Theatrical Direction

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“The show blew all my preconceptions out of the water. I was riveted throughout the play. The theatricality and use of space were masterful. The designs allowed the indoors and outdoors to work on the audience on a theatrical, non-literal level. His blocking was always tied to the action of the moment and extended to the internal life of the characters in surprising and risky ways. It was a beautiful dance in all the ways good blocking is supposed to be, but it also had that elusive effect of lifting the stakes to a heightened and dangerous place. It’s the kind of direction I look for wherever I go—and it was in abundance.” 

– Katy Brown, Associate Artistic Director, Barter Theater (Lort C), Abingdon, VA

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Michael McNulty has directed over 100 theatrical productions, at the collegiate and professional level, from a variety of genres, including devised productions, musicals, Shakespeare, physical comedy, puppetry, contemporary drama and magical realism. He has worked with a wide cross-section of actors and other performers, from Equity actors with Broadway credits to community members, students, circus acts and children. He has received several commendations for Excellence in Directing from The American College Theatre Festival and is a member of the Society of Directors and Choreographers. Michael received his MFA in Directing from the Carnegie Mellon University’s School of Drama and holds a BFA in Acting from Emerson College. Highlights of his work include:

*denotes productions with union actors under contract or special agreements with Actors Equity Association.

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“McNulty conjurs up captivating visions that ensnare the audience in breathtaking splendor—transforming objects into inspiring symbols to tell a magnificently compelling story. Leading with an impeccable balance of playfulness and humble curiosity, collaborating with McNulty seems less like work and more like a dance, trusting someone who is technically skilled and powerfully passionate to engage with you to create something beautiful and bigger than everyone involved. McNulty masterfully blends the drive to succeed and a genuine wonder needed to coax the courage to ask questions on the stage about what it means to be human.”

-Kara Dotten, Actor/Artistic Collaborator, Mock & Mummery

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“His mindful weaving together of light, sound, set, and acting for this show created a Gestalt moment of such aesthetic energy that time and again, stunned absoute silence filled the theater as both players and audience experience that total inner stillness that comes from participating in truth.”

-David Brock, Technical Director, RPCS- Baltimore, MD

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“The large disciplined ensemble cast was incredibly well choreographed on that small space – and the shifting of the numerous scenes was so seamless! I saw the hand of a fine director at work there!”

-Bonnie Elosser, Former Executive Director, Pro Art, Wise, VA

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“This is exactly the kind of creative thinking I have been preaching. All the old shows need to take this kind of look at what they are doing and stop clinging to the past just because “that’s the way we have always done it.”

-David Weiss, Founding Artistic Director, Heritage Theater Company, Charlottesville, VA

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Aesthetics

Theater is a sort of secular religious practice where communities come together to collectively imagine some shared expression of our humanity- of who we are or who we hope to become.   Instead of contrived illusions on recorded media, separate and apart from us, theater exploits the live event of performance, acknowledging its pretense, and providing a structure and language to make-believe with one another.   Theater’s medium then is the imaginations of the assembled audience.  As co-creators in this shared imagining, the live audience (or polity) makes the theater democratic and communal by its very nature. 

Good theater is made of aesthetic forms that remind us that we are pretending while inspiring the feeling of and participation in truth-seeking.  This dynamic tension between truth and artifice is the liminal ground from which the imagination is stirred to make meaning out of the disparate elements of our experience.  When we are made aware of our ability to make meaning from that which we know to be pretense, we gain an understanding of the humbling nature of humanity—that what we feel isn’t always based in truth, and that what we think we know may be motivated more by desire than veracity.  This realization is the catharsis relieving us of the burdens embedded in our desire to exert control over our lives.  

All of that civic purpose must be realized aesthetically.  This aesthetic realization is the ongoing effort to discover the means by which stories might be told theatrically through overt manifestations of pretense- what is clearly pretending, not an effort to fool us into believing.  It requires extensive collaboration, imagination, and practice, but it also requires acute judgement.  For example, the compelling theatricality of masks and puppetry convey the epic and mythic, but they are probably a questionable means for interpreting the works of O’Neill or Williams.  There is a complementary theatrical form for naturalistic styles of playwrighting, but it demands a subtlety similar to the language of the playwright.  Generally, these forms are found in slight exaggerations of the designs and/or the theatrical manipulation of design elements as a metaphoric expression of theme or action.  Regardless, I believe that one must strive to uncover with one’s collaborators a uniquely theatrical aesthetic, appropriate to each production.  Performances must exceed some idyllic purism of “life-likeness” toward some greater truth that Picasso insisted art had to lie to realize.  There must always be a reason that a performance is ephemeral and temporal, a reason that it must be experienced live, communally, in the moment, not recorded in illusive flickers projected on a screen.