Acting has been a hobby of mine since I was a small kid. From high school through college, I acted in at least three shows a year. Since college, I have done less acting and forayed into directing. I have found that I enjoy directing as much as I enjoyed acting, if not more. Last year, I directed two short plays at play festivals celebrating new works.
Of course, after each play that I direct, I am mobbed by throngs of people begging me to write a blog post about my directing style.
Ok, not really.
In actuality, my purpose in writing it is two-fold. First, to demystify the directing process for those who are interested in trying it for the first time or just curious. Second, to solidify my own thoughts and share some tricks I have picked up along the way.
I was never formally taught the skill of directing. Instead, I have assembled it haphazardly, like Frankenstein’s monster, from the styles of the many directors I worked with as an actor. Read on if you dare.
If I had to describe the job of a director in one word, it would be coordinating. While producers and stage managers are responsible for coordinating the logistics of putting on a play, it is the job of the director to coordinate the artistic elements.
The process of putting together a play typically starts with a script (although not always). Scripts are ambiguous. Sure, they have words in them, but anyone who has endured a high school literature class knows that the interpretation of a haiku can be stretched to the length of ten pages if the assignment calls for it (double-spaced, 12-point font, of course). There are a lot of ways to think about the same script. A good director does not prescribe an interpretation but helps the whole creative team, actors and designers together, arrive at one together. Their goal is to converge on a level of specificity that makes the creative team feel like they are telling a unified story while leaving enough ambiguity that the actors, designers, and audience have room for their own ideas and interpretations. Striking the right balance between under-specifying and over-specifying is part of the art of directing.
As an example, take Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. One director might choose to make the production dark and gritty, likening the conspirators to a frenzied mob and emphasizing how quickly misinformation can spiral into violence. Another might opt for a stately and regal production, highlighting the corruption that can be present even at the highest level of government and the complexities inherent in unseating it. Both are perfectly reasonable readings of the play, but can you imagine if half the actors chose one interpretation and half chose the other? Chaos! Someone might even end up getting stabbed! With the director shepherding the creative team in the same direction, the team can tell a unified story.
Directing as coordinating also has a much more literal interpretation when it comes to the physicality of the play. Individual artists are usually good at making individual character choices. It is much harder to spontaneously coordinate group movements. As such, it is up to the director to set the blocking: where actors will enter/exit and where they will stand at pivotal moments.
There are some schools of thought that view the director as the only artist and the rest of the team as puppets executing the director’s master vision. This school of thought is stupid and you should ignore it and not work with people that think that way.
In my college theater group, we sometimes said that there are two types of concepts: “concepts” and “Concepts with a capital C.” The former are ideas the director arrives at from the script. The latter are ideas the director imposes on the script. From my presentation, you can probably tell that I prefer the former over the latter.
When I think back to the plays that I have seen in my life that were most impactful, I often cannot remember individual lines of dialogue. My memory is not that detailed. Plus, I need all that extra brain space to remember all 150 original Pokemon (a game I have not played in many years). Instead, I remember visual moments, situations, or character arcs. These are what I aim to create as a director: poignant moments or images which the audience will remember long after they have forgotten the particulars of the show.
Here is what I do to decide on a concept for a show. I present to you Mark’s Algorithm for Developing a concept (note the lower-case “c”):
Your concept can and should evolve. For example, I knew when I started directing As You Like It that the Forest of Arden had to represent liberation and that each character needed to discover something about themselves along their journey. Initially, I had thought about incorporating mirrors into the set to toy with the idea of self-reflection, but after further discussion and reflection (pun intended), we found better ways to convey the idea in a more minimalist fashion.
If you have ever done scene work as an actor, you know that a scene is broken down into beats: relatively uninterrupted trains of thought. Like a sentence. Beats affect the pacing. You could have a beat that goes on for a long time like a run-on sentence and which makes people wonder: is the person who wrote this sentence trustworthy and, if not, does there come a point in the sentence when I should consider no longer reading the sentence and just skip to the next sentence, or would skipping to the next sentence cause me to miss crucial details that will become relevant later in the paragraph? Or not. Short works, too.
As a director, you will start with the whole play and break it down into arcs then break scenes down into beats. If you are a fellow mathematician or computer scientist, you can think of this as creating a tree structure (the computer science kind, not the botanical kind, although planting a tree is rarely a bad thing).
First up is finding the arcs in a play. Many stories follow a literary three-act or five-act structure, but it is up to you to find those acts. Find the moments of delineation. Where is the rising action? Where is the climax? Where is the falling action? When are there changes in the overarching balance of power? When is an important decision made? When is a crucial detail revealed to the audience or another character? When do you emphasize the drama? When do you emphasize comedy? When does a surprise shift the tone of the whole piece? When will this essay have another sentence that is not a question?
I’ll give two examples. The first is from Spring Awakening. When I directed it, I saw the song The Dark I Know Well in the middle of the first act as a crucial turning point. Before it, the failings of the adults in the show do not manifest any serious consequences. The show can even be a bit silly and there is room to play around. With The Dark I Know Well, the tone shifts on a dime (or whatever currency they used in turn-of-the-century Germany). By articulating the arc structure, we could reflect the mood change in the acting, the lights, and the music.
The second example is from As You Like It. In this case, the first arc had less to do with tone and more to do with the setting. In the first arc, the characters are in the court. For the rest of the play, they are in the Forest of Arden. Although the “court” section technically consisted of several different settings (outdoor, large rooms, chambers, etc.), we kept those set changes relatively simple to keep the pace quick and have one consistent “feel” for the court. The only time we had a major set change was after the first arc.
As with beats, you can have longer arcs or break things down into shorter arcs. As for beat work within scenes, I have nothing particularly insightful to say about it! If you have not done it… consider taking an acting class. Or just go audition for a show.
Can you direct a show without ever having acted in one? Well, you can, but I don’t think you should.
Can you direct a show without ever having been a designer? Yes, I think so.
Am I a hypocrite? Probably. But art is all about embracing hypocrisy, so deal with it.
If you are like me and came to directing primarily from the acting side of things, you might find the technical side of things a bit intimidating. Before I got into directing for the first time, I spent a few hours reading and watching (on YouTube) just enough about each department that I would be able to communicate my ideas effectively. If you have been around theater for long enough, most of these ideas will be familiar. You do not need to become an expert, but you should learn enough to communicate your ideas.
In the world of lights, it is helpful to understand the different effects produced by different types of lights: a wash, backlighting, top lighting, side lighting, etc. It is also good to be aware of the different kinds of lighting fixtures. Some can move and change colors. Others cannot.
In the world of sets, it is helpful to have a rough idea of how complicated of a build you are asking for. Especially if you are working on a financial and temporal budget (if not, please tell me where this mythical theater with infinite time and money is), you will want to ask for sets that use your resources wisely.
Here is my top tip: a good strategy for communicating with designers is to communicate how you want the audience to feel. Communicate the outcome you want and let the designer figure out how to achieve it.
For example, you can communicate “I want the lights to convey a sense of foreboding” or “I want the lights to delineate stage right and stage left because they are separate places but we are not going to change the set when the action moves.” An experienced designer will have room to do their art and accomplish this. For sets, you could say “I want the audience to feel like there is a barrier between upstage and downstage, which some characters can cross and others cannot.” This sort of logic can even work with props. Saying “I need two backpacks that are clearly distinguished from each other and match the characters’ costumes” gives the prop designer more room to operate within your intent than just saying “I need a blue backpack and a pink backpack.” Of course, if you have very specific sound cues and props you do need to specify those: “I need the sound of a plate falling on the floor on page 7.” Not a lot of ambiguity there.
Auditioning actors is a weird process. Most of your work as a director is about supporting and collaborating with your actors. During auditions, you need to discern between a lot of good candidates (hopefully).
From auditions, there are two things you want to learn about every actor. First, you need to know what a polished performance from them looks like. Second, you need to know how well they take notes. The second part is crucial: an actor could be a genius at playing characters in exactly one way. I would rather have a malleable actor than one who gave a more polished but rigid initial audition.
If actors bring a prepared monologue, I always ask them to do it twice. First, without any comments from me. I give them a score on a scale of 1 to 5 based on how well they perform their polished monologue. Next, I give them a small note and ask them to try the monologue again. I score them not on the quality of the monologue but on how different it is from their first attempt.
When possible, encourage actors to bring monologues that are in the same style as the show you are doing. Although prepared monologues are a norm, I have found that I can derive just as much signal from giving actors sides from the play we are doing a few days in advance. Sure, they have less time to prepare and polish their performance, but it gives me a standard measuring stick to judge everyone.
Do not rely on your ability to remember the actors. Write. Stuff. Down. Trying to remember each performance will work for the first five or six actors and you will think you are a genius, then ten more people will audition and it’ll all start to get jumbled in your head and you’ll think back to this essay. Then you’ll think back to ten other essays that you read and you’ll forget what this essay said and start doubting the very nature of memory itself.
When it comes to callbacks, different directors take different approaches. Usually, I have a pretty good sense of how I want to cast the show from initial auditions. In preparation for callbacks, I create a few possible castings, usually with a rough sense of priority between them. It is not always as simple as having a few actors for each role, because sometimes a particular pair of roles need to have a particular dynamic. My callback process is akin to hypothesis testing, where the hypotheses were formed from data gathered in initial auditions.
To give a concrete example, when I directed a three-person show, my casting ultimately came down to two possibilities for two of the roles. For the roles of X/Y, I was either considering actors A/B or actors B/C. I knew I wanted actor B to be in the show, but I was unsure in which role. It depended on whether actor A was stronger in role X or actor C was stronger in role Y. In a sense, actors A and C were “competing” with each other, although not for the same part.
One of the directors I worked with told me a phrase that has stuck with me for years. Her philosophy was to “do the play that is in the room,” meaning that while auditions are ostensibly about finding the actor that fits your vision, you also should be open to adapting your vision if the set of people who audition unlock a different energy. This can happen in subtle ways and be hard to describe, so I will give a very overt example: I once acted in a production of Romeo and Juliet where the director was initially intending to cast a male-identifying actor for Romeo. However, he did not feel like any of the male-identifying actors fit his vision and instead chose a female-identifying actor. Of course, this took the production in a different direction than he had initially intended, but he did the play that was “in the room” and created a really interesting show from it.
For each scene in the play, there are typically four phases it goes through before it’s ready to be strung together into longer chunks:
In practice, it is often not practical to separate these phases into four separate rehearsals. When I can, I try to rehearse each scene three times and definitely at least two, with at least one rehearsal before off-book date and one rehearsal after it.
I am fairly insistent on going through these four phases, even in musicals. This makes me a bit of an oddball, since not every director does table work for musicals. Of course, different plays and musicals will spend different amounts of time in each phase. A Shakespeare play inherently requires more tablework. A physical play requires a lot more time in the middle two phases. An emotionally complex play might require more time in the last stage.
There are some directors who ask actors to be off book in time for the first blocking rehearsal. I find this rather cruel to the actors, because it is easier to learn lines when they are accompanied by blocking and not just words on a page. For that reason, I roughly tend to do the first and second phases together in the first rehearsal. For the second rehearsal, if the actors are already off book I lump the third and fourth phases and then do further refinement during full runs. If the actors are not off book, I just do the third phase. If possible, I then try to have a third rehearsal after off-book date. Sometimes, scheduling necessitates that the final refinement happens during longer runs.
In terms of timing, I have found that a reasonable heuristic is to work backward from the end. For the week before tech week, I expect to be doing full runs or at least act runs. For the week before that, I expect to be running full acts or at least contiguous chunks of the play together. Before that, I divide the rehearsal into two or three “blocks.” During each block, I plan to do each scene at least once. I allocate each scene time proportional to its page length. I also leave at least one or two days open for “character work,” which are acting exercises intended to help the actors develop their character by taking their individual scene work and “zooming out” to think about their arc as a whole.
In the first two plays I directed, I front-loaded the character work: devoting the first day or two of rehearsal to it and not revisiting it. Later, I got feedback from my actors that they wished the character work was revisited throughout the process. When directing my third play, I took this advice to heart and added additional character work halfway through the rehearsal process.
If I were stuck in a room with an early-career airline pilot and an early-career computer scientist, I would probably have better career advice for the computer scientist. My advice for the pilot would be something along the lines of “try not to crash any planes,” which, while technically good advice, is not exactly a deep or helpful insight. It is often easier to give advice to someone whose path/approach is most similar to yours. In the world of directing, I have found myself generally better at coaching actors whose approach to acting is similar to mine.
One belief that I hold relatively strongly is that in order to play your character’s spoken lines, you must always know their internal monologue: what they are thinking at any given moment. For that reason, I like to give my actors guiding questions, asking them to find analogies in their own life. I don’t interrogate them about it, though. I let them decide on their own how to “use” their past experiences to reach the desired empathy for their character. Often, it is helpful if these questions concern their relations with other characters, since actors are often good at developing their own characters but might be less good at spontaneously agreeing on relationship details with other actors.
An example of this principle in action comes from when I directed Spring Awakening. In it, there is a song Left Behind during which all of the characters come to drop a flower on Moritz’s grave. None of them had a line, so they had to convey all of their emotion in their movement and facial expressions. To help them arrive at the right physical expressions, I prompted them: “Think about a memory your character shared with Moritz and no one else.”
Another tool that I leverage in my own acting and encourage in those I direct is giving the character a “physical language.” Indeed, sometimes it can be easier to first decide how a character moves and then figure out how they think than vice versa. My early exercises focus on this. If a character is proud and rambunctious, I have them hold their chin up high and make big, bold strides across the stage. If a character is timid, I have them take smaller steps and perhaps have their shoulders hunched more. Does the character tend to have their hands in their pockets or wave them about to gesticulate? Does the character tend to make eye contact or shy away from it? Does the character get very close to others while speaking or give them a wide berth? These can often give a first pass at character development, even before cracking open the character’s psychology and moment-to-moment inner thoughts.
It is not uncommon for actors, even veteran ones, to occasionally fall into a rut. Especially as you repeat a scene several times, it is possible to reach a sort of “equilibrium” where the actors do the scene identically each time. This is great if you are happy with the equilibrium, but if not then your job is to disrupt the equilibrium. I try to accomplish this through targeted exercises. For example, I once directed a play in which two characters were having an argument. I felt as though the actors were not doing enough to grab each other’s attention as the argument went on, so I added a physical inspiration: I introduced a prop into the scene and told the actors that they could only speak if they were holding the prop. They rehearsed the scene again and it had a whole new energy… since each line had to start with them grabbing the prop from the other, their lines took on a new power and urgency.
One of the tropes of directing is that it is always easier for a director to dial an actor back from being “too big” than it is to dial them up. The reason this is a trope is because it is absolutely, completely, unequivocally true. I like to start off my rehearsal process with exercises that encourage actors to take risks, so we can drop any pretense of modesty or reservation from the get-go.
Finally, one of my biggest pet peeves is theater is a show where the actors are not picking up their cues. No one has time to sit through hours of dead space between lines or quips delivered like a baby whale searching for its mother. Once the actors are off-book, do a speed-through. You can thank me later (and with all the time you save, you can write an essay about directing).
As a director, the moments I have found most exciting and memorable were when a cast or crew member understood my concept for the show and took it to the next level. In these situations, the cast or crew added their own idea on top, making it better than I could have imagined. As the actors inhabit their characters, this will happen more and more. In these moments, you know that the team has internalized your vision and found their own storytelling voice within it. You struck the right balance. You have handed off the baton, they have gotten it, and they are running with it.
For example, when I was directing As You Like It, I employed physical comedy extensively throughout the show. Naturally, as the director, I came in with a lot of these gags planned out from the first blocking rehearsals. However, about halfway through the rehearsal process, my actors started to suggest gags of their own which were totally in line with my “style.” We tried them and added a lot of them to the show, including several which I remember even more fondly than my own.
This process of transitioning ownership is natural and I do my best to give notes explicitly encouraging it (“I loved it! Keep it!”)
Once you are done with the early parts of tech week and the cues are mostly fixed, you will probably have two or three runs of the show where you are just watching and giving notes. These can be a little slow, especially if you arrive early while the actors are getting set up, doing a fight call, etc. Although the theater is dark and it is tempting to take a nap, you are definitely not supposed to.
One of the directors that I worked with twice in college had a tradition of handwriting personalized thank-you notes to each of his actors, which he delivered on opening night. I liked being on the receiving end of this tradition so much that I copied it, even for my largest cast of 15 actors! Typically, I decide what I want to say in advance and then use the downtime during tech week to write it on cards.
If you have never been involved in theater, I hope this essay gave you interesting insights into the process by which shows are created. If you have been involved in theater but have not considered directing, I hope this essay inspired you to try it for the first time.
Bows!