A Conversation with Brooke Ciardelli

Abstract

Brooke Ciardelli was the founding artistic director of Northern Stage, a regional nonprofit theater located on the border of Vermont and New Hampshire, where she directed over sixty productions. Brooke has been honored by the New England Theatre Conference's Moss Hart Awards for Excellence in Theater three times, for All My Sons (2004), Les Miserables (2008), and Hamlet (2009). She directed a staged reading of Arthur Miller's then-unpublished Resurrection Blues with the playwright himself in residence. She has directed Patrick Stewart and Lisa Harrow in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and worked with playwright Sonja Linden on the American Premiere of The Strange Passenger.Ciardelli has also directed regional premieres of Wit, The Beauty Queen of Leenane, Pride's Crossing, and No Orchids For Miss Blandish, as well as a significant number of large-scale musicals. As a creator, Ciardelli has adapted a number of classical pieces for the stage including Ovid's Metamorphoses, O Myths, and The Shrew Tamer by Shakespeare and John Fletcher. She is working on a stage adaptation of Boccaccio's Decameron for international production.Ciardelli received the Miller Estate's permission to create and direct a Muslim/Syrian version of A View from the Bridge. The production received its world premiere in a staged reading on Saturday evening, October 17, 2015, at the Arthur Miller Centennial Conference at St. Francis College. This interview took place February 6, 2015.Stephen Marino: Welcome. On behalf of the readership of The Arthur Miller Journal, I would like to thank you for your willingness to be here today to discuss your insight in directing Miller plays, particularly this exciting, new version of A View from the Bridge.I would like to start with your experiences as the founding artistic director at Northern Stage. You certainly cast a wide net in the plays you selected up there. I don't know if eclectic is quite the right word, but you staged classic tragedies from Agamemnon to Macbeth; many other plays are drawn from the twentieth-century dramatic repertoire, and you have done a fair share of musicals. I would like to know how, as an artistic director, you select those plays. Then how does that affect your work as a director working in such a mixture of styles and genres?Brooke Ciardelli: I do plays that I love. What I call great plays. If you are an artistic director, you are hired for your taste, your personal taste. So you have to start there, read the plays, and wow-give this as a present to the audience every night. It's a feeling of when you buy someone a really special birthday gift and it's wrapped up in the box. You know what's in it; you know how much they're going to like it, but they haven't opened it yet. So that's what I want to find in a play. To have that feeling about it. I ran the company for sixteen years and we did between seven and eight shows every year.SM: That is a lot of shows.BC: Yes, that is a lot of shows. They all ran three weeks; some of them ran as long as five. The area where the theater is located is fairly rural with a very large subscriber base. It is only one of four theaters in America that has such a small population density yet produces its own work at this level, which some may argue doesn't work. You don't have quite enough people.SM: So how do the preferences of your rural, but engaged, audience affect your choices?BC: It's a very smart community. My audience base did not grow up in the area. They maybe went to Dartmouth; maybe they wintered and did ski vacations in Vermont. They went out, lived their lives all over the world, and chose to come back and retire. Many of them are fairly young. It meant that they had seen world-class culture offerings and had established levels of expectations. When you deal with a subscriber audience-we had a very large subscriber base-that is very good for a theater. One person buys every show in the beginning of the season so the plays are not reviewed. …