I have directed closer to a dozen Shakespearean plays, and also a small handful of modern plays. I am currently the artistic director of the SL Shakespeare Company.

Many people confuse artistic director with art director, and I think the two are actually very different roles. The artistic director is not only the head artist of the theatre company, but also the CEO. It's a rather interesting role in that the artistic director can never really pursue art for art without worrying about budget and funds, whereas in cinema, the director just leaves that nitty gritty finance stuff to the producers. An art director, on the other hand, simply worries about the art; they aren't necessarily the overall admin person.

My adventures as artistic director of the SL Shakespeare Company are most apt for someone like me, since I like to do everything. Where there's no budget, I can make everything work out by filling in the gaps—i.e., designing wardrobe, sets, and more, and also direct. As I hope you're getting a sense of on this Portfolio, I'm not your typical kind of person who does everything—I do everything well, with a certain minimal degree of fluency. One reason why I am adept in virtually all aspects of Second Life—from building to texturing to scripting—is because I spent an entire year immersed in Second Life in isolation from the real world (and an additional 3 month to test the waters, prior to that). When your typical foreign language student visits a country speaking that language, they naturally become fluent in it.

I believe that directing is an extension of literary analysis, where one part of it is interpretation, and the other part of it association with whom and what you've got to convey the play to the world. Casting is where the director connects the past of the play with the living present, the actors available, and artistically interpolate on whether this actor might fit one of several possible manifestations of the character. Before and during the first part of production, I believe a director of any theatrically legitimate production must spend at least ten minutes to an hour per page analyzing and interpreting the play. Table work gets the actors to start seriously thinking of turning their role into a living creation, and also helps them understand the character. When an actor isn't getting their character, I attempt to talk it out with them, to try to get them to see things from the character's perspective, with respect to the character's relation in the play.

I believe that even if a director is not a master of human psychology and might not understand real people as well, a director must fully understand the phenomenon of characters in a microcosm to the extent of creating a coherent interpretation of the world of the play. I'm guilty of the first, but I think I'm obsessed with the latter. Directing, for me, is not just about me working with people, but about me seeing the non-ephemeral connections between ancient plays and actors alive and auditioning now! It's always magical to hear an actor audition and just naturally for them to give off the “essence” of a character in the play (at least to me!), and then to see them become that character in rehearsal and performance, in their own unique way.