Director Ariel Craft has a new show opening at the Breadbox.
Theater
Ariel Craft held her first auditions for the Breadbox, the theater company she founded in 2012, before she graduated from college and before she even lived in the part of the country where her company would be.
It was spring break of her senior year at New York University, and she knew she’d be moving back to the Bay Area, where she’s from, to do theater. “I don’t remember why I knew that,” she recalls in a recent interview at the Exit Theatre, one of her artistic homes, “but I just had deep determination that that was happening.”
That determination and refusal to waste time have paid off. Craft has become one of the most promising young directors in the Bay Area, known for her bold, fresh vision and her ability to make classic stories feel unfamiliar. She’s directed at the Exit, Impact Theatre and Custom Made, in addition to many Breadbox shows; her latest for her own company, an adaptation of Kate Chopin’s “The Awakening,” opens this week.
Craft is also the associate producing artistic director at Cutting Ball Theater, where she’s known founding Artistic Director Rob Melrose (who just stepped down from that post in May) since high school at San Rafael’s Marin Academy, where Melrose taught theater. It was Melrose, she says, who first encouraged her in directing and then in applying to NYU.
“I directed Harold Pinter’s ‘Betrayal’ my junior year,” Craft recalls. “Isn’t that ridiculous? Like, what did I have to say about ‘Betrayal’? Nothing! But Rob was like, ‘Yeah, go for it!’ ”
Craft says she’s always been drawn to theater for its storytelling capabilities. “I learn about the world through narrative, which is why the work we do at Breadbox — because it’s work that we pick — feels almost all the time like stuff that I’m sussing through in my own life,” she says. “I think it’s just the way I deal with my problems and my baggage. I do not want
to meet the person I would be if I wasn’t dealing with narrative constantly.”
In a gap year between high school and college, Craft briefly focused on becoming a musical theater performer — “I went, like, full Disney in that time,” she says — before returning to directing.
“What I found is that I am someone who does really well with a feeling of leadership and control, which sounds crazy to say, because I don’t think that I’m a very controlling director,” she says. “In the room I really try to foster an environment of collaborative work, where it’s about all the different hands that are touching it.”
Those qualities were manifest at a recent rehearsal for “The Awakening.” Almost every direction from Craft began with an “I wonder if ...” or “Can we ...,” and her collaborators shared plenty of their own ideas, using similar prefaces — not a common rehearsal-room dynamic, even as many directors profess to work collaboratively.
“I feel at my strongest when I’m helping others do their best work,” Craft says. “I also really like seeing a whole picture of storytelling as opposed to being dedicated to one slice of it.”
Craft and “The Awakening” adapter Oren Stevens have been doing theater together since they were 12 years old, including playing a romantic couple in eighth grade.
“The Awakening” started from a desire to adapt a story, both because adaptation is Stevens’ specialty and as part of a new direction for Breadbox this season. “The maxim we have is ‘projects, not plays,’ ” Stevens says. “We don’t want to just, like, take existing scripts that are totally set and just do a really great production of that script.”
Craft adds, “If we get to the point where we’re laying bricks for someone else’s dream, we’re not doing the job anymore. I’ve done new-works processes where it feels like it’s entirely about what the playwright is doing, about helping the playwright achieve their best play” — which is valuable, she says, but not what Breadbox is about: “We are distinctly not a new-works theater.”
This bucks a trend among Bay Area theaters, especially those led by young artists, many of whom emphatically focus on new work.
The choice to adapt Kate Chopin’s 1899 proto-feminist novella, about a turn-of-the-century housewife in Louisiana, originated as an idea for a new show about the structural and thematic parallels among “Anna Karenina,” “Madame Bovary” and “The Awakening.” Then, Craft says, the group realized, “‘Anna Karenina’ is, like, fully 2,000 pages. Why do we think we can put that and two other shows into an evening of theater?”
Of the three stories, they decided to adapt “The Awakening,” the story of a fallen woman, because it’s the most feminist and the most modern, and it’s the only one written by a woman. In it, Edna (Maria Giere Marquis) chafes against societal norms for wives and mothers, as enforced, mostly unsuccessfully, by her husband, Leonce (Robin Gabrielli). Rather than keep house and dote on her sons, Edna prefers to paint and to pine for Robert ( Justin Gillman).
Another reason why Breadbox chose “The Awakening,” Craft says, is that, while all three stories delve into gender relations and feature a romance, “the very significant thing about ‘The Awakening’ is that it’s not about the men at all. The personal journey in the story happens in step with a romance, but not because of a romance.
“That’s been the hugest conversation,” Craft says. “How do we not make this a story about a woman who gets left by a man and kills herself ? Because that’s so not what it is.
“For me, as a young woman trying to be a human in the world,” Craft continues, “I feel like I’m trying to deal with all this stuff constantly. I’m constantly running up against ‘should’ and expectation. To me, it’s such a foolish oversimplication to think that we have moved past our own relationship to expectation and our own relationship to what others need from us — and the idea that that comes before our own needs. That feels like a myth we tell ourselves to get through the day, but it doesn’t feel like my reality at all.”