Steppenwolf ensemble member and celebrated stage director Tina Landau splits her time between the Windy City and the island of Manhattan. Likewise, Landau has divided her artistic vision and unique craftmanship among a myriad of theatrical forms and stage stories. Co-creator of the Viewpoints method, Landau is perhaps best known for the New York productions of Floyd Collins, Bells Are Ringing, and Superior Donuts, as well as the sui generis Steppenwolf mountings of The Diary of Anne Frank and The Tempest. Landau recently sat down with Alissa Norby to discuss the upcoming Midwest premiere of Tarell Alvin McCraney’s The Brother/Sister Plays, the directorial overlap between music and drama, and why Regina Spektor is quickly becoming one of her favorite composers. Interviewed by Alissa Norby.

ShowBiz Chicago: Superior Donuts recently closed on Broadway at the Music Box. You journeyed with this production from its gestation in Chicago until its bow in New York. What was that experience like for you?

TL: It closed on Sunday, so [it’s been] less than a week! Superior Donuts was interesting because I was not supposed to direct it originally, Amy Morton, who is another Steppenwolf ensemble member was going to. She happened to be in August: Osage County on Broadway and opted to stay in that as a performer. I got a call about three months before rehearsals started here from Martha Lavey, our artistic director, asking if I would consider taking over. The designers were in place [but] it had not been fully designed or fully cast, so there was still a lot to do. But it was a play that I really did because I liked it, I wanted to work with Tracy, and I kind of was doing it because my family, i.e. Steppenwolf, called on me and said ‘can you help us?’ So I thought yeah, you do this for family. I grew to love the play and the experience even more than I expected. In that, at first it seemed to me the kind of play that I wouldn’t normally for myself choose or do, I had not directed something that was so firmly naturalistically based for a long time and I kept feeling like and saying to Tracy at the beginning ‘I just hope I don’t ruin your pou lay.’ But I didn’t [laughs]. Thank goodness!  People kept saying ‘do you feel pressured coming right after August?’ to Tracy, and ‘You won this award and that award’. But in a weird way, it was the opposite. I think we all felt very little pressure because it was sort of like throwing caution to the wind and just saying it’s going to be what it’s going to be. I came in late, Tracy’s mind was a little elsewhere, and we all kind of just thought let’s just do the best we can and see what happens. So the whole experience from here to Broadway was very relaxed and loving and low-key. It was really remarkable how grounded we all felt and stayed through the transfer, the opening, and the end. It was a very tight ensemble and I think for everyone it was just a joyous, easy experience from the beginning to the end.

ShowBiz Chicago: Superior Donuts seemed to be one of the more dialogic-based productions of the recent Broadway season in terms of its relation to the audience. Why do you think it didn’t catch on this year?

TL: I think it is true what people, the zeitgeist is saying, which is that to be a big hit on Broadway at this moment, you need one of two or three things. The first, a big name star. There is no doubt that if you look at the season you realize that pretty much almost every play or musical that had a big marquee name did okay. [Oleanna] shows how big a name you have to have, because for some reason Julia Stiles and Bill Pullman were not quite big enough names I guess. Or [you need] some kind of really palpable manifest, grabbable sexy hook. There are plays and musicals that I think people feel like, “I get what that is. I know how to define it” and it has a kind of must-see factor about it, what one might call something sexy about it, just in its profile. Superior Donuts was always very hard to define and sell especially in that way. It didn’t have that kind of hook. It’s a beautiful subtle, human, complex play. Even with great reviews, and they were great reviews, none of them said ‘must-see’, ‘must-run’. So for whatever reason, its kind of quiet success was not enough in this moment and day and age to have a long run on Broadway. Although I think all of us were quite happy with how the run ended up.

ShowBiz Chicago: You recently completed a production of Tarell Alvin McCraney’s In the Red and Brown Water at The Public Theatre. How did your partnership with the playwright come to be and eventually evolve to its present fruition?

TL: We did a full production at the McCarter Theatre which ended up being a co-production with The Public Theatre. That was the whole trilogy of The Brother/Sister Plays. I directed In the Red and Brown Water and Robert O’Hara directed the other evening which was Brothers Size and Marcus; Or the Secret of Sweet. [The collaboration with McCraney] began right here in Chicago at Steppenwolf. I was directing a piece in the garage called Theatrical Essays which was a kind of labor of love project I wanted to do, a very experimental piece exploring literally how to create theatrical essays. I was looking for a group of collaborators, performers, to work with that brought something to the table beyond what would traditionally be expected of an actor interpreting a role. So I was looking for people who wrote or played instruments, or were master chefs or had PhDs in French literature. We had extensive auditions here in Chicago, and Tarell McCraney who was just out of DePaul recently came and auditioned. [He] performed something he had written and also danced, sang, acted, everything. I pretty much cast him on the spot. I said, that is a magical person. We worked together on Theatrical Essays and right after that Tarell went off and entered the Yale School of Drama as a playwright. In his last year, he called me to find out if I would be interested in working on In the Red and Brown Water for its first professional production. Since then we’ve done about six shows together.

ShowBiz Chicago: Let’s talk about the upcoming Steppenwolf production of The Brother/Sister Plays, a piece involving three interconnecting narratives that is informed by Afro-Caribbean folklore and Yoruban mythology. Tell me about the process of creating that piece on the Steppenwolf stage.

TL: The plays focus on a community in a fictional town called San Pere in Louisiana. They are set firmly in Louisiana but Tarell describes the time, place, and setting as the ‘distant present’. So it has the feeling of being distant in the way that the past or the present might, but also being very of-the-moment. One of the things Tarell does so beautifully is create theatrical worlds that are this and that, past and present, hot and cold, folkloric and Yoruban yet completely contemporary and vernacular and street. Those dualities coexist in this world that he has created. So the stories focus on several generations of people living in the projects in Louisiana and many of the characters are named after Yoruban deities called the Orishas. The stories that are enacted and told to the audience are both of our contemporary time and are very topical on the one hand, and on the other are based on very ancient myths and timeless stories that have been told in many traditions. It’s really spectacular the way Tarell has managed to do both of those things simultaneously. Each of the different plays focuses on a different perspective or pocket or group of people that is as you said, interconnected, so the three plays can stand alone but they gain a kind of dimensionality and echoing referential depth by seeing them together as a trilogy.

ShowBiz Chicago: I recently read an interview in which Tracy Letts stated that, whilst in rehearsal for Superior Donuts, you presented an artistic collage to use in the developmental process. In many of your works you have chosen to employ a confluence of artistic forms in the arena of the stage, most recently with The Tempest. How does The Brother/Sister Plays tap into that approach for you?

TL: Gosh good question. I think it’s why Tarell and I love each other so much and found such an immediate kinship together artistically. I think we’re both really interested in that. The way Tarell describes it is he less so juxtaposes different things and sort of slams them up against each other. You might find for instance the work of another playwright, Chuck Mee, whom I work a lot with. Chuck will take disparate elements of style or text and really accentuate the line between them. He’ll smash them against each other. Tarell is interested in looking at how one exists in the other. For instance, in In the Red and Brown Water, when I was first working on it I said to him ‘Oh this is so cool-I can use Hip-Hop music there and some African drumming over there,’ and he was like, ‘why?’ and I was like ‘why what?’ He said [I was] keeping them separate. What he was more interested in was not contrasting them or juxtaposing them but allowing the Hip-Hop music to breathe in a way that we could hear the African influences that are already in it, how the two are actually the same and not different. So it’s been really great working on these plays because what I’ve been able to do is explore them in all these different ways and from different angles. It’s funny you say collages, because if you go downstairs into the rehearsal room you will see that I have plastered all over the walls collages that I have been making. It’s so crazy. In my free time- ha ha- when I am not in rehearsal, which basically means from nine in the evening until whenever I can force myself to go to sleep, I sometimes can’t stop working on the plays or thinking about them. So I’ve started making collages which kind of relaxed me but allows me to keep dreaming on the plays in a less direct fashion. If you look at [the collages] you will see on the boards imagery that [encompasses] Yoruban African sculpture, and then a photograph of a woman in a FEMA trailer post-Katrina. The plays ask for that. Tarell grew up in Miama so his influences were very multiple, meaning Cuban, American, African, Haitian. You really feel that in his plays, in for instance a play like In the Red and Brown Water is Lorca’s Spanish “Llerma”, it is the Oya Yoruban tale, it is the story of Tarell’s own sister who grew up in Liberty City in Miama. You can read the play in all three, or five, or ten of those ways. For me, as someone who loves to think that way and create that way , they have been like an open invitation to bring in any and everything and kind of work on fusing them in a way that feels organic and whole.

ShowBiz Chicago: One of the most striking components of The Brother/Sister Plays is how it marries the concepts of myth and folklore with dramatic realism. To some extent that has been a consistently reoccurring pattern in your work, specifically in pieces such as Floyd Collins and The Tempest. What about the relationship between those two realms interests you?

TL: I’ve never quite thought of it in that regard. I’ve thought about it, maybe not as well articulated as you just put it, in these plays because the actors tell the story to the audience. They speak their own stage directions and embrace and show us a theatrical mechanism for telling the story. So they function in this one level that I am calling the Orishas or the Gods, or storytellers, which is very abstract but it also places us in the theatre, the here-and-now. They are there to remind themselves and the audience that we are here in this room together. The event that is happening is live and now. And then they are in the more contained, four-walled naturalistic moment, they come out of it again, and go back into it, and so forth. So I am very aware of it in these plays because that is kind of the fundamental way in which they express. I think probably the reason that, in different forms, has been very prevalent in my work is first of all, I am a very spiritual person. Perhaps not religious in any traditional sense but I believe strongly in layers of reality and dimensions that we don’t touch and taste and see and access in our every day waking lives with our bodily senses. I believe in the theatre as a place that can help us access those levels of experience and understanding, so I’m always interested in the stories I tell in both the world we live in and the world beyond the world, the other side of the veil. And [I believe] that as human beings we are better, fuller and more loving and awake when we can traverse both those worlds and become aware of them. So I do tend to do work that embraces both. To say that on our stage can exist different kinds of reality and that those kinds of reality exist sometimes all at once, or back to back, or fluidly- that, for me, is what feels real. It feels like the way life is.

ShowBiz Chicago: Let’s go back to the conceit of the partnering between different musical forms in The Brother/Sister Plays. In addition to the dramatic works, you have directed and written the books for several pieces of musical theatre throughout your career. Do you employ a different approach with a musical narrative than you would a straight dramatic one, or have you been able to establish a synthesis between the two?

TL: Completely. I am so happy and excited about that. I used to think of them as being more different. I find it impossible to think of them as different [now]. I find that if I am doing a musical piece to think of it like a play, i.e. to apply all the standard lines of inquiry around intention and arc is very helpful. But even more so, the plays I am directing just feel like music to me and I approach them as such. I have been very fortunate in the things I’ve chosen or been handed ranging from A Time of Your Life to The Cherry Orchard. We approached Superior Donuts musically. [Regarding] The Brother/Sister Plays, Tarell has described one of them, The Brothers Size, as a musical score. When I asked Tarell what I needed to know about this play or that play, the thing he said to me over and over about Brothers Size is that it’s a piece of music, so approach it like a score and it will reveal its answers to you. Very often when I am directing I might not know or be able to articulate to the actors why this moment should go, [creating sound effects], “Boom, boom, chacka chacka, talk talk talk talk, long pause.” I don’t know why except that is the music of it and I’ve allowed myself to direct that way. Actors, at least the beautiful ones I work with, tend to be very open to my perhaps slightly unusual approach in that regard [laughs].

ShowBiz Chicago: You are one of the few out lesbians working in theatre today. Many of your productions, including the upcoming Brother/Sister Plays, have addressed the theme of the search for self-identity in an environment that is either hostile or isolating. How does being out, and being a woman, affect your approach to that framework?

TL: It’s interesting because people have asked me on and off throughout my career how hard it’s been to be a woman directing or to be out. I have not, very fortunately, experienced much of that. I have more generally in my life felt outside the mainstream, [such as being] self-conscious when I walked around some neighborhood I lived in, in Manhattan. I lived in the wrong neighborhood when everyone was in their pumps and work skirts and I was traipsing around in my Doc Martens and sweat pants. I have to tell you, it’s been being a woman, being gay, and being Jewish. I also acknowledge that in many ways I am very much a part of the mainstream. I am white, I am privileged, I am educated, I came from a well-off family, I went to Yale. There are many ways in which I’ve had it really good, right in the center. How it’s impacted me most is exactly what you’re implying, which is choice of material. I have found myself and continue to feel myself committed to material that tells stories of those that are, for a multitude of reasons, what one might call disenfranchised or on the outside, marginalized. That might include all kinds of society outcasts or “other”. I have found that pretty exclusively that ends up being the work that I am interested in doing and the stories that I want to tell in the theatre. In these particular plays, Tarell was asked once what is most important to him and he said “giving voice to the voiceless”, putting onstage a range of characters that have not been seen in the history of American theatre or even world drama to some extent. In The Brother/Sister Plays we’re talking about gay people, single moms in the projects, ex-cons, drug addicts. He really is embracing a very wide spectrum of people who are beautiful and I would even go so far as to say God-like in their qualities and yet are the kinds of people that a lot of folk might want to turn their heads away from.

ShowBiz Chicago: Going off of the idea of giving a voice to the voiceless, which is essential to theatre and certainly the works that Steppenwolf produces, what is notable about both The Brother/Sister Plays and Superior Donuts is that both pieces focus on two demographics that are often ignored in professional theatre: young people and individuals of color. The Broadway League’s “Great White Way Report” has just been released and has indicated that the Broadway audiences are more homogenous than ever. Why do you think, despite it being 2010, we have so far to go in this regard?

TL: When you just said that my heart just sank and broke. I will say this- I don’t the “f” know. But we have to change that. God bless Tarell, that guy goes out nightly to the clubs, to the homeless shelters, canvassing the streets. [He] invited people into our theatre. And they came. We have to make an effort. We have to mobilize. The theaters have to more than put their money where their mouths are. I just know that when we’ve been able to really open the doors and say please come, this is for you, we want you here and are incomplete without you, we’ve gotten those audiences and the material and the plays just take off and soar. I feel very committed to this. I am ecstatic that Steppenwolf has finally broadened the ensemble to include a phenomenal core of African American artists in our group, and may that be the baby step of a sea change for us all.

ShowBiz Chicago: On a final note, let’s talk about Beauty, your upcoming musical production with music by recording artist Regina Spektor and lyrics by Michael Korie of Grey Gardens fame.

TL: Yes! It’s a piece that is based on a play I wrote called Beauty that I did at the La Jolla Playhouse in 2003. I had started working on that in 2001 so by the time it reaches fruition, yes it will be a project that I’ve worked on for about a decade. We went through many permutations and even composers. I was a huge Regina Spektor fan and kept thinking, “That’s what the score should sound like.” I finally got our wonderful producer Stuart Oken to approach Regina, and for some reason, even though she had turned down many other opportunities, this really grabbed her interest. It’s a riff on the Sleeping Beauty fairytale but transposed to our own time and beyond in many interesting and wacky out-there ways. In fact when I leave here, Regina and Michael and I will be finishing our first full draft of the musical. I could not be more excited. I love Regina, I love the material. I don’t know what we’re cooking up except that it’s some strange, enchanting brew.

“The Brother/Sister Plays” run January 21, 2010 through May 23, 2010 at the Steppenwolf Theatre, 1650 N. Halsted. Tickets may be purchased by calling online at www.steppenwolf.org