Alan Ayckbourn in rehearsal at 59E59 Theaters

Since 2005, Sir Alan Ayckbourn, the British playwright and director, has been bringing plays – often two or even three at a time – to 59E59 Theaters in New York from his home base at the Stephen Joseph Theatre in Scarborough, England, where he was artistic director for more than 30 years. On each of his six visits to the U.S. – save for one where he fell ill at the last moment – I’ve moderated a public conversation with him, prompted by our friendship dating back to 1996 and the U.S. premiere of By Jeeves at Goodspeed Musicals, where I was general manager at the time.

For the first time, this year I remembered to record our conversation on May 29. Because I always learn so much from discussing theatre with Alan – we’ve also done two lengthy audio interviews, the most recent (2011) of which can be found here – I thought I’d set down a bit of this year’s conversation, focusing entirely on what Alan had to say. These pieces of the conversation have been slightly edited and condensed for clarity.

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Richard Stacey and Elizabeth Boag in Confusions

On Confusions, his 14th play, from 1974, which is only now having its U.S. premiere at 59E59 Theaters.

I hardly recognize the boy who wrote Confusions. He was very, very young. I never rewrite them, I just them be. I just don’t know the guy who wrote it and I don’t want to meddle with his work, in case he comes forward in time and beats me up….

It’s a great art form, one-act play writing. Just because you can write full-length plays doesn’t necessarily mean you can write one-acts. One of our great one-act writers was a guy called John Mortimer who wrote some wonderful one-act plays. But I think his full-length ones were slightly less certain or sure-footed than his one act plays, plays like The Dock Brief and What Should We Tell Caroline and all those were marvelous little examples.

It’s like the way Saki wrote a short story. It’s akin to short story writing because you just need a different set of muscles. Like an athlete, just because you’re a 100-metre sprinter doesn’t mean you can run a marathon, in fact you probably can’t. It just depends on the discipline.

The one-act is a fascinating discipline because everything has to be very concise, very quick By the time one of the Confusions plays is over, Hero’s Welcome [this year’s other Ayckbourn production in New York, his 79^th play], in time span, is just getting underway and you think that’s leisurely, you can establish the characters, you can establish the situation, you can plant questions in people’s minds.

On working in theatre.

One of my crusades is live theatre and keeping it alive. I’ve never worked extensively in movies, or television or radio. I’ve always concentrated in theatre.

About every five years, we need to stop and just ask ourselves, why are we staying in theatre? The depressing Sunday morning when nothing’s happening or the Wednesday afternoon when nobody’s coming in, you think “What the hell are we doing this for?” and I just have to list the things which I consider important with live theatre.

One of those things, and it sounds like a total cliché, is it’s live. It’s when you do something here in this space, we’re all in the same room and in this tiny space a group of people will perform something and hopefully you will interact with them and they will interact with you. It’s a live, living experience.

It’s the one facet of theatre that’s totally unique. You can forget all the other things: big flying pieces of scenery and spectacular lighting effects and the huge orchestras that swell up. In the end it’s just a group of human beings with a certain talent for acting getting together and doing something, trying to tell a story which somebody else who has a certain talent for writing has constructed, and allowing it to happen.

On his eight-hour narrative for voices, The Divide, performed only once to date.

I think one of the things that drives me, apart from live theatre, is the need to surprise myself, or indeed in the case of The Karaoke Theatre Company [his newest play, debuting this summer at the Stephen Joseph], to terrify myself.

I’m aware that when you get to my length of career, 80 plays and counting, the danger is to rely on the tried and tested. There’s nothing in new in theatre. Always when you do something you consider totally new someone will come up and say, ‘I saw in 1921 an identical play to this’ or it was just slightly different, so you don’t try to do that but do something different.

Because I’m a director and a writer and the two roles are simultaneous – as I’m writing a new play I’m directing it in my head, I’m solving the problems, at least to a certain extent. I’ve got no unsolved problems by the time I’ve got them onstage, because I know what I’m doing. That’s not conceited, it’s just practice really. So when I sat down for The Divide, I wrote something I knew I couldn’t stage.

On science fiction.

Sci-fi gives you common ground with the generations you are no longer part of. You can invent a world which hopefully they will accept which doesn’t depend on me knowing their jargon or their way of texting or anything like that. I invent the ground rules. You ask them please accept the ground rules of this….

When you try and do an Isaac Asimov, when you start prophesying the future, you try and think of the trends. I got quite a lot in Henceforward [his 1987 play being revived this summer at the Stephen Joseph] right. What I haven’t got right is the technology, which has leapt through. Who could anticipate that since 1987 digital technology would advance as far as it has?

On relationships between men and women in his plays.

Russell Dixon and Stephen Billington in Hero’s Welcome

I always felt that I’m probably very calm and I hope pleasant person, but whenever I’ve hurt people, they’re always people I love, because it’s a sort of defensive thing. Over the years, when I was very young, I got quite aggressive to some people with whom I should have known better.

Nevertheless, you must have perceived in some of my plays that when men and women cohabit, when they choose to live together, they proceed to destroy each other and do terrible things they never would dream of doing to a complete stranger – even if it’s non-physical, saying terrible things.

On whether he sees much theatre beyond his own work.

When I go into a theatre I go to work. I sit in the auditorium, and I sit and worry, quite often. I think about how can we make this better, how can we make this right? So I go to the movies. I don’t have to worry there.

If you’ve ever been to the movies with a film editor they are appalling people. They go “No, no, no. Cut, cut, cut. For god’s sake they’ve let that shot go far too long.” And I just sit there going, “Oh, that’s good.”

Responding to an audience member who asked how, since he works so much, he’s learned such a great deal about human nature.

I’ve worked with human beings. They are actors, admittedly, and they’re rather extraordinary human beings. Actors have a tendency to live very close to the surface and they tend to be very fluent about themselves because they use themselves so much. I learn a lot about human nature from actors, and the rest I observe, staring out of the window and walking around.

The deep and interesting things, the psychological things I learn by working as a director. The director is an interesting mix of facilitator and dictator really and a little bit of something else, a sort of counselor, who hopefully is helpful.

Once I asked Stephen Joseph, “What’s the secret of directing?” and he said, “The secret to directing is to create an atmosphere in which other people feel free to create.” That is the most extraordinarily easy answer and the most difficult thing to achieve. Because you get a group of actors who are different, they’re fairly centered a lot of them, and you can persuade them, cajole them, to work together and sometimes they do very willingly and sometimes with great reluctance. It’s most interesting and informative thing for a dramatist and also I think it brings me a lot closer to the psychology of what makes people tick.

On casting and creating an ensemble.

Like many directors I try not to always rely on the same team because there’s eventually something stupefying about that. You sit there thinking, ‘Aren’t we wonderful, aren’t we wonderful?’ No, we’re not wonderful. You have to bring new blood in. I have a sort of rolling system. Hopefully I have enough actors at any one time in the company who understand the ethic of the way I like to work and then you bring the new people in who provide the new spark. It is a growing thing.

I’ve always worked on the assumption, it’s an old show biz cliché really: Take the work seriously, but never yourself. A lot of the time we work from having fun, just enjoying each others’ company and I think that is very helpful in the process of creation, because it relaxes people, they feel confident, perhaps. If you’re going to act, you’ve got to try a role out, try to do something with it, chances are you’re going to make a bit of a fool of yourself in the early stages, because you’re going to go too far or just do something that’s totally wrong, but if you give the actor the feeling they can do that without you going “Ga-ah, stupid,” you just say “Well that hardly worked, but well done. Moving on. Shall we try another one?” So it’s that sort of trust. I hope the actors who work with me trust me to say the right thing.

Lynn Hawley, Amy Warren, Maryann Plunkett and Meg Gibson in Hungry (Photo by Joan Marcus)

I’m writing this column during an interval. I’ll still be waiting out that interval when I write again next week. In fact, I won’t be getting in for Act II until September, after which I’ll wait about six weeks for Act III.

Of course, this is an exaggeration, but as I try to explain the experience of seeing Richard Nelson’s The Gabriels: Election Year in the Life of One Family, it gets at what Nelson is doing with his new trilogy, akin to what he previously achieved with his quartet, The Apple Family Plays.

Offering glimpses of a few hours with a family at something approaching real time, these works are not unlike dropping in on relatives that you manage to see only a few times a year. In some ways, it’s the opposite of immersive theatre: it gives you a very small taste of a story, and then makes you wait for months before you get another shot. To be fair, each play can stand on its own, though the collective experience gains a cumulative power.

I saw the first of The Gabriels plays, Hungry, on March 6; the events of the play took place on March 5, 2016 – and they always will. That’s why subsequent stagings of these Nelson works will never quite match the temporal verisimilitude of their first productions, because even if they’re spaced out to approximate real time, they can never again be exactly of the original moment. For all their simplicity, these Nelson works are almost daring in their formal approach to time.

Usually when we think about time in the theatre it’s durational: how many hours did it take? The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby, The Mahabarata, The Norman Conquests, Gatz: part of the experience is how long we sit for them – and subsequently we brandish our stamina in front of others. Nelson not only wants audiences to allow their own lives to pass before they next experience the work, but he also wants time genuinely to pass in the life of his characters – and it forces him as a playwright to grapple with intervening events in the world, beyond the Rhinebeck NY village where both multi-play works are set.

The tradition of playing with time in theatre is longstanding; J.B. Priestley used it frequently, in such plays as Time and the Conways; Ayckbourn has toyed with it as well, adding the geographic complications and simultaneity of House and Garden. More recently, Annie Baker has pushed the perceived boundaries of what can be done with naturalistic dialogue in The Flick, mandating gaps in conversation that mimic halting, awkward real speech, but are contrary to the snap and pace of so many stage works.

Sarah Steele, Arian Moayed and Jayne Houdyshell in The Humans (Photo by Joan Marcus)

Even as The Gabriels unfolds its first chapter and leaves us wondering what will be part of the next, another experiment in time is taking place on Broadway, but so subtly that few people realise they’ve seen one.

Moving from Off-Broadway, Stephen Karam’s The Humans has once again been acclaimed for its portrait of a family at Thanksgiving as they reveal the threads that may be unraveling in their permanently linked lives.

But what people miss is that while the play appears to unfold in real time, from the arrival of guests for dinner right up to the moment the guests depart – with drinks and meal included – it takes only 90 minutes from start to finish, never seeming rushed or abbreviated. Karam packs in an enormous amount of information about his characters’ lives in circumstances as mundane and everyday as those in The Gabriels. His sleight-of-hand compression, played out without a pause, takes an event we know to be lengthy from our own experiences and leaves us thinking we’ve watched the real thing.

Though it is often held up as an artistic goal, nothing in the theatre can ever truly be natural; a certain artificiality is inherent in the form. But right now in New York, in the least apparent of productions, we’re watching playwrights alter how we perceive time and how it can be employed in the theatre, invisible stage magic played out at extraordinary length and deceptive brevity.

“It’s one of my lost plays that I feel we can bring back,” says British playwright Alan Ayckbourn of 2003’s Sugar Daddies, which will make its U.S. debut this month at Seattle’s A Contemporary Theatre, directed by the author.

ACT has previously staged 10 Ayckbourn plays with other directors. So what prompted this in-person visit by the playwright himself to stage a work little seen beyond his home base of the Stephen Joseph Theatre in Scarborough, England?

“They asked me, is the simple answer,” explained Ayckbourn. “I met Kurt Beattie the artistic director when he came to Scarborough two years ago. He slipped me the ground plan of their Allen Theatre, which is conveniently in the round, and he asked if I’d fancy working there.”

Ayckbourn says the plays – about a young woman who helps an elderly crime boss who she helped after he’s hit by car, and ends up as his protégeé –  is based in part on the Faust legend. “It is, in the end, the story of a girl corrupted by worldly goods, “ Ayckbourn says. “Do you sell your soul or do you hold on to it? There’s nothing particularly English about it.”

Still, Ayckbourn notes that he’s not planning to Americanize the play for the Seattle production. “I’d been down the road of Americanization early in my career. It turned out to be a very unfortunate choice. If you’re not an American writer, your vocabulary when you’re translating is much narrower. It’s the same as trying to squeeze Tennessee Williams into Cheltenham.”

The author of 77 plays (not including one-acts, children’s shows and holiday entertainments), Ayckbourn has directed American acting companies in two plays previously, Henceforward at The Alley Theater in 1987 and multiple engagements of By Jeeves after its stateside debut at Goodspeed Musicals in 1996. Does he find a difference when working with U.S. actors?

“Here [in Scarborough] I have the advantage,” Ayckbourn notes, “of having a rolling company and they are, to an extent, imbued with the ethos of the way I work and the style in which I write. It used to be difficult for American actors, because they went after the jokes in my stuff and fell flat on their faces – because there are none. Most of my jokes come from monosyllables like ‘yes’ or ‘no.’

“I have to ask people not to treat it like a broad English comedy. The more seriously you play my stuff, the funnier it gets. But these days, because of my age and reputation, if you like, they treat me a bit too reverently. I have to knock the reverence out of them.”

I have yet to see Pinter in the Pinter or Sondheim in the Sondheim. I have, however, seen Ayckbourn in the former and, incongruously, Pee Wee Herman in the latter. For anyone confused, I am referring to the recently renamed Harold Pinter Theatre in London’s West End and Broadway’s Stephen Sondheim Theatre. I applaud the naming of these venues, and I am equally enthusiastic about the Caryl Churchill Theatre that will open in Surrey next year. They are manifestations of a topic I find myself musing upon: using theatre naming as a means of promoting the awareness of theatrical history.

On the one hand, the name of every Broadway and West End theatre carries history, since the venue name will be associated perpetually with famous productions that played there. However, names are not exactly fixed in stone. While Broadway’s Belasco and New Amsterdam may stretch back to a century ago, the current Helen Hayes Theatre is the second building to honor “the first lady of the American Theatre”; the original (which had two names before Hayes) was torn down some 30 years ago. Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid Of Virginia Woolf? premiered at the Billy Rose Theatre 50 years ago; today, that same theatre is the David T. Nederlander, named for a member of the family that now owns it.

The point is that theatre names are somewhat fluid, and the rationale behind their naming, past and present, can have a variety of motivations. It was certainly the style, once upon a time, for the impresario who built the theatre to name it after himself, but in New York, there has been an intermittently enlightened approach that has resulted in such venues as the Lunt- Fontanne Theatre (named for the husband and wife acting duo in 1958) and the August Wilson Theatre (renamed in 2005, just after the pioneering African American playwright passed away, the building’s sixth name). Among Broadway’s 40 theatres, two are named for legendary critics, the Brooks Atkinson and the Walter Kerr, and a third for newspaper caricaturist Al Hirschfeld, no small recognition for the fourth estate.

Other theatres are named for more practical reasons: when the not-forprofit Roundabout Theatre Company reclaimed a theatre on 42nd Street, part of the restoration and its ongoing funding was secured through a long term sponsorship that named the new venue the American Airlines Theater. Purists were dismayed, but to my mind, it was not affront, since it reestablished a working theatre where none had been for decades.

But I return to the Wilson, the Lunt-Fontanne, the Sondheim, the Hayes, because to me they are exemplars. Maybe, just maybe, patrons seeing shows in those theatres might take the time to find out about these storied names, both bygone and current. Perhaps programmes or websites can provide not just the history of the theatre, but of its namesake. Could our theatre capitals take the opportunity to make themselves billboards for theatre history with more judicious naming? In New York, what of a George Abbott, a Comden and Green, a Wendy Wasserstein Theatre? And they need not be posthumous. Harold Prince, one of the most influential figures in New York theatre from the 1950s to today, might be thusly honoured (even if he has had, at one time, not one but two theatres named for him in Philadelphia). In London, what of Ayckbourn, Stoppard, or Ralph Richardson?

This is not a decision that can be achieved through public opinion, since the authority rests with the owners of the buildings themselves. But perhaps while theatres retain the truly memorable, essential names, the more generic ones can become theatrical history markers. By way of example, both New York and London have Lyceums that might be better off personalized, if preservation regulations allow it. Since theatre is not a religious rite, why do London and New York both have St James Theatres if he was the patron saint of furriers and chemists?

Some theatres’ historic names have been proven outdated, the figures they were named for more fleeting than expected. Perhaps we must change these pieces of the theatre’s history in order to better promote theatre history and commemorate it for subsequent generations.