Q&A with Director Dane Eissler
Q: You're designing and directing the play. How does your design process weave into your directing process?
Design and direction are intrinsically connected for me. I almost pursued animation/illustration before falling into theater, so I’m always thinking in terms of imagery. But I’m also a big nerd, so I do a LOT of research. For me, a lot of my work comes from the connections made in liminal space, so whether I’m designing, directing, or both, I approach the project like one big art installation. Everything is intrinsic and every element is holistically interconnected, from the design to the staging and the performances. It all has that same sense of impulsivity and play and experimentation that I would have working on a painting or a sculpture.
Q: What do you start with? A visual image? Or?
My starting place is always the text. It’s what the text inspires on first read that suddenly becomes different with every project. It could be an idea for set/space, or a costume concept, or an overall conceptual idea, or even character sketches that evoke some visceral tone of the piece. With these two plays, especially paired together as if in the same timeline of Tom (later becoming August), I became interested in the image of August, alone in his hotel apartment surrounded by pages and wine bottles and feeling abandoned by the world in his late career (similarly to Williams), and thinking back on the foundation of his life he built for himself. Reconnecting with his memories when he has no one else and allowing, as August says in SCSC, “Life is all - it’s just one time. It finally seems to all occur at one time.” Suddenly, the imagery of ghosts/memories using his apartment and his belongings as their stage came up. The couch becomes the beach shack, wine bottles into glowing candelabras, and a typewriter into a glass menagerie.
Q: Production in Town Hall. Does that have any significance?
As the central gathering place and time capsule of the history and memories of Provincetown, Town Hall feels like the perfect place to stage these two megalithic memory plays that span decades between the two plays. There’s an element of the design of the shows too that feels like a ritual, calling August and the audience into it, like, as August and Clare say, a “moth around a flame.” We’re very fortunate to be doing pieces that carry so much nostalgia in a building that evokes nostalgia tenfold.
Bonus Q: You've been an artist at the Festival a number of times. Has that influenced your thinking this time around?
From my previous experiences at the Festival, I came to these two plays knowing that the festival fosters experimentation and creative risk. My previous experiences have been as a Production Assistant for the blindfolded adaptation of Beckett’s Company and as a Production Designer for And Tell Sad Stories of the Deaths of Queens, both with EgoPo Classic Theater, so to be able to dive in and direct two plays within one conceptual world, knowing that the fest has my creative back and then some, has certainly been motivational.
You can purchase tickets to The Glass Menagerie here.
