Joanna Settle on directing 9 Parts of Desire and what she refuses to ask an actor to do

Comments (0) By Robrt L. Pela Thursday, Mar 13 2008

Director Joanna Settle is the other woman behind playwright/actor Heather Raffo's acclaimed 9 Parts of Desire as well as a slew of other award-winning productions. She has Genet to blame for this, but takes full responsibility for her troubled relationship with schnapps.

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I knew I wanted to be in show business when I read Jean Genet's The Blacks: A Clown Show in undergraduate school. I knew I could stage that play. I thought, "If theater could be like this, I'm a director." I was 18, and I've been a director ever since.

The worst thing about being a director is the audition process. Everyone thinks auditioning is so hard on actors, but it's a terror for directors. What if the actor auditions well, and then is a mess in rehearsal? What if they think I'm full of shit? A nightmare.

If I could be anyone other than myself it would be financier and philanthropist George Soros.

It's not entirely true, but I sometimes tell people that I'm not interested because I'm married. I mean, I am married. But for most of the guys that hit on women they don't know, "I'm married" is the only "No" they can hear.

I laugh uncontrollably at people falling down. Nothing like a good pratfall.

The one thing I absolutely refuse to ask an actor to do on stage is humor me. I expect actors to have their own voice, to challenge me if we need to get to the bottom of a difference in perspective. I think great art is a collision of different voices, not everyone getting on board with a single way of looking at the world. The final component, the last voice added, is the audience.

Currently I am reading God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything by Christopher Hitchens; Roast Chicken and Other Stories by British foodie Simon Hopkinson; and My First Movie, interviews with groundbreaking film directors on the making of their first films.

The first time I got drunk was the last time I ever tasted peach schnapps.

Like my father used to say, "It's just as easy to fall in love with a rich boy as it is to fall in love with a poor boy." I certainly never found that to be true, but what did he know? He also used to say, "Honey, there's been a little snafu. Come down to the station with bail?"