Cynthia Croot: Catalyst, observer, editor

Cynthia Croot is making her directorial debut at the Stonington Opera House with Much Ado About Nothing, which runs through July 16. Shake Stonington bloghead Alicia Anstead spent a few minutes with Croot on a break from rehearsal to talk about Stonington, directing and Shakespeare.

How has it been directing for theater in the remote setting of Stonington?
It's not Manhattan, which a lot of the actors are used to -- a very instant gratification landscape. Stonington is great for focusing energy and for walking with your work all the time. You go home, and you're still talking to the people you were just in a scene with. You have dinner, and act three comes up. It's a sense of retreat, where you can really concentrate on what you're doing. It's a wonderful space and it's astonishing what has been built here. When a group like this takes root and stays, it's almost like a maypole around which other activity can assemble itself. That's exciting to me to think about community and theater that way.


What interests you about the work at the Stonington Opera House?
You can do anything onstage -- you can read the phone book and it can be riveting. But the essential thing is the intent with which you do something and what you bring to it in terms of want and desire. You can do that on a larger scale with an organization. You can imbue everything that you do with a kind of humanist, democratic, deeply artistic position, committed to independent artists, committed to engaging work and engaging with community members. All of this is built into the foundaiton of the place and it's really inspiring to me.

Why are you director and not an actor or a designer?
I tried acting in college. I was actually pretty good at it. But I was working with student directors, and I thought I knew more than they did, and I wanted to see if I was right. I think I had a hard time taking direction, which is logical for the personality of a director. In a happy accident, my skills led to this. I'm naturally collaborative, naturally good at conflict resolution. I saw the theater as a place where I could build family that builds art.


What is the role of the director?
Primarily an inciter and an editor. You set something in motion based on what you see and observe. You have to be a really cagey observer. The catalyst, the observer and the editor.

What interests you about Shakespeare?
Shakespeare, because we still care about him, is mysterious and god-like to me. He seems to capture both this broad accessible space and the subtle nuances of the human heart in a deeply moving way. I fell in love with him during A Winter's Tale, which I did at the Colorado Shakespeare Festival. It's so essential to his plays that to win something you much lose something. But it's not pat or simple. There's a sense of this is how life really is, but rendered in the most poetic way possible. In Much Ado, in particular, I love the idea of the soldiers coming home and they are no longer afraid for their lives any more, but love is a scary thing.

Is Much Ado one of the Shakespeare plays you really love?
It is now. There are a couple I love out of hand: Hamlet and Lear. But I fall in love with each one I do.

Can you work with a text like Much Ado and still make your own imprint, relay your own message?
Sure! What is the "much ado" about? The "much ado" is about love. The cross-gender casting puts us in a space where we ask the audience: Is it possible to consider love divorced from gender and divorced from sexuality -- to see people as people?

This is especially cogent given the changes in the gay marriage laws in New York. We're grappling with this as a country right now.
I didn't enter into this as an interrogation of gay union. But I'm sure that will be on people's minds as they watch.

PHOTO: Cynthia Croot by Alicia Anstead