There is a version of the future being sold to us right now, and it has a very particular shape. Faster. Louder. More output, less stillness. A world where the mind’s chatter finally gets outsourced to something even faster than the mind itself. I don’t think that’s the future. I think it’s just the current tempo, extended. I’ve spent years in rehearsal rooms watching what happens when an actor stops adding and starts removing. My teacher’s teacher, Grotowski, spent a lifetim

In 2016, I directed Conor McPherson’s adaptation of The Birds at 59E59 Theatres in New York. Somewhere in the middle of the process — I couldn’t tell you the exact day — I noticed the actors weren’t just rehearsing anymore. They were performing something closer to a ritual. And so was I. It took me longer than it should have to name what was happening. I wasn’t directing a play about a world under siege from an unexplained, implacable threat. I was building a ritual of mourni

A quiet transmission from the laboratory I was told once that we are not the voice in our heads. We are the ones who hear it. The sentence arrived as a kindness. It sounded finished. I wrote it on a page and most likely forgot about it, which is what the mind does with any truth that would require it to step aside. Then, in the night, the voice came back. It did not argue. It handed me the script and called it my life. In that script the narrative is woven out of family lines