What a famous theater director did to totally change the dynamics of a nervous cast

On energy, hierarchy, and what keeps people engaged

Photo by Dimitrios Kambouris/Getty Images

A few years ago, I got a call asking if I would work with three founders who had lost trust in each other. It was a last-ditch effort to salvage their working relationship. I was up for it, but only if they were up for whatever I wanted to do, no quibbling. We would need a full day, phones off, in a neutral but beautiful space. They were so desperate, they agreed.

In an apartment full of light on an urban riverbank, I started the morning by having the three men stand in a circle, close their eyes, and recite a line from Hamlet together as if one actor: “To be or not to be, that is the question.” Each “actor” had alternating words, and they had to speak the sentence aloud in sequence without sounding disjointed. While one spoke, the other two had to match his spacing, tone, and rhythm. The goal was to sound like one voice.

Over 90 minutes, they struggled to speak the sentence as a single unit. In some rounds, one founder would hesitate, unsure whether the other would follow his lead. At other times, one of the partners would lose confidence or subtly shift his delivery to leave his own mark on it rather than submit to the others. In one case, when they had it almost perfect, one of the founders burst out laughing. Joy or sabotage?

This exercise, without talking about their startup at all, revealed their relational dynamics. Two of the partners were willing to follow each other’s leads. One kept undermining the others whenever it wasn’t his turn. One of them found it difficult to lead. Another kept messing up in a way that puzzled the other two.

At first, they rolled their eyes at the “game.” By the end, they were dumbfounded. “Through this simple exercise, you’ve helped us reveal, in a low-stakes way, the patterns of our group,” one of the partners said. Because the exercise had absolutely nothing to do with their actual work, they could see.

It took months to work through what was revealed that morning, but it was a breakthrough. And the breakthrough came not from the tools of their own field, or even from “conflict resolution,” but from the tools of the theater.

Tools for group life are everywhere if you know where to look. And nowhere have I found a deeper or more usable source than in the theater. A good director cultivates actors who are both confident in themselves (the I) and deeply attuned to one another (the we). That balance is at the heart of any healthy group.

Without further ado, three things theater directors have taught me about how groups come alive.

1. Break down hierarchy. Last summer, Saheem Ali, the Associate Artistic Director of the Public Theater, was appointed to direct the iconic summer series, Shakespeare in the Park. He had just finished casting for that summer’s play, Twelfth Night, and it was time to bring the cast together for their first table read. Each actor was famous in their own right, had never worked together, and it was now Ali’s job to make them one. “Everybody is insecure about Shakespeare,” he told me. At the very first read-through, he had each actor read someone else’s part, instead of their own. The readthrough became fun, generous, even funny. It gave actors empathy for each other’s roles and allowed them to take risks, in part because it wasn’t their own role. And, it temporarily equalized the entire room. When I watched Twelfth Night last summer, I was struck by how bonded the cast felt on stage. They visibly delighted in one another. When I asked one of the actors about it afterwards, they credited their bond to Ali.

And, guess what? Saheem Ali himself will be our special guest for our next Substack LIVE BREAKDOWN series (more info below!).

2. In long-term groups, connection isn’t enough; you also need heat. When Jenn Colella, the Tony-nominated actor from Come From Away, was deep into a run that would stretch past 1,200 performances, she began to wonder how to keep the cast alive once the initial thrill wore off. Her solution was to introduce small, secret games during the show — a tap on the lower back, passing invisible objects, even playfully “killing” each other off — subtle rituals the audience never saw, but that kept the actors connected and present. As she told me, “Sometimes casts play games on stage without the audience knowing. The whole trick is that we do this thing that’s keeping us connected, but we do not interfere with the storytelling at all.” These games gave the cast something to play for together, not just perform for an audience. “It kept us excited to keep showing up to work and each other. But we would always keep the integrity of the play intact,” she told me.

3. If you ask people to do hard things together, help them also come out of it together. I recently saw an interview with the director Chloé Zhao, who said that, while filming Hamnet – a film based on the novel by Maggie O’Farrell about the death of a child and a mother’s mourning – she had the actors really dance after every scene. They needed a way to move the emotion of their roles out of their bodies. While Zhao (as all directors do) asks a lot of the actors, she also provides the tools for collective relief.

As I say in all of our GROUP HELP Labs, we can learn from anywhere. I return to the theater again and again because it takes both the integrity of the individual and the power of the group seriously.

As always,

Priya

P.S. Join me for our next Substack Live BREAKDOWN with director Saheem Ali on Wednesday, April 8, at 12 pm ET. We’ll go inside how he brings casts together, loosens hierarchy, builds trust, and turns a group into a true ensemble. It’s free and open to all. Group Lifers (paid subscribers) will get the replay. To join us, click this link at the time of the live either on your desktop or from the Substack app.

P.P.S. The full April lineup will be announced on Sunday, April 5th. Keep a lookout.

P.P.P.S. If you want to read more, start with Keith Johnstone’s Impro: Improvisation and the Theatre and Viola Spolin’s Theater Games for the Classroom: A Teacher’s Handbook, oldies but goodies, and two of the pioneers of the theater game movement.