“WHEN WE SIT DOWN AND TALK ABOUT POSSIBLE SHOWS, WE JUST TALK ABOUT PLAYS AND MUSICALS THAT WOULD BE EXCITING SHOWS FOR US TO DO. ON THE TWENTIETH CENTURY WAS ALWAYS SOMETHING I WANTED TO DO...”
something dark and deep and all of that. That’s very different from how it is today. The men in show business like Oscar created people like Lily Garland. They changed their names, they gave them images, they gave them back stories, they gave them boyfriends, they gave them girlfriends. They controlled all that.
TS: What were you looking for when casting this show?
SE: Casting, to me, is always the same. It's a very important part of a director's job. I pick people that I sense I'd like to be in a room with and will enjoy the rehearsal process with, because that’s the best part. A lot of these people I've worked with, I've known for a while. I get to pull those people back into a room to play with. Some of them, I don't know. I've never worked with Mary Louise Wilson yet, but I've been a huge admirer and fan for a long time. This is an opportunity to say, “Great. I'd like to work with her!” I think part of casting this show is finding actors who are all a little off-center, you know?
TS: You need incredible singers. SE: That score is pretty remarkable. You’ve got to really fill that space.
TS: Will you talk to us about how you've been working with your set designer? David Rockwell is someone you've worked with many times.
SE: The one thing you have to start with is that it takes place on a train, and the train has to leave at some point. We went back and started research on the actual train itself. We started that way. How do you move that train? You knew you had to get rid of the train several times because of flashbacks. The authors were so smart to do the flashbacks. It allows us to get off the train. When you get off the train, you better have something big visually and emotionally. So many of the meetings were about just the mechanics of where the train lives, where are you going to put the train, how are you going to do all that? It took us a long time to figure those logistics out. Thank God I am working with David.
TS: You've gotten great reviews this season for your direction of a comedy, You Can't Take It With You, and a drama, The Elephant Man. How did you pace yourself?
SE: Honestly, you never know when things are going to line up. I certainly didn't expect it to line up this way. I was going to do a film that fell through in the summer. All of a sudden, I was available. Out of the blue, I got a call about You Can't Take It With You. That was very, very fast, but it fit into the schedule. The timing actually worked well because The Elephant Man's dates got changed. We were supposed to do The Elephant Man last season in the fall. It got moved because of scheduling problems with Bradley Cooper’s filming schedule. I think the hardest one was actually You Can't Take It With You because I was starting from scratch with no set, no nothing. The Elephant Man I did in Williamstown, so I had a sense of that even though we changed a lot. On the Twentieth Century, we had also been working on for a long time—so we had really just jumped ahead to design the set. It just all worked out because the starting dates spread out in a way that was manageable. You just have to stay on top of it.
TS: When I talked to Kristin, she said, “You know, playing a part like Lily, you have to live like a nun.” Did you have to live like a monk?
SE: No, because I was not allowed to. You can't live like a monk if you have two five-year-old twins. That ain't happening. Just the opposite actually.
TS: What's coming up for you after this? Will the film come back?
SE: Who knows? Film is always—it floats in and out. After this, I'm going out to San Diego to the Old Globe to do my first Shakespeare. I was asked, and I've never done a Shakespeare.
TS: Which one? SE: The Comedy of Errors.
TS: Perfect. You’ve already done The Boys from Syracuse.
SE: Well, it’s a bit different from the musical. Barry Edelstein, the Artistic Director at the Old Globe, gave me a list of shows that they have and haven’t done recently, and I was looking at a drama. Again, with most of the Shakespearean dramas, you need to know who the leading actor is. Barry said to me, “You know what? If you want to do a comedy, The Comedy of Errors is the shortest play Shakespeare wrote.” I said, “Then I'll do that. If I'm going to do my first Shakespeare, I'll do a short one and see if I can do it.”
TS: It's also one of his earliest plays. And you got the two sets of twins to cast.
SE: I know about twins.•
ON THE TWENTIETH CENTURY UPSTAGE GUIDE
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