The Artistic Director Blogs!

Thoughts on another season.

This season’s plays are picked, the rights are procured, season tickets are on sale – so what does the Artistic Director do now?

Aside from learning my lines for THE THIN PLACE, and preparing to direct that play, a lot of my attention has turned to casting and choosing design teams for the season. My first questions always go to our Resident Artist, formerly co-artistic director, still co-founder, and wonderfully, my wife, Kim Tobin.

I’m so, so happy that Kim will appear as Bella in Adam Rapp’s THE SOUND INSIDE. It’s a huge role, in an entertaining but challenging play, and Kim’s participation ensures that the role will be treated with the utmost integrity. Ditto Kim’s direction, later in the season, of SANCTUARY CITY, by Martyna Majok. This play achieves its startling climax partly by jumping back and forth in time, sometimes very quickly. It needs a sure hand – and with Kim at the helm, I know it will get exactly what it needs.

Next, I query our two guest directors, both new to 4th Wall: K. Lorrel Manning and Aaron Brown. Who do you see acting in the play you’re directing? What designers would you love to have join you? Not all of this has been set, yet, so I can’t write much about it now, but it’s a thrilling process. We all get to dream about the perfect production: how it looks, sounds, feels; and who will make it that way.

There will be blood: new blood!
I know already that we have some designers who are new to 4th Wall. Stefan Azizi, the managing director of Rec Room, will design a set for us; Samantha Hyman, new to Houston and 4th Wall, will design costumes. (If you ever meet Samantha, make sure to ask her about her stilt -walking!)

And more new blood: I also know that there will be several actors making their 4th Wall debut. Carolyn Johnson will finally join us, in THE THIN PLACE. “Finally” because Carolyn has been doing excellent work all over Houston for two decades, but, because of timing, mostly, hasn’t yet appeared on the 4th Wall mainstage.

Luis Quintero, a Houston lad who went off to school at North Carolina School of the Arts, and then started a successful career in NYC, was brought home by Covid and has already built a good career here in H-town. He’ll be in SANCTUARY CITY, and, as a former teacher of his as well as acting colleague, I couldn’t be prouder of that fact. And Christian Tannous, another former student of mine, will make his 4th Wall debut in THE SOUND INSIDE.

I’ll write more about the excellent people who have worked with us in the past, and who will work with us again this season; people who I think of as the foundation of 4th Wall, in a subsequent blog.

The end is nigh, but so is the beginning!

Perversely, perhaps, here’s another thing I do at the beginning of a new season: I have to pick four (or maybe five) plays to do the season following this one.

“Already?!” you say?

And I say: it’s always on my mind, and it always comes up faster than I can believe.

So I ask myself: What do I like?

What will our audiences respond to?

How many roles are in that play?

Ten?! Ten actors? I only get twenty actors total in a season – I can’t do a play with ten actors in it! Or can I? How would that work?

In the original production of that play, they had a turntable – can we do it without one?

We haven’t done a Shakespeare play on our mainstage in quite a while – is it time?

What about an American, or British classic? When’s the last time any theater in Houston did a play by Harold Pinter? Chekhov? Shaw? Pirandello?

And on and on until the new season is old and it all starts again.

Picking a season is, to me, the single most important thing I do as artistic director. The plays we produce at 4th Wall define us – and my taste, my very personal, idiosyncratic way of looking at the world, and the world of theater is what drives those choices. It is a privilege and a heavy responsibility that I’m grateful for

If you made it this far, you’re a champ; I’ll write another one of these in a month or so.

- PL