In Conversation: Diane Paulus and Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui

Ryan McKittrick: Diane, what drew you to Romeo and Juliet as a director and as you were planning this season at the A.R.T.?

Diane Paulus: I’ve always loved this play. I played Juliet as a young actor (in a production with Liev Schreiber as Tybalt), and I’ve always wanted direct it. But I always felt overwhelmed by the decisions I thought I had to make as a director about the nature of the “ancient grudge.” When I picked up the play again recently, I realized Shakespeare never tells us what the grudge is. And I began to think that maybe this is less a play about the hatred between these families and more about a problem of love.

Romeo’s line to Benvolio at the beginning of the play—“Here’s much to do with hate, but more with love”—has really resonated with me. So has Romeo’s line to Friar Laurence: “Thou canst not speak of that thou dost not feel.” So I felt liberated by that idea, and I started to think about making a production that was stripped bare so that the audience could bring their stories to it. We’re all carrying situations that are pulling us apart right now. I wanted to use the play as a way to open up something that’s actually connecting all of us.

RM: You had an extraordinary creative collaboration with the choreographer Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui on Jagged Little Pill. What made you think about working with Larbi on this production?

DP: I wanted the language to feel physical and for the production to feel visceral. That was my first impulse on Jagged Little Pill, as well. So I immediately thought of Larbi for this production. In fact, I thought I can only do this if Larbi is available! As a choreographer, Larbi is so interested in the humanity, the psychology, and the intention of the movement.

RM: Larbi, when Diane reached out to you, what drew you to this project?

Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui: First of all, it was that I’d be working with Diane again! But the fact that it was a play also really attracted me. I have a lot of opera, dance, and ballet in my life. Working in the theater really liberates me from all of that and pulls me closer to what I’m looking for, which is the deeper intention and psychology of every character—why they say what they say, why they are doing what they are doing. And being able to share all of this with Diane is so exciting.

I think it’s also what Diane said about the ancient grudge—that we don’t really know its source. People have an image of Romeo and Juliet being about this family against that family. But what I find fascinating when digging into the play is that inside of the families there is a lot of strife. The families have within them dysfunctional behaviors. They don’t have issues with each other as much as they have issues with themselves. That is why Romeo is Romeo and why Juliet is Juliet—because they are children of dysfunctional families.

In that sense it’s quite similar to Jagged Little Pill, which was also about a dysfunctional family. And this dysfunctionality is not exceptional. Every family has dysfunction. We are all learning to deal with our children. We are all learning to deal with our parents. What’s also exciting about Romeo and Juliet is seeing how extreme these two characters are, and what drives them there. What does it mean to lose your lover to banishment? What does it drive you to do? The play ends tragically for these two young beings. But maybe for the families there’s a space of growth and development, and an awareness that only comes when there is real loss.

RM: The plot of Romeo and Juliet is structured around a number of famous fight scenes—the opening brawl that ignites the play and the deaths of Mercutio and Tybalt right in the middle of the play, for example. How have you been approaching these scenes in terms of a movement vocabulary?

SLC: First, I think it’s important to say how much Thomas Schall, our Fight Consultant, has offered. I’m in awe of him. He came with a very concrete fight language—elements that could be organized in order to have convincing violence on stage. Then I have been able to organize all of those elements on stage choreographically. The actors in this production are not afraid of physicality. They’re really courageous, and they are capable of understanding that they need to be very disciplined about it. The challenge is finding a way to be believable in the aggression without getting a hundred bruises every night. What’s been really exciting is bringing the poetry of the text into the fight scenes by using stop motion and other non-realistic devices. We are in a theater, so we are capable of zooming in or out, of slowing something down or making something go very fast.

RM: The last project you two worked on together was a musical. What has it been like to work with the spoken text of this play?

SLC: It’s so poetic, so powerfully written. It’s like a musical score in a way. There are real beats to it. As a choreographer it’s exciting to try to figure out how we can relate to the music the actors are making.

DP: There’s so much to get from the language of the play. The language is music, it is rhythm, it is psychology. It’s all there. Larbi always says that the movement is going to come from the language.

RM: That makes me think about the Elizabethan stage that Shakespeare wrote for, which was a somewhat bare space that really put an emphasis on the language. The scenic designer for this production, Amy Rubin, has created a relatively open platform with a massive wall that gets manipulated and transformed over the course of the production. How has this design been inspiring the rehearsal process?

SLC: Amy gave us a space where we can literally do anything. It’s such a neutral, abstract place that it makes everything possible. It’s exciting to feel like we are working with imagination and with the power of the language. You don’t need a lot of things—the language is enough for the imagination.

DP: Amy has offered an amazing platform—both literally and metaphorically—for the show to happen on. It’s actually very hard to do something simple. You have to make very precise choices. I always like a set that will evolve as you learn more in the rehearsal room, a set that is capacious enough that it will reveal itself over the course of the process. I can read a play over and over to understand it intellectually, but I don’t really understand it until I can be in the rehearsal room and physicalize it, until I can be with the actors and understand the relationships among the characters. Shakespeare’s plays are not just great works of literature, they are meant to be experienced as theater.

SLC: I totally agree with Diane. When you are with actors in the rehearsal room, everything you thought about the play gets erased and you have to start all over because the actors are so much a part of the process. They really inspire us to make different choices. It’s like a chemical reaction that you can’t foresee.

Ryan McKittrick is the Director of Artistic Programs and Dramaturg at A.R.T.

Photos

Rudy Pankow, Emilia Suárez, Director Diane Paulus, and members of the company in rehearsal: Nile Scott Studios.
Emilia Suárez, Movement Director and Choreographer Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui, and Rudy Pankow in rehearsal: Nile Scott Studios.
Director Diane Paulus and members of the company in rehearsal: Nile Scott Studios.