Director David Warren acknowledges frankly that casting television stars in a theatrical production is helpful, at least from a box-office vantage point. But a high-profile career isn't enough, he emphasizes, adding, "The actors have to be right for the roles." Warren is specifically talking about Wendy Malick and Mark Moses, respectively of Just Shoot Me and Desperate Housewives fame, whom he has cast in Burleigh Grimes, a new work by Roger Kirby slated to open Off-Broadway at New World Stages 3, June 13. "I've wanted to work with Wendy for a long time," Warren says. "She is droll, three-dimensional, and human no matter how wicked. And just watching Mark on Desperate Housewives, I realized that he is Burleigh Grimes," the self-serving title character in a work depicting soulless stock traders, ruthless in their quest for success.
"Trading is a metaphor for every interaction in this play, including romance and friendship," continues the easygoing, youthful 45-year-old Warren. "This play is not just about Wall Street. Its themes are universal, suggesting that anyone who is smart can get what he wants, and those who don't are not very smart. The tone of this play is cynically masculine and that's new for me. I know it's a cliché, but anything worth doing is scary."
The play is not a musical but a dramatic work with music (composed by David Yazbek), which is more new territory for Warren, who makes a point of not repeating himself. Off-Broadway and regionally, he has helmed original works by such writers as Nicky Silver and Richard Greenberg, new musicals, revivals, and classics. His work has been seen on Broadway twice: revivals of Philip Barry's Holiday for Circle in the Square, and Tennessee Williams' Summer and Smoke for Roundabout Theatre Company. This fall he will be directing his first TV show, an episode of Desperate Housewives.
"To direct a TV show, you have to jump through several hoops, including shadowing a show for an entire episode, connecting with the supervising producer, and explaining what you appreciate in the show and how you connect with it," he says. "For me, Desperate Housewives is a combination of high comedy and truth. That's something I look for in any project I direct."
He also looks for a certain kind of actor that marries unlikely qualities. "I'm interested in those who have an instinctive understanding of style—farce and comedy, for example—juxtaposed with simple emotional truth."
Brought up in Larchmont, N.Y., Warren toyed with the idea of acting. But at Sarah Lawrence College, he majored in philosophy and took some drama on the side. In one such class—taught by Wilford Leach, best known for his New York Shakespeare Festival production of The Pirates of Penzance with Kevin Kline and head of Sarah Lawrence's directing program—Leach told Warren, "You're not an actor; you're a director." Recalls Warren, "I had done a scene from the screenplay Saturday Night and Sunday Morning [by Alan Sillitoe], and instead of worrying about the acting involved, I reset the scene in a punk rock '70s London thrift shop. Wilford was right. I was not thinking like an actor but a director."
Nonetheless, Warren pursued a liberal arts degree, not a fine arts degree. "Theatre you can learn by doing, but studying books with knowledgeable professors is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity," he says. "And directing is interpreting, and to interpret, you need to know how to read and understand what you're reading. I also took design classes at Sarah Lawrence. I had the pretentious idea that I could direct and design."
That was not realistic, he discovered. Nonetheless, he graduated with the requisite skills to assist set designers, gigs that paid the bills and served as a steppingstone to directing, first as an assistant to La Jolla Playhouse's artistic director Des McAnuff and then to James Lapine. An important career turning point occurred in 1989, when he was tapped to direct a short play at the now-defunct New Directors Program offered by New York Theatre Workshop.
"Several different types of directors were selected for the program, and each of us was matched with a mentor," Warren recalls. "Besides myself, Michael Greif was in the program that year, and so was David Esbjornson. Michael had a degree in directing but no experience, while David had been kicking around downtown doing showcases."
Like the actor trying to launch a career, "it's a Catch-22 for the director as well," Warren says. "No one will hire you because you don't have any directing credits, and you don't have any directing credits because no one will hire you. As a result of the New Directors Program, we each had a real directing credit with a production that was up and running. I got my first agent because of it."
Within short order he was directing at the Public Theater, Playwrights Horizons, and the Music-Theatre Group. "It happened for me very early, and though I've had my frustrating periods—not always directed the shows I've wanted—I've never had a dry period," he recalls. "I've always been able to make my living at this. I'd like to make a better living."
If he were not a director, he says he'd be a food critic. "I love to cook, I love to eat, and God didn't play a cruel trick by giving me a slow metabolism." Italian cuisine is his specialty and he travels to Italy twice a year, enjoying the culinary fare and speaking fluent Italian. He also understands (but doesn't converse in) Spanish.
When he's not in Italy, he is looking for new theatrical projects, insisting that his revival of Holiday, with Laura Linney and Tony Goldwyn in the roles made famous onscreen by Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant, was an artistic and career watershed. "Up until that point I did only new plays, and no one would even think of me to direct a revival," he says. "I agree with Richard Greenberg, who says artistic crop rotation is essential. If you do the same thing over and over, you deplete the soil. After Holiday, I got to direct Shaw and Shakespeare. And those muscles would have atrophied without those opportunities."
His most successful play was Mindy Kaling and Brenda Withers' Matt & Ben, a New York International Fringe Festival production that moved Off-Broadway in 2003 and then on to Los Angeles, garnering rave reviews and large crowds. "I certainly didn't expect that kind of success, and I didn't choose to do it for that reason," he says. "You can have an inkling if something is going to make it, but commercial success is ephemeral. Once you start thinking in those terms, you're going to be wrong far too often, and you'll lose your way."
Warren believes that directors at every stage of their career—but especially newcomers—should do projects that turn them on. "I advise young directors to read lots of plays to find the kind of plays they want to direct and discover the kind of directors they want to be," he says. "It's important to have a true vision and be able to talk about it. At some point an artistic director is going to say, 'What do you want to direct?' You should be prepared with an answer. I also think young directors should get their work seen—wherever, including church basements. And then work your way up and out of the church basement."
Asked what role critics play in Warren's world, he says, "I recognize their importance to a play's success. But I don't read reviews. They either hurt my feelings or confuse me. I let my agent read them and give me a general overview of what was said."
That need for a thick skin, while "being a generous soul and having access to one's deepest feelings," is what makes theatre artists in general—and actors in particular—so fundamentally different from the characters in Burleigh Grimes, whose job description is learning how to be unscrupulous to survive. "Actors can take a few lessons from this play," he says, laughing.