6The Daily Tar Heel Wednesday. April 24, 1985
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By FRANK BRUNI
Arts Editor
When Greg Boyd was a senior at the University of Cali
fornia at Berkeley, he was given carte blanche by the drama
department to stage, a play of his choice. He had impressed
many with his abilities as an actor: by his junior year, he
had added membership in the Berkeley Repertory Theatre
to his university workload, and his list of accomplishments
included the taxing lead in Rostand's Cyrano de Bergerac.
But no one was entirely sure what to expect from Greg
Boyd the director.
Boyd came up with his own adaptation of Herman
Hesse's novel Steppenwolf. He solicited 10 classical and jazz
musicians to join the actors, and he mounted the produc
tion in an abandoned campus building through which the
audience wandered and encountered surrealistic images. He
called the play No Show Tonight, a title whose appearance
on banners outside the building persuaded more than a few
theatergoers that the play had been canceled.
That was a little more than a decade ago, but Greg Boyd
is as audacious now as he was then. As artistic director of
PlayMakers Repertory Company and a professor in the
UNC department of dramatic art for the past four years, he
has earned a reputation for directing provocative renditions
of traditional texts.
He is the man who portrayed the street urchins of Vienna
as painted punksters roaming a post-apocalyptic landscape
in Shakespeare's Measure for Measure. He is the man who
took the female courtiers in the Bard's As You Like It,
shaved their heads and had them eat what looked like
animal entrails. And he is the man who defied traditional
assumptions about Williams' The Glass Menagerie by inter
preting Laura's handicap not as imaginary but as real and
putting her in a cumbersome leg brace.
But if there are those who perceive Boyd's work as out
rageous, he sees it merely as innovative. "It has never
seemed to me that I have done a play in an especially eccent
ric manner," Boyd says. "IVe only done the play the way it
occurs to me that the play makes sense to be done. I don't
say, 'Wouldn't it be weird if?'. I don't say, 'I'd love to do a
play that's set on the moon with Indian costumes what
play can we do that's like that?' I never do that. I only do
plays that I admire and I admire them because I see a way,
I think, to make them work for me on
a visual, visceral level."
Over his four years in Chapel Hill,
Boyd has seen "a way" to make some
of the most revered plays in the history
of drama work for him. The 12 main
stage productions he directed include
Chekhov's Three Sisters and O'Neill's
A Moon for the Misbegotten in the
fall of 2, The Greeks and Pygmalion
in the spring of As You Like It the
following academic year and, during
the current 4 to 5 school year,
Thornton Wilder's Our Town, Mea
sure for Measure and Cyrano de
Bergerac.
Says Ben Cameron, PRC literary
director and one of Boyd's colleagues
in the drama department: "I think the
notions Greg has promulgated about
how to approach classics will stay here
a long, long time. His work is brilliant.
He has helped put this theatre com
pany on the map."
Milly Barranger, chairman of the
drama department and executive pro
ducer of PRC, points to the statistics.
The Paul Green Theatre is playing to
j 92. percent capacity. Between August
of 2, Boyd's second year here, and
the present, PRC productivity has
increased 300 percent while student
attendance at PRC productions has
gone up 250 percent. And over that
same time period, the number of UNC
students taking classes in the drama
department in a given semester has
jumped from 550 to more than 1500.
Barranger gives Boyd much of the
credit for these improvements. "I cant
say enough about Greg's energy,
vision, teaching ability and artistic con
cepts that have brought this depart
ment into a national perspective it per
haps did not have," she says.
When Boyd leaves Chapel Hill for
Stage West in Springfield, Mass., in a
matter of weeks, his legacy will be a
rejuvenated PRC, a reorganized mas
ter of fine arts program for drama stu
dents at UNC, and a canon of work
that reflects a man whose creative
genius, admire it or not, is undeniable.
That creative genius was incubated
over the course of a privileged child
hood. Born in San Francisco and
raised in its upper-middle class sub
urbs, Boyd discovered his interest in
the theatre at age 5. He loved the duel
sequences in the Shakespeare plays his
mother read to him and was enrap
tured by the pageantry in the produc
tions to which his parents brought
him. He and his neighborhood friends
invented and performed their own
plays. That hobby took a more formal
turn at San Mateo's Arragon High
School, where the circumstances were
propitious to Boyd's development as
an artist.
"Because we were in a very intellec
Mahlon Bouldin (left) in
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tual high school that was kind of for
academic over-achievers, we had a
very good theatre program, very good
music, very good dance," Boyd recalls.
"It was also the '60s and Haight
Ashbury and the Summer of Love and
all that was happening in the city, so
that's where we spent most of our wee
kends, at rock V roll concerts. Of
course, you couldn't escape drugs at
that time. Everybody in our high
school did them frequently espe
cially theatre people."
And Boyd was, by that point in
time, a confirmed theatre person.
When he entered Berkeley in the
summer of '69, he knew his focus
would be drama. Although it was an
era of intense politic protest and social
rebellion "the best time to go to
school," Boyd says he didn't com
mit himself to any one cause. "I'm not
a joiner," he says. "I'm too much of an
effete intellectual snob, I guess."
Partly because he felt he had a mind
too analytical for acting, Boyd became
more and more interested in directing.
So , when he graduated from Berkeley
in 1973, he went East to Pittsburgh
and Carnegie-Mellon University, home
of the oldest drama department in the
nation, to study the director's craft.
. Boyd was disappointed by Carne
gie's emphasis on show business profes
sionalism over innovative artistry. His
disenchantment confirmed his suspi
cion that commercial theatre was not
where he belonged, and he steered
clear of it upon his 1975 graduation.
The 24 year old joined the faculty at
Williams College, where he held the
distinction of being the youngest assist
ant professor in the institution's
history.
The lure of Williamstown, Mass.,
however, was not so much its presti
gious college as its summer theatre fes
tival, one of the great traditions of
U.S. theatre. As a director with the fes
tival, Boyd worked with the likes of
Christopher Walken, William Hurt
and Richard Dreyfuss. "It was the sin
gle most catalytic moment in my
career," he says.
Boyd spent four years in William
stown, and he might have stayed
longer had it not been for the influence
of colleague David Rotenberg. In
1980, Rotenberg was offered the artis
tic directorship of PRC but didn't
want to take it unless Boyd came with
him and the two shared the position.
Boyd consented to give it a shot, arriv
ing in Chapel Hill in the fall of 1
with an obligation to stay only six
months.
It was a fall Boyd will never forget.
His directorial debut with PRC, The
Glass Menagerie, earned scathing noti
ces from area reviewers and many
PRC subscribers. "Broken Glass" read .
the headline of the review in The Spec
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Boyd's rendition of Wilder's 'Our Town':
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tator. The Raleigh Times lambasted
"an eccentric directorial interpretation
that would sink the show even if it
were better acted."
"People hit the roof," recalls Boyd.
"They thought that was directed by the
anti-Christ. It took a certain amount
of chutzpah, I must admit, to do that
play in the South that way, because we
didn't do it as an ethereal piece of gos
samer, which is its reputation. We did
a much harsher kind of production."
But in spite of that ill-reception
which extended to Boyd's second pro
duction, Angel Street and his own
low estimation of the graduate pro
gram in the drama department, Boyd
returned to UNC in the fall of '82. He
saw bright possibilities for a marriage
of PRC and the graduate program,
possibilities espoused by Barranger,
who had just been hired to oversee the
department's transformation. To con
summate that marriage, she made
Boyd, who still kept his position at
PRC, head of the actor training pro
gram. As such, he auditioned more
than 150 applicants for the six spots in
a revamped, three-year M.F.A. pro
gram from which candidates would be
the core of PRC.
Three Sisters was the first product
of this bold experiment. The show was
immensely successful, quelling any
doubts among community members
about Boyd's talent or the program's
viability. Next came A Moon for the
Misbegotten, followed in the spring by
The Greeks, a six-hour extravaganza
welding and updating 10 Greek clas
sics. It was The Greeks, which Boyd
co-directed with Rotenberg, that most
vividly displayed Boyd's penchant for
jarring imagery and hip moderniza
tions and foreshadowed his work in As
You Like It and Measure for Measure.
It wasn't long before people in the
Chapel Hill theatre community began
to expect certain things from a Greg
Boyd production: an austere set; dis
turbing, sometimes befuddling imag
ery; contemporary flourishes in regard
to the settings and circumstances of
older texts; dark humor. As Cameron,
who came to UNC just this past fall,
said, "I had heard that his vision was
highly idiosyncratic, that there was no
mistaking a Greg Boyd production. I
had heard a lot about Shakespeare
done punk."
Boyd is conscious of the particular
"look" of his productions and of what
that look owes to the Eastern Euro
pean, avant-garde theatre. "The look,
to reduce it to cliche, has to do with a
lot of white light as opposed to
colored light and a lot of scenery that's
based on massive architectural units,
like the windows in Measure for Mea-
"He is intimidating.'
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Vendy Barrie (right) in Chekhov's 'Three Sisters': "He's the best director I've ever worked with."
sure," Boyd says. "It's the free admis
sion that people are in the theater as
opposed to seeing a realistic place
depicted onstage."
In fact, it is Boyd's reaction against
realism that explains many of his idio
syncracies and the reason some theater
goers have trouble connecting with his
work.
"No other country in the world
embraces realism the way America
has," Boyd says. "It's horrible, it's
awful, it's soul-deadening and mind
killing. Because part of what we look
to art for is to connect with us on
some sort of imaginative level and not
simply to reflect our world. My work
is poetic, it's primarily non-realistic. It
is surreal in some ways. The phrase we
used most around here is 'compelling
juxtapositions.'"
These juxtapositions of costume
with character, prop with costume, set
with action, music with set produce
the startling imagery indigenous to a
Boyd production. It explains the punk
costumes and the rock 'n' roll score in
Measure for Measure, the occasional
imposition of contemporary props and
situations over the classical storyline of
The Greeks, and the menacing appear
ance of the courtiers in As You Like
It. But such imagery, Boyd insists,
should hot betray the playwright's
intentions. "You're informed in terms
of the juxtapositions you choose to
make by what's happening in the
play," he says.
Cameron deems Boyd successful in
this attempt. "The costume choices
that were made in Measure were an
evocation of Vienna gone decadent,"
Tie says. "IVe never seen a production
of Measure where that idea was more
powerfully conveyed. What I've
learned from Greg is the notion that
you can be irreverent with a text and
at the same time show a reverence for
it. His irreverence is a quest to recreate
the power originally in the text."
"There are always people who are
going to say, 'Why don't you let the
play speak for itself?,' " Boyd says.
"Well, I'm not interested in doing
plays that are capable of speaking for .
themselves, that are imminently knowa
ble. I think even the most naive theater
goer knows that he or she is going to
the theater to see a production of a
play. The play itself, the written words,
lives on the shelf. It is immutable, and
it means different things to different
generations."
"The reason I don't do classical
plays in classical periods is because I
don't see any reason to do it that way.
If you think about it, it's not logical.
Shakespeare didn't do his plays in any
historical period other than his own.
When they did Julius Caesar, they
wore Elizabethan clothes."
Likewise, Boyd says, it would be a
mistake to do a Shakespeare produc
tion today in Elizabethan dress. "You
Photos by Jonathan Serenius
" i. ' 9 i
can't put men in tights and doublets,
because that looks like you're playing
dress up. It's such a distance between
the person in the audience who's trying
to receive the play and the playwright,
who's trying to send a series of images
and words at the audience. So what we
try to do is find a context for the
clothes that says something about the
character's vision of himself, his social
status, the culture in which he lives."
"Greg is part of a small but new con
tingent of directors who don't believe
that an older text has to be treated as
a museum piece," says Barranger. "The
text must speak to the contemporary
audience. If that means introducing
rock into a Greek play, so be it."
Boyd's work as a director, however,
has not been his only focus as both
head of the actor training program
and PRC artistic director (he assumed
the full responsibilities of the job when
Rotenberg left in spring 83), and the
rein lies the source of some of the
shortcomings and frustrations of his
tenure in Chapel Hill. What makes a
PRC season successful and what is
best for the education of M.F.A. candi
dates are not always one and the same.
Forced to consider both these con
cerns when choosing and casting pro
ductions, Boyd sometimes has been
unable to do justice to either.
"We work in all these dichotomies,"
says third-year M.F.A. candidate
Wendy Barrie of the professional and
educational aspects of the graduate
program. One of the initial group of
six actors picked by Boyd to pioneer
the new program, Barrie perceives the
PRC UNC relationship as a mixed
blessing, bringing more roles to
M.F.A. candidates but also discourag
ing certain casting risks risks that
might broaden and challenge the
actor. Often, she says, individual
actors in the company seem to play the
same kinds of roles over and over
again.
"As a member of a professional
house, you don't expect to know any
thing about decisions," Barrie says.
"But from the department you expect
democracy. It leaves a tension not
knowing why you're used the way you
are."
The consensus among Boyd's col
leagues and students is that he is much
more comfortable as an artist than as
a politician. "He's the best director IVe
ever worked for," says Barrie. "He's so
full of ideas. He has one brainstorm
after another. But things don't work
out when he intimidates his actors.
Greg is an incredibly private person. It
takes a while to get to know how to
communicate with him."
"Heis intimidating," says Mahlon
Bouldin, a senior from Clarksdale,
Miss., who played the role of George
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Gibbs in Our Town. "He has a way of
dealing with his actors that's very
direct. It's good but it's not always
easy."
"I think that my immersion in the
work sometimes blinds me to some of
the human needs of the people I w ork
with," says Boyd. "I think I spend
more time in my imagination than in
the real world." It was Boyd's concern
that his actors remain busy and chal
lenged, however, that created PRC's
hectic schedule and often undercut the
quality of individual PRC
productions.
"I guess I have a neurotic tendency
to try to keep everybody working all
the time and keep everybody perform
ing as much as possible. It's a noble
impulse, but, in practice, it means we
get exhausted and our success ratio
comes down a little bit."
Wearing too many hats and mount
ing too many productions has taken its
toll on Boyd's spirit. "It's probably
what's ultimately driving me out," he
says. At 34, he is less anxious to spend
every waking moment in the theater
than he was as a college student. He's
concerned about his private life; his
10-year marriage recently ended, but
that did not erase his desire to have
children someday. "I can't spend 18
hours a day in the theater anymore,"
he says. "I'm getting too old for that."
But more than anything else, he
feels that it is necessary for him to
move on if he is to remain creative. At
StageWest, he will be living in what he
called "the Northeastern corridor of
American theatre," where the top
talent is more accessible than in
Chapel Hill. He anticipates that his
schedule will be less hectic, giving him
more time to fashion each production.
"1 don't feel capable of offering any
originality here anymore," Boyd says.
"I feel that I've challenged myself and
that circumstances here have proven to
be challenging, because we've tried to
do such ambitious plays within such
modest means, but part of my decision
to leave was based on the fact that I
didn't see much in store for me here
but simply repeating myself, which I
don't care to do. I'm losing my inge
nuity and I don't want to lose my
ingenuity."
Somehow, it's hard to imagine a
Greg Boyd sans ingenuity. He is, after
all, the man who adapted Hesse's Step
penwolf to the stage, who shaved the
heads of the female courtiers in As
You Like It, who played Talking
Heads' "Girfriend is Better" in between
scenes of Measure for Measure. That
he could ever cease to be ingenious is
inconceivable. That PRC is losing a
rare artist, however, is painfully
obvious.