Your first summer you will also take a course on the fundamentals of directing a new play, and how that can be different than working on a published play where the script is finished and most of the problems of production have been solved by lots of other directors before you got your hands on it. You’ll learn the tricks of the trade involved in asking for and accepting rewrites, how to talk to a playwright, how to keep actors from going bonkers after they work hard on a scene that the playwright decides to cut, or rapidly learn new lines right before opening. Of course, all the normal directing principles will be reviewed and reinforced.
In your second summer you take a course on Viewpoints Training and Composition, which will teach fundamentals of devised work creation. You also take a course on creating and running your own theatre company dedicated to producing new plays in collaboration with playwrights, and a course on fundamentals of design in which you will create set, costume, and lighting design options for the festival script you are directing that summer, along with an examination of graphic illustration for publicity purposes.
There is one class that you take both summers, and that is called Directors and Playwrights in Collaboration. Over the six weeks of the summer session, you will be directing a reading that will be part of our annual playwrights festival. This course is designed to be one half weekly production meeting to check in with how your collaboration with the playwright and actors is going, and one half discussion group for identifying problems and finding solutions with the guidance of the instructor.