Over the last few weeks of rehearsals a theory has slowly been taking root for me about the directing process. That is, specifically the pragmatics of the process, not the creative aspects. (That’s an entirely different issue.) In the last few days, it’s finally gelled into something approximating words, so here goes.

A director I once had from whom I learned a great deal — in the Norman Schwarzkopf sense1 — gave a singularly unhelpful note in rehearsal. Despite the lack of usable insight, it was funny (and true), and so it’s stuck with me for a while. I’ve kept thinking that there was, just maybe, something valuable hidden behind it. Now, finally, it’s given me the perfect way to frame my nascent theory.

I call it the More Good; Less Suck Theory.

A director has only so much time available for a given project, so in many ways the overall process is really about resource allocation. So imagine that that time is really some sort of building material. Dirt, or concrete, or whatever works for you. It seems that the natural progression of putting up a play divides into two phases, in which you use the “concrete” available to you for different goals.

The first phase is the More Good phase. Every2 play has a few key moments that the whole work hinges on. If the audience understands and believes those moments, then they’ll follow you for the rest of the play, more or less. And so for the first part of the process you’re focusing on building up those key moments, creating the general topography of the play.

But at some point you’re running out of “concrete” and you have to give some attention to the spaces between the key moments. I call this the Less Suck phase. It’s where you try and fill in some of the deepest valleys and try to make them less of a contrast to the good things you’ve hopefully built up so far. You just don’t have enough time to bring everything up to the same high level, but you can make the ride a bit less jarring for the audience.

So there you have it. More Good; [then] Less Suck. Note that this has nothing to do with the relative talent of the actors involved. There are always things that work better than others, and this is just a mental model for prioritizing the things that really have to work. It also by no means implies that things stop getting better; in fact, by filling in those valleys you make it easier for the actors to find more good stuff overall.

  1. ”You learn far more from negative leadership than positive leadership. Because you learn how not to do it.” [↩]
  2. Reasonably-well written [↩]