Director Mark Ramont speaks to the cast during the first rehearsal of Next Fall
I recently spoke with Mark Ramont, director of the upcoming production of Next Fall. Performances run at Round House Bethesda from February 1 – 26. You’ll remember Mark’s great work at Round House on last season’s hit production of Amadeus. It was wonderful catching up with him. Here’s our talk.
Jacqueline Lawton: During our chat last year during Amadeus, you mentioned that the first play you ever directed was The Glass Menagerie, a beautiful and haunting memory play by Tennessee Williams. Geoffrey Nauff’s Next Fall is also a memory play. What is it about looking back that makes for such a wonderful and poignant theatrical conceit?
Mark Ramont: I don’t think I would call Next Fall a memory play because it begins, ends, and is solidly set in the present. The past does, however, play a very important part in making sense of what is happening in the present – both for the audience and for Adam, the play’s protagonist. I think all of us have a foot in the past as well as the present; we are constantly investigating how we got where we are. Past events shape us: they affect our decisions, our relationships, our ability to grow and learn. In this particular case, I think the past is essential to finding the hope in Adam’s journey. He is able to learn from his mistakes and from Luke’s extraordinary ability to forgive and accept.
JL: In that same conversation, you shared that working with Anne Bogart on The Baltimore Waltz defined your rehearsal process. Can you talk a bit more about this process? For instance, what is the first day like for you and the cast? Do you engage in certain exercises or rituals throughout the process? If so, what are they?
MR: I approach rehearsals from the point of view that what we do in the theatre is tell stories, and we tell those stories through actions. With that in mind, I spend a good portion of my rehearsals sitting around the table determining exactly what that story is. I take the play’s natural scenes and have each actor write about what happens in that scene from their character’s perspective – and in the first person. This helps the actor discover the voice of their character and to entwine it with their own. I have one very important rule in rehearsals: we try everything. I have an idea, we try it; the actor has an idea, we try it. That’s what rehearsals are all about – trying things in order to discover the best and most interesting choices.
JL: And since we last talked, you stepped down as the Director of Theatre Programming at Ford’s Theatre and are now teaching theatre at California State University in Fullerton. They are so fortunate to have you! How do you balance your course load with freelance directing?
MR: This is the first freelance directing I’ve done, so I’m kind of discovering that. I have a colleague taking my classes for the two weeks I’ll miss and my assistant on the show I’m directing at school (Spoon River Project – a new adaptation of Spoon River Anthology) will take over my rehearsals for the first two weeks. If I get back and everything’s a mess, I’ll never do it again! I’m back doing Next Fall because a) I love the piece and have been dying to do it since I first encountered it and b) I had made a commitment to Round House before even hearing about the job at CSUF. We had already cast the show and the designs were well under way when I got the offer. Keeping my commitment to Blake and Round House was a condition of my accepting the job, and Fullerton was wonderfully supportive and understanding. In the future, though, I probably won’t take on a freelance gig that eats this deeply into my teaching schedule. I don’t think it’s fair to my students – and, honestly, I really miss them and miss being there in those important first weeks.
JL: What excited you about directing Round House’s production of Next Fall? What made you say yes?
MR: I saw the NYC production when it was at Playwrights Horizons (before it went to Broadway) and fell in love with it. It grapples with the challenge of being gay and a Christian in a way that honors both sides and treats both viewpoints with respect, dignity, and humanity. Reconciling the two has been a big challenge in my own life, one that has kept me distant from my own family and my own roots. I still haven’t made peace with it – and I’m not sure they are reconcilable. I applaud Geoffrey for taking on a topic that pushes such emotional buttons in so many people. I also love all of the people in the play. They’re not just mouthpieces for different points of view, but complex, rich characters who struggle with these issues in important ways. No one has it all figured out, and that strikes me as very, very real. I’m very grateful to Blake for asking me to do it. He saw the play in NYC and, like me, knew that he wanted to do it. I feel very, very fortunate that he thought of me immediately as the right director for the project.
JL: Next Fall tells the story of a couple who couldn’t be more different from one another. Luke is a struggling actor with a promising career and a fundamentalist Christian, while Adam is in a constant state of mid-life crisis, a hypochondriac, and also agnostic. They’re an unlikely pair who finds great love in one another. What can audiences learn from Luke and Adam’s relationship?
MR: Honestly, I don’t want to get into that a whole lot. If we do our job well, people will be moved deeply by this play. That emotional connection will allow the play to live with them beyond the performance, and they’ll come to their own conclusions about what the play is saying about relationships – and what they can learn from it. Theatre IS a great teaching tool, but unlike the pulpit or the classroom, it doesn’t work very well when it tries to teach us WHAT to think, but stimulates our minds enough to draw our own lessons. One of the things that I really love about the writing is that Geoffrey really embraces ambiguity: he raises a lot of questions that he never really answers.
JL: Smartly written, at once hilarious and heartbreaking, Next Fall addresses important issues such as faith, sexuality, addiction, the role of the family, the impact of friendship and the reality of disappointed hopes for one’s life. How have these ideas influenced your approach to the play?
MR: I’m not a hugely conceptual director. For me, the fun of directing a play is the exploration. The ideas that Geoffrey raises in this play excite, confuse, fascinate, and move me. I’ve pulled together the best team of actors and designers that I know so that when I get in the room with all of them, we can all really have a blast tearing these issues apart, figuring out what makes them tick, and putting them all back together in a form that can communicate with an audience: in other words, create a living, breathing slice of humanity that will speak to our audience, get THEM excited about these ideas and issues to the extent that they want to explore them in their own lives and with the other people in their lives.
JL: If there is one thing you want audiences to walk away knowing or thinking about after experiencing Next Fall, what would that be?
MR: Ultimately, it’s all about relationships on both a macro and a micro scale. I’d love it if the audience thought about the people that they love in their lives and ask if what they believe brings them closer or pushes them away from those they love. Whenever we’re reminded about how fragile life is, how temporary all of this is – and this play is very good about reminding us about all of that – I think it gets us re-examining what we value, what we think is important, what our priorities are, and how we treat people in the pursuit of all of that – especially those we love. That’s a lot to think about.
JL: What’s next for you as a director?
MR: Spoon River Project at Cal State Fullerton. After that, nothing on my plate, so if there are any artistic directors out there looking for someone with free time in the summers or who doesn’t mind rehearsing over Christmas . . .
- Jacqueline Lawton
Jacqueline Lawton is a member of Round House’s Artists’ Roundtable
