Guest Blog 6
Tony PIsculli discusses problem solving in theatre productions.
On Directing: The Crux
by Tony Pisculli
When I approach a script as a director, the first thing I do is try to identify the crux—the most challenging aspect of the play for the audience. What’s the one thing that’s going to most interfere with their appreciation of the show?
For example, my Hawaii Shakespeare Festival co-founder R. Kevin Garcia Doyle likes to say that the key to directing comedy is making the audience laugh in the first sixty seconds. How then to handle the opening scene of Comedy of Errors, which is a nearly uninterrupted tragic monologue of exposition which isn’t funny? That’s the crux.
With The Taming of the Shrew, the crux is likely to be Kate’s servile profession of love to Petruchio, who’s been heaping abuse on her for the entire play.
Resolving this will have ramifications for the entire production process—from casting to costuming to staging—and will depend enormously on the specific audience I’m directing for. If they expect a happy ending, I need to find a way soften the impact of Petruchio’s abusive behavior or somehow redeem his character. For a more sophisticated audience, I can deliver a deconstruction of marriage-as-happy-ending. The idea isn’t so much to arrive at the “correct” interpretation as to determine what’s the likely sticking point for the audience, then bend the entire production process toward resolving it.
Recently I directed Henry IV, Part One for the Hawaii Shakespeare Festival and, among the many challenges that script presents, the one that stood out to me is that the central conflict revolves around a number of characters who don’t appear on stage until after intermission. One—Edmund Mortimer—is mentioned twenty times before the audience ever lays eyes on him. These historical figures would have been familiar to Shakespeare’s audience but not to ours.
Henry IV, Part One is among Shakespeare’s most engaging and accessible history plays with a surprising amount of humor and heart.
I was confident that the audience would engage with the personal drama of Prince Hal choosing between his actual father, the cold and distant King, and his surrogate father, the lovable rogue Falstaff, if I didn’t first lose them with the politics of the court that lead to rebellion and war. I had to find a way to introduce the off-stage characters to the audience earlier.
One way to tackle that would be with a program note, but, in my experience, no one reads those except reviewers. My next idea was to have the actor playing Edmund Mortimer literally come out and introduce herself to the audience—“I’m Victoria Kashiwai. I play Edmund Mortimer, a character that is often mentioned but doesn’t appear until after intermission, so I thought I’d come out and introduce myself. Hello.” Then, having established the meta-theatricality of Mortimer, have him introduce and/or comment on other significant characters as they are mentioned.
The final idea came from
my Associate Director, Kelsey Baehrens, who suggested we stage the fight between Hotspur and the Douglas that sparks the initial conflict.
(In the script, this fight is reported in a dispatch but never seen.) We expanded on this idea to create a dumbshow of every major character mentioned in the first scene, including Prince Hal. This gave the audience a visual reference for each name, alerted them to the significance of the character to the story and gave them a visual reference for each name so they would recognize the character when they appeared later. It also allowed us to bring Hal and Hotspur, protagonist and antagonist, together at the beginning of the show as a preview of their climactic fight at the end of the play. (We also kept Mortimer’s introduction which gave the audience permission to laugh and helped dispel the air of reverence which audiences sometimes bring to a Shakespeare production that can interfere with their genuine enjoyment.)
Any play will have challenges for the actors, the designers and the directing team, but I don’t worry about those initially.
I know we’ve got the entire rehearsal process to sort them out. But the audience only gets one chance to experience the show. There’s no pause, no rewind. They can’t flip back a few pages to see what they missed. My goal is to serve the audience. That’s why I make identifying and addressing the crux my priority.
Tony Pisculli is the co-founder and producer of the Hawaii Shakespeare Festival, now entering its 14th season. At HSF in 2016 he presented an experimental version of A Midsummer Night’s Dream in invented language--aActually, in two invented languages, one for the Greek court and mechanicals, and another for the fairies.
Tony is also Hawaii’s premiere fight choreographer and has been teaching stage combat and directing fights for more than 20 years. He is a Master Teacher with Dueling Arts International and has choreographed over 100 productions including stage, indie film, opera and burlesque. He is currently living in Hawai‘i and is a recent graduate of the Stone Coast Creative Writing program, and the author of a novel now out on submission.
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Twitter: @tonypisculli
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