This thesis explores my evolving relationship to preparation; how my training at UCSD gave me the tools to better express my directorial point of view and create a more sustainable process as an artist.

In this paper I discuss how I went beyond commonplace, rational ways of theater-making and relied on certain “extreme”, irrational gestures to create my production of Charles Mee’s Orestes 2.0. I discuss the circumstances that led me to unlock my subjective artistry, the manner in which I tackled and fulfilled my “directorial concept”, and how I created a production that challenged the tyranny of rationality both on the stage and within the culture of the theater department. 

I relate personal experiences entering school during a time of national suspicion, and I discuss how a more expansive artistic outlook developed in response to my environment. I go through the execution of my directorial concept and show how I “projected a world” from my interior into the theatrical concrete, drawing on the work of master Polish director Tadeusz Kantor. I describe the “rules” of my theatrical world in terms of its diegetic reality, its method of construction, and its aims. I then describe the rehearsal process, highlighting the ways that irrational methods and a focus on body and imagination drove the process. I discuss my creative state of mind, my performance as the character Farley, and the way in which I hoped authority and sense-making functioned in the audience experience of the performance.

Throughout, I accompany my ideas with supporting quotations from Mee’s play and the writing of French theorist, poet, and director Antonin Artaud, situating my use of the power of the irrational inside the theatrical tradition and the play-text.

This thesis explores my experience directing X by Alistair McDowell as a lens through which I identify, meditate on, and codify directorial challenges and experiences that feel unprecedented, but are in fact essential and deeply rooted parts of my process.

Proceeding from the perspective that theory can be utilized in practice, this thesis chronicles the making and production of the University of California San Diego production of Tony Kushner’s Angels in America, Part Two: Perestroika in 2016, directed by Jon Reimer. Through the examination of queer theory to justify definition of textual ambiguity, the establishment of queer spirit as a guiding lens of conceptual perspective provides clarity in the directorial decision-making process, as well as a framework for other collaborators to make choices within the interpretive parameters. In applying queer spirit for understanding vague concepts, the workload on the director actually lessons as the rehearsal process continues, emboldening with confidence the other collaborators to justify their choices at a deeper level. The identification of a unifying theory to address the centralized question of the play -- What is God and the Divine in Perestroika? -- demonstrates the efficacy of theory for not only simplifying but also streamlining the tasks of the director in production development.

This thesis aims to imagine with the great Cuban-American playwright María Irene Fornés. To do this, I perform an investigation of my virtual, live production Fornés’ Letters from Cuba by revisiting images that remain. This production was produced in the Fall of 2020, at the height of the pandemic and political uncertainties. These digital ephemera are the trappings that remain from my first musings of the play, sketches from my notebook, stills from the media tests, notes from rehearsals, and varied scrawled moments. By putting myself in conversation again with these images, I return in order to move forward. I wade through these images and reflect on the discoveries they represent in order to ask “how can imagining with Irene launch us into the theatre of now?” How does her practice of living and theatre-making inform, guide, and instruct us on how to meet our current moment as artists?Assembling and moving through this collected archive asks me to reflect on the ways Fornés invites us to reframe our relationship to our intimate self, the audience, innovation, and our imaginations, and even love itself. Ultimately, Fornés asks us to join her as brave visionaries to create the world in which we want our art to exist.

This thesis explores my celebration of the multiplicities within Latinx performance. I document my direction of Blu by Virginia Grise and the creation of The Stars Through The Smog Showcase with the tools of movement, community-building, and metaphors I developed in the process.