How do we begin?

HOW DO WE BEGIN?

The August of 2021, just before I turned 24, was a pivotal moment in my life both as a director and as a person. I had been in New York for a year, but between making my exeunt from a conservatory program that promised much and delivered little, a dire financial situation, and my mom’s recent leukemia diagnosis, signing a new lease in a city far from home seemed to make very little sense. Despite this, I felt that my time in the city was nowhere near finished. So, I did something that is generally frowned upon in my religion.

I gave God an ultimatum.

My proposition was this: I was to take back the agency of my life and get back on the path of pursuing my MFA in directing so I could become a freelance director and college professor. I would do the grinding: applying to jobs and knocking on doors, and anything else I could do to make that happen. If the doors opened, I would take it as my sign that I should stay. One of the doors I knocked on was that of a man named Colm Summers. 

A month or so prior to this, I had stumbled upon his website and something within me told me to save it. Now, I pulled it up again. I could never pinpoint what it was exactly that made me do it, but something told me the two of us would just work. It was likely that he wouldn’t respond. “He was probably busy,” I imagined,and I was no one of significant importance, but as they say, the only way to guarantee a person will respond with “no”, is to not hit send. And besides, I have a nasty habit of knocking on doors that should be closed to me. 

I wrote:

Dear Colm:

My name is Emma Denson, and I am a New York-based aspiring director. I stumbled upon your website and I am a huge fan of your work.

 I decided to find a few directors that I really like in NYC and see if they will allow me to shadow them or help out with their shows as a stagehand.

 My work ethic is unmatched, I am incredibly organized, and I would be willing to help out with anything your productions need (set or costume help, sweeping the stage, note taking, etc.) if it meant I could be in the room and observe the process of a professional production. 

If this is something you would be interested in, please let me know.

 Thank you for your time. Sincerely,

 Emma Denson

A couple of hours later, I was sitting in the New York Public Library, reading a few scripts. Four or five emails came in sequentially, all paving the way for me to stay in New York. Jobs I’d applied for, a paid theatre gig, and even roommate confirmations. Last but certainly not least, a reply from Colm:

Dear Emma, 

Great to hear from you - and glad that director's are rising through the ranks and eager to enter the post-pandemic fray. 

Let's talk, I can do a zoom call some time next week if that suits? Afternoon Mon-Fri between 1-4 are better for me, but book fast to avoid disappointment! 

Looking forward to meeting, 

Best,

CS

The rest, as they say, is history.  

The following pages are a running record of the lessons I learned from Colm Summers in the year he agreed to bring me on as an assistant and prepare me for grad school, just as he was finishing his own MFA Directing program at Columbia, delayed due to the pandemic. It is also worth noting that our work together began at the height of the coronavirus pandemic, with the American theatre on its knees, and that this work represents two young artists finding each other in a moment of critical cultural transformation, a time when - as Colm would say - “theatre was most threatened, and more necessary than ever.”

These lessons were learned during our mentoring sessions, in various rehearsal rooms, seeing live shows, and at the 11th Street Bar in the East Village. I’ve learned, and am still learning, a lot from him and I think he’s learned a bit from me.

This is our story. And it’s just the beginning. 

***

Colm and I began as strangers, and there is nothing quite as daunting as meeting a stranger who you want so desperately to work with for the first time. My fears were soon absolved, however, when we had our initial meeting on Zoom. Colm was more than happy to talk to me about grad school in a frank and informative manner, and throughout the hour or so we spent on our discussion it became abundantly clear that my initial instinct was right: the two of us just clicked. 

 At the conclusion of this call, we agreed on a time and place to meet for coffee and discuss more what a potential collaboration might look like on each of our ends. He sent me some of his scripts to read, and I tore through them furiously. They were so incredibly different from anything I had ever read, and I have to admit that I didn’t entirely grasp the full meaning of either of them in this first read. The plays demanded more critical thinking then I was willing to give them in the moment, something later regret when Colm interrogated me about the plays. “What did you not like,” he asked.

He had also asked me to prepare a dream list of what I wanted for my resume and portfolio by the time I was to apply for graduate programmes. This list could range from the practical to the seemingly impossible, and everything in between. It had been a while since I had pondered what this would look like, and it felt incredibly freeing to be exploring directing possibilities again. 

***

Over the course of a few meetings, Colm and I had established a series of expectations of how to make this relationship one that was mutually beneficial. The framework of our collaboration was to be as follows:

I would assist Colm on his work, handling some managerial tasks, using my skills as a writer to help him reach his goal of applying to a list of fellowships, grants, and other directing opportunities, and assisting in the room (or sometimes online) with productions as a proper Assistant Director. He was not in a position to pay for this time, so instead he proposed that we develop, together, a directing curriculum of our own. The aim was to give me the skills and opportunities to enhance my application materials for the following fall, when I would start applying to the universities of Columbia, Yale, and Brown for their Directing MFA programs. Any task I was charged with would have at least some educational component that would help me as a director, in addition to helping Colm.

What this looked like on my end was completing a series of assignments and then, once a week, we would meet for two hours while I presented my findings. The assignments, the seemingly endless lists, the writing projects that took not one, not two, but upwards of three times to get to a quality that was acceptable, all of these shaped (and continue to shape) my craft and my personhood as I learned more and more about what it took to be a theatre director in New York. 

By establishing the expectations and standards for quality of work from the very beginning, I knew (to some degree at least) what I was getting into by undertaking this collaborative project. By setting up a strong beginning, we were quickly able to not only work together, but to work together well.