9. CRYING WHILE DIRECTING
9. CRYING WHILE DIRECTING
doctors hate this one weird trick!
art by tuesday moon on etsy.
“yes, i cry while directing almost every single day.” spoken by — not me, surprisingly! — greta gerwig, in her vogue “73 questions” video. (skip to 12:13 for that line.)
as i get ready to return to running a rehearsal room (yes, it’s late, and yes, i get alliterative when i’m tired), i’ve been thinking a lot about what leadership looks like. i’ve been thinking about the way i balance my internal scales of comfort and danger when i direct. i’ve been thinking about what it means when a director cries.
that greta gerwig quote, which i first encountered several years ago, has been a little bit of a beacon for me. it’s a reminder that another director cries, that she isn’t ashamed to admit it (to vogue!), and that rather than her access to emotion somehow limiting her, it is, in fact, perhaps, part of what has made her such a supernova.
i cry a lot in life. i actually have come to love this about myself. i think it’s healthy! i love that my heart and my brain and my tear ducts are in such constant communication. still, i usually try not to cry in front of collaborators. in other words, i cry almost every single day and i direct almost every single day, but never (or at least rarely) the twain shall meet. there are obvious pros to this compartmentalization; it’s definitely helpful to not be crying for much of the time that i’m actively running a room. but i do wonder if sometimes it wouldn’t be such a bad thing for me to reflect some of the emotional vulnerability that directors ask actors to bring to their work every single day.
i’m curious about how other directors navigate this, if they navigate this at all. i’m curious how actors and designers and stage managers and more feel about it when a director, for a moment, allows the free expression of their authentic reaction to sadness or pain. i’m curious whether it shrinks the emotional landscape of the process for others, making them feel as though there is no room left for them to express their own hurt or grief, or whether it broadens it, giving them permission to commiserate or confess.
near the end of the reading i directed last week, my sister started to sing “landslide” by fleetwood mac. it’s a song that means something different every time it resurfaces in my life. this time, the line that stuck with me was “can i handle the seasons of my life?" i didn’t cry during the reading (“i’m directing!”), but i cried thinking about it tonight. i thought about how handling the seasons of my life didn’t have to mean holding back my tears. it could mean letting them out, and letting people see.
reading.
the next article in jesse green’s series on theater practices.
this essay by regina victor on the way that artistic directors of color are routinely set up to fail.
this profile on julie benko, whose name you may recall if you read the timeline of the funny girl dust-up i sent along a few weeks ago.
this post on grief.
this poem by frank o’hara.
some advice if you’re yearning for awe and ritual.
seeing.
so. many. self tapes. i have seen. so many self tapes this week.
the faces of my college roommates over zoom. a real gift.
i want this shirt so bad.
also this one.
the plants at the grocery store across the street from me. almost every day, i try to take a walk to visit them. sometimes i visit the plants at the grocery store down the block, too. the other day, i saw a plant there, a caladium with tall stems and bleeding heart leaves, for just ten dollars. i’ve been leaving my wallet home more and more on my daily walks, so i told myself if it was still there the next day, i would buy it. i did. it’s sitting proudly on top of my fridge, new leaves already unfurling.
i remain obsessed with linocuts and wolves. exhibit a at the top. exhibit b below.
hearing.
on a wailin’ jennys kick.
enjoying this as a morning playlist.
and this as an evening playlist.
making.
the reading for eleven months of nuclear summer was incredibly special — even rain couldn’t stop us. plus, it gave me my new favorite photo of me directing, taken by the one and only sophie mcintosh. (it also led to a conversation between me and sophie about how each of us had been extremely intimidated by the other when we first met, largely based on our websites. artist websites, man. so weird.)
hopefully, next week i’ll have a full cast of before the flood to announce to you all! (and maybe a poster. and a ticket link.) i can’t believe rehearsals are starting so soon. this play is (naturally) flooding my life, so even though i’m writing this late on a thursday evening, i still have a first design meeting to go to before bed. i LOVE first design meetings. they’re like christmas, and everybody brought me the gift of spending real time and care on bringing this show to life. first design meetings are always one of the first times that a production starts to become concrete for me. it has to exist in real, three-dimensional space: the actors will be wearing those costumes, sitting on those cushions, lit by those lights. it all starts to come together.
