“I look for work that baffles, or delights, or shocks me,” says Sarah Benson. “Shows that come from a perspective different from my own force me to be honest, and honesty takes one to surprising places. Theater should make us see things we would never think to see and crack open how we think about our environment.”
Benson’s directorial style is, at its core, collaborative, bringing together many art forms. This desire to break down boundaries began when she co-founded a theater company called Arion. “It was born out of an interest in putting music, theater, visual art, and architecture together,” she says. This interdisciplinary approach highlights her passion for a theater of images. “I spend a lot of my time in museums, and often the images of a play will kick-start the process for me,” she said.
Her 2008 production of Sarah Kane’s infamous play Blasted embodies this aspect of Benson’s artistic signature. “The images in the play are so startling,” she says, “that at first I wanted to hold them at arm’s length. But then, I asked myself why that was.” For example, the stage direction “the soldier grips Ian’s head in his hands. He puts his mouth over one of Ian’s eyes, sucks it out, bites it off and eats it,” is puzzling to direct. Benson, however, did not shy away from these graphic directions. Rather, she embraced them, utilizing the horrific images to wring a terrible beauty from Kane’s language.
Benson’s passion for the visual complements without competing with the language. She allows the visual to breathe with the text. “I am also very text-driven,” she says. “I was steeped in text from an early age. I did a degree in English Literature as I was so fascinated with text. Classic texts are definitely a big touchstone for me.”
As Artistic Director of Soho Rep, she has continued to develop her directorial style for the past four years. “My process is driven by trying to constantly figure out what I learn from each project and applying that to the next. On each show you screw up, you make discoveries, you learn, and all of that becomes the fodder for the next piece.”
At the A.R.T., Benson will soon begin directing a new translation of Sophocles’s Ajax, one of her all-time favorite plays. The images in the classical text fascinate her and she hopes to show how they relate to our contemporary experience of war and the other cultural, social, and economic challenges we currently face as a society. Benson will encourage the audience into a collaboration both with herself and with the events and characters on the stage. Under her direction, this ancient tragedy will speak loudly and clearly to a modern audience.
Christina Farris is a first-year dramaturgy student at the A.R.T./MXAT Institute for Advanced Theater Training at Harvard University.
