November 13, 2012: Reflections on Pericles

I have just finished directing Pericles at my alma mater, The College of Idaho.  We are entering our second and final week of performance, and although I’m holding a pickup rehearsal tomorrow evening, I am aware that my work on this production is, for all intents and purposes, complete.

In the depths of the rehearsal process (as I worked 70-hour weeks and sometimes found myself forgetting what time of day it was), I imagined that I would feel relieved, at this point, to have a lighter work load and my evenings free again.  Instead, I find myself missing the onslaught of questions, challenges, and inspiration I faced working/playing/exploring with my cast and crew every night.  I miss the electricity of the collaborative environment.  I guess that means I’m doing something right.

I hesitate to explore this process in too much detail, publicly.  Dare I admit that my only previous directing experience was in a class I took my sophomore year of college?  That although I did my best to analyze the script, develop my “concept,” and clarify my ideas about what I wanted for the show before casting it, I’m certain I fell short?  I fell on my face 1,000 times since the beginning of June when I started working on this project, and especially over the last 7 weeks.

And yet… I’m so proud of the way the show turned out, and of everyone involved in it.  We’ve come together to tell an engaging story in an authentic way, and we’ve grown in the process.  And the show has been well-received so far.  We were adjudicated on Saturday night, and the respondent described my directing as “delicate,” and the acting, overall, as “natural and genuine.”  He said the play evoked in him a feeling of Eastern mysticism (which, in case you’re wondering, is in line with the concept of the production).  After the opening night performance, a student I’d never met was gushing about how she never knew Shakespeare could be so entertaining, and how she wished she had auditioned for the play.  The set is beautiful, and the lights, costumes, and sound all help to define the world of the play and tell the story.  What more could I ask for?

In the last 7 weeks, a lot of different people asked me a lot of different questions, most of which I didn’t know the answer to.  What I learned is that I didn’t have to pretend to know things I didn’t know.  There is a degree of freedom in admitting I don’t know all the answers, and in supposing that the process has something to do with mutual exploration around a theme or set of guideposts.  Perhaps the greatest and most humbling thing I discovered through this process is that a substantial part of my job, as director, was to give my fellow creative artists the space and support to explore their own creativity, as I attempted to provide a lens through which to focus everyone’s ideas. 

Next time I direct a play, I’ll be a little more knowledgeable, a little more experienced.  I’ll prepare different materials.  I’ll ask different questions.  It’s a process, and I’m intrigued about where it goes.