Director Peter Sellars: Bridging the Modern and Postmodern Theatre

Director Peter Sellar s: Bridging the Modern and Postmodern Theatre Tom Mikotowicz During the 1980s, the American theatre experienced the meteoric rise of Peter Sellars. Sellars graduated from Harvard in 1980 and went on to direct significant , yet controversial, dramatic and operatic productions at major institutions throughout the country. At 25, largely as a result of his non-traditional approach to classic plays, he won the MacArthur Foundation Award, commonly referred to as the "genius award." During the same week in 1983, however, he was fired for that same nontraditional approach as director in the pre-Broadway previews of My One and Only, a show that he conceived. Although his productions were well-received while he was the manager of the Boston Shakespeare Company in 1983, he left after only a year, the company's troubled finances unsolved. In 1984, he was given what many directors would consider the opportunity of a lifetime: leadership of the American National Theatre at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C. He combined his somewhat radical productions with imported ones from all over the world. His tenure there, unfortunately, ended in a permanent "leave of absence" after his efforts failed to build an artistic following. Since 1987, he has attempted to codify his ideas of the relationship of culture to politics as the director and producer of the biennial Los Angeles Festival. In September 1990, this festival featured a series of productions throughout the metropolitan area that included plays by national avant-garde and local groups, as well as intercultural works from Latin America, Asia, and the Pacific rim. As a result of his directorial approach, he has been referred to as an "iconoclastic deconstructionist." Director Andrei Serban called him the "destroyer of the classics" (Coe 14). In American Theatre, Elinor Fuchs suggested in her essay, "Misunderstanding Postmodernism," that others have labelled his approach "postmodern" for the blend of "high art and show biz" within his productions (26). His quintessential approach is to contemporize the action of a classic, while leaving the text and music intact. Not interested in recreating the illusion of a realistic historical locale or era, Sellars presents simultaneous layers of the past, present, and future, extending the definitions of performance time and 87 88 Tom Mikotowicz space, and that of onstage realism. All of this, he would argue, is his attempt to faithfully recreate the intentions of the original work. This effort, however, inevitably leads to anachronisms in the production that inspire the acrimony of traditionalists. But, unlike some other postmodern directors, Elizabeth LeCompte, Lee Breuer, and Joanne Akalaitis for example, who consistently alter classic texts and often work for different intentions, Sellars generally uses a similar interpretive approach as a modern director. It is his physical manifestation of the dramatic action which focuses on more than one concept that diverges markedly from the "moderns." Finally, from a performance studies' perspective, Sellars has broken through the ethnocentricity of the western classic canon with a multi-cultural and intergeneric approach that has given those plays a renewed efficacy in a postmodern world. It is this newer framework that brings significance to the study of his works. Sellars's directorial techniques created controversy and notice while he was still an undergraduate at Harvard. He developed a reputation for his contemporizations as director of more than 40 shows across campus. By now his student productions are legendary: King Lear, in which Lear arrives onstage in a Lincoln Continental; Antony and Cleopatra staged in a swimming pool with the actors treading water while reciting their soliloquies; and MacBeth, with a cast of three. In his third year at Harvard, Sellars produced The Three Sisters (1978) on the Loeb mainstage. Unlike Stanislavski's original production, Sellars's did not emphasize the realistic details of setting or action; instead he created a highly stylized production with simple elements and an onstage pianist playing Chopin. He commissioned a new translation of the play that he claimed was a more accurate version of Chekov's original with its intentionally incorrect syntax than previous versions. The young director, a senior at Harvard, was invited by Robert Brustein to direct at American Repertory Theater. Sellars produced a summer series that...