Director's Notes
Susan loved rehearsing a play and, it was often suspected, might have preferred to keep the actors and artists to herself in the rehearsal hall, never to open the play for an audience. She was having too much fun, collaborating, trying things, laughing, learning.
She wanted everyone in the audience to have as much enjoyment watching a show as she did in rehearsal, and typically wished for as much in her Director's Notes printed in the production program. A sample conclusion from her notes on Ten Little Indians: "This is as much fun as it looks like it is!"
Below are a few excerpts from Susan's program notes through the years:
The Immigrant: “The first few times I read the script, my impression was that it was more a story than a play. I couldn’t see what it was about beyond its plot. For a play to be satisfying to me, I need it to have a theme or be a metaphor for something else or have resonance in the larger world. Besides that, I have no other way of figuring out how a play works.
“I continued to read the script and continued to be frustrated. Finally I gave up trying to find a handle for myself in the text and got down my old American history book thinking that if I had to go into rehearsal still not knowing what the play was about, at least I would have a little research done so that the actors and designers would be fooled for a while.
“...Of course I’m not going to tell you what my conclusions were. If I did you wouldn’t have anything to do while you’re being entertained by these exceptional actors, designers and technicians. I mostly hope you have something to mentally gnaw on after you leave the theatre.”
Photo: Devora Millman as Leah Harelik and Glynis Bell as Ima Perry. Photo by Judy Andrews.
Young Rube: “Whew. The process of getting Young Rube from the page to the stage has been its own Rube Goldberg machine. Six months ago it was only words and notes on paper (not necessarily in the order you will hear, either). It’s certainly been the most exciting journey I’ve ever been on.”
Driving Miss Daisy: “When I began working on it, I was convinced this play was absolutely, categorically not about prejudice, for how could three such funny, likeable characters as Miss Daisy, Hoke and Boolie carry with them such a hateful, despicable quality as prejudice? I recognize parts of myself in them! How wrong I was in a way. The more appropriate question should be, ‘How can such a hateful, despicable quality as prejudice have crept into three such funny, likeable characters?’
“...[Alfred] Uhry has hit upon, for his characters, probably the only possible solution to their problem. As the play progresses, the characters begin to recognize not their differences but their sameness. And it is this sameness which allows peace in their little world. How simple it sounds.
“I hope you have half as many laughs as we have, and I hope you have a little bit of a good cry. But I mostly hope we all begin to see sameness, not difference.”
Photo: Darrie Lawrence as Miss Daisy Werthan and William Hall, Jr. as Hoke Coleburn. Photo by Judy Andrews.
Wit: “I consider myself the luckiest director in the country right now for having been given Wit to direct. When I first began hearing about it, I dismissed it as another Disease of the Week (as in Movie of the Week) play; it was always described to me as being a play about cancer, written by a first-time playwright/kindergarten teacher. ... When Steve handed me a copy to read, I took it with trepidation, dreading the moment I’d have to return it and say I thought it was too transparent and should be sent immediately to Hollywood where it would get the treatment it deserved.
“I’ve been happily eating those unspoken words for months now. Not only is it not about cancer (although cancer is a condition of the play), it’s anything but transparent. That a first-time playwright could write a play as intellectually complex as Wit is astonishing; that it contains the elements that we, the interpreters, need to make it theatrically viable is almost unbelievable.”
Black Coffee: “What I find fascinating about mysteries, whether as a book, on TV, on film or on the stage, is that I can’t help trying to solve 'whodunit'. I try all kinds of systems. Being lazy, I usually work backwards from the least obvious characters, because I’m not supposed to pay attention to them, so that would, then, be the most obvious choice. When that doesn’t pay off, and I’ve missed a whole bunch of clues, I try for the most obvious character, because this is (I seem to have decided) where the writer wants us to go so we don’t go there so that’s where I go and then I’ve missed another bunch of clues.
“Then I give all that up in frustration and take a wild jab at figuring it out the way the author’s detective figures it out—if it’s Sherlock Holmes, I try for physical evidence; if it’s Patricia Highsmith, I go for armchair psychology; if it’s an Alfred Hitchcock, I attempt to ignore suspense and surprise and just look at all the facts, all the while trying to find Hitchcock, because someone once told me he put himself in everything he ever made. And sometimes they fox me and make their detectives work the opposite way to confuse me some more.
“None of these systems works for me, you understand. If you have a sure-fire system, I’d certainly like to know what it is.”
Photo: Joe Palmieri as Hercule Poirot and Eric Swanson as Captain Hastings. Photo by Judy Andrews.
Three Tall Women: “They say that just before we die we somehow review our lives. Having once come close myself, I can attest to this phenomenon. It’s like running your VCR on fast-forward and stopping at the interesting scenes. What I don’t remember happening, although I expect it did happen, is carefully examining those little scenes.
“What Edward Albee has done for our edification is to organize a situation where the character, A, is not only able to fast-forward through her life, she is also able to scrutinize the elements which have made her what she is.
“...The rehearsal process has been the equivalent of psychological exploratory surgery—the careful dissection of A’s life and the delicate suturing of each incision after we found what we were curious about.
“Three Tall Women ain’t for sissies.”
Photo: Darrie Lawrence as B and Judith Roberts as A. Photo by Jerry Naunheim, Jr.
The Clean House: “Except from an unsated appetite, I consider myself about the luckiest director around. To be given the job of directing Caryl Churchill’s A Number last season and Sarah Ruhl’s The Clean House this year, is close to Nirvana in my corner of the world.”
The Last Night of Ballyhoo: “Confronting this basic human drive for acceptance has brought a few tears and lots of laughter during the rehearsal process, for the actors must experience exactly what the characters experience if they’re to give you an honest and believable performance. If you have half as much fun and long half as much as we did for it all to come to a satisfactory conclusion, we’ll consider our job well done.”
Bug: “I’ll admit that I love thrillers; that’s thrillers in any form—movies, plays, books—and the scarier (almost) the better as far as I’m concerned. I’m not talking about high fallutin’ thrillers either. I mean Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho, Frederick Knott’s Wait Until Dark, Stephen King’s The Stand; all of them literal or metaphorical page-turners. “A couple of years ago, I was lucky enough to direct a production of Patrick Hamilton’s Angel Street (re-titled and considerably rewritten as the film Gaslight) in Kansas City. I vividly remember carrying on, at length no doubt, about maintaining the playwright’s integrity. In that script there are no special effects: no dead bodies waiting in showers, no trick disguises, no convenient storms for theatrical legerdemain. There are just five actors and a single, simple set. It’s the human experience that makes the thrill.”
