‘Renegades, authors, and classics:’ a Conversation with Robert Woodruff

Robert Woodruff was recently appointed Artistic Director of the American Repertory Theatre (ART), a resident company now in its 22nd season at Harvard University’s Loeb Drama Center. He has directed productions at many of the country’s major regional theaters; his most recent work includes the American Repertory Theatre productions of Brecht's In the Jungle of Cities, Charles Mee's Full Circle, and Shakespeare's Richard II. Woodruff co-founded the Eureka Theatre, San Francisco, and created the Bay Area Playwrights Festival, a forum for new play development. He has served on the faculties of the Banff Center, Alberta, Canada; the University of California, San Diego; U.C. Santa Barbara; New York University's Tisch School of the Arts; the Saratoga International Theatre Institute; and the graduate program at Columbia University's Hammerstein Center.

Woodruff recently spoke to Jack Megan, director of the Office for the Arts at Harvard, about his new post at the ART; his directing career at theaters throughout the country; and the state of undergraduate theater at Harvard.

Jack Megan (JM): Robert, I read an interview you did some years ago about Shakespeare’s Richard II, in which you suggested that you saw Richard as an artist who ultimately destroys everything he has created. You remarked, I think tongue in cheek, that maybe artists shouldn’t be allowed to run cultural institutions. Yet here you are after many years of artistic freedom, during which you traveled the U.S. and abroad, taking creative risks, diving into new projects, and without the responsibilities of running an institution. Is there creative danger for you in assuming the artistic leadership of the American Repertory Theatre? What risks and opportunities do you see?

Robert Woodruff (RW): Well, yes, there are elements of that creative life, which I’ve lived for many years, that I will miss—engaging with new communities of actors and creators, inventing something new and then moving on to the next project somewhere else. It’s just very rich—the new places, the collaboration, the different situations that are vital to me as an artist.

With this role at the ART, though, on some level you’re given tremendous creative freedom because you have more control of the resources of an institution. As someone who creates things in an institutional context, my role is to push the institution until it almost breaks in order to achieve what it needs to achieve. That’s the role of the artist in any institution —and in leading this institution, I don’t know that it changes that much. You’re pushing its resources, you’re pushing its artistic statement, you’re pushing its possibilities as far as possible.

Of course, you also have to be the one who safeguards the institution so that it can’t be destroyed. So part of it is having a dialogue inside yourself in terms of how far I really can go—in terms of what can be gained and where the wall is. And part of it is having that dialogue with Rob [Robert Orchard, the Executive Director of the ART].

Another thing about creativity: now I have to play the other role as host. It’s a great exchange. Now I’m welcoming great artists to this institution and putting resources at their command to suit their ideas. That’s something people have been doing for me for twenty-five years, and I hope I’ve learned something from people who know how to do that well.

JM: I would guess that your work at regional theaters all around the country has enabled you to think about what it means to do those things well.

RW: Yes, and also to think about the right setting for me and that kind of work. There’s something simpatico about what Bob Brustein created and what I feel is important. The ART has always been a theater about renegades and authors and classics. It’s really been the only director’s theater in America. I think that’s why artists and great directors feel comfortable coming here. The greatest artistic events need a leader. They need to spring from somebody’s vision, which inspires collaboration, which inspires artists around the idea. The leader’s idea becomes the rallying point for the creation of the event. I think that’s the best definition of a director’s theater, and that’s what this place has been.

JM: Moving to a related aspect of the ART’s mission, have you had a chance to see much undergraduate theater during the past year? What did you think of it, and what opportunities do you see for involving students in the ART?

RW: I haven’t seen enough of it, but I’m looking forward to seeing more this year. As for what I think of it, I just believe that theater—student or not —has to be invented in the moment that it’s made. Every moment has to be invented. And the questions that are asked in its invention are necessary to the creator and hopefully to the audience.

I’m feeling out ways for engaging students in our work. I don’t know that they’ll be the traditional ways. For instance, I was speaking to the managing director of a theater in Milan recently, and he told me that his company approached a physicist who wrote a five-section piece based on paradoxes of Infiniti. The director said they used this to create theatrical performance, and that it was one of the most inventive pieces that the theater staged all year. That idea interests me—the idea of trying to tap the intellectual life of Harvard and work that’s being done here. How can we find and define theatrical content and context, and create a theatrical event around work that’s being done elsewhere here? Where is there theater in science, philosophy, architecture, and is there a contextual basis for work that’s being done here that is inherently dramatic? I’d like to try to engage some of that work on the stage. I could see involving undergraduates in that kind of pursuit.

JM: Would you have any specific advice for undergraduates involved in theater at Harvard?

RW: Sure. Get out of the canon. Get away from it and invent your own canon. Invent a source of what theater can come from. Because let’s face it, the most interesting work may not be about the well-made play; it may be about taking an idea, deconstructing a classic, or essentially writing your own event. So I encourage that because that’s obviously what I come from, and that’s what I want to go to! I want to see something that nobody’s ever made before.

JM: You are asked—and the ART strives—to be several things at once. A world-class repertory company, a graduate training ground for future professionals, and a resource for undergraduate theater. Do you see tensions in that?

RW: No. At least not yet! I’m just going to make things. I’m going to engage with people, work towards engaging the student body, work towards engaging artists, and encourage artists of all kinds, including students, to come here. If we bring people here who are some of the greatest theater artists in the world, my hope is that students will feel the benefit of that.

If I had an interest in physics, for instance, and someone brought a great physicist to the campus, I would stay up all night and sleep outside the man’s door to be at his feet. I hope some of the undergraduate community will approach the ART’s work with that same philosophy. I don’t know how someone in the world of drama or the arts in general develops artistically, if you don’t know what came before. I was always wanting to know what was going on in theater. That exposure was part of how I grew as an artist. I needed to know.

JM: So if you build it, they will—or should—come?

RW: Yeah, but if they don’t think that, I don’t know what I’d do. I don’t know how to respond to that then.

JM: Do you need to worry about that?

RW: I don’t know. Do I? Honestly, I’m a newcomer, but if there’s tension between the ART and Harvard undergraduates, I think it has less to do with whether some students like or dislike our work, less to do with those who want to be involved with professionals and those who don’t, and much more just to do with lack of space. I hear people talking about this tension as if there’s a mysterious element to it. It’s like, Okay, let’s breathe. There’s not enough space for the arts on the campus, and when there are limited resources of any kind, tension is inevitable. And that’s novel or mysterious? That’s the history of the world.

JM: Okay, but leaving aside the issue of resource allocation for the moment, what do you think it means ultimately to run a world-class repertory theater in an academic environment?

RW: Truthfully, my focus is on that stage right there. I think if I can put excellence on that stage and create a buzz, that is where my focus belongs. I mean, I want to engage with everybody in this community. Why not? I’m a teacher. I just spent five years at Columbia teaching. The best job on the planet! The best job in New York! I loved it. I had students who were an intellectual community for me, an artistic community for me, and a home for me --– everything I never had before in my artistic life. So I know the riches that students bring for someone in my position. And the way to engage them, at least for me, is to begin by putting the best work I possibly can on that stage.

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