INTERVIEW WITH DIRECTOR WILL DAVIS


Education Dramaturg Ted Sod spoke with Director Will Davis about his work on Bobbie Clearly.


Ted Sod: I wanted to start with some biographical information. Where were you born and educated? Why did you decide to become a director for the theatre?


Will Davis: I was raised in Santa Cruz, California, near San Francisco. I went to college in Chicago at DePaul University, and I went to graduate school at the University of Texas in Austin. I’m a director and a choreographer. I came to the theatre through dance. I studied ballet when I was a child, but when it became clear I wasn’t quite ballerina material, I started to have important experiences with live performance in the theatre. Those experiences set me up for my artistic life pursuits, which I call “handmade spectacle” or “rough magic.” Collaborating on handmade spectacles with other people and creating work that is actor- operated and -generated transports you. That’s something I value and spend a lot of time tinkering with. When we make theatre, we present a very detailed fiction to an audience. We say, “Please believe this is a hotel room or my kitchen or whatever.” There’s something about that fiction that I find very moving. It feels like such a gift. It’s so human.


TS: How do you begin your process with a new play?


WD: I use the same set of skills one uses to analyze a script to analyze what I refer to as “the physical score of a play.” I build a physical score that’s based on a few basic ingredients, and then I put them in dialogue with the spoken word. Let’s say there’s a pile of corn on the stage. I want the audience to see that corn transformed over the course of this play. When they leave, the corn should be totally different. Investigating the physical score of the play has a deep dramaturgical connection, and it has become a big part of my work. I also try to predict what is going to be the hardest part of any show I direct. And when I identify it, that’s what I start with.


TS: Have you identified the hardest part of Bobbie Clearly?


WD: No. I ask myself this question because it makes me feel like a weather vane. I must locate myself emotionally in relationship to this play.


TS: How did you come to direct Bobbie Clearly, and how are you collaborating with the playwright, Alex Lubischer?


WD: Alex and I didn’t know each other before this project. It’s always exciting to make new friends. I have had a lovely relationship with Jill Rafson, Roundabout’s Director of New Play Development, for a few years now. I directed a reading of another play as a part of the Underground Reading Series last year. When Bobbie Clearly was chosen for the 2017-18 season, I believe Jill connected me with Alex because the show offers so many possibilities to think expansively and theatrically about the world.


TS: What do you think Bobbie Clearly is about?


WD: It’s about how a human being metabolizes trauma and how trauma becomes part of your DNA and animates your life. In Alex’s play, we’re watching a group of people traverse a huge expanse of their lives together. We’re watching them constellate themselves. We


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Will Davis


watch them imagine and reimagine their identities. I feel Alex’s play is asking big, Our Town-esque existential questions around being, community, and the meaning of carrying on. And all this is being delivered with an idiosyncratic, almost Waiting for Guffman humor. Alex has said, “This isn’t a monologue play and it isn’t a docudrama.” When you look at the text, you think it might be these things. Alex’s play wants an abstract gesture—I believe that is what he intended. On the first page, before anyone starts talking, the play describes the sky as being hung with corn. That image tells me something wonderful about this world. The playwright is presenting this as a gesture of being in a psychological space. His characters are struggling consciously and unconsciously with being trapped.


TS: Does the play have personal resonance for you?


WD: Well, I am not from the Midwest. I am not from a small town, and I am not from a farming community. I don’t have personal resonance in that way. But I am absolutely drawn to all these characters. What makes this play so funny is that each character is trying to create a life they can believe in out of imperfect materials. That’s a universal thing. There’s something about that that I find very touching. That’s what we’re all up to. Often, when we move through our lives, we see what’s being presented or projected from the other person. But because of the structure of this play, we get to see these vulnerable characters who are trying to arrange their faces or clothes or relationships to look good for the camera. This is one of the universal themes of the play, and the humanity of that destroys me.


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