INTERVIEW WITH DANIEL FISH

Daniel Fish
Daniel Fish
Daniel Fish’s work has been seen at theaters across the country and abroad. His recent work includes The Elliott Smith Project (True Love Productions/Bard Summerscape) and Clifford Odets’ Rocket to the Moon (Long Wharf Theatre, Bard Summerscape). For McCarter he has directed Hamlet, Loot, The Importance of Being Earnest and The Learned Ladies. Off-Broadway credits include the premiere of True Love by Charles L. Mee (Zipper Theatre), Ghosts with Amy Irving (CSC), and the US premiere of The Woman Before by Roland Schimmelpfenning (German Theatre Abroad). He directed the premiere of Poor Beck by Joanna Laurens for The Royal Shakespeare Company (Stratford and London), Twelfth Night and The Merry Wives of Windsor for The Shakespeare Theatre in Washington DC, The Merchant of Venice, Measure for Measure and Cymbeline for California Shakespeare Theatre. His work has also been seen at Yale Repertory Theatre, The Wilma Theatre, Baltimore CENTERSTAGE, Great Lakes Theatre Festival, Court Theatre, The Intiman and The Juilliard School. Daniel Fish has worked as Associate Director to Sir Peter Hall and Michael Kahn and has taught at The Yale School of Drama and Princeton University. He is a graduate of Northwestern University’s Department of Performance Studies. He is currently working on the premieres of new plays by Theresa Rebeck and Charles Mee and a film about east Texas.

INTERVIEW WITH DANIEL FISH:

For the second play in our theater season, McCarter will present Molière’s Tartuffe.  This seventeenth-century classic depicts a household under the sway of a seductive imposter. Summer artistic intern Joseph P. Cermatori spoke with director Daniel Fish about his perspective on the play and his goals for this production.

Joseph P. Cermatori: This is your second time directing Tartuffe in ten years—you directed an earlier production at the Court Theatre in Chicago. What has brought you back to the play, and what has changed since your last encounter with the play?

Daniel Fish : Well, I’m ten years older. The world’s a whole lot different. Also, I suppose I should start by saying that I’ve always loved working on Molière’s plays: I love their fierce comedy, their muscularity, I love how intense the people in these plays are, how strong-willed they are. That’s always been a part of it.

I’m interested in the issues of power and submission. What is it about human nature that allows us--or sometimes even pathologically requires us--to submit ourselves to a person or a force, be that a political leader, a spouse, a friend, a co-worker, who’s more powerful?


Joseph P. Cermatori: Why Tartuffe now, in this particular moment?

Daniel Fish: I try to do the play in as personal and as honest a way as I can. So I think certainly these issues of submission and power are ones that we’re concerned with now, and we’ll always be concerned with them. The compulsion to sometimes see situations not as they truly are, but in a better light than they are, and to refuse to acknowledge what’s really going on: clearly that’s an eternal problem. And it’s the basis of a lot of comedy.

I suppose one of those things I’m really grappling with is the issue of the seventeenth century. Most of the classical plays I’ve done of late have all been done in a way that was very contemporary, and I think that partly comes from my strong belief that the theater happens now, it’s about the world we’re living in, it cannot but be that. And I still think that’s true with Tartuffe, but it also didn’t seem right to have the actors walking around in contemporary dress.  

So I began to research—and get obsessed with—the 1660s. I have a truly vexed relationship with it. On the one hand, I’m fascinated with it; fascinated with the excess of it, and the allure of it, but rather than saying ‘Okay, we’re all going to pretend that we’re in the 1660s, I’m trying to really grapple with the issue of how we look at the past, and how we represent the past onstage, and how a play can be contemporary and still be obsessed with another world.


Joseph P. Cermatori: And this question actually inspired a trip for you and your partner Kaye Voyce—who is also the costume designer for the play--to go to France and research at the Musée Carnavalet and the Louvre. Did this trip yield any particular inspiration for the play?

Daniel Fish: It yielded a lot.. The Musée Carnavalet is a seventeenth-century building. When we went, we found ourselves looking at the scale of the rooms, and the scale of the doorways, and how light comes into the rooms, and the role played by mirrors, and then of course the paintings. Frankly we ended up looking at a lot of Dutch painting because Tartuffe is quite a domestic play in many ways, and of course most of the French painting of the period is of royalty or religious subjects; and so if you want a domestic scene, you have to go look at Dutch painting.

Also, we had an interest in the culture of the museum itself, and why we go to museums, and why we look at the past, and how things are presented there… and also all the stuff that’s around a museum: the cameras, and the shops, and the book stores, and the cafes, and the ticket booths: all of this is a kind of strange and fascinating way of examining and fetishizing history.


Joseph P. Cermatori: What kind of dialogue do the conventions of the contemporary stage have with those of the seventeenth- century stage, with seventeenth-century ideas of representation?

Daniel Fish: This is important, and I think it’s a great question. I begin by saying ‘Two really important dates are 1664 and 2007. Okay. These words come from 1664, these people come from 2007. What happens when you put them in a room together for four weeks? And what happens when we put another thousand people into the room and watch that?’ That’s the entry point, and I don’t know the result of that yet. We’ll know something about that after we make the play.