Raz Golden, director of Golden Leaf Ragtime Blues, now running through October 30 in the Elayne P. Bernstein Theatre, seldom encounters the big-shots. Of artillery, that is.
Perhaps to the benefit of workplace culture, there are no big tanks or machine guns ambling around his rehearsal studios. He leads drills, but more likely Linklater Voice scales than a regimen of 68 push ups performed in platoon formation. But what might surprise some is that these two alternative worlds, for Golden, are more similar than different — for a time, he contemplated becoming a war reporter. What, I wondered when he told me this, sitting across the picnic table from one another on an overcast Tuesday morning, could directing and war-reporting have in common? Empathy, perhaps. An urge to make the lives of distant people, both real and imaginary, more immediate to an audience. The rest of his answer lies below.
S & Co’s Clara Shapiro: How did you first get into theater and directing?
Raz Golden: I first started theater because I didn’t have any friends. It was in middle school, and I was looking for a way to engage with people, and my school was doing Fiddler On the Roof. I did not join in, because I didn’t think I could be in Fiddler On the Roof, and I was very, very nervous, but then the next year, they did Once On This Island, and I did audition for that, and got in as Agwe.
C: Oh, the water god?
R: Yeah, yeah. I’m not a great singer, but it was a really useful introduction to theater and how it works and all that really really wonderful stuff. And I was in love since then. I started directing my freshman year of college [Carnegie Mellon University], where I spent some time looking for plays I wanted to see done, and when I found a play I really loved — it was called Dog Sees God — that I really wanted done, I was trying to get other people to make it, and an upperclassman said to me, “Why don’t you direct it?” And I was like, “I don’t know what that means,” so I did a whole bunch of studying, I asked as many people as I could, and I took the actor training I had from the last five years, and translated it into directing.
C: Did you major in theater?
R: I majored in history, but I took a minor in theater. So I studied in the theater school as well.
C: Do you think that studying history has affected the way that you direct?
R: Completely. My speciality in history was non-European theatrical history. The historical-theatrical practices, and theater as politics, so I focused in Western Africa, South Africa, and the Middle East, and I looked at theater in West and South Africa, and film in the Middle East. Also, I for a long time thought I might transition to become a museum curator, and I worked for the Carnegie Museum of Natural History [Pittsburgh] for two years, and what I figured out is that the study of history is actually much more scientific than people know… There’s a certain level of proof you need for history. History is about “How could this have happened?” and “You need to prove this, and this, and this, in order to say this happened. And then I realized that in theater, theater is about the what-ifs, the how-could, or “should this have happened in this way”? And so that was something that really excited me.
C: What do you think draws you to directing?
R: I think taking the wholesale look of a production. The director’s primary job is to see the overall, to really take a look at everything, and see how everything fits together. And I’ve always found myself really drawn to that aspect of taking a step back, and looking up at it. One of my favorite parts of directing is in tech, when you finally have the actors and the lights and the set-changes and costumes all together. You feel like a conductor in an orchestra. It’s all about timing, and precision, and that’s really exciting for me.
C: I guess you have to be pretty precise as a director.
R: I would say so. I’d say some of the best directors bring a precision to their work. There should be a period of looseness, a period of discovery, but at a certain point it’s really about the details, and making sure that things feel sharp.
C: For you, does the period of looseness and discovery come more at the beginning of making the play, and then the finer points?
R: I think so. The beginning, for me, is all about letting things go where they go, and letting our subconscious lead our discovery. The first week or two is very much, “Let’s try this. Let’s see what happens. This might work and this might not work.” It’s all about drafting. I think a lot of people who do theater feel as if when you have all the people in the rehearsal room, you have to know all the answers immediately, and you forget that a sketch artist has hundreds of thrown-away sketches, and so we should as theater artists feel free to have those sketches and throw them away, because that’s the only way we can sort of refine the idea that’s really going to be successful.
C: Makes me think of paintings, like when you have to find the negative space on the canvas so that you can see what’s actually in the foreground.
R: I think that’s exactly it. Negative spaces. For example, when you have all of Hamlet, you’re definitely cutting the script, right? And so all of Hamlet is this block of clay or this block of granite, and you’re sculpting away at it, getting rid of negative space, and deciding what is negative and what isn’t is a really exciting process.
C: Does directing contemporary plays differ for you from directing Shakespeare plays, and if it does, then how?
R: For me, yes. Well, one of the biggest changes for me is the playwright [is] my partner when it’s a contemporary play, and not so when it’s a classical play. I try to be, when I’m working with a contemporary play, as collaborative as possible, and I see myself as a director more as a partner with the playwright, taking what their vision is on the page and enhancing it with my ideas, but also trying to protect what it is they’re trying to do. Whereas with classical work, I think I find myself a lot more experimenting. Also from my history background — when you write an academic paper on a subject, you don’t ignore the fact that seven other scholars have written about this subject. You take their work, read their work, and incorporate it into your work, and you comment on it, and I think of that when I’m doing classical plays, because a lot of directors will say “I approach it as a new play.” I don’t. I need to know what the history of this play is, how it has been presented, because I think more than anything, classical plays are in our active conversation. When an audience comes to see Romeo and Juliet, for instance, they’ve seen presumably three,four,ten other Romeo and Juliets, so it’s a conversation that’s happening in their heads, and we’ve gotta acknowledge that ourselves.
C: What about Golden Leaf Ragtime Blues do you find most exciting to direct?
R: Golden Leaf Ragtime Blues is, to me, a character play. It’s about four different characters butting personalities, and I’m really always excited about plays that embrace language, and embrace characters talking with each other, and figuring things out. I love the dance of language when you have two characters fighting in this power struggle, and there’s wins and losses, and you can sort of carve out the topographical map of their conversation. Golden Leaf is really about hearing these characters talk with each other so that’s really exciting.
C: Pompey is a real grouch a lot of the time. Do you find him a sympathetic character?
R: I do, yeah. He spent a large chunk of his life on an art form that no one wants anymore. And so he feels discarded in that way. And he feels discarded by his daughter, who doesn’t visit him as much as he’d like, and the loneliness of it all, I can really see, makes me sympathetic for why he sort of chases people away and doesn’t accept people in, because the eventuality of people leaving him is something that is really deep within him.
C: Is there something about Golden Leaf Ragtime Blues that you find difficult to direct?
R: I think what I find difficult to direct is trying to make the decade — the time period that it’s in — feel lived-in without feeling sitcom-y or cartoony, and that something that we’re really focused on in the design aspect. The play is set in 1993 and you can go wrong in that you can make the play feel so of that decade that people don’t see this people as real people, they see them as historical reenactors.
C: If you could ask one character in Golden Leaf Ragtime Blues one question, who would it be and what would you ask?
R: I would ask Jet, how did it go? Jet’s fate at the end of the play is a little unknown, and he would be about in his forties right now. He’d be the same age as Marsha is in the play, and I would ask him how did it go? How did his life go?
C: What is one play you dream of directing?
R: One play I would really love to direct is A Dance of Forests by Wole Soyinka, who is a Nigerian writer, poet, and playwright, and it’s a play that really interacts with Yoruba mysticism and Yoruba culture, and that’s my Nigerian culture, where I’m descended from. It’s very rarely done, because it’s a super complicated, psychologically weird play. That’s one. I would say the other play that’s a little bit more known is Skin of Our Teeth, Thornton Wilder. That’s definitely a play I would really love to work on, because it’s this crazy three-act, every-act-is-different-from-the-last-one… it has dinosaurs, Ice Age, end-of-the-world three times. It’s irreverently funny, but it was just done on Broadway, so we’re going to have to wait five to ten years before anybody wants to see it again. And it was done really well on Broadway.
C: Is there one play that you would never direct?
R: There are many plays that I would never direct, because I don’t have a way into them. There’s a big conversation about who should direct what, and whether your identity needs to match the playwright or the characters, and I think that there’s some credence to that conversation, but I think that what’s more specific is, “Do you as a director have a way into a play, or a specific opinion on that play even if your identity doesn’t match the identity of that play?” There are so many plays that I think are really, really amazing that I don’t have a specific “in” or a specific opinion on. The Taming of the Shrew I think is an interesting play — I would never want to direct it because I have nothing to say about the gender politics that happen in The Taming of the Shrew, but I am endlessly interested in other directors’ visions of it.
C: What are your most loved books?
R: I’m a big fantasy and sci-fi person, and as a young person, my favorite sci-fi book was Speaker for the Dead, which is by Orson Scott Card, and it’s a book in the Ender’s Game series, and it’s this really wonderful sort of sci-fi. [The character called] Speaker for the Dead [is] an orator for funerals, and he goes to another planet to give a funeral oration for a character, and then things happen. It’s a really, really lovely book. Another book I really love is Me Talk Pretty One Day by David Sedaris. David Sedaris is a really famous memoirist, and this is I believe his first, or one of his earliest books, and it’s about his time as a kid, discovering about his queerness, and figuring out his speech impediment, and it’s super funny and sweet, and it’s a book I go back to every five years or so.
C: If you weren’t a director, what career would you want?
R: I really wanted to be a war reporter. I really wanted to go to the Middle East or somewhere else with a camera and a microphone, and film war and strife and bring it back to America, and try to make sense of human conflict. My dream was to spend four or five years in a conflict zone and then bring that knowledge back, and then work for CNN, doing cable news.
C: Do you think that directing and that other path have a lot in common?
R: I guess sort of, yeah. It’s all about taking information, and taking what the world gives you, and interpreting and internalizing it, and making it into something that people can follow, and people can hold onto. Ultimately, it’s about affecting the way people see the world.
This interview is part of Shakespeare & Company’s #LiveinCompany social media campaign, an extension of its mission to live creatively, work collaboratively, and honor community. #LiveinCompany content highlights the words and work of visionaries in various disciplines and aims to answer the three questions at the heart of each of Shakespeare’s plays: What does it mean to be alive? How should we act? and What must I do?
