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Onstage at the Neil Simon Theatre one recent afternoon, Andrew Garfield was wrestling with an angel. The thirty-four-year-old movie star was in white pajamas; the Angel, played by the British actress Amanda Lawrence, wore a Phyllis Diller wig, a skirt fashioned from a frayed American flag, and eight-foot-long wings made of crinoline and linen, as grimy and tattered as a New York City pigeon’s. “Mortal Kombat”-style music blared as the Angel dragged Garfield across the stage by his leg, slammed his head on the ground, and then floated above his motionless body. Then: a fakeout! Garfield grabbed her by the arm and rammed his head into her torso. The Angel shot up twenty feet in the air, lifting Garfield with her, and shrieked:
She drifted back down to the stage, and Garfield straddled her, victorious. A choir was heard. Garfield turned to watch a pink neon ladder descend from the rafters. “Entrance has been gained,” the Angel told him, adding, “Now release me. I have torn a muscle in my thigh.”
“Big deal,” Garfield retorted, in a haughty drag-queen lilt. “My leg’s been hurting for months.” He grasped a rung and—bringing to mind his Spider-Man days—climbed nimbly into the heavens.
“Well done, everybody,” came a voice over the sound system. “Thank you for your time.” The voice—less God-like than warbly—belonged to Marianne Elliott, the British stage director, who was sitting in the orchestra at a tech table littered with binders and half-finished smoothies from Pret a Manger. It was five hours before the first Broadway preview of “Perestroika,” the second half of Tony Kushner’s two-part drama, “Angels in America.” (The first half is “Millennium Approaches.”) Elliott’s moody revival, which opens this week, is the first production of “Angels” on Broadway since 1993, when its vision of the AIDS epidemic and the lagging response to it was urgent news. With its sprawling cosmology and political fury, Kushner’s “gay fantasia on national themes” (as it is subtitled) thundered into the theatrical canon like a new book of the Bible, in which a dying gay man (Prior Walter, the role played by Garfield) serves as an unlikely, and unwilling, prophet.
“All the characters wrestle with their angel at one point in the play,” Elliott had told me. A soft-spoken woman with a pert blond bob, Elliott, who is fifty-one, is as self-effacing as she is successful. She is known for her visual ingenuity, often using puppetry, choreographed movement, and technological wizardry to underscore human (and animal) behavior. Her seven-and-a-half-hour revival of “Angels” premièred last May, at London’s National Theatre, where she was previously responsible for two notable hits, “War Horse” (co-directed with Tom Morris) and “The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time.” Both toured internationally—unusual for non-musicals—and both came to Broadway, where each won the Tony Award for Best Play. Each also won the best-director prize, making Elliott the only woman with more than one Tony for directing.
At the “Perestroika” rehearsal, Elliott wore a dark blazer embellished with the words “Art Is Truth” in rhinestones. (“She’s the most fashionable director I’ve ever worked with,” Nathan Lane, who plays the right-wing lawyer and power broker Roy Cohn, told me.) The goal that day was to fine-tune the flying and to coördinate the entrance and exit of the neon ladder with the light and sound cues. There was a slight malfunction of the wings—they weren’t attaching properly to the Angel’s back—so an alternate pair was brought in. Elliott paced the aisle, conferring with designers, occasionally dispensing a hug. “We did a run yesterday with about eight stops,” she told me. “We’ll see how it goes. It’ll be the same audience that we had for the first preview—they were just so lovely. I just hope the show doesn’t stop tonight, for the actors’ sake more than anything else. It’s so technical, so huge.”
For directors, “Angels in America” presents a challenge: the text can be both maddeningly specific and maddeningly vague. The scene with Prior wrestling the Angel (Act V, Scene 1) contains the stage direction “Within this incredibly bright column of light there is a ladder of even brighter, purer light, reaching up into infinity.” A lighting designer can easily key in the “bright column of light,” but “infinity” requires brainstorming. After Prior returns from Heaven, Elliott griped, “The stage directions are something like ‘Prior floats back into his bed.’ ” She laughed. “Thanks, Tony.”
“Angels” is at once epic and intimate. “Tony is tackling nothing less than the relationship between freedom and responsibility in the American character,” Oskar Eustis, who commissioned the play for San Francisco’s Eureka Theatre and co-directed the 1992 production at the Mark Taper Forum, told me. “And he’s doing almost all of it through the medium of two-person scenes. That combination of the big lens and the small lens is Tony’s particular genius, but it represents an enormous challenge for the director.” Elliott’s collaborators describe her as the rare director with equal flairs for visual inventiveness and psychological acuity. “She explores every ounce of text and makes you go back and reëxamine things, and questions you constantly,” Lane told me. Garfield, whose research process included going to London drag revues, said, “She was very encouraging of my feminine side. She would tell me often that I reminded her of her best friend from high school. She woke up the parts of me that needed to be woken up.”
The playwright Simon Stephens, who has worked with Elliott on several of his plays, including “Curious Incident,” described her as “the most elegant kind of swan.” He went on, “She creates this illusion she’s not working at all, but underneath the water she’s working harder than any director I’ve dealt with.” In 2002, she directed his play “Port,” about a working-class teen-age girl, at Manchester’s Royal Exchange. “I thought I’d written a play that was defiant and punk, defined by the juvenile energy of this girl,” Stephens said. “Before the first read-through, she said, ‘You do realize that death is mentioned fifty-eight times in this play.’ I hadn’t read it as carefully as she had.”
For someone who commands such large, ambitious productions, Elliott is strikingly inward, even openly insecure. “I’m not the best choice for this play,” she told me when we first met, over lunch at the Jane Hotel. “I’m female, I’m English, I’m not in any way Mormon or Jewish. I wasn’t affected by AIDS directly. So there are lots of reasons why I shouldn’t be doing it. But I feel like it is my story.” “Angels,” she went on, depicts people “stripping off their identities and redefining themselves.”
When I asked how that was her story, she laughed. “Well, on a general level, I have a crisis of confidence,” she said. “I don’t often think that I can do it. And yet here I am. I hate public speaking. When I was a kid, I never spoke. I would sit under a table and not speak to anybody. No words for years. So to be in a position now where I’m leading a huge company of people and having to stir them and infuse them and inspire them every day, that’s not an easy thing.”
Yet beneath her timidity is tenacity. The producer Chris Harper, with whom she recently formed the company Elliott & Harper Productions, told me, “She becomes a kind of warrior. She’s, like, ‘I am not going to let go. I know how to do this.’ There’s total fearless absolute insistence. She’ll take on anybody.”
In 2016, “anybody” was Stephen Sondheim. Elliott wanted to direct “Company,” his 1970 musical about a thirty-five-year-old man named Bobby, who is struggling with romantic commitment. Elliott, finding the play’s concerns dated, wanted to make Bobby a woman. “I looked around, and I was surrounded by thirty-five-year-old women who are in my profession and thinking they should settle down,” she explained. “And, if they do, they should do it quickly, because of the biological clock. But what does that mean in terms of their career?”
Sondheim had recently rejected the notion of an all-male “Company,” which the director John Tiffany (“Once”) had proposed. Elliott met with Sondheim at his New York town house and pitched her gender-swap concept. He agreed to let her workshop the idea and asked her to send him a tape. She returned to London and did just that. “I asked him to have a few people sitting with him when he watched it—some younger people, some women as well,” she said. Harper told me, “She would have wrestled him to the ground.” But she didn’t have to. Sondheim gave her his blessing, and “Company,” with the main character renamed Bobbie, will open in the West End this fall.
Directors of “Angels in America” have employed various levels of spectacle. George C. Wolfe’s original Broadway production used lavish effects, as did Mike Nichols’s HBO film. But the Belgian director Ivo van Hove set his production on a bare stage, and the Angel was a male nurse in hospital scrubs. Before rehearsals for the latest version began, Elliott and her set designer, Ian MacNeil, spent a year and a half hashing out the design, meeting every few weeks at MacNeil’s apartment, in Shoreditch. They read each scene aloud, Elliott recalled, “trying to park the paranoia of ‘How the fuck are we going to do this?’ ” MacNeil, who is gay, and lived in New York in the eighties, gave Elliott a crash course in gay culture, playing her Shirley Bassey and Kraftwerk and Cole Porter and Wagner. “We listened to Judy Garland a lot,” Elliott said.
They had two big breakthroughs. The first was deciding on the look of the Angel. Elliott envisioned her not as a gleaming white creature out of a Renaissance fresco but as “flea-bitten and ragged. I kept saying, ‘She’s more of a cockroach or a monkey. There’s something feral and animalistic about her.’ ” Instead of flying around on wires the whole time, the actress playing the Angel is manipulated by six puppeteers in black.
The other breakthrough was having the action of the play, at the beginning, take place on three turntables, allowing for rapid location shifts; then, as the play goes on and gets more abstract, the turntables spin away and vanish.
“The play, for me, is about erosion,” Elliott said. “We strip away walls. We strip away revolves. We strip away anything that isn’t essential to the piece. And then we strip away illusions.” By the time Prior visits Heaven, late in “Perestroika,” the set has become the theatre itself. He pulls back a curtain—a “Wizard of Oz” reference—to find a team of angels working at lighting consoles and monitors, not unlike a stage crew during a tech rehearsal. “They’re trying to make things work back on Earth, as if it was another stage,” Elliott said. “And yet, of course, there’s no God. There’s no one person who is directing what should be happening down on the stage.”
All this was of interest to Tony Kushner. More than most living playwrights of his stature, Kushner is an open resource, sometimes to the vexation of his collaborators. “He’s very controlling, Tony, I have to say,” Elliott told me. “But, because of that, he’s also very generous.” “The World Only Spins Forward,” a new oral history of “Angels in America,” by Isaac Butler and Dan Kois, includes a section called “Tony Has Notes.” Declan Donnellan, who directed the first National Theatre production, in 1992, once received fifty pages from Kushner by fax in the middle of the night. Richard Feldman, who directed an early workshop at Juilliard, recalls getting a handwritten page that said, simply, “Ugh.” Kushner and Eustis had constant high-pitched fights during the original Los Angeles production, leading to a falling out; when the show moved to Broadway, in 1993, Eustis was replaced by Wolfe. (The stage directors’ union sued the New York producers, unsuccessfully, for retaining elements of Eustis’s production. Kushner and Eustis have since reconciled.) Wolfe had his own tangles with the playwright. “Part 1 was a baptism, because I got volumes and volumes of notes,” he told me. “But I did not retreat into a corner.”
The relationship between director and playwright is tricky, a combination of co-parenting and shotgun wedding. Eustis told me, “It can be very challenging for a director to work with Tony’s notes, because they tend to be infinitely more granular than most playwrights’. But he’s also a hell of a lot smarter than most playwrights.”
“I take a lot of notes,” Kushner said, when I met him at a steak house before a preview of “Millennium Approaches.” “Not nitpicky things, but I usually try to diagnose what I’m seeing.” He’ll scribble on a notepad in the dark, then type up his comments or dictate them to an assistant.
In the past quarter century, Kushner has worked on letting go. “I don’t like that side of myself,” he said. “There’s a narcissistic vulnerability that I don’t want to make anybody else’s problem. We’re seeing in the world right now what it feels like when somebody is unscrupulous about their narcissistic vulnerabilities becoming other people’s problems.” He stayed out of the way for most of Elliott’s twelve-week rehearsal period at the National, but the two e-mailed constantly. She would ask him about a specific line or phrase—including the meaning of “bubbeleh”—and often get a three-page response.
Kushner liked the idea of the ratty Angel (“I’ve always wanted her to look odd. She certainly is an odd being—she has eight vaginas and a number of phalli,” he said) but had reservations about the six spectral puppeteers. At first, Elliott was calling them “Familiars,” but Kushner thought that sounded too witchy; he suggested “Shadows,” drawing from Shakespeare. (“If we shadows have offended / Think but this, and all is mended.”) Also, he said, “I was a little nervous, because eight is a kind of magic number in the play: there are eight acts, and Roy Cohn says at the beginning, ‘I wish I was an octopus.’ And there are eight actors in the play, so adding six more is a little bit . . . surprising. But I also thought, Why not?”
He did lodge some objections. In Act III of “Millennium Approaches,” Prior hallucinates his ex-boyfriend, Louis, who materializes in his bedroom. “Moon River” plays, and they slow-dance. “Tony really wants that ‘Moon River’ to start when they start dancing,” Elliott told me. “But I love that it starts when Louis appears, in this beautiful tuxedo, with a mirror ball and smoke on the stage and this pink haze. That’s how I would imagine my fantasy guy arriving in my bedroom.” Kushner voiced his preference several times, but ultimately let Elliott decide what to do. Before the second preview, he told me, “I have to find out if I won or not.” (He hadn’t.) He went on, “If I’m working with a director I respect—and I respect Marianne very, very much—I’ll ask for something five or six times, and then, if it’s not happening, I don’t want to make the director feel like they have to say, ‘Will you please fuck off?’ ” Elliott said, “I’ve learned to say to Tony, ‘I don’t see it that way. Let’s agree to differ.’ ”
Elliott had been single-minded about getting the rights to “Angels,” which had been held by London’s Old Vic; Kevin Spacey, at that time the Old Vic’s artistic director, wanted to play Roy Cohn. “I literally banged on the doors until they heard me,” she recalled. The moment Spacey dropped the idea, she took it to the National, where she was an associate director.
The revival turned out to be timely: the first day of rehearsal was January 21, 2017, Donald Trump’s first full day in office, just after the L.G.B.T.-rights page disappeared from the White House Web site. Cohn, a closeted gay man and former aide to Senator Joseph McCarthy, had been an early Trump mentor. (He died of AIDS, in 1986, but insisted to the end that he had liver cancer.) “Everything that Tony captured in Roy Cohn is now in the Oval Office,” Eustis said. “That complete shamelessness, that utter aggression, that complete immorality. Tony wrote about it twenty-five years ago, and now Cohn’s protégé is President.” Elliott told me, “It suddenly became this important political statement that we were doing it.”
Elliott was reared in Stockport, a suburb of Manchester, far from the thrashing rise of the American right. She comes from a distinguished theatrical lineage. Her mother, Rosalind Knight, is an actress whose credits include “Tom Jones”; Knight’s father, Esmond Knight, was also an actor, who appeared in Laurence Olivier’s film “Henry V.” Elliott’s father, Michael Elliott, was the son of a canon in the Church of England who led radio services during the Second World War. Michael Elliott was a prominent stage director; when Marianne was nine, he moved the family from London to Manchester, where he was a founding director of the Royal Exchange, a theatre built in a former cotton-trade center partially destroyed in the Blitz.
As a child, Elliott hated the theatre. But in our conversations she recalled seeing her mother as the Evil Stepmother in a production of “Cinderella”: “At the end, she realized she had been quite cruel, and she ripped off her evil-stepmother clothes and had this fantastic dress underneath. She would do this bop, as she called it, around the stage. That’s sort of seared into my memory, because the audience absolutely loved it—the showmanship.” Her memories of her father have less to do with his work than with his chronic health problems. He used a home dialysis machine three nights a week. Elliott’s mother told me, “Marianne rather kept away from that, because the machine made frightening noises.”
Elliott sensed traces of what she called her father’s “difficult, dark background.” His mother had struggled with mental illness, and his brother was killed in a bicycle accident when he was a teen-ager. When Marianne was about sixteen, her father left the family to be with another woman. “There were things going on that were beyond my comprehension, and the way that I dealt with that was to get very quiet and observant,” she said.
About a year later, after undergoing a kidney transplant, her father died. “I sort of went inside myself, which is what I knew how to do—just imploded in,” she recalled. Elliott did badly in school, and felt that there was nothing she was good at. (Her older sister, Susannah, was the “shining star.”) To compound the upheaval, Michael’s death led to a rift between the Elliott clan and the remaining directors of the Royal Exchange. “They were pretty vile to us,” Knight said. “I think they were jealous of Michael’s reputation and his talent. They were bound by hate.” At her agent’s urging, she moved the girls back to London.
Elliott never imagined herself joining the family trade. “I honestly assumed that directors were male, and intellectual academics,” she said. “Which they were at the time, and my dad was that.” Despite her resistance, she wound up studying drama at the University of Hull, in Yorkshire, “because I wasn’t really clever enough to do anything else.” She had a brief, awful foray into acting, in Lorca’s “The Love of Don Perlimpín and Belisa in the Garden.” She told me, “There was a third-year directing me, and he kept saying, ‘Can you try to be a bit more sexy?’ That was a really good learning curve for me, because (a) I thought, How dare you sit there in your nice, comfortable rehearsal-room clothes, while I’ve got this ridiculous costume on, and just tell me that I have to be sexy? You’re not taking on board the fact that I feel very exposed. And (b) you can’t tell an actor to be sexy, because it’s not about the effect you’re trying to create. It should always be about what you’re trying to do to somebody else.”
After graduating, she moved back to London and took waitressing and secretarial jobs, then assisted a casting director and worked at Granada, the television studio. When she was twenty-three, her boyfriend, Stewart Harcourt, was struggling to break through as a playwright, and suggested that she direct one of his scripts. “We rehearsed it in my bedroom,” she said. “We scraped the money together and took holiday pay.” The play, “The Good Times Will Come,” was produced in 1994, in a space above an Islington pub. Remarkably, people from the Royal Exchange—from which her family had cut ties years earlier—caught the show and offered her a job as an assistant director.
In Manchester, she found a mentor in Greg Hersov, one of the newer artistic directors. Hersov was impressed by Elliott’s meticulous preparation. “She creates a very quiet, calm atmosphere—no histrionics,” he told me. She met her husband, the actor Nick Sidi, when she directed a production of “As You Like It.” (They have a thirteen-year-old daughter, Eve Blue.) Returning to her father’s theatre seems as though it would be a Freudian minefield, but Elliott was surprisingly at ease. “Maybe I just felt like I was completing the circle,” she said.
In 2005, Nicholas Hytner, the artistic director of the National Theatre, asked Elliott to direct Ibsen’s “Pillars of the Community.” The production, starring Damian Lewis and Lesley Manville, got five stars from the Guardian, which called it “stupendous.” Hytner invited Elliott to join the theatre as an associate. He saw her insecurity as a source of strength. “She was constantly astonished that the rest of the world had such confidence in her,” Hytner told me. “She is as well prepared a director as I ever came across at the National, partly because, I suspect, she has a horror of having to wing it. Some directors—particularly university-educated men—are very good at winging it. She never needs to.”
Another associate, Tom Morris, had the idea of adapting Michael Morpurgo’s children’s novel “War Horse,” about a country horse pressed into service in the First World War. Morris, a physical-theatre specialist, was eager to work with the South African troupe Handspring Puppet Company. Hytner asked Elliott to direct. “She’d shown herself to be a tremendous storyteller, and she seemed hungry to occupy big stages and engage big audiences,” he said. But Elliott was daunted, and asked Morris to co-direct. The artistic hurdle was obvious: the book is told from the horse’s point of view, but Elliott knew that a talking horse would be “ridiculous.” She said, “We had to relay what Joey the horse is going through in other ways than him expressing it through words.”
The first preview of “War Horse” was a fiasco: it ran more than three hours, and stretches of dialogue were in German, leaving the audience confounded. “Nick Hytner got quite frustrated with us,” Elliott recalled. “He basically said, ‘You’ve got to get your acts together, otherwise you’re going to bring the National Theatre into a million pounds of debt!’ ” During three years of workshops, the creators perfected Joey, who was made of aluminum, leather, and cane. “The puppet became more articulate in terms of showing how it felt,” Elliott said. “The movement of the ears and the flicking of the tail and the articulation of the limbs. The three puppeteers and the horse became like a synchronized being.” Elliott shepherded the show to Lincoln Center, where it ran for nearly two years, and then to Toronto, Sydney, and Berlin. In London, it drew the interest of Steven Spielberg (who adapted it as a film) and of Queen Elizabeth, who invited Joey to Windsor Castle for her ninetieth birthday.
“The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time” also had an unconventional narrator. Mark Haddon’s novel is told from the perspective of Christopher, a fifteen-year-old boy with Asperger’s syndrome who is trying to solve the murder of a neighborhood dog. Simon Stephens, who wrote the play, asked Elliott to read it as a friend. “I knew once she read it she wouldn’t want anybody else to direct it, so it was slightly sneaky on my part,” he said. He was right—Elliott seized on it. Working with the designer Bunny Christie and the movement company Frantic Assembly, she immersed the audience in Christopher’s mind. In one scene, he runs away to a train station. Elliott externalized his sensory overload: gigantic signage flashing across the “Tron”-like set, cacophonous rave music, and darkened figures who randomly lift Christopher in the air. Elliott called it “an abstract piece of ballet.”
The show was performed in the round in the National’s smallest space, where spectators watched Christopher’s imagination play out on the stage floor. Chris Harper, who was a producer there, was certain that the show could have a commercial life, but Elliott couldn’t picture it in a proscenium theatre. He convinced her over several bottles of wine. “There was a reticence: ‘What if it doesn’t work?’ ” Harper recalled. “It was a real tug-of-war.” Eventually, Elliott said, “we found a way, because in the design there are lots of boxes, little white boxes that are containers of his thoughts, I suppose. And so we made the whole show like a box of his thoughts, of his brain.” The play reopened at the Apollo Theatre, in the West End, in March, 2013; the Times critic Ben Brantley compared it to “War Horse” in “its ability to create a theatrical world that somehow feels more lifelike than life itself.”
A month later, Hytner announced that he would step down from the National. Elliott was an obvious contender for the position, but she took herself out of the running. “She said very simply that she had a life, a young daughter, other priorities,” Hytner told me. (The job went to Rufus Norris.) Even with two hits under her belt, Elliott was still crippled by self-doubt. “I was thinking, What am I going to put my head above the parapet for?” she told me. “What do I really want to do? I was at a point where I thought, Should I give it up? Should I stop directing? And I went totally the other way. I set up my own company.”
The day after the first Broadway preview of “Millennium Approaches,” Elliott was back at her tech table in Row G. “Last night was quite hairy,” she reported. “Nathan’s phone wasn’t working. The walls on the revolve fell during the first act. It finished late, because the interval was long. But they’ll get tighter.”
Onstage was a men’s bathroom, the site of Act I, Scene 6. Louis—Prior’s nebbishy boyfriend, a quasi avatar of Kushner—is crying over a sink when he meets Joe, a closeted Mormon lawyer. Lee Pace, who plays Joe, took the stage with James McArdle, the burly Glaswegian playing Louis. McArdle spoke in a thick burr that made it hard to imagine him as a Jewish New Yorker, but when the two men ran the scene he morphed instantly from Fat Bastard into Woody Allen. (In London, Elliott told me, the cast had the help of a dialect coach and “three different rabbis.”) At one point, Joe hands Louis some toilet paper. “There’s something about the tissue paper,” Elliott observed. “Because you’ve learned by now—”
“There’s probably AIDS going on,” Pace said.
She nodded. “So be slightly careful about how you hand the tissue paper,” she said. “Maybe you just hold it on the corner.” More actors drifted in: Denise Gough, who plays Harper, Joe’s wife, thanked Elliott for bringing them all vitamins. (“I took nine of them!”) The actors agreed that the audience had reacted well—especially to the jokes about Republicans, which didn’t get the same laughs in London.
As the crew fiddled with the set, the cast gathered around Elliott’s table, where she kept a thick binder. (Kushner told me of their meetings, “She brought these huge director’s notebooks that looked like the Talmud. At the center of each page was a little piece of the script, and then diagrams and charts all around it.”) She ran through her notes from the night before. In the scene where Louis has sex with a stranger in Central Park, McArdle had growled his line “Infect me. I don’t care.” “I loved it,” Elliott told him. “You do care. You want death.” During Louis’s Act III rant about American democracy, McArdle had crossed and uncrossed his legs too many times. In a scene between Joe and Harper, Gough had underplayed a moment of tension: “When you say, ‘You never should have married me’—you can really attack there.”
Gough worried aloud that she had been crying too much: “I try to hold it back, but I’m not always able to.”
“I’ll look at it tonight,” Elliott said. “If the tears happen as a subsidiary thing, they happen. As long as you play your action.”
They took a break, and Elliott went back to her binder. Earlier, describing the play’s characters, she had told me, “They all feel like they’re under a weight of expectation. They should be behaving a certain way, and they can’t. Or something should be happening to them and it’s not. Or something shouldn’t be happening to them and it is.” ♦
