Mother’s Day Interview - Tazewell Thompson
⊆ May 14th, 2006 by courtney | ˜
I sat down with Tazewell Thompson in Molly Smith’s office during the intermission of On The Verge or The Geography Of Yearning last week before the public opening at Arena Stage. Mr. Thompson has very interesting things to say about directing “in the round”, the differences between theatre in the US and Europe and the women who shaped his life and career.
Interviewer: Ronnie Ruff
Tazewell Thompson became Artistic Director of Westport Country Playhouse on January 1, 2006. At the Playhouse, he appeared as an actor in Checking Out in 1976 and directed The Old Settler in 2003 and The Immigrant in 2005. At Arena he has directed M. Butterfly, Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, Caucasian Chalk Circle, Yellowman, The Glass Menagerie, Playboy of the West Indies, Yerma, plus his own play Constant Star and many others. His international opera career has taken him to L’Opera de Paris, la Scala, Houston Grand Opera, Teatro Real Madrid, Tokyo Opera, L’Opera Bastille, Glimmerglass Opera, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Vancouver, Portland, Michigan, Osaka and New York City Opera. His production of Porgy and Bess was broadcast on PBS’s “Live from Lincoln Center” and received Emmy nominations for Best Director and Best Production. His national theater credits include Arena Stage, Goodman Theatre, Manhattan Theatre Club, The Guthrie, Old Globe, Hartford Stage, Seattle Rep, Oregon Shakespeare, PlayMakers Rep, Peoples Light and Theatre Company, Huntington Theatre, Actors Theatre of Louisville, Public Theatre, Second Stage, Roundabout, Goodspeed, Indiana Rep, Cleveland Play House, San Jose Rep and Virginia Stage, among many others. An award-winning playwright, Mr. Thompson’s play Constant Star has had more than a dozen productions and recently received five NAACP awards. He is commissioned to write plays for Arena Stage, Lincoln Center Theatre, South Coast Rep and Peoples Light and Theatre Company.
May 18th, 2006 at 7:53 am
[...] Director Thompson, in a podcast interview with dctheatrereviews (which you can access here), said that he looked forward to telling this story in the round (previous productions at Westport were on a proscenium stage). Surprisingly for such a linear story - it is literally the tale of people marching from one side of the stage to the other - Thompson pulls it off. Assisted by Arena’s famously capable technical staff, as well as Lighting Designer Robert Wierzel and Sound Designer Fabian Obispo, Thompson’s staging wrings all that can possibly be wrought from this difficult text. In another good decision, Thompson apparently decided to eliminate the recorded voice of Christopher Plummer, which had been scheduled to announce titles to the play’s scenes. The play requires great concentration to follow, and Plummer’s mellow tones would have made the audiences’ task that much harder. [...]
May 19th, 2008 at 9:41 pm
Where and When is the next showings of Constant Star?