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Photo By Wendy Uhlman
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Michael Haney is directing Private Eyes for Ensemble
Theatre of Cincinnati
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Matthew, an actor, thinks his wife Lisa is having an affair with Adrian, their director. He's in therapy talking about it. But our frame of reference keeps shifting in Steven Dietz's Private Eyes, a hilarious who-done-it that keeps audiences guessing from start to finish. What's real? Whom do we believe?
Michael Haney is directing the show, which was presented in 1997 at the Humana Festival of New American Plays at Actors Theatre in Louisville, for Ensemble Theatre of Cincinnati (ETC). It's his first time to work at the Vine Street theater, but his ability to move actors through an engaging story is very familiar to Cincinnati audiences: For seven seasons he's directed the Playhouse's seasonal classic, A Christmas Carol. Earlier this year he hung around after the holidays at the Playhouse to stage The Last Night of Ballyhoo.
He's known ETC's D. Lynn Meyers for many years, and when he's been in town directing Christmas Carol he's often headed to Over-the-Rhine to see whatever Meyers has onstage at ETC.
"We talked about trying to do something last year, and it didn't work out," he recalls. Meyers picked Private Eyes and invited him to direct. "We had talked about this play. After I read it, I told her I'd be really interested in doing it," Haney says.
Dietz's play is one of those stories that seems to be headed in one direction, then suddenly takes an unexpected turn. More than once, the audience might think they have something figured out, when a new twist takes them back to square one.
"It's so theatrical. It's like a roller-coaster ride," he says. "I love that. It's just constantly pulling the rug out from under the feet of the audience."
This runs somewhat counter to his usual role as a director, he tells me. "I always feel the director's job, more than anything else, is to be the audience during rehearsal for the actors, to make sure that the story is getting told. I'm really acting as the surrogate audience." But in this case, the actors need to play convincingly toward a deception. "It's up to the audience to decide what actually is going on."
The complexity of the play's story also can make it a challenge to stage, since it must shift quickly from one location to another.
"It's important to keep the show moving," he explains, "because you have to keep ahead of the audience. How do you shift from the rehearsal hall to the restaurant? From the restaurant to Frank's office? What I'm learning is that as long as the actors take you there and make you believe they're there, we go with them. As the play goes along we have residual things left on stage from each of the sets, so we can simply step into the areas."
Haney is enjoying working in ETC's intimate space, especially with with an audience arrayed on ETC's steep rise of seating. "It really changes ... when you're elevated. It's a bit like looking down at a chess board."
The pieces director Haney is moving around are a group of actors with some history. He's only directed Greg Procaccino previously (he plays Scrooge's long-dead partner Marley annually in A Christmas Carol), but several others in the cast have worked together, including Robert Rais and Sherman Fracher, who were in last fall's production of Warren Leight's Side Man with Procaccino. Also in the cast is ETC veteran Cliff Jenkins and newcomer Sunshine Cappelletti, just finished with a run in the Cincinnati Shakespeare Festival's production of The Oedipus Trilogy.
"You'd think they'd all been working as an ensemble for quite a while," Haney says. "The show requires that. It's not about a star turn. It's about finding the truth of these moments."
Haney looks forward to having people see Private Eyes. "It's one of the most theatrical plays I've ever worked on in my life. It's a celebration of everything theater can do to you: It's the best type of theater. It's totally, engagingly entertaining. It makes you laugh and it makes you think. And hopefully, it makes you feel a little bit.
"I think people are going to be talking about this play for a couple of days after they've seen it."
PRIVATE EYES, staged by Ensemble Theatre of Cincinnati, continues through May 21.
