Tony award-winning director, playwright, and producer George C. Wolfe had a style and a vision all his own. This vision had roots in his personal life. From humble beginnings in Frankfurt, Kentucky, where he was born in 1954, Wolfe carried with him “an obligation to open doors to those who find them locked” (Loewith 395). Throughout his professional life in the theatre, across the many roles and positions he occupied, Wolfe offered opportunities to many who may not have received them otherwise to break down social barriers to professional development in the theatre. With the responsibility of providing opportunities, Wolfe recognized the importance incorporating a collaborative approach into his directing aesthetic
Wolfe attended Pomona College in Claremont, California, initially for acting and design, but transferred to the directing and writing track. After graduation, he stayed in Los Angeles, writing and directing plays, until 1979 (396). Wolfe worked at the Inner City Cultural Center, but he knew that he shouldn’t stay there because of the focus on film (De Vries). His interest in live theatre called him away from Los Angeles, but taking it from it his initial opportunities in the realm of theatre. He moved to New York City and in 1984 received a master’s degree in dramatic writing and musical theatre from New York University’s Tisch school of the Arts (Loewith 396).
From there, Wolfe’s career began with a rush of opportunities and artistic growth. In 1986, his play the Colored Museum premiered at the Crossroads Theatre Company and transferred to the Papp Public Theatre in New York City later that same year (396). This play serves as the starting point for the writing and directing opportunities that would allow Wolfe to break through into live theatre. Four years later, he directed an adaptation of Zora Neale Hurston’s short stories, Spunk which also transferred to the Public. For his directing of Spunk, he received an OBIE award for direction. Due to his success with Spunk and this first accolade, the Papp Public theatre also hired him as part of their staff.
Once at the Public, he directed Jelly’s Last Jam there in 1991 which then moved to Broadway the following year, giving him eleven Tony nominations. Right after the musical about jazz musician Jelly Roll Morton, Wolfe was given the opportunity to direct Angels in America Part One: Millennium Approaches, for which he received his first Tony award for direction (396). In the middle of the rehearsal process, Wolfe was asked to serve as the artistic director of the Public, assuming the title of producer in 1993 until 2004 when he stepped down (395-396). Once the performances began for Angels in America Part One, Wolfe began work as director for its sequel, Angels in America Part Two: Perestroika. His next achievement started in 1995, with Bring in ‘Da Noise, Bring in ‘Da Funk, which started at the Public and moved to Broadway in 1996 when he received another Tony award for his directing (396-7).
In 2010, after he had left the Public, Wolfe reappeared in the New York theatre scene as the director of John Guare’s A Free Man of Color at the Lincoln Theater Center. Like before, he followed this production closely with the Normal Heart in 2011. The production was awarded three Tony’s (although none to Wolfe), but he received a Drama Desk award for best direction with Joel Grey and the Stage Directors and Choreographers Foundation’s Mr. Abbott award (398). These were the final awards for live theatre that Wolfe received, but these do not encapsulate everything he achieved in the profession. In 2004, at the end of his time at the Public, “thirteen of the theatre’s productions had moved to Broadway on his watch, and it embraced the kind of ‘cultural collisions’ Wolfe wanted so much to present” (397). Through the highly and less successful productions he produced at the Public, he accepted large risks, particularly on new musicals, to provide opportunities to others. These opportunities may have brought him some critical reviews, but he managed to give voice to many artists looking for an open door. After his many successes that he traced back to a few opportunities he had at the beginning of his career, he felt the need to offer opportunities to others like the ones he was afforded. In the end, the productions he chose during his tenure as the Public’s producer embraced his own vision and aesthetic.
Wolfe’s aesthetic generally revolves around “characters [standing] on the border between an alien culture and the mainstream, and the stories they tell illuminate both sides of the divide” (395). Bridging divides and providing opportunities for experiential learning are important to him. This is telling in the productions he directs and the style he applies to each.
Wolfe was inspired by particular personae and particular scenes in several productions he had seen in his childhood or as he was studying. His mentors were “book writer Peter Stone, director-writer Arthur Laurents, and director-lyricist Richard Maltby, Jr.” (Thelen 210). In addition to these role models, Wolfe believes that “‘the Quintet’ from West Side Story was very liberating for my brain. The ‘Bowler Hat’ number from Pacific Overtures; the way that was staged and written by Hal [Prince] and Steve [Sondheim] was crucial” (210). These scenes and people, mostly having to do with musicals and music, suggest why much of his work includes some musical component or other (Bernstein 59). That is only the stylistic component of Wolfe’s work, as many of his productions have a thematic relation as well.
In Jelly’s Last Jam, there’s an emphasis placed on contemporary cultural issues, through an expansion of the thematic and stylistic work that began with August Wilson (De Vries). More specifically, Wolfe tried to tackle the mixed social responses to stigmatization and how it relates to discussing these crucial issues across ethnic and socioeconomic factions. Wolfe attempted to break down the different reactions to the play. All those instantaneous reactions were “painful. Because that’s exactly the place where I was coming from…it was really a play about self-empowerment. About how I am now going to define myself the way that I am capable of” (Demastes 452). Providing opportunity to the audience to say that they can define themselves in their own way is one way of putting Wolfe’s aesthetic to work here. In his childhood, he lacked the opportunities to redefine the black gay experience through art and theatre, and so Jelly’s Last Jam acted as an opportunity Wolfe felt obliged to give to the audience as a catalyst for discussion about race perceptions in America.
His recent efforts to stage Shuffle Along have been met with hesitation in the theatrical community, but that is why he feels the need to produce it. Wolfe believes the old musical “‘should be a part of the conversation…because it was a crucial moment in New York’s history, a crucial moment in African American history. Why the hell weren’t we talking about it?’” (Marks). Even the historical moment of the musical needs the opportunity to be staged and presented again to the world. He is thinking about the need to produce this musical in terms of the cultural history that has yet to resurface or be acknowledged in contemporary theatre production. Savion Glover, the choreographer Wolfe asked to collaborate with him on this production, “expressed misgivings…about the distasteful connotations the word ‘shuffling’ has for black entertainers” (Marks). Wolfe knows that the period of the piece is a discriminative time in theatre. But that is why he feels so strongly about bringing it back to life; “[it’s] this coda that intrigues Wolfe as much as the initiating energy that propelled Blake and company to dare to try Broadway” (Marks).
On top of reviving the musical from 1921, Wolfe added a subtitle, “dangling like an heirloom earring: ‘Or the Making of the Musical Sensation of 1921 and All That Followed.” Wolfe’s gave a new focus to his recent project, in writing in a new section with a focus on characters, the original playwright, book writer, and lyricist, who decide to make art their own way, taking on an opportunity for themselves (Brantley). He takes the biographical context of the original performance and adds it to the production to create characters that illuminate the connection between the history of the piece and contemporary production controversies. One character Wolfe wrote in, “Carl Van Vechten…has a rhythmic debate…with the Shuffle Along team about its place in posterity,” which the New York Times’ Review highlights as an achievement of making historical theatre applicable in the contemporary context (Brantley). Wolfe seized the opportunity he was given through this production to artfully make a statement and send a message, enveloping his own individual sense of aesthetic in his own life experience.
In critical responses to A Free Man of Color and Jelly’s Last Jam, Wolfe’s vision has true focus. In A Free Man of Color, one critic felt that Wolfe’s world resulted in “a feeling of openness and endless possibility, a world of opportunity for independent men of adventure and spirit, and a place of personal invention where ‘you can be whatever you declare yourself to be’” (Demastes 452). Wolfe’s consistent vision across the two plays fits into his overall aesthetic, with just a little activism bend to it as well. The world and the comic script are tools which Wolfe uses to produce “more than laughter; incorporated with them were instances of cruel injustice and hypocrisy among the ruling classes” (452). He simultaneously promotes people for opportunities while recognizing the problems that face them. This social commentary acts as a dynamizing part of his aesthetic that ties the stylistic and thematic components of his work together. Wolfe welcomes artists into professional theatre, then artistically identifies the barriers to their other opportunities in the effort to combat and eradicate those barriers. It is clarified in another critical review that “Wolfe’s subject, in short, is not racism, but classism–the more widespread, if less publicized problem of our times, since it is an issue that involves Americans of every ethnic type” (Brustein 33).
Wolfe did not focus on one group over another in his efforts to provide experience and opportunity to people. He provided opportunities across all means of identifiers from ethnicity, to gender, and to origin. His intent to provide these open opportunities goes hand in hand with his efforts to provide opportunities to underprivileged artists, in that artists without any means to express themselves could be considered to be on the border of society and the theatre that imitates it.
Wolfe’s aesthetic has a particular focus on a genre of conflicts epithetical to theatrical performance. He addresses opportunity inequality and the emotional distress that that can cause to people. In theatrical narratives, an audience can watch characters take risks and undergo stressful experiences like no other narrative form, and Wolfe is drawn to this artistic flexibility. He practices addressing and breaking down the barriers to people’s opportunities in real life through theatre, so that his work transcends the theatrical community and has an impact in the community at large. In the end, much of his aesthetic revolves around the idea of seizing your own opportunities and the social barriers to such a seizure. Nowhere is this more evident than in his relations with the actors and production team and in his rehearsal process.
Wolfe has expressed that a director must not solely communicate as a director. In his perspective, a director must also be able to interact as “‘an actor, a writer and a designer,’” so as “‘to gain insight into their process, which can in turn empower you…to get what you need’” (Loewith 405). Wolfe’s collaborative spirit and interdisciplinary theory about being a director ensures that a director is the center point for everyone involved in a production. This is critical to the process, as it allows him to bring together all the artists involved under his singular vision. Wolfe believes that communicating with the actors and production team as they would communicate amongst themselves, in other words being immersed in their own expertise and vocabulary, it strengthens his ability to break down the professional barriers and bring everyone together for the opportunity that is a production. Wolfe describes the process of directing in rehearsal as being “available to the room, as much as you have to be in charge of the room”. There’s a common anecdote Wolfe shares about his first experiences as a director in which the actors solved a problem which he and the music director could not solve (Wolfe 100). His availability to the rehearsal space means that he is open to ideas, efforts, and possibilities the actors and production team might contribute to his concept for the production. Being available to the room means being open to the solutions to the problems he is struggling to solve that come from actors, designers, or playwrights. It is also part of his ability to speak the language of the various professionals in the field that helps him to understand their proposed solutions in their own way. This provides opportunity to many actors and designers who would otherwise not feel empowered to experiment with the play material and come to a fuller mastery and experience in the production.
Pre-production preparations and communication are essential to Wolfe’s process. He feels the work of “evolving the vision of the piece with the writers and designers, and casting the show [is] the most important work the director of a musical performs…poor decisions in a show’s development or sloppy execution during this time can ultimately undermine the entire production” (Thelen 216). Wolfe’s hesitant to call anything done mentality, thoroughly thoughtful brand of pre-production work crafts the vision collaboratively with the production team before putting anything on its feet. The deliberative process he undergoes with the production team demonstrates his desire to provide every artist involved with the opportunity to strengthen their talents. In addition to design, Wolfe considers casting choices extremely carefully. That way, working with actors can be very specifically oriented toward further collaboration.
Wolfe’s directing is a deliberate, thoughtful process. Arthur Lubow, a reporter for the New Yorker magazine, wrote an article in 1993 on his observations of the rehearsal process for Angels in America: Millennium Approaches. Lubow describes Wolfe’s similar administration of the NYC Public Theatre and his directing approach as “[replacing] each piece gingerly, aware that the structure may unexpectedly topple” (Lubow). The process of changing blocking is the same as the process that Wolfe employed to invigorate the Public; he reworks the scene with attention to every last detail. Wolfe also accepts that every change requires a subsequent change.
On top of his attentive change-making process, Wolfe works in chronological order. “Rather than tackle the biggest problems first, he begins at the beginning, and only when he is satisfied with that will he go on to the next scene. As time runs out, his collaborators squirm” (Lubow). Because he makes little changes until his vision is accomplished, arriving at the final scene takes most of the rehearsal process. Tony Kushner expressed concern for the final fixing of Millennium Approaches–an angel overlooking the stage–before critics came to view the final rehearsals.
He employs empathy when working with actors, since he tries to collaborate so completely during the process. Wolfe has stated his rehearsal process philosophy to express how they must all meet in the middle:
“‘There are fundamentally two styles of directing in terms of actors: you can stand where you are and demand that actors come to you, or you can go to where they are and woo them in the direction you want them to be…you goal is to get them to utilize the intimate secrets they know from having lived on the planet for as long as they have, which is in turn going to enhance the work” (Loewith 406).
Wolfe believes that the actor’s method and their life experience go hand in hand; everyone has to bring their life experiences into the room as inspiration and employ it to go in the direction that Wolfe “woos” them. It will heighten the theatrical experience and welcome actors to interact more intimately with the material with which they have the opportunity to collaborate. Wolfe works with them in developing that emotional attachment to the theatre without expecting them to find that attachment for themselves.
However, Wolfe avoids character work such as objectives since that, in his opinion, is a diminution of the play text through oversimplification of the mechanisms at work in it. Because of his desire for actors to use their personal life experiences, Wolfe’s “‘normal working process is focused on empowering the actor to go on a journey of vulnerability…the work is much more intimate-slash-conceptual-slash-emotional’” (408). The actors’ objectives and tactics are their artistic responsibility and are strongly encouraged to be done independently in Wolfe’s collaborative method.
Wolfe sees his own directing method “as both dictatorial and permissive…dictatorial in holding to his vision; permissive in allowing others to contribute to it” (Thelen 218). He welcomes actors and designers to enhance the vision that his copious and thorough pre-production work has established, but he remains adamant about the final vision that those months of preparation have created. The collaborative energy Wolfe exudes in all his productions requires that actors come up with their own character work and bring it in full force to their contributions to his strict vision.
Even set designers are familiar with Wolfe’s strict vision parameters. Robin Wagner, who collaborated on Millennium Approaches and Jelly’s Last Jam, explained to Lubow that “‘[with] George, anything on the stage has to make its place felt. Everything gets distilled down to whatever comment he’s making visually’” (Lubow). The vision is everything to Wolfe; the set and the acting choices have to individually and collectively portray the concept for a production that Wolfe has worked deliberately to form with the production team.
Wolfe’s attention to pre-production work also allows for collaborative flexibility, because the actors will receive a lot of information both dramaturgical and conceptual upon rehearsing. Wolfe tends to give information before the initial read-through so that the company can “question the material for themselves…then they can view the text without limitations” (220). Once they do the research that Wolfe has done, the actors are then allowed to make informed creative approaches to objectives and tactics, as well as the more technical blocking procedure which begins well into the production’s timeline.
As a collaborator who empowers and encourages actors’ informed creative approaches, Wolfe never pre-blocks a show (221). It goes along with the idea that the pre-production work and the collaboration with actors is important in contributing to the strict vision Wolfe has for every production.
Wolfe’s rehearsal process and relationship with the production team is fundamentally collaborative. It allows for artistic freedom from all professionals in their own fields, as long as their innovation and creativity reflects on the concept that Wolfe has decided to realize. Understanding as a director the professional approach of the designers, writers and actors involved in a production allows the director to be a guide and better leader, encouraging all individuals toward the goal in the most artistic, expressive way, because the director comes to them, can perceive the production as they do, and guide them toward the vision he sees as the central node of the production. Serving as the audience’s voice for the production, Wolfe speaks all the different languages of theatre, from playwright, to set and costume design, to acting to allow everyone to meet in the middle and provide everyone the opportunity to arrive and express themselves toward a vision.
From his personal life, to his aesthetic, even down to the last detail of his process, George C. Wolfe is all about opening doors to those who receive little opportunity on their own. As a director in theatre, there are many instances where this can be a risk not worth taking, but Wolfe appreciates the challenge and the thrill of collaborating on art. Throughout his career, he proved that these risks can be successful. Many plays he directed or produced came from an opportunity he provided to someone and became a hit. Any director can learn from Wolfe’s success in theatre that optimizing creative talent and offering opportunity for creative growth is paramount to a creative process that revolves around an aesthetic dedicated to giving characters the agency to define themselves in social interactions that attempt to define them as an individual in a generic demographic.
Wolfe’s attention to detail and thorough approach to presenting work on stage acts as a counter balance to his aesthetic of providing opportunities to burgeoning artists. Not only does he want to produce new theatre from artists with few other means to produce art, but he wants that work to be stunning, precise, and professional. He wants to raise up those given opportunities through working with them to perfect their work. His drive to stay consistent with a vision impacts his own directing style and his collaboration with other artists. That perfectionist drive strives to optimize the opportunities he gives to others, in the effort to help them learn the most from each experience and give them the tools to progress their future work. In this way, Wolfe’s impact on theatre spread beyond his time at the Public and beyond the productions he directed.
Beyond his aesthetic, Wolfe’s approach to directing is applicable to the work of directing. Whatever be the aesthetic, a director must understand how one single opportunity or collaboration can change everything and be the answer for someone else, who will in turn change everything. If this seems like a broad generalization, it can be reduced to the theatre in terms of artistic innovation. One production can inspire another, which in turn inspires another. Any number of which can be successful and reach a wide audience. At that point, the aesthetic and the collaboration changes the art and the craft of theatre. Wolfe’s inclusionary principle has changed the craft of theatre throughout his career from The Colored Museum and Jelly’s Last Jam to A Free Man of Color and The Normal Heart. His generosity with opportunity in his role as producer and artistic director of the NYC Public Theatre expands his impact on American theatre.
Works Cited
Berstein, Robin, ed. “George C. Wolfe: An Interview by Andrew Vélez.” Cast Out: Queer Lives in Theater. Ann Arbor, Minnesota, USA: The University of Michigan Press, 2006. 56–59. Print.
Brantley, Ben. “Review: ‘Shuffle Along’ Returns to Broadway’s Embrace.” The New York Times 28 Apr. 2016. NYTimes.com. Web. 15 Oct. 2016.
Brustein, Robert. “‘Cause Jam Don’t Shake Like That.” New Republic 206.23 (1992): 33–35. Print.
Demastes, William W. “A Free Man of Color (review).” Theatre Journal 63.3 (2011): 451–453. Project MUSE. Web.
De Vries, Hilary. “The Wolfe at the (Stage) Door: With a Hunger for Shattering Myths, Playwright/director George C. Wolfe Applies His Provocative Style to Jazz Legend Jelly Roll Morton.” Los Angeles Times 3 Mar. 1991: 6. Print.
Lubow, Arthur. “George Wolfe in Progress.” The New Yorker 20 Sept. 1993. Web. 15 Oct. 2016.
Marks, Peter. “George C. Wolfe: A Theater Man on a Mission to Do a Forgotten Show Justice.” The Washington Post 13 Apr. 2016. washingtonpost.com. Web. 15 Oct. 2016.
Thelen, Lawrence. “George C. Wolfe.” Show Makers: Great Directors of American Musical Theatre. New York, New York: Routledge, 2002. 208–225. Print.
Wolfe, George C. “The Solution Can Come from Anybody.” The Alchemy of Theatre: The Divine Science: Essays on the Theatre & the Art of Collaboration. Ed. Robert Viagas. New York, New York: Playbill Books, 2006. 100–107. Print.
