Play Directing, 7th Edition

Appendix 3

Your Future as a Director

 

 

One cannot talk about the future of directing without looking back at how it has operated over its lifetime in the United States. In some ways, it has not changed greatly from those first years at Provincetown (MA), where playwrights directed each other’s plays. Eugene O’Neill wanted to call the group The Playwright’s Theatre when it found winter quarters on MacDougal Street in Greenwich Village, because playwriting, in O’Neill’s view, was its reason for being. But George Cram Cook, who sparked the group into life and directed more than the others, thought The Provincetown Playhouse a better title because it delineated all the crafts of the theatre and not just one. When he introduced a “dome” for O’Neill’s ...