Q&A: Alison Schultz on directing 'A Bright Room Called Day'

A double major in theater and government/history, Schultz  stage-managed six Theater Department shows at Skidmore and directed two workshop performances before directing the upcoming production of A Bright Room Called Day. One of the earliest works by award-winning playwright Tony Kushner, the play opens Friday, Feb. 27, for six performances. (For information and reservations, call the theater box office at ext. 5439.) After her actors take their final bows, Schultz will be looking forward to Commencement and a curatorial internship at the U.S. Supreme Court this summer, followed by a hoped-for stint as a wrangler on an Arizona ranch, where her experience as a Western-style rider and horse lover will come in handy. After that, she plans to tackle graduate school.
 
 
Q: What is A Bright Room Called Day about?

The play is about individuals responding to political repression past and present, starting with a group of artists and political activists living in Berlin in the 1930s during the Weimar Republic, the constitutional republic that governed Germany from 1919 to 1933, before the rise of Nazi fascism. For this group of political activists—a visual artist, a cinematographer, two actors, and a homosexual anarchist—the question is, should they stay in Germany and fight Nazism or leave and start again in another country? A major character is Zillah, a modern-day Jewish-American woman who moves to Berlin to protest Bush administration policies. She lives in the apartment long ago occupied by the friends and her story echoes that of one of them, a minor actress and budding political activist named Agnes.
 
Q: Why is the play titled A Bright Room Called Day?

Kushner chose the title after seeing a painting with what he thought was that title. When he looked closer the title was something completely different, but the phrase stuck with him. For me, a “bright room called day” refers to Agnes’s Berlin apartment and the warmth and protection that it symbolizes for the characters. Unfortunately, as the play progresses, the outside environment enters the apartment, and the idealists are forced to face the real challenges that exist in a rapidly changing world.
 
Q: What made you want to direct this play?

I wanted to combine all my majors in a show that was powerful, historical, and beautiful. This play asks questions like 'What is an artist’s responsibility to society? Do artists have any responsibility besides making art? Is art ever not political?' I think art is always political and Kushner would agree.  When you make art, you put yourself into it and everyone is 'political'—we all put our own ideas and beliefs into everything we do.

Kushner wrote the play in 1985, as a protest against the policies of the Reagan administration, and he has written 'Please update' in his notes to the play, so we updated details in Zillah’s speeches to reflect Bush administration policies and events. The play has lots of parallels today. The issues raised by Nazism have not gone away and will not go away—for instance, with today’s global depression, there has been a rise of neo-Nazism in Germany. In hard times, people turn to extreme politics.  We should never feel completely safe in a democracy; the Weimar Republic that preceded Hitler was a democracy.
 
Q: Given human nature, it sounds like this play could run forever.

We’ll never run out of Nazis, or genocide….Kushner wrote the play to be hopeful but it seems sad. In the play’s foreword, he wrote that this was a time of 'what-if,' and to me, it’s not about what has to be but a call to action. One of the characters, a visual artist and activist named Gotchling, says 'the times are what we make of them'.
 
Q: Is it hard to direct a cast of your peers? Do they listen to you?

All my cast members have been in the department for at least a year, and they’re all very professional. But I don’t expect them to just listen to me. I want them to discuss the play and the characters and make suggestions, then I mold what they give me.
 
I try not to jump in and act out the way I want things to be. But sometimes to get a certain response I’ll try a different way of communicating.  One actor has a big entrance and a very big line—to get him pumped up for that I screamed at him, 'What are you doing, what are you saying?'
 
 
Q: You didn’t come to directing from acting, as so many directors do, so how did you train to be a director?

The key is observation. As a stage manager, I got to watch how lots of directors worked through the process. I took what I liked and shifted and shaped it.  I’m always impressed by directors who do the background research and bring that to the table. You share that background with your cast and see how that sparks them. It’s important to be involved in a lot of productions, whether you’re working backstage or directing.  You learn to see what others look for and you learn a lot about communicating with creative people.
You learn how to block each scene, but I don’t think the final blocking is ever anything we started out with.  You give the actors some direction, and they create something and you end up somewhere else.  As the actors learn more about their characters, they start to bring out different aspects.  Actors might start to hear a new or different meaning in the words, even in a scene that’s already been rehearsed many times, and that changes the way that actor says the lines, and that changes the way the other actors respond, and that changes the whole scene. It’s wonderful to watch. ~Interview by Barbara Melville, Office of Communications