Falling in Love with Shakespeare: 7Q4 Tina Landau

Director Tina Landau is in demand from the from the La Jolla Playhouse to the McCarter in Princeton and Hartford Stage, from the Seattle Rep to New York’s Signature, Playwrights Horizon, and the Public, to name just a few. She’s directed off and on Broadway, too, but home is the Steppenwolf in Chicago. 

Landau studied directing at the American Repertory Theater for Advanced Theater Training at Harvard. When I talked to her for a story about the Institute for a 1992 issue of TheaterWeek, she said she had been able to do her worst work there, to fail and learn from failing, but that’s not the way anyone at the A.R.T. talked about her early work. Robert Brustein simply beamed with fatherly pride anytime her name came up, and the people she worked with most when at the Institute, Richard Riddell and Anne Bogart, described her as a major talent from the get go.

I’ve seen her work mainly in Chicago, and that work is wildly different on each outing, as different as The Berlin Circle is from The Diary of Anne Frank, but consistently exciting.

Landau

Currently, she’s directing Antony and Cleopatra at the Hartford Stage Company, and she loves doing that, too. 

That would have surprised her a few years ago. As she says in the interview that follows, she avoided doing Shakespeare until she did A Midsummer Night’s Dream at the McCarter.

DN: You’ve done a wide range of work–Chuck Mee and Tracy Letts, for instance, Floyd Collins and Bells are Ringing.  How do you select the plays you do?  

TL: I always feel when I start a project that I have to have some sort of necessity, some passion either for the subject matter or something that is being attempted formally. I learned a long time ago if I did what was just a gig, even when I was young and had to find work, somehow I would get sick. It took a toll on my psyche. I could only do things that I felt deep love for and could imagine myself standing before a full audience and justifying my time and their time. My choice reflects my interests and passions and whims at any given moment, what I’m sensing in myself and the world around me, and that’s constantly changing.

DN: What draws you to Antony and Cleopatra?

TL: Michael Wilson [artistic director of Hartford Stage] brought it to me. He wanted a vehicle for Kate Mulgrew. Kate and I had a great working relationship at the Signature, where we did Iphigenia 2.0  I got an email from him. I don’t think I batted a blink of an eye before I wrote back “Yes.”

I had been somewhat Shakespeare adverse for most of my professional life. I didn’t want to direct Shakespeare, I didn’t like seeing Shakespeare. I did some dabbling way back, and I liked reading Shakespeare. I didn’t direct Shakespeare until Midsummer Night’s Dream at the McCarter four or five years ago. When I finished that, all I wanted to do was direct Shakespeare. I next did The Tempest at Steppenwolf.

For me, this play is about a kind of size of living and passion as is incarnate in these two main characters. And I think there are so many ways in which the play is resonant and timeless and has reverberations for today. It feels to me like a paean to extremity and excess of living that is both glorious and at times destructive. What grabbed me at first honestly is that’s something I struggle with.

DN: There are people you work with almost constantly, like Scott Zielinkski, your lighting designer for Antony and Cleopatra. How is the experience different, if it’s different, when you work with people you’ve worked with less often? Is it easier to work with the Steppenwolf Company than, for instance, to do a show in Hartford? Is the process of creating community difficult or does it happen naturally?  

TL: I’m very fortunate because no matter where I work, I’m allowed to bring a number of people with me, and that changes time to time. In this case, I’ve worked with all of the designers before, and three or four of the actors. I do spend a lot of time in rehearsal paying attention to how to forge a community. I’m a big advocate of ensemble, not just in and among the actors but with everyone involved in the production. On the first day of tech, I make sure everyone introduces themselves by name. You’d be surprised at how often that doesn’t happen.

The rehearsal room is open to everyone on staff, except on days when I have closed rehearsals. Ultimately, it really makes a difference in the work and in the joy of what we do. What we do is so hard and has so many obstacles, so the last thing any of us want is an unpleasant working environment.  

DN: Do you use Viewpoints (a method of staging that considers tempo, duration, kinesthetic response, repetition, shape, gesture, architecture, spatial relationship, floor pattern, vocal pitch and timbre), in all your work now, or do you approach each play differently, and specifically, how do you work on Shakespeare?  

TL: I’ve only not used Viewpoints once, as an experiment, and I remember in previews thinking that we really should have done some Viewpoints. I use Viewpoints, but I don’t use Viewpoints to the exclusion, for example of text work and historical research. I am open to the myriad ways one can approach material. At different times in rehearsal, I like to draw from different parts of the self and hope they will form into something cohesive, layered and physical and psychological and intelligent.

 DN:  What can you tell us about Antony and Cleopatra? The concept? The cast? The design?  

TL:  Part of what’s made this show exciting is Kate’s chemistry with John Douglas Thompson, our Antony. He’s been receiving raves recently for his Shakespeare performances, and I just saw him doing Richard III in Lenox. The guy is phenomenal. Kate and John are two people who embody the size and scope and richness of the play. They are a match for each other. They aren’t afraid to live big on stage, and to do it with tremendous truth.

I love Kate Mulgrew. She’s amazing, a fierce stage monster. I felt it on Iphigenia-she played Clytemnestra-and there was something majestic and queenly and animalistic in her performance. I don’t know anyone else I can imagine doing what Kate is doing on Antony and Cleopatra. She doesn’t care how she looks, she’s willing to kick and scream and cry, flirt with anyone on stage, reveal her deepest vulnerability. She’s willing to go to that place. I am amazed at her lack of ego in the work. She wants to try the biggest, boldest choices. Cleopatra is a performer, too. We laugh and we cry, everything goes on in rehearsal.  

Set model

Uncut, this is a four hour play. I keep cutting it and cutting it and it keeps getting bigger and bigger. This play has more scenes than any other Shakespeare play, some only four or eight lines, with cross cutting. I told someone recently, ‘Call me Cecil B. Landau.’ Sometimes it feels like I’m directing a movie or an opera. I’m really in love with the play. Yet, for the design, there are a couple of large gestures, but the main part of the stage is bare. I’m hoping we can achieve both a large scale aesthetic and an intimate one.

There’s a lot of music. At times I’ve joked that we’re doing Antony and Cleopatra: The musical. We’ve added little singing and a good amount of underscoring. I combed the world for music-Italy, Egypt, Iran. A lot of the score is found music that our sound designer, Lindsay Jones, is designing into a cohesive whole.

DN: You’re at work on a new musical, aren’t you?

TL:  Beauty is based on the Sleeping Beauty fairy tale.  I had done a play at La Jolla in 2003 and for the last couple of years, I’ve been developing it as a musical with Michael Korie, who will write the lyrics, and Regina Spektor, who is writing the music. The score for the first act is close to being finished. Stuart Oken and Elephant Eye Theatricals will produce it regionally somewhere before a hopeful New York opening.  

DN: Anything else in the works?

TL: I’m going to be at Steppenwolf, doing Hot L Baltimore. Steppenwolf is my artistic home, and I’m really aware of how over the years I’ve been able to try new things that I wouldn’t have if I didn’t have a home like that.

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Photos courtesy of the Hartford Stage Company.  Production photos of Mulgrew and Thompson by T. Charles Erickson. Scenic design by Blythe R. D. Quinlan, costume design by Anita Yavich, lighting design by Scott Zielinski, original music and sound design by Lindsay Jones.

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