All About The Red Umbrella

Pre-production is officially in full swing on DirectorFest. I am directing The Red Umbrella, a short play written by my long-time collaborator and friend, Jason Williamson. This marks our tenth collaboration; we've worked together on a range of material from his original plays to reshapings of classic text to new adaptations of foreign plays. We enjoy working together because we share the fundamental philosophy that the stage should be a place for stories that have to be told theatrically. For us, this means heightened language, theatrical spectacle, and stories that don't confine themselves to the kitchen sink and reach beyond the stars. What we both embrace in our work is the inherent artifice of theatrical representation. We do not seek to duplicate "reality." Anne Bogart compares truth with the sun; in order to really look at it, one must look slightly to the side. That is what we hope to do in any project we realize.

The greatest pleasure out of working together so closely and so often is that we've developed a very close relationship. We've spent so many nights dreaming together that any opportunity to create a new piece is simply another chance to push each other to a place we've never been to. As Jason is fond of saying, the history of great collaborations in the theatre is the history of great friendship.

Above, Jason and I on New Year's Eve at a beach in North Carolina, right after an impromptu countdown midnight swim!

The Red Umbrella is a love story between an Everyman and Death, who he meets on the beach as a young boy. Death prophesies that he will see a red umbrella at the moment of his dying. He journeys through life on a quest for the red umbrella that may reunite him with his beloved. The play is a whimsical, sad, funny fairy-tale; I hope to capture both the absurdity of the picture of the world it paints as well as the profound truths it contains in telling the story of a mortal man who reconciles himself to both fate and mortality. In the preliminary design conversations, I've asked designers not to consider any part of this world literally. I would like to find a way to create a visual language for the play that is rooted in poetic metaphor, without deviating so far away from a recognizable reality that the characters become ungrounded.

Below, some pictures of productions that Jason and I have worked on together:

Above, Agnes the preacher's wife is haunted by the Hawk in our adaptation of Ibsen's Brand.

Above is a Sea God comes ashore to romance a mute nymph in Jason's play Ether Steeds.

Below, our most recent collaboration, an original adaptation of Schiller's Don Carlos. This scene sees Crown Prince Carlos importune his father King Philip for leadership of Spain's army.

(posted by Ed)