Several years ago, in the throes of directing a theatre production for the Seattle Fringe Theatre Festival, I made an ill-fated attempt to create a blog where I would talk about my directing process, and respond to theatre-related stuff—productions and books. It died an unhappy death when I had no time to do anything outside of rehearsal and couldn't publicize the problems in rehearsal.

But the other day I came across this abandoned post, dated August 27, 2003. (Warning: this won't be interesting to anyone not already under the spell of Letters to an Unknown Audience.)

It seems to be a law of nature that almost no good writing about theatre exists. Writings about theatre are like unstable combinations of fundamental particles, I think, and they quickly disintegrate or become less meaningful. It's related to the fact that performance depends largely on the presence of the actor, making "performance documentation" a specious practice. Videotapes of theatre events are scant shadows of the original sense of time and space, and the opportunity afforded by live performance to choose what you look at.

When I initiated this site, I resolved to read one theatre book per week. So far I have read about two.

The first was Anne Bogart's A Director Prepares. Bogart is to be reckoned with, as a director. She's done a string of well-respected productions with creative perspectives on classic texts, always using a lot of what theatre people call "movement"—that is, her productions avoid becoming talking heads. She even developed her own, widely-taught, approach to generating movement, an approach known as "Viewpoints."

The book is divided into seven sections that deal with problems a director is supposed to encounter in rehearsal. The choices are interesting: Memory, Violence, Eroticism, Terror, Stereotype, Embarrassment, Resistance. These are interesting axes along which to view a rehearsal, and to my knowledge they haven't been dealt with by other writers on theatre.

In "Memory," she is confronted with the fact that Americans have no performative tradition from which to draw in creating performance material—or so she thinks, at first. By contrast, performers with clear ethnic roots, or with ritualistic religious backgrounds have memories of movements in their bodies, which they can revisit while developing gestures and actions for their characters.

But on further consideration, Bogart decides that she herself, and generally, an American, does have performative tradition and memory on which to draw, citing vaudeville, operetta, and the evangelical tradition.

My favorite chapter of Bogart's is "Violence." In rehearsal I am constantly working to elicit answers from the actors. Unlike talking over a set design, or building a piece of software, I can't just cycle between brainstorming and ciriticizing. Every idea needs to be held gently because the actor's delicate personal associations with it are the origin of his performance. But inevitably I get to a point where the actor and I directly disagree on the meaning of a moment. At that moment I do an act of violence, discarding the actor's coddled belief and substituting a new one. Then we have the hard work of rebuilding the associations that will allow the actor to actually perform it. Bogart urged me to get comfortable with that feeling of violence, and I'm slowly getting there. But it is a delicate balance: too much violence and the actor has nothing personal to motivate himself. Too little and he will slip out of phase with the rest of the piece.

I've become so artistically lazy since then!