Happy New Year, DTC’ers!
This blog comes to you from the desk of Amanda Curry, Audience Services Manager and Marketing Associate here at DTC. I’m absolutely thrilled to be sharing behind-the-scenes info, news and updates as we embark on our third show of the season, the 2010 Broadway hit TIME STANDS STILL by Donald Margulies. I recently had the pleasure of sitting down with the Director, Bud Martin, as well as the Assistant Director, Bill D’Agostino, to discuss this extremely timely and smart modern drama, and the process of a co-production.
-Bud, you acted as producer for TIME STANDS STILL on Broadway (starring Laura Linney). Being so close to the show, what attracted you to it most from a directorial standpoint?
BUD: Well, I think my first love is directing and when I saw the show originally done at the Manhattan Theatre Club I felt it was one of the first plays in a long time where I was so transported into the world of the play and the lives of these characters. It was what I thought theatre was really all about. I’m drawn to the characters and the challenges that they have, and the struggles of what makes for a successful relationship and passion: your passion for your work, your passion for your partner, etc… Looking into two very different couples at two very significant points in their life is the kind of thing I love working on as a director, in terms of dealing with the subtext of all those relationships.
-Bill, I’ll extend that question to you- what attracted you most to this show?
BILL: I’m also a playwright, and I am awed by playwright Donald Margulies’s writing. It is so seamless and smart and there is so much craft involved, and yet to an audience the craft is just seamless, it just looks like you’re looking in on these people’s lives, as Bud just said. And you’re just following the story and you’re gripped by these fascinating, flawed beautiful people. But yet behind the scenes, there’s such wonderful mechanism; such wonderful writing behind it that it’s just stunning. There are things working on multiple levels at all times — ways that he (Margulies) withholds information and gives information away. Nobody else writes like that; in such a beautiful, seamless way.
BUD: The great piece is the withholding of information. There’s a producer friend of mine who often says: “If it ain’t on the page, it ain’t on the stage” and as a director I say “No, it is what’s NOT on the page that is important to find on this stage!” Donald Margulies is so brilliant at that: How do you say what’s not being said?
-Bill, I know that your background is also rooted in both journalism and dramaturgy (researching the background information of a play to inform the actors and production team). How have both of these served you in beginning work on this project as an assistant director?
BILL: I was never a war journalist, but I think having known people who were….it’s been useful. I knew people that were driven not necessarily to go to the battlefield but to the way that covering certain things you kind of have to bifurcate yourself. I talked in the first rehearsal about the fact that I covered three very intense trials and knowing by the third one the way that you start to, not lose your emotional life, but the way that you have to separate how you feel as a person and your job, that’s important to understanding both of the two main characters, especially Sarah. She does that to the nth degree. I did a lot of dramaturgical research for Bud and the actors in terms of articles that are useful to understanding the world that these characters are in. I found articles from New York Times photographers and reporters. I just gave Kevin Kelly (the actor who plays James) a biography of Daniel Pearl who was a war reporter who was hijacked and killed. He and the character of James both went to Stanford.
BUD: It’s an interesting study. I love looking at the layers of people in relationships and people that actually do this [war photographers/ photojournalists] and put themselves in harms way: and why do they do it, are they doing it because they think it’s the right thing to do or are they doing this because they are adrenaline junkies to some extent, I mean why do they take those kinds of risks? It’s not completely altruistic, it’s not just to show the world an injustice, it’s really to get the shot and to survive the risk associated with getting the shot. And you take that and you couple it with: how do you have a relationship with someone at the same time? I think it’s an enormously intensely layered person who does that. It is so timely- we were just looking at pictures of the New York Times Year in Review about three photographers who died taking shots of the war — two in April and one in May, and it’s so much in our minds.
-Bud, is this the first thing you’ve directed that you produced first?
BUD: No, I did The Story of My Life. I actually tried to get that to do at Act II and someone optioned it for Broadway and tried to convince me to do it with her. And that’s one of the ways I learned that there is a completely different job description for the director that works with the playwright on the first production and somebody who does subsequent productions. There is so much more dramaturgy (research) involved for the director of the first production. This cast auditioned with the script as it was originally done at Manhattan Theatre Club versus the script that was published after the Broadway production at the CORT theatre. The actors were all saying it’s amazing how so much of what was in the script was no longer in the script because that was, again, instead of talking about your intention, how do you take that out of there and play it with more sparsity and more economy and more efficiency in the language? And that’s a different job description than remounting a show and giving it sort of your own twist.
-For both of you, since this is a co-production with Act II playhouse in Ambler, what sort of challenges are you anticipating regarding moving the show from one theatre to the next? (Note: The show will be at DTC from 1/18 to 2/5 and at Act II from 2/14 to 3/11).
BUD: The stage at Act II is substantially smaller than the stage at DTC, so the audience will literally be “in the apartment.” The knees of the audience at Act II are right at stage level, so things have to be condensed a bit. We (at ACT II) don’t have height and we don’t have quite the width, so the way the set is designed is there’s a molding seam, layer of brick that will be taken off at about a 9 foot level at Act II and we’ll have to cheat everything a little closer together. So, I’m not anticipating changing traffic patterns, we do have the ACT II stage taped out within the rehearsal space up there so we’re trying to be cognizant of that and shouldn’t have to re-block the show. When we did a co-production two years ago with Theatre Exile of a new play that Bruce Graham (who plays Richard in this show) wrote, we moved the show from Plays and Players Theatre in Center City Philadelphia to Act II. The change in the intimacy was very interesting because the audience sort of felt like they were sitting in the den and they were implicated in the plot. But it’s amazing for a bigger theatre, I think the acoustics are fantastic here at the Delaware Theatre Company, which will allow actors to be able to be more subtle and not have to worry about pushing to be heard. They can spend more time on their real intention, and- how would somebody say that? I love this space at DTC, but on the other hand there are some really great benefits of the intimacy of working in a 130-seat theatre.
-Because this show deals with the dangers of photo-journalism on the “front lines” of war- what sort of other resources have you relied on to inform this process?
BILL: The DART center is a center that deals with journalists in conflict (http://dartcenter.org/), and I gave each of the actors a pamphlet of information from their website on what it’s like — what are some tips and tools, to give them the feeling of being insiders. So they know what kind of information journalists would get, rather than just getting the information that journalists present. 2011 was a terrible year for photojournalists, actually. Bud mentioned the three in Libya that were killed. There were also a number that were hijacked and held captive, including the female journalist that was one of the inspirations for the piece, Lynsey Addario. She wrote a gorgeous essay for the New York Times about being a female war photographer, which I think speaks very synchronistically to the play itself, maybe not surprisingly, since she was one of the inspirations. She articulates the benefits of being a female photographer, especially in Arab countries, in terms of gaining access to places that men wouldn’t, but also what she endured as a female war photographer and some of the biases. This is a play about a war photographer, but I think any woman who has to juggle her relationship with her job and her relationship with her family will understand the kind of difficult decisions Sarah (the lead character) faces. Addario articulates these challenges very well.
BUD: We did a benefit for the DART center during the Broadway production and gave them tickets to a show to raise money, with a reception with the cast afterwards. It was really revealing to the cast and I think the first performance after they met many of those people was significantly impacted by having spent time with them. We also did a lot of talk-backs and got many famous photographers and journalists to come by and speak about their experiences. Bob Woodruff and his wife came and talked about their experiences. It was very fascinating to a lot of people because of the timeliness of it all.
-Obviously this work is extremely relevant in this time of political unrest in the Middle East. In the show the characters Sarah and Mandy represent two opposing views of the responsibility of a photojournalist in times of war (i.e. are they there to help or there to document?) That being said, how do you think this production will resonate with this audience at this time?
BUD: That’s a great question and I don’t know that the play tries to answer the question as much as expose the challenge. Susan McKey (actress who plays Sarah), was talking about having watched a movie about the guilelessness and nerve of photographers, and not just war-time photographers, but what kind of mentality you have to have to get the picture and to sort of force yourself into a situation and actually find that right moment and get the picture. Think about the nerve and lack of sensitivity that paparazzi photographers have. There’s something that’s characteristic about the focus on capturing the picture vs. changing the reality. The play doesn’t respond to it — I think that differing opinions are as much about: should you intervene to try and be helpful? The 1993 photograph by Kevin Carter — of a vulture looking on at a starving Sudanese toddler — won a Pulitzer Prize and the photographer ended up committing suicide because he got so much grief about: Did he intervene? Should he? It was a ghoulish, horrifying picture, but talk about a picture that opened people’s eyes to just how horrible the situation was. But there was so much outrage about him one, taking the picture and two, should he have done something to intervene? It’s a real challenge. He would have said he exposed the situation, and the drama of that picture made it so much more powerful to so many more people so they could actually take action. It’s a great debate. I think the bigger polarity between the two (characters) as women is as important in the play as the role of the photographer and the professional woman versus the woman who decides to be a mom and have a child and makes the choice that that’s the most important thing for her, not work. And having that woman, Mandy, be accepted by Sarah, who is all about professionalism, is important. Bill said it’s as much about the tension between a woman’s passion for her work and passion for the person that she loves in her life, but it’s also about women’s opinion of other women: Mandy’s fear that she’s being looked at as being less of a person because she wants to be a mom and stay at home with her kid, because that’s what’s most important to her.
BILL: It’s also as much about — what is the price that that person who is responsible for the world pays in their personal life? That’s not just women — Barack Obama, what is the sacrifice he’s making as a father? I don’t think anyone can successfully balance the responsibilities to the globe, to their community, to their family, to themselves. It’s a tricky navigation that we all have to make. And all four characters find very different answers along that spectrum. And they’re all right, but it’s heart-breaking to watch them make those different choices.
This thoughtful drama is absolutely not to be missed. TIME STANDS STILL runs at the Delaware Theatre Company 1/18 to 2/5 and at Act II Playhouse in Ambler from 2/14 to 3/11.
-Amanda Curry
Audience Services Manager and Marketing Associate
A few weeks ago, anxious to see how the bevy of over 30 handcrafted hats and costumes were progressing, I stopped up to our costume shop to visit costume designer Brian Strachan and his team. I was drawn to the beautifully designed quilt that Brian, Kimitha Cashin (our props master who’s been assisting in costume construction for this show), and costume assistant Mary Beth Regan (“MB” as she’s known by), were creating for the character of Mother Shaw. The script calls for Mother Shaw (played by the lovely Barbara D. Mills) to have a shawl. The shawl is utilized throughout the show as a sort of representational object as Mother Shaw and her ‘hat queens’ share their life lessons and what it means to “wear a crown.” Director Kevin Ramsey came up with the idea of turning the shawl into a quilt, with patches on the quilt to reference the various journeys that the characters take throughout the show, including many of the core stories depicted in the show, such “jumping the broom,” the “wedding” and the “funeral” scenes, among others. From personal experience (my mother is an avid quilter) I truly appreciate this idea of sharing a legacy, as a quilt does, and was delighted to see how the quilt truly becomes a sort of character in the show. Take a look at our slideshow (left) with some fun quilt-creation photos.
Inspired future playwrights + current theatre professionals =an innovative evening of theatre.
