Great Directors at Work

To imitate Jones' directors, you would need to be handed the original script of Chekhov's The Seagull, Williams' A Streetcar Named Desire (along with Marlon Brando), or to be Brecht mounting his own Mother Courage in several productions over 20 years, or to have the Royal Shakespeare Company at your complete disposal for a year. This is a rich lode Jones is mining, of great directors producing original works of great genius. First, though, he asks, what exactly does a director do for a living? (Full-fledged directors, like orchestra conductors, first appeared about a century ago.) Well, they enliven contemporary works, peel the wallpaper off the classics, and show action, word, and character in all their presentness. Thus, 1880-1980 is the third great age of Western drama, an era comparable or superior to the eras of Sophocles and Shakespeare in such respects as duration, number of productions, cultural reverberation, and artistic achievement; and the same century has been the century of the director. Jones studies his directors mainly by texts they've produced: a puzzled Stanislavky's vast preliminary notes for The Seagull, in which he invented the subtext or spiritual thread that needed to be produced physically on the stage; Brecht's three-volume modelbook for productions of Mother Courage; Kazan's notes for directing Streetcar and his energizing ideas for helping the actors grasp the spine of their characters; and Peter Brook's workshop investigations of Antonin Artaud's theater of cruelty, and their role in the famous production of Peter Weiss' Marat/Sade. Among the wonderful moments that Jones revives is Brando's gifted but unpredictable genius in playing - reluctantly - a brute completely strange to his own sensitive beatnik soul. Not ground-breaking, but jampacked with lore and readable headstuff. (Kirkus Reviews)