Multiple award-winning director Gary Griffin has another acclaimed show on his hands with his production of Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine's Pulitzer Prize and Tony Award-winning musical, Sunday in the Park with George, now playing at the Chicago Shakespeare Theater ( 800 E. Grand on Navy Pier ) . Renowned for his transformation of large-scale Broadway musical productions in intimate theatrical settings, Griffin's equally lauded production of Sondheim's Pacific Overtures opens in London, a co-production of the Chicago Shakespeare Theater and the Donmar Warehouse, in June of 2003. Griffin took time out of his busy schedule, shortly after the opening of Sunday In The Park With George, to speak with WCT.
Gregg Shapiro: What can you tell me about your connection to Stephen Sondheim, in regards to your work on the productions of Sunday In The Park With George and Pacific Overtures?
Gary Griffin: Going back, when I was beginning in the business, I think it was Sondheim's voice that got me the most excited about music theater. Through working on his stuff I actually began to be able to look at other pieces with a more intimate point of view. I didn't know that kind of music theater was possible. The first time I remember hearing A Little Night Music and Company and Sweeney Todd, they were extraordinary things. Directing his work, it took a long time to feel comfortable with that. It's very demanding and because you have such respect for it, you want to serve it very well. For me, what you find in Sondheim, is that there is this really long journey back to the beginning. You have to make a lot of mistakes and wrong choices, because your instinct says. "I know what this should be, but I don't really know why." To me, his stuff always feels incredibly well-crafted and edited and smart and simple and specific. You have to go through that process to get there. One of the reasons that I like doing the work in an intimate theater is that it absolutely forces you to go there, where you know it lives. You can dress him up, but it's not as effective, and I think that's what we try to do.
GS: Are there specific challenges to directing a production such as Sunday In The Park With George in an intimate setting such as the 200-seat Upstairs at Chicago Shakespeare Theater?
GG: Yeah. There's a level of psychological truth with which you have to present the material. There's a lot of things about musical theater that feel very false. The whole matter of someone speaking and singing. You're trying to create this universe where singing is natural. Where a human being expresses themselves through song. In Sondheim's world, that's more challenging because he works at a level that is close to the emotional marrow of a person, that feels more appropriate for an Edward Albee play. Actually, once you get in there it's absolutely right. He gives you everything. He's like Shakespeare in that way. Everything is there for it to work. Your process becomes about earning and understanding it. The biggest challenge is finding how to make it honest for yourself and make all of the behavioral things about it natural and feel like they make sense. When a character sings in Hello, Dolly!, it's because the world of Hello, Dolly! is singing waiters and it's a little easier. In Sondheim, these are emotionally and intellectually complex people. I think he's often drawn to stories and universes that don't naturally sing. Like Assassins. Where do you find the songs in John Wilkes Booth and John Hinckley and those people? Or in Serraut? But, yet, there is a song. It actually takes me to a more thrilling place. It's finding why that character sings, why that's musical at that moment.
GS: What are the potential rewards of this production?
GG: I think that Sondheim, whether he sets out to be or not, is a brilliant teacher. A brilliant teacher is also a brilliant learner. With any project he did, you feel like he took it on because he was going to try something new for himself. Ostensibly, you take that journey with him. The reward, I think, is that I always come out of one of the projects knowing so much more about something. The amount of research that you have to do in order to do Pacific Overtures or Assassins, you have to do a lot of research to understand what he was writing about. He also challenges you to consider a character's motives and point of view in a way that you probably wouldn't just on the surface. I think that one of the things about the character of George, particularly, people think he's aloof, but what we discovered with that was that was the easy answer. It was actually in his absolute concentration on another person that he would get so involved with someone's behavior that he would miss the surface relationship because he was staring at the flower in the hat. It's not a distance or a remove, it's quite the opposite.
GS: Pacific Overtures will be presented in London in June 2003 as a co-production of Chicago Shakespeare Theater and the Donmar Warehouse.
GG: When we did the show, we created it specifically for the upstairs space. What I'm most excited about is that that story caught fire and that people are all of a sudden considering Pacific Overtures not as this little curiosity experiment, but as a show that has a viable, important place.
GS: How successful was it when it first premiered?
GG: It wasn't. Unfortunately, too, it opened in the year of A Chorus Line and it was really overshadowed. At the time, I think, the world wasn't quite ready for it. It was a very brave show. I don't think the mid-'70s, post-Vietnam ( culture ) was ready to hear a story about who we are in the eyes of the world. I think that after Sept. 11, we were ready to hear that story. Incredibly ironically we had no idea that would happen, of course. It was an amazingly strange thing that we got to be telling that story at that time. What I think a studio theater should be is that we work in the place where you can take something and give it a bold experiment. That's what I'm about and what I believe we should be doing. Some of those bold experiments will render themselves ideas that should be seen beyond there.
GS: What are your plans for Chicago Shakespeare Theater in your role as Associate Artistic Director?
GG: I hope to continue to explore things in an experimental way. I think that, interestingly, Shakespeare was an experimental playwright. He took big risks, tried things, tried theatrical conventions, and was a real showman. We're trying, in using other work, to be inspired by his sense of experimentation with the theater, with strong, language-based works, things that have interesting theatrical challenges.
GS: Is that the key to the survival and longevity of Shakespeare's work?
GG: Yes, absolutely. Because alongside a classic, brilliant play like Hamlet or King Lear, there's Cymbeline or Pericles. You watch the things that he was experimenting with versus the things that at times he nailed. You see in Love's Labor's Lost where, eventually, in A Midsummer Night's Dream he's going to nail it. That's our job--to take the experiment and be inspired by that sense of theater. Also, I hope that we eventually do new work. I hope that we take this idea, working with musical and non-musical theater, using the specificity that we're exploring as a launching pad for new work and to create collaborations and for our space to be used to do that, as well.
