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Volume 6, Number 1 - Fall 2007
Creating Theatre that Awakens New Audiences
talking with
Emily Mann
The first play she saw left her terrified. It was a production of The Dybbuk, on Second Avenue in New York, and Emily Mann sat in the audience with members of her Jewish youth group. When the Dybbuk began speaking, “I felt like my blood had turned to cotton. All tingly and numb. I started screaming.” She was eight years old. “I never imagined the theater would have anything to do with me.”
In high school and college, though, theater kept pulling her in. By the time a Harvard professor crisply informed Mann, in 1974, that women could not direct plays professionally, it was too late. “I got so angry, I thought, ‘Yes, I can!’”
Today Mann is an award-winning playwright, director, teaching artist and, for the last 17 years, artistic director of the McCarter Theatre in Princeton. She is also a board member of People & Stories/Gente y Cuentos, a program whose mission echoes her own drive to bring theater to all kinds of audiences.
Mann learned of People & Stories while directing Anna in the Tropics by Nilo Cruz, a play about Cuban workers in a cigar factory who listen while a hired lector reads to them from Anna Karenina.
“One of the biggest projects I’ve brought to the McCarter is to make outreach and education a vital part of the theater. We help people express themselves through drama or find a new appreciation of the theater. We try to do it past race, past ethnicity, past economics…Most people, when they’ve heard a really good story, it awakens something in them that is about them. That becomes undeniable.”
She recalls how students from Trenton High School cut classes in order to see Miss Julie, a 19th-century play by August Strindberg. “That was the greatest review I’ve ever gotten,” Mann says “The play is about class, about raw sexual need. It made more sense to their lives than any number of contemporary pieces.”
Mann’s own plays include Having Our Say, Execution of Justice, Meshugah and, the most recent, Mrs. Packard, presented as a People & Stories benefit in June. The play, set in 1861 and based on true events, examines religious fanaticism, corrosive power and the unequal status of women through the story of a wife confined to a mental institution by a husband who cannot abide her independent spirit and theological challenges.
While Mrs. Packard’s situation is far from her own life as a 21st-century woman—Mann is married to Gary Mailman, an attorney, and has a 23-year-old son, Nicholas—she sees the story as an emblem of the numerous limitations that still confine women throughout the world. “It’s a metaphor for so much of what we deal with every day, and it’s still there.”
Much of Mann’s work as a playwright is “theater of testimony.” She interviews people, then creates a script based on their language. “It’s a way to bring the real language of disparate people, those who are rarely heard from, onto a stage.
“I work like a poet; I distill the words down to their most poignant and powerful nuggets, and out of that, construct plays…I hear interesting stories whenever I travel. I sit down on a train or bus and I’ve heard the life story of someone before we’ve gotten to our destination. At the moment, I’m looking for my next story. I have a storehouse of things that are very difficult and very upsetting. I’m looking for one that’s less so. A play takes me two or three years [to write]. I have to love the story. I haven’t found the one I want to tell yet.”