When we wrapped my second production, KWLT’s Dangerous Liaisons (2009), someone asked me if being a director had ruined me for the magic of theatre, now that I had been twice immersed in the behind-the-scenes process. Quite the opposite, I have found that being director has only increased the magic. Where else do I get to be part of the enchanted circle that creates magic from words on a page and movement on a stage? Just because I know how the magic is created, doesn’t make it any less compelling; the trick is to make the magic as compelling for everyone involved, from the cast to the audience. If I can compel them all to feel what I felt when I first read those words, or envisioned the production in my head, then great magic has indeed been wrought. The successful director is very much a kind of magus.

This is my first production with TenBareToes, and one of the advantages of doing this production under Anita’s banner is a key component in making great magic: being able to guarantee having all the right components as opposed to selecting from only what comes to market (or, in this case, auditions). There are ways to work with open audition policies to better stack one’s casting odds, but being able to skirt the risks by going straight to hand-picked resources cuts through a lot of the uncertainty that sometimes unsettles community theatre productions from the get-go. There are no guarantees in life, nor in theatre; I have had to do three recastings in the production as life got in the way for some actors, but I will say this for the Kitchener-Waterloo community theatre pool: there is a wealth of talent out there, and recasting as a necessary evil becomes less a chore and more a challenge in narrowing down options.

As we get into the second full week of Shadowlands rehearsals, two things become abundantly clear to me as a director: cast well, and you’re more than halfway to that magic; and I really love the directing process (you’d think this part would be obvious by the time someone has helmed four productions… I never said I was a quick study). Last night’s rehearsal was an example of the first point as some of the cast begins to gel into onstage and personal relationships. We get there a little faster in some productions when the majority of the cast has worked with each other at some point in the past (some more recently than others; I’ve picked up several cast members from the previous 10BT production of The Odd Couple), but that we get there at all is always the kind of thing for which directors will hold their breath. That easy camaraderie goes a long way towards making the working relationship through the difficult scenes and the seventh-inning stretch of rehearsals flow more smoothly. When we know when and how to make each other laugh as well as focus, you know there’s a solid interpersonal structure at work behind the illusions they’re also weaving on stage.

Recently on a workshop application form, I was asked to describe my style of directing, and while I’m pretty sure I botched the question by trying to be authentic instead of artistically-pretentious, I’m also reasonably certain I managed to convey the fact that I love this gig. It’s been interesting to watch what passes for a “style” develop over four reasonably different types of shows, from being over-prepared with semi-blocked scenes in my first show, to a very lax and largely-unprepared slide into this one. Last night, just before rehearsal (in our second week on the schedule), I finally marked up my script with scene divisions. I normally have the massive binder I refer to as either the Big Book of the Play or The Brick (depending on what kind of day I’m having), but my sheet protectors still have Frankenstein’s marks all over them, and I haven’t even finished loading the script for Shadowlands. And yet, there was no doubt in my mind that I was as ready as I wanted to be when we hit the read-through more than a week ago. My direction this time around is less about telling my cast where to go and how to be, and more about getting them to think about what they’re doing, what they mean, what they think. This is all part of what Obsidian Theatre’s Philip Akin (one of my mentors) calls “intentionality”, and a skill I am learning to develop both as a director , and as something I help my actors develop. I have learned that the high points of the rehearsal process, for me, are less about the moments when the actors successfully convey something I’ve directed them to do, and more about the moments when I ask them a question about intentions that stops them. If I get, “That’s a really good question,” and a pause while they work it out for themselves, I know they’ve come one step closer to getting inside the characters they are portraying. Every moment of connection that leads to a deeper expression on stage is where the real magic lives for me.

(And it’s fair game when they in turn ask me something that makes me think. I’m very much about learning from them as much as I hope they can learn from me. Over the years, I’ve also gotten far more comfortable with saying myself, “That’s a really good question to which I do not have a good answer, or possibly even ANY answer; let’s try and work something out.”)

Ultimately, I know we’re making magic when we hit those moments in which, even as Director who knows the script, who knows these are actors in a rehearsal room, who knows the cues, the light changes, the soundtrack, the grips’ choreography, the spikes on the floor, the flubbed lines, I can still hold my breath and just watch wide-eyed as the characters come to life and the moment of the story just flows over me like a wave. In those moments I forget to be the Director, because what’s happening on stage is so compelling that knowing the trick doesn’t save me from being carried along in it. The fact that it’s a learning process for all of us doesn’t mean we lose the magic at all; sometimes the greatest magicians are simply those who understand the power they wield well enough to walk that fine line between “acting” and “being”, where the magic becomes so compelling that, as young Douglas says in Shadowlands, we simply want it to be real. And for a moment, it is.

That’s why I love what I do, and why the magic will never go away for me.