The Working Director | Samuel Hunter

SH: I think the idea that makes all other moments clear is the tension between wild mythology and domesticity. Slim wants domesticity with his offstage family and mythology with Cavale. Cavale wants both in Slim. They want the same things in different ways, two things that, at least for these people (and maybe the rest of us), are mutually exclusive. Every moment in this play is some manifestation of this conflict, which eventually tears Cavale and Slim apart.

But it is also important to understand why these two ideas are mutually exclusive and I think it’s because, at it’s core, to be a myth is to be inhuman. A human being is an infinitely rich, complex, contradictory thing. And to love somebody so strongly that you can build a home with them is to accept all of it, unreconciled. To be a myth, to be an icon, is to be stripped of your humanity, to be forever associated with that one thing in which you were mythological. The rock and roll savior Cavale screams for is a human who is so selfless they become a reflection for everyone else’s problems, frustrations, and desires. A true savior, a true icon, gives us the gift of ourselves – we see who and what we are and bear the brunt of our own inadequacies. But to become that kind of icon, a person has to be willing to part with their own frustrations, their own sense of self. That sort of sacrifice prohibits anybody from actually knowing who and what you are, prohibits anybody from loving you, prohibits any sense of community, any sense of family.

I kept coming back to rock iconography and especially work by Andy Warhol. I found a photograph of Buddy Holly, and that same picture done by some art student in the style of Andy Warhol. But what’s even more surprising is that if you do a google search for Buddy Holly, one of the first things that pops up is a pair of glasses. Buddy Holly used to be a guy with thoughts and feelings and loved ones. Now he’s a pair of glasses. We did that to him. We reduced him to his most obvious parts. For better or worse.

I also became fascinated with architecture in various holy buildings. Cathedrals, of course, but also the more sparsely decorated churches and synagogues and mosques and yurts. Eventually, the basic parts became clear – shrines, altars, clear borders between the outside realm and the holy realm. Those became important in the scenic design. If the play is about a tension between the real and the holy, the wild and the domestic, then it’s important the space share that tension. It’s not just a hotel room, it’s a rock and roll temple, desecrated with Cavale and Slim’s domestic life – their bed, their belongings, their arguments.

SH: There wasn’t much of a difference, really. We all recently (as in last week) graduated from UC San Diego, a school with a great faculty and great mentorship, but not a  lot of physical support for undergraduate endeavors. I’m used to doing shows without a space locked in until the week before performance, so we were operating on the assumption that we had no space until we found one. And since we weren’t sure what sort of technical support we would have, we operated on the assumption that we’d have none. Eventually you begin to find reasons why these people are making their own sound, or operating their own lighting. It only serves to strengthen the concept, I think. I’m very reluctant to put things into an empty space anyway – I take great care in what sorts of gestures are made in space – so the plays are rarely tech-heavy.

I find the fringe environment to be similar to a university environment. There are many people, all committed to and passionate about this work and they all seem very excited to watch each other take risks. Even if I fail, I did it at the fringe festival, and I met a bunch of people who (hopefully) are committed to making the community a better place – through support and constructive criticism. I don’t feel like I can lose. 

SH: Easily the biggest challenge was one of basic story telling. How do all these moments actually lead to one another? At first glance, the script seems to disrupt it’s own momentum. There are a large number of pauses, followed by Slim saying, “Now what do we do?” or “Tell me a story.” The struggle was to avoid attributing it to biographical fact. Sure, Patti Smith and Sam Shepard were probably on a number of drugs, but this isn’t their story anymore, it’s ours. And that choice allows an absence of humanity and an absence of cause and effect. How can you create something that explains every moment – how do you find the central question – if none of the moments are related? So figuring out how each moment led to another became top priority. I sat mulling it over in my apartment for a long time before my mentor, Kim Rubinstein, told me it might be valuable to stay in the protoplasm for as long as possible until the heart of the play presented itself. And, to nobody’s surprise, she was absolutely right. Justin O’Neill (Slim) and Claire Kaplan (Cavale) memorized the entire script via punctuation walks, which is a memorizing style which  requires the actor to walk a step on every syllable, speak in a monotone voice, and then do a different physical action for each piece of punctuation. This cleans out the actors rhythms and replaces them with the playwright’s. From there, we broke the play into a few chunks and did each individual chunk about a dozen times on loop, Justin and Claire simply listening and responding to one another with only the text as their container. Occasionally I’d prompt them to repeat something, or clarify an intention that was already there, but mostly they just talked and listened. Slowly but surely new things began to pop and sparkle and reveal themselves in a much deeper way than my cerebral exercises could have yielded alone in my apartment. The situations made themselves present. It became clear that this play is, at its most basic level, the last day of a relationship. Shepard’s and Smith’s poetry is a bit tough to crack, but that is essentially what is happening. I didn’t know that when I first started out. 

SH: Well, I’m new to the directing scene, being a college graduate for all of one week now, so it’s hard, and probably presumptuous of me to say anything. But I’ll do my best. I’ve been presumptuous and wrong in writing before.

I think there is something wrong with the regional non-profit model. I’m not 100% sure what it is yet, but all you have to do is look at what kind of theatre is excelling and what kind of theatre is getting shoved off to the sides. It may be a cultural problem. It may be that the United States doesn’t really value theatre the way some other countries do. And if that’s the case, then the real problem is in education – we don’t learn the consumption skills required to experience theatre.

It may be an economic question. If the market is flooded, then of course directors won’t get paid well – people will choose what they already enjoy, and that’s the big Broadway musical. If we prove time and again that we will work for free, or at least very cheaply, then nobody has any incentive to pay us more. And if we pack up our bags and go someplace else, then those directors who are left will make a little bit more. The market is flooded in LA, San Diego, San Francisco. All the places where a person would think to go for theatre, everybody has already gone to. It’s hard to cut your teeth in a flooded market.

But the regional non-profit model also can make it difficult to get anything out of an apprenticeship. Directing is one of the last bastions of guild-like development, but so many directors are flying all over the country to work on whatever job they can get that it’s hard to have an appreciable apprenticeship with them. They ship in, work for 6 weeks with a bunch of strangers, and ship out. If you’re lucky you can slip a few Q and A sessions in over beers while they lament a bad day of rehearsal. Maybe it’s just me – maybe I turn people off – but I have had a hard time getting the ear of the people I’ve assisted professionally. Of course, this experience is compared to that of the university, where it is everybody’s goal to learn from one another, so I may have unrealistic expectations.

Or maybe everything is just fine. Ask me again in a couple of years.