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Directing Passion Play
An Interview with Mark Wing-Davey
British actor, director and teacher Mark Wing-Davey first came to prominence in the U.S. with his production of Mad Forest, a fascinating exploration of the Romanian revolution by British playwright Caryl Churchill. His production, which had begun with a group of students at London's Central School of Speech and Drama, earned him an Obie Award when it traveled to New York Theatre Workshop-and led to a directing career that has paired him with some of this country's most prominent playwrights, including Tony Kushner, Anna Deveare-Smith, José Rivera-and of course, Sarah Ruhl.
Prior to establishing himself as a director, Wing-Davey had an impressive list of credits as an actor, including a long association with Joint Stock, a British theatre collective famous for devised work that emerged out of long research-based development processes. In a recent conversation with Goodman Literary Manager Tanya Palmer, Wing-Davey discusses his unique approach to developing new work, and his longstanding interest in Sarah Ruhl's Passion Play.
Tanya Palmer: You have a long history with Passion Play. Can you just tell me a little bit about how that came to be?
Mark Wing-Davey: I was up at the Sundance Theatre Lab, and I was working on the play 36 Views by Naomi Iizuka, which I subsequently did at Berkley Repertory Theatre and The Public Theater in New York. They have these readings [at Sundance], and I went to a reading of this play-the first two parts-and was very struck by it, by the language and its approach, by its particular voice-those things. So I approached Sarah, told her I thought it was really interesting and asked for a copy of the script. At that stage I was running a thing called the Actor's Centre in London, which was a little tiny theater and I thought, why not do a bare-bones production of it? We were doing productions with £50, (about $100) but since we were doing the first two parts, we gave ourselves £100. So I did a very bare-bones production of the play with friends of mine and people who came and worked for nothing. And it was a tiny little tryout in its own right. It was only supposed to happen for a week because that was all the time I had. It ran Wednesday through Saturday, four performances, maybe five. We charged five pounds to get in, if that. But what happened was that the actors all fell in love with the play. They wanted to keep doing it, but I'd already committed to something else for the following week, and three of the actors weren't available. So one of the actors said, 'I'll tell you what. I've got some other friends who'd like to be in this play.' I had to leave, but this actor rehearsed his friends into the play, and I came back at the end of the week and watched it. So it had a rather odd life.
TP: You've worked with a lot of writers, and worked on a lot of new work. What do you think sets Sarah apart? What do you think distinguishes her as a writer, makes her voice unique?
MWD: I suppose for me it's this mix of sexuality and whimsical imagination in her work. I've seen The Clean House, Eurydice and I saw a reading of The Melancholy Play. In all of those plays, there are twists and turns when you think you know where she might be headed. But instead it's constantly surprising. And illuminating.
TP: Why do you think this particular play drew you in?
MWD: Partly because of the English connection, to be honest. But what I particularly liked is that it is one of those "theater" plays. As a director/actor or actor/director I very much like looking backstage at how the theater can make much larger statements about human beings and our relationship to our own kinds of performances.
TP: I want to ask you about your way of working. You were part of the theater company Joint Stock, which was known for creating plays as a collective that derived from research-the playwright Caryl Churchill worked with them a number of times, developing plays like Fen and Cloud Nine. Can you talk a bit about how you bring that way of working to new play?
MWD: Well, with that way of working, there are two strands to it. One is a kind of research-based method, which comes out of Joan Littlewood's Theatre Workshop, a very influential political theater in Britain that produced company devised works like Oh What a Lovely War. Littlewood would get the actors to do little bits of research and bring it back to rehearsal. The reason I do that is because I don't want to be seen as the person who has all the answers, I think it's quite good if the whole cast has information in common about a wide range of subjects. I also ask the actors to interview people and then come back and perform as those people. It's an antidote to what I call "received performance." Why do you become an actor? You become an actor because you fall in love with acting. And how do you fall in love with acting? You fall in love with acting when you see Marlon Brando or Sean Penn or whoever it may be and you think, "I could do that. I could be that person." The danger is, you then begin to imitate that person's acting, instead of discovering your own self as an actor. The virtue of the interview, where someone comes back as someone else, is that it's against that notion of performing. All of these exercises are about doing a bit of chiropracty on one's approach to the work.
Through working on these exercises, the company of actors are knit together by their common experiences, rather than being isolated by themselves as individuals. And that is part of the Joint Stock thing-that you have a shared experience which enables you to do this particular piece of work. It's not magic, it's a craft. Because I've worked extensively as an actor I'm very unsentimental about it. I don't think that it's a mystery at all. It's a challenge, but it isn't something like a priesthood.
TP: When did you start directing? When did you decide to shift from acting to directing?
MWD: I didn't shift consciously. I began acting way back when-my mother's an actress-she's 92 and is still working. So I knew I wanted to act when I was very, very young. My first job was working with the playwrights John Arden and Margaretta D'Arcy before I left for university. But then I seriously began acting when I left university. After about eight years or nine years I was feeling so frustrated with the direction I was getting. Because I was university trained and quite opinionated, I just got so cross. My wife encouraged me to go and teach at Central School of Speech and Drama, which is where she had trained. So I began to work there. It was great, and I did that for years. Then in 1988 I was asked to be artistic director, which I did.
In 1989, I became conscious that the people who were dying in the Romanian revolution were the same age as the students I had in my care. I spoke to the playwright Caryl Churchill who I'd worked with when I was an actor with Joint Stock, and asked her "Look, do you fancy doing a workshop on the Romanian Revolution?" This was literally two weeks after Romanian dictator Ceausescu had been shot. She said no and then an hour later she rang back and said, "Yes, what am I thinking?"
The big thing about Joint Stock was that, when you could, you went "on location" so that you could do first-hand research. For example, when I did The Ragged-Trousered Philanthropist we went down to a seaside town and we were workers for half the time. Anyway, we all set off to Romania and did the work, which I've got lots of tales about, with students in Bucharest and British actors. Caryl then wrote Mad Forest, and it was performed here in England. The performers were students when it was first produced and then we formed a cooperative and continued to play it. We then took the show to Bucharest and then to the Royal Court Theatre for a new production with the same actors. Joe Papp from The Public Theater saw the production and asked me to bring it to New York. But by that stage the students, who had been doing it for nine months, said "We've had it, we don't want to go." Then, unfortunately, before we could get it to the public, Joe Papp died. But Jim Nicola from New York Theater Workshop called me up the next year and asked if I'd like to do it there. The production ended up winning a bunch of prizes and that's what bounced me into a directing career in America. It led to me working with Tony Kushner, doing Angels in America and working with people like Craig Lucas, Naomi Iizuka, playwrights who were interested in an approach to the text which is very, very detailed.
I have a high regard for the American way of working. I like it, I think it's risky and interesting. It has a sort of a thrill and an excitement about the actors' acting. Even the work I've done in Britain or in Australia has sort of bounced from my American experience. I'm really more like an American director with a British accent.
Click here for more information about Passion Play: a cycle in three parts.