Theater Comes to Life: Literally

Eugene O'Neill describes the setting for "A Long Day's Journey into Night" and suddenly dark wood panelling, a bookshelf under a portrait of William Shakespeare, a round table and chairs with three windows from which you can overlook the water surround me, not because I'm imagining the room as I read, or admiring set work while viewing the play, but because I'm sitting in the room itself, where J Ranelli directs a reading from the classic.
The room, exact in detail as described in the stage directions of the play, is in O'Neill's boyhood home and the reading is the first event in which I'm participating as a fellow at the National Critics Institute at the O'Neill Theater Center in Waterford, CT.
Ranelli, one of the most skilled directors I've ever worked with, brings O'Neill's words to life as he guides the actors through selected scenes. The idea is for us critics, who review plays, to get a better understand of how a performance comes to be. I get even more than that out of the experience.
Ranelli suggests that the two actors playing Edmund and Jamie go out into the kitchen and enter the room laughing, just as described in the play's stage direction. They do, and the effect is chilling. I feel as though I'm living inside the pages of O'Neill's autobiographical work and expect to hear the melancholic foghorn. I can feel his pain, the frustration of a disfunctional family trying to make it through the day while denying, then trying to deal with the mother's drug addiction.
It's gripping and I realize that this is why I do theater: to move the people watching. To try to touch them with the material in a personal way and, in our case at Masterwork Productions, where our projects carry a message of hope, to offer them something to think about and in some cases, a solution.
The experience leaves me with a strong sense of confirmation and a bag full of directing techniques gleaned from Ranelli's years of experience in theater and television that hopefully will make me a better director, both of theatrical endeavors and of this performing arts organization. He stresses a mentoring relationship between director and actors and I realize that this type of relationship is what brought me here in the first place. Friend and Broadway critic Retta Blaney has encouraged me to pursue writing reviews of Broadway shows from a Christian perspective. A few of those reviews earned me a spot as a follow at the institute and now God has opened the door for mentoring from some of the nation's top critics.
It's amazing how many doors God can open and not surprising that he uses mentors like Retta to turn the door knob.