Introduction
Over the past decade, this director has built a reputation for productions of classical drama that are simultaneously rigorous and surprising — faithful to their source texts while feeling urgently alive in the present moment. We met to talk about process, philosophy, and the state of theater today.
On Approaching a Canonical Text
When you begin work on a play like Chekhov or Shakespeare, where do you start?
"I start by trying to forget everything I know about it. That sounds facetious, but I mean it seriously. Every canonical play comes pre-loaded with received ideas — about how it should look, how it should sound, what it's 'about'. My first job is to clear all of that away and read the play as if I am the first person who has ever read it. What does it actually say? What happens, moment to moment? Not 'what is this scene symbolically about' but 'what does this person want, right now, in this line?'"
And then?
"And then I start to hear it. The text is the score. I think of my job the way a conductor thinks of theirs — I'm not composing the music, I'm finding the tempo, the dynamics, the moments of silence. Chekhov in particular is almost entirely composed of silences. The pauses are the play. The words are what characters say instead of saying what they mean."
On Minimalism and Design
Your productions are known for relatively spare staging. Is that an aesthetic preference or something else?
"It started as a constraint — working with small budgets forces invention — but it became a conviction. Every element you add to a stage is a claim on the audience's attention. A spectacular set design says 'look at this.' I want the audience to look at the human face. The face is infinitely more interesting than any set piece I could build."
But you do use design elements when you feel they serve the work?
"Of course. I'm not a dogmatist. When the design emerges from the text — when there's something the set can say that the actors cannot — then it earns its place. But I am always suspicious of spectacle that exists to compensate for insufficient work on the text and the performances."
On Working with Actors
How do you approach rehearsal?
"Very slowly, at first. We read and talk for longer than most companies would consider sane. I don't want actors to be performing the play in the first week of rehearsal — I want them to not know yet, to still be asking questions. The danger with any well-known play is that actors arrive with fixed ideas about their characters. I try to make the familiar strange again."
What do you ask of actors above all?
"Specificity and courage. Specificity — because vague feeling is not acting, every moment needs a precise intention. Courage — because real emotional truthfulness requires vulnerability, and vulnerability is frightening. I can teach technique. I cannot teach the willingness to be seen."
On Contemporary Audiences
Do you think about your audience when you're making work?
"Constantly. But not in a pandering way — I think about what they need, not what they expect. And I believe audiences are hungry for difficulty. They are hungry for work that asks something of them, that doesn't explain itself, that treats them as intelligent adults capable of sitting with uncertainty. The theater that underestimates its audience is the theater that is slowly dying."
Final question: what do you hope people take home from your productions?
"A question they haven't been able to answer by the time they fall asleep. If they've resolved everything neatly by the lobby, I haven't done my job."