Prolific Director, Off Off Off Off Broadway

Charles Isherwood, New York Times

Prolific Director, Off Off Off Off Broadway - Charles Isherwood, New York Times 11/9/08

IS David Cromer the most talented theater director that Americans have never heard of?

Er, silly question, I know. Most Americans could not name a single theater director, talented or not, Tony-laureled or obscure, unless a nephew, daughter or second cousin happens to be one. But Mr. Cromer has a low profile even among the theater cognoscenti in New York, because he has worked for the last two decades in Chicago, mostly at the kind of small, funky spaces that seem to take root in almost every neighborhood in this theater-rich city.

As the first fingers of a chilly Midwestern winter began to tickle noses, Mr. Cromer was seemingly omnipresent on the small-theater scene here. By night he was playing the Stage Manager in his freshly reimagined production of “Our Town,” a smash for the Hypocrites theater troupe last season, which returned for an encore run this fall at the enchantingly funky Chopin Theater in the Wicker Park neighborhood. During the day Mr. Cromer was in rehearsals directing a new play, “Celebrity Row” by Itamar Moses, at the American Theater Company.

And out in the suburb of Glencoe, north of Chicago, at the Writers’ Theater, Mr. Cromer’s evocative staging of William Inge’s “Picnic” was earning rapturous notices. “It is one of the best performances of anything — and I mean anything, not just plays — that I’ve seen in my life,” Terry Teachout wrote in The Wall Street Journal. “This is a destination show, worth traveling any distance to see.”

The roaring Broadway success of “August: Osage County,” which began life here at the Steppenwolf Theater Company and opens at the National Theater in London this month, has rekindled the Chicago-New York theater connection. Coincidentally the Chicago Shakespeare Theater picked up the regional Tony Award this year. (This is the only city that is home to four companies that have been given that laurel; the Steppenwolf, the Goodman Theater and the Victory Gardens Theater are the others.) But the city really is most notable for the health and variety of its smaller theaters, making it possible for directors like Mr. Cromer, and scads of talented actors, to forge careers — perhaps more artistically rewarding than financially remunerative — without leaving town.

In recent years, however, Mr. Cromer, a native of Skokie who attended high school and college here (he didn’t finish either, he amiably confides), has begun branching out, in particular earning some well-deserved attention from New York.

His Steppenwolf production of Austin Pendleton’s “Orson’s Shadow” was a modest hit when it moved to the Barrow Street Theater in Greenwich Village in 2005. This year his searing production of a musical adaptation of Elmer Rice’s “Adding Machine,” first produced at the Next Theater in Evanston, opened at the Minetta Lane Theater. It was among the best-received Off Broadway productions of last season and had a healthy run of five months — impressive for a small-scaled, pitch-black musical. Mr. Cromer won Obie and Lucille Lortel awards for his work.

So why isn’t he ensconced in the country’s theater capital by now, fielding offers from New York’s major not-for-profit theaters?

The man himself points to the figure in the mirror, mostly. “I have always been a little lazy,” he confesses, speaking primarily of his decision to stay in Chicago as his career developed, rather than head east at some point to bring it to the next level. “I may not be the most adventurous person.” And he’s been busy working.

He has only recently acquired a New York agent. (“There really are no agents for directors in Chicago,” he notes.) A tinge of wistfulness can be detected when he speaks of his happy experiences working in New York — albeit under the relatively risk-free conditions of restaging well-received work.

“It still has a romance for me, a romance that would probably evaporate soon if I move there,” he says. “And I don’t think I would have survived in New York as a young man. I was too sad.”

Mr. Cromer, who is now 44 and can be melancholy and funny at once, directs a wide range of work, old and new. (Next up: Aaron Sorkin’s “Farnsworth Invention” at the Alley Theater in Houston.) His productions are marked by a delicate touch and an emotional intricacy that are best served by a seat in the front row. But the remarkable thing about his work is that you always seem to have a prime view, even if you’re up against the back wall. I was at the back of the theater when I saw Mr. Cromer’s heart-rending production of Inge’s “Come Back, Little Sheba,” but the transparency of the acting was such that every quicksilver flicker of emotion registered crisply. (That production, for the tiny Shattered Globe Theater company in 2006, was infinitely superior to the limp version seen on Broadway last season.) “Our Town,” which Mr. Cromer staged with the actors surrounding an audience of a few dozen seated in just six rows, gave a sharp contemporary accent to a play that often comes wreathed in folksy warmth, despite its thorny message of life’s dissatisfactions.

“I saw a review of the original production that said it was ‘the last word in avant-garde theater,’ with its stage directions requiring no scenery, and the dead people speaking,” Mr. Cromer says. “But what was at one point innovative had become standard vocabulary for the theater. How do you strip the artifice away today, get it back to its original cool?”

Mr. Cromer’s approach took Thornton Wilder’s stark ethos a bit further. His production is mostly performed with the house lights up, and the actors wear street clothes and forgo New England accents. But he springs a startling surprise in the last scene that adds a vivid accent to its sharp philosophical thrust. And to watch this play about the little pleasures and big heartbreaks of life amid an audience whose responses become part of the fabric of the play added a moving dimension to it.

It was hard not to feel with unusual potency the pain of life’s fragility as you sat cheek by jowl with the inhabitants of the Grover’s Corners cemetery. Almost anybody in the audience could reach out and touch one of the becalmed deceased sitting placidly in their chairs.

Anna D. Shapiro, the Chicago director who won a Tony Award for “August” this year, has known Mr. Cromer since they studied directing together at Columbia College here. (They actually went to the same high school, but they didn’t know each other then.) She has seen almost all his work and says she considers precision to be his greatest strength as a director.

“His interpretations never feel general or vague,” she says. “He’s got a meticulous brain. And he’s not driven by overarching external ideas about a play. Everything that’s happening in David’s productions is happening between people. He’s also completely unafraid of sentiment, but he delivers the sentimental in an honorable way.”

Mr. Cromer confirms that he never approaches a text with an idea of imposing a radical interpretation on it. “More and more I’m obsessed with taking a close-up approach, letting the audience come to us. But it’s not what you can do to the play but what the play does to you, really,” he says. “ ‘Our Town’ and ‘Picnic’ were very different experiences. ‘Our Town’ was almost made up as we went along. One day in rehearsal we used real string beans and liked the sound of the snapping in the small space, so we kept it in. We started rehearsals with some roles uncast.

“ ‘Picnic,’ on the other hand, needed to be tightly controlled, down to the smallest detail. We obsessed about everything — the strawberries on the cake, the number and color of the leaves.”

He admits that he’s been less than obsessive about guiding his career and that his meticulousness has sometimes caused friction with theaters. During a rough patch several years back he was on the outs with more than one Chicago-area theater. (He has since patched up the relationships.) Fortunately, there is always another scrappy theater company springing up in a storefront.

“In New York there is a finite amount of space, so competition for that space is profound,” he observes. “Here we’ve got lots of room. It’s the Midwest. The city is spread out, and there are lots of places to work. If things aren’t going well, you don’t have to leave,” he says with a laugh. “You can fail a lot while you’re finding your way.”

The economic imperative is not a factor as it inevitably is in New York, where the mercantile ethos of Broadway can insinuate itself into the mind-sets of even the not-for-profit theater. “Our theater culture here is not commercial,” Ms. Shapiro notes. “Aspirational artists here are not looking at Broadway. The action is at the big not-for-profit theaters like the Steppenwolf and the Goodman. Our theatergoing public has that orientation as well.”

Of course New York’s renewed attention to Chicago theater over the past year has not gone unnoticed. “People do have an eye to New York,” Mr. Cromer says. “It seems to happen every 20 years or so. In the ’60s there was Alan Arkin and Barbara Harris and Nichols and May. Of course you had Mamet and the Steppenwolf in the 1980s. Now ‘August’ has made a big splash.”

He is both level-headed and maybe a little sentimental — honorably sentimental — in discussing the centrality of New York in American theater culture. “I don’t think the theater is too New York-centric,” he says. “It just is New York-centric. But doesn’t there have to be a place, a destination? The country is so big. Chicago is a great place to work, and it’s a hell of a lot easier to live here. But I wouldn’t want to lose New York as a sort of icon. There has got to be an Emerald City.”