Mann worked her way up through the ranks to being what Howard Shore of the American Theatre Wing calls “the tip of the iceberg” of women who now hold prominent positions in American theatre institutions. Mann responds to this assertion that women have anything close to an equal footing with men in the industry with the argument that she and a few other women like Susan Booth, artistic director of Atlanta’s Alliance Theatre “are” the iceberg. In an interview with Ms. Magazine in 1998 Mann called herself “a natural feminist who looks for works that show women not as ‘monoliths, either good or evil,’ but as complex human beings capable of just about anything” (Boyl 74). For many years she had not consciously planned to be a feminist advocate through her work but realized, after it had been pointed out by a colleague, that her choice of plays to write, direct or produce over the years had leaned toward women’s stories as much as stories about marginalized groups in our society such as African Americans, Jews, gays and Latinos.
Mann explained to 1998 conference attendees of the Association for Theatre in Higher Education that “choosing plays and a season is obviously a subjective thing. For me, it’s always a gut thing about what I need to hear about. And it’s also artist-driven” (Erdman 2). Mann is committed to supporting theatre artists who approach her with projects by making a home for them at the McCarter if she senses their passion to investigate a new or classical play is in line with her own sensibility. Her most recent protégé is African American playwright Tarell Alvin McCraney who she plans to foster with the same kind of playwrighting residency that August Wilson had with the Yale Repertory Theatre. Wilson’s last play, Radio Golf premiered at Yale Rep in 2005, but it was the McCarter production in 2007 that made it to Broadway. Mann has connected with other important playwrights over the years, producing premieres and revivals of Edward Albee, Christopher Durang, Beth Henley, Mary Zimmerman, Athol Fugard, Brian Friel, David Rabe, Tom Stoppard and Sam Shepard and Lanford Wilson.
She has been called the mother of documentary theatre, having been doing it since the seventies, long before it became a fashionable form of theatre in the nineties. But the roots for this type of theatre go further back to the 1930’s Depression era, when socio-political drama and agit-prop theatre had their heyday at places like the Federal Theatre Project, and Living Newspaper productions were the newest popular dramas ripped from the headlines. Mann’s pieces were given the moniker “theatre of testimony” by the late South African playwright Barney Simon, because they reminded him of a theatrical tradition in his own country. “From hours and hours of interviews, she distills – but never changes – her characters’ words into theater, a process she likened to a sculptor’s” (Potier). An article in Theatre Topics describes it as weaving “oral history and verbatim interview into often chilling dramatizations of private stories and public events, particularly those dealing with both victims and survivors of violence and oppression” (Erdman).
Her appointment as artistic director of Princeton, New Jersey’s McCarter Theatre in 1990 inspired a mission to build McCarter’s theatre community with more challenging material than the English and Western European revivals that had previously been produced there since the professional company began in 1970. Housed on the campus of Princeton University, the theatre had originally been merely “a place where the “Princeton Men put on their Triangle Club skits twice a year” (Mann interview). Mann endeavored to open up the predominantly older white McCarter audience and attract African American patrons by doing shows like Betsy Brown: A Rhythm and Blues Musical co-written with Ntosake Shange. It was the first work from an African American artist ever to be staged in McCarter’s history. Mann’s bold vision for the McCarter was very specific: “I wanted to have the audience reflect what America was, racially, ethnically, economically, in terms of age, in terms of interest. So we worked hard in different areas of the community” (Erdman 3).
After her first year at McCarter, subscriptions had dropped off and disaster loomed with rumors of the theatre closing, but after four years and a 1994 Tony Award for Outstanding Regional Theatre, subscribership had soared from 6,000 to almost 11,000, an “80 percent increase” (LoBiondo) since Mann had taken the helm. Mann directed a production of Anna Deavere Smith’s Twilight: Los Angeles 1992 that played at the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles and at the McCarter in 1993. The show, based on the aftermath of the Rodney King trial and verdict, was subsequently produced on Broadway with direction by George C. Wolfe. Mann adapted Having our Say (1994) from the biography of Bessie and Sadie Delaney, two century-old sisters who recount their personal experience of the evolution of racial prejudice since the early 1900’s. It moved to Broadway and garnered three Tony Award nominations, toured internationally, and was made into a television movie with a screenplay adaptation written by Mann. Her documentary piece, Greensboro: A Requiem about the 1979 massacre of civil rights protesters by the Ku Klux Klan and Nazi sympathizers opened in 1996.
She directed Anna in the Tropics by Cuban born Nilo Cruz at the McCarter in 2003. It also had a successful Broadway run and won a Pulitzer Prize. Actor Jimmy Smits received rave reviews for his portrayal of a lector in a 1929 Miami cigar factory who reads Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina to the workers and changes their way of looking at life. Mann was praised for analyzing and conveying “both cross cultural politics and class struggle through the pacing of her actors, as they technically master Cruz’s fluid and intoxicating ‘stage tango’” (Ramírez 482).
Although Mann champions plays that have some important social significance, she endeavors to create theatre seasons with a mixture of new plays and classics such as Noel Coward’s Private Lives and Moliere’s The Misanthrope. Mann has commented that she wants her theatre to be a place where “the community comes together to share an event, a forum where significant ideas can be batted around. It’s also a place to laugh together. There has to be a balance” (LoBiondo). Peter Brook had been an early mentor who counseled Mann to always make theatre an event, and she has delivered on that mission ever since. She strives to create works that will get audiences talking to each other, and in several plays such as Having Our Say, she has directed the show specifically to have two intermissions, giving more time to patrons to interact and talk with each other during the breaks. South African playwright Athol Fugard, who considered the McCarter theatre his American theatrical home, has said of Mann, “More than any other American writer of our time, (Mann) has demonstrate the central importance of theatre to the psychic well being and sanity of a society” (Boyle 74).
Mann continually addresses important issues by writing plays such as Still Life (1980) about a Vietnam veteran which won six Obie Awards and Execution of Justice (1986), based on transcripts of the trial of Dan White, who murdered mayor of San Francisco George Moscone, and an openly gay city supervisor, Harvey Milk in 1978. Commissioned by Oskar Eustis, artistic director of the Eureka Theatre Company in San Francisco, the play moved to New York, giving Mann her Broadway debut as playwright and director. In the cast were Mary McDonnel, Stanley Tucci and Wesley Snipes. The play garnered four Drama Desk nominations and won for best lighting design, but closed after only 12 performances.
Mann’s feminist ideals surfaced fairly clearly when she chose to change the part of Prospero to Prospera in The Tempest and cast Blair Brown in the part, but her recent play, Mrs. Packard (2007) perhaps comes closest to dealing with feminist issues head on. The play “illuminates one well-educated and insightful woman’s battle to resist incarceration for daring to disagree” (Siegel). Adapted from the late 19th century writings of Elizabeth Packard, it is the true story of a young wife who was sent to a mental institution because she defied her husband, a self-righteous preacher.
Since the McCarter’s audience was also curiously devoid of students even though it was housed on the Princeton campus, Ms. Mann made a goal of attracting the younger crowd. By 2000, ten years into her tenure, Mann boasted having at least 500 students who were subscribers to the theatre. Her method had been to market the theatre to students who attended rock concerts which also played at the McCarter. Also, if the theatre were doing a play with any sort of historical or literary connection, she would enlist the appropriate university departments to require their students to attend as an adjunct to their education.
As the NEA began giving less money for arts in the schools as a legacy of the 1980’s Reaganomics era, she made it the theatre’s mission to go into the schools with outreach programs. The McCarter began to develop teachers’ study guides for their plays, and these were eventually also shared with adult theatergoers, feeding discussions that were scheduled after certain performances with the playwrights, actors, designers, or guest scholars. As the internet came into use as an important communication tool, the study guides and dramaturgical material became a natural extension of the theatre’s web presence which also provides video previews and interviews. All of this helps to build a young audience that can grow with the company.
A few years ago, Mann was part of a movement of regional theatres to found a National Theatre in lower Manhattan at the projected complex that would replace the former World Trade Center. The plan is to have regional theatres feed the National Theatre in New York with their productions of classics and world premiere plays. Mann commented, “You could start to see the rich theatrical work that’s all over this” (Pogrebin). Americannationaltheatre.org is the website created for the group which announced a planned first production slated for the fall of 2007, but there has yet to be any further news of the group’s plans coming to fruition. Mann just finished restaging Lanford Wilson’s play “Tally’s Folly” this fall and in February she will direct G.B. Shaw’s Mrs. Warren’s Profession.
There has been a certain symmetry in Ms. Mann’s career. When she became “the first woman in the Guthrie’s 17 year history to direct on the mainstage,” (Klein, Cymbeline), she did The Glass Menagerie and later staged it as her first production as artistic director of the McCarter Theatre. Similarly, Mark Lamos staged Cymbeline as his first and last play of his 18 year career as artistic director of the Hartford Stage and then made it his directing debut for the McCarter. He had been the one to advise her to take the job at McCarter when she was succeeding as a freelance playwright and director. She was a single mother, raising a young son at the time and also felt the need to give back to the theatrical community, since she had been so fortunate in having early opportunities to grow and succeed as a playwright and director. Ironically, Mann had been the one to give Mr. Lamos his first directing job when she was the resident director at the Guthrie 2, and he had responded by hiring her to direct plays at the Hartford Stage during his residency there.
Obviously, Lamos had been a different sort of mentor for the young Mann than Guthrie’s artistic director, Michael Langham, who had told her to “Be an actress. Women can’t be directors. No Way” (Klein, Cymbeline). While working on her bachelor’s in English Literature at Harvard, Mann had received similar advice from an “anonymous advisor,” who told her that “she couldn’t possibly have a career as a playwright and theater director. Had she considered children’s theater?” (Potier). But Mann, nevertheless went on to win countless respected awards and nominations for Tonys, Obies, and Drama Desks in her illustrious directing career that has now spanned over thirty years.
Of her style of directing, former McCarter president Peter Ventimiglia has said that she “created the kind of nurturing environment that made the best people in the business want to return. And she didn’t do it by coddling them” (Shumer). He goes on to describe how, in a reharsal an actress had a tantrum and Emily, in no uncertain terms, told her to stop it. After the scene the actress went to Mann and embraced her. She has been known to have the company do 30 minute yoga routines at the beginning of a rehearsal. This may be a result of Mann’s own discipline for staying healthy after having been diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, surviving many years of physical hardship and experimental drug treatments. But she asserts that the yoga helps her actors connect their bodies to their heads and usually has them do formal group vocal warmups as well.
One example of her style of direction and her unique vision was shown in her staging of Strindberg’s Miss Julie in 1993. Rather than the usual interpretation that downplays the character of Jean’s wife, Kristin, Mann’s adaptation fills out the role so that there is a definite complex triangle that provides Miss Julie with higher stakes in this competition for Jean’s attentions. As reviewed, the performances were said to “maneuver with changing hues and psychological complexity” (Klein). Mann also bucked tradition by having Miss Julie’s reaction to the consumation of their seduction be one of satisfaction instead of assuming that she has been raped. Mann concluded that Miss Julie would not remain to to converse with Jean if she had been treated so brutally as has been the accepted interpretation of the play. This again, is an interesting feminist point of view, negating the traditional notion that women can’t possibly enjoy sex as much as men. This was a bold directing choice, but it appeared to resonate truthfully with the actors and audiences. Kim Cattral as Miss Julie was praised by the critics for being true to the character’s attitude of “superiority” and alternating “tortured ambivalence” without “subscribing to vamping” (Klein).
Regarding women’s abilities as directors, Mann has said that she believes woman are naturally equipped as part of their cultural programming as caretakers to be good directors, because they lean toward collaboration—a necessity for good theatre—rather than assuming a dictatorial approach. She reasons, “It’s supposed to be the woman’s job to take care of relationship, to take care of people. That kind of training is very useful for the theatre” (Daniels 95). She also notes that because men as well as women feel more comfortable discussing their feelings with a woman, that this is another plus for women in being able to rehearse plays that depict deep emotional upheavals. Even though there may be a double standard that allows men to lose their temper and be demanding as managers, but punishes women with a bad reputation for the same behavior, Mann believes that women can use this to their advantage. As much as tantrums and loss of self-control are frowned upon for women in roles of authority, this can be seen as a motivation for them to be better at problem solving, finding more creative solutions to every challenge and increasing the chances for a successful production. She states, “I look at the things that are asked of a good director, which is detail in emotion, detail in dress, detail in the décor of a home or a room, materials and things that often men don’t think about twice” (Daniels 95).
In her approach to Garcia Lorca’s The House of Bernarda Alba, Mann played up the theme of it being a female family drama that just happened to also tell the story of the atrocities of Spanish dictator Francisco Franco. She believes that by putting controversial situations into the context of a more palatable domestic story, audiences can be deeply affected and led to meaningful discussion after the play has done is job as a catalyst to provoke thought, debate and social change. She professes a strong interest in “bearing witness to the human soul” and agrees with Lorca’s summation that “theatre is simply poetry which gets up from the page and becomes human; and talks and screams and weaps in despair” (Boyle 74).
For her adaptation of Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard, she used a set design that was abstract, taking it out of the Russian locale, although period costumes were still used. The setting was implied as being in the American South just after the Civil War. And instead of talk of serfs, the casting of African Americans in the servant allowed the play to be a commentary on racism in America. The casting was not true color blind casting, but an underlining of a “racial and social divide” that sparked reviewer Robert Brustein to comment that even though he may have questioned some of Mann’s choices, “at least her interpretation was one that provoked debate. Both in her adaptation and her staging, she had freshly rethought every moment of the play” (33).
With the play Having Our Say, Mann started out with 300 pages of dialogue for the two character play, and even after much cutting during rehearsal to adapt to the slower pace of her actresses’ delivery, the play ended up running two and a half hours. The action of the play consists of the women serving tea and preparing a five course meal as the women recount various anecdotal stories from their long lives. There is a similarity to Mann’s first play, Anulla, in which that character makes chicken soup. Mann returns often to this technique of having her characters performing mundane, everyday activities such as eating, drinking and preparing food as the perfect balancing device while they are talking about controversial issues.
When Ms. Mann spoke at an ATHE conference in 1998, she answered several questions from attendees. One had to do with whether her directing approached changed when she was working on a classical play as opposed to one of her own documentary works. She answered that she believed there was “no difference between the kind of acting required of Still Life and The House of Bernarda Alba . . . Because the naked truth about what was happening to those women on that stage is, I hope, as transparently truthful and naked as what happened with Still Life” (Erdman 11).
In terms of a specific way of working in rehearsal, Mann explained that she didn’t think she could codify her directing process. “I don’t actually have a way of articulating the methodology.” She mentioned that when she had heard Ann Bogart speak earlier that day, she had concurred with Ann’s comments, saying, “when you don’t have an ideology, when you hit a wall, it’s hard to find the door. You have to find out what interests you. That’s not easy. Now, when I’ve written it, I usually know already. Because as I’ve told you, I’ve usually been resisting, resisting, resisting, and I find out I have to do it . . . So, when I’m picking up someone else’s play, I also need to be obsessed by it to do it well” (Erdman 11).
Mann goes on to discuss how her best work comes from the desire to make it have an impact on one person. For instance, she recalled that Still Life was done to prove something to her father, and Annulla was done to show love for her mother and to honor her family’s sacrifice. She declined to give any further examples, because she believes that keeping the knowledge of a personal secret about her work is what makes it powerful for her. While she may avoid sharing her secrets with the public, she often reveals them or the essence of them to actors, designers or composers as she collaborates with them on a project.
She is very serious about doing as much advance preparation as possible for any work she approaches. She shares that she finds “a way to make it vivid for them through my self knowledge of the work, then every single element stems from that. You know how to go into the room every day. You know how to make the choices you need to make when you’re onstage with lights, final visuals, final questions, from beginning to end” (Erdman 11).
Mann also believes in the theatre being a place where actors’ families can, and should be accommodated. She shared an anecdote about her experience working with Mark Lamos, who brought her to his theatre to direct a play when she was a young mother with a baby. He asked her where she wanted to put the crib and arranged for a baby-sitter. She has adopted that same spirit of inclusion of family in her own theatre.
She also extends that philosophy of trying to fully support a creative team by making sure the theatre’s facilities are up to par, saying that she “wanted a place where designers felt they were truly served, where we have the greatest shops anywhere . . . our costume shop, our prop shop. I wanted to make sure that when the lighting designers came, it was a joy to work in our theatre. That they could build their visions” (Erdman 13).
Beyond the fact that keeping a group of actors employed for an entire ten month season is cost prohibitive, Mann prefers not to have an acting company because she wants the casting to follow the plays that playwrights or directors bring to the theatre rather than being constrained by choosing plays for specific actors. She holds auditions in New York and admits to putting actors through their paces, as she tries to assess if they are open enough to respond to her direction and willing to take the emotional risks that are necessary in the type of plays she produces.
When she does new plays, Mann will spend a good amount of time with the actors doing table work, especially if the writer is available to be there and answer questions. For other types of plays, Mann finds that intellectualizing too much about the play can be a detriment. She will get the actors up and moving immediately in such cases. When rehearsing for The Tempest, she recalls doing a four-day workshop but says that they never sat down and did a formal reading of the play. Her advice to young directors would be to “know exactly how you want to stage it and be willing to throw it out” (Fliotsos 174). Mann avoids telling actors where to move onstage and believes strongly in the act of collaboration with them rather than dictating what she wants them to do.
While in production for Execution of Justice, Mann allowed writer Susan Letzler Cole to observe several rehearsals. The author who surveyed a handful of other directors for the book as well, likened Mann’s process to Maria Irene Fornes and Elinor Renfield who made it a point in their rehearsals to raise, without answering, certain questions that would lead the actors in the right direction. Mann had cast 23 actors to play 44 roles in the production. For the most part, the script was not rewritten or reworked during the rehearsal process for this particular show as is often the case with new works. For actors who complained that certain lines were difficult, Mann would explain that she would not alter lines because they were transcripts of the actual trial and she felt it was better to allow the actors and audience to work a little bit rather than having the documentary aspect be compromised. Later in another rehearsal, however, the observing writer noted that in some places, Mann did alter lines in the performance scripts, while retaining the original transcript versions in the published version of the play.
Mann used multimedia in her production to create a: “distracting array of simultaneous images competing for attention: the live actors performing communal actions; the over-familiar, seductive images of the faces of the actors on closed circuit television as they perform; the footage of actual events in San Francisco” (Letzler-Cole 60). The writer describes Mann as being an intense observer of every nuance of the actor’s performances, often mirroring their emotional journeys in her own facial expressions or silently mouthing their words as they recite. Mann reportedly gives group notes and then individual notes at the end of rehearsals and tries to always give some sort of positive feedback. For certain types of notes such as volume levels, Mann had shared with Letzler-Cole that she can’t assess that until she gets into the actual performance space. During technical rehearsals in the space, Mann appeared to juggle all of the elements of lights and sound, etc. always with collaboration in mind, as when she was seen remarking to the lighting designer that she had adjusted an actor to take care of a problem he had been having.
Not having been kept up with the theatre scene for many years, I had missed out on the blossoming of Mann’s career and only discovered her while doing research on Molière last year. I found some interesting dramaturgical material on the McCarter website about their 2007 production of Tartuffe. It’s interesting that the show’s director, Daniel Fish, used a similar technique of having closed circuit television cameras hooked to huge projection screens on stage, creating a modern multimedia look to the show by zeroing in on the actors in close up shots for certain moments in this period comedy just as Mann had done for her docu-drama, Execution of Justice over twenty years ago.
Mann has certainly been a forerunner of style when it comes to both playwriting and directing and is sure to be a historic figure among the men and women who built up the regional or resident theatres across the nation to be a fragmentary network struggling perhaps toward a unified national theatre scene, if not a formal institution, which is concerned with identifying and creating works for the theatre that are as entertaining as they are socially redeeming and artistically brilliant.
I like the fact that when others in the business are complaining about gloom and doom, the death of theatre, etc., Mann refuses to be sucked into a fatalistic attitude. By the way she addresses colleagues in various interviews and forums, she seems to always find a way to bring the discussion back to what kind of work she would like to pursue, rather than what can’t be done because of economic downturns or political climates.
I like the fact that she is outspoken when it comes to the fact that women still do not have an equal share of power in today’s theatrical marketplace, even though more and more women are graduating from university programs every year. Her approach to classical works, with an eye toward feminist deconstruction, provides an important role model for others to follow in re-thinking the social paradigms that have led both to male domination of the theatre and to theatre being used to perpetuate male domination in society.
I also admire the fact that she wants to make theatre a place where the diverse cultural background that is the foundation for this still-young and emerging country can be explored and harvested for a wealth of creative expression from all kinds of voices telling their stories. She seems to be an artist who not only brings intelligence and a high level of artistic aspiration to bear on everything she is involved with, but a person who provides as much inspiration to other theatre artists as she has received herself from a previous generation of great men and women of the theatre.
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