A Whole New World

Theatre may be the actor's medium, but when a perceptive, empathetic director enters the room, it's the rare actor who doesn't take notice. We're not referring to the director who barges into the production process with hit-filled résumé boldly worn on sleeve. Rather, it's about sensing that the director has something salient to contribute to the actor's—and the playwright's—eventual success.

Loretta Greco offers a substantive case in point. She has never staged a Broadway show (and is married to a Broadway set designer, Robert Brill), and while her credits are extensive, it's the stylistic diversity of her projects more than their volume that makes her an articulate conversationalist. Greco is known almost entirely for staging new works, particularly by key playwrights at the Public Theater, including Tracey Scott Wilson's The Story, Ruben Santiago-Hudson's Lackawanna Blues, and Nilo Cruz's Two Sisters and a Piano. Regionally, Greco has often ricocheted among the nation's major nonprofits—San Francisco's Magic Theatre, the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, the Cincinnati Playhouse in the Park, Seattle's Intiman Theatre, and New Haven's Long Wharf Theatre, among others—and she directed the national tour of Emily Mann's Having Our Say. Recently she ended a two-and-a-half-year run as producing artistic director of Off-Broadway's Women's Project & Productions (now known as Women's Project), where the likes of Rinne Groff, Toni Press-Coffman, and Karen Hartman have received high-profile, career-enhancing productions.

Her final project for the company is Kathryn Walat's Victoria Martin: Math Team Queen, which opened Jan. 21. In a story both sweet and snarky, the central character is, in the words of the production's press release, "über-popular" and "wicked smart," the "third most popular" high school sophomore in her class, who is "roped into joining the all-male, all-nerd Longwood High School math team." With The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee and other works about supersmart, deep-feeling teens in the Zeitgeist, the play's popular appeal was clear to Greco from the start. But there was, she says, more to her interest than that.

"Usually I would have a very treacherous story about how this play came to me and how it got developed," Greco says. "But in this case I really don't. It was when I ran the Women's Project, where I'd produced a play reading for Kate and read two other plays of hers. With Victoria, though, I sat down. It was one of those things where you give something a peek, then you keep turning the pages. I laughed out loud, full out. And I cried. I felt like she hit upon this moment where we all make this rite of passage toward figuring out who the hell we are. It could be your high school, my high school, or it could be the high school of someone who graduated 10 minutes ago or who graduated a decade ago."

Because Victoria Martin concerns high school students, Greco, together with Walat, wrestled with many of the same casting issues that have afflicted works like Spelling Bee: Do you cast age-appropriate performers or hire actors who are older than their characters and ask them to "young" it down?

"I went to [casting director] Paul Fouquet and we talked about the importance of us casting the genuine article—that we didn't want 30-year-olds pulling off 16- and 17-year-olds," Greco explains. "So we went for the scary open call, where there were people coming in who didn't go to fancy theatre schools and didn't have the fancy credits. Paul worked with them first, then we worked with people together. It was so much fun, and it opened up a whole new world for me, to be honest—not working with people with 10 years of craft, degrees from Juilliard. I mean, with all respect to the Juilliards and the NYUs, these actors brought something fresh. I just wanted to be sure we were honest in our approach to the material, because I felt otherwise the material had the potential to be commented on."

Although she doesn't initially say it, that last remark—"commented on"—reveals one of Greco's central tenets of directing: the essentiality of staying true to what the playwright has written, as opposed to superimposing a concept or an agenda on it. "I felt the trajectories of each of the characters," she says, "and for Victoria, it's about questions of sexual and personal identity: Is she going to become the most popular girl? Is she actually going to embrace the fact she's incredibly bright and social? This is the sort of post-feminism I like: recognizing that at some point this young girl realizes she can't have it all and has to choose. I felt like it could be a world of cell phones, iPods, and Kate has cut through all that. We didn't want to look at the play with any sense of irony, especially since Kate doesn't tie it up with a happy ribbon. Every character goes through a treacherous year of high school. It needed to feel real."

Jessi Campbell, who plays Victoria, had worked with Greco previously on Groff's play Inky, so as rehearsals got under way, Greco says, there was already a connection between the actor and her. With the other actors—Zachary Booth, Adam Farabee, Tobias Segal, and Matthew Stadelmann—however, the director quickly realized that "everybody works differently and that together we would have to forge a common vocabulary."

The question was how. "If there's any overriding thing for me, it's the collaborative aspects of the work," Greco says. "I so relish the conversation, the emotionally viable give-and-take from auditions to rehearsals to the moment they kick me out so press can come in…. In Victoria, there's a lot of direct address—I've worked on more direct-address plays than anyone should. And while it forces the audience to lean forward, whether they want to or not, it also forces the actor to say, 'I'm really in this scene.' You can't just show up and fake it. You have to break the fourth wall—and your scene partner is the audience, and the audience should feel as if they've just had a dialogue with you when you're done.

"With Victoria," Greco continues, "I guess you could say I've been a little more technical than with other plays. You don't have to tell Ruben [Santiago-Hudson] not to miss the operative word. And the beauty is that this cast will do just about anything."

So the challenge in the audition room, she says, wasn't forging a common vocabulary; it was figuring out who would be most present and fearless in the first place. "Again, I'd worked with Jessi before, so I knew the play had its anchor," Greco explains. "Now, directors say they always try to go with the better actors, but what does that mean? For me it's about who's engaged, who's game. It's where you look them in the eye and know they're there. It's about asking yourself, Who do you want to spend six weeks with? It's when you get a sense that they have a rigor and the proper generosity of spirit. And you learn how to pick up on that when you're auditioning."

One technique, Greco says, is simply asking actors at an audition to really stretch. "When you give an actor an adjustment, I often go way overboard, asking actors to pick something that they might twist and turn and show me something," she says. "So it's not only where cerebrally they get it, but where there's a fearlessness about making an ass of themselves. It's what separates the excellent from the absolutely sublime."

Finally, there's one characteristic Greco asks actors to leave at home: "That real, real sense of entitlement. You know, that whole 'I wanna be a star yesterday' attitude, where they come in, say 'I'm tired,' and we've just begun rehearsal. I fear there's a lack of a sense of apprenticeship, of coming into your craft. And it's a shame, for I still believe in my heart that going into the theatre is an experience unlike any other." <