Meet Vivienne Benesch

Vivienne shares her thoughts on joining PlayMakers Repertory Company as our new Producing Artistic Director

Photo by Alison Sheehy

Dear Friends,

Greetings of expectation!

It’s been my privilege to direct three productions for PlayMakers: Sarah Ruhl’s In the Next Room (or the vibrator play) in 2011, John Logan’s Red in 2012 and Deborah Salem Smith’s Love Alone in 2014. And I’m extremely excited to bring you the premiere of Libby Appel’s version of Chekhov’s Three Sisters in January as I begin my new role as your Producing Artistic Director.

It’s rare to discover a profound affinity with an organization—its artistic mission, its community, its artists and its values. But such was the case, I happily found, here at PlayMakers from the first time I stepped off the plane at RDU.

What life journey brought me here? Well, I dove into theater at a very early age, actually wanting to become a dancer, like both my mother and grandmother, but with flat feet that wasn’t in the cards. A life engaged with words, movement, ideas, space and emotions, however, was. In other words, my life has been a thread of stories. And moreover, I've been very privileged to make a career of storytelling. 

I went to Brown University, where I studied both Theater and Religious Studies, and while there directed far more than I acted. After graduation, however, I decided to pursue my MFA in Acting, having been wisely advised that that was without a doubt the best training for a career in either acting or directing. So I attended NYU's Graduate Acting Program, where I was lucky enough to study under the leadership of Zelda Fichandler, a fierce female icon of the regional theater movement in America. It was during those years that I learned not only about the craft of acting, but also about what I value most about collaboration: that diverse voices make for better art, better audiences and better conversation.

My professional journey over the last twenty years has been multi-faceted. After graduate school, I had several successful years acting professionally, winning an OBIE Award, working on and off Broadway, regionally and in the West End (with Maggie Smith! I've got some stories...) But my lifelong passion for directing was rekindled in 2001 when I helmed a production of The Skin of Our Teeth for the Chautauqua Theater Company. The die was (re)cast, and I began directing and acting simultaneously. I became Artistic Director of the theater at Chautauqua in 2005 and have had the pleasure of leading its transformation into one of the best summer theaters and most competitive summer conservatories in the country. Now, after ten wonderful years at Chautauqua, I’m eager to serve PlayMakers and this community in a year-round capacity. PlayMakers and Chautauqua have much in common. They are both embedded within institutions that truly value the role that the arts and arts education play in the investigation of what it means to be human and a citizen of the globe...one of the many reasons I already feel such a great affinity for this organization.

I believe I have an innate understanding of—and vision for—the role this great theater plays not only in the national arts scene, but also as a cultural center for its local and regional community, as an integral part of a professional training program within UNC’s exceptional Department of Dramatic Art and, indeed, as an essential resource for the University at large. I can’t wait to begin the great work of leading PlayMakers forward on all these fronts.

As a director, actor and producer, I am as much at home with the classics, modern masterpieces and brand new work and have a particular interest in originating interdisciplinary collaborations—among theater, dance, music and visual artists. I love to create spaces and opportunities for artists to collide fearlessly with one another. I also love to facilitate theatrical experiences for audiences and communities to collide with art—to let that art shed light on our humanity, and to provoke dialogue and debate. To ensure that the highest quality art is accessible to audiences of all ages and backgrounds, and to provide a forum that embraces our diverse histories as a means of discovering our common ground as we forge into the future.

The face of America is changing. I am humbled with the charge of serving this great company in a time that I believe will see great transformation in the American Theater—no longer holding up a mirror to just a narrow view of nature—but to the expansive reality of what the human race actually looks like and experiences today. And we're lucky, because PlayMakers is the perfect home for such a collision of art and change to take hold.

Building on its already excellent programming and reputation, PlayMakers stands poised to become one of this country’s theater jewels—a leader in the cultural conversations of the 21st Century. It will be my honor to bring you my passion, invention and dedication in this next leg of the journey.

I look forward to being with you soon, at home in Chapel Hill!

Vivienne Benesch

What’s in a Name? "Love Alone"

By Gregory Kable, Dramaturg, Love Alone

Edna St. Vincent Millay. Image: The Book Haven.

Deborah Salem Smith’s title comes from a work by the American poet Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892-1950). Born in Rockland, Maine, Millay was raised by her progressive mother to be productive, self-reliant, and to cultivate a love of the arts. Her early training bore fruit when Millay gained widespread acclaim of her 1912 poem “Renascence”, an extended lyric piece about symbolic death and rebirth.  Millay would go on to attend Vassar College, champion women’s causes, and find both fame and notoriety as a prominent figure in New York City’s bohemian community in Greenwich Village. She was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1923, the third woman to be so honored, and the Frost medal in 1943 for her body of work.

There is a theatre connection in her playwriting efforts for the Provincetown Players, America’s first avant-garde company who sought alternative models of writing and production from those of the commercial Broadway industry. Millay contributed several verse plays to the company, which intended to exclusively champion new works by American dramatists. Founded as a summer colony on Cape Cod in Massachusetts, the Provincetown Players attracted enough attention to open a winter season in New York City within two years of their founding. Fellow alumni included Eugene O’Neill, Susan Glaspell, the prominent stage designer Robert Edmond Jones, and journalist-activist John Reed, who would chronicle the 1917 Russian Revolution in Ten Days that Shook the World.

The converted fish wharf marking the humble origins of American experimental theatre in Provincetown. Image: Province Town Playhouse.

More central to Smith’s play, Millay was equally devoted to her love of music as well as literature. Among her correspondence is a1920 letter relating, “I can whistle almost the whole of [Beethoven’s] Fifth Symphony, all four movements, and with it I have solaced many a whining hour to sleep. It answers all my questions, the noble, mighty thing, it is ‘green pastures and still waters’ to my soul. Indeed, without music I should wish to die. Even poetry, Sweet Patron Muse forgive me the words, is not what music is.”  In this we can see the resonance of Millay in the rising musician in Smith’s play. That character Clementine is grieving the loss of her mother while her career as guitarist in a punk band (named One-Armed Edna in a subtle reference to Millay) is taking flight.

 

Edna St. Vincent Millay. Image: brainpickings.org

Clementine wrestles with some of the same emotional issues regarding passionate beliefs and personal vulnerability that Millay articulates in her poetry.  We can economically find the dichotomies by juxtaposing two Millay poems (with that title poem “Love Is Not All” on the right):

Similar to Millay’s contrasting expressions of the ephemeral and enduring aspects of love, Clementine will take a step toward healing in reinterpreting “Love Is Not All” into a song lyric. Smith’s lyric from that Millay original reads:

They say love’s not all
Can’t fix my bones
Can’t fill my chest, so I can breathe
I rise, I sink
But now I know
I won’t sell your love to be free.

I was bold 
Thought I was fine on my own 
Can’t keep my head above the water 
For lack of love alone.

I was bold 
Thought the empty sky was my home 
I turn the tide, feel more alive 
How do I reach your shore?
I don’t know…
I don’t know…

This musical meditation on the nature of love brings the Millay connection full circle: two artists turning their pain into beauty, giving form and voice to the turbulence they mutually defy in order to begin reclaiming their lives.

* Click here to listen to Millay’s own poetry reading.

 

By Stages: Grief, Gratitude, Guitars

By Gregory Kable, dramaturg

Deborah Salem Smith’s intimate and expansive drama Love Alone deftly engages several seminal debates of our cultural moment, including the effectiveness of our health care system, escalating litigation and its impact on doctor-patient dynamics, and the status of women in male-dominated professions. It equally addresses broader themes of mother-daughter relationships, generational gulfs, interpretations of justice and personal responsibility, core human experiences of love and loss, the legal standing of same-sex couples and the painful, yet profound process of recovery from any life-altering circumstance.

Thanatology, the interdisciplinary field focusing on death, dying and bereavement, entered popular consciousness in the 1960s, due in large part to the widespread influence of a pair of books generating considerable attention. The first was journalist Jessica Mitford’s The American Way of Death, a 1963 expose of the funeral industry which spoke to a dominant national repression and avoidance in all matters related to mortality. The second was the classic 1969 study On Death and Dying by Dr. Elizabeth Kubler-Ross. Rooted in her clinical work with the terminally ill, Kubler-Ross provided the psychological complement to Mitford’s sociology, identifying a cycle of responses in the face of death which she famously proposed as stages of grief. For Kubler-Ross these were comprised of denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance, the purity of any theoretical model complicated by Kubler-Ross’ awareness that individual reactions vary greatly from any definitive pattern, particularly given the thread of hope that passes through all of these permutations.

Gustave Moreau, Orpheus (1865)

Several of Mitford’s indictments led to industry reforms, although she still found much unchanged in attitudes and practice decades later in a revised edition published posthumously in 1998. Kubler-Ross’ conclusions were both celebrated and consistently challenged by rival perspectives, sparking controversy to the present day. What makes these still valuable touchstones are their shared articulation of a deeper process beneath the rush of concerns and conflicting emotions in confronting and surviving loss. As does Smith’s play, they share a compassionate acknowledgment that in the wake of death we are thrust into passages which both transform and redefine us.

How appropriate, then, that the settings in Love Alone are intermediary spaces such as waiting rooms, a house made alien by absence, a new home, consulting offices, music touring arenas and parking lots, and that its characters are likewise in varied states of transit. A realtor, a rising musician, a doctor just out of residency, a young married couple in a period of adjustment, combine for a study of lives in flux, and their consequent mutual vulnerabilities are equally revealed as potential strengths. In such tentative environments, emergencies can land with seismic force, while the opposite can also be true: without the certainty of long-held habits and stubborn resignations, the known and familiar are less calcified obstacles, and growth can occur with unforeseen swiftness. But Smith refuses easy answers and pat resolutions. As in classical tragedy, her characters must navigate a complex landscape of ethics, law, and politics. 

Love Alone further resonates with the classical world in its themes attending to art. In The Hero with a Thousand Faces, comparative mythologist Joseph Campbell outlined the main contours of the Hero Quest in religion and mythology, defining three recurrent phases he labels separation, initiation, and return. This pattern of isolation, immersion, and reintegration is as applicable to one’s progress through mourning as it is emblematic of the creative process. Among the most prominent mythic figures in twentieth-century art is the Greek god Orpheus, a deity whose story is inextricably tied to music, death and rebirth. Orpheus charmed nature itself with the sound of his lyre, journeyed to the underworld in a vain attempt to recover his lost wife Eurydice, was torn apart by frenzied Bacchants, and ultimately resurrected.

For numerous artists, Orpheus has served as a symbol of both the creative spirit and the alienation which can accompany that identity. Tennessee Williams wedded both perspectives in his mid-century tragedies Orpheus Descending and Suddenly, Last Summer, whose respective protagonists were a musician and poet broken and literally consumed by corrupt contemporaries. In contrast to these metaphors of a fallen world, Smith offers a rebuttal in the person of a female guitarist, whose success in a punk band “One-Armed Edna” (recalling the dismembered Orpheus) is a testament to all of the women of rock before her, from acoustic legends Joan Baez, Joni Mitchell and Bonnie Raitt, to electric pioneers Nancy Wilson of Heart and Joan Jett, to our present spectrum of pop confessor Taylor Swift and Moscow activists Pussy Riot. This ascendance of female guitarists in the often unwelcoming male landscape of rock embodies a message of empowerment which speaks to that promise of survival in the Orphic legend. And the assertiveness linking these divergent women is another marker of those wider drives toward greater equality in America and abroad. Nevertheless, on the personal level, such a journey, like Orpheus’ own, is fraught with peril. States of uncertainty, fear, and regression are as frequently suffered through in the arts as in grief. In this respect, it’s telling that the renowned American director Anne Bogart titles a central chapter in her essays on the profession “Terror”, counseling the anxious that in making peace with danger, “beauty is created and hence, grace”. 

A Modern Day Orpheus: Heart's Nancy Wilson

Just as artists embrace the darkness, and each successive female musician widens the path for those who come after, Smith’s play confirms that mourning can be an experience as marked by dignity as distress. As she reinforces in an interview, “You never know who you are until it’s your tragedy.” Love Alone offers us a collective portrait of individuals simultaneously bound together and pulled apart by a common crisis: their emotional evolutions tracing a syncopated yet similar arc in the direction of that terminal point of the mythic quest: moving through stages, rebuilding relationships, aspiring toward healing, committing to wisdom, and finding a way back into the light.