Working Together in Theatre

Collaboration and Leadership

Robert Cohen

• Publisher: Methuen Drama
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781350316393
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Theatre Direction & Production

Robert Cohen draws on fifty years of acting, directing and teaching experience in order to illustrate how the world's great theatre artists combine collaboration with leadership at all levels, from a production's conception to its final performance. This book challenges the notion that creating brilliant theatrical productions requires tyrannical directors or temperamental designers. Viewing the theatrical production process from the perspectives of the producer, director, playwright, actor, designer, stage manager, dramaturg and crew person, Cohen provides the techniques, exercises and language that promote successful collaborative skills in the theatre. Collaboration is vital to successful theatre making and Working Together in Theatre is the first book to show how leadership and collaboration can be combined to make every theatrical production far greater than the sum of its many parts.

PART ONE

INTRODUCTION

Family Theatres/Theatre Families

“No one … not even geniuses … ever makes it alone,” says Malcolm Gladwell in his best-selling Outliers. This truth permeates this book, which has only one goal: to help theatre artists learn to create great art together.

The chapters that follow are not about aesthetic or intellectual goals, but rather about the process of working as a unit. Every theatre production, though sometimes headlined by a world-renowned director or one or two famous actors, is put together by a great many people, numbering from the dozens to the hundreds. And when these people work together they can, as a collective, attain artistic heights that none could attain independently. “If the theatre is not about the interaction of people, it’s about nothing,” says Joe Dowling, former head of Ireland’s Abbey Theatre and now of Minneapolis’s Guthrie Theatre. “Theatre,” Dowling continues, “can never be solely about concept, ideas, intellectual pursuits – it has to be about the way in which the people relate to one another.”

People in a theatre or film company, therefore, must work closely together. In doing so, they often call themselves a “family.” Indeed, one of the most common comments theatre artists make when accepting Tony or Academy Awards is praising their fellow artists in the project by saying, “We were a family!”

There would rarely be a need to say this in previous centuries, however, because until the seventeenth century, real families created most theatre. The troubadours, jongleurs, mimes, and commedia dell’arte troupes that toured Europe from the Dark Ages through the Renaissance were almost entirely blood-related artistic collectives, with elders handing down their duties and roles to their descendents from one generation to the next. Even the celibate monks who created liturgical dramas at the start of the second millennium were members of lifelong “brotherhoods,”* as were the craft guilds that created the mystery plays of the European High Middle Ages. In the late sixteenth century, it was two real brothers, Richard and Cuthbert Burbage, together with their father, James, and their fellow Warwickshire countryman Will Shakespeare, who came together to create the greatest theatre and dramatic repertoire known to the English-speaking world. A century later, the young Jean-Baptiste Poquelin assumed the stage name of Molière and, together with four members of the Béjart family (one his mistress and another afterwards his wife), founded the Théâtre Illustre in Paris, which became the greatest theatre company in that country’s history. Meanwhile, half a world away, eleven Japanese families were developing a unique and popular dance-drama style into the kabuki, which for the past four centuries has been Japan’s leading theatrical art.

And in the nineteenth century, a Russian teenager named Konstantin Alekseiev gathered his relatives together and, with them, created the Alekseiev Circle, a family company whose amateur productions entertained Muscovites in the Alekseiev home and country house, leading Konstantin to take the name “Stanislavsky” and co-found, with Vladimir Nemirovich-Dantchenko, the Moscow Art Theatre, which went on to revolutionize acting throughout Europe and, eventually, the United States.

These were all, at least initially, family theatres. Some continue to reflect their family heritage: In Japan, the same eleven families that ruled the kabuki in the seventeenth century continue to dominate it today. In France, Molière’s Illustre, which was consolidated with others into the Comédie Française not long after his death, is still known as the “House of Molière,” and its permanent company members call themselves not artistic partners but sociétaires, implying a social and not just a professional linkage.

But blood-linked family theatres are extremely rare today. In America, the tradition is upheld mainly in the circus – as exemplified by the Zoppé Family Circus, founded in 1842 and now run by its founder’s great-great grandson, Giovanni Zoppé, who grew up performing with his father, mother, wife, two siblings and their spouses. We’re “just like the circus was 100 years ago,” said Giovanni in 2005, as he took the reins from his father.

Members of such real family theatres did not acquire their theatrical skills by training at drama schools or university theatre departments, as most theatre artists do today. Rather, they learned their skills in apprenticeships with their family-led troupes. Tradition has it that William Shakespeare’s first theatre job was looking after the horses of wealthy patrons when they attended his company’s performances. Before he was invited to play before King Louis’ court and become France’s most famous actor-playwright, Molière had honed his craft touring his company through rural villages in Southern France for some thirteen years. What training such artists received came not through courses of formal instruction but through continuous performing – often passing the hat for their supper when not being chased out of town. This called for an extraordinary commitment and group loyalty, for which family ties are the surest component.

Non-family theatres created in subsequent centuries in many ways followed the family model, forming large companies of actors who lived in the same city and performed at the same theatres, working with many of the same colleagues year after year. Many in such companies married and performed together, including Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne, Henry Irving and Ellen Terry, and Hume Cronyn and Jessica Tandy, while others created family acting dynasties, such as the Booths, the Barrymores, and the Redgraves.

But there has been a sea change in theatre production since the mid-twentieth century. As a person who has been directing plays since 1957, I have watched these changes evolve with fascination.

First, theatre has diversified geographically, particularly in America. In the 1940s and 50s, the American professional theatre simply meant the New York professional theatre. To be sure, there were the seeds of a regional American theatre movement being planted – Nina Vance’s Alley Theatre in Houston, Margo Jones’s Theatre 47 in Dallas, Zelda Fichandler’s Arena Stage in Washington, Herb Blau and Jules Irving’s Actors’ Workshop in San Francisco – but that was about it. Apart from those venues, anyone wishing to create professional theatre and be paid for it had to move to New York. Now, however, there are nearly 2000 professional theatres in the United States, about 150 of them operating on budgets of anywhere from one to thirty-some million dollars. And these theatres are broadly scattered throughout every state and large city in the nation. Such diversification is good in many ways, but – since the vast majority of theatres outside of New York present only limited runs of, typically, three to seven weeks – it has also led to actors, designers and directors working mainly on short-term, single-production assignments rather than on yearly (much less lifetime) contracts as was commonly the case in earlier generations. And while single-show ensembles may bond into what participants may call a family at Tony Awards time, such pseudo-families are, in most cases, decidedly short-lived.

European theatres companies, maintained through most of the twentieth century on a permanent or semipermanent basis, often with ample government funding, have also moved toward single-production contracts in the third millennium. Prominent European actors and designers worldwide now receive attractive offers from other theatre, television and film companies from around their continent – and even around the world. In our now-global economy, permanent companies are rapidly giving way to independent theatres where relative strangers come together for short work periods to produce single projects.

Second, as the theatres are diversified, so are the artists they engage. Today’s professional theatre practitioner has probably received his or her basic training in a university graduate program (particularly in America) or a theatre conservatory (particularly in Europe) or a commercial school in New York, London or Los Angeles or other large city, rather than a long-term professional apprenticeship or internship – which, today, is almost always very brief (measured in months rather than years), usually unpaid (even lacking a housing allowance), and can thus normally only be a brief midway step between the classroom and the profession. So the “family of strangers” that gathers today to mount a twenty-first-century production is also educationally diversified: its constituents comprise a varied assortment of independent artists who have been trained in different schools, in different cities, in different ways, and by different teachers. Moreover, they have usually received intensely specialized training in just a single theatrical discipline: as an actor, perhaps, or sound designer or stage manager or a projection designer. If they are trained in a university, they will sport MFA degrees in their specific discipline: an MFA not in “Theatre” but in “Costume Design.” And when they then become professionals, they will join specialized professional unions,* which oversee the rights pertaining to their particular discipline and protect their members from real or imagined subjugation from artists in other professional unions.

Specialization existed in the past, of course, but not so rigidly. Thespis, whom Aristotle considered the world’s first actor, was also the playwright and director of his early Greek tragedies. Aeschylus and Sophocles wrote, directed and often acted in their plays, and designed them – and perhaps their stage machinery – as well. Shakespeare and Molière acted in their own works as well as the works of other writers; probably both also directed their plays – Molière definitely did. Indeed, until the twentieth century what is now called directing was in fact normally executed by the production’s playwright or leading actor.

So in contrast to their predecessors over the past two millennia, theatre artists today are also diversified professionally into separate artistic disciplines. This can lead to isolation of the various artists – what in France was ridiculed as the “arthritis of specialization” when it threatened to throttle the more free-form avant-garde theatre of the early years of the twentieth century, when distinguished easel painters, including Pierre Bonnard, Edouard Vuillard, and Pablo Picasso were routinely designing scenery for theatre and dance.

Finally, artists who hope to make a living in today’s highly mobile and geographically diversified theatre must become individually competitive if they hope to make a living. No longer able to rely on a family connection to begin or sustain their careers, today’s artists must compete avidly for a foot in the door, an audition or portfolio review, a production assignment, a union membership, and then continuing (and hopefully growing) recognition – in the press, in the media, and by word of mouth – on a larger and larger scale for the rest of their careers. Since today’s theatre is broad-based, they must embrace its diversity of locales, styles, and performative media. Which means that unless they snare a permanent position at a regional theatre, or national attention in film, television, or star assignment on Broadway, they must “go on the move,” competing to establish reputations in multiple media and separate locales. They must compete broadly for their livelihood, and they must do so throughout their careers. And they must make friends – without making rivals or enemies.

But all of this requires the most serious attention to “working together.”

For today, families don’t make theatre; theatre makes families.

* “Brotherhood” remains a term that designates certain unions, such as the United Brotherhood of Carpenters and the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers.

* The unions, basically, are Actors Equity Association (AEA) for Actors and Stage Managers, SDC (the Stage Directors and Choreographers Society, as recently renamed) for Directors, and the United Scenic Artists (USA) for Designers – with USA members segregated into more than a dozen specific branches, including those for Scenic Designers, Costume Designers, Lighting Designers, Sound Designers, Projection Designers, Scene Painters, Art Directors (for films), Storyboard Artists, Computer Artists, and Art Department Coordinators, among others. While Stage Managers are currently represented by AEA, they have different (and higher) salary scales than do the actors in that union.

1

Collaboration and Leadership

Collaboration and Leadership: the key words of this book’s subtitle. Are they allies or opposites? Does one contradict the other, or does one require the other? Let’s look at them separately first.

Collaboration

“Theatre is a collaborative art.” How many times have you heard that? Hundreds probably. Maybe thousands.

Well, it’s true. And even though obvious, it bears repeating. If a sales clerk daydreams at her post at Macy’s one afternoon, the store won’t close down forever, but if the actor playing Mercade – who is suppose to arrive with the news that the king is dead – fails to make his entrance in the final scene of Love’s Labor’s Lost, the play simply cannot continue, for his unexpected announcement instantly reverses everything that’s been happening up to this point.*

Yet the actor playing Mercade is not the only person who could create this theatrical catastrophe. If the stage manager has failed to call him up from his dressing room in time, or failed to flash the offstage cue light that signals his entrance from behind a see-proof and soundproof door he is to enter through, the play may likewise come to a dead halt. Or if the wardrobe assistant had mistakenly taken Mercade’s costume back to the costume shop for repairs ten minutes beforehand, or if the scene shifting crew had failed to unlatch the door after moving it into place during the previous scene change, the entire performance could be ruined, and no one would talk about anything else after the curtain call. In the theatre, everybody must pull his or her own weight, and pull it all the time or disaster may follow.

So full collaboration among all members of the theatre company is essential and essential all the time. No job in theatre is too small to engage everyone’s attention. Actor Willem Dafoe has won two Oscar nominations for his work in films, but his career is centered on his stage work at the experimental Wooster Group theatre company in New York, which calls itself an “ensemble of artists.” How did he join the group? “I just wanted to be with those people … I literally walked in there and said: ‘I wanna work with you guys.’ And they said: ‘Okay, well you go and sweep in the corner,’” Dafoe explains. Film and Broadway star Denzel Washington describes his attitude in similar fashion: “What I learned working with directors like Jonathan Demme, and what I now try to create, is community feeling. We’re all in it together. I can grab the bucket and pail just like the next guy. Nobody can get to work earlier than me. And I like that.”

For there’s nothing like sweeping and scrubbing the dressing room floors – and doing it well – to remind you of how much effort and affection (and often humility) goes into collaborating with others in the creation of great theatre art. Indeed, most of the persons who work in theatre love doing so. Not every minute of every day, of course, but almost always they come back for more – whenever they can. Few theatre artists retire voluntarily. Many, when they are between well-paying assignments (Broadway shows or films, say), work for free. As this book was being readied for press, Broadway stars Bernadette Pete...