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‘Making Theatre, Making a Society’: an Introduction to the Work of Peter Sellars

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 January 2009

Maria M. Delgado
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Abstract

Variously raising hackles and acclaim, the work of Peter Sellars is wider-ranging than the occasional observer might suppose – rooted in an apprenticeship as a puppeteer, followed by some sixty productions in a variety of media during the decade of the ‘eighties. But it is for his eclectic approach to opera that Sellars has become best known on the international festival circuit – which, suggests Maria M. Delgado, he is forced to travel by default, since his socially critical stance combined with an anti-realist aesthetic deters the sponsorship on which so much American theatre depends. Maria M. Delgado here offers an overview and an assessment of a career and a philosophy dedicated to an awareness ‘both of theatre’ s role as a force of political and social responsibility and understanding and of the need to rise above the literal’. The author teaches in the School of English and Drama at Queen Mary College in the University of London.

Type
Research Article
Information
New Theatre Quarterly , Volume 15 , Issue 3 , August 1999 , pp. 204 - 217
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1999

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References

Notes and References

My title derives from a statement made by Sellars during a talk at Columbia University, that ‘when we talk about making theatre, we're really talking about making a society’. See Peter Sellars, ‘Theater, Opera, and Society: the Director's Perspective’, Grand Street, No. 61 (1997), p. 227. I would like to thank the British Academy for funding research undertaken at New York's Public Library for the Performing Arts and the University of California (Berkeley and Los Angeles), where I was able to consult Peter Sellars's personal archives. I am grateful for the assistance received from Peter Sellars and his assistant Kevin Higa during the Preparation of this piece.

1. Peter Sellars, in conversation with Ruth Mackenzie, Edinburgh Festival, August 1995.

2. Sellars, Peter, ‘In Conversation with Michael Billington at the Royal Exchange Theatre, Manchester’, in In Contact with the Gods? Directors Talk Theatre, ed. Delgado, Maria M., Heritage, Paul (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996), p. 227Google Scholar.

3. Sellars, Peter, ‘Sellars on The Persians’, The Persians Programme, Mark Taper Forum Fall Festival, 1993, p. 5Google Scholar.

4. Sellars, Peter, ‘Theater, Opera, and Society: the Director's Perspective’, Grand Street, No. 61 (1997), p. 193Google Scholar.

5. Peter Sellars, quoted in Trousdell, Richard, ‘Peter Sellars Rehearses Figaro’, The Drama Review, No. 129 (Spring 1991), p. 71Google Scholar.

6. Coe, Robert, ‘What Makes Sellars Run?’, American Theatre, IV, No. 9 (12 1987), p. 47Google Scholar.

7. Heymont, George, ‘The World According to Peter Sellars’, Opera Monthly, II, No. 3 (07 1989), p. 20Google Scholar.

8. Peter Sellars, ‘Theater, Opera, and Society: the Director's Perspective’, p. 198.

9. Peter Sellars, quoted in Richard Trousdell, ‘Peter Sellars Rehearses Figaro’, p. 67.

10. For further information on Sellars's views on this subject, see Trousdell, ibid., p. 66–70.

11. Sutcliffe, Tom, Believing in Opera (London: Faber and Faber, 1997), p. 200Google Scholar.

12. For a more detailed treatment of Sellars's views see Green, Amy, The Revisionist Stage: American Directors Reinvent the Classics (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 153Google Scholar; and Littlejohn, David, ‘Reflections on Peter Sellars's Mozart’, Opera Quarterly, VII, No. 2 (Summer 1990), p. 6–36CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

13. Said, Edward, ‘The Barber of Seville, Don Giovanni’, The Nation, 26 09 1987, p. 318Google Scholar.

14. Ibid., p. 319.

15. Peter Sellars, ‘Theater, Opera, and Society: the Director's Perspective’, p. 203.

16. Tom Sutcliffe, Believing in Opera, p. 209.

17. ‘I did build a big prison on the stage of the Châtelet Théâtre just on the other side of the Seine from the Palais de Justice, where immigration detainees were being held in prison before being deported. So I was on every French television station, and I took the television cameras over there and said, “The prisoners in here are being deported next week”, and then walked back across the bridge to the Châtelet where half of the people on stage were Africans. I did try to use the situation to address the specific crisis that was going on. And most of the major media ran discussions on the topic, related to the show. … Our task as artists is to respond, to make a record of what's going on and to put something on stage that actually reflects something in society’. See Sellars, ‘Theater, Opera, and Society: the Director's Perspective’, p. 204–5.

18. For further details see Clements, Andrew, ‘Peter Sellars’, Opera, 11 1995, p. 1267–8Google Scholar.

19. Swed, Mark, ‘Wrenching Slice of L. A. in Paris’, Los Angeles Times, 30 09 1996, Sec. F, p. 6Google Scholar.

20. Segal, Lewis, ‘When Fire Doesn't Melt Ice’, Los Angeles Times, Calendar Section, 29 01 1995, p. 84Google Scholar.

21. Ibid.

22. A new collaboration with John Adams and Alice Goodman, Nativity Oratorio, is scheduled for production in late 2000 at the Châtelet Théâtre, Paris.

23. Mikotowicz, Tom, ‘Director Peter Sellars: Bridging the Modern and Postmodern Theatre’, Theatre Topics, I, No. 1 (1991), p. 87CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

24. Discussion with the author in various conversations held during April 1997. This subject is also dealt with in Clements, Andrew, ‘Peter Sellars’, Opera, 11 1995, p. 1263–4Google Scholar.

25. Sellars, Peter, quoted in Shewey, Don, ‘I Hate Decoration Onstage: Director Peter Sellars Talks about Design’, Theatre Crafts, 01 1984, p. 27Google Scholar.

26. Sellars, conversation with Ruth Mackenzie, August 1995.

27. Ibid.

28. For further details see Smith, Ronn, American Set Design 2 (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 1991), p. 160Google Scholar.

29. Ibid, p. 159.

30. For further details, see Ronn Smith, ibid, p. 160.

31. Peter Sellars, from a lecture on design delivered at Northwestern University while Hope Abelson Artist-in-Residence, 17 February 1990. For further comments by Sellars on the collaborative importance of his designers, see Barstow, Arthur, The Director's Voice: Twenty-One Interviews (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 1988), p. 280Google Scholar; and Shewey, Don, ‘I Hate Decoration on Stage: Director Peter Sellars Talks about Design’, Theatre Crafts, 01 1984, p. 24–7, 44–6Google Scholar.

32. David Littlejohn, ‘Reflections on Peter Sellars's Mozart’, p. 13.

33. Richard Trousdell, ‘Peter Sellars Rehearses Figaro’, p. 73; this source also documents Littlejohn's view.

34. For further details, see Sellars, Peter, interviewed by Bates, Mark, ‘Directing a National Consciousness’, Theater, XXVIII, No. 2 (1998), p. 87–90; Richard Trousdell, p. 72–3; and Tom Mikotowicz, ‘Director Peter Sellars: Bridging the Modern and Postmodern Theatre’, p. 88Google Scholar.

35. Clements, Andrew, ‘Peter Sellars’, Opera, 11 1995, p. 1263Google Scholar.