Directing When You Are Not a Director: A Creative Process

As theatre practitioners, audience members entrust us with the valuable asset of their time. They give us hours of their lives that they will never get back in exchange for the possibility of a transformative theatrical experience. When creating college theatre, we have an academic responsibility to the students working on the show, but more than that we have an opportunity—an opportunity to offer up an experience that entertains, enlightens, and fills an audience with knowledge about how to live a little better in this world. And the one person who leads that experience from start to finish is the director. Directing, with all its potential and responsibility, is a commonly required duty for theatre faculty, regardless of their training or experience. While it can be a pleasure for some, faculty members who are not trained as directors may view it as daunting and not be aware of how to take full advantage of this exciting artistic opportunity. I have prepared the following Notes from the Field in an effort to keep unseasoned faculty directors from becoming overwhelmed, and to aid them as they approach the invigorating task of directing a play.

Note that this is a “crash course” that lays out only some of the methodologies available to directors, but by following this guide, you will have a solid foundation and can then move on to craft your own approach. For more information, I encourage you to read the full texts I reference throughout the article. A Sense of Direction (1984) and The Director’s Craft (2009) by William Ball and Katie Mitchell, respectively, are particularly good resources for new directors. So as to be as applicable to as many readers as possible, this Notes assumes that the play is a traditional, published work; that there is no dramaturge assigned to the production; and that the playwright is not available as a resource.

The Creative Process

The creative process refers to a course of action that anyone producing a creative act must go through, both internally and externally. Traditionally, it can be broken down into five distinct steps. As defined by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi in his Creativity: Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention (1997), those steps are: preparation, incubation, inspiration, evaluation, and elaboration (79). You must go through all five of these steps, and each one leads to the next. I use these steps as a framework for what follows, and as we move through the process I will lay out what directing-related information you must acquire along the way to achieve the most successful production possible because good directing is more than just making a rehearsal schedule and playing onstage traffic cop, although it is both of those things as well. Good directing is doing research (preparation), giving yourself time to have ideas (incubation), fully understanding the play (inspiration), rehearsing effectively (evaluation), and then bringing all those ideas fully to life (elaboration). Allow me to walk you through this process, creative step by creative step.

Step 1: Preparation

Csikszentmihalyi describes preparation as “becoming immersed, consciously or not, in a set of problematic issues that are interesting and arouse curiosity” (79). For directors, this can be translated as “researching the play.” Specifically, it is research that leads to a deeper understanding of the text, which will lead you to a plan of attack for approaching rehearsal and technical production.

While there are many ways to perform this research, detailed below, the most important thing that any director, but especially a new one, can do to help make his production a success is to start early. The more time you give yourself to work, the more research you can do; the more you research, the more you will understand the play; and the more you understand the play, the more your subconscious can do the work of being creative and give you ideas about how to direct the production.

Read About the Play

Start your research by attempting to discover what the originating impulse was for the playwright. This will tell you much about what the play is trying to communicate...