Timothy Douglas seems a little nervous about the winter. When we meet up for coffee at Coffee Chicago in Andersonville, he’s heavily bundled and admits that he hasn’t experienced a full winter in a long time.
It may seem like an odd thing for a Chicago resident to say, but Douglas hasn’t been in Chicago for very long. He joined Lincoln Park-based Remy Bumppo Theater as artistic director in July of 2011, but prior to that, he was a freelance director for years, putting on shows in places as disparate as Louisville, Pittsburgh and New Zealand. His globe-trotting freelance career was something of an accident, according to him.
It’s a theme he revisits often when discussing his background: much of his success seems to have come as a surprise to him. It’s a funny concept when talking to someone who has a master’s degree from the Yale School of Drama.
“Even at a young age, I knew myself well enough to put this thought together: that I knew that I just wanted to be a star,” Douglas says, with a touch of amusement at his younger self’s single-mindedness. “I was really just living out a very active fantasy life.”
He assumed that “when the time came to separate the wheat from the chaff, I would just be weeded out and then I would figure out what I was doing with my life at that point.”
Douglas joined Remy Bumppo during a period of transition. He took over from founding Artistic Director James Bohnen and Executive Director Kristin Larsen was tasked with finding “something different.” She says, “I didn’t know what that something different was until I had my conversation with Timothy.” With other candidates, she had a dialogue, but no conversation.
Conversation and communication, as it turns out, are both very important parts of Douglas’ work process.
“I remember as an actor I was often in trouble with the directors because of the kinds of questions that I ask,” Douglas says. He wanted to know what was going to happen with the lights and why he was being given certain directions, not because he was resistant, but because he wanted a deeper understanding of what he was being asked.
The response from the directors he worked with was primarily frustration. Now that he finds himself in the hot seat, he says he gets to “satisfy a lot more curiosities I have about the storytelling on stage.”
He made the transition from acting to directing in 1994, a conscious choice because “I could no longer deal with the profession. I didn’t have the skin for it.”
Douglas says he loves the process of collaborating to put together a production and he admits that at heart he might always have been a director. “I don’t want to design for the designers,” he says. Rather, the look and feel of a production comes about from long conversations with the designers where all parties talk about how they think and feel about a play.
He’s particularly opinionated about the idea of contemporizing classic plays. “I’ve seen it so often diminish the play,” he says. His decision to set the current Remy Bumppo production of the 18th century Pierre Marivaux play “Changes of Heart” in 60s Chicago had to do with trying to help modern audiences have a greater understanding of the play itself.
The play involves a class-crossing romance between a prince and a commoner, an idea that would have been both shocking and “titillating” for contemporary audiences. “I felt if the American audience didn’t have an equivalent understanding or an equivalent titillation, there was no way I could deliver the core of what Marivaux was saying.”
He chose to cast the lovers as an interracial romance, in the hope that it would give American audiences a more visceral awareness of the class issues at the heart of the play. “I think our race challenge in America is actually primarily a class one. It just seems to be that the majority of those we would call lower or poor classes happen to be people of color, so I thought, well, that’s immediate, that picture.”
The next play on tap for Remy Bumppo is “Chesapeake”, by Lee Blessing. Douglas will be directing again and with the play’s focus on civil disobedience, it’s likely to fulfill their goal for thought provoking plays and community discourse.
