Stage Directions: You are rehearsing a show and the director wants to change the script. What should you do? What can you do?
Stage Directions editor Jacob Coakley interviewed Howard Sherman about new productions being inspired/borrowing/stealing from older or original productions of the same show. It is a terrific interview, especially when Sherman makes points about authorial intent and what we are teaching aspiring artists and audiences about intellectual property in art.
1 comment:
This is interesting to me because of my experiences in high school. In a few different shows we did, my director had me help with casting, so during certain shows we would decide which student actors did not make the cut. For several of these shows, my director decided to add extra roles in, or split certain roles up, in order to add more people into the show. Her intentions were pure, she wanted to get more kids involved in the production, but sometimes it led to extremely large casts and confusion on stage. While this seemed harmless at the time to me and is relatively harmless in terms of this scenario presented in the article, it can lead on a slippery slope. Where does the distinction between director and the artistic vision of the playwright end? How much freedom can a creative team really have with a script? Is it different if the playwright is still living, because they might be "cool" with any of the changes?
Something this reminded me of was in CMUs production of Lord of The Flies, with the choice to make Jack played by and portrayed visually as a female but still referring to the character with male pronouns and the words "boy". That is truly staying accurate to the script, and whatever the artistic teams reasoning for doing this was, that was good. But, to an audience member who possibly does not have that innate suspension of disbelief that a regular theater goer might have, that could have been very confusing. Just a thought.
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