Michael Halberstam is the artistic director of The Writers’ Theatre Chicago. He earned a bachelor’s in fine arts degree from the University of Illinois Actors’ Training Conservatory in 1986 and then toured with the Virginia Shakespeare Festival. He returned to Chicago a few months later to pursue a Chicago career and his Chicago acting credits include Bailiwick Theatre, The Court Theatre, Oak Park Festival Theatre and Shakespeare Repertory. Michael then spent two years at The Stratford Festival in Ontario and performed in Timon of Athens, The Knight of the Burning Pestle, Much Ado About Nothing, As You Like It and Macbeth. In 1991, he returned to Chicago and founded The Writers’ Theatre Chicago, an intimate 50-seat theatre located in the back of a Glencoe bookstore. Since then, Writers' Theatre has evolved into a sophisticated two-venue organization with nationally acclaimed productions and a $2.3 million operating budget. With great fanfare, the 2003/04 season opened in the Glencoe Woman's Club at 325 Tudor Court, an intimate 108-seat performance space that offers a different level of intimacy and a new scale of production while still accommodating the ever growing demand for tickets. The Writers’ Theatre was voted first behind Steppenwolf in the Chicago metropolitan area by readers of North Shore Magazine in 1996-97. It currently has 630 subscribers and its 1997-98 season will feature four productions involving five weekly performances running for seven weeks. More information is available by contacting Michael at Writers’ Theatre Chicago, Books on Vernon, 664 Vernon Ave., Glencoe, IL 60022.

 

Many actors are only interested in performing. What motivates you to move between performing, directing, writing, designing, and teaching? Is there one you prefer?
Initially, I think I was stirred to direct because I was so frustrated as an actor. I would frequently sit in the bar after rehearsal with my fellow cast members and together we would bemoan the state of our production and articulate clearly and simply the very course of action that could put us all on track. Yet we were never consulted and so the problems remained unresolved and occasionally the production would falter. I promised myself that were I to direct I would always encourage a vociferous participation by the cast.

What impact has your wide range of experience had on your choices as Artistic Director of the Writers' Theatre of Glencoe, Illinois?
Total impact, if I understand the question. I am the sum of my experiences and I use those experiences in order to make personally informed decisions and hopefully avoid intellectual detachment. Everything that happens to me, I store away for possible transformation or direct application.

You received a BFA from the University of Illinois Actors' Training Conservatory: How did you know that a conservatory program would be the right choice for you?
I didn't. I emigrated from Nottingham when I was 14 and spent two years in a very small 240 pupil University Lab School in Champaign Urbana where my father was serving as head of Math department. I graduated from High School early and begin only 16 and being seduced by the remarkable and beautiful Krannert Center for the performing arts I decided to at least start my University work at the U of I. I really had no knowledge that there was any other kind of acting training program other than a conservatory. I was very fortunate in my teachers. Two in particular had profound influence on me. My voice teacher Sandra Shotwell informed us on the first day of class that she would have our voices fully trained in a single year and indeed she did. We had a full basic grasp of resonance, range, projection, diction and relaxation by the end of the school year. The other great teacher for me was our movement teacher, Robin McFharquhar who put us all profoundly in touch with our bodies.Much of what they taught me did not actually make sense until years after graduation.

Do you feel that you were well prepared for a career as an actor, both as an artist and as a business-person?
I'm not sure if anything could really have prepared me for the reality of coming to a big city to try and be an actor short of the actual experience itself. We certainly lacked basic resume and headshot skills and our audition classes bore little resemblance to the real thing but I've observed programs that have excellent and practical guides to real life survival and I've watched the actors graduate and still seen them stumble under the adjustment from the fantasy environment of University to the cold hardness of the real world.

What are your long-term goals as an actor (or an artist in general)?
As a director, as an actor and as a producer I always strive to find a continually deeper sense of simplicity. As an actor I look to remove the capital A from Acting. That is, I try to find a place where, even if the text is heightened, I am clear, using good story telling, and yet the audience should not be aware of my technique. If they are admiring my fine resonance, excellent diction or ability to cry real tears, the truth of the moment has been lost. As a director, I try to guide actors to this place. My technique allows me to clearly feel and hear the difference between the text when it is being honestly spoken and when it is being embellished. Of course, actors don't like to be told that they are ACTING and so the secret is to try and guide them into a more truthful delivery in as subtle and sublime a way as possible so that the discovery of that truth can be their own. I'm still working on unlocking this secret.

As a director I also work very hard to help actors avoid fixing their characters. I am referring to the tendency many actors have to soften and make romantic what is often hard and decidedly unromantic. It's an easy trap to fall into. Our training frequently pushes us to connect. Our media presents rosy images. Our society judges basic human behaviors if it considers them to be unpleasant. It is therefore quite natural for an actor to take a cruel moment in a play and apologize for it. Sometimes the actor will stand outside the moment and show the audience that they don't behave in that way. Sometimes the actor will soften the moment and try to add sentiment to it. Sometimes, the actor will commit to the cruelty and then immediately show that they regret the action in order to make the character more appealing and 'sympathetic'. Of course, the consequence is that the moment is completely dramatically depleted.

Do you have any role models, theater-folk or otherwise?
I'm a big fan of Judi Dench, Ian McKellan, Ian Holm, Richard Ehyre, Sian Phillips, Gary Griffin, and Simon McBirney.

As a performer, you've had a lot of experience with Shakespeare, touring with the Virginia Shakespeare Festival, spending two years with The Stratford Festival in Ontario, and working with Chicago's Shakespeare Repertory. Why is it important that we continue to perform Shakespeare's works?
All plays prior to Shakespeare lead up to Shakespeare. All plays after Shakespeare lead back to him. It is possible that Chekhov approaches him for in Chekhov the poetic grandeur is found not within the text but within the wondrous and complex neurosis of his characters' psychology. The full spectrum of the human experience is contained within his complete works. That would make it important I think.

If you look at the notion I addressed when responding to goals and the tendency to fix what is not broken, you'll find it manifest in many contemporary approaches to Shakespeare. Look at the problem plays for instance. Two Gentlemen of Verona is frequently criticized for its ending. Why would a girl who's just almost been raped and has certainly been lied to and betrayed by her boyfriend go back to him? Why indeed? And yet it happens all the time. I have known several woman who are repeatedly attracted to abusive men.

I understand that academia frowns upon Shakespeare these days because of the incompatible and unenlightened times in which the plays were written. Notions of King, God, and sexuality have radically changed in the intervening centuries it's true and Elizabethan society was decidedly misogynist for instance. But I would question whether Shakespeare himself was misogynist. Was he not just 'holding the mirror as 'twere up to nature'? And quite frankly, we're not going to truly tackle misogyny by removing suspected instances of it in literature. This is a surely cosmetic approach. We would do better to try to understand it. (I bring up misogyny by the way because I believe it to be one of the planet's greatest problems.)

You recently presented scenes from Measure for Measure as part of Loyola University's "Law & Literature" Lecture Series. What can law students learn from Shakespeare?
The idea discussed by the professors and I prior to arranging this program was manifold. (Incidentally, as far as we can tell from the public record Shakespeare spent a fair amount of time in and out of court.) His plays are bristling with rhetorical exercise and as law is based in the manipulation of words, who better to turn to? We chose Measure for Measure because of it's gray moral ground and it's ethical dilemmas. Morality is rarely as simplistic as television and zealots would have us believe. Additionally, the professors thought it might be interesting to see how a director works with an actor in order find a more persuasive way of story telling. The students seemed very engaged.

What is your opinion of productions that strive to make Shakespeare's plays more relevant to contemporary audiences? (For example, Baz Luhrman's Romeo + Juliet)
I loved Baz Luhrman's Romeo and Juliet precisely because he didn't try to make the play more relevant. He just did the play. He found real and highly textually specific environment in which the play could sing. He rarely if ever tried to bend the play to fit his film. I'm always disappointed when Romeo and Juliet opens without any sense of danger. If the street brawling looks foppish then everything that is to follow is diminished. There was a marvelous sense of danger in the opening sequence of Luhrman's film - a city torn apart by gang warfare - two households, both alike in dignity, from ancient grudge break to new mutiny indeed. The recent Hamlet with Ethan Hawke was less successful (although very good) because it fought the rules of the play. At it's base, Elsinore and Hamlet must have some sense of the Church because the foundation of the ghost story is built on the Catholic mythology of absolution and purgatory. Also, the corporate world was too limited. Elsinore is a superpower in the play. The stakes must be enormous. So you see my point? There's no need to make Shakespeare relevant. One just needs to do it well. Doing it well mean obeying the specific rules of the play and not trying to impose ideas on top of the play. When we try to compete with Shakespeare, we usually lose. Usually.

In 1992, you and Marilyn Campbell founded the Writers' Theatre in the anteroom of a bookstore in suburban Chicago. Why? What is unique about Writers' Theatre that couldn't be found elsewhere?
I wanted to create an environment where the text and the actor were the most important aspects of any production. Our bookstore theatre is really really small. With 50 audience members and a cast of actors there's not much room for anything else. And yet, through the ingenuity of our directors and designers and the extraordinary skills of the best actors in Chicago we have transformed the little back room into the conservatory for Misalliance, the tortured interior of Raskolnikov's mind in Crime and Punishment and a luxury liner for Rough Crossing. Everything starts with the text. Clarity of storytelling is first and foremost and any design conceptualization must have direct inspiration from the written word. Actors are respected, well looked after and paid commensurate with our big brothers and sisters downtown.

What were the greatest challenges in going from the initial idea of "Hey, let's start our own theater!", to your first productions? Did the process go smoothly?
The greatest challenge was probably the realization that in the early stages one person was going to have to do the bulk of the work and if I really wanted it, it was going to have to be me. Don't get me wrong, I've had a tremendous amount of help over the past 13 years and in the early years was blessed by the dedication of our board and a small collective of artists some of whom still can call the company home. Did
the process go smoothly? About as smoothly as could every go. We have been remarkably lucky.

How far into the future did you plan? Did you expect that a decade later you would still be producing shows and have won so many prestigious awards?
I must confess to not having thought much about the future. I only long term plan under extreme pressure. Theatre is a transient art - an art of the moment, and too much adherence to future planning can make the work stale and calculated. However, I have also been flanked by several colleagues both on board and in the office who have been both tolerant of this tendency and clever at ensuring that there is always a goal at hand. We are fortunate to have the considerable talents and expertise of Jennifer Bielstein who joined us as Managing Director last year. She looks out marvelously for the long term health of the company. We are in the process of embracing the next stage of development currently. Can't wait to see what it will be.

You have been awarded an ABBY for excellence in theatre management from the Arts and Business Council. What are the guiding principles that have enabled your organization to thrive in such a difficult endeavor? Why have you succeeded where so many fail?
I would not want to speculate as to why others fail, and I'm not sure I would classify our state as one of success as that implies a conclusion which is a little chilling don't you think? However, I would say that we
have produced very consistently excellent theatre. There is no substitute for reliable productions. Our audience trusts us.

How do you choose the plays you will produce? What are you looking for in a script? Do you consider what will please your audience when planning a season? Is there an overall message or theme that Writers' Theatre is striving to convey?
I look for good plays that speak to me and then I hope that if I think it's good, so will the audience. So far it's worked. The second guessing game is dangerous. If we start trying to figure out likes and dislikes of five and a half thousand varied subscribers, we're doomed before we even begin. There is no overall message except that we strive to offer a truthful reflection.

What is the role of the artist in society? Why is it important that people attend live theater?
There is a great confusion in the mind of the American Public about artists and theatre. Because our government does not embrace us, and because our media pays only scant attention to us, the public does not quite know what to do with us. We're expensive because we lack appropriate subsidies and we're consequently elitist because only the wealthy can afford to see us.

Our role is vital and without us, our culture is doomed. People need more than bread on their plates and a roof over their head in order to function. We currently exist in a society in which platitudes are embraced as truths and religious bigotry counts for morality. At an Art Gallery, a concert, in the heart of a literate read or a good poem, we can find the right questions to ask. Until we truly know and then learn to love ourselves, warts and all, we can have no real understanding or love of others. And if we can't love, then what's the point? Like religion, art should provide a tool for self discovery, spiritual awakening and self actualization. It's interesting how often both get used for pointing fingers at others.