Feedback: A Directors’ and Playwrights’ Forum

Certain sounds may be dictated in a production as early as the playwright’s first draft of a script. As he develops his concept, a director may hear sounds he feels are necessary to the production. Both playwright and director hear the call of sound, and respond by incorporating it into their work in the many ways their craft and unique personalities allow. Theirs will be primary voices in your sound design, so consider their perceptions well.

The following section involves directors and playwrights focusing on sound—its conception and design, and its impact on their work in today’s theatre. Their views were gathered in either personal or phone interviews or in written responses to specific sets of questions designed to reveal their philosophies on the use of sound. The authors extended the privilege of choosing which questions to consider to the individual respondent.

Since the first edition of this book was published in 1992, in the interest of updating the forum, we have added some new contributors and retired some as well. The very talented Gerald Gutierrez passed away in 2003 and we have kept his responses here intact. They are timeless, and we remember him and his important, creative voice as a director.

THE DIRECTORS

Joe Brancato is the Founder and Artistic Director of the Penguin Repertory Company, a professional theatre that has been dedicated to developing new works for over 30 years. The New York Times has called him “one of America’s most insightful directors.” Productions in NYC include Tryst (Outer Critic’s Nominee, Best Play); Cobb (Drama Desk winner), produced by Kevin Spacey at the Lucille Lortel Theatre and coproduced by Mr. Spacey and Garry Marshall in Los Angeles; Door To Door ; Escape from Happiness (starring Marsha Mason); One Shot One Kill ; The Big Swing (starring Madeline Kahn, Sarah Jessica Parker, Matthew Broderick, Marisa Tomei); and Dr. Valentine’s Waltz (starring John Turturro, Laura Linney, Gina Gershon, Jane Alexander) at Naked Angels. Regional credits include Seattle Rep, Williamstown Theatre Festival, Houston’s Alley Theatre, Hartford Stage Company, Westport Playhouse, Capital Rep, Boston’s New Rep, Hartford Theatreworks, and Florida Stage.

Roger T. Danforth has extensive credits as a director, producer, administrator, and educator. He has been the artistic director of the Drama League Directors Project since 1996. Prior to this he spent seven years at Cleveland Play House as resident director and associate producer, and as the acting artistic director of the 1994–95 season.

Best known as a playwright, Athol Fugard is also a director and actor. He has been seen onstage in South Africa, London, and on Broadway, off-Broadway, and in regional theatres in this country. His plays are regularly produced and have won many awards, and some have been filmed. Fugard made his directorial debut in 1992 with the film version of The Road to Mecca. In 2006, the film Tsotsi, based on his novel of that name, won an Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film. Other well-known plays of his include The Blood Knot, Boesman and Lena and Master Harold … and the Boys, A Lesson From Aloes, and My Children! My Africa!

A Juilliard graduate, Gerald Gutierrez was an Associate Director of the Lincoln Center Theatre. He directed plays by David Mamet, Peter Parnell, Ted Tally, and Wendy Wasserstein in New York. He twice won Broadway’s Tony Award as Best Director (Play), in 1995 for a revival of The Heiress and again in 1996, for a revival of Edward Albee’s A Delicate Balance. He was also nominated in the same category in 1994 for a revival of Robert E. Sherwood’s Abe Lincoln in Illinois.

Des McAnuff is Artistic Director of the Stratford Shakespeare Festival in Stratford, Canada, and Director Emeritus of La Jolla Playhouse, where he was Artistic Director from 1983 to 1994 and 2001 to 2007. His production of Jersey Boys received four Tony awards, including Best Production in 2006, and he has received Tony Awards for his direction of The Who’s TOMMY and Big River.

Artistic Director Emeritus of the Old Globe Theatre, Jack O’Brien has staged productions on Broadway, in the West End, and regionally. O’Brien directed the London production of Hairspray, which won the 2008 Olivier Award for Best Musical after being nominated for an unprecedented eleven awards, including Best Director. He was the recipient of the 2007 Tony Award for Best Direction of a Play for his work on Tom Stoppard’s trilogy The Coast of Utopia. In addition to garnering consecutive Tony Awards for his direction of the acclaimed Broadway productions of Henry IV (2004) and Hairspray (2003), O’Brien received the 2002 “Mr. Abbott” Award from the Stage Directors and Choreographers Foundation, one of the country’s most prestigious directorial honors. He also received the 2001 Drama Desk Award and a Tony Award nomination for his direction of Tom Stoppard’s The Invention of Love. Notably, he was also nominated for the Tony for Dirty Rotten Scoundrels and The Full Monty. O’Brien was inducted into the Theatre Hall of Fame in 2008.

Tazewell Thompson is a theatre and opera director, as well as a playwright and an actor. His play Constant Star has had more than a dozen productions in regional theatres throughout the United States. He has been commissioned to write plays for Lincoln Center Theatre, Arena Stage, South Coast Rep, and Peoples Light & Theatre Company.

Jerry Zaks has directed more than thirty productions in New York, on Broadway, including Chazz Palminteri’s A Bronx Tale, The Caine Mutiny Court Marshal, Little Shop of Horrors, The Man Who Came to Dinner, The Front Page, Laughter on the 23^rd> Floor, Assassins (Drama Desk nomination), Sister Mary Ignatius …, and Beyond Therapy, and received Tony Awards for Guys and Dolls, Six Degrees of Separation, Lend Me a Tenor, House of Blue Leaves, and La Cage aux Folles. He was nominated for the Tony for A Funny Thing…Forum, Smokey Joe’s Caf é, and Anything Goes. He received the Obie for The Foreigner and The Marriage of Bette and Boo. In London, he directed The Philadelphia Story at the Old Vic, starring Kevin Spacey. Mr. Zaks served as resident director at Lincoln Center Theatre from 1986 to 1990 and is a founding member of the Ensemble Studio Theatre. He was the recipient of the SSDC’s George Abbott Award for Lifetime Achievement in the Theatre in 1994.

THE PLAYWRIGHTS

Michael John Graces is the Artistic Director of Cornerstone Theatre Company in Los Angeles. He has directed and written plays in New York and regionally. Michael is the recipient of the Princess Grace Statue Award and the Alan Schneider Director Award and is proud to be a resident playwright at New Dramatists.

Amlin Gray’s plays, eight published in acting editions by Dramatists Play Service, include the Obie-winning How I Got That Story. He has translated and adapted plays from German, Spanish, and Ancient Greek, and has worked extensively as dramaturge, both staff and freelance.

Philip Kan Gotanda has been a major influence in the broadening of our definition of theatre in America. Through his plays and advocacy, he has been instrumental in bringing stories of Asians in the United States to mainstream American theatre as well as Europe and Asia. Over the last three decades he has created one of the largest Asian American-themed bodies of work. He is also a respected independent filmmaker.

Wendy Kesselman’s plays include the Broadway production of The Diary of Anne Frank, My Sister in This House, The Foggy Foggy Dew, The Notebook, I Love You, I Love You Not, The Juniper Tree, A Tragic Household Tale, Becca, Maggie Magalita, Merry-Go-Round, The Executioner’s Daughter, and a musical adaptation of A Tale of Two Cities and The Black Monk, A Chamber Musical.

In addition to his plays, Missing Persons, Reckless, and Three Postcards, Craig Lucas worked with his longtime collaborator, director Norman Ren é, on three films: Blue Window, Prelude to a Kiss, and Longtime Companion.

Eric Overmyer has been affiliated with Playwrights Horizons and Baltimore’s Center Stage, and has also written for network television. His best-known play is On the Verge, or, The Geography of Yearning. Other plays include Dark Rapture, Native Speech, The Heliotrope Bouquet by Scott Joplin & Louis Chauvin, In Perpetuity Throughout the Universe, and In a Pig’s Valise.

DIRECTORS’ QUESTIONS

What do you perceive as the most important function of sound as a design element of theatre art?

DES M: Sound has to be considered equally with the other design disciplines, and I think we’re finally reaching a point where that’s beginning to be the case. The theatre was just as slow to recognize lighting’s vital role. For a long time, lighting designers were thought of more as technicians and not as real designers. They weren’t considered of the same importance as scenic and costume designers. The key idea to recognize here is that sound and controlled sound plays a large role in our cultural vocabulary. It is a critical aspect of live performance. I don’t think sound should just play a role where it is aiding in the creation of verisimilitude, like car doors slamming. It’s important that sound design works creatively and abstractly in the theatre whenever it’s appropriate. I believe sound should accompany the human voice. I don’t think we should be shy about sound as underscoring, because all of the audio elements are truly wondrous and should routinely be considered part of our palette.

When lighting instruments were first invented, I’m sure people were horrified at the notion of using electric light because it was so unnatural. I’m sure this was also true when they dragged candles onto the stage, when theatre moved indoors and stages were lit with candlelight. Actors were outraged—they insisted that theatre was meant to be played under the open sky. Basically, the theatre is a reactionary art form, and there’s always going to be great resistance to technology. Also, in this age, actors spend so much time in the mechanically reproduced mediums where they are dealing with technology all the time—technology that’s out of their control—that there’s a substantial amount of resistance to making use of technology in the theatre because of the times we’re living in. This is understandable. But I think it’s important to press on and do it, nonetheless.

TAZEWELL T: In the ninth grade, I was extraordinarily lucky to have a truly inspirational teacher: Daisy Aldan. A published poet and editor, she would bring great writers to read to our class: Allen Ginsberg, Anais Nin, Norman Mailer, John Ashberry, Kenneth Koch, Storm DeHirsch, etc. I was struck by how each individual writer chose specific words not only for their meaning but for the aural impact they had. Each had a distinct vocal style and dimension that they employed to great and sometimes exaggerated effect to communicate with and engage their audience. From these experiences, I discovered the often symbiotic relationship of the printed word and the human voice/sound giving life to the word. As a child, Ms. Aldan was a cast member of the radio program Let’s Pretend, a series of weekly radio plays. She invited this program’s sound effects person to recreate for the class the live sound effects that were used over the years for the radio show. He also gave us a seminar on how far back sound effects were used for story telling. For example, sounds created by slapping the human body with one’s hands; different formations of the mouth to create varied effects; the rattling of bones; twirling sticks in the air to mimic wind sounds; etc. For the months that followed his visit we were assigned the challenge to write a short play that boldly emphasized the use of sound. No recordings were allowed. This is the earliest and favorite memory I have of the function of sound in the theatre. Of course, I went on to become the “sound man” for the school productions. Remember the days of cutting reel-to-reel tape with a razor blade and slicing it on a small contraption?

For me, sound is equal partner with set, costume, and lighting design. It serves multiple purposes in advancing the narrative of the play: setting the atmosphere, place and emotional tone of the work.

ROGER D: The more I direct, the more I’m convinced that sound is one of the most crucial elements of a production. It is absolutely essential in helping me set the right mood, intention, ambiance, and emotional values in a scene. Sound is often the first design element to bring us into the events onstage, it sustains the event during blackouts and scene shifts, and it’s often used to bring the conclusion to its full ripeness. As an audience member, though, I often feel the sound is setting a mood or tone not shown by the rest of the work on stage.

ATHOL F: Sound should function in much the same way as the other design elements—supportive of the final statement of the play. My concept of theatre is to subordinate everything to the play—to serve the play, to convey its message, its story.

JOE B: Film is art. TV is furniture. Theatre is life. We live in a soundscape—let theatre reflect that life.

JACK O: Sound is playing a more important function all the time. First of all, our ears are more sophisticated. People constantly walk around with little earphones and little speakers in their ears, in cars, on the golf course, at the gym, at the supermarket. If the individual theatre is well equipped, then you can do lots of interesting things. But like any other element, sound should never become self-conscious and done for its own sake.

JERRY Z: To enhance the production with sound that is music, effects to make the storytelling as successful as possible. Amplification of the human voice, used discreetly and effectively so all the audience can hear are the actors and so they feel that their voices are coming from their bodies, not the speakers.

When you begin a new production, how are the ideas for sound and music usually generated? Do you look to your sound designer or composer to offer suggestions for concept? Do you usually have preconceived ideas?

TAZEWELL T: Both. From the moment I read a play I develop a feeling, an instinct, from what I feel the playwright is telling me. Some playwrights have very specific instructions for what is required to tell their story. Even still, within these parameters, I allow my imagination and impulses to guide me, at times even sweep me away.

I make detailed notes in the margins or on a separate pad. I am currently preparing my work for a production of Sweet Bird of Youth that begins rehearsal nine months hence. On the first page of dialogue, as a character is opening the window shutters in a hotel suite, Williams writes, “we hear the cry of birds.” Then the bellboy, responding to the question “I didn’t know it was Sunday,” says “It is Easter Sunday morning. The bells are from the Catholic church and the singing is from the Protestant church.” So here sound brings us to a specific time, place, and atmosphere. While I am excavating the script my sound designer and composer (usually Fabian Obispo, with whom I have collaborated on countless productions) is already responding with a list of his own ideas and thoughts about the play. We then continue to have open-ended discussions about how to proceed with the creative execution of the project.

JOE B: If the script has indicated playwright preferences, that is my first source to just “get on the same page” with the playwright’s intentions—if there is no indication of sound, the ride is far more joyous from the outset and the collaborative meetings with the sound designer will take us to places that neither the sound designer nor I could anticipate.

ROGER D: I usually have a “sense” of how a production should look and feel. When I’m not sure, I’m still pretty positive about what I don’t want. I always rely on all my designers to help me find and/or hone a vision for a play. Even the ones for which I have very strong images or sound ideas. In fact, I’ve never done a play without finding and using many ideas I’d never thought of until a designer suggested them to me. That’s their job and that’s why I want to work with good designers—to help us all realize the writer’s words and images to the fullest extent possible.

JACK O: First of all, if it’s classical, I look immediately in the script for what is indicated in terms of sound effects. Or in a modern script, what the script itself says or what is asked for. And I may or may not decide that I want to have music. Actually, it is rare for me not to have music in a classical play—transitions are so much easier when cushioned by imaginative sound. As a relationship evolves with a sound designer I trust more and more for him to come up with things on his or her own. In the case where lots of sound has to be pulled, I don’t usually even screen the ideas. I just sort of plug them in, and if I have an adverse reaction to them, then we discuss it. But I assume that my sound designer, like my costume designer and my set designer, is bringing a point of view with individual ideas and feelings to the sessions, so I need to hear from that. I may ask for a specific idea based on a concept I have myself, but I’m also very often receptive to the ideas of the designer I’m working with.

ATHOL F: In Master Harold … and the Boys there are very specific stage directions about a jukebox, which plays a very specific piece of music at the end of the play. But then also, over and above that, is this idea that sound can be a major dramatic device in terms of underscoring or highlighting the action of the play. The sound designer is usually the best person to lead me to see those possibilities. The designer comes along and says to me, “Well, you know there is this moment, there’s that moment, and then there is also this moment, and would you like me to try and show you what I think can be done with those moments?” Starting with that sort of a dialogue developing, we end up with a sound design for the play.

DES M: If I really know somebody well, I might first want to get his intuitive or creative responses to the piece. And I might want this uncluttered by any ideas from me. But I think that most of the time, the sound and music concepts come out of a series of discussions with the designer and composer.

What I generally like to do is talk about the reasons that I am doing the play and the qualities that are important to me about the play, and perhaps the ideas that pertain to a particular situation or event in our lives and times—something to do with our own world. That’s vitally important to me. And I like to start talking about the content and the themes of the play and how they apply. Hopefully, thoughts then develop—thoughts about sounds.

I like the sound designer and composer in the room working with the actors. Sometimes a concept evolves over the first several weeks of the rehearsal process. Frankly, I prefer to work as we go, even if we already have a battle plan. After we work through the play, we can go back and sketch out a more formal plan and talk through it.

GERALD G: Sound has always been a very big element of my preproduction planning. I can’t recall a production I’ve done that didn’t use some sound design elements. The sound designers I work with, I work with a lot. When one of them reads the script, he knows the way I work and the kind of things I look for and want. By the time we come to our first face-to-face meeting, he has a whole list of things that either corroborate what I’ve thought of ahead of time or are things that I may never have thought of before.

JERRY Z: In early meetings with designers, compare script notes. I have preconceived ideas but I’d be stupid not to listen to their suggestions. The number of times my ideas have been improved upon by sound designers is far too numerous to list!

When did you start thinking of sound as a design concept? How did you happen to begin working with a sound designer?

JOE B: My experience of entertainment frankly was as a child watching films, never entering a professional theatre until I was 12, so of course everything had a score to it in my mind’s eye.

GERALD G: A lot of what I think about the theatre is a direct result of how I was trained for it. And also the fact that I grew up in New York. As a high school student, I would cut classes just to go to matinees. It was in the era of the APA-Phoenix, and I remember thinking that when I grew up, I wanted to be a member of this company. Ellis Rabb always used a lot of music in his plays and he underscored his work, and so my point of view about the use of underscoring came out of the fact that I was a teenager sitting in these theatres, being swept away by the emotional possibilities of sound.

DES M: I started with musicals. So my first work was starting back when I was a youngster with Hair. Then I wrote a musical when I was in my late teens, which was a very precocious thing to do. I think that is when I first learned about sound reinforcement and what music and underscoring could do under scenes.

I can remember when I was about nineteen or twenty watching a sound designer named Bill Fontana work in Toronto—a brilliant guy, a composer as well as a sound designer. And it was impossible to cue him, because all his work was improvisational, although you’d never know it in performance. It always felt like the sound was cued, because Bill’s cues were going off somewhere in his head. No stage manager was calling them—no stage manager would dare. But Bill did remarkable things with sound. Once he taped the live actors’ voices on several machines and then funneled them all into a loop on one machine so that at a certain point late in the performance of this particularly terrifying play called The End, these voices would suddenly build slowly and eerily and finally sound like a strange human siren going off. It was completely unnerving—you’d want to run screaming from the theatre. He would do staggering things with cymbals, bells, bottles, chimes, gongs—you name it—as well as with tape. I think he was a definite inspiration for me to use sound in the theatre I’ve done.

From the time I was first writing and directing, I think there’s always been somebody responsible for sound and often for music, too. I can’t think of any production I’ve ever done that didn’t involve sound on some level.

TAZEWELL T: From my earliest childhood memories, I have always been super sensitive to sound to the point where now, in my adulthood, I live with a strange and sometimes debilitating dichotomy: the slightest sound will wake me from a deep sleep and yet, I cannot fall asleep in a quiet environment. I must have the sound of voices from a radio or recording in my room. So it just seems a natural progression that sound and music design would always play a major role throughout my career as a director and writer. I cannot remember a production that I worked on in which sound and music were not integral on some level to the storytelling.

ATHOL F: I think my most important sense of sound was when I came to doing a play of mine called A Place with the Pigs, which was not all that long ago. It is the story of a man in a pigsty. The play is a mixture of realism and fantasy, and the fantastic elements involved an extraordinary use of the designer David Budries, who is associated with Yale Repertory Theatre. I don’t know how to describe the actual technology, but he ended up getting pigs to sing the Russian national anthem and the Volga Boat Song—things like that. It was really an extraordinary bit of work. I think that’s when I first really appreciated the huge contribution that sound design can make to a production.

ROGER D: I first really took sound design seriously when a designer (Miss Kaye, in fact) designed a show I was directing. She brought me so much wonderful music from the period that it sparked all sorts of ideas in my head about different ways to use it—not just as entry and exit music for scenes, but how to incorporate it into the fabric of the show. That taught me to bring designers into my directing process earlier, so that I could build their ideas and suggestions into the style and tone of the production.

JACK O: I’ve thought of music a lot, but it was in mid-career at the Globe that I realized music was going to be part of the overall concept of the design. Before, if the sound designer didn’t like the levels or wanted to rerecord a cue, I respected it, but didn’t know how to take advantage of it. Now I’m eager to. Beginning to work with a sound designer had to do with the fact that I needed music in my productions and the musicians inevitably had somebody that they wanted to help augment their work. First it was a technician, and then suddenly there was the sound operator. After the sound operator was not sufficient, or more sound or sound effects were required, a sound designer evolved.

In what ways do you like to be involved with the developmental aspects of the sound design to be used in your productions?

JACK O: If I know the work of the designer, I don’t want to be involved at all. I want the designer to just do it. And then I want to respond to it. If you hear two sound cues that your designer is doing, you can tell whether they’re on the right track or not. If they are, you let them go. If they aren’t, you have another talk. So I would prefer, in the best of all possible worlds, to hear the sound in technical rehearsal as we set the levels. But quite frankly, that usually isn’t the case, and I just need to be checked with as the design takes form.

JERRY Z: When I first began directing in larger spaces. The sound of the actors had to be sweetened in order for the audience to hear and understand what they were saying. I first started working with a sound designer off-Broadway. My interest was more about specific sound effects that the sound designer could come up with to help punctuate or underscore moments in the play. I’d make suggestions to Guy Sherman, my first sound designer, and he’d bring back a tape of possibilities.

TAZEWELL T: When I am working on a play, I listen to music from the period of the play or music that connects me, involves me, inspires me, and takes me deep into the play. Sometimes this music or related music consciously or unconsciously will find its way into the production. Most of the time, I will let the composer know what I have been listening to and this will inspire/influence him in his work. There is constant communication through phone calls, emails as well as in-person meetings. I encourage the sound designer/composer to attend as many rehearsals as possible. Our collaboration is thorough and unending.

JOE B: For the first ten years of my professional career I designed every sound cue that I used on a reel to reel (does anyone remember that?) so my first collaboration with a professional, outside designer was a gift from heaven, in that now I had a partner in creating the soundscape for a project. Now my enthusiasm is piqued awaiting what a good designer brings to the table on their own. So I guess I have grown in my sense of trust over the years.

GERALD G: Because I also trained as a musician, I’m able to communicate with my sound designers in terms of the music. They can understand what I’m looking for musically. I also involve myself in the placement of the sound effect, the level at which it’s set, and what speakers it comes from. This is all extremely important to me. It all relates. It’s like lighting—all very subtle, but an important element of the production.

DES M: I like to spend lots of time listening. When I worked with the designers on Macbeth, Eric Drew Feldman and Stephen LeGrand, we spent a lot of time together at their studio just listening to all of the elements they were working with. In that case, we worked with a number of themes that were suggested by the play itself—doors knocking, birds screeching, the horns and drums of battle. So basically, we created a kind of nightmarish, abstracted universe out of textual suggestions, and we worked with all the wonders you can create with sampled sound.

I had worked previously with Harry Somers, the Canadian composer, on that same play. Harry combined wind and string instruments with natural sounds that he had recorded in a variety of locations, including the Arctic. We used those natural sounds as a foundation for the Canadian production, but then turned them berserk—thereby capturing the rebellion of nature that goes with Macbeth’s descent into eternal night.

ROGER D: I like to talk with a designer about the moods and images a play conjures up to me. I also love for them to watch as much of rehearsal as their schedule allows. I hate to have a design meeting or two and never see the person again until tech. That’s not a collaboration. That’s just treating your designers, and having them treat you, like a gun for hire. I want them to get turned on by my work, have that spark their creative juices, so that they bring me suggestions for music and their own exciting ideas.

ATHOL F: I like to listen to the designer’s ideas. I like to define an idea and a concept with a designer. Then I like the designer to go away and to come back to me with one or several examples of that concept, roughly realized. In other words, he should come back, as it were, with sketches, in much the same way that the scene designers or the costume designers do. Then we look at those sketches and start a dialogue based on them, making choices and slowly refining and becoming more specific about the direction we are going in. I find it enormously useful to incorporate rough ideas on tape in the actual rehearsal process. That helps me test the validity of the sound ideas.

JERRY Z: From the beginning—in every possible way. I don’t like surprises. I look forward to generating ideas with the designer. I like to create the design prior to going into tech.

What pointers have you found helpful in achieving an effective working relationship with sound designers or composers?

JOE B: To meet and discuss my intentions/goals for the ultimate emotional journey of the play; make that clear to the designer and then allow the designer to feel that any choice can be brought to the table and considered.

TAZEWELL T: There are no set rules. Some designers like to be told exactly what I desire. Others prefer communication in more abstract terms. Still others want to surprise me by bringing ideas to the table before any discussions are had. I think it is important to be open and feel out the personality and the work habits of the designer that you are sometimes given. You are not always allowed to choose. It can be like a blind date. If things work out, you have begun a new relationship. And listen. Listening to each other is critical.

ATHOL F: There are absolutely no rules. These are intensely personal relationships that depend on the personalities of the two people involved. Some designers like to do a lot of talking. Some like to do a lot of listening. Some designers like to do nothing of either and just get on with the job.

JACK O: The way we relate to our husbands, wives, lovers, dogs, family is the way we relate to each other as professionals. I think that mutual respect and mutual consideration are the two most important elements of any healthy collaboration. You have to feel that you are being listened to, you have to feel that you can listen. I have found, over the years, the wisdom of having one set of personal rules for everyone!

GERALD G: It’s the same to achieve a good working relationship with any colleague. You have to respect and trust in their talents and abilities to bring you things you never thought of, or to build on your ideas. I think that’s the biggest thing—trust and respect for the designer as a contributing artist.

ROGER D: If you don’t like an idea, don’t just say “No!” Explain why not. Support your positions—not with mindless defenses—but with explanations of how ideas came to you. But be willing and happy to entertain better ideas, from whomever they come. Also, don’t abandon your gut feeling for something, even if it’s not working out right. Share this feeling. Invite your designer into your innermost thoughts. Their talents can help you make it work if it’s a worthy idea. Share and Trust—the key words.

DES M: I think it’s important to include a composer and sound designer in every stage of development of a project. You can create a relationship simply by inviting your colleagues to participate in the entire process. The most important way to develop a relationship is to spend lots of time together.

JERRY Z: Listen to what they have to say. Try to be as specific as possible when making suggestions to them. Try to articulate the effect or mood you’re looking for.

When using sound in a production, do you rely on it more as a tool to relay information, or as part of the emotional palette to set the mood?

TAZEWELL T: For me, it is ideal when it provides information as well as mood and ambiance. Whatever the play demands. The primary source should be emotional.

JOE B: Emotional palette. I hate off-stage toilet flushes….

JACK O: Both, frankly. In classical plays, sound can swiftly change locations for the scenes being acted, or in highly or complicatedly emotional landscapes, help the actor woo the audience. These are different techniques for different situations.

DES M: I use sound to create an ambiance or a mood more than anything else. It’s often not one ambiance for a whole act, but rather something very specific, more moment to moment, shifting and evolving with the action. And there are certain things I don’t like to do. I generally don’t like to foreshadow with sound. In other words, I wouldn’t want the sound to change a beat before an actor did. I prefer the sound to respond to actors, which is why I prefer working with MIDI or multiple tape decks. But I also think there are some wonderful things about samplers and working with live players and keyboards. The technician and the person who is running the show can breathe with the actors much more.

In A Walk in the Woods, Michael Roth and Tom Clark miked the actors very subtly and changed the instrumentation from act to act. The second act, for example, used strings, autumn sounds. The first act was flutes and recorders, woodwinds. The third act was completely silent, and we turned the microphones off for that and got a much flatter sound—the kind of sound you get on a cold day. It was a sneaky, subtle little thing. In that case, I would say the ambiance was created partially by the instrumentation in each act, in each scene. We also had a number of layers of sounds. There were particular kinds of bird sounds as ambiance, and then we also had all kinds of specific bird cues which went with cues where we would drop a single leaf. In a sense, we had created this white box and orchestrated nature, spanning four seasons over two hours. Most people never noticed how specifically all of that was controlled. We could subtly play on people’s emotions. A leaf dropping at a precise point could heighten and bring meaning to a particular moment. It was an attempt to create a kind of poetry. Sound became a part of that poetry. And sound should be dealt with as that kind of tool or instrument. It’s not just something that arbitrarily imitates nature, or that occurs because it’s simply mentioned in the text.

ROGER D: Sound provides both mood and information, depending on the need. I will say that I use and like it much more to set an emotional mood, since usually I want plays I direct to work first on the emotions of an audience.

GERALD G: Sometimes the sound will tell you place, time, temperature, or time of day. For instance, chickens cluck a different way at the end of the day than at the beginning. Everything clearly comes from the page. Some places in the text demand sound to underscore or heighten a mood. Directors have to know where and how to make that happen.

ATHOL F: Sometimes sound relays information. Sometimes it’s just a requirement. Somebody puts a coin in a jukebox and there’s got to be a piece of music. There is nothing that you can do about that. But then sometimes a sound design can both create and pass on information about a situation of deep and dangerous social unrest but at the same time work as an emotional underscoring of the moment.

I did a production of A Lesson from Aloes in which I used only a little brushstroke of sound [a radio] at the start of each act. But I could have just as easily not had that. I don’t think my production would have been severely diminished. In other words, I directed a play in which I used just the spoken word and silence.

JERRY Z: Both. This is not an either/or question and it’s a dangerously academic distinction. Sound creates mood. Sometimes it relays information. The gun shot that unexpectedly goes off at the end of A Bronx Tale startles the audience but it also relays the information that someone’s been shot.

Have you miked performers for reasons other than amplification? If so, what effect was desired, and did miking serve the purpose?

JOE B: No. Only to enhance and “sweeten” the voice.

GERALD G: I did a wonderful Trinidadian play called Meetings by Mustapha Matura. It is a three-character play that takes place in a kitchen. An upwardly mobile couple hires this peasant girl from the country to cook for them. It was breathtaking and theatrical and ended in a bloodbath. For practical and dramatic reasons, I wanted to show the girl actually cooking. I had her come out between scenes and prepare the food onstage. The smells permeated the theatre and it was very exciting. I wanted to find a way to further heighten all this. There was one dish she prepared where she would have to slice an onion. We developed a way to mike the cutting board with a surface mike. Right before she started to slice the onion, we brought the level up very high. You heard the slice of the serrated knife through the onion, and it was really spectacular. We had to take the level down when she chopped, so that it wouldn’t be deafening. But every time she sliced a tomato or potato, we heightened the sound, so that the audience was hearing this sensual, visceral aspect. It was great. Sound can focus and heighten anything you want in the theatre.

TAZEWELL T: For the play On the Verge, an extremely literate play where the words played a pivotal role in the storytelling. In fact, words, their usage and invention and how they sounded next to each other, were a key spine of the play, and if lost in performance, would undermine the production of the play. At Arena Stage, where the audience surrounds the actors, and of necessity some scenes were played with the actors’ backs to a section of the audience for lengthy periods of time, the use of body mikes to enhance and support the consonants and vowels worked beautifully. I have also used miking to distort voices in productions of A Christmas Carol, Macbeth, The Tempest, Cymbeline, and for the voice of God in my own play Constant Star.

DES M: I love reinforcing voices when no one in the audience knows we’re doing it. The voice can be slightly exaggerated to become larger, deeper, and more resonant—larger than life. And no one really notices that the performer is miked. I did this for a production of Three Sisters. We used very subtle miking which gave Olga an otherworldly, slightly unnatural quality in her opening speech. I think this is a wonderful effect, particularly when you use it for just one character. You can sometimes create a little more distance, or cool down the voice just a bit. All of these uses can be very valuable.

ROGER D: I have not personally used mikes in that way, although at the Cleveland Play House I remember we once miked two characters who were ghosts to give them an “other-world” quality. Personally I was not very satisfied with this, though I am not sure if it was because it was not the right thing for the moment, or if it was not executed well.

ATHOL F: At the end of Act I of My Children! My Africa!, a microphone was directed at an actor at the climax to a long monologue. The image I wanted to create was a political rally. In the course of the monologue, the atmosphere, the quality of the moment, had changed from something very personal and intimate to something very big, wide, and open. I think the use of a microphone at that critical moment, at that climax, in order to amplify his voice, and the African chant that he came out with, achieved that effect.

JACK O: When the ghost in Hamlet spoke, in my second (or was it third?) Hamlet, I wanted there to be some odd and intermittent reverberation of sound, yet not picked up by other actors in the scenes. This was very much a surprise. The audience was unable to predict when it was going to happen. Sometimes there was a hollowness in the ghost’s speech—a strangeness to the sound, and sometimes not. I thought it was spectacular.

What factors or problems may prevent you from achieving the sound design you want for a production? Conceptual differences? Substandard production of the effects or music? Other difficulties?

JOE B: Budgetary restrictions very often can constrain the effect you want but I have found that even the most basic equipment can be effective with a solid sound design.

GERALD G: Inevitably, problems happen when I work with somebody new. There’s a point in the preproduction planning where I have to force-feed a concept and then finally say the thing I hate to say, which is, “This is what I want.” I hate to do this because it’s door-slamming and negative. This problem usually relates to people from whom nothing much is demanded, sound designers who are in-house staff members and who look on my production as one of twelve that they do in a year. Usually, when they’re permanently employed by the theatre, they get lazy and really don’t give a damn. This happened to me on a production of Carousel at the Houston Opera. I wanted to do something that they’d never done before, which is to have sound effects in a musical—wind, the surf on rocks, and seagulls. I felt that these atmospheric things and echo and reverb would help tell the story. Not that the in-house guy fought me on it, but he really didn’t do it. The seagulls sounded more like pigeons, and the buoys clanging never really made it, so I started cutting cues, and before I knew it, I had cut all of them.

What I wanted to do was to heighten the storytelling. The problem with doing a musical like Carousel is that it comes with so much baggage. We’ve all seen the terrible movie or bad productions of it. You know Billy’s going to die because you’ve seen it before. But I thought that you could be involved and wrapped up and swept away in the story of this antihero, and that the sound would add to the element of suspense. The designer didn’t do it, and it was fine. But I lamented the loss of it.

ROGER D: Usually a lack of imagination on the designer’s part. I often have lots of feelings and images that I want a piece of music to fulfill. I hate it when a designer says, “Just tell me what piece you want.” If I really am certain, fine. But most of the time, I’m not. I don’t have all the answers. That’s why I hired a sound designer.

TAZEWELL T: Most sound designers want to know where the speakers are placed in the auditorium of the theatre. They want to know the size and the quality of the speakers. Then they want to know about the experience of the operator and technician. Other than that, perhaps I am unique in this, I have not had problems or difficulties in achieving the desired sound design. The key is having first-rate technical equipment and experienced operators/technicians and, most of all, a highly gifted, imaginative, and industrious designer capable of exploiting them to maximum effect. A designer that enjoys attending rehearsals as well as participating in numerous meetings and discussions so that by technical rehearsals she is fully prepared and on top of her game.

ATHOL F: There’s a danger that, because you are using a sound designer, you feel that there has got to be sound or a lot of sound.

DES M: Because I start working with sound in rehearsal, I very rarely find myself terribly dissatisfied with the result. If I don’t like a particular sequence or the way something is going, we can always change it. And so the chances are that on some level the sound is my creation, too. I’m responsible for it long before we get into the theatre. I get very few sound surprises in tech week. I have never been in a situation where I would reject an entire score. Ironically, that does sometimes happen with me with light. Because you can’t draw light. I have found that it’s possible to gel the show the wrong way.

One of the principles I have is that most of the time, the human voice is the solo, the melody. Therefore, sound becomes the bass line, the chords, or even the countermelody. But the melody is the human voice, for the most part.

I have learned that in a musical, you should always mike book scenes with wirelesses, never try to go back to foot mikes, because the book scene will recede psychologically, and dip. And it will anyway, because you’re reaching an emotional peak with the music. Underscoring can help tremendously that way if, once a song is finished, you raise the volume of the underscoring, or pick up the tempo, which is basically an elevation. You can actually boost into the book scene psychologically.

Sound is a very powerful element. You have to accept, as a director, that you do manipulate an audience whether you like it or not. Unless you’re doing something that is entirely improvisational, whatever planning you do is suggestive, if not manipulative, and I think that once you take responsibility for that, it is very liberating. You can do wonderful things to people psychologically and emotionally through carefully controlling sound.

Where you can get into trouble is when you start pushing actors into places they don’t want to go. For example, if you make an early decision that there’s an emotional peak three-quarters of the way through a speech and that the sound accompanies that speech in such a way that it forces the speech to peak at that moment, you may never give the actor a chance to change his mind—you may be stuck with that forever. So sometimes it’s important to anticipate where things may want to go and leave plenty of room for the actor. In other words, you try to avoid straitjacketing the performers by making dead-end choices. This is why I tend to like cues that are long slow fades. I don’t like to do things that will, say, take exactly twelve seconds. I like to allow for timing changes so that a show can breathe.

What scares a lot of people off is that they’re afraid they’ll get locked into a bunch of cues. I think it’s possible to design sound so this doesn’t happen, so that you have a lot of flexibility in performance. And in this day and age, there is much more live control than there once was. I’m sure it’s going to get better and better.

JACK O: Sound design doesn’t work if the speaker placement isn’t properly worked into the initial design. Most of my musical collaborators have said to me that I never used to look at where the speakers were going to go in the original design of the set, and I have taken that to heart. In the last several years, I have striven to rectify that omission.

JERRY Z: The only factors are not anticipating what we need. Budget has never been an issue. There has always been enough for necessary sound design.

Please describe a moment from a specific production of yours in which the sound design was most useful or magical.

JOE B: Every tenth production you are lucky enough to find a sound conceit, song, or artist that not only illustrates but enhances your intentions. Such was the case in a recent production of mine, Lyle Kessler’s Orphans—the use of musical selections by Tom Waits embossed every intention of the director and designers—enhancing every element of the play.

GERALD G: I remember an effect for a play called Geniuses by Jonathan Reynolds that took place in the Philippines. There was water onstage and a lot of special effects. A typhoon hits very suddenly, and there’s an attempt by helicopters to rescue people out of their hut. We had a series of speakers hanging over the ceiling only for the helicopter effect. The sound traveled from speaker to speaker. You really thought those helicopters were overhead. I loved it so much I used them again at the end of the play for a fadeout. It was a fabulous effect.

DES M: One wonderful bit of manipulation was in a production of Romeo and Juliet. I believed very much that the tragedy in the play falls on these two families and not on the two characters. When you first read the play you think, “My God, they die!” and then everyone comes on and they talk and they talk and they talk. Friar Lawrence goes through the whole story again. Well, as you study the play more carefully, you realize it is as much about greed and money and hatred as it is about the love between two young people. In my opinion, Friar Lawrence becomes the protagonist, the one who is driving the play, and then the ending starts making more sense as you realize that the tragedy really is falling on the families.

It’s amazing that I found, even in rehearsal, that I could watch these two young people die without having as much of an emotional reaction as I would have in the following scene. And I think that’s because you’re dealing with the horror of their death—there’s so many emotions going on at that moment—and you’re not really able to register the grief. To let yourself feel freely and completely, you need some distance from the moment. And Shakespeare is such a brilliant dramatist that he would know that, and he would know exactly how to pace himself emotionally through the poetry of that last scene.

Michael Roth’s whole score was in a minor key up until that scene. Well after the death of Romeo and Juliet, Capulet and Montague are pledging peace to each other. In our performance this was staged, not exactly cynically, but in a way that, hopefully, made the audience skeptical about whether or not this peace would come. It’s kind of absurd because they’ve both killed off their only living heir. So there’s this deeply sad, tremendously ironic scene. Capulet and Montague, even at this moment, can’t prevent “money” images from creeping into their speech. And during the last scene, this minor theme that we’d been hearing for two and a half hours suddenly went into a major key. There was an amazing emotional reaction and, literally, you would see the audience pulling out handkerchiefs and weeping inconsolably—even hardened old businessmen. It had a devastating emotional effect. It was a memorable audio moment. I had to smile in the back of the house, watching this happen.

ATHOL F: I would say that moment I’ve already described of Thami’s at the end of Act I in My Children! My Africa! The sound really lifted the climax of that act to a level that the actor by himself would have had difficulty achieving.

JACK O: I have to say I think the opening of Uncle Vanya was one of the most beautiful things of mine I’ve ever achieved on a stage. In worklight, an actress walked from the back of the theatre through the set. She pushed a samovar on the stage and as she did, a Chopin mazurka started. Simultaneously, the lights began to change to the most beautiful texture of light and sound on stage possible. That whole opening used to make me just ache with pleasure. For me, the blending together—initiating the theatrical moment, ushering in the play with music that invaded the audience’s ear exactly in the same proportion as the light began to change—was enormously pleasurable. On the dramatically opposite end of the spectrum, I would imagine I will never rival the individual or collective openings of the acts of The Coast of Utopia—the blending of all possible elements into an unimaginable landscape of water and characters will remain the standard for me for quite some time.

TAZEWELL T: In Black Star Line by Charles Smith, a play I directed for the Goodman Theatre, the character of Marcus Garvey was preparing to deliver a very important speech in front of an enormous crowd of his followers. Rather than a sound cue of audience hubbub and chatter, the sound designer, Fabian Obispo, and I decided that while the previous scene was fading away and Marcus Garvey was changing into his tie and tails in front of a three-paneled mirror that rolled on during the scene transition, we would use the sound of a huge orchestra tuning up before the arrival of the conductor. Although it was opposite to what was expected, the sound cue was chilling since Garvey saw himself as a Godlike figure (conductor) leading the masses.

However, the most challenging and ultimately the most rewarding solution of a sound “problem” occurred when I was the stage director for a new Glimmerglass Opera production of Francis Poulenc’s masterpiece, Dialogues of the Carmelites. The opera is based on a true historical event that takes place during the French Revolution’s Reign of Terror: Sixteen Carmelite nuns are sent to their deaths—martyred by guillotine—in the opera’s harrowing third act finale. In the concluding, unbearable moments of the opera, the nuns sing a simple, yet ecstatic Salve Regina while, one by one, their voices cease as the “thwack” of the guillotine’s blade repeatedly falls, frighteningly off the beat of the music. Every director and sound designer is confronted with the task of finding the sound of the off-stage blade of the guillotine that remains the most important directive-notation in Poulenc’s score. Sixteen times! After weeks of experimentation with all kinds of blades, axes, hatchets, various carpenter’s tools—including metal mallets smashing cantaloupes and a variety of melons—we discovered the perfect solution: a rather old and rusty metal paper cutter! It was placed in the orchestra pit after the second intermission next to a microphone that was carefully turned off and on in between “thwacks,” so as not to pick up and imbalance the sound of the orchestra between “beheadings.” The age and rust of the paper cutter blade created a realistic and horrific off-stage character, especially when amplified with a slight reverb. It brought gasps from the audiences. After the final, solo voice was silenced by the guillotine, there was a chilling silence. It was thrilling. This is why we do theatre.

ROGER D: In The Man Who Came to Dinner, I wanted a magical way to open the second act, when the huge Christmas tree is revealed for the first time. We had designed a beautiful show curtain, which was a blowup of a large Christmas greeting banner from Mesalia, Ohio, the play’s location. I asked my sound designer, Jeff Montgomerie, to look for a terrific version of a great Christmas song from the period. Somewhere he found an absolutely wonderful live Christmas Eve broadcast of a 1930s big band, complete with a fabulous intro from the band to “everyone out there in Radioland,” which then swung into “Jingle Bells.” Since Sheridan Whiteside, the main character, is a radio personality, it was the perfect piece of music, and so working with the sound and lighting designers together, we built a terrific opening of the act. In several steps, accompanied by the band intro, we gradually lit the room from behind the curtain, which revealed itself to be a scrim. First we had just the tree lights and the star, then the tree area (nestled in the turn of the grand staircase) warmed up to reveal the characters posed decorating the tree in silhouette, and finally light expanded into the entire room. Band intro segued into music—scrim out, characters moved, and dialogue! It was as magical as I had hoped, and got a huge round of applause every night. But as wonderful as this moment was, it all happened because my designer found a very special piece of music that ignited a whole bunch of staging ideas for me.

A totally different issue arose from a production of Lee Blessing’s Two Rooms, a harrowing play about a man being held by terrorists in Beirut, alone and blindfolded in an empty room. After reading it many, many times, I called my designer and said, “I don’t know what to say. Everytime I read this play, I hear No Sound. I’ve never felt that way about a play before. The main character is totally isolated from everyone and everything, so I keep hearing and feeling No Sound. Yet, if we don’t have sound, won’t audiences think we just forgot? How do we make No Sound seem like designed sound?” Tony Garfias, my designer, took it as a wonderful challenge, and our work together was very enjoyable. I am still amazed at all the sound ideas and options he brought me, all of which helped to convey No Sound—my favorite being a drip of water, that would fall periodically, splitting the silence of that empty room with a mournful loneliness that was devastating.

Do you often have difficulty convincing producers of a need for a sound designer? If so, how have you been able to change their minds and budgets?

JOE B: Never had that experience to date—producers have been supportive in understanding the importance of sound design.

GERALD G: I always try to make the producers see that I’ve placed the sound on an equal footing with the set, costumes, and lights. And I’ve had to fight for it. You just try to convince them of the importance of sound, and if you can’t convince, then you demand. You have to make them realize how necessary it is.

ROGER D: You just have to be firm and say that any play requires a minimum of four designers—lights, sets, costumes, and sound. I remember one of my very first professional jobs—I was hired to take over a production of Jules Feiffer’s Little Murders, which has one of the most complicated sound plots of any show I’ve ever done. The producer had lost his director about a week before rehearsals were to begin, and knowing that I had directed it previously in college, he called me in a panic and asked me to take it over. When we had our first design discussions, I discovered that not only did he not have a sound designer for the show, he didn’t even have a sound system in the theatre! (It was quickly apparent to me that he had committed to this play without reading it.) I told him flat out that this play couldn’t be done without a sound designer, and if he couldn’t commit to that, then he had to pick another show. The very least the script called for were sirens, street noise, construction sounds, subway noise, and gunfire. He told me, “The other director said he was just gonna hang a microphone out his window.” I told him I was not hanging any microphone out my window!

The bottom line was that he did hire a designer and bought a sound system, but it took a threat to quit to get it. I’m certain the producer always felt I had caused him needless expense. Having done that show once, I was unwilling to sacrifice what was minimally required to get it done right. Remember, no one in the audience knows or cares when corners are cut or what compromises are made. If they don’t like what they see, it’s the director’s fault. If you don’t demand what you need, you’ll pay for it in other ways.

JACK O: I think it depends on the project. If you are doing a musical, producers usually see a need for a sound designer. If you are doing a two-character play that doesn’t seem to have any sound effects, yes, it’s a problem. I haven’t always been able to change their minds. But I always think that as you bring people into the process, instead of pounding your fists and saying “I need this and you’ve got to get it for me”—if, in fact, you are patient and you show them the necessity and that the necessity is real—people are pretty realistic. They try to accommodate me when they can. When they can’t, we compromise.

TAZEWELL T: The pioneers of the American regional theatre movement really did the advance work and paved the way in recognizing the importance of sound designers as a key staff member of their theatres. I am talking about Zelda Fichandler, Jon Jory, Gordon Davidson, William Ball, Tyrone Guthrie, and Joseph Papp. They understood the need for resident sound designers as integral players in the theatre art form. While many theatres today cannot afford to have sound designers in residence, they do appreciate the need for their contribution.

DES M: I have had the experience before where people are surprised that I want a sound designer, particularly if it’s a drama and they don’t see any sound cues called for in the script. Then I have to explain the way that I like to work. As far as I am concerned, sound is a design element. With A Walk in the Woods, I thought of the sound as a major element in terms of bringing the forest to life. Michael Roth was with me for the whole journey. We always thought of the forest as the third character in Lee Blessing’s two-character play. Producers are notorious for hiring one operator and expecting him to do both sound and lights. In many productions these days, that’s impossible, if you’re working with any kind of ambition. Insisting on having a sound designer would be an early battle for me with a producer. It would be on my list of things I needed in order to do the work, and it would come up immediately. I wouldn’t already be working on the design and say, “Oh, by the way ….” I think a good producer is going to try to give you whatever you absolutely need. And most producers are much more familiar with sound design now than they were ten years ago.

PLAYWRIGHTS’ QUESTIONS

Before a new play of yours is produced or read, do you ever “hear” sound or music as part of your concept?

MICHAEL G: Yes, in fact quite often. There is sometimes a particular piece of music that inspires me during the writing, or is particular to how a play gets structured. This music is sometimes incorporated into the production of the play, but, even if not, it is, I think, useful for director and designer to hear in understanding what I was thinking/feeling/intending during the writing. I rarely see how a piece should be staged or produced while writing; don’t think much about set. But I do “hear” the play as I’m writing it, the rhythm and melody of the dialogue. So I am very interested in how sound—and silence—interacts with the music of the spoken word. I also think a lot about non-musical sound as I’m writing, in terms of what the soundscape the play lives in might be, what non-musical sound might be used as punctuation or as bed—the sound of an old air conditioner, or latenight traffic, or a hospital cafeteria at off-hours.

AMLIN G: I often (in my mind’s ear) hear the aural element of my plays before getting a visual image. Today we say we go to “see” a play, but we used to say we “heard” it, and we still rehearse a play. I sometimes ascribe the primacy of sound over image in my head to a deficiency in my visual imagination, but the plays I like tend to live very fully in the sound they project. They tend to be terrifically exciting on records, from the works of Shakespeare to Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? I’m very sorry that radio drama has no audience in this country. It’s been a vital developmental venue for the last two generations of English playwrights. The two radio plays that I’ve written I’ve found very satisfying to work on. The writer, in (one hopes) close and happy collaboration with the sound designer, has complete control of the imaginary world which the listener receives. That’s not true of any other medium.

Hearing is a much more involving sensual process than seeing. Seeing is, relatively speaking, a cool and distant kind of contact with its object. All our metaphors for skepticism are visual: appearances deceive, don’t judge a book by its cover. You look askance at something, you don’t listen askance.

PHILIP G: I started as a musician before I was a writer and spent about ten years in rock ‘n’ roll. I played guitar, wrote songs, sang, and performed by myself in clubs. My early works contained a lot of music that I wrote. My first play was a musical and the subsequent one was a play with music.

So as I write a play, I do hear sounds and put them into the script. Dream of Kitmura was based on a very vivid dream. The play itself has a dream quality and a mythic quality. I decided that sound was, in a sense, a character of the play, and participated in the play. When I did the play in New York, two Japanese musicians created a very interesting score which they played live that incorporated a classical or traditional Japanese instrumentation.

When the young ing é nue is introduced to the male lead, she appeared in a pool of light and slowly, very slowly she folded a paper airplane and then tossed it. The plane itself was carried by a person dressed in black. This kurogo moved the paper airplane very slowly across the stage toward the other actor and while this was happening, there was a rhythmic arpeggio repeating over and over, with Japanese flutes playing over it. All of it had to work together. The movement of the paper airplane was at a very slow speed, and the repetitive music was a little ahead of it in terms of the time signature. The continuously repeating music against that very slow movement created a tension that made that moment compelling. So in this particular play, the sound was really a direct participant in the emotional action onstage.

WENDY K: An anonymous song from the Warsaw ghetto stayed in my mind as I was writing I Love You, I Love You Not. I went through many songs of the Holocaust, but that one seemed particularly connected to the two characters in my play.

ERIC O: Sometimes when I’m writing a play, a song will pop into it. That happened in On the Verge several times. There were songs that became part of the narrative, that are like artifacts. But I also sometimes hear sounds as underscoring. There is a point in Native Speech at the beginning of the scene that I put in the stage directions. I heard a far-off electric guitar in the ether. But I don’t do a lot of that. I don’t do any kind of stage or design direction; I always leave that to the designer and director. But every once in a while, when I think that something is absolutely essential, I will write it in. Whether the director pays any attention to that stage direction is another question and something I often have no control over.

Have you ever drawn upon a specific piece of music as inspiration for a play? Was it incorporated into the script?

MICHAEL G: Yes and yes. I wrote a piece some time ago in which pieces by Jimmy Giuffre, Thomas Tallis, and Thelonious Monk were integral to the scenes, as background and as foreground. The designer was initially very resistant to my ideas, until he and I met; he had brought some samples of what he would like to use instead, and we played all of it, and soon realized that our ideas and inspiration were remarkably similar, and wound up having a great collaboration. He brought a lot to the table which enhanced and deepened my original impulses. He and I wound up collaborating on projects for years. I also sometimes write songs—at least lyrics, with ideas about melody—into scripts. This often influences the approach of the sound designer—who is also sometimes the composer.

CRAIG L: I have frequently started with the idea of a song as either a jumping-off point for the story or as an atmospheric or contextual notion for the world in which the play might take place. Or, in one instance, I have designed a whole piece around a song—Blue Window, in which William Bolcom’s The Office Girl’s Lament is part of the script. I knew I was going to name Prelude to a Kiss after the Ellington tune before I began writing, and nurtured from an even earlier time a very general notion for the plot and characters. When writing the first draft of Reckless, I kept hearing Bing Crosby singing I’ll Be Home for Christmas, which found its way into Norman Rene’s production. Again, it was part of the inchoate germ; how it informed the ultimate product, I couldn’t say.

PHILIP G: While writing Fish Head Soup, there was one piece of music that I listened to a lot. That was Like a Rolling Stone by Bob Dylan. At one point it was in the script, then it was taken out, and then put back in. But that’s an example of a piece of music that I heard as a young kid, and it had a great deal of impact on me. For some reason, years and years later, I was listening to it and I wanted to bring it back. As I wrote this particular play, I was listening to it because the play is emotionally based in a period of my life that the song allows me to reenter emotionally. The song allowed me to write the play in a particular kind of mood.

When I used it in the script, it was not so much for the audience as it was for me. I wouldn’t have included it, though, if I thought it was only for me, because I do think the song has a peculiar effect on a lot of people. There’s a certain cynical sadness to it, a kind of posturing cynicism that captures a quality I like.

WENDY K: For I Love You, I Love You Not, I indicated the Bruce Springsteen song I’m On Fire, which seemed crucial for Daisy. Gerald Chapman, who directed the reading of it in Boston, commented on what a beautiful stroke it was to choose that particular piece of music. I had never thought of it, but he saw it as symbolizing the ovens at the concentration camps. For a new play, The Foggy Foggy Dew, the title itself is crucial in the development of the play.

ERIC O: Other people’s research has affected my work. For instance, for Heliotrope the musical director did a lot of research finding period music. And he dug up some really wonderful stuff. The play was written. It was really up to him and the director to decide where they wanted music and what exactly they wanted there.

AMLIN G: I’ve often heard about writers getting plays from a song that may have no apparent connection with the finished work. Maria Irene Fornes, for example, says that Fefu and Her Friends came from a recording of a Cuban woman singing folk laments. She heard the songs in her head as she conceived the play and played it while she wrote. The play is set in America. None of its people are Cuban. But the emotional core of the play is the songs.

Do you often indicate, in terms of stage directions, what music or sound you want to happen within a script? If so, are these incidents usually results of research or your general knowledge? Do you ever consult with sound designers or composers as part of your research?

ERIC O: I’m repeating myself here, but I indicate sound and music very sparingly, and I usually leave that sort of thing to the designer and director. In most of my plays, music is transitional because my plays are verbally dense. It’s hard for underscoring to work in them. The underscoring often seems to be competing with the words. The music that has been used successfully tends to be transitional.

I do look to sound designers or composers for research a lot, because I don’t do research myself. I’m fairly knowledgeable in a hobbyistic sort of way about certain kinds of folk music, jazz, and American pop music—that sort of thing. I have a big personal collection, and I buy a lot of records. It’s all avocational, for my own personal pleasure. I would not know how to go about researching anything. That’s what sound designers are for.

CRAIG L: I have never done research on music or sound, and I use very few stage directions. In the original script of Prelude to a Kiss, I indicated that the song They Can’t Take That Away from Me would play in the bar before Peter found Rita trapped in the old man’s body. It was not my idea to use Van Morrison’s Someone Like You, a much better choice for the scene.

I consider the use of sound to be the director’s province. I have worked with composers at various stages of writing.

WENDY K: I do indications in the script. I’ve sung a great deal with the guitar and have wonderful source books by Ruth Rubin and Theodore Bikel. A friend gave me Voices of the Holocaust, which supplied many ideas for the music of I Love You, I Love You Not. I researched a great deal for the French Revolution play I’m working on [The Executioner’s Daughter]; I listened to many cassettes and was given books of French songs of different periods. There was one song that I fell completely in love with which I’m using in the play.

MICHAEL G: In general, I rarely include stage directions in my scripts. So, other than some musical ideas, or general notes, there is usually not much indication. That said, I recently wrote a play, Los Illegals, in which I described in great detail the ongoing, evolving soundscape of the play, which was a big part of my intention for the production (in this case I also described the physical environment). This was as a result of my research, which involved interviewing day laborers at worksites and street corners all over Los Angeles, as well as attending proand anti-immigrant rallies. It was crucial from my perspective to creating the right atmosphere for the production that a theatricalized—sometimes altered or exaggerated—version of the particular sounds of these environments. In response to the third part of the question, I have created pieces in collaboration with composers, and sent designers and composers texts for their response in starting to think how they would be articulated in performance, but I’ve never “consulted” with a designer or composer during the writing process.

PHILIP G: Certain sounds that I hear, certain music that I come across, are just in my background as part of my upbringing. And I prefer to draw upon my own general background as a Japanese American.

I don’t research music or sounds much for my plays. I do listen to music a lot. In the course of conceptualizing a production, I’ll sit down and work with the composer or sound designer or director, and we’ll develop an approach.

AMLIN G: I love to talk with music people about the form of plays, my own and other people’s (also about the form of musical works). I go along with what Walter Pater (I think it was Walter Pater) wrote, that all the other arts aspire to the condition of music.

Has your research on music or sound ever had a profound effect on any of your plays?

MICHAEL G: Often. As I said before, music has had a huge impact on the writing of many of my plays, and when one particular composer, song or genre/type of music inspires or becomes part of a piece, I often explore other work of the composer or genre, and this in turn influences the course of the writing.

AMLIN G: I’ve always found it irksome to look at play structure analytically for long at a stretch. I think a good many other people likewise fight shy of extended critical, abstract attention to the form in which they work. But I can spend no end of time in complete fascination thinking about, say, painting, and making half-stabs at applying resultant abstractions to plays. The greatest hit of artistic speculations concerns the Golden Section, used (no doubt not always consciously) in so many visual works. The Section is, of course, the place where you divide a line so that the shorter part is to the longer part as the longer part is to the original, undivided line. A rectangle constructed of the shorter and longer parts is aesthetically pleasing, and has been used as the frame size of paintings by da Vinci, Dalí, and countless others, as well as everywhere within their compositions. But a painting is before its audience all at once. This makes problems for the application of painting principles to theatre, which unfolds over time. All right then, so does music. Composers such as Debussy and Bartok have used the Golden Ratio in their works. Also Chopin, whose etudes and nocturnes are often “cut” at the Golden Section by their point of greatest technical difficulty and highest excitement.

I try and structure my plays in five parts. Worked for the Romans, worked for Shakespeare. The climax, in this synthesis, ideally comes at the end of Part Three. Everything preceding leads up to the climax; everything afterward results from it. Now, this three-fifths point isn’t exactly where the Golden Section comes. That would be a little later. But not much.

Lots of musical pieces are structured in five parts. I’m working on a play now with a mind to the proportions of the five sections of Schoenberg’s Transfigured Night.

The above is all very wiggy and vague. But it’s probably best if abstract synthetic thinking stays somewhat on the level of noodling. Get too systematic and you rob concrete imagination of the freedom it needs.

ERIC O: Other people’s research has affected my work. For instance, for Heliotrope, the musical director did a lot of research finding period music. And he dug up some really wonderful stuff. The play was written. It was really up to him and the director to decide where they wanted music and what exactly they wanted there.

PHILIP G: It’s not necessarily that I found it in research but I did rediscover a sound from my childhood that I’ve ended up using in my plays: Buddhist sutra chanting. I grew up with it, as I attended a Jodo Shinshu Buddhist Temple as many Japanese Americans have. I find that it’s the only sound that allows me to feel something as close to a Japanese American soul that there is. I mean it in a transcendent, vessel type of way. It washes over and through me and lets me fall through a crack back into me and beyond. I’m Japanese American from California and I’m Japanese from Hiroshima in the early 1900s.

WENDY K: Music is always such an integral part of my plays. The folk song sung in I Love You, I Love You Not occurs in the first scene and then comes back, in a kind of broken replaying, in the end of the third scene. I don’t know if I could say that the song shifted my structure of the play, but it did affect the emphasis.

The French song in The Executioner’s Daughter has been in and out of drafts and readings, and although other French songs have been eliminated because they didn’t seem right, this one seems to stay.

What function do you believe sound design does/could/should play as a design element when developing your scripts?

CRAIG L: I see sound design as an important element of a production, and I will occasionally incorporate a director’s contribution into the final published script. But I don’t see sound design per se playing any part in the development of my scripts. If a telephone rings, I put that in the original script, but I don’t indicate “traffic noises” if a scene is set outside in New York. I find Chekhov’s broken guitar string in The Cherry Orchard an unhappy shock when I’m watching the play. It sounds like a good idea when you read the play, but I prefer to let the director find his or her own solutions to the sound “design.”

ERIC O: I don’t think I’ve ever gone back and incorporated something that the sound designer invented and passed it on to the next production. So really, all the designers start from the basic text every time. I’ve never worked with a designer from a rough script, although it might be interesting. I should work with a sound designer on a scenario—really develop it together—and see what happens.

AMLIN G: I like everything in a show, as far as possible, to be live. The resulting immediacy seems to me to be of the essence of theatre, and it has increased in importance as film has staked its incontestable claim to the combination of realism and mobility as well as access to an enormous and various audience. What’s special about theatre is that it’s live, and that its liveness potentially provides the energy to enlist the audience’s very active imaginative collaboration on the particular performance they see.

Accordingly, I like live sound. Of course, it’s possible to woo the audience to give you license to try for the best of both worlds, live sound and recorded sound. Kingdom Come started with a lone violinist coming onstage and playing a cadence of harmonics—damping the string he was playing, so that all that sounded was the sympathetic vibrations of adjacent strings. A very beautiful and unsettling effect. But, as the show went on, taped synthesizer music—string orchestra in timbre—came in strong behind the soloist. We weren’t kidding anyone that our violinist was pushing that cinderblock wall of sound at the audience, but they were willing to hear it, as it were, through his visible presence.

PHILIP G: I’ve always put sound into my scripts; I don’t know if that’s unusual or not. Sometimes I am specific about what sounds I hear. For example, in The Wash, I use two lullabies. They’re both traditional, but one is very childlike and the other is a very haunting, somber song. They’re used at various points to establish moods of the main character. They then served as a takeoff point to compose music for underscoring other scenes.

WENDY K: I always include music and sound in some form, and I see it as an extremely important part of my work. What happens between scenes is easily as essential as what happens in them. The ringing of a phone, the clanging of a bell, after what line a car horn is heard are all crucial, and the timing of these cues very specific. The sound of a key turning in a lock and the sound of a door fanning in and out are both important in My Sister in This House. These sounds sometimes form the segues between scenes. I’ve always been aware, as I’m writing, when sounds fall—after which sentence, before what scene. Sound must be used carefully, and it is becoming more and more important to me.

MICHAEL G: Often. As I said before, music has had a huge impact on the writing of many of my plays, and when one particular composer, song, or genre/type of music inspires or becomes part of a piece, I often explore other work of the composer or genre, and this in turn influences the course of the writing.

Is there a style to your use of sound, or does it change from play to play?

PHILIP G: I’ve begun to realize that I prefer a very sparse score, not too overproduced, with minimal instrumentation. I use one or two instruments, and I prefer not to use chordal music like piano. I like certain Japanese instruments, like the shakuhachi and the string bass. They are interesting to me because they don’t have a precise tone. They can be played in quarter-tones; you can bend the notes. I also like the idea of certain instruments like the shakuhachi, which can duplicate a human wail. It also can reproduce a quality of nature, like the wind. I like that it can bend and doesn’t have a heavy tone, unlike the very set piano tonal scale. I also like ambiance and sound effects and percussive instruments.

Even silence is very important. I consider silence to be a type of sound. For example, in The Wash, there are certain sequences that could easily be scored, but I’ve always thought that they work best in total silence. Silence, to a degree, only works if you have some kind of sound before it that sets up the no-sound. Just dialogue can be sound, a type of music, or a lot of dramatic action onstage can create a sense that there is a kind of sound. Then after that, to not have any sound sets up the visual moment. In The Wash, the last moment is when the woman comes in, bringing the laundry she has been doing for her husband, even though they are separated. She picks up the dirty clothes and puts them in a brown paper bag and she starts to go toward the door. Then she decides this time that she’s not going to take his dirty wash, and leaves it at his home, symbolizing her decision to go on with her life and basically break from this man for good. That moment done completely in silence becomes very compelling. We tried sound then, but pulled it out. It’s all done through discovery. Sometimes you make these choices during the course of rehearsal because it just feels right. But for each play, as I work conceptually with the director and the designer, we develop something that I think is consistent.

AMLIN G: My only constant is a strong preference that music and sound be “up front.” I always hear that movie music is working when you don’t know there is any. I like a live show to put all its cards on the table. An adaptation of Coriolanus I prepared and dramaturged for Georgia Shakespeare Festival a few years ago had a great percussion score, by Klimchak, played in full view of the audience. I loved that.

MICHAEL G: It changes from play to play, from production to production, and from collaboration to collaboration. It’s part of the fun of it.

Please give us an example of your attending a production of one of your plays and finding that the sound or music offered a fresh interpretation of your work. How about instances when the sound or music was completely off base?

CRAIG L: The whole question of interpretation of a play is the director’s prerogative. Whether or not I’ve approved or disapproved seems to me to be irrelevant. I’ve always been very happy with Norman Rene’s use of sound and music in my plays. I’ve seen productions, successful or otherwise, that use sounds I didn’t like, but I just don’t think it’s my business.

WENDY K: Some years ago, the Dublin production of My Sister in This House, directed by Ben Barnes, used incidental music in an extraordinary way. Some of the pieces I had chosen that I felt were so crucial to the play were probably hard to find. Only one song, a lullaby I wrote, was published with the script. Ben made his own decisions about what music was used and it was quite different from what I had conceived. But he is very musical and has a wonderful ear. It was a beautiful production.

AMLIN G: In my play How I Got That Story, I have two actors enact the encounter of a reporter and an event. One plays the Reporter, the other plays the Event: all the people it comprises as well as its sights and its sounds. Since the Event actor was always either onstage in a particular character or offstage madly changing costume, most of the sounds had been prerecorded, though in the first production we made the actor’s voice recognizable as much as we could, so as to intensify the sense of a burgeoning presence that finally engulfs the poor Reporter. But I specify in the script that, whenever possible, the Event actor should make the sounds live and in sight of the audience. The best realization of this injunction I know was in a production I did not work on, but saw, in Rochester, New York. The Event was played by Joe Morton. During the scene where the Reporter first goes out into the streets of the (to him) exotic Asian city he’s supposed to cover, Joe swung around behind the Reporter in a slow, wide arc making the sounds of tanks, Hondas, chanting bonzes, beggars, arguing soldiers, sirens, etc. The whole city appeared on that bare stage, with all focus bearing down upon the overwhelmed Reporter. All done with live sound.

MICHAEL G: A designer composed a piece, quite different from what I had imagined, for a song (made-up) that a character sang fragments of during a monologue, and then used this music as a basis for transitional music throughout the piece and it worked beautifully, giving a real coherence to the production. It was quite haunting, and very appropriate to the play.

I’ve had a couple of experiences in which the sound design seemed heavy-handed, either getting in the way of the piece or overemphasizing the themes or mood instead of setting them off or contrasting them usefully.

ERIC O: I don’t ever know where the director leaves off and the designers begin. I don’t ever really know who to either credit or blame. I have worked with the same director so much, and he controls the design aspect so heavily, that I tend to give all the designers maybe not enough credit. For instance, I thought the sound design for the production of In Perpetuity Throughout the Universe was really good.

PHILIP G: I’ve had instances where it was all off. It usually is that they’ve used something quite literal in relationship to the activity on the stage. Or, they’ve used too much or made it too loud. Usually it’s someone who really should be driving a truck for a living.