape of the play determined, the director changeshis focus. In early rehearsals he was often focused on minutiae: a character'sreaction at a specific moment or a bit of stage movement. Now the directormust shift his focus to the shape and movementof the overall production and the effect it will have on an audiencemember seeing it for the first time. In refining rehearsals thedirector may work on pacing, comic timing, transitions among scenes, heighteningclimaxes, or shifting the tone of scenes. Since refining rehearsalsfall later in the rehearsal process, when the play is usually being rehearsedoff-book and as a whole, with work-throughs -- which stopand start to address problems -- or with run-throughs, thedirector is able to see the overall shape and to put himself in the shoesof an audience member.
In technical rehearsals the work of the actors is finally puttogether with the work of the designers. Usually scenery, lights, and soundare added first, reserving costumes for the dress rehearsals, whichare typically the last couple of rehearsals before previews or openingnight. A first technical rehearsal, or "tech", is often a cue-to-cue,or rehearsal which skips from one sound or light cue or scene change directlyto the next one, leavingout all intervening dialogue. The director's role in the technicaland dress rehearsals is to observe and adjust how all of the elements fittogether. Just before entering technical rehearsals, he usually sits downwith the stage manager, lighting and sound designers, and possibly theset designer to set all cues and how they should be called by the stagemanager. The stage manager marks in her prompt book when light, sound,and set cues should be called; whether they correspond to lines, movements,and music; how they correspond to one another; and how long they take.This meeting is often called a paper tech. Once in tech rehearsals,he may find that the scene changes are longer than expected and ask thesound designer for more music, or decide that the lights should not goto black between scenes but that actors should be seen by the audienceas they move into place for the nextscene, or find that the color of a light produces an unattractive colorwhen it hits an actor's costume. The director makes the aestheticchoices about how to reconcile such unforseen events during the technicaland dress rehearsals.
If there are preview performances, as most professional theatres have,the director gets to make final adjustments to actors' performances andtechnical elements based on audience responses. By opening night, the director'sjob is done. Often she will come to opening night to hear and seehow the final product works in front of an audience, but her role is overonce the play opens.
Historical Conventions of Directing
Until the middle of the 19th century, the job of director as describedin the preceding sections did not exist. One of the best explanationsfor the sudden creation of the director's job is that staging in past eraswas highly stylized and regularized, as was set design andacting; in other words, each Greek tragedy looked and sounded approximatelylikeothers, and the same with each Restoration comedy. However, onceset designers began to create entirely new environments for each play,electric lights brought the job of lighting designer, and artistic movementsbegan to define radically different goals for differenttheatre texts, the need for a single, unifying artistic vision,as supplied by a director, also arose.
Throughout theatre history, there has always been a figure who did someof the functions assigned to the contemporary director. For centuries,either a company's lead actor or the playwright himself made whatever stagingdecisions were necessary. Theatre or company managers bought whatever sceneryor properties were required by the current repertory of plays when theyhad the money for it. This was true both of the sharing companies ofShakespeare's time and the later companies managed by businessmen.Costumes were left to the whims and financial resources of the individualactors. Financial, more than artistic, decisions dictated what theatrecompanies purchased. For example, in the 18th century, theatres acrossEurope began to attract patrons because of spectacularly painted scenery;since opulent scenery brought audiences, companies began to hire designerswho gradually replaced the older system of stock scenery with scenerybuilt and painted for a specific
production.
The German author Johann Wolfgang von Goethe was one of the firsttheatrepractitioners to take decisive steps toward the art of stage directing.In the late18th century, he assembled a company of actors at the smallcourt theatre in Weimar. He greatly extended the normal rehearsal periodfor plays, from a week to at least a month. He coached each actor individuallyon his diction and character interpretation, and encouraged actors to createnew characters for each play rather than repeat successful types of characters.Finally, he approached the stage like a canvas, composing the actors ineach scene so as to fill out the three dimensional stage space; this replacedthe older practice of actors standing front and center whenever they hada sizable speech. This is the first decisive step toward blocking as weknow it today.
Two other Germans of the mid-19th century, Richard Wagner and GeorgII, Dukeof Saxe-Meiningen, are usually credited with defining the director'srole and accelerating the spread of directing among European and Americancompanies. Wagner, who is better known for his work composing operas,also directed his own productions and designed and built a theatre to househis operas. His major contribution to the development of directingis his concept of gesamtkunstwerke, which translated literallymeans "assembled art work." From his experience of operas, Wagner saw clearlythat each element of a production must support all of the others towardsa specific overall effect on the audience. Although actors and playwrightshad relied on the work of painters and fashion designers for centuries,the idea that they should be an integral part of a theatre company andthe process of play production was new. Wagner articulated the needfor a central, unifying artist, himself, to direct the visionsof other artists in the opera.
Saxe-Meiningen produced plays with elaborately researched, historicallycorrect details in scenery, set dressings, and costuming. Someother 19th century men were also interested in historically accurate productions,but the Duke had the time and money to work in detail. More importantly,he applied the same detailed approach to his work with actors.Building on Goethe's innovation of composing the stage picture, he madethe stage picture dynamic and extended stage action off the sidesof the stage into the wings. He rehearsed his supernumeraries, whoare actors with non-speaking roles in crowd scenes who had typically beenhired off the street and put on stage with no rehearsal, and formed theminto groups with a trained actor in each group. In Saxe-Meiningen'sproductions, each individual in a crowd scene had his or her own characterand each reacted and moved differently in response to the stage actionaround him. When the company toured Europe, starting in 1874, theatre artistswere amazed at this new approach to staging and immediately adopted theDuke's ideas.
The early 20th century saw the rise of auteur-directors,or directors who viewed themselves as a species of author, either writingtheir own texts or significantly altering a playwright's text to fit theirown visions. These are an extreme example of the creative directors describein part 1. Many auteur-directors also designed their own scenery and lighting,taking a desire for artistic unity to an extreme. Perhaps the mostextreme wasBritain's Edward Gordon Craig, who not only radically adaptedclassical texts anddesigned his own productions, but also suggested that actors shouldbe übermarrionettes, or superpuppets, responding entirely toa director's vision, without imposing any ideas of their own. In such anextreme viewpoint, the director becomes not the unifying artist of theatrebut the only artist. Max Reinhardt introduced the idea of findingor building the right theatre for a production in the 1910's; he believedthat we should not have a single kind of theatre space but many optionsso that a director might choose the most appropriate theatre for his visionof the play. Reinhardt staged plays outdoors, in sports arenas, in cathedrals,and in small and large playhouses.
Many 20th century directors have helped to define new styles of performance,whichin turn increases the need for directors generally. Today many optionsexist for how aplay should be produced and how the various elements of theatre shouldfit together, that the controlling vision has almost become a necessity.Expressionismin the 1920's opened up a new theatrical style, as did Brecht's EpicTheatre over the next two decades andAbsurdism in the 1950's and 60's. These theatrical styles weredefined by directors and critics in response to new theatrical literature;the best embodiment of the writers' texts required new acting styles andnew relationships among performers, designers, andaudiences. Since the 1960's, some directors like the Polish JerzyGrotowski and EnglishSir Peter Brook began to create theatrical effects with actors' bodiesand voicesinstead of many technical effects, turning theatre away from illusionand spectacle and back to an experience of the imagination. This is calledpoortheatre. Today most directors use a combination of these twentiethcentury techniques as they find them useful in a specific production.
Over the last 30 years, some companies have moved away from the traditionalview of directing because of its autocratic implications;in such companies decisions are made collectively or by a governing group.Many of these groups also have had political or social goals, like women'stheatres (At the Foot of the Mountain in Minnesota) or chicano theatres(El Teatro Campesino in southern California), and felt that the theatre'sartistic structure ought to mirror the artists' ideals for larger socialorganizations.
