Arts
Veteran director Daniel Sullivan (2001 Tony Award Winner for Best Direction of a Play for “Proof”) talks about his suddenly busy 2010-11 Broadway season, which will see transfers of his productions of “Time Stands Still” from Manhattan Theatre Club, “The Merchant of Venice” with Al Pacino from The Public's Delacorte Theater, as well as the premiere of David Lindsay Abaire's “Good People” for MTC. He also talks about getting his start as an actor and his early experiences with the San Francisco Actors Workshop, run by Herbert Blau and Jules Irving; moving to New York with the Workshop when it became the Repertory Theater of Lincoln Center; working as Stage Manager and Assistant Director on the original production of “Hair”, and why he had to restage the show almost every night; getting his first directing opportunity with the debut of A.R. Gurney's first play, “Scenes From American Life”; how quitting his first directing job at Seattle Rep (a production of “The Royal Family”) didn't impede his becoming Resident Director there, and two years later, Artistic Director, a post he held for 16 years; why his greatest disappointment at Seattle Rep was ultimately the inability to create a full resident company of artists; how it felt to embark on a freelance career again in 1997; and his thoughts on the playwrights with whom he's most associated: Herb Gardner, Wendy Wasserstein, Donald Margulies, Charlayne Woodard, Jon Robin Baitz and David Lindsay Abaire.