Staging Story: Five Fundamentals for the Beginning Stage Director

By Robert Moss and Wendy Dann

Moss is the founder of Playwrights Horizons, one of the most influential theaters in New York
He has also been Artistic Director of the Hangar Theatre in Ithaca and Syracuse Stage
He has directed at theaters around the country, including LORT, small professional theaters, and universities
This book will be specifically appealing to theatre students and professors as the book shares essential knowledge for emerging directors.
Wendy Dann is a playwright and director as well as an associate professor at Ithaca College. Dann received the 2013 NYFA Fellowship in Playwriting.
Dann served as associate artistic director under Kevin Moriarty at the Hangar Theatre for seven seasons, and her regional directing work also includes Dallas Theatre Center, The Repertory Theatre at St. Louis, Alliance Theatre, Geva Theatre, Syracuse Stage, Capitol Repertory Theatre, and the Kitchen Theatre Company.
Dann's credits/works include:
Directed and co-authored Sammy & Me , which had productions at Alliance Theatre (Atlanta, GA), The Hangar Theatre (Ithaca, NY), MusicalFare Theatre (Buffalo, NY) and the National Black Theatre Festival.
Her original play Birds of East Africa premiered at Kitchen Theatre Company in 2017.
The Strangest Thing was a finalist for the 2010 and 2012 O'Neill Theatre Center's National Playwrights Conference.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Theatre Communications Group
• Release date: Jul 5, 2022
• ISBN: 9781559369985

Robert Moss

Robert Moss, the creator of Active Dreaming, is a best-selling novelist, journalist, historian, and independent scholar. He leads popular workshops all over the world, and online courses at www.spirituality-health.com. His seven books on Active Dreaming include Conscious Dreaming, Dreamways of the Iroquois, The Dreamer's Book of the Dead, The Three "Only" Things, The Secret History of Dreaming and Dreamgates: Exploring the Worlds of Soul, Imagination and Life Beyond Death. He lives in upstate New York. For an events schedule, visit the author's web site at http://www.mossdreams.com/

Book preview

TO THE READER

TEACHER TO STUDENT TO TEACHER

Bob cast and directed Wendy in a production of The Heidi Chronicles at the Hangar Theatre in Ithaca, New York, in the summer of 1992.

Six years later, Wendy enrolled in the MFA directing program at Syracuse University, where Bob was teaching and serving as artistic director of Syracuse Stage. Wendy was a student for two semesters in Bob’s Fundamentals of Directing classroom from 1998 to 1999.

Upon graduation, Wendy began a freelance directing career. Two years later (boy, that was fast!) Bob engaged Wendy on her first SDC union contract to direct Lee Blessing’s Chesapeake as part of the Syracuse Stage subscription season.

Wendy served seven years as the associate artistic director at the Hangar Theatre and began teaching directing at Ithaca College. Whenever she had to take a short leave to direct at a regional theater, she would ask Bob to take over her classroom. And thus began a series of conversations from teacher to student to teacher around the best way for students to begin the practice of directing.

This book is the result of the cross-fertilization of Bob and Wendy’s ideas and mutual experiences, both as professional directors and teachers. It introduces five fundamentals for staging and offers practical exercises for the application of those fundamentals. It is meant to be a technical manual for a physical staging practice. While that practice may exist alongside the study of theory, history, or script analysis—and may be applied to the director’s role in design or production—the sole intention of this book is to get you on your feet. Staging story.

FROM BOB

This little book will not teach anyone how to direct. That’s not actually possible. The act of directing a play is so idiosyncratic, so personal, so much a matter of relationships between and among artists that to try and codify seems an endeavor likely to come to no good resolution. At one end of the spectrum is the army commander who barks orders and expects them to be fulfilled. Stand here! Slam the cup down and shout that line! This technique can be effective. Tyrone Guthrie was famous for saying, What you’re doing is quite boring, my dear. Come back and astonish us in the morning!

At the other end, perhaps, is Elia Kazan: the psychologist, the wooer, the gentle, cuddly coaxer, who softly asks in a soothing, nonthreatening voice after every other line or move, How did that feel?

In between the general and the psychologist are all possible variations. Is any one better than another? Guthrie and Kazan were both geniuses and supreme theater artists. Personally, I suspect, I’m somewhere in the middle.

Shortly after enrolling at Queens College, I attempted to join the student drama club so that I could keep acting. The members asked me if I had any experience, and when I told them how much acting I had done in my school, my temple, my YMHA in New Jersey and in summer stock, they asked if I would direct. Sure. The moment I stood in front of my cast at that first rehearsal, I had a bodily awareness (almost a shiver!) that this was where I belonged. Not onstage, but in rehearsal. Directing.

Now, a confession. After two semesters of college, I dropped out and never looked back. I never went to school for directing. I did take several classes with theater artists. I went to one class (and I mean one class session) with a relatively well-known Broadway director who began with a long lecture on how a director should dress at the first rehearsal in order to win the confidence of his cast. I never went back. I took another class with José Quintero in 1956, who was in the midst of opening the original Broadway production of Long Day’s Journey into Night. A fascinating man (he wore a black leather glove on one hand because it amused him) but I don’t remember learning much. He told stories of rehearsing the O’Neill play and of working with Fredric March and Florence Eldridge. He told of the difficulty of the fourth act, when father and son sit at the table for their long scene together. Sometimes, in moments of high stress, he explained, no one moves for a long time. That lesson, actually, has stayed with me.

The longest time I ever spent in class was in June 1958, with Jack Garfein at the HB Studio. I had seen his movie, The Strange One, which was cast out of his group of friends at the Actors Studio. All method actors. The acting in the movie was intense and when I heard he was teaching, I thought I might learn something. I was accepted into the class, and heard words like action, intention, obstacle, as ifs (which I thought were aziffs), but had no idea what they meant or how they could be useful. I directed many scenes in that class and was the butt of the teacher’s humor and the class. Never do what Bobby did was frequently heard. In a late rehearsal for my final scene, Tennessee Williams’s Talk to Me Like the Rain, I suddenly realized what the class had been talking about. Action. Intention. Obstacle. It was a breakthrough for me. The class criticized my scene the way the class always did. But this time, I knew my scene was different.

Undaunted, I continued directing. Because people asked me to. And I must have—however blindly—been doing something right. Actors were willing to work with me more than once, and theaters were hiring me more than once. Rehearsals were fun and my productions worked. Whatever that meant.

I began teaching because someone asked me to. That someone was André Bishop, who had become the artistic director of Playwrights Horizons when I left in 1981, and who had formed an alliance in 1983 with NYU Tisch undergraduate drama. I was to teach Directing Fundamentals and Anne Bogart was to teach Alternative Directing (more of that anon).

My initial response was to reject his offer