Echoing in many ways Orlando
director Natalya Baldyga’s beautiful and passionate post three days ago,
Paulus begins by telling us that the speech she had been planning radically
changed last Sunday in the wake of the shootings in Orlando. “I make theater,”
she says, “because it is a forum to ask questions. To live inside questions. To
push boundaries with questions. To provoke with questions. “ She tells young
directors, “If the theater you create is banal, it is most likely because you
have not asked a big enough question.”
Paulus’ tenure at the ART, like Rob Orchard, Polly Carl, and
David Dower’s at ArtsEmerson, like Melanie Joseph’s at Foundry Theater, and on
and on, has been signally engaged with how to get the big questions in the
water, to get them to live in the staff and artistic teams, in the audiences,
and those who don’t usually come to theater, those who we in theater are often
talking about. Those of you who know
the Opera House know that that was the OHA founders’ goal as well, in the
post-show conversations, invited rehearsals, and Shakespeare-in-Stonington
reads, and in general the commitment to listening to our community, making work
that responds to this community. I am moved and heartened by the new additions
and directions in which Meg Taintor, the new Producing Artistic Director at the
Opera House, is taking these efforts.
Here are a few of them: Preparation for the summer season
begins with sit-down read-throughs of the season’s plays. You are invited. Next,
Page One conversations are held with each director, to apprehend their vision, their big questions, to—get everybody on
staff on the same page before the rehearsal process begins, to understand how
to market the shows, to understand to whom to reach out, to whom to ask
questions. The whole staff attends, and community is invited. YOU are invited.
To read, to listen, to ask your big
questions.
This week there was a sneak-peek at an Orlando rehearsal. YOU were invited, and will be again. Come! And
if there is any question about how theater slows time down, observing just this
one thing: how in rehearsal a gesture is taken apart, again and again and
again, to make it visible in terms of sight lines—can everybody see this!?—and
visible in terms of what it communicates, to the other actors, to the audience,
about the character—will answer that question. Liz Rimar is sublime in giving
us a turn of the wrist that is at one moment male and in the next female,
whatever that means. Feel how that sets loose something in your gut.
Paulus, in her also Harvard role these days, actually begins
the remark about time slowing down by talking about how college offers this to
young people. Scholarship, at many levels, offers it to us all. Pausing . . .
to think things through, to find out what we mean.
Shout out to Linda Nelson who at this very moment is at the
Americans for the Arts conference and texted me to say: Watch this now! You can
watch Paulus’ speech on Youtube (Diane Paulus, Opening Plenary: Arts and
Engaged Citizenship—but you’ll need to skip to hour two, precisely, past the
welcomes and awards), and I cannot recommend it enough.
