The S&B sat down with Becky Mwase ’07, director of the one-act play Defusion. The one-acts festival is this Friday at 7 p.m. and Saturday at 2 p.m. and 7 p.m.
What sparked your interest in the play you chose to direct?
I went to this bookstore in Taiwan that had a lot of English-speaking books and I found The Best Short Plays of 2005 and I was like, “Sweet, I can find my one act.” So I read through about four and then got to Defusion, and thought it was amazing and decided that’s what I was going to do, even though I thought Chris [Connelly] might say no because there weren’t stage directions of any kind and no blocking, so basically I would have to come up with everything.
Describe your play.
It’s about a man and a woman. They don’t have names. My play is after the fact. The woman had a boyfriend and she started an e-mail affair with a guy that she’d met three years previously and then went to see him. And they had sex and everything went wrong, so she went home and her boyfriend broke up with her. But the story is being told after all of this has happened and she’s sort of trying to work her way through it.
Did you look for anything in particular during the auditions?
Can you act? I had no preconceived notions about what I needed or wanted. I basically went in and looked for people who I thought listened to direction well and then called those people back and looked at how they interpreted the parts I gave them to read. And I looked at how informed their choices were and how they varied.
Describe your directorial style.
Sexy. (laughs) It depends on what we’re working on. I take notes every run and if I’m working stuff I move around to view things from different angles, and it helps me think when I’m walking. During the actual performance I try not move because it distracts [the actors].
What are the challenges of being a student director?
Never knowing what you’re doing. No, it’s weird because the directing class mainly just consists of reading and discussing articles by other directors. They rarely help me because there are so many divergent views on how you should direct and it’s difficult to sift through that and find your own style and the way that you work the best.
Have you identified with any of the directors that you’ve read in class?
Not really. All of the directors that we read are professional directors and so they’re working with professional actors. They don’t have the issues that we have, such as working around schedule conflicts. You can’t force them [our actors] to do anything, so if they show up late, the most you can do is give them time fines or a stern look. (laughing) You don’t want to yell at them and make them hate you. Every minute that they’re late you can hold them a minute after.
How has your perception of the play changed?
I understand the play much more for what it is rather than what I was trying to make it. I was trying to make it like a love story—she fell in love and then she went [to meet her lover]—but that wasn’t what was happening. Instead, she wanted to have an affair and it blew up in her face. That’s what happens and it’s painful. But there are fun moments in it and I’d been missing those. Now there’s a balance and the stages of her development are more obvious.
Do you plan to continue to work in theatre?
I would like to. I really enjoy directing, surprisingly. There’s something fulfilling about shaping and creating this thing. Initially, the play ran at 17 minutes, and now the actors have truly relaxed and are able to give a more nuanced performance that runs at 21 minutes. So that’s a tangible difference.
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