David Cromer on Good Night, and Good Luck and Offering 'Perspective' in a Fragile World

As both a director and a performer, David Cromer has been drawn to awfully cramped spaces.

Though he won his Tony Award for Best Direction of a Musical for The Band's Visit—staged in the reasonably spacious Ethel Barrymore Theatre—he came to the attention of many a New York theatergoer with his quietly devastating Our Town off-Broadway in 2009 ("Watch your toes," advised The New York Times in its review), performed to around 150 people at a time at the Barrow Street Theatre.

More recently, he directed the generations-spanning Jewish family drama Prayer for the French Republic at the Samuel J. Friedman Theatre (650 seats), and Dead Outlaw, a toe-tapping folk musical about an ill-fated bandit, at the Lucille Lortel Theatre (299 seats), which transfers to Broadway later this season. Most recently, he co-directed, with Caitlin Sullivan, Jordan Harrison's centuries-spanning sci-fi play The Antiquities at Playwrights Horizons (198 seats).

In the last couple of years Cromer has also found time to tap into his astonishing vulnerability as a performer in two productions directed by his directorial protegé Jack Serio: a hot-ticket production of Uncle Vanya, staged in a Flatiron loft (40 seats), and Animal Kingdom, a searing play about family and suicide, staged at the Connelly Theater Upstairs (51 seats).

Now, he is undauntedly tackling an unashamedly epic production: a screen-to-stage adaptation of Good Night, and Good Luck, starring George Clooney in his Broadway debut, beginning performances at the 1,500-seat Winter Garden Theatre on March 12.

“Oh my god. We’re doing it at the Winter Garden?” Cromer joked in conversation with Broadway.com.

He went on, more seriously: "It’s not ‘How are we going to put this intimate film in the Winter Garden?’ It’s ‘We are telling this big piece of American history in the Winter Garden, and how do we embrace the scale of that?’”

Good Night, and Good Luck centers on the heated battle between broadcast journalist Edward R. Murrow (Clooney) and Senator Joseph McCarthy (depicted in archival footage) at the height of the senator’s anti-communist witch hunt in the 1950s. In “Wires and Lights in a Box,” Murrow’s most famous speech—which features, in abridged form, in the 2005 movie of the same name as well as in the new play—Murrow criticized those in the radio and television industries for insulating Americans “from the realities of the world in which we live.”

The passage of time has not diminished the power of Murrow’s words to inspire and galvanize. “It’s just really good to hear those speeches,” said Cromer. “It’s really good to watch those broadcasts. It’s really, really moving to hear those words again and to hear them fresh every couple of years.”

Cromer highlighted the immense personal and professional risks Murrow and his colleagues took in exposing McCarthy’s fear tactics. “The risk involved in doing that, the fear involved in doing that… It was scary to do. Courage is not the absence of fear. It is the management of fear. That's what I love about it. I find that really moving.”

Like a raft of buzzy recent and current Broadway productions, Good Night, and Good Luck will incorporate live video. Unlike those productions, Cromer said, the intention isn’t to dazzle. “We’re attempting to embrace the antiqueness of the technology. It’s not that great a picture,” he said, referring to the live feed. “I know that doesn't sound like a selling point…”

The production’s “Wires and Lights in a Box” moment, for example, features “this very sort of grainy, diminished imagery”—just like the original broadcast, said Cromer. It’s a fitting metaphor. “It's all very delicate. You know what I mean? Our republic is delicate, the technology is delicate, the public peace is delicate. It's all very delicate. That's one of the things I think it's about too. We are fragile. The world is fragile. Our safety and our security is fragile.”

“I'm always nervous about any suggestion that something is timely or relevant or is necessary or helpful,” Cromer added. “But the world is a fragile place. It's fragile to exist in it. Our peace is fragile. I'm given some perspective by being reminded how often these things happen.”