Jack in the Box: Or, How to Goddamn Direct

Rapt observation, intuition, and the ability to win nervy battles with playwrights are necessities in the theater director’s toolkit, according to this exuberant memoir. O’Brien, former artistic director of San Diego’s Old Globe Theater, follows up on Jack Be Nimble with more showbiz wisdom both practical—he explains how positioning and moving actors can make a joke land or a speech resonate—and mystical: “It is the play itself that appears to assert, like the natural flow of water, its own organic truth.” At the book’s heart is its depictions of collaborations and arguments with other theater artists, like the mercurial director Mike Nichols; the charismatic but prickly playwright Tom Stoppard (“It was as if... some idiot from the street wandered in and just vomited it out,’” was his verdict on Ethan Hawke’s rendition of a Stoppard soliloquy); and the even pricklier Neil Simon (“I was lying at the bottom of Poe’s The Pit and the Pendulum... with Neil’s distorted face above me, the blade coming ever slower, ever lower,” he writes of being fired by the playwright). There are swollen, clashing egos here, but O’Brien presents them sympathetically and treats the wrangling as a necessary part of the creative process. The result is an entertaining, colorful, generous panorama of the stage and its luminaries. Photos. (Nov.)