Three Plays, One Harried Director
(12/29/2009) When asked how he was managing to juggle rehearsals for the three plays he is directing simultaneously, not to mention managing the enormous cast and crew involved, and preparing and getting through
 Tom Kochie
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the holidays, Michael Disher said, the week before last: “I don’t know.”
The artistic director of Center Stage at the Southampton Cultural Center, Mr. Disher, who lives in Amagansett, and his company will present a triple play event with Noel Coward’s “Private Lives” beginning next Thursday and running through Jan. 17, followed by “Twelve Angry Men,” which will ignite the stage for two weekends, Jan. 21 to Jan. 24 and Feb. 6 and Feb. 7, and “The Laramie Project” for two weekends, Jan. 28 to Jan. 31 and Feb. 4 and Feb. 5.
“The schedule is nonstop,” the director said. “I have been rehearsing six to seven days weekly and usually six to nine hours daily. Afternoons are structured for individual and scene work and evenings are designed for full cast rehearsals. It has presented challenges and rewards.”
“Private Lives,” which Noel Coward wrote for his partner, Gertrude Lawrence, deals with the unhappiness of a couple who could not live with each other or apart. The conceit of the rambunctious play finds Amanda and Elyot, after having been divorced, honeymooning with new partners in adjacent quarters of a Riviera hotel. There’s plenty of quibbling and bickering and sharp barbs bandied about to keep the pace of this quintessential Coward play brisk.
“I think the struggle between men and women and their ability and necessity to stay together, with or without bruising, is timeless,” said Mr. Disher. “I am sure that Coward would enjoy the irony that his most popular piece was created in a mere four days after a bout with influenza. I also enjoy period comedies that contain contemporary commentary. After 70-plus years, many of Coward’s observations ring brutally true.”
“Twelve Angry Men” has long been a favorite of audiences worldwide. It has been done as “Ten Angry Lebanese,” “Twelve Angry Women,” and “Twelve Angry Jurors,” and last year simply as “12,” in a Russian film adaptation. Before it ever was produced in a theater, “Twelve Angry Men” debuted as a teleplay in the CBS dramatic series “Studio One” in 1954, written by Reginald Rose, who later tailored it to the stage, and it received three Emmy Awards.
Mr. Disher is particularly excited to stage “The Laramie Project” by Moisés Kaufman, which he has not seen performed, although he did attend the “The Laramie Project: Ten Years Later,” a follow-up piece in New York City that was staged on Oct. 12 in as many as 100 theaters around the U.S.
The original production was based on interviews with over 200 people in and around Laramie, Wyo., where 21-year-old Matthew Shepard was brutally murdered for being gay. It is “the greatest sociological experiment I have ever witnessed on a stage,” Mr. Disher said. “Others maintain it is an ‘Our Town’ for the new millennium. It is a superbly crafted piece of theater.”
Mr. Disher hasn’t directed any of the three before, and, “to the best of my knowledge, they have not been produced at this level on the East End. Each covers a genre and era. And I did want a variety, because the actors I work with are so varied,” he said.
The actor, director, choreographer, and teacher also conducts an intensive professional theater class with Alec Baldwin at the Ross School in East Hampton during the summers, and he has directed and choreographed dozens of productions in East End theaters. He was also a professor of theater at Long Island University for several years.
The triple play event “is an experiment, to be sure,” he said. “I will be curious to see if three startlingly different shows can find a collective audience in January and February. The variety and opportunities are here. I hope the audiences are, as well.”