One of my favorite Berkeley directing stories concerns the professor whom I would later fire from being my dissertation advisor. He was directing a show and my good friend Mike Foster (whom I met as a student in a class I was TA for and who later became a close friend) asked a question of his director. The professor (and I hesitate to call him a director, since he was not skilled—which is why I always say Stanford thinks it’s better than Berkeley and I disagree) launched into a long winded exegesis of…something. But let me quote Mike in his description of the event.
“It was during the rehearsal of, I think, Lydie Breeze. David was giving me a note about a part of a scene; as I remember, I was still on stage. He apparently wanted me to do something different with this monologue-like bit that I had just finished. Instead of telling me how I should move or speak to make that moment better, he launched into a long and semi-inscrutable description of my character’s inner emotional life—in the belief, I suppose, that if I were to somehow completely internalize what he was telling me, my emotions would visibly and audibly manifest in the form of whatever it was that I should be doing at that moment, but wasn’t. I waited patiently for him to finish, took a beat, and then said: “So do you want it louder or softer?”
