DIRECTING SITCOMS AND THEATER

From Stage to Screen

►An Interview With Sheldon Epps

Sheldon Epps has served as Artistic Director of the renowned Pasadena Playhouse since 1997. During that time, he has directed more than 150 sitcom episodes for shows such as Sister, Sister, The Jamie Foxx Show, Veronica’s Closet, My Wife and Kids, In-Laws, Everybody Loves Raymond, Friends, Frasier, Joey, George Lopez, Reed Between the Lines, and Instant Mom. For five seasons, he was also producer-director for the hit series Girlfriends.

Epps began his career acting and directing theater in New York City in the 1980s. He was a cofounder of the off-Broadway theater, The Production Company, where he conceived of and directed the highly acclaimed musical revue, Blues in the Night. The show went on to Broadway, where it was nominated for a Tony Award for Best Musical of the Year, and then on to London’s West End, where it was nominated for two Laurence Olivier Awards and ran for over a year.

Sheldon Epps

Photo courtesy of The Pasadena Playhouse

Epps has directed plays and musicals for major US theaters such as the Guthrie, The Old Globe Theatre, Manhattan Theatre Club, Seattle Repertory Theatre, Playwrights Horizons, Crossroads Theatre, Cleveland Play House, Arizona Theatre Company, and Coconut Grove Playhouse.

I’m curious about your transition from acting to directing. How did that happen initially?
Let’s see, I was part of a small theater company in New York called The Production Company, and we often had trouble finding directors. The gentleman who was acting most like the artistic director at that theater, Norman Rene—who went on to have a pretty substantial directing career—he said, “Well, you think like a director, so if you wouldn’t mind directing some of the shows, that would be a big help to the company.” So that’s when I started directing. And then one of the projects I directed, Blues in the Night, was picked up for Broadway. So that became a calling card of sorts, which then led to other productions of that show and other opportunities to direct at theaters around the country.

And when did you move into television directing?
It wasn’t until I directed here at the Pasadena Playhouse for the first time that a friend had his television agents come see a play I was directing. It was a play called On Borrowed Time, and that was the beginning of the television segment of my career. It really grew out of my work in the theater.

When Norman Rene suggested that you were thinking like a director, had you had that itch before?
Not really. I really did it in service to that very small company. I just tried my hand at it without any strong interest in having a directing career. But then I started to get work as a director, and I realized after about a year or so that I wasn’t acting as much and hadn’t really missed it. It felt like an easy and comfortable transition for me. I never regretted making the decision to move into the directing career.

Even though you trained as an actor, it wasn’t tough to give that up?
Yes, that was my initial training at Carnegie Mellon, but I never looked back. I suppose part of it was economic. Rather than being a struggling actor, I was a working director. So the fact that I was getting work and enjoying the work, well, that made it easy for me to make the transition.

Having been an actor, do you think that’s helped you in working with actors? You speak the same language?
There’s a lot you have to learn and grow into as a director, but I do believe very strongly that the heart of the director’s job is in working with actors—helping them tell the story that the playwright wants to tell, but also enabling them to do their best work. Yes, you have to know about staging and lighting and all of that, but my belief is that the director’s primary job is to elicit great performances.

And this is true for television as well as theater?
For me it is. Once I started working in television, I think I became known as an actor’s director. I knew a lot about working with actors, and I’ve always said that when you’re on a television set, there are a whole lot of people who know as much or more than you do about the technical aspects—the lighting, the camera work, sound, special effects, and all of those things. But there’s really only one person who knows how to talk to an actor, and that’s the director. That’s your great value on a television set—working with the actors.

I imagine some theater directors might look to your career as inspiration—that it could be a natural, comfortable transition to go from live theater to sitcoms. Did you find that to be true?
Sure, my focus in television was half-hour situation comedy, and for the most part, all of those shows were shot in front of an audience—if not all of the time, certainly most of the time. So for me, it was very similar. My philosophy was that I was doing a twenty-two-minute play, which I would rehearse in the same way as a play. We would rehearse for three or four days, and then figure out how to shoot that play in front of an audience using the four cameras.

Is that pretty standard? You typically have four days of rehearsal on sitcoms? At what point do you bring in the audience?
Not until the fifth day. The whole process is five days long from the time you do the table read until the time you shoot the show. So you have three days of rehearsal just with the cast, and then on the fourth day you rehearse with the technical crew to figure out how the show is going to be shot. Then on the fifth day, you spend the day reviewing that, and usually in the late afternoon or evening you start shooting in front of the audience. So you don’t actually need an audience until the end of the fifth day.

How long does it take to shoot the show with the audience?
That depends on the show, really. Number one, it often depends on whether it’s a new show or a show that’s been on the air for a long time. Shows that have been on the air for a long time can fall into a certain rhythm and be shot very quickly. We used to shoot Frasier episodes in about two and half hours. On the other hand, there are shows like Friends that do a lot of rewriting in front of the audience, so that takes longer. That’s frequently also true of a new show where they’re trying to find the characters and find what works. Sometimes it can take five or six hours, depending on the demands of the individual show.

There was a period in the 2000s where you were Artistic Director of the Pasadena Playhouse and also directing what looks to be one TV show per week. I’m trying to imagine what your schedule must have looked like.
Sometimes when I look back on it, I’m not sure how I was actually able to do it. I was younger for one thing, and perhaps had a bit more energy. But it’s true. I would frequently spend a good part of the day on televisions sets and then the latter part of the day here at the theater into the evening.

Can you break down the day for me? On a show like Girlfriends, you directed fifty-nine shows between 2000 and 2005. What time would you get to the set in the morning?
Usually 9:00 or 10:00, and depending on where you were in the process, some days were shorter and some days you would finish by 2:00 or 3:00 in the afternoon. Even the tech day with the camera crew, that could be a shorter day unless you were doing something outside or preshooting. So even those days could end at 2:00 or 3:00. Your long day would always be the audience day, because you start in the morning and you’d be there until at least 9:00 or 10:00 at night.

Does work typically start on a Monday, and then the long day is a Friday?
It used to be that the shows had either a Monday through Friday week or a Wednesday through Tuesday week. They did it that way because it made the camera crew available to more shows. In other words, the camera crew could work on one show on Thursday and Friday and on a different show on Monday and Tuesday. It was a way to spread out the availability of the prime camera crew and cinematographers. Rather than everybody trying to shoot on the same days and get exactly the same people, somebody had the idea of the staggered schedules.

Do you have a strategy for working with actors on the humor in sitcoms? I’m wondering about your approach to directing actors with comedy material.
My approach is to really not talk very much about the humor. Something doesn’t become funny because you say, “Let’s make this funny.” It becomes funny because it’s inherent in the writing and you’re approaching the material honestly. The best comedy comes out of approaching a ridiculous situation seriously. Frasier is perhaps one of the best examples of that. That’s a character who took himself very seriously but got into ridiculous situations. The latter is the result of the writing, of course, but the actor has to always approach it truthfully. So in that regard, there’s not a whole lot of difference between doing a sitcom and a television drama. Eventually, you do have to know where the jokes are, and you have to allow the audience to participate by laughing, but you don’t produce that laughter by saying, “This is a funny line, let me make this funny.”

Do some actors have a tendency to change their performance once they get in front of an audience?
I think that an audience—and this is true of the theater just as much as television—but an audience tends to bring more adrenaline to the performances, and there’s a boost in energy. And there should be a boost in energy that comes from doing something in front of an audience. That’s somewhat inevitable, and it’s a good thing. The challenge is to not play to that audience and get overblown and untruthful in a way that damages the humor.

In theater, the actors can ride the wave of the audience reaction it seems, but would that not be the case with television because you can’t cut it together?
Well, that’s actually the value of the multi-camera—that you’re getting all of the shots you need at one time. You almost always do it twice, so you have choices between the first time you run it and the second time. If you do a scene twice in front of four cameras, you have eight different choices of the shots you want to use. So yes, you can ride that wave with the audience reaction, as you say. It can work that way.

Of all of the aspects that you’ve described involved with directing a sitcom, are there parts in the process that you find most rewarding and most challenging?
Well, the most rewarding is doing it in front of an audience—rehearsing and then having it pay off in the reaction from the audience, because you never know how it will play until you’re actually in front of the audience. So when an actor gets a good solid laugh or response from the audience, that’s the great part. The challenging part is that it’s very fast-paced and always changing. As I said, it’s inevitably a five-day period, and over that five days it often changes every single day, and then it can even change even as you’re shooting it. There are times when a new scene will come in, and if that happens on the very last day, you have to do all of that on the fly, including reblocking the cameras. So those couple of days are really challenging, because you’re shooting somewhere between twenty-eight and thirty-six pages over the course of two days.

And then do you work with the editor after that?
Yes. Once it’s all shot, usually about a week or so later, you get the editor’s cut of the show. Then either you’re in the room with the editor or you’re sent a copy of it, and you review it and then give the editor notes on things you want to do differently. You might remember a different take that you want to use, or you might think something plays better in a two-shot than a single, or even in master, for that matter. So you give those notes, and then the editor reassembles it, and after that it goes to the showrunner.

I’m trying to imagine the headspace you give each of your projects, because you’re working on so many different shows.
Yeah, sometimes there would be seven or eight different shows. That’s a challenge, just because every show has its own personality, depending who’s involved on the producer-writer side or the actor side. And the group of actors coming together forms a being of sorts that has its own personality. That’s something you just have to feel out as you go into a show for the first time. Who really needs help? Who doesn’t want any help, or only wants help in a certain way? That’s challenging, like serial dating, I would call it sometimes.

Directing fifty-nine episodes of Girlfriends, that isn’t the norm, right?
No, I was essentially the resident director on that show for the first five seasons. I didn’t do all of the episodes, but I directed most. But there are situations where there’s only one director. Jimmy Burrows has been known to do every single episode of some shows. I understand that. I don’t know that I’d want to do every single episode of any show, just because I think it’s really hard to do—but to have a show that you do regularly is certainly preferable because you know everybody. I’ve spent a whole lot of time and energy learning peoples’ names, for instance. You want to know the actors and the camera crew so it becomes a comfortable and communal experience, and you can get the work done more easily when you know all the players involved.

If you do one episode of a show and get to know everyone, that seems like a lot of work if you won’t come back again for a second or third episode.
Yes, I got to the point where I would say through my agent that I really don’t like doing just one episode of a show, because you feel a little bit like a substitute teacher. If a cast and crew know that you’re going to be there for a while, then you’re perceived differently. If they know that you’re just going to be there for one week, then they don’t really have to pay all that much attention to anything you say.

Why would that be preferable, to have a different director every week?
I don’t know. I don’t think it’s wise. I can understand if a show is new and rotating directors at the beginning to find out where the chemistry is right. That makes sense to me. But at a certain point, I think most shows settle into a rotation of four or five directors who do all or most of the shows. It’s pretty rare once a show goes past the first cycle of thirteen that they would have a different director every week.

What personality traits do you think someone needs to have to succeed directing half-hour shows?
Well, number one, you have to love the form. You have to love sitcoms. If you’re more drawn to hour shows, go and do that. You have to really celebrate the half-hour form. And I would say, really learn how to work with actors. Because as I’ve said, I think that’s your primary responsibility. And know dramatic literature, know structure, know what makes a story work. I don’t think coming up through the theater is at all a bad way to establish yourself as a television director, because it gives you the skill of storytelling. There’s no better preparation, I believe, for telling stories in television than learning how to do it working in the theater.

And unless you’re the resident director on the show, as I was with Girlfriends or Jimmy Burrows on his shows, if you’re going to be a guest director, you really have to have flexibility. You have to have the ability to listen, and you have to understand psychology—the nature and personalities of the people involved. And you have to get there very quickly.

For the most part, have you only directed shows in Los Angeles? So you’re able to go to work and then go home to dinner and over to the theater?
Fortunately, yeah. I did one show in Atlanta and one in New York, but everything else that I did in television was shot here in Los Angeles. That was the only thing that allowed me to have the dual career—because the theater was here in Pasadena. I could never have done that if my theater had been located in Chicago or New York.

So you’re retiring from The Pasadena Playhouse at the end of the 2016/2017 season. What are your plans after that?
Honestly, I don’t know. It’s not a decision I made because I’m planning to move on to something else specifically. I have some stories to tell about my time working in the theater and television, which maybe I’ll put into book form. But more than anything, I’m just leaving the door open for the universe to let me know what’s next.

Is that something that you’ve always done? Are you someone who typically let’s things happen? Or do you move purposefully toward something?
That’s a good question. I think I’ve been willing to leave myself open to possibilities, even if that meant making a change and not knowing what was next. I was lucky to be at The Old Globe Theatre in San Diego before I came here under a grant, and I had the opportunity after that grant was up to either stay there or move on. I decided to move on. Most people think I had the job at The Pasadena Playhouse when I made that decision, but I didn’t. So it was having faith that the right thing would come along, and that’s been something that has played out well in my career.

Interesting. I can imagine that some people might look at that as a risk, though—right?
Right, and I don’t think of it as risk as much as just opening the door to other opportunities. If you don’t open that door, there’s no possibility that those opportunities can come in. Risk is always there. That’s true in all great art. But if you don’t take a chance on failing, you’ll never be great. That’s just part of making a life in the arts. If you jump off a cliff, yes, you can fall. But you can never fly unless you take the leap.

Were you always able to understand and respond to that—recognizing that you need to be willing to embrace the possibility of failure?
I guess I’ve always had a reckless nature in that regard, or just faith—that would be another way to put it. I’ve always had the faith that if I make a choice to move on from a place or to shake things up, that good things can happen. And fortunately, that’s been the course of my life—when I made those choices, good things have emerged.

Has there ever been a time when making a choice to shake things up resulted in failure, making you question the choice you made?
No. There are things that don’t turn out as you hoped, but they teach you something, and hopefully that knowledge is something that you use in the next leg of your journey.

So you have the ability to reflect practically, to not get too emotional.
Yes, and I’ve never had a long stretch where I wasn’t working on something that I really enjoyed that wasn’t artistically and even economically profitable. I’ve had the privilege and the pleasure to be able to reflect that way, I suppose. I understand that not everybody does, but I’ve had the good fortune to be able to think in that way.

Good fortune, but in some ways, you do make your own fortune.
Right. That’s very true.