A Conversation with Robert Falls

BY Jonathan Abarbanel

Robert Falls

For the first time in many years, I recently had a long conversation with Robert Falls, whom I’ve known professionally and personally for over three decades, from his earliest months in Chicago. In the day, the Off-Loop Theatre community was much smaller and quite close-knit. Everyone knew everyone, and shared many pitchers of beer and glasses of wine – not to mention other controlled substances – late into many nights. Falls and I worked together (I was then, arguably, the city’s leading dramaturg) at the St. Nicholas Theatre Company, the Midwest Playwrights Lab, Goodman Stage 2 and the Chicago Theater Project, all before Falls became the Goodman Theatre artistic director.

We’re many miles down the road since then. Falls’ fruitful career has taken him to numerous places far beyond the confines of Off-Loop theatre and Chicago. Personally, Falls has settled into high-profile respectability as husband and father of three in Evanston, although he’s never going to be mistaken for Ozzie Nelson or Robert Young.

The artist in Falls, however, really isn’t in a mood to settle into any groove. He’s used the occasion of his 20th anniversary as Goodman artistic director to shake himself up, throwing himself into a professional year as challenging as any he’s ever had, and putting himself physically into fighting trim via a major diet.

Opening the season with a controversial King Lear, Falls has moved almost directly into Frank’s Home, a new play by Richard Nelson currently running in the Owen Theatre (through Dec. 23). After the holidays, he’ll journey to New York to stage the Broadway premiere of Eric Bogosian’s Talk Radio.

Naturally, I had to open our conversation with a controversial question.

JONATHAN ABARBANEL: I was shocked, Bob – shocked – to learn it’s not really Del Close’s skull in your office. What do you have to say about it?

ROBERT FALLS: Did you see the New Yorker piece? I felt the Chicago Tribune should be out there doing hard-core journalism rather than trying to dig up the dirt on Del Close’s skull. I feel a little bit like “Next news item: There is no Easter Bunny.”

JA: What keeps you at the Goodman? With your continuing successes in New York and London, you could make as much money or more on your own, doing what Dan Sullivan has done since leaving Seattle.

RF: A large part of it is my family, a large part of it is I love Chicago and I really want to raise my children in Chicago. It’s been a home for me for 30 years, and I’d like it to continue to be a home for my children. I have no desire to disrupt my life. It’s the greatest life anyone can have, and that extends to my work at the Goodman. I have the greatest job in the world. You know, if there was a moment when I felt the work was deadening or not stimulating, or I wasn’t getting something out of it or I didn’t enjoy it, I probably would be the first to move on and look for other stimulants. But I’ve been fortunate. It’s a great city and a great theatre in a great theatre community and I continue to feel nurtured and surprised and challenged by it.

JA: There was a lot of talk that you wanted to direct television, and that Disney gave you a film deal.

RF: There was a time, maybe about 15 years ago, where I thought I should be learning a new trade to go along with directing theatre. I did spend some time learning television directing and worked a little bit in television, but had no real aptitude for it. I’ve had over the years numerous development deals in the film world, but for a variety of reasons those film opportunities never panned out. It’s very, very hard for anybody to get a film off of the ground. Harold Ramis told me, “Bob, don’t go into film, it’ll break your heart.” Now this from one of the most commercially successful filmmakers of all time. But Harold had a reasonably difficult time making a real labor of love, The Ice Harvest. I realized that in order to pursue film you have to spend really a lot of time working on film. The people who make films put all their energy into it. I didn’t have that energy. My life was in the theatre. If I could have made a film I probably would have; it hasn’t happened yet, maybe it will, maybe it won’t.

JA: You’ve gotten over all that?

RF: I’m not actively pursuing it. I did have the proverbial three-picture deal with Disney, but that requires one to make a movie. I wrote a script with my wife, Kat Moynihan, and Disney paid us rather handsomely for it, but chose not to continue making the film. So, that’s sort of where I am.

JA: What about opera? That’s an area that’s opened for you.

RF: I would love to do more opera. I’ve had in the past three weeks three offers to direct opera. As attractive as it is, I find it hard as part of the balance of my life. One offer was for five weeks in the summer and I’ve committed to my family for a vacation at that time. Another offer was in a lovely city, but I would have had to be there for eight weeks in 2009. I can’t take that time. Another was to mount a production in Europe. Again, opera directors direct a lot of opera. I wouldn’t mind doing another opera or two but I find them hard to fit into a schedule and a life.

JA: There still are productions of Aida, your Broadway show for Disney, running in Tokyo, Seoul and Germany. How much time do you devote to Aida?

RF: Very little at this point. I went out in each case to oversee the production with assistants. This is the first time I haven’t [looked at final casting choices]. In the Asian production I did not, because that’s such a world unto its own, I didn’t really have the time. The German production I was very involved in, and prior to that the Dutch production. I have a whole slew of assistants who work on that.

JA: Susannah at Lyric Opera and The Met, and Aida were your first opera experience and your first big Broadway musical, respectively. Did you learn anything about directing from doing them? And was it technical knowledge, or something about philosophy or theory?

RF: I didn’t learn anything about directing, but I learned a helluva lot about directing a Broadway musical and a helluva lot about directing a major opera. My directing skills or interests or philosophy kind of maintained where they were, but it had more to do with managing time and space and personalities and money and opportunities rather than actually directing. And they were very happy experiences in both cases. I would love to do another opera. I would love to do another Broadway musical, but there hasn’t been anything that I’ve seen or I have found that’s excited me as much as Aida.

JA: Do you have an open door at Disney?

RF: Absolutely, yeah. But Disney more or less has laid out the agenda for itself for the last four or five years, and is still on it. They’re still working on their next couple of productions and I don’t have any place in them.

JA: Bob, you reminded me today that you went to college to study playwriting, and I know from my experience working with you that few directors are as good as you are with playwrights and new works. You don’t really need a dramaturg.

RF: And yet I work with a very good dramaturg, Tom Creamer. I went to college on a Rockefeller Foundation playwriting scholarship, but at the University of Illinois I found myself enjoying the social life of a director more than staring at a blank page…but I have a real understanding and appreciation of playwriting. I’ve tried deliberately to go back and forth between new plays and classical plays. So it’s entirely part of my history to come off of King Lear and go to work on a new play with Richard Nelson.

JA: How many times do you read a play before you decide to direct it?

RF: Once on a new play. I can tell. A classic is different. With classic plays, I have been thinking about them and re-reading them for years. Every once in a while I’m driven to go look at another classic play. I’m driven all the time. I’ll constantly go up to my office and pull out of my bookshelf, let’s say, The Wild Duck. And I’ve read The Wild Duck a number of times, but I’ll read it again and it may resonate a little or not. But there very well could come a time in a year or two or 10 when I go, “Well, I’d really like to do The Wild Duck.” And it comes out of multiple, multiple readings of the play. With a new play I almost always know, I just know, and I read a lot of new plays. But I can tell on the first reading if the play grabs me, and will often accept immediately. I don’t need to read it a second time.

JA: What about preparation once you choose a play? How many more times do you read it? How do you break it down?

RF: Excessively, compulsively and virtually forever. More so with classics. Any classic play I direct, I’ve been thinking a minimum of six months of preparation and usually more like a year. Any classic play. And behind that year there are usually any number of years of thinking intensely about the play. A new play can be often much less, it’s a whole different thing. There are times when I’ve been offered a play, even in a commercial venue, and I’m like, “Yes!” and we start in a month-and-a-half, we start in six weeks, and that’s fine, if the schedule is clear. You just go, and that’s part of the fun, working with the playwright and designers. I don’t profess to require as much creation and interpretation as on a classic. A new play is mostly made in the room; it’s made in the excitement of the room with a playwright and a group of actors. When we did Midwest Playwrights Lab, I loved that work because you had to make decisions fast, you had to rely on your instincts. That was very instructive, and I sort of carry that over when I work on a new play.

JA: When I examine your career, I see a marked preference for plays of ideas or family dramas. You rarely are drawn to romantic plays. You’ve done few boy-meets-girl works.

RF: Aida is a romance, and I respond to that, [but] there are a helluva lot more interesting family dramas and plays of ideas than there are romances. I don’t know, it’s like an old-fashioned genre of sorts. I think you’re right. It’s also no accident that family plays are the greatest American plays ever written, or the greatest plays in the repertoire, period.

JA: Has your idea of what makes a great play changed over 30 years?

RF: I don’t know. I actually don’t know. I’m always surprised at plays. I’ve written screenplays, which to me is like building a house. It’s more like architecture, more like craftsmanship. You build it from the ground up, you build it. A play emerges from a deep place, and can take a number of different forms, different shapes. What makes a play really interesting is how different they all are. I don’t know what makes a great play. I know what moves me, I know what I like. There’s no argument with the classics, but with new plays, I think that most of the new plays I choose to work on are pretty great plays, and I’m always surprised that more people don’t think so.

Falls and I discuss his admiration for the plays of Stephen Tesich, two of which he staged at the Goodman to cool receptions, The Speed of Darkness and On the Open Road. Falls maintains they are important and neglected works in part, perhaps, because they fit a European model of drama more than an American model.

RF: On the Open Road, almost ignored in America, sticks in the repertoire of almost every major theatre in Germany, all through Scandinavia, it’s been produced everywhere in the Eastern Bloc. A wildly popular American play that has found its way into the European repertoire. That gives me satisfaction.

JA: Let’s talk about King Lear, because it strikes me that you took a European approach to it, at least in terms of its physical setting. I found your production eccentric, perverse, shocking, extremely well-realized, memorable and also unlikable in the metaphysical sense vs. the theatrical sense. I was surprised by it, because I figured you would emphasize the familial aspects of Lear and its power as a tale about the getting of wisdom, now that you are a father and middle-aged.

RF: All of those things are true about me, but my great fear is bringing my children up into a world of complete moral and political chaos, that I think we are on the brink of, as a former great empire. So to me the great lesson is the sort of savagery we saw in the former Yugoslavia. I don’t think people are far from that in all sorts of places in the world, and that was a fairly civilized – if religiously complex and ethnically complex – part of the world. I took a very, very, very dark reading of that play which I think comes out of the text. I underlined it out of moral outrage at the world we live in. I wanted it to be clear as cautionary outrage. I wanted it to be a play about rage, and fueled by a violent outrage that I think exists in the world. It felt morally responsible for me to take it that far. To do anything less than that far was chickenshit and unrealistic. And I wanted the production to surprise people, thought it would surprise people.

JA: Bob, I know you were talking about doing King Lear for at least two or three years. Did your concept change?

RF: Yes, it did change. I knew I wanted to work on Lear, I knew I wanted to work on it with a great actor, I imagined Brian Dennehy in the role for some time…it was a mismatch of timing. I felt I had to do King Lear now, driven by my 20th anniversary, and Brian was not in a financial or emotional way that he could go there. I went to Stacy very quickly with Brian’s great enthusiasm and blessing. They’re great friends. Brian came to see the production two or three times for Stacy. Once Stacy jumped in, it became a collaboration with Stacy. I’d never even gotten to the position with Brian of discussing these larger conceptual issues. There are some things in that play, and some images and visions that I’ve been thinking of for as long as 10 or 15 years. I have multiple scripts. I misplace scripts, maybe I’m out of town, it’s like reading glasses. You can always find a Penguin copy of King Lear. I’ll be in a hotel room in Berlin and I’ll be thinking about King Lear. Maybe I saw a production at the Staatsoper or the Berliner Ensemble that made me think about King Lear, and I’ll buy a copy and make notes on it. I’ll mark stuff up, I’ll make cuts. So I literally have at home a shelf of marked up copies of King Lear, and I’ll go through them and find things that I wrote 20 years ago, some of which I’d forgotten about. And the production builds from that.

Falls comments on why he so rarely has directed Shakespeare, although he has directed The Tempest three times. Falls notes his admiration for Barbara Gaines and Mary Zimmerman, whom he believes have an affinity for all of Shakespeare’s work. He concludes with references to his recent Lear and his early, famous modern-dress Hamlet at Wisdom Bridge Theatre.

RF: No Shakespeare is ever hurt by having nude men and women running around, or dressed in suits. I don’t think of myself as a Shakespearian, actually. I have certain Shakespeare plays that I’m extremely passionate about, that I think a lot about, and others I don’t even know. I’d love to do a Measure for Measure sometime; I love Antony and Cleopatra. I like those biggies and complex moral thoughts. I think now that I’ve done Willy Loman and James Tyrone and King Lear, Prospero makes more sense to me.

JA: The world premiere of Frank’s Home, by Richard Nelson, is about Frank Lloyd Wright. What would you like audiences to take away from the production?

RF: Richard is an extraordinary playwright and a seminal figure for 30 years. One of America’s great dramaturgs who also writes plays, the way the Europeans accept that. Richard is an American through and through, American subjects, American history. I think Richard is an underrated American writer and this is, perhaps, his finest play in many ways. It’s a play about the complexities of genius, and the complexities of living your life. Frank Lloyd Wright is a massive American subject. He’s never been tackled in a major play. Frank Lloyd Wright is so epic and so large – he spans 90 years, an entire century – that he’s almost too big a subject. Nelson has written much more of a Chekhovian play with a genius named Frank Lloyd Wright at the center of it. It all takes place within 48 hours in mid-career of Frank Lloyd Wright. He’s 55 and he thinks his career is over, he has nothing. He’s been driven out of Chicago, he’s alienated from his clients, from his children, from his mistress, he’s been through incredible tragedy, he’s getting no work and he has no idea what tomorrow will bring. That’s the crucible he’s going through. It’s a brilliant way to think about Frank Lloyd Wright. A very, very personal play about fathers and children, and a play about art and genius and moral responsibility.

JA: Longer term, what other works do you want to do? Do you have a wish list?

RF: I wish I knew, I don’t have a list. I respond very intuitively to things. I’d very much like to do more Chekhov. I’m interested in the major Chekhov plays, although I think they’re wildly overexposed. We see a Cherry Orchard every three years. I have to say Ivanov and Platonov, some of the early, early work.

JA: Do you feel you still have anything to prove to yourself, or prove to others?

RF: I have something to prove to myself. You know, I don’t feel constrained to do anything without a sense of ambition and challenge, and I think it begins with yourself first and foremost. A good example is Lear. I knew that Lear was going to be tough, I felt Lear would be highly exposed and visible, and I felt it also made demands on me to rise to King Lear. That was the challenge, and I wanted to prove to myself and to other people that there’s a sort of feistiness that I still possess. I haven’t gone gently into that good night; that there’s certainly a feistiness I wanted to regain in my Goodman of challenging myself and the theatre and the audiences with work that I’m passionate about.

JA: Do you think you’ve lost that edge?

RF: Sure. Yes, I think so, yeah. I think I’m a fairly feisty individual in a good way but I wanted to, with King Lear – -there’s no doubt, it’s hard when you’re 50. There’s a great difference between 50 and 20. You’ve got a lot to prove when you’re 20, and most people are a lot skinnier when they’re 20. People get fatter when they’re 50. You drink a lot more when you’re 20; you live a lot wilder a life. I’m glad not to have the wildness of my early life on every level. But – I live a pretty bourgeois life. I wanted to try and get in touch with an energy force that I experienced in my 20s and early 30s with King Lear, where I said I don’t give a fuck, I don’t give a fuck, I’m going to do what I believe in. And that does get a little harder as you get older. You want to please people a little bit more, you want to please subscribers. I wanted to shake that out of myself and it was a good lesson.