Yael Farber on directing The Crucible (Digital Theatre Plus)

Yael Farber talks about The Crucible for Digital Theatre plus. Screencap

Yael Farber was interviewed about directing The Crucible and the interview was put on Digital Theatre Plus (the variant for institutional subscribers) this week. This is a summary of the things that interested me, not a paraphrase of the entire half hour interview. Some of the stuff she said about her perspective on Miller or the play I have already articulated my disagreement with, so I will spare you that.

Much of the interview confirms things we’ve already heard in other venues and interviews, with more detail. For instance, she discusses her desire to cast actors who move, which she relates to her roots in the South African theater. This was her direction to the casting agent she worked with — and she says that she had two or three meetings to cast actors. In that sense she seems to think the encounter with Richard Armitage was “random.” She also told all the actors she worked with that they had not to be afraid of looking foolish or falling and having to get up and start over again.

Interesting: Armitage did not read with either Samantha Colley or Anna Madeley before any of them being cast. She just knew, could see, that they would have chemistry with each other.

There’s a long section where she praises her entire creative team — especially the movement coordinator. I thought when I saw the Nirbhaya trailer that Armitage tweeted that the general look of the plays seems similar, and she says in this interview (based on her quote of someone or other who believes that the stage is the place where anything can happen and something must) that she wants the space to be constructed in such a way that it can all be swept away at a moment’s notice. She didn’t want it to be weighed down with immovable things or have that feeling, and she related this desire to the way that the Massachusetts settlers had to create their new society, carve it out, from what was there.

Also interesting: all of the actors except William Gaunt (for reasons of age / health) were barefoot during rehearsals. Farber does not understand how you can pretend to be someone else when you’re wearing your own shoes. They did all do a warm up together before rehearsals. She and the movement coordinator also did a lot of extra work with the actors who played the young women, after rehearsals, to sort of push them to their breaking point in terms of their expressiveness. (To me, the way she described it, this sounded questionable, but I am not an actor.)

She thinks that a lot of what is being said in the play is said in the silences and in-between spaces. She felt that both Armitage and Madeley were artists who were able to capture this quality of saying things via silences. She made them rehearse up against walls, where they were extremely close to each other but could not touch, or so close they could smell each other (as she says). [After that part of the interview there’s a clip of part of Act Two and you can really see how something like that might be playing a role in their acting.]

In general, it was important to Farber to mark the social spaces between different people by means of understanding how they touched (or did not touch) each other. She felt that a major aspect of understanding relationships in the play relies on what the spaces are for personal and physical expression. If there are only certain spaces for sensuality in a particular context, then expression has to be seen on stage in those places. On the whole she feels that contemporary theater and acting do not show this element of relationships through physical attitudes and touches well enough.

The main impression I have of Farber after this interview is one I’ve had all along — she is authoritative and seriously uncompromising. Seen from the viewpoint of that impression, I find it interesting that she seems to be the person Armitage has currently fixed on as a creative partner.

~ by Servetus on April 10, 2015.