in my own words
Expanding the Boundaries of Theater
Diane Paulus
Artistic Director, American Repertory Theater
Tony award-winning director Diane Paulus has always enjoyed the challenge of
organizing a group of people to make something out of nothing. Sometimes that
means convincing a cast and crew to merge Shakespeare and disco in a common
space, as she does in her smash hit, The Donkey Show. Sometimes that means
working with the world’s best athletes and acrobats to tell a story without words,
as she does in Cirque du Soleil’s new production, Amaluna. But, always, it means
waiting for the very people she cannot direct to come and make her shows real.
The lonely pianist
I grew up in New York City, and my
parents exposed me to all of the arts. My
older sister was a professional harpist,
so there was always music in the house.
I was taken to the ballet, and I danced as
a kid with the New York City Ballet when
George Balanchine was still alive. My
father was an actor. He would make me
read the newspaper out loud and correct
my enunciation. He took me to shows ever
since I was a kid.
I seriously pursued playing the piano
until, at about age 12, I was deciding if I
should continue with music. It would have
meant dedicating four to five hours a day
practicing, solo. I had also started doing
theater, and I just loved the experience
of being in a group and that feeling of
creating something with other people.
When I had to choose between living the solitary
life of a concert pianist and being in the room with a
lot of people making something together, there was no
question which way I wanted to go.
Community building
I went to Harvard as an undergraduate thinking I
wanted to go into politics. Growing up in New York
in the 1970s, I looked around me and saw all of the
distress of the city. I couldn’t understand it. I went to
college with this dream of being the mayor of New
York. I really felt that I could help New York and make
the city a better place to live.
In college, I spent some time working for the city
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government, and I enjoyed it. But I realized that theater
was my passion. There was nothing I loved more
than being in the theater. That is where I felt the most
challenged—intellectually, emotionally, and physically.
I could rehearse 12 hours a day or until 2:00 in the
morning and never get bored or feel like it was a task.
Looking back, I was interested in theater for a lot of
the same reasons I was interested in politics. Theater
is about building community. It’s about outreach—
engaging other human beings and making them feel
alive, present, and valued as individuals.
I believe you can make theater on a street corner or
in a field or on a stage. As a professional director, my
passion is to find ways to redefine theater and return
it to a more central place in our lives, to have it be not
just an elite cultural activity but something that fuels
our lives as citizens.
Now more than ever
The theater serves our human needs. We have a need
for ritual—for going through something together as
a group. We have a need for spectacle, or seeing
something larger than ourselves. That’s why people
like to stand on a mountaintop and look out over an
ocean. They want to see themselves in the presence of
something larger. There is a human need for magic, for
empathy, for learning. Those are all things that theater
can uniquely do.
We’re living in an age in which electronic devices
are glued to our hands. We spend most of our lives
hunched over and pressing keys. Anywhere you go,
people are relating to these electronic devices more
than they are to each other. But that doesn’t mean we
don’t still have these needs. We’re going to realize
that we can look each other in the eye and celebrate
being together in a space, and the theater will be a
place where we go to do that. There will be a profound need for community—physical community, not
a community through Facebook or iChat—a need to
be in a space together, in real time.
Please don’t take your seats
At the American Repertory Theater in Cambridge, our
mission is to expand the boundaries of theater. When
most people think of theater, they think of going to an
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auditorium, seeing a show on a stage, and
sitting in a chair that’s bolted to the floor.
The lights go down, they’re in the dark,
and they’re not supposed to say anything
during the show. When it’s over, they
applaud and go home. But that is so not
the theater.
I look backward for inspiration. I
look to medieval times, when theater
was pageant plays outdoors or in the
town square. You walked around, and
theater happened around you. Or I look
to ancient Athens, when theater was a
festival and everybody in the community
participated. You voted on who wrote the
best tragedy. In Shakespeare’s Globe
Theater, you stood as a groundling. You
were on your feet, you were physically
engaged, and you were probably eating something.
Actors were talking, and you were talking back to
them. And I look forward at the same time.
The Donkey Show is an example of that. It’s the story
of A Midsummer Night’s Dream set in a nightclub.
In my fantasy, we’re riffing on the Globe Theater
because you stand as a groundling, which is the mosh
pit. Or, if you want a seat, you can sit like Queen
Elizabeth would have, in the royalty boxes. But you’re
alive! There’s music, a pulse, and a rhythm.
Up the mountain we go
An idea for a show always comes first as a question. I
think many young directors feel that they have to have
the answer first, that they have to have the concept. But
for me it’s exactly the opposite. I have to have a big
enough question. The bigger the question, the deeper
the exploration is going to be.
I consider a show and look at the potential there. I
can feel something percolating in it. I have to identify
it, and I have to become excited and obsessed with it
enough to convince everyone around me—the actors,
the designers, the writers, the technical staff—to climb
the mountain. A director can see vaguely, through the
clouds, the top of the mountain. I don’t know how we’re
going to get there, and I don’t know what path we’re
going to take. But my job, even if I can’t see it clearly,
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is to have a sense of the top of the mountain and to
inspire and gather everyone and chart that journey,
especially when we’re all tired and nobody wants to
climb another step. My job is to keep everyone going
up that mountain until we get to the top. With a project,
the sense of potential or the question always relates to
the audience.
The Donkey Show is a
version of A Midsummer
Night’s Dream set in a
disco club. Audience
members stand in the
mosh pit or are seated
around the perimeter.
Theater happens
The theater is not a movie that sits in the digital world
or on film; it’s not a painting on the wall. It’s not a book.
Actual creation of theater happens only in the live
transmission between the performer and the audience member. That is the moment of theater. You can
rehearse and prepare to death, but theater only exists in
that moment. When I think about making a theater show,
I ask, What’s the event? What’s that transmission? Who’s
the audience and why are they there? What is the reason?
What interests me about the theater is what happens
when we ask the audience to come and be in the presence of what we are making. I’m interested in that basic
moment of feeling alive and feeling in the present. We
very rarely live our lives in the present. We’re dwelling
on the past; we’re planning for the future. But what is life
but being in the present, but being alive and feeling,
seeing, and hearing with all our being? Theater makes
us alive—mind, body, and soul.
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