“My criteria are not terribly high-falutin': I read the play; I meet the author; and at some level I ask myself, 'Will it be exhilarating to go into this room everyday?'”

For a director, choosing a script is such an important artistic choice. What made you decide to direct McReele and The Paris Letter back to back?

I like to think of myself as a polymath. I like to change. I don't stay with one kind of world. It's thrilling to me last year that I was able to do a play like Frozen on Broadway while I was directing Engaged by W.S. Gilbert, off Broadway. One of the great pleasures of working in the theatre is that you're traveling to very different latitudes and longitudes all the time. I am a hankerer after variety.

My criteria are not terribly high-falutin': I read the play; I meet the author; and at some level I ask myself, “Will it be exhilarating to go into this room everyday?” If the answer is yes, I try to do it. In Jon Robin Baitz's case, there are other considerations. Robbie sent me the script. I've worked with him before, once on a production of The Film Society at the McCarter Theatre in Princeton, New Jersey. In addition to all this, The Paris Letter feels almost like a psychological thriller. The unwinding over time of a secret history, the un-spooling of information, the ambiguity of motive —all of these are fit material for Alfred Hitchcock, who is really my favorite director. All those things I think can be stirring, exciting and a little scary for an audience.

A political play like McReele, when put provocatively and entertainingly before an audience, becomes an envelope for anxieties and outrages. It becomes a sieve for the observations about the confusions I feel about the political life of this country —the fact, for instance, that the labels of conservative and liberal seem preposterously empty of meaning, at this point, and the fact that the entertainment value of the politician is more important than the content of their politics. Nobody else has sent me a play that tackles these subjects, in my opinion, in as sharp and smart a way as McReele.

Stephen Belber

Do you remember the first time you spoke to Stephen Belber about McReele?

I remember it very well. We had breakfast and I told him as long as I didn't say anything in our first meeting that didn't repel him, I'd like to do this. It was his call. One thing about McReele that is extremely valuable to understand: for a completely pluralistic and polyglot society, I don't believe our theatre puts black people and white people and Asian people in dialogue with each other onstage often enough. Most plays are a pretty ghettoized phenomenon and, therefore, are out of date. In McReele, there's a confrontation, a relationship —almost a romance— between Rick, a white liberal disaffected journalist, and Darius, a black former death-row inmate, that's wonderfully chosen and apt.

It's almost a sociological experience for audience members to dream of what it would be like to have a recently released one-time convicted murderer in their kitchens. Again and again in the play there are questions that are handled very subtly and sometimes very comically about cultural adjustments that people make. In McReele, there's a scene early in the second act, where Rick, who becomes the campaign manager, is coaching Darius for an appearance on television and says, “You have to keep this consistently senatorial.” This, of course, is a euphemism: You can't be this black and be effective as a political candidate. I like that scene in the play very much; it instantly struck me as unique. I don't see enough written about, to use a very old-fashioned term, the melting pot of American society.

After going through rehearsals and performances has your view of McReele changed from that first conversation?

Yes, it definitely has. I'll tell you why, and it's been very good news, this change in my perception. When I first sat down with Stephen I talked much more about the ideas and issues in the play. The experience of rehearsing it drew me much more to where my work is better focused, which is on the visceral and emotional life of the play —the one-on-one human dramas. Stephen's initial work was very focused on the policy debates. Over time, working on the show, politics has become personal. I had underestimated the volatile emotional life of the play.

The “romance” between Rick and Darius became one of the organizing principles in our thinking about casting and in rehearsal. It was something that could be positively exploited. Michael O'Keefe [who plays Rick] and Anthony Mackie [who plays Darius] have truly explored their instincts about these two guys who require each other but perhaps don't entirely trust each other. Their questions, their performances, have made that “romance” an event in the play that probably trumps the larger discussions about the death penalty, abortion and foreign policy. What the play boils down to is: Do you trust this person? That ultimately has something to do with human alchemy—a kind of animal magic—more than it does with the question of do I agree with this or that political stance.

Jon Robin Baitz

You're now in pre-production for The Paris Letter, so it's probably too early to ask if your view of that play has changed.

If one's view isn't changing almost every time one encounters a play—if it doesn't stay fluid sometimes on the big underground river of “Gee, I didn't even notice this the first time” —it's probably a bad sign. When people ask me about the job that I do, I definitely see the director as being a member of the audience who gets to talk back. I get to spend all this time with this play; I get to re-encounter it and re-read it. Hopefully I can fill it up with enough possibility so that over the three acts of The Paris Letter an audience can be tempted to shift its perspective about its characters a number of times.

I had heard about The Paris Letter for a couple of years. It had been one of the famous un-produced plays —in New York City anyway— and I'm thrilled it wound up in my lap. Of course, Robbie has the advantage of having had a production of The Paris Letter out at the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles. I had the good fortune to see the show this past winter, and that has given Robbie and me something to talk about as we prepare the Roundabout production. The design team for the Roundabout production will be entirely different. I'm now in the process, with John Lee Beatty, of designing the play, which is very tricky. In terms of casting, Ron Rifkin, for whom the play was written, will play Sandy.

In an interview, you made a remark about the responsibility of a director, which I found provocative. You said, “It isn't good enough to deliver to the audience the message” such as “greed is bad.” Your job is “to give an audience an experience of a complex human system.” Plays like The Paris Letter and McReele live and die on a director's ability to manifest this human complexity.

In The Paris Letter, I find that the human system wonderfully, and in my opinion, accurately, has to do with the ravages of time. This play takes place over 40 years or so, and what is challenging and exhilarating is how a company of actors and I can manifest time's havoc over the course of the production. I'm speaking of the accommodations the play's characters make over time, the departures from certainties that they have in their 20s, the personal arrangements they create in their 50s and 60s. I'm also talking about the question of identity, which seems to be the zeitgeist of The Paris Letter, McReele and even a play like Doubt. It's the great theme in all these plays.

The ravages of time, identity, trust—how you do you begin your research or exploration for such huge subjects?

On my table in my apartment are stacks of books about New York's architectural history, in particular that massive Robert A. M. Stern book, New York 1960s [co-authored with Thomas Mellins and David Fishman, and subtitled “Architecture and Urbanism Between the Second World War and the Bicentennial”] about what this city has looked like over the years. I grew up in New York City, and The Paris Letter made me think so much about how the city devours itself, consumes itself, erases itself and reinvents itself. So do all the characters in the play, and so do all of us. But the time device of the play actually furnishes us with a microscope to watch how that transformation happens to people.

The stage is a very old device that gives us a chance to perceive things that we don't notice in the real world. Change happens while we're not paying attention. We don't have the magnification of the stage. Things that seemed terribly important to me when I was 25 have receded a bit. We worried when we were 25 much more about what other people thought of us; much of our behavior was tailored to please, impress or cultivate cool—in other words, to perform. One of the pleasures of hurtling toward the grave is the shedding all of that worry.

“The stage is a very old device that gives us a chance to perceive things that we don’t notice in the real world. Change happens while we’re not paying attention. ”

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In the case of Sandy Sonenberg [the 60ish money manager in The Paris Letter], his life is a prison. He is confined by this need to perform. He remains forever and always somebody's son, a striving son who is eager to please his father and ashamed of anything about himself, including his homosexuality, that might displease a father whom we never see but who nevertheless looms huge in his consciousness. The Paris Letter is very much about the notion of a person who can perform very ably in public: You can succeed mightily in life and still remain unknown to yourself. Sandy is a character who is known better by the people around him than he is to himself. His tremendous effort over years and years to deny his true self —which is wild and, one might say, needless— is fascinating to me, and I think accurately drawn by Robbie. Certainly you can see many examples of lives lived —whether it's a question of sexuality, identity or who is the love of your life— where people deny their own being, tragically.

The Paris Letter takes place in this moneyed, rich world of New York City, and it depicts how this particular culture has changed over time. There's the issue of the open acceptance of gay identity. What equipment does a director need to make manifest those changes?

The Paris Letter is a kind of secret history of New York. The history of how life is really lived takes place in little moments and in small betrayals, in big well-intended mistakes and in the playing out of tragic best intentions. That is what life really feels like, and it's fun to talk with actors about them. The Paris Letter is filled with themes where people are being erudite, where people are performing, and yet so many things that are buried are also going on, things that are primitive and even childish and less flattering of the characters' images of themselves. Those less polished, less impressive things are the nasty stuff that I think the play is founded on.

I'm very struck by the conservative leanings of the main characters of these two plays. In The Paris Letter, Sandy Sonenberg is the scion of a conservative, moneyed, elite family. In McReele, Darius McReele did his time in prison for murder, but once he starts running for office, he sure sounds like a conservative almost in black sheep's clothing.

Anthony Mackie in McReele

Of course, Darius would never claim that that's his strategy. He will simply tell you what he thinks, even if it departs from a liberal orthodoxy. So yes, McReele finds himself in front of a television camera and he challenges affirmative action and the welfare system. Much the same way —let's face it— as Bill Clinton did, not in the case of affirmative action but certainly in the case of welfare reform. Clinton was the first Democrat to get two full terms in office since Franklin Delano Roosevelt. So there's that very interesting tension. Darius would have never been plucked from obscurity by the Democratic committee in the state of Delaware had he been taking positions that perhaps are more left leaning. We're living in a conservative era, whether it's a kind of national rebellion of what had been the orthodoxy of the New Deal approach to government's role in the life of the citizens.

How central are social, political and moral ideas to you as a director?

The drama was really created to help us cope with our life in society; that's what it was invented to do. I perhaps should admit this with embarrassment: I'm an old-fashioned leftist. I'm a fossil in today's political climate. I think living in our society is an impossible situation; there's always bound to be injustice and betrayal of the ideals that we proclaim govern us. Some of the very best plays —I can't think of one that couldn't be described this way— put people in impossible situations where there are human limitations.

All of us scurry around feeling as though there's a shortage of what we need in life. Even the characters in The Paris Letter, who for the longest time have plenty of money, feel as though there's a shortage of love, a shortage of nourishment of in their lives. Our behavior is driven by the feeling, and a view of the world, that we're not sharing in the abundance; somehow it didn't work out that way, so what's going on is much more of an atavistic struggle. In Shakespeare's Henry V, war is fun, war is fascinating, war is glorifying. Even as we deplore it with one breath, we draw our breath to align forces and set out to do battle. Sandy in The Paris Letter is stuck in an impossible situation, so are Rick and Darius in McReele. You are not omniscient. You are not god. You don't know what the moral calculus is, so you act imperfectly.

Ron Rifkin with Mary Louise Wilson in Cabaret

You spoke earlier of Hitchcock —about the ambiguity of motive. In The Paris Letter and in McReele, how much ambiguity can audiences take?

I think they love it. For the most part, people love plays that provoke argument and discussion. I hope McReele and the actions of Anton Kilgallen, the gay maitre'd in The Paris Letter, without giving too much away of the plot, will be fodder for debate. The worthiness and viability and trustworthiness of Darius McReele as a senatorial candidate, I hope, will be provocative to an audience.

The real play we're doing doesn't happen on stage. It goes on inside the consciousness of each member of the audience. As actors and directors, we're doing things with light and shadow and text upon which an audience can project the drama.

Randy Gener is the senior editor of American Theatre and has written and directed his own plays, including Love Seats for Virginia Woolf and What Remains of a Rembrandt Torn into Four Equal Pieces.

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