Maria Mileaf: Earth Mother
She likes tough plays, great actors and "juicy choices"
By Randy Gener
What is she saying? Can anyone hear what she’s telling Polly Draper? With relaxed command, director Maria Mileaf has crossed her arms above her skirt, knelt beside Draper and whispered something into her ear. Is it a secret? A personal aside?
We’re watching Mileaf direct a July 2003 workshop rehearsal of Susan Bernfield’s Barking Girl. In a series of Jules Feiffer–like episodes, the play cuts to the quick about a wistful young woman’s apprehensions about becoming a mother. It asks the husky-voiced actress to realistically embody an emotional balancing act: She needs to be depressed but not reckless, strong-willed but not off-putting, on-edge yet subtly affecting. Amid the open-rehearsal ethos of the Eugene O’Neill Playwrights Conference in Waterford, Conn., the whisper sticks out, because it trumps the expectations of a room full of attentive observers. Yet in a flash, Mileaf has created a close conspiracy between actor and director. And it works beautifully: Draper makes a key adjustment; the rest of the scenes propel forward.
The moment confirms what I’ve always suspected about Mileaf. As a director, she orchestrates without false strain or fussy effort. Cagily, she will do whatever’s necessary to elicit galvanizing performances or excavate deeper meanings from the script.
A graduate of Yale University and University of California–San Diego, Mileaf is widely recognized as an actor’s director and a skilled contemporary-play interpreter. Everyone singles out—and celebrates—the exquisite risks actors in her care undertake. “Actors are devoted to Maria—they trust her," says Kate Loewald, founding producer of the Play Company, where Mileaf has staged back-to-back shows: French writer Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt’s Monsieur Ibrahim and the Flowers of the Koran, with Ed Vassallo, in 2003; and the 2004 U.S. premiere of Indian playwright Vijay Tendulkar’s 1974 Sakharam Binder (featuring Bernard White and Sarita Choudhury). “Buck Henry, who was in the touring company of Yasmina Reza’s Art [which Mileaf staged] thinks the world of Maria,” says Loewald. “People respect her. I trust her opinions and feel comfortable giving her something challenging. She’s a person who I feel can tackle writings from different cultures and has the ability to see things from other points of view.”
Lucid portrayals, compelling stories, vigorous pace and bristling ideas typify Mileaf’s freelance work at nonprofit factories of new works around the country (such as Playwrights Horizons, Women’s Project, New Georges, Philadelphia Theatre Company and Williamstown Theatre Festival). “I like directing because I’m not called upon to speak,” Mileaf allows. “I like being behind the scenes, observing, provoking, shaping. I like being able to have a reason to analyze work as opposed to writing it on a paper. When I was younger, I thought a director was a much more primary voice. Auteur directing is important and valid, but right now I’m much more interested in narrative and invisible work. I still think a director has to have a strong point of view. But I love to synthesize storytelling for the stage. I always think about why something is or is not theatrical, but I’m not calling so much attention to it.”
Instinctual and self-effacing Mileaf approaches her task as a conversationalist, not as an egotist. A diva of difficult texts, she never doles out sound bites. She is more likely to point out her own faults and foibles than to toot her own horn. Responding to the big questions (What is the role of a director in the theatre? What is the function of imagination?) is “a nightmare,” she says—she so refuses to manufacture markers of her own worth or importance.
“For me it’s hard to talk about work because in the best collaborations, it’s intensely personal,” she says. “You stick a lot of yourself in it, and to name it somehow diminishes the dream life or the creativity or the personal risk in presenting psychology.”
That modesty, that innate sense of discretion, is rewarded in profound ways. “I’m nuts about Maria,” says Erik Ehn, whose ’Maid Mileaf staged for the Lincoln Center Festival. “She looks for the historical logic from the text; she looks for meaning in the logical pattern of events. Simultaneously she searches out images that give a present-tense reality to expository circumstances, and has a gift for making those images fluid enough to race through time. She creates a strong ensemble and creates a generous space for co-creation.”
Raising two children, a boy and girl (sired by her husband, the scenic designer Neil Patel), Mileaf is viewed as a nurturer. She frequently collaborates with the same cadre of actors, designers and producers. “Her approach is subtle,” says Patel. “She leaves room to evolve. In a way, she’s aggressively drawing people out, but over a long period. She doesn’t let anybody off the hook. She has a good sense of the clarity of the contract with an audience, so that the people she works with never lose track.”
That earth-mother nature marks her as a director in the classic American sense, but it masks a powerful dynamic. Underneath Mileaf’s exquisite taste for actors is a thinking writer’s director: If you line up her successful shows, like transparencies over each other, what comes through is an anti-Brechtian way of making life vivid, spackled and complex—what Ehn calls “her respect for the organic energy profile.” She’s interested in making behavior complex, but she’s also avid to create a sense of theatrical distance. “For Maria,” Ehn attests, “it is not enough to cause a singular surprise. The surprises build, rebuild, change dynamic and vector.”
A case in point: Sakharam Binder, a hard-hitting psychological drama about a lordly Indian bookbinder who, while denouncing the hypocrisy of fornicating men, offers lodging to cast-off women in exchange for housekeeping favors and regular intimacies. Banned for several years in India, this major work by one of India’s foremost living dramatists is virtually unknown in the U.S. Its playing time approaches three hours, and it deals with an unfashionable subject matter, the de facto enslavement of modern Indian women. Yet Mileaf’s painstakingly realistic production was thrilling and often funny. “It’s one of our trademark productions,” Loewald says.
Another example: Lee Blessing’s Going to St. Ives, which Mileaf craftily staged for California’s La Jolla Playhouse and New York’s Primary Stages, could’ve been just another talky issue play about two women (one white and one black) sitting in a garden and sipping tea. But with Vivienne Benesch as the guilt-ridden British surgeon and L. Scott Caldwell as the regal mother of a monstrous Central African dictator (she arrives for an eye operation), this two-hander was transmuted into a gripping theatrical event, with the propulsion of a mystery. Nothing particular happens in Blessing’s drama—yet in Mileaf’s realization of its post-colonial world, wracked by violence and the injuries of imperialism, everything was at stake. Bound by matters that sully friendship, these two utterly human characters wrestled with their personal demons and weighed the moral gravity of their actions.
Oren Safdie’s 2003 Private Jokes, Public Places, another Mileaf triumph, packed that sense of occasion, too. But where Going to St. Ives resonated with the force of Greek tragedy, Safdie’s comic folderol about the egos and aesthetic snobbery of modern architects felt as brisk as a hard slap in the face. Performed at the theatre inside the Center for Architecture (the Greenwich Village haven of the New York chapter of the American Institute of Architects) and written by the son of a world-famous architect, this play mercilessly derides the empty-headed pretensions and cruel insensitivities of celebrity “master builders” who are evaluating the design work of a Korean graduate student. Mileaf’s riveting show stacked the verbal jousts to the point where the war-of-the-pseudo-wits transgressed the hallowed space it occupied, and several explosively funny thrusts were directed straight at the audience.
Collisions, fast pace, delicacy, inventive variation and uncluttered directorial guidance decorate Mileaf’s productions, like pearls on a string. During rehearsals, her favorite thing to say is “That would be a juicy choice.” Far from being only a new-play maven, she is equally at home with deconstructing classics. This past summer at Williamstown, Mileaf turned in an eccentric revival of Noël Coward’s Blithe Spirit, which she (along with Patel and costume designer Katherine Roth) refashioned from an airy 1941 drawing-room chestnut into a zany 1970s séance, complete with the bean-bag chair and period ruffles. (The flamboyant cast was to die for: Jenn Harris, Jessica Hecht, Bernard White, Adriane Lenox, Michael Boatman, Wendie Malick and Kate Jennings Grant.)
Currently, Mileaf is doing meat-and-potatoes work, directing Christine Lahti in Wendy Wasserstein’s last play, Third, through Oct. 21 at Los Angeles’s Geffen Playhouse. “Whether you’re working on Euripides, García Lorca, Coward or Wasserstein, directors always have to interpret,” Mileaf believes, “and there’s something about telling stories through space and time. In terms of content, I’m so grateful that Third is political. Elections are coming up. Wendy’s characters are grappling with their effectiveness as political citizens in this country. Wendy is exposing and articulating the hard questions.”
At the same time, Mileaf is eager to work her way out of the kitchen. “I want to create a situation where I can be doing more difficult staging,” she says. “I want to live in a world that is poetic and theatrically challenging, but I also crave for that sharpness of narrative, where the point of view is primary. I’ve been trying to figure out how to put it all together.”