Directing is Asking Questions

I had not intended to write more about questions, but then I attended a talk featuring Tina Packer and Mark Farrell, the co-directors of The Approach, a forthcoming production at Shakespeare and Company.

The Approach is a play performed by three women. There are no male actors, but the women refer to many of the men in their lives. Packer and Farrell talked about “creating the story” of the characters who are mentioned but do not appear on stage. The actors need to know who these people are, they said, in order to convey their relationships and the women’s attitudes about them.

As they were describing this necessity, I asked if these stories were created by the directors and ‘given” to the actors, or if the actors participated in creating them.

Packer immediately said that it was not the role of the director to create the concept. She described herself as an “anti-conceptual director” whose philosophy runs counter to Yale’s. She stated that “Directing is asking questions,” noting that there were no directors in Shakespeare’s time, only actors. “Ultimately,” she said, “the theater is between the actor and the audience.”

In addition to being an actor, director, and founder of Shakespeare and Company, Packer is a prolific author. When I was president of the community college in the same county as Shakespeare and Company, I read her book, Power Plays, Shakespeare’s Lessons in Leadership and Management.  Her remarks about directing, I thought, were a leadership lesson that applies equally to other settings.  Top-down decision making at a college, for example, rarely generates ownership among faculty. Later during the talk, a member of the audience who works with children asked about directing techniques for them. Packer replied that the principal of asking questions works for them as well. Leading by asking questions is a transferable skill.