Play Directing, 7th Edition

1

Why the Director?

 

 

This book is about leadership—specifically, the leadership of an artistic enterprise: the play director in today’s theatre. Although there is a brief discussion of doing musical theatre and opera in Appendix 1, the concentration throughout the basic text is on work with plays as the oldest (2,500 years) continuing form of live theatre in Western culture. When you are a director, on some days you might think of yourself as a football coach, managing a team and calling in plays from the sidelines; on other days, you might see yourself as a conductor of an orchestra, emphasizing and blending the sounds made by the violins, horns, and drums in front of you. But most of the time, you will see yourself as a leader (not a dictator) ...