UI theater professor Daniel Sullivan is recognized as one of the leading stage directors in the United States today. Sullivan recently received the Village Voice Obie Award for Best direction for the Off-Broadway production of “Stuff Happens,” and he was nominated for a 2006 Tony Award for best director, for the Broadway hit “The Rabbit Hole.” He won a Tony in 2001 for his direction of David Auburn’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play “Proof.”
It’s been said that the key to directing is to bring out the best in an actor. Do you have your own trademark method for doing this? Or do you tailor your approach to the capabilities or personalities you’re working with?
The key to a long directing career is patience. There are as many approaches to acting as there are actors and my method, if it can be said to be a method, is to discover that approach and to work along side it. That requires patience. A way of working often doesn’t reveal itself immediately. Often an actor doesn’t even know he has a way of working. Directors have to wrangle these disparate ways of working into a unified result, what I call the “illusion of wholeness.” A rehearsal period is a sort of month-long negotiation with an actor’s impulses. An actor has to trust you, trust that the negotiation is honest and that you are not manipulating.
On and off Broadway, you’ve worked with some high-profile actors – from Cynthia Nixon and Tyne Daley, most recently, to Mary Louise Parker and Annette Bening. Do you approach your job any differently working with these established, “star”-caliber actors than you do when directing students at Illinois?
I approach stars no differently than I would anyone else. And stars, for the most part, are exceedingly hard working and focused, if only because their reputations are more publicly on the line. Rehearsal breaks are sometimes longer as stars tend to spend more time on the phone or on their BlackBerrys. Here at Illinois, I’m teaching, and that’s a very different process from directing. When I work professionally, I work from the assumption, “you’ve been taught already.”
You’ve been hailed as both a nurturer and mentor to some of the best young playwrights in the country. How are these connections made? And once a relationship is established, how – exactly – do you work together?
I made a lot of connections with writers when I ran a new play program at the Seattle Repertory Theater. I’ve had long and fruitful collaborations with many writers and I believe that’s because I put the text first. I may feel changes are necessary in a given script, and I will articulate that to a writer as often as she can stand it, but in the end, the writer knows she has my full support. Also, I have the deepest admiration for the process of writing for the theater – the extraordinary and frightening act of going from the most private of pursuits (the writing) to the most public and most collaborative (putting it on).
As an award-winning director, with abundant opportunities, how do you choose which plays to take on? Is there a formula, or do you go with gut instinct?
I only choose plays that I know I can spend time with. I will read a lot of plays that make me think “Oh, I’d like to see that!” But that’s not the same as wanting to direct it. When you direct you have to visit the play everyday for a couple of months. So you have to be interested in the people, you have to be interested in exploring their relationships and those relationships have to feel deep enough or weighty enough to stand up to extensive examination. And yes, I think gut instinct has a lot to do with it. And sometimes time of life, present concerns or even a diet of work that’s been heavy on a certain kind of play. Who knows. Since I gave up running a theater and no longer have to come up with an attractive season of plays for a subscription audience, I’m free to take it moment to moment, play to play.
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