Artistic Statement
While preparing my play Krispy Kritters in the Scarlett Night for production, I heeded Suzan-Lori Parks’s challenge to excise stage directions and communicate physical action in dialogue. The script transformed, and became ‘director-proof.’ Yet, in seeming paradox, it also became director-friendly. Now, in all my work, I minimize stage directions in order to open doors for directors, actors and designers to exercise artistic agency when breathing my words to life. A successful collaboration has, at its essence, the deliberate giving up of control.
Although artists’ creations originate in our inner recesses, they are not meant for us. Ultimately, a play belongs to the audience, in their experience of it, and in the emotions and memories they carry away. I view my plays as gifts for others. Some are funny, some bloody, and some flummox. But they can never waste an audience’s or a collaborator’s time. This requires rigor and honesty. I must not find satisfaction in first impulses without testing them. The actors of Poland’s Teatr Zar spent eight years crafting three one-hour plays. Each moment is not the first idea, but the twelfth or fifteenth. The more I revise my play Mount Misery, the more precise and nuanced it becomes. Early scenes that seemed critical now demand amputation.
I am fascinated with unexpected combinations and obscure encounters. For example, Mount Misery occurs on Donald Rumsfeld’s vacation home; in 1834, it was a plantation where adolescent Frederick Douglass was a slave. This is becoming a hallmark of mine. I want to create theater that is difficult, if not impossible, to convey in a novel, tv or film.
Fundamental to my work is learning: about new audiences, new ways to collaborate, new theatrical and artistic languages and forms, research into new content. I delight in learning about things previously unknown to me, and through the theater, sharing them. Through learning, I can enrich and push the field and the art form. My future as a theater artist will involve a continual evolution of curiosity.
Learning implies listening, which is emerging as a central theme in my work. I must listen to my intuition, to my characters, to my collaborators, to the play itself. I mustn’t force a rigid outcome onto something that, while grown inside of me, will ultimately live out of my mind and hands. By listening, I connect with people very different from myself, which enriches my work, and those who touch it.
Although artists’ creations originate in our inner recesses, they are not meant for us. Ultimately, a play belongs to the audience, in their experience of it, and in the emotions and memories they carry away. I view my plays as gifts for others. Some are funny, some bloody, and some flummox. But they can never waste an audience’s or a collaborator’s time. This requires rigor and honesty. I must not find satisfaction in first impulses without testing them. The actors of Poland’s Teatr Zar spent eight years crafting three one-hour plays. Each moment is not the first idea, but the twelfth or fifteenth. The more I revise my play Mount Misery, the more precise and nuanced it becomes. Early scenes that seemed critical now demand amputation.
I am fascinated with unexpected combinations and obscure encounters. For example, Mount Misery occurs on Donald Rumsfeld’s vacation home; in 1834, it was a plantation where adolescent Frederick Douglass was a slave. This is becoming a hallmark of mine. I want to create theater that is difficult, if not impossible, to convey in a novel, tv or film.
Fundamental to my work is learning: about new audiences, new ways to collaborate, new theatrical and artistic languages and forms, research into new content. I delight in learning about things previously unknown to me, and through the theater, sharing them. Through learning, I can enrich and push the field and the art form. My future as a theater artist will involve a continual evolution of curiosity.
Learning implies listening, which is emerging as a central theme in my work. I must listen to my intuition, to my characters, to my collaborators, to the play itself. I mustn’t force a rigid outcome onto something that, while grown inside of me, will ultimately live out of my mind and hands. By listening, I connect with people very different from myself, which enriches my work, and those who touch it.
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Andrew Saito
Artistic Statement
While preparing my play Krispy Kritters in the Scarlett Night for production, I heeded Suzan-Lori Parks’s challenge to excise stage directions and communicate physical action in dialogue. The script transformed, and became ‘director-proof.’ Yet, in seeming paradox, it also became director-friendly. Now, in all my work, I minimize stage directions in order to open doors for directors, actors and designers to exercise artistic agency when breathing my words to life. A successful collaboration has, at its essence, the deliberate giving up of control.
Although artists’ creations originate in our inner recesses, they are not meant for us. Ultimately, a play belongs to the audience, in their experience of it, and in the emotions and memories they carry away. I view my plays as gifts for others. Some are funny, some bloody, and some flummox. But they can never waste an audience’s or a collaborator’s time. This requires rigor and honesty. I must not find satisfaction in first impulses without testing them. The actors of Poland’s Teatr Zar spent eight years crafting three one-hour plays. Each moment is not the first idea, but the twelfth or fifteenth. The more I revise my play Mount Misery, the more precise and nuanced it becomes. Early scenes that seemed critical now demand amputation.
I am fascinated with unexpected combinations and obscure encounters. For example, Mount Misery occurs on Donald Rumsfeld’s vacation home; in 1834, it was a plantation where adolescent Frederick Douglass was a slave. This is becoming a hallmark of mine. I want to create theater that is difficult, if not impossible, to convey in a novel, tv or film.
Fundamental to my work is learning: about new audiences, new ways to collaborate, new theatrical and artistic languages and forms, research into new content. I delight in learning about things previously unknown to me, and through the theater, sharing them. Through learning, I can enrich and push the field and the art form. My future as a theater artist will involve a continual evolution of curiosity.
Learning implies listening, which is emerging as a central theme in my work. I must listen to my intuition, to my characters, to my collaborators, to the play itself. I mustn’t force a rigid outcome onto something that, while grown inside of me, will ultimately live out of my mind and hands. By listening, I connect with people very different from myself, which enriches my work, and those who touch it.
Although artists’ creations originate in our inner recesses, they are not meant for us. Ultimately, a play belongs to the audience, in their experience of it, and in the emotions and memories they carry away. I view my plays as gifts for others. Some are funny, some bloody, and some flummox. But they can never waste an audience’s or a collaborator’s time. This requires rigor and honesty. I must not find satisfaction in first impulses without testing them. The actors of Poland’s Teatr Zar spent eight years crafting three one-hour plays. Each moment is not the first idea, but the twelfth or fifteenth. The more I revise my play Mount Misery, the more precise and nuanced it becomes. Early scenes that seemed critical now demand amputation.
I am fascinated with unexpected combinations and obscure encounters. For example, Mount Misery occurs on Donald Rumsfeld’s vacation home; in 1834, it was a plantation where adolescent Frederick Douglass was a slave. This is becoming a hallmark of mine. I want to create theater that is difficult, if not impossible, to convey in a novel, tv or film.
Fundamental to my work is learning: about new audiences, new ways to collaborate, new theatrical and artistic languages and forms, research into new content. I delight in learning about things previously unknown to me, and through the theater, sharing them. Through learning, I can enrich and push the field and the art form. My future as a theater artist will involve a continual evolution of curiosity.
Learning implies listening, which is emerging as a central theme in my work. I must listen to my intuition, to my characters, to my collaborators, to the play itself. I mustn’t force a rigid outcome onto something that, while grown inside of me, will ultimately live out of my mind and hands. By listening, I connect with people very different from myself, which enriches my work, and those who touch it.