Local talent
‘Deathtrap’ brings rising star Michael Cotey back to director’s chair
Michael Cotey was a senior at South Milwaukee High School when he had what he now describes as a “pipe dream” of directing a show that year with his friends. Among the plays they considered? Ira Levin’s “Deathtrap,” which still holds the record as Broadway’s longest-running comedic thriller, after playing more than four years following its 1978 opening. Two years after Cotey directed Milwaukee Chamber Theatre’s production of “Boeing Boeing” — the company’s biggest hit in the past decade — Cotey is back to direct a Chamber production of Levin’s play.
Now 31, Cotey and friends passed on “Deathtrap” in high school, and he’s glad he did. “It would have been terrible,” Cotey said with a grin, during a recent interview before a “Deathtrap” rehearsal in the Chamber’s Broadway Theatre Center offices.
Cotey had long forgotten about the play — and never seen the 1982 film adaptation starring Michael Caine and Christopher Reeve — when Chamber artistic director C. Michael Wright asked him if he’d like to direct it.
“Michael is always really good at giving me things I wouldn’t be expecting or choose for myself,” Cotey said, referencing prior Chamber productions “Things Being What They Are” (2013) and “Boeing Boeing” (2015). “It’s great to have things I’m doing that I wouldn’t have picked for myself, because they’re the productions through which I grow the most.”
A killer play
Set in Westport, Conn., Levin’s story revolves around playwright Sidney Bruhl, nearing 50 and strapped for cash as his one big hit — now 18 years in the rearview mirror — recedes ever further from view.
Sidney’s mood isn’t improved by the script he’s been reading as Levin’s thriller gets underway. Written by a former student named Clifford Anderson, it’s for a play called “Deathtrap” that Sidney would kill to have written himself. As the first scene progresses, it’s clear that killing Clifford and claiming Clifford’s play as his own is an increasingly attractive proposition.
That’s as much as can fairly be said about a play with numerous ensuing twists, during which Sidney (Bill Watson, in the Chamber production) works out his next moves in relation to his wife (Susan Spencer) and his lawyer (David Sapiro) as well as Clifford (Di’Monte Henning) and a famous psychic (Mary Kababik).
Even as he acknowledged that “Deathtrap” reflects its genre, Cotey refuses to be bound by preconceptions regarding what this production must look like or do. “Defining this as we go along is the fun and challenge of it,” Cotey insisted.
“As an actor, you need to forget that this play has anything to do with murder. You need to forget any hidden plots. You need to play these scenes for real. For every character, there’s something big at stake. Even the supporting characters are hungry for something missing from their lives. Finding and playing that truth comes first for me.
“Take Sidney,” Cotey continued. “Like Levin
himself, Sidney had a big hit followed by a number of flops. Like Levin, he’s approaching 50. The guy writing ‘Deathtrap’ is pouring a lot of his personal frustration and darkness into a play that’s very ironic and self-referential. Sidney can be very funny as he pokes fun at himself and what he does. It all feels very personal.
“It’s beyond wanting another hit on Broadway. It’s also, ‘how do I get out of the trap that I find myself in? How do I get out of my current life situation?’ ”
Caught in a trap
Ever since directing a production of Pinter’s “The Dumb Waiter” during his senior year at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, Cotey has been drawn to plays involving how trapped people can feel as well as the stories — imagined or, in Sidney’s case, stolen — that might set them free.
In his professional debut as a director, Cotey helmed a now-legendary Youngblood Theatre Company production of Mickle Maher’s “Spirits to Enforce” (2010), about actors playing characters from Shakespeare’s “The Tempest,” now trapped in a submarine and doubling as superheroes trying to once again become relevant.
Ensuing productions he directed with Youngblood, for which Cotey was the founding artistic director, included one play set in a psychiatric ward and a second unfolding within the disturbing interior landscape of a sadistic child’s mind. Both plays were preoccupied with how stories can be used and abused.
Then it was off to Northwestern, one of the most prestigious graduate programs for directors in the country.
Cotey is now concluding a four-year stint there that included directing three more plays — adaptations of “Frankenstein” and “The Great Gatsby” among them — suggesting his ongoing preoccupation with stories that can alternately impede and expand one’s definition of self and world.
I saw all three of these Northwestern productions; collectively, they confirm Cotey’s status as one of the most promising young directors to emerge from Milwaukee in the past 15 years. He’s come a long way since appearing on stage opposite Watson — one of his most influential mentors — in an In Tandem Theatre production of “Equus” 10 years ago.
The stories we need
“All three Northwestern shows are about people who are not only responsible for telling others’ stories, but also struggle with being honest in the way they tell them,” Cotey said. “I’m haunted right now by that relation between the stories we tell and the way we live.”
The best of those productions was a staging of Bill Cain’s “Equivocation,” which Cotey will direct again at Next Act come January. Featuring what Cotey rightly calls a “stacked cast” led by James Ridge embodying Shakespeare, it’s among the shows I most eagerly anticipate in the upcoming season.
Cain’s play imagines Shakespeare — called “Shag” here — choosing between the truth he wants to tell through art and the propaganda that King James’ court wants him to write instead. Imagine a more sophisticated, political and considerably darker version of “Shakespeare in Love” that also explores what happens when our politicians define what counts as truth.
But first comes “Deathtrap,” seemingly very different but ultimately wrestling with some of the same themes, involving how well a playwright knows himself and relates to the world — while driving home that how we shape and write a story always has high stakes and potentially deadly consequences.
“At the center of both plays is someone undergoing an internal struggle that becomes external,” Cotey said. “Their struggles with what they want bleed into and affect the rest of the world.”
One might say the same of any good director, struggling to translate a personal vision by telling liberating stories.
“I’m more focused, now,” Cotey said, reflecting on how he’s changed since he began directing nearly a decade ago. “I’m not just trying to stay busy making theater. If I have a certain number of stories to tell between now and when I’m dead, I want to do all I can to ensure that the blood of the plays I do meets my blood. I want to go as deep as I can and say the things I need to say.”