Top Girls: Broadway's Women Directors Tell All
In a typical season on Broadway, a couple of shows might be directed by women. As for theatrical awards, a woman director took home a Tony for the first time only 10 years ago actually, two women did, when Julie Taymor and Garry Hynes won on the same night for The Lion King and The Beauty Queen of Leenane, respectively.
This year, for various happy reasons, a total of seven female directors have mounted Broadway productions, and all of their shows are still running. Wow! Why not, we thought, get these powerhouse directors together in the same room and listen in on their conversation? Easier said than done, of course, given their super-busy schedules, so we settled for a roundtable of four: Annie Dorsen Passing Strange, Kathleen Marshall Grease, Anna D. Shapiro August: Osage County and Francesca Zambello The Little Mermaid. Unable to attend—but sending along good wishes—were Maria Aitken The 39 Steps, Debbie Allen Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and Susan Stroman Young Frankenstein.
As our panelists greeted each other warmly at Broadway.com's offices, they expressed admiration for one another's achievements this season and seemed instantly at ease, although most were meeting for the first time. Marshall, who arrived straight from a casting session for her next project, a new Gershwin musical, offered pointers on surviving awards season she won a Tony two years ago for her choreography of The Pajama Game. Shapiro, an ensemble member at Steppenwolf Theatre, will soon tackle Our Town for Chicago's Lookingglass Theater, and Dorsen will collaborate with the string quartet Ethel on Truckstop for the Next Wave Festival at BAM this fall. As for Zambello, she's juggling a musical adaptation of Little House on the Prairie coming to the Guthrie this summer, developing a First Wives' Club musical and eyeing a Broadway transfer of Rebecca, which is running in Vienna. But for now, the four directors are riding the wave of what Marshall calls Broadway's "class of 2008."
Three of the four of you are making your Broadway directorial debuts this season.
FRANCESCA: Isn't that exciting?
ANNIE: It's amazing how many times people say, "Welcome to Broadway!" like it's this whole new stage of life.
Was Broadway a goal for you?
ANNIE: No, not at all. I grew up in New York and would go see Broadway things when I was a kid, but I joke that having a show at [the off-Broadway venue] PS 122 was more of a closely held ambition of mine than Broadway [laughs]. But all those fears I had about Broadway being some kind of weird secret club were not true. The audiences have been really great; our producers have been fantastic. I had a little bit of that downtown idea of what uptown was, and I'm quite pleased to have had that corrected.
How has the Broadway experience been for you?
Does it ever get easier, Kathleen? You're the veteran of this group.
Francesca, was Broadway what you expected, having come from the world of opera?
Are the four of you surprised that seven women have directed shows on Broadway this season—and at least eight additional women have directed major off-Broadway productions?
Is there a particular reason it's happened this season?
It's a little different for you, Anna, because you have an artistic home in Chicago.
Kathleen, has being a woman posed an issue in the course of your career?
Was it difficult to make the jump to Broadway director?
Women directors have had more opportunities on Broadway in musicals than in plays, so it's great to have Anna here with August.
What are some of the challenges you've faced as a Broadway director?
How did each of you decide to become a director? How did you know that directing was your gift?
Annie, you started as a writer as well as a director, right?
How do you maintain balance in your lives? How do you keep the job from taking over?
ANNA: Ninety-nine percent of them had been on Broadway. And they're old—they have homes and families. Not all theater people want to just pick up and go. To be honest, they were probably preparing themselves for being replaced. They didn't think there was a shot in hell that anyone would say, "Yeah, let's bring 13 people nobody's ever heard of, in a three-and-a-half-hour play written by someone two people have heard of, directed by someone nobody's heard of." Our producers made it possible for them to want to come. That changed everything.
ANNA: I thought I was going to be cooler, but I'm not. I find this [awards] period coming up completely overwhelming. And I will want to go home. I was at a meeting with my agents the other day and said, "I'll be home all of May," and they said, "No you won't!"
KATHLEEN: Oh no no no no! [much laughter] You're on a roller coaster that's not going to stop until mid-June.
ANNA: That's very difficult for me because I have a really vexed relationship between wanting an enormous amount of attention and wanting to be appreciated and lauded but wanting to control the way that attention is happening. So I'm totally overwhelmed. And…I'm totally overwhelmed [laughter].
KATHLEEN: Oh no, it's terrifying [laughter]. But all we can control is what we put in front of an audience from 8 to 11, or 8 to 11:30, at night. We can't control the rest of it—and it's all so public in terms of reviews and nominations and awards. The problem is, no matter what your show gets, it's never enough because somebody you care about will get overlooked. Especially as the director, the day those nominations come out, you have to make congratulatory phone calls and "you were robbed" phone calls. So I think you have to ride the wave of it. There are so many events and luncheons, and even though it's nerve-wracking, just go to them all. I've gotten to know a lot of people I've never worked with simply because we all showed up at the same events at the end of the season. There's this great camaraderie of being part of the class of 2008 that you'll feel forever.
FRANCESCA: Pretty much, and I've worked a lot in London and the West End. It's interesting to be here, because I am a New Yorker, and my mother [Jean Sincere] was on Broadway when I was a child.
KATHLEEN: Really? She was a performer?
FRANCESCA: Yes. When I was 10, we moved to Europe, but musical theater was a world I knew from a distance. A few years ago, I made a mental shift and decided to focus my attention of developing pieces that are more wide-reaching and accessible, building new audiences and making musical theater for kids and families. That's what drove me to commercial theater because that's the way to reach the greatest number of people and ignite new minds to the theater. For me, it's almost a calling.
KATHLEEN: It's fantastic! We were rehearsing Grease at New 42nd Street Studios last summer at the same time Francesca was rehearsing The Little Mermaid and Stro [Susan Stroman] was rehearsingYoung Frankenstein—on three different floors—and I thought, "I bet this is a first!" It's pretty amazing.
FRANCESCA: I think women are great storytellers. Just in this room, the work everybody's done is incredibly diverse, but I do think they all have the imprimatur of a woman's hand. They have very emotional stories about youth, family, values, change. You [Kathleen] reinvisaged a lot that piece [Grease] for me, and the characters are much deeper than I expected. I went into Passing Strange expecting a rock show, but I was drawn in by the characters and the actors.
ANNIE: That's really Stew.
FRANCESCA: And August—I had no idea what it was going to be like beforehand and then was taken on this big journey. Of course there are political aspects: Producers are going to trust women more now. Is it easy? No. It's easier. There are tons of fantastic female directors, but [change] has got come from the people who have the money to make it happen. I think that women still have to work harder; you have to prove yourself more. But why shouldn't there be more women on Broadway? More than half the audiences are women.
ANNA: And thank heavens I have a home to go back to [laughter]. You know, I just read this interesting conversation with the president of Harvard. In her inauguration speech, she said, "I'm not the first woman president of Harvard, I'm the president of Harvard." She got a lot of letters from women who said, "We take pride in the fact that you're a woman and by not saying that, you're taking something away from us." And she was so amazing, because she made a public apology. I come from a culture in Chicago where [being a woman director] is just not an issue. Steppenwolf is ostensibly run by women now, which is hysterical considering its background. But I don't want to say that it isn't special for me to be here doing this. Because I do recognize it as being special. I don't think it should stay special for long.
FRANCESCA: Let's hope it won't.
FRANCESCA: Disney Theatrical is run by one producer, so I'm essentially working for Tom Schumacher, who is a great producer. You've got to look at who's at the top. Certain things are different in working for a corporation, but I've also worked for a million nonprofits at this point in my life, and you're always answering to somebody as a director. That's just the nature of the beast.
KATHLEEN: Well, it's different for me because I came [to directing] through choreography, and that was a very different process because you're like an apprentice. I worked on half a dozen or more Broadway shows before I became a choreographer in my own right, and then a director. Actually it was wonderful because you get to see how auditions and production meetings and tech are run, with several different directors. By the time I was in the hot seat myself, it wasn't a foreign world to me, and I knew a lot of people already.
KATHLEEN: My first thing as a director was Wonderful Town, which transferred from Encores. That's what's interesting: women generating projects outside the world of commercial Broadway and then [producers] gravitating to them because they're good and you [as director] are brought along. Grease is one of the first times [I was asked to do] a commercial thing from the beginning. Once you get that seal of approval, other projects come directly to you. It's not so much that there's been a "boys' club" or a resistance to women; it's about proving yourself. When push comes to shove, producers want to go with somebody who has a track record. Unfortunately, there aren't a lot of women with a track record on Broadway, so they'll go to the tried and true. And that happens in every department. It happens with designers; it happens with actors. You can get the smartest people in the room and there's still no guarantee that a show is going to work, so it's like insurance.
ANNA: When you come solely from not-for-profit, which I do, you have to grow up and understand that [economics] has to be part of every decision that gets made [on Broadway]. With August, the first thing was having to be in such a large house, and me thinking, "I just won't say yes to a house that's 1,000 seats or over." [The Imperial Theatre has 1,400 seats; the Music Box, which the play moves to on April 29, has 1,000.] It was explained to me, "Well then, the show won't come, because it can't work economically having to pay that many people." So I had to try to understand and deal with [every question] in as ethical a way as I can, understanding that it's a business.
ANNIE: But isn't there something really refreshing about the clarity of that? I also come from the not-for-profit world, and I find there's something so honest and unconflicted about the business aspect of the commercial world. The same pressures are applied in not-for-profit, but there's a split personality about it sometimes, a feeling of being pulled in two or three or five different directions. In the commercial world, it's very, very clear. We made a show that people responded to, and then some producers came along and bought it and decided to try to sell it to other people. That's as clear as a bell. And in this economy and the world we live in now, it's no more compromising than anything else.
KATHLEEN: Did your producers want you to make changes moving from downtown to uptown?
ANNIE: Yeah, they did, and the changes fell into two psychological categories. There were questions about whether we were satisfying our initial premise and whether we could spruce the whole thing up. Those were super-legitimate concerns. And then there were what I call the financial panic changes [laughter]. They would sometimes have the attitude of "I love this section, but it may be a little too off-putting or unconventional." [Co-creators] Stew and Heidi [Rodewald] and I tend to think that audiences are really, really smart and that they like the feeling of having to extend themselves. Exactly those things that make producers nervous might be the gold. But I never experienced any of the cliche things of "We've gotta have a number; we've gotta have a button." Someone probably did say at one point, "You've gotta have a button," and Stew and I said, "What's a button?" [Laughter.] But it was never that kind of cigar-chomping…
KATHLEEN: "…louder, faster, funnier" notes.
ANNIE: No.
KATHLEEN: What's wonderful about August is that it's this crazy-quilt of fascinating characters, but it's not like it's a "women's issue play." It's a family, and everybody can relate to that. I'm sure there are a lot of people who think that your playwright, Tracy Letts, is female...
ANNA: …all the time.
KATHLEEN: …but when you walk out of that play, if you didn't have a Playbill, you wouldn't know if it was written by a man or a woman or if it was directed by a man or a woman.
ANNA: The funny thing about it is that the scripts people want me to do now are women's plays. And I don't mean that in any kind of diminutizing way, but what they're offering me has nothing to do with the kinds of things I normally do. August: Osage County is actually a little lighter than the things I normally do. That's been fascinating.
KATHLEEN: I say do Mamet next! [Laughter.]
ANNA: Exactly. Do you have any plays about the army?
ANNIE: I'm getting all the black stuff. And when they give me a script that's for some kind of a black musical, I want to ask, "So why do you think I'd be right for this?" [Laughter.] The more generous way of looking at it is exactly what you were talking about [Kathleen]—people wanting the insurance of knowing they're getting a team that has done it before.
ANNA: But look what happens when you step a little outside of the box. I love opera, and I've seen [Little Mermaid scenic designer George Tsypin's] designs several times. When I saw your show [Francesca], I felt that I was sitting in a musical for families, but the visual life was so inventive and so otherworldly and new. That was really exciting for me, and it had nothing to do with gender.
ANNIE: I didn't necessarily go into Passing Strange thinking, "I'm going to make a blockbuster." We're bombarded these days with so many images of the ideal, the perfect, the wealthy, the beautiful, the young. I appreciate opportunities to put things out into the world that maybe aren't for everyone—that are a bit more for the marginalized, the alienated, the people who feel like they don't exactly fit.
ANNA: I am psychically devoted to the temporal, so the most disorienting part of this for me is that it doesn't stop. There's no end that I can see. A friend said to me, "A director is used to waving from the pier as the boat pulls away, and the problem with August is that they keep coptering you out to the ship." I think to embrace this gigantic project [The Little Mermaid] that you did [Francesca], you had to say, "I'm going to make this story speak to everyone." In a weird way, August Osage County is a much smaller idea. It's actually not a big play at all; it just has a lot of people in it. Anyway, I become disoriented by this continuation—and I think in continuation is deterioration.
KATHLEEN: I find maintaining shows one of the hardest parts of my job. When you're creating a show, you're nurturing and changing and growing; even in previews, you're coming up with new ideas and trying to make it better and clearer and stronger. But when you come back to check up on a show or put new cast members in, you sort of feel like a scolding hall monitor: "No, no, no, you shouldn't be doing that!" A show is like a garden. You have to go in and prune and weed a little bit, because it's going to go off in some direction and you've got to wrangle it back in. It's almost easier to put together a second company. I had a note session with the Grease company a couple of weeks ago, and you're doing this pep talk, because it's hard to do eight shows a week and keep it up.
ANNA: We had one yesterday. I saw the show for the first time in a really long time, and there were performances you could have seen from space [laughter]. I was stunned. I thought, Oh. My. God! Luckily, we have long relationships together and we were able to laugh about it. It's about the emotional level that the play gets to, and it's three and a half hours. They're on stage 24 hours in the course of the week. It's like a golf swing that gets a little bit off; you're slicing it into the woods. That was challenging! But they were great about it.
FRANCESCA: I think that for all of us, the exciting part of what we do comes at the beginning, until you get the show open; that's why we keep doing it. "Let me go into that boxing ring again and throw myself at this new idea." You can't put something on a stage if your heart and soul isn't in it. That process is our lifeblood, and then as the captain of the ship you have a responsibility to be nurturing to all those people. You're mother, shrink, babysitter, whatever, and you can't forget that.
FRANCESCA: When I was four years old, I knew that's what I wanted to do.
KATHLEEN: Really? That's so cool.
FRANCESCA: I was under my mother's piano putting on the show, I was writing the show, I was building the puppet theater. I was directing plays in elementary school. For me, there was no other way to be alive.
KATHLEEN: I came to it as a performer, which is interesting, because I think every choreographer has been a dancer. I was very lucky in that I grew up in Pittsburgh and got my Equity card at Pittsburgh Civic Light Opera with Susan Schulman directing. We would do six classic musicals in eight weeks, boom, boom, boom. And to have had a woman director for my first professional experience was, without knowing it, saying that [directing] was an option. You aspire to what you see, in some ways. Even though it was the furthest thing from my mind at the time, later on, Susan hired me as a choreographer several times.
ANNA: I never acted. I did come from a family of artists, and I resisted it as long as I possibly could. But it's like coming from a family of cops or lawyers: It's not whether you're going to be a cop or a lawyer, it's what kind of cop or lawyer you are going to be [laughter]. My mother was an actress, and I loved going to the theater. My father was a photographer, and although he was very successful, I saw an artist's life as painful and I didn't want anything to do with that. Of course, you grow older and realize that the source of the pain is somewhere else, and that freed me up. I was a film major at the time, putting myself through school as a film editor, and I thought, "I'm going to see if I can direct a play." And that was it. Now I can't imagine doing anything else—except retiring [laughter]. Otherwise, I love everything about it. I think it's the best job in the whole wide world.
FRANCESCA: I really think we're blessed.
ANNIE: I was into theater, and then I was into rock-and-roll, union politics and all kinds of weirdness. This theater thing was actually like my dirty little secret because it was so dorky [laughter]. I would never hang out with the theater kids, they would be working on "the plays," and I would go off with the rock-and-roll people.
ANNA: Because rock-and-roll people are not dorky.
ANNIE: They are dorky, they just don't know it [laughs]. I finally figured out that if I could create my own pieces—write and direct and construct things— I could make theater and my other interests go together. Only later did I figure out what a phenomenal control freak I am, so it's a lucky thing that I ended up a director. I would have thought I was completely laid back, but then when I started directing, this desire to control people got unleashed.
ANNIE: I think I'm good at making an abstract idea activated—making it visual, making it happen.
FRANCESCA: That's the biggest challenge. A lot of people have great ideas, but being able to make it real is very difficult. And whether that's through a gesture, something visual, a sound or a word, we're the filter that things go through to become real on the stage. That, to me, defines our job: to be able to take the idea and give it existence. The work you do with composers and writers is the hardest part of the job. Even though they're the creators and you are the interpreter, you have to guide them in telling the story through three dimensions. People don't understand what a director does.
KATHLEEN: They say, "Are you at the show every night? I'm coming next Thursday—will you be there?" [Laughter.]
ANNA: They think you're the backstage version of what a conductor does up front, and I can completely understand why they would think that. [My quality is] I can watch it wrong for a very long time. When you do plays, you have to be patient, because if you give your company the experience by rote, there's no information you're getting you're getting from what they're doing. I assume everyone at this table can articulate a point of view well or we wouldn't be working, because you have to be able to have that conversation.
FRANCESCA: You've having a conversation with yourself. We have collaborators and colleagues, but we're alone.
ANNA: Very much alone.
KATHLEEN: I think a big part of directing is deciding what information to give to who when. People will say, "Are you going to tell them about that?" and even if you know [what's coming] down the line, you've got to figure out when to bring it up. If there's a feminine quality that helps in directing, I think it's that degree of patience and nurturing in terms of giving people the chance to find their way. Even if we're gently guiding them, we do it in a way that makes them feel a sense of collaboration or ownership in what they're doing.
KATHLEEN: As creative person, you use a tank of gas when you're creating something, and then you have to find a way to fill up the gas tank again. For me, it's traveling, it's getting out of this world of theater, going to museums, going to see things that have nothing to do with Broadway musicals. It's spending time with family and friends.
FRANCESCA: A very settled and quiet home life, dogs, a partner. And for me, it's nature. If I have free time, it's about hiking, camping, going long distances alone. Sometimes I don't want to be in a black box. I want life!
ANNA: I'm with you. For me, it's making my home life a little more primary, which I'm doing for the first time. And that's probably why for the first time I have a successful home life! [Laughter.] I also like to do really silly things. If I can spend the afternoon at Barneys, I will. I might not buy anything, but I'm a shopper and I enjoy going out into the air.
KATHLEEN: And being around people who could care less what we do.
ANNIE: I don't relax! [Laughter, as the women exchange e-mail addresses and say good-bye to one another.]