Direcor's Processes
The director's process extends from the selection of a play for production through to opening night.  The director works closely with all members of the artistic staff and some members of a theatre's administrative staff, but the bulk of his time will be spent working with actors on the text in rehearsals. The second largest amount of time will be spent in analyzing the text, which is a process that continues and evolves throughout the production process and often involves extensive research.

A director and play may be brought together in a number of ways: if the director is a member of a theatre's artistic staff then he may select a play himself or in consultation with the governing artistic and financial bodies of the theatre; he may be hired by a company to direct a play chosen by that company; or, he may select a play and then seek producers to fund the production or an existing company to sponsor his work.

No matter how she has been hired, the director's next step is to work with the text.  She will analyze the plot, characters, themes, style, diction, environment, and actions. She will envision and hear parts of the play in her head. She will consider the audience for whom the play will be presented and ask herself what in the text will be most exciting and pertinent to that audience, and also to herself.  This analysis and imagining will lead the director to a production concept.

The first production meeting is where a director communicates the production concept to set, costume, lighting, and sound designers, stage managers, producers, technical directors, and publicity managers.  A more collaborative director will seek feedback, clarifications, or revisions of her ideas from the designers.  The producers, who provide the necessary funding and want to see a production turn a profit, might also provide input.  The technical director, who will be responsible for building scenery and other effects and is usually familiar with the special needs or problems of working in the theatre space, might provide valuable advice to designers at production meetings.  Publicity managers also use the work of the director and designers, presented in production meetings, as they develop marketing strategies for a production.

At an early meeting, the production staff must establish a production schedule, which sets deadlines for design approval, deadlines for set and costume construction, dates on which the lighting crew works in the theatre, press release deadlines, program copy deadlines, and dates of technical and dress rehearsals.

At subsequent production meetings designers will present sketches or samples of their ideas.  The director's job is to coordinate and refine the designers' artistic ideas so that the resulting production will cohere. The director approves final design plans, usually presented in the form of renderings, or detailed depictions of a set, costume, or lighting effect as an audience member will see it.  Production meetings typically occur at least weekly during the play's rehearsal process. Thus, as the director shapes the play with the actors, she informs the designers of developments at production meetings.  In turn, the designers can respond to changes in interpretation of the play or to new practical needs.

The director may cast actors in a variety of ways.  She may hold auditions and select a cast herself, or she may be working with a company of actors who must be cast in the major roles, or the producers may already have a star cast in a major role, who may then have input into which other actors are cast.  Depending on the play's producing organization, the director may have to cast all Equity (professional, union) actors contacted through their agents, or a certain number of union actors, or be restricted from using Equity actors at all.

In professional theatre, the director usually hears actors present monologues of their own choosing at an initial audition and then holds call-backs for actors whom she thinks she may cast.  At call-backs the actors read from the play text, either cold readings, meaning unprepared, or with time to prepare their characters, called prepared readings.  Many directors structure auditions according to their personal tastes or the unique needs of a play;  for example, a director might ask actors to improvise or tell a story in an audition.  For musical theatre, an audition typically consists of a monologue, a song, and a dance audition. Actors may audition privately in individual sessions, in small groups, or all together -- often referred to as a cattle call.

Once the play has been cast, it enters rehearsal. The director is responsible for scheduling and structuring each rehearsal. While each director will run rehearsals in her own unique manner, there are several categories of rehearsal that illuminate the director's process of working with actors; a typical progression is from reading, to blocking, to character building, to refining, to technical, to dress rehearsals, and finally to previews and opening night.

At a reading, the actors may simply read the play or they may analyze the text and characters as they read.  In blocking rehearsals, the director sets where and when actors move on the stage.  By this time the director will have a groundplan from the set designer, which is a scale drawing of the stage from a bird's eye perspective; it indicates where all walls, doors, furniture, platforms, stairs, or other scenery is placed. The stage manager usually places tape on the stage floor to indicate the boundaries of the set pieces for the director and actors to use while blocking. Some directors encourage actors to improvise blocking based on character motivation in the stage environment, finalizing blocking much later in the rehearsal process. In
character rehearsals, actors work intensively on their characters.  These rehearsals will often be held with small groups or individuals, and the actors will depart from the playwright's text in order to flesh out their characters. The director clarifies points of character, orchestrates relationships among characters, and ensures that characters fulfill their structural purposes within the text.

Once the whole play is blocked, characters defined, relationships among characters developed, and the shape of the play determined, the director changes his focus. In early rehearsals he was often focused on minutiae: a character's reaction at a specific moment or a bit of stage movement. Now the director must shift his focus to the shape and movement of the overall production and the effect it will have on an audience member seeing it for the first time.  In refining rehearsals the director may work on pacing, comic timing, transitions among scenes, heightening climaxes, or shifting the tone of scenes.  Since refining rehearsals fall later in the rehearsal process, when the play is usually being rehearsed off-book and as a whole, with work-throughs  -- which stop and start to address problems -- or with run-throughs,  the director is able to see the overall shape and to put himself in the shoes of an audience member.

In technical rehearsals the work of the actors is finally put together with the work of the designers. Usually scenery, lights, and sound are added first, reserving costumes for the dress rehearsals, which are typically the last couple of rehearsals before previews or opening night. A first technical rehearsal, or "tech", is often a cue-to-cue, or rehearsal which skips from one sound or light cue or scene change directly to the next one, leaving out all intervening dialogue.  The director's role in the technical and dress rehearsals is to observe and adjust how all of the elements fit together. Just before entering technical rehearsals, he usually sits down with the stage manager, lighting and sound designers, and possibly the set designer to set all cues and how they should be called by the stage manager. The stage manager marks in her prompt book when light, sound, and set cues should be called; whether they correspond to lines, movements, and music; how they correspond to one another; and how long they take. This meeting is often called a paper tech. Once in tech rehearsals, he may find that the scene changes are longer than expected and ask the sound designer for more music, or decide that the lights should not go to black between scenes but that actors should be seen by the audience as they move into place for the next scene, or find that the color of a light produces an unattractive color when it hits an actor's costume.  The director makes the aesthetic choices about how to reconcile such unforseen events during the technical and dress rehearsals.

If there are preview performances, as most professional theatres have, the director gets to make final adjustments to actors' performances and technical elements based on audience responses. By opening night, the director's job is done.  Often she will come to opening night to hear and see how the final product works in front of an audience, but her role is over once the play opens.

Historical Conventions of Directing
Until the middle of the 19th century, the job of director as described in the preceding sections did not exist.  One of the best explanations for the sudden creation of the director's job is that staging in past eras was highly stylized and regularized, as was set design and acting; in other words, each Greek tragedy looked and sounded approximately like others, and the same with each Restoration comedy.  However, once set designers began to create entirely new environments for each play, electric lights brought the job of lighting designer, and artistic movements began to define radically different goals for different theatre texts, the need for a single, unifying artistic vision, as supplied by a director, also arose.

Throughout theatre history, there has always been a figure who did some of the functions assigned to the contemporary director.  For centuries, either a company's lead actor or the playwright himself made whatever staging decisions were necessary. Theatre or company managers bought whatever scenery or properties were required by the current repertory of plays when they had the money for it. This was true both of the sharing companies of Shakespeare's time and the later companies managed by businessmen. Costumes were left to the whims and financial resources of the individual actors. Financial, more than artistic, decisions dictated what theatre companies purchased.  For example, in the 18th century, theatres across Europe began to attract patrons because of spectacularly painted scenery;  since opulent scenery brought audiences, companies began to hire designers who gradually replaced the older system of stock  scenery with scenery built and painted for a specific
production.

The German author Johann Wolfgang von Goethe was one of the first theatre practitioners to take decisive steps toward the art of stage directing.  In the late18th century, he assembled a company of actors at the small court theatre in Weimar. He greatly extended the normal rehearsal period for plays, from a week to at least a month. He coached each actor individually on his diction and character interpretation, and encouraged actors to create new characters for each play rather than repeat successful types of characters. Finally, he approached the stage like a canvas, composing the actors in each scene so as to fill out the three dimensional stage space; this replaced the older practice of actors standing front and center whenever they had a sizable speech. This is the first decisive step toward blocking as we know it today.

Two other Germans of the mid-19th century, Richard Wagner and Georg II, Duke of Saxe-Meiningen, are usually credited with defining the director's role and accelerating the spread of directing among European and American companies. Wagner, who is better known for his work composing operas, also directed his own productions and designed and built a theatre to house his operas.  His major contribution to the development of directing is his concept of gesamtkunstwerke, which translated literally means "assembled art work." From his experience of operas, Wagner saw clearly that each element of a production must support all of the others towards a specific overall effect on the audience.  Although actors and playwrights had relied on the work of painters and fashion designers for centuries, the idea that they should be an integral part of a theatre company and the process of play production was new.  Wagner articulated the need for a central, unifying artist, himself, to direct the visions of other artists in the opera.

Saxe-Meiningen produced plays with elaborately researched, historically correct details in scenery, set dressings, and costuming. Some other 19th century men were also interested in historically accurate productions, but the Duke had the time and money to work in detail.  More importantly, he applied the same detailed approach to his work with actors.  Building on Goethe's innovation of composing the stage picture, he made the stage picture dynamic and extended stage action off the sides of the stage into the wings.  He rehearsed his supernumeraries, who are actors with non-speaking roles in crowd scenes who had typically been hired off the street and put on stage with no rehearsal, and formed them into groups with a trained actor in each group.  In Saxe-Meiningen's productions, each individual in a crowd scene had his or her own character and each reacted and moved differently in response to the stage action around him. When the company toured Europe, starting in 1874, theatre artists were amazed at this new approach to staging and immediately adopted the Duke's ideas.

The early 20th century saw the rise of auteur-directors,  or directors who viewed themselves as a species of author, either writing their own texts or significantly altering a playwright's text to fit their own visions. These are an extreme example of the creative directors describe in part 1. Many auteur-directors also designed their own scenery and lighting, taking a desire for artistic unity to an extreme.  Perhaps the most extreme was Britain's Edward Gordon Craig, who not only radically adapted classical texts and designed his own productions, but also suggested that actors should be übermarrionettes, or superpuppets, responding entirely to a director's vision, without imposing any ideas of their own. In such an extreme viewpoint, the director becomes not the unifying artist of theatre but the only artist. Max Reinhardt introduced the idea of finding or building the right theatre for a production in the 1910's; he believed that we should not have a single kind of theatre space but many options so that a director might choose the most appropriate theatre for his vision of the play. Reinhardt staged plays outdoors, in sports arenas, in cathedrals, and in small and large playhouses.

Many 20th century directors have helped to define new styles of performance, which in turn increases the need for directors generally. Today many options exist for how a play should be produced and how the various elements of theatre should fit together, that the controlling vision has almost become a necessity. Expressionism in the 1920's opened up a new theatrical style, as did Brecht's Epic Theatre over the next two decades andAbsurdism in the 1950's and 60's. These theatrical styles were defined by directors and critics in response to new theatrical literature; the best embodiment of the writers' texts required new acting styles and new relationships among performers, designers, and audiences.  Since the 1960's, some directors like the Polish Jerzy Grotowski and English Sir Peter Brook began to create theatrical effects with actors' bodies and voices instead of many technical effects, turning theatre away from illusion and spectacle and back to an experience of the imagination. This is called poor theatre. Today most directors use a combination of these twentieth century techniques as they find them useful in a specific production.

Over the last 30 years, some companies have moved away from the traditional view of directing because of its autocratic implications;  in such companies decisions are made collectively or by a governing group. Many of these groups also have had political or social goals, like women's theatres (At the Foot of the Mountain in Minnesota) or chicano theatres (El Teatro Campesino in southern California), and felt that the theatre's artistic structure ought to mirror the artists' ideals for larger social organizations.

To Director Part 3