The Backstage Alchemist

Anyone who’s followed American theater over the past decade has probably run across the name of director Daniel Sullivan. In fact, it would’ve been hard to avoid.

A nearly ubiquitous presence, Sullivan has been responsible for developing and bringing to Broadway plays such as Herb Gardner’s “I’m Not Rappaport” (1985) and Wendy Wasserstein’s “The Heidi Chronicles” (1989) (which went on to win a Tony and a Pulitzer) and “The Sisters Rosensweig” (1992).

He has been nominated three times for Tonys, staged a number of hits at key off-Broadway venues and had more successful productions touring from here to Hoboken than virtually any other nonmusical director today.

Sullivan doesn’t try to do it all, like some other regional theater artistic directors who have had success directing musicals on Broadway--such as the Old Globe’s Jack O’Brien or former La Jolla Playhouse artistic director Des McAnuff--and his work is more difficult to characterize. Unlike many others today, Sullivan doesn’t direct in a flashy or high-concept style.

“I’m sort of stuck in realism, in relatively traditional storytelling,” says the soft-spoken director, who tended to look away as he formed his thoughts during a recent conversation at the Mark Taper Forum, where his staging of John Patrick Shanley’s “Psychopathia Sexualis” opens Thursday. The comedy about gender differences by the author of “Four Dogs and a Bone” is set in motion when a man confesses a sexual quirk to his fiancee.

Sullivan, 55, is the kind of man who considers his best work to be when “the direction disappears.” And the director, like his work, is famously unobtrusive.

But don’t let his low-key style fool you: This is a shrewd player with a knack for spotting commercially viable new plays.

Artistic director of the Seattle Repertory Theatre since 1981--a post from which he will step down in one year’s time--Sullivan is widely credited with putting that theater on the map. Yet he’s known for nurturing new scripts.

The secret of his success seems to be, in large part, his way with writers. “It’s posing questions, more than anything else,” Sullivan says. “I’ve never known ‘you should do this’ [to help].

“The less attached I get to my own thinking and the more I pose questions, the more the writer has to work with,” he continues. “It may sound a little like manipulation, and maybe it is, but it allows the writer ownership of what he or she is doing.”

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Clearly, Sullivan is a playwrights’ director, as a wide range of artists will tell you.

“He loses himself in the play,” says Gardner, who also developed “Conversations With My Father” with Sullivan. “He’s only interested in what you’re after, not what he’s after.

“I would call him the state of the art,” Gardner continues. “There’s only about half a dozen really good directors, and he’s four of them.”

“Daniel Sullivan is a mysterious, good man who works very hard,” says Bill Irwin, whose “Largely/New York” was created under Sullivan’s aegis. “I don’t entirely understand how he does it, but he makes amazing work happen--and he’s always at work.”

Sullivan’s working ways, of course, didn’t develop overnight.

He was raised in San Mateo and attended nearby San Francisco State. He became involved with the theater there, studying under Jules Irving and Herbert Blau, in particular.

In 1971, Sullivan went to the Repertory Theatre of Lincoln Center, where Irving was director (Irving and Blau had taken over the theater in 1964, but Blau resigned in 1967). Although he was there ostensibly as an actor, Sullivan recalls, “They really didn’t have much for me to do so they said ‘here, go direct plays.’ ”

When Irving resigned in 1972, Sullivan continued to work in the N.Y. theater. Then, in 1979, he accepted the position of resident director at Seattle Rep.

One of his first moves in his new Northwest home was to establish a new play program. “The first play I had directed was [A.R.] Pete Gurney’s ‘Scenes From American Life’ at Lincoln Center,” Sullivan says. “I was used to the process of developing a new play and I missed it when I got out to Seattle.”

What made the program devised by this self-described “slow reader” different was that it stressed refining a script before staging it. “The whole idea of developing a new play was not a current idea,” he says. “You put on plays. You didn’t develop them.”

In 1981, Sullivan became the Rep’s artistic director. Since then, he’s staged more than two dozen plays, including main-stage productions of Shakespeare, Chekhov and other classics, as well as works by new vaudeville talents such as the Flying Karamazov Brothers and Irwin.

Yet the new play program has been, and remains, his calling card. In it, he has nurtured scripts such as “Cat’s Paw” and “Shivaree” by William Mastrosimone and Gardner’s “Conversations With My Father,” which went to New York in 1991.

If such transfers are the measure of success, Sullivan’s program has indeed done better than most. Yet he credits the setting as much as himself.

“We were so far away from everything,” he says. “A lot of writers who want to get away from the cultural centers and the pressures of working under the microscope like to come to Seattle, where they assume no one would really notice.”

He also knows that the collaborative method isn’t for everyone, although many other theaters have emulated Seattle’s program since it began, if with more modest success. “Many writers that I know, particularly my age and older, don’t really like the idea of a workshop,” Sullivan says. “That’s not in their background.

“They just took plays out of town and worked on them, and then they brought them in [to New York],” he says. “But the workshop, which suggests that the play needs work, was anathema.”

Those who thrive in such a setting tend to be younger, and the majority of the writers who pass through Seattle’s program are baby boomers. “The generation of writers under 50 are used to that whole process of developing,” Sullivan says. “It means being able to work on it, seeing how an audience reads the play, and then work from there, on the basis of what we learn from a workshop.”

First, of course, Sullivan must find a script with potential. Yet for all the winners he’s spotted, he denies having a formula for finding plays.

“It’s such an ephemeral thing,” he says. “There aren’t measures that you can apply. Part of it has to do with what keeps you reading. Almost all the time, if I finish a script, I like it.”

Once he’s got a script, Sullivan has to lay the ground rules. “One of the things that I’ve found is absolutely necessary is that you’re as clearheaded at the beginning about the play as you possibly can be,” he says. “If you’re open and honest, there aren’t any surprises later on.

“You say, ‘Here are the areas that need work’ and ‘here are the areas that I think are strong’ and that forms a kind of contract.”

Then, when the playwright comes to Seattle for a two-week residency, there are rehearsals, discussions and rewrites. At the end of the two weeks, four staged reading-style performances are given in front of an audience, which is invited to comment on the work after the performance.

Ironically, as Sullivan’s reputation within the theater community has grown, he’s had to do less and less searching. “Most of the writers that I’ve worked with have gotten to me, rather than the opposite way around,” he says.

Wasserstein--whose latest work, “An American Daughter,” will be given readings in June--is a case in point. “A friend of hers was having a play in the workshop process,” Sullivan says. “She saw the process and thought that might be good for her.”

The Seattle Rep audiences have been one of the draws. “It’s a very literate town,” Sullivan says. “Wendy was impressed that for the first time she wasn’t hearing an audience telling her how to rewrite her play. They were simply responding to the play in a positive way.”

The staged readings are also useful in anticipating the demands of actually staging the piece. “We try to make it feel like production in some ways, so that you’re dealing with whatever production problems there might be,” Sullivan says.

“When Wendy wrote ‘The Heidi Chronicles,’ for instance, she had no idea of how to get from one scene to the other,” he says. “Someone would be onstage at the end of 1971, and then be onstage in the next scene in 1981, and there was no time there for a costume change. So one of the things that we would do is figure out a way to get that person offstage and into a change.”

Jon Robin Baitz also sought out Sullivan, although the director already knew of the playwright’s early work “The Film Society.”

After working with Baitz in Seattle, Sullivan staged the playwright’s “The Substance of Fire” at Playwrights Horizons in New York in 1991, at Lincoln Center shortly thereafter and at the Taper in early 1993. In February of this year, he staged Baitz’s “A Fair Country,” which is still running at Lincoln Center.

This fall, Sullivan makes his debut as a film director with “The Substance of Fire.” Shot last August, the movie stars Ron Rifkin, who also played the lead in the New York and L.A. productions.

Shanley too approached Sullivan. The director--who had never before worked with the author of such plays as “Danny and the Deep Blue Sea,” “Italian-American Reconciliation” and the film “Moonstruck”--staged the premiere of “Psychopathia Sexualis” in Seattle earlier this year.

And Shanley--who typically directs his own plays and hasn’t handed over that job to someone else in seven years--has been pleased. “He’s a very sober, deliberate, whimsical, introverted creature,” the playwright says. “He gives me lots of room.”

Sullivan is not, however, without a creative point of view, cautious as he may be in expressing it. “This is probably more overtly comic than [Shanley’s] previous work, but you still have to approach it very behaviorally,” Sullivan says.

“The men [in this play] are highly disturbed people. You have to be able to see that as comic.”

Yet Sullivan has a clear idea of what would be going too far. “It’s not as though we’re playing farce, and that becomes the line,” Sullivan says. “When we go over it, we have to pull back.”

Because Sullivan himself performed one of the roles in Seattle, he has to be careful not to let what he knows as an actor get in the way. “I know where the laughs are and to go through an entire rehearsal period without mentioning them is hard,” he says.

He manages though, partly because the writer-director relationship is predicated on a trust that’s all the more volatile in a “development” situation, which can be tough on a writer’s ego.

“It’s always a delicate relationship,” Sullivan says. “You want to get to the point where you can say anything to the writer and they can say anything to you, but that doesn’t happen all the time.

“I like writers who work on their feet, who can interact in a rehearsal situation,” he continues. “I tend to do most of my work in rehearsal, without that much preparation. I generally instinctively respond to what’s there, and it’s nice when a writer can do the same thing.”

Proven though Sullivan’s methods may be, he’s also at a career crossroads. He has announced that he will step down from his post at the Rep, effective one year from now.

“I’ve been there a long time,” Sullivan says. “I was finding it more and more difficult to juggle, and I was just away too much.”

Whatever Sullivan’s post-Seattle future may hold, though, he’ll continue to work with new scripts. “I can’t imagine not doing it,” he says. “That’s what I seem to know how to do.”

Despite speculation that he might relocate to New York, he says he plans to stay based in Seattle--at least until his 14-year-old daughter has finished high school. But not having the responsibilities that go with an artistic directorship will definitely increase his ability to work elsewhere.

“If I do shows in New York, I don’t want to have to do more than those shows,” says Sullivan, who is also working on film scripts with Wasserstein and Baitz.

Whatever Sullivan takes on, however, he’s unlikely to slow the hectic pace he’s set for himself in recent years. “It doesn’t frighten me,” the director says. “But a year of unemployment, that would be frightening.”*

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“Psychopathia Sexualis,” Mark Taper Forum, Music Center, 135 N. Grand Ave. Tuesdays to Saturdays, 8 p.m.; Saturdays and Sundays, 2:30 p.m. $28-$35.50. Ends June 30. (213) 365-3500 (Ticketmaster).