‘I wish theater criticism in this country could be more of a companion piece to the experience than a warning about where not to spend your money,” says director Anna D. Shapiro, the 36th and newest ensemble member of the Steppenwolf Theatre Company. She wonders why a critic can’t be “partners” with a theater, on the “same team.”
At this point in the conversation I’m more or less goading Shapiro into letting loose on the topic. But she’s been thinking about this one. She’s not confrontational, but she’s not one to dance around something that makes her angry.
The hazel-eyed Shapiro doesn’t appear to blink very much. Forty minutes into a conversation with her, she may not have blinked at all. Did I miss it? you think. Did she blink when I was off getting coffee?
When the subject turns to how shabbily she believes playwright Bruce Norris, among others, has been treated by the local theater press, the not-blinking becomes intense. She’s protective, she says, of “our guys,” the Steppenwolf-favored writers. They include Norris, whose plays “The Infidel” and “Purple Heart” Shapiro staged in world-premiere versions for Steppenwolf, and Tracy Letts, actor and author of “Man From Nebraska,” which Shapiro directed in a superb 2003 production. She’s not directing the second production of “Man From Nebraska,” at the equally prestigious South Coast Repertory in Costa Mesa, Calif. Instead, William “Exorcist” Friedkin, who is slated to direct a screen version of Letts’ play “Bug,” is staging “Man From Nebraska” there.
“Which is fine,” she deadpans. “No comment.”
It took too long, she says, for “Man From Nebraska” to get a second major production. Likewise, Norris’ work, which Shapiro considers “magnificent and important, and I think in 10 years, it’ll be seen as seminal,” has yet to reach a wider audience in or outside New York. “Yeah. Yeah. You know what?” she asks. “With all due respect, you guys don’t help, OK? And that’s very frustrating for me. . . . And You’re shooting this guy down?” She’s about to open Norris’ play, a bruising social satire, “The Pain and the Itch.” Shapiro believes the play, as well as Norris’ next one, “The Unmentionables,” will send him into orbit. “You’re shooting this guy down? You have to be kidding me. Have you been anywhere lately?
“Two things baffle me and make me angry, and they are this: When somebody writes about a new play and says the play is beautiful; the production is beautiful; the performances are stunning; the directing is weak. That makes me angry. But not as angry as: The direction is beautiful; the production is wonderful; the actors are amazing; the play is weak. That makes even less sense to me.”
Rigorously unsentimental
Shapiro’s gaze serves as a handy metaphor for Shapiro’s work. As a director, she casts a sharp, unblinking eye on the material at hand. The hallmarks of her productions — a bittersweet tang, a painterly eye, a rigorously unsentimental approach to character — have guided the Evanston native to the top of the list of Chicago-based stage directors. Her productions contain no fat, no flourishes and no nonsense. It is a paradoxical but undeniable measure of her quality that Shapiro has never even been nominated for a Jeff Award.
Shapiro’s most recent Steppenwolf productions, “Man From Nebraska” and the sentimental ’60s Robert Anderson chestnut “I Never Sang for My Father,” confronted audiences with boldly conceived visual environments without sacrificing the focus on the people within. The scenic conception of “I Never Sang for My Father” was especially personal, dominated as it was by large-scale black-and-white photographs, lovely and rueful, taken by Shapiro’s late father, a photographer.
“My father’s work was very spare and lonely,” she says, drinking black coffee at the Crate and Barrel coffee lounge near the theater. “And I think even when the sets are big, my work is spare and lonely too. Members of my family have told me as much. So, yes. I would say there’s something of his work in mine.” This isn’t an easy topic. Shapiro’s father died eight years ago; her mother, sister and two brothers are alive and well.
Losing her father was, she says, “unspeakably difficult. Heartbreaking.” Then she corrects herself.
“Still heartbroken.”
Shapiro is 39, and recently tenured: Three years ago she took over for Robert Falls as the head of Northwestern University’s graduate directing program. “It’s bizarre,” she says, smiling a sideways-J smile. “It’s bizarre for an artist to have job security. I don’t really know what to do with it.”
She got her undergraduate degree in theater from Columbia College Chicago and her graduate degree in directing from the Yale School of Drama. For a time she was married to actor Chris Bauer. Since 1995 she has worked at Steppenwolf, first as head of the now-defunct New Plays Lab, then as resident director, then as associate artist, now as ensemble member.
“The seminal years of my life, I’ve been surrounded by these people,” she says of Steppenwolf.
Shapiro’s touch, says artistic director Martha Lavey, who acted in “I Never Sang for My Father,” has grown more supple and sure with time. “I trust her intelligence,” Lavey says. “She knows how to encourage a psychologically complex reading of a play.”
Mahoney’s impressed
John Mahoney first worked with Shapiro in 1989, when she assisted director Sheldon Patinkin on a National Jewish Theater revival of “After the Fall.”
“Even then she was so smart. So smart,” Mahoney says. Lately he acted under Shapiro’s direction on “The Drawer Boy” at Steppenwolf and, this year, at New Jersey’s Paper Mill Playhouse. Last year Mahoney co-starred with Kevin Anderson in “I Never Sang for My Father,” which Mahoney found “terrifying.”
“I couldn’t find anything to like about that character,” says Mahoney of the drama’s bullying martinet of a patriarch. “Anna didn’t coddle me. I’d look for places to soften him, but just like Jerry Zaks did with me on `House of Blue Leaves’ [in New York], she said: `Don’t. Don’t do it. The audience won’t necessarily like you, but they’ll understand your motives.’ I think it was her lack of sentimentality that enabled me to go ahead and play it honestly.
Shapiro, who wasn’t the first director considered for the project, had to find a way to “take ownership” of that piece. She didn’t want to buy into the potential bathos of the father/son rift. She remembers telling scenic designer Todd Rosenthal in early discussions of the design. “Please don’t make me look like a girl.”
“The Pain and the Itch” has a discomfiting edge, she says, like all of playwright Norris’ work, but this one’s more of a hurtling black comedy. At Thanksgiving time a monstrously hypocritical family of upper-middle-class liberals contend with a mysterious visitor, a mysterious apparent insect infecting their avocados and an unpleasant skin disease. It’s harsh material, but Shapiro puts it this way, laughing: “To get his points across, this time Bruce on some level is using his powers for good instead of evil.”
“Anna was pointing out to me the other day,” Norris says, “that `The Pain and the Itch’ structurally operates on the principles of farce. `The Infidel’ [which featured Mike Nussbaum as an eloquent, sexually obsessed rotter] was essentially static, almost like a radio play. She and I approached everything in that on the level of: What are the psychological reasons this character says this word at that moment?
“In this one, she’s working from the outside in, getting people moving and interacting as though they’re not in a play, but just at a holiday gathering.”
Shapiro says she likes working new material because “you get to be first, and I’m very competitive. It’s great to work with actors when they’re inhabiting characters for the first time. I love figuring it all out, and I like work about what’s happening now, and I feel that Bruce writes that.
“I’m getting less and less interested in the problems of youth,” she says. “I’m much more interested in the idea of emotional paralysis, and I find myself less interested in work that doesn’t have anything to do with a conversation about the world. We’re living in a time when it is impossible to deny the damage I feel this country is doing to the rest of the world. Theater, for me, is no longer a conversation about how we destroy each other; it’s much more about how we may be destroying everyone else.
A voice heard
“I didn’t ever think I would be interested in having responsibility for an artistic voice,” she says, finishing her coffee. Rehearsal starts in five minutes. “I studied film as an undergraduate and was a film and videotape editor, and I thought: This is perfect. I wanted a craft, because I was surrounded by deeply talented people whose lives, their artistic lives, I connected with some very painful things. Then I realized that I liked that sort of life, and that it didn’t have to be painful.
“The people I know, my friends and my peers, the ones who are really struggling — it’s heartbreaking to me. The people who get a voice can’t complain. They have no right to complain. I have a lot of amazingly talented people in my life who have no voice in the world. That’s difficult. That’s difficult.
“My father had a voice in the world,” she says. “And I have a voice in the world.”
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mjphillips@tribune.com
“The Pain and the Itch” previews 3 & 7:30 p.m. Sunday; 7:30 p.m. Wednesday-Friday; and 3 & 7:30 p.m. Saturday. It continues July 12 through Aug. 28 at Steppenwolf Theatre, 1650 N. Halsted St. Tickets $20-$60 at 312-335-1650 or www.steppenwolf.org.
