The 24 Hour Play Festival--Aftermath
So you should already have read the last entry, talking about the 24 Hour Play Festival. To sum it up...it was a blast. It stole four years of my life, but it was fun, nonetheless.
Anyway...directing! How the heck do you direct a play, much the less one that's just been written and will be performed in twelve hours?
Well, it's an odd process. For me, since I was the writer, it was a pretty simple deal. I wrote the play knowing where the play was to be performed. I also knew my actors. So when I wrote the play I was staging it in my head at the same time. There was no need for the typical director's task of staring at a script until it made sense. So when it came time to direct "Whee! Gee!" I simply took the images in my head and translated them as best I could to the stage. Since I had good actors and a minimum of set, that allowed us the luxury of focusing on line memorization and fine-tuning the comedy.
All directors have a similar task. They take stories and interpret them for the spaces and mediums in which the stories will be told. They are the ringmasters, guiding the actors, crew, and technical staff to turn words on paper into a vision.
But when is a director a good director? And how easy is it to tell?
Just about anyone can tell you when a play stinks. It can be for any number of reasons...maybe the play was poorly written or the actors weren't up to their parts, or the costumes are totally inappropriate. All these things are noticeable because they jar the audience back into reality. You think, "Why the heck is Romeo wearing a set of Blu-Blockers? Boom! You've been sucked out of Venice and back into the theatre.
The funny thing is, I don't think most people will notice when a director is doing something brilliant. A scene that's poorly lit or blocked will stand out because it's interfering with the telling of the story. But when the lighting is really setting the mood and the actor was directed to take their character in a unique direction, often the director's touch will go unnoticed--because that's the director's job--to use others to tell a story as well as it can be told.
I personally believe that you can always tell a bad director because the bad director is more interested in interjecting their own personality into the work, rather than being true to the story being told.
That or they just have no idea how to direct.
Anyway...directing is hard. Directors have to interpret a story and know enough about the medium they're working in to tell that story well. It's technical and it's creative and it's a blast.
Just another reason to love theatre.