Directing Three Hit Shows In One Season, Lila Neugebauer Is An Artistic Virtuoso

What an epic year it has been for director Lila Neugebauer. This theater season alone he directed the critically acclaimed plays Appropriate, Uncle Vanya i the Ally. He is working with the powerhouses Second Stage, Lincoln Center Theater and Public Theatre.

Written by Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, Appropriate it received eight Tony nominations, including Best Play and a nomination for Neugebauer. The play was so successful that it moved from Second Stage's Hayes Theater and moved to its current home, the Belasco Theatre. Extended three times, when it closes on June 30, Appropriate it will last 27 weeks.

Appropriate revolves around a fractured family staying together in their father's strange and overly cluttered 19th-century Arkansas home, which was a former slave plantation. The Lafayette brothers and their families have to deal with the patriarch's property and everything he kept buried and everything they keep buried. As sister Toni (Sarah Paulson) and her brothers Bo (Corey Stoll) and Frank (Michael Esper) last the weekend, I have more chilling and disturbing details about their father. They are forced to face realities about him and each other.

Neugebauer met for the first time Appropriate in 2013. The play was performed at the Humana Festival of New American Plays at the Actors Theater of Louisville. “I was blown away by the play when I first saw it,” says Neugebauer, a Yale graduate who directed plays by Christopher Durang and David Ives as a senior at Hunter College High School. (Film and television director, her debut was Causeway with Jennifer Lawrence).

After directing a production of Appropriate with Juilliard students in 2016, Neugebauer collaborated with Jacobs-Jenkins in the world premiere of his work, everyone, at the Signature Theatre. In Jacobs-Jenkins, a gifted storyteller who creates characters both funny and heartbreaking, Neugebauer discovered a valuable collaborator and friend.

“Branden is exciting as a chameleon writer. He has traversed radically divergent theatrical landscapes, all of which are grounded in his fascination with history. He never takes the theatrical form for granted,” Neugebauer says of the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright who is also showrunner, executive producer and writer of the FX series. apparent.

“In each of his works, he re-imagines the theatrical register appropriate to the concerns of his subject. It's rare to work with a writer who possesses both such a dynamic imaginative range, a deep insight into human psychology and behavior, an incomparable craft, and is also so hilarious.”

In the early months of the pandemic, Jacob-Jenkins asked if she would be open to going back Appropriate. “I think I said 'YES' before I could even ask the full question,” says Neugebauer. “It's a brilliant play that I absolutely believe in, so the opportunity to revisit it on a bigger stage, as well as reunite with Branden, was a no-brainer for me on every level.”

Much has changed in this country since that first production in 2013 and even in 2016 when Neugebauer directed it. He believes this has helped change the audience experience Appropriate. “Without suggesting that the audience is monolithic, a lot of people who come to see this play now have a vocabulary that was found to be much less accessible when it was first released,” says Neugebauer.

“Divisions in this country that some people might have been inclined to overlook have become blatantly undeniable in the last decade, many of them within families. I think these developments are allowing a wider audience to access more deeply both the pain and the humor that has been in this play all along.”

Jeryl Brunner: When you were a student at Hunter College High School, you directed comedies by Christopher Durang and David Ives. Why was directing so eye-opening for you?

Lila Neugebauer: I think the central revelation of directing for the first time was the discovery that in this particular role I felt like myself. I discovered an expression of myself that felt authentically “me” in a way I hadn't been able to channel anywhere else.

Brunner: You can share your process when you have a script like Aappropriate and how do you get it from one page to another? what do you do first

Neugebauer: I like to bring the whole design team together at the beginning of a project, not to talk about a specific design choice, but to talk about the world of work in general. To share initial impressions, questions and inclinations. I think designers are some of the best playwrights, and these early cross-departmental conversations provide a crucial foundation for the larger effort to unlock the play.

Brunner: The house inside Appropriate it's almost like a third character. Is it possible to describe how you imagined the house?

Neugebauer: The house is the expression of a wonderfully rigorous collaboration with the stage collective DOTS. It is based on an actual shot they found of the period and region, theatrically reimagined in response to the play's provocations. Many of our stage choices were achieved by building backwards from particular images I hoped to land.

Brunner: Uncle Vanyacurrently playing at Lincoln Center is so funny and moving and unlike anything else Uncle Vanya I've never seen it. How did you know you had to direct it?

Neugebauer: That production started with a phone call with Andre Bishop, who invited me to direct a play at the Beaumont. We discovered a shared love of Chekhov. I told him I would like to Uncle Vanya, but only if my dear friend, writer, remarkable human being, and Russian speaker, Heidi Schreck would translate it. And luckily for me, she agreed immediately. I had not visited it again vanity maybe in a decade when I read it again. And the ways in which I heard it speaking in my own life and up until this moment felt both devastating and hilariously personal.

Brunner: You also have a successful career directing film and television. What brings you back to directing the theater?

Neugebauer: There are clear lines through film and theater direction. And yet part of the joy of working in different mediums is how each activates completely different parts of my brain. It involves radically different processes, toolboxes and expressive languages. And I've found that the ability to work in multiple media has helped me stay curious.

Theater involves the spontaneous invention of a temporary community, one night at a time. To do so, you must find value in this particular emotional journey: its inherent fragility, ephemerality, and the unique visceral impact born of shared live presence.