BY LUCIA MAURO
“I
think the playwright is the slave to the Art. So the playwright knocks
out his or her ego to create universal, long-lasting Art. Then the director
needs to be a slave to the playwright. Everything you do as a director
needs to come from what the playwright wants. The actors and designers
are then slaves to the director. I demand of actors a complete mental
and physical commitment to the role. And it always goes back to the playwright.”—Sean
Graney, Director/Playwright
How does one glimpse into the mysterious mind of Sean Graney, beyond the
distinctly arresting and empathetic productions he’s directed for
The Hypocrites? Talk with him about his craft over coffee—and watch
him doodle. The visionary director manages to avoid self-congratulatory
auteurism.
There’s a randomness and detail to his scribbles—boxes within
boxes surrounded by odd calligraphy and razor-edged letters. He can be
exacting and spontaneous. All the while, Graney discusses the humane and
empowering logic of absurdism particularly apropos as he gears up to direct
Samuel Beckett’s Happy Days for The Hypocrites at Stage Left Theatre
(May 31-July 6).
“I just love this play, and I love Beckett so much,” Graney,
30, quietly effuses. “Human suffering dealt with a comedic eye struck
a chord with me.”
He also was attracted to the depth of experience Hypocrites company member
Donna McGough—whom he says is “so emotionally available as an
actor”—brings to the role of protagonist Winnie, an idealist
slowly consumed by a mound of earth.
“You need to bring that level of experience to Beckett,” Graney
continues. “I was in college when I 'acted’ in a production
of Krapp’s Last Tape. It was funny, wrenching, terrible. And it was
ridiculous. When you’re 21, you don’t know what’s going
on. It was odd, as the character looking back at his life, to not have
a younger self to judge.”
The “mathematically inclined” director is approaching Happy
Days from a profound emotional base—one that is very real and one
that painstakingly charts in numbers and degrees how much happiness is
covering up the sadness. Tragedy essentially joins hands with a vaudevillian-style
of humor.
“It’s hard when you have a play about misery, and the actors
don’t have a camaraderie with the audience,” Graney asserts.
“It becomes an actor saying your life is miserable, and it’s
condescending. As a performer you are part of the audience, part of humanity;
you’re saying all our lives are miserable—and there’s a
greater truth and compassion in that.”
Beckett—and his absurdist brethren, most notably Eugene Ionesco—speak
to Graney in art and life: “I really believe, philosophically, the
existentialism of Beckett’s writing. We are all gonna die. We find
meaning where we have to find meaning. All we do is grab onto life, and
it has meaning to us. Whatever we latch on to is who we are.”
Graney first discovered theatre in his hometown of Saugus, Massachusetts.
He grew up in a blue-collar family and enjoyed drawing pictures, an interest
that has filtered into his theatre work on many levels, from his set designs
to unobtrusively sketching out the visuals of a script on a more metaphoric
level. He’s attracted to the notion of giving shape and life to the
“blank canvas” of a theatre space. During his junior year at
Saugus High School, he got involved with summer theatre and quickly started
a theatre club, where they did “bad musicals.”
“It gave me a sense of belonging,” shares Graney with a semi-wry
grin. “All the misfits did plays, and I was one of the head misfits.”
He went on to receive a BFA in theatre and writing from Emerson College
in Boston. While at Emerson—a school that stressed hands-on experience
in the arts and media—Graney decided “to put all my eggs in
the basket of absurdism.” He pursued his own personal studies of
the absurdists and quickly veered away from “slice of life”
theatre. Up until his third year, he had been pursuing acting. But, admitting
his problem with authority, he found it tough to deal with directors—and,
not surprisingly, later became one himself. He also concentrated on playwriting
and won the Rod Parker Playwriting Award during his senior year at Emerson.
Graney soon found himself penning “bad Ionesco knock-offs” and
trying to get them produced in Boston—an existentialist struggle
in and of itself. In 1995, he moved to Chicago to be a playwright. When
he wasn’t working at Starbucks, Graney was holed up in his apartment
and leading the life of a tortured writer—a lifestyle he began to
reject. So he landed a job as a house manager at Chicago Shakespeare Theater
(then Shakespeare Repertory) and got a first-hand understanding of how
a theatre company is organized.
By 1997, he started his own troupe, The Hypocrites, a respected, absurdist-rooted
company where he has been able to bridge the gap between visible theatrical
contrivance and rich emotional truth. Inaugural productions, like Ionesco’s
The Bald Soprano and Georg Buchner’s Woyzeck, were minimally staged
at the now-closed Café Voltaire. His vision continued to take intriguing
shape with itinerant Hypocrites productions: Edmond, The Fire Bugs, Marat/Sade,
The Cherry Orchard, Arcadia, Blood Wedding, Rhinoceros, Machinal, and
more classic yet rarely produced works.
Graney is one of the few directors capable of putting a personal stamp
on his stagings while remaining fanatically devoted to the playwright’s
original purpose and the hierarchy of theatrical responsibilities: “I
think the playwright is the slave to the Art. So the playwright knocks
out his or her ego to create universal, long-lasting Art. Then the director
needs to be a slave to the playwright. Everything you do as a director
needs to come from what the playwright wants. The actors and designers
are then slaves to the director. I demand of actors a complete mental
and physical commitment to the role. And it always goes back to the playwright.”
Following the basic tenets of absurdism, Graney is not attracted to works
with a specific philosophical viewpoint. And he does not approve of how
absurdism has evolved into “just wacky—like Christopher Durang—which
I loathe.”
“I like plays that don’t know the answers themselves,”
he says. “I like plays that ask questions: What is the meaning of
life? How do I live? How should man live? Man in conflict with himself
is most interesting to me.”
Graney makes it a point to constantly hone his craft and delve deeper
into the possibilities of theatre. An important turning point occurred
during his production of Blood Wedding. He notes how his stagings were
often criticized for being emotionally bereft.
“And I thought that was my bag,” continues the director. “I
attributed most of the problems of theatre to emotional theatre—people
pretending they’re sad or angry on stage. That’s what I was
calling emotional theatre. I had thought the actors were being dishonest
with me.
“But, with Blood Wedding, the play is so heightened emotionally.
The people are just speaking this beautiful, bizarre poetry on a heightened
level. I kept explaining to the actors how deep I wanted them to go, and
they just weren’t going far enough for me. I finally said I’m
not explaining why—I would just give them more emotions and say,
'You just have to be the saddest you can possibly be.’ I constantly
pushed them.”
Through this process, Graney realized he had swung from an emotionally
bereft sensibility to plunging full force into the emotions but found
them to be the same thing: “I discovered that I’m not fighting
for the emotionally bereft or the emotionally deep. I’ve just been
fighting for honesty. I don’t think actors put on masks of characters.
I think characters are extensions of actors. It all has to come from your
person. If theatre is all fallacy, pretend and illusion, then why should
we listen or believe in it or care?”
To bring that honesty of the performance out, Graney believes you have
to push the play into a chaotic realm it’s never been in before because
“that’s where your true self comes out; you don’t have
a mask for those situations.”
In The Hypocrites’ most recent production of Machinal, he more clearly
linked both ends of the emotional pendulum: “I tried to make the
world cold and distant, and the characters emotionally charged. I asked,
'If the world is like this, what happens to the sensitive person?’
But I’m not saying one is right or wrong; I’m not making any
judgments.”
He is particularly anxious to direct Balm in Gilead, which is The Hypocrites’
season opener this fall. “I’m doing it,” says Graney, “because
it’s all about the chaos of the environment—people leading their
desperate lives. Plus Lanford Wilson writes with a theatricality that
often gets ignored. At one point, the actors turn the set around.”
Then he laughs almost diabolically: “I’m excited about orchestrating
34 people. It’s maddening, and I love it!”
Graney also has been gripped by playwriting again. His latest work has
been featured in Collaboraction’s “Sketchbook” and Estrogen
Fest, and his plays are receiving staged readings at Chicago Dramatists.
Heavy-hitting topics include obsession, the death of innocence and the
death of a relationship. His psychologically unsettling drama, The 4th
Graders Present an Unnamed Love-Suicide, is receiving its world premiere
at the Side Studio in Rogers Park through May 31.
He plans to continue to grow The Hypocrites and says he would like the
company to have its own space within five years, while dividing his time
between directing, writing and set design.
The fundamental appeal of theatre for Graney is that “it’s literally
an artist talking to the audience. It seems so pure; it doesn’t need
to be filtered through a medium.”
Happy Days directed by Sean Graney opens May 31 at Stage Left Theatre.
For more information, call 312/409-5578 or visit www.the-hypocrites.com.