A play is like a person: It’s born, it grows, it changes with the times. Does it follow, then, that you can develop a romance with one?
Kimberly Senior is going steady with the play she’s directing at the Geffen Playhouse. “It goes from casually dating for a couple months to being in a serious relationship,” she says of the process. Turns out the most clichéd dating truisms apply to directing, too: “Over time, it’s like I let the play see me in a bad mood. ‘Be more vulnerable!’ ‘Bring your best self!’ For making plays, that [advice] works really well.”
It’s only fitting that the play in question is Laura Eason’s “Sex With Strangers,” a steamy two-hander that contemplates and complicates fame, technology, and, of course, modern romance. Senior and the play have history, so to speak, as she produced its first draft at Steppenwolf Theatre Company’s First Look series in 2009. “Over the years I kind of kept track of it,” she says. “I love the play. Our work is so itinerant and our relationship with our work is so ephemeral, it’s been amazing to have a sustained relationship with a story.”
Playing March 1–April 10 at the Audrey Skirball Kenis Theater, Senior’s production stars Rebecca Pidgeon and Stephen Louis Grush (who originated his role in that first reading) and contains different connotations today than it did seven years ago. Having directed shows all over the country—most recently Ayad Akhtar’s Pulitzer-winning “Disgraced” since its inception—Senior often thinks about the context audiences provide.
“A play you see live is a world premiere every night because the audience is there and it’s different every night,” she says. This is especially true for Eason’s play, which was written, as Senior points out, back when chatting with someone while also texting was a strange phenomenon. “Seven years ago I didn’t have an iPhone. Now I feel like we have better learned how to incorporate technology into our world... so I don’t have to teach the audience that as much.”
The way a Los Angeles audience approaches a play may differ from a Chicago or New York crowd, she adds. “In particular [with] ‘Sex With Strangers,’ which is so much about fame versus art, what you get famous for... What are you willing to compromise to get money? That’s a real question that’s burning here in Los Angeles; you feel it on the street. Whereas in Chicago, that’s not necessarily what’s driving artists.”
Even after two decades of freelance directing, Senior’s still enchanted by it. “I get to take things that were previously in one dimension and put them into three dimensions using my imagination and intellect and people skills,” she exclaims. “You’re always beginning as a director because you’re always encountering something new. I still feel like an early-career artist.”
Senior’s advice for novice directors, in fact, comes down to persistence and passion. “I think to understand the longevity of our career is something that’s very challenging, because you’re wanting to do it, you know how to do it, you’re hungry to do it, you’re watching other people do it. There are moments where you feel the scarcity of jobs and money, but also moments when you’re feeling an abundance of collaboration and joy.” When in doubt, she says, think of the life of a freelance theater artist as a road—not a ladder.
“I’ve never seen this career as something vertical. I’m just as thrilled to work in a basement as I am on Broadway. There will be times where I’m looking at my calendar and there’s a vast gaping hole and I go, ‘Oh, do I have to get my yoga teacher certification?’ But [you have to] know it’ll work out in the end. You have to be comfortable with that feeling of danger.”
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