Bartlett Sher was nominated for a Tony on June 7 for August Wilson’s Joe Turner’s Come and Gone (JTCG) and rumor has it that Wilson was turning in his grave. This is the first time a white guy has directed Wilson on Broadway, something Wilson did not allow during his lifetime. His plays, he said, were about the black experience and could only be interpreted fully by someone from the African American community. An article in The New York Times assures readers that black cast members helped educate the white director.

It should be noted that Sher also has directed works by women and by a prominent Elizabethan playwright. Shame on him. Can’t we agree that nobody born after 1616 should do Shakespeare?

In any play worth producing, universal themes are embedded in particulars, which means that anyone who understands poverty and man’s inhumanity to man ought to get the African American experience just fine.

Hiring trained and talented artists to do plays outside their own experiences doesn’t limit possibilities for African Americans, as Wilson feared. It increases them. The Yale Rep just ended its season with a play starring Charles S. Dutton and Kimberly Scott, who created roles in the original JTCG that Lloyd Richards directed at Yale nearly 25 years ago.  This time, they appeared as Willy and Linda in Death of a Salesman.

Issues of nontraditional casting have been discussed and debated, notably by Robert Brustein and Wilson at Town Hall in 1997.

What nobody has looked at yet is how the August Wilson Method threatens the very art of directing.

Wilson’s position that directors ought to share experiences with characters brings to mind Lee Strasberg’s American Method, a reinterpretation of Stanislavski’s acting method that nearly did in the American theater. Strasberg’s “affective memory” technique requires actors to access their personal lives in order to do a role. An actor playing a grieving widower, for instance, thinks about the loss of his wife or brother, or if he has lost no person, the loss of his dog, until tears well. Actors sometimes throw themselves into life experiences in order to conjure up the needed emotions for a role.

Much has been written criticizing this approach: If an actor is overwhelmed by grief, will he remember the stage directions? Does an actor have to murder someone to portray a murderer? Do Method actors wind up playing themselves instead of characters?

Some might argue a personal connection may not be essential, but the more of this a director can bring to a project, the better. Not so. On the contrary, just as an actor’s genuine tears can limit the control he has over his performance, if a director’s personal connection to the details of a script is too intense, that can hamper his ability to make the play relevant to audiences who haven’t been through the same experiences.

Method directors work with actors to evoke emotional memories. Is a new kind of method director emerging, one who must draw on his own memory and cultural heritage?  

When a woman wants a woman to direct her play, when an African American wants an African American to direct his play, we are on the verge of limiting directorial vision. When it is not enough to do a careful study of the text, research a play’s period and people, maybe even come up with an original interpretation, something has gone awry. When a director must connect to characters in personal ways, when it is necessary that he has been to the same places around the same time, done the same things, suffered the same injustices, laughed at the same jokes, the art of directing has gone haywire.  

Suppose we were able to bring back to life an actor-manager who lived in Elizabethan England so he could stage Cymbeline and Titus Andronicus next season. Suppose he did a production that would have been immediately accessible to people who passed severed heads along the bridge on the way to the theater. Would it be meaningful to audiences today? Would Elizabethan scholars at our best universities fully understand the show?

A director serves as a liaison between the play, all the artists and crews involved in a production, and the audience.  The most inventive and accessible productions of Shakespeare have been directed by those who didn’t try to resurrect earlier styles but who have shown the relevance of Shakespeare’s plays today.

How do you make this play relevant to this audience here and now? That’s a question any director must ask when undertaking any play. Fortunately for Wilson fans, his estate is not holding his plays hostage. If they were, August Wilson would have come and gone.

Photos: (Top left) Joe Turner’s Come and Gone, by T. Charles Erickson; (Middle right) Scott and Dutton in the Arthur Miller play, by Joan Marcus (Bottom left) Bartlett Sher