Interview with
Director Robert O'Hara

The following is a lightly-edited transcript of a conversation between Williamstown Theatre Festival Artistic Director Mandy Greenfield and A Streetcar Named Desire Director Robert O’Hara. To listen to the conversation, click play, above.

 


Mandy Greenfield‍In 2019, you directed Lorraine Hansberry's A Raisin in the Sun at the Williamstown Theatre Festival. In 2020, you were to return to the Williamstown Theatre Festival to direct A Streetcar Named Desire by Tennessee Williams. We were obviously interrupted by this global health pandemic, so we made it instead as an audio production. But why are we doing these titanic American classics with each other, what attracts you to these big, giant plays, Mr. O'Hara?

Robert O'Hara It's exciting to me. I've been doing a lot of new plays, and sometimes it's nice to play with something that isn't new. At the same time, I don't sort of put them on a pedestal, I don't have a reverence; they're living organisms, and they should be engaged with the living. So that's how I approached them. I don't approach them as these precious jewels that can’t be touched. I think the sign of something being classic and being inspirational is that it can actually be dealt with in many different hands. It can be pulled and stretched and investigated in many different ways, and it always bounces back. So there's nothing that I can do that's going to ruin the reputation of A Raisin in the Sun or A Streetcar Named Desire. That allows you a lot of license to not have reverence and to know that you can't break it.

Mandy Greenfield Talk a little bit about your approach to the play—your approach to the text—and how you imagined it would live in three dimensions—that is to say when we were going to do it on stage at the Williamstown Theatre Festival—and the degree to which you embraced, rejected or neutralized any of that work as we thought about migrating to this audio format.

Robert O'Hara  Well, I think there's a lot I don't want to give away about the 3D version of it on the stage. But I can say I've always wanted to investigate the play from Blanche's point of view and from a point of view of a woman who is in the throes of mental illness and who is suffering from addictions—and how she's dealt with by society, and by men, and by family. So that's really where I start my investigation in A Streetcar Named Desire: it's from her point of view, and that has not changed from when I was going to do it on the stage to doing it on Audible. I think that what has changed, mainly, is our relationship to the audience, for Audible, and that what I can do with Audible that I can't do on the stage is I can bring the audience closer to us, as opposed to making the actors go bigger to get to the audience. And so, you know, in a theatre, your distance from the stage will always remain the same. But, in your ear, I can bring you close, I can pull you away, I can take you outside, I can take you right into the middle of their conversation, between their lips. I can put you in her head. I can put you upstairs, instantly. So that was fun to sort of play with, in imagining A Streetcar Named Desire on Audible.

Mandy Greenfield You talked a little bit about interrogating this text from Blanche's point of view; let's spend a minute on our Blanche: six-time Tony Award winner Audra McDonald, arguably one of the globe's singular talents, singular voice as a singer, singularly accomplished as an actress on stage, in film, in television. Also, a Black actress, putting her mark on this role. Let's talk about Audra McDonald as Blanche DuBois.

Robert O'Hara She constantly amazes me. As I told her when we first started talking about the play: every time that there's an announcement that she's doing something, I'm going, to myself, “What? What is she thinking?” And then you go see it and you're like—Wow—you're just blown away. She is constantly reimagining herself and putting herself in places in which we don't see people like her. I think that's sort of amazing and wonderful and inspiring. So, working with her was a joy. She's always testing herself and challenging herself, and that's exciting to be engaged with an actor who is challenging themselves. I think that anyone that goes and says they want to take a bite out of one of the sort of chestnuts of the cannon should be looking for a challenge.

Mandy Greenfield Talk about Carla Gugino as Stella and what she brought to this process

Robert O'Hara I was so excited when Carla agreed to do this. She has such control and such a powerful sense of her sexuality—and her owning her sexuality. Usually, we see a Stella who is this sort of victim without any sort of agency and without much sexuality. Much of what Carla and I talked about is engaging in the fact that she is being fully satisfied by Stanley sexually, and how she is allowing that to mask the other abuse that comes with living with him and also his own alcoholism. How, in many ways, we allow intimacy to cover the emotional trauma that is happening inside our relationship. Carla, because she has such a vulnerability and a power inside that vulnerability, brings a level of central-ness, if that's a word—there’s an awareness of her being a sexual being as Stella is figuring out who she is. At the same time, you have Blanche, who is hypersexual but pretending to be a virgin, having these sort of white, pure, virginal ideas about how she's supposed to be spoken to and how she's supposed to be taken care of by a man. Stella, when her man leaves, she just, you know, she weeps, she doesn't know what to do when he comes home, she crawls into his lap. There's something about diving in there, that Carla has done, which is so exciting, and it just pulls open three characters. We usually see a brute of a man who is violating and who is antagonizing these two women that are in his household. I sort of wanted to recenter the women and their journey, because I'm not particularly interested, really, in why Stanley is doing what Stanley is doing. I'm uninterested in centering the abuser in this production, but centering the women who have to actually negotiate that behavior. I think two very strong and exciting artists, like Audra and Carla, just meld together in such a way. They had such grace for each other and such respect for each other, that it just made the whole experience seamless in a way

Mandy Greenfield I, too, have seen countless productions of A Streetcar Named Desire. It's a play that we are culturally obsessed with. We see it, we have an insatiable appetite for this play. Why? What are we chasing in this play? What do you think this play is chasing that we want to understand? And what did you hear anew in this sort of first interrogation of it with this extraordinary group of artists around you?

Robert O'Hara  One of the things we're chasing is the madness of Tennessee Williams. He was truly mad and troubled. There's something fascinating about working on someone's work who lived with madness. In many ways, he had the same addictions and the same illnesses that many of his characters have. I think that's what we're chasing: the truth inside the messiness and the madness of the work. As it is, I'm not really interested in telling stories about healthy people. I'm not interested in going to see stories about people who have everything together and who are doing just fine. I'm interested in the mess because it actually illuminates my own mess to find my way inside another type of messiness on the stage. A Streetcar Named Desire has such highs and such lows, the writing is so glorious, and yet the abuse and the sexuality of it and the alcoholism of it is so in your face, and sometimes I think that we try and cover it up. We want to make Blanche, not too sloppy a drunk, you know, and not really a pedophile, or make Stanley not really an abuser, not totally a rapist. And I think that that is the complete opposite of my approach. I want to go full-tilt boogie into who they truly are from the clues that I get from the page. And that's what's exciting about this incarnation is that everyone, especially Audra, really wanted to go into the truth behind their actions and not trying to clean it up, not trying to prettify it and have some sort of sheen on it. It is very, very difficult, I think, to deal with someone who is addicted and who's mentally ill. It's challenging; it's traumatizing. It costs you something. And, in many ways, it costs the reader something to read it, and the viewer to view it, and I know it will cost the listener to hear it, because Audra and the rest of the cast really go there with this play, which is exciting to me.

Mandy Greenfield What's your hope for it as it reaches listeners? How do you hope this lands on listeners? And what's your hope for the project as it sort of finds this global platform?

Robert O'Hara I hope it whets the appetite for not just this potential production, but for a reexamining of what we call the American canon of plays, and also a reexamining of how we cast and think of plays. So, I hope that because you cannot see who is speaking that you can actually see it better than before. That's my hope.

Mandy Greenfield I think that's beautiful. I'm going to ask you just one last question. What did you learn making this as an audio project? What did you learn either about the play or about yourself as a director?

Robert O'Hara I learned the same thing that I learned in working on A Raisin in the Sun or working on any one of these sort of chestnut plays: that it is a mammoth undertaking. I have learned to pace myself and to really enjoy it, and to not try to figure out how to make it easy but that the work should be work, as I say. There were times when we had to just take a break from living inside this type of world, and that's always very telling: that it is costing us something to participate in this world. I learned that there is so much to unlock—which is why we call it a classic—inside these plays. That's why I think they will never stop being done and that they actually deserve to be investigated and interrogated in as many ways as possible.