Danya Taymor (‘The Outsiders’ director) on using cinematic techniques on stage to depict ‘visceral’ violence and ‘hard-won hope’ [Exclusive Video Interview]
- Oops!Something went wrong.Please try again later.
- Oops!Something went wrong.Please try again later.
“The thing that pulled me the most is the authenticity with which the writer Susie Hinton explores what it feels like to be a teenager,” reflects Danya Taymor on what resonates with her about the 1967 novel “The Outsiders.” The popular book was adapted for the screen by Francis Ford Coppola in 1983 and has now come to the stage as a musical. The director finds the original work so powerful because the novelist was able to capture the experience of adolescence “without pulling any punches, without trying to sugarcoat it in a way that dove into my heart and talked to the 14-year-old inside me.” Watch our exclusive video interview above.
“The Outsiders” features a large and young cast of performers, many of whom are making their Broadway debuts. “To do ‘The Outsiders’ asks so much of their spirit, their bodies, their minds, and it’s been a privilege to be their leader,” shares Taymor on her experience at the helm of this incredibly energetic ensemble. As director, she hoped to “help harness their talent and potential and ideas and creativity” as well as create a space where “many of these young men can be emotional.” This goal ties into the themes of the novel, too, because Hinton investigated “the cost of the way society traps young men and encourages them to be stoic or tough or violent at the expense of love and togetherness.”
More from GoldDerby
WATCH our exclusive video interview with Rick and Jeff Kuperman, ‘The Outsiders’ choreographers
Much of Taymor’s inspiration for the staging of the musical derived from the libretto by Adam Rapp and Justine Levine. “So much of the way the physical violence is depicted on stage comes from [Rapp’s] stage directions of the rumble,” explains the director, adding that their book for the musical also informed her approach via its “use of silence and pause.” In turn, she strikes a careful “balance between silence and noise” in her mounting of the tale of two rival teenage groups, the Greasers and the Socs, in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in 1967.
Movies play a major role in the life of the protagonist Ponyboy Curtis (Brody Grant) and they also inspired Taymor’s directorial vision. Since the show is told through the main character’s eyes, the director draws on cinematic techniques so the audience can “feel really close to not just him but all the characters.” It also presented her with “an analog language” with which to tell the story. Collaborating with the “amazing” projection designer Hana S. Kim, the director brings “jump cuts” to life on stage, explaining, “You can use light and sound to skip time, and that felt like a really effective way to try to depict some of this violence” in a way that is “very visceral, really emotional, grotesque.”
SEE Tony Talk: Will ‘The Outsiders’ break into the competitive Best Musical race?
One of the standout moments of this production is the rumble at the heart of the second act, a transcendent moment of theatre that begins with fight choreography between the Greasers and Socs and transforms into something much more “expressionistic.” Taymor calls this long sequence “the height of collaboration” of all the creatives and designers involved in the show. She also drew on a section of the original novel in which she feels “Ponyboy really starts to dissociate” after the deaths of his friends Johnny and Dallas. “I wanted to bring that feeling into the rumble as well,” discusses the director, saying that this aspect of the book directly informed the moment on stage in which Ponyboy “starts to become the only one who’s doing the violence,” “pulls a body out of the rumble” and “realizes its Johnny.” She explains, “The idea came to me because we think we’re doing violence against an enemy when really our enemy is ourselves or our best friend or the person we love the most.”
In comparison to the complexity of the rumble, other moments in the show are powerful because of their simplicity. The song “Great Expectations,” for example, in which Ponyboy reads the Charles Dickens novel of the same name and contemplates his and his friends’ futures, unfolds with a flashlight and an evocative night sky. This moment of staging came directly from Taymor’s life, as she says, “I was a kid who had trouble falling asleep and would have nightmares and would read until I passed out with a flashlight in my bedroom.” A later number, “Little Brother,” hinges on allowing the audience to “really see” the character of Dally and the “emotional depth” of performer Joshua Boone. And after “Stay Gold,” the show ends with its first use of bright “gold light in the piece,” a moment the director says is “bittersweet” because it’s “not absolution, but hard-won hope and a reason to keep going and a reason to reach out to somebody.”
PREDICT the 2024 Tony Awards nominations through April 30
Make your predictions at Gold Derby now. Download our free and easy app for Apple/iPhone devices or Android (Google Play) to compete against legions of other fans plus our experts and editors for best prediction accuracy scores. See our latest prediction champs. Can you top our esteemed leaderboards next? Always remember to keep your predictions updated because they impact our latest racetrack odds, which terrify Hollywood chiefs and stars. Don’t miss the fun. Speak up and share your huffy opinions in our famous forums where 5,000 showbiz leaders lurk every day to track latest awards buzz. Everybody wants to know: What do you think? Who do you predict and why?
SIGN UP for Gold Derby’s free newsletter with latest prediction
Best of GoldDerby
Sign up for Gold Derby's Newsletter. For the latest news, follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.
