Sunday, June 01, 2008
A+E, Theater, Reviews

Lady of the ‘House’

Lisa Adler directs dream cast in Horizon’s latest production

By Bert Osborne
 
To envy James Donadio or not to envy James Donadio, that is the question. On the one hand, as the sole male in co-artistic director Lisa Adler’s Horizon Theatre production of the Sarah Ruhl play “The Clean House,” Donadio gets to share the stage with four of the finest actresses in town: Jill Jane Clements, Carolyn Cook, Suehyla El-Attar and Mary Lynn Owen. On the other hand, well, he has to hold his ground opposite four of the finest actresses in town.
 
Adler can’t deny it’s a dreamy cast. With one exception, all of them have previous histories with her and Horizon, the company she co-founded 24 years ago with husband Jeff. (The odd man out, so to speak? Why, Donadio, of course.) In Ruhl’s surreal comedy-drama, Cook and Donadio are a married couple of doctors; Clements portrays her neat-freak sister; Owen is his free-spirited mistress; and El-Attar plays their maid, who prefers telling jokes to cleaning house.
 
“They’re all super-pros,” Adler enthuses during a recent lunch interview. “The best actors, like these, are the ones who give you a lot to work with. An actor’s instincts are usually better than a director’s, because they’re more intimately connected to what their characters are going through. My job is to try being open, to listen to what they give me, to funnel all the different creative energies and shape all the various pieces, in order to tell the whole story.”
 
After a pause, she continues, “What I hope I’ve learned over the years is that you’ll only find the good ideas by saying ‘yes’ to all of them. The more you say ‘yes’ to their ideas, the more they’ll bring you. Otherwise, it’s part of the artistic temperament to shut down or start self-editing. It’s not about good ideas or bad ideas. One of the hardest things for me about directing is making myself say ‘yes’ when I might want to say ‘no.’ A director can still say ‘no’ later, but anything the actors want to bring to the table ought to be valid and open for discussion.”
 
Adler smiles. “To my detriment, that’s something I haven’t learned to do administratively,” she says. Some 30 years ago, her theater career began as a member of the Academy Theater’s acting ensemble, but performing onstage at Horizon eventually took a back seat to her responsibilities behind the scenes. “It’s really hard to produce, direct, administrate and act. Acting needs to be focused on the smallest details, and that’s tough when you’re also worrying about the big picture, about selling a play and reaching an audience,” Adler admits.
 
Despite Horizon’s emphasis on contemporary American plays, Adler has found her greatest directorial success of late dealing with pressing global issues—in “Homebody/Kabul,” “The Syringa Tree,” “9 Parts of Desire” and “In Darfur.” As she explains it, “That developed almost by accident, but I think it makes for compelling theater. It’s not just navel-gazing, you know? It’s looking at things that are bigger than ourselves. They’re so-called ‘problem plays’ in a way, but they have a positive spirit about them, a sense of healing and renewal and celebration, as opposed to just giving us the problem without offering any clue what to do about it.”
 
In that respect, “The Clean House” is true to Adler’s form. “The characters are reevaluating their lives. They have their problems, but the play gives a vision of them working through it, and then coming to an unexpected place as a result,” the director observes. “Things go from clean to messy, both emotionally and physically. It’s about living in the moment, about accepting fate and not trying to control things too much, about actually appreciating some of that mess.”
 
As she approaches a quarter-century running her own theater, those are words Adler can live by. SP