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Writings about Melia Bensussen
August 1, 2003—Cynthia Citron, "A visit with director Melia Bensussen," San Diego Jewish Press-Heritage, pages 18-19: For the past three summers, maybe some kind of a record in directorial circles, Melia Bensussen has been directing workshop productions of new plays at the (Eugene) O’Neill Playwrights Conference in Waterford, Connecticut. A by-invitation-only conference, the O’Neill offers a handful of selected playwrights (from more than 900 applicants) a chance to see how their plays look and sound on the stage—and the opportunity to cut, rewrite, and rethink the work before it begins the long process toward production in theaters around the country.  For many playwrights, Bensussen is the director of choice to help them through this difficult process. Melia Bensussen grew up in San Diego (she attended La Jolla High) and has traveled a long road to this quiet retreat in Connecticut.  The journey began just a few miles to the south, in New York, where she was born in 1963.  It continued in her father’s native Mexico City, where his parents had settled after leaving Lebanon and Turkey. “I had a shtetl upbringing,” she says, reflecting the strong sense of community among the Jewish families in Mexico City.  “I went to a Zionist/Jewish school, where I studied half the day in Hebrew and half the day in Spanish.” She never felt isolated, she says, because she was always “surrounded by ‘Israelitas’,” which is what Jews were called in Mexico.  But in the 1970s, when anti-Israel feelings burgeoned in Mexico, she and her friends felt the sting of anti-Semitism and were advised not to wear their school uniform, with its identifying Star of David, in public. Eventually she and her parents and siblings, Jake, Becky, and Willy returned to the United States, settling in San Diego, where the elder Bensussens, Isaac and Abot, and her sister Becky, still live. Her journey took her on to Brown University in Rhode Island for a degree in Theater and Comparative Literature, and then to Louisville, Kentucky, where she spent a year at the Actors Theater. Louisville is the home of the Humana Festival, which Bensussen calls “a breeding place for new works”—much like the program at the O’Neill. Her first job in New York was with the Festival Latino, a wing of Joseph Papp’s Public Theatre.  Mentored by Papp, she recalls being invited to a dinner with him, Harry Belafonte, and Nobel Prize-winning writer Gabriel Garcia Marquez, where she served as translator for Garcia Marquez.  She still cherishes his verdict: he told her she was “as good as Fidel’s translators.” It was at the Public, with Papp’s encouragement, that she began directing, working with many of today’s well-known actors: Camryn Mannheim (of “The Practice”) and Allison Janney (“West Wing”), as well as with Alan Ball, the creator of HBO’s blockbuster series “Six Feet Under.”  Her work with him was with a production called “Five Women Wearing the Same Dress.” She went on to work with some of the best playwrights of the decade, and won an Obie award (the Off-Broadway equivalent of the Tony) for her direction of “The Turn of the Screw” in 1999. She also works with a number of Latino playwrights—most recently with Edwin Sanchez, who comes from Puerto Rico and is also bilingual.  “I love having the opportunity to work in both English and Spanish,” she says, “since that feels closest to who I am in total.” This year her work at the O’Neill was with Chicago playwright Lisa Dillman, whose play “Rock Shore” deals with a group of tuberculosis patients at a sanatorium in upstate New York in the early years of the 20^th century.  It had an ensemble cast of nine seasoned actors, invited to provide Dillman with a sense of how her play holds up on stage and in front of an audience. Some 500 theater professionals filter through the O’Neill each summer, spending up to three weeks honing their skills in such fields as puppetry, musical theater, or, in my case, theater criticism.  It’s a strenuous and stressful period, with successive teams of playwrights and directors nurturing a play from the first design meeting, where set and lighting designers explore the play’s possibilities, to the first reading, where the playwright reads her play for the rest of the cast, through the rehearsals, technical meetings, and final run-throughs to the actual workshop performance—all in four days. Bensussen finds the process exhilarating.  She has worked with Dillman before and finds the writer “eager to get better” and knowledgeable about “which notes to take and which to ignore,” referring to the suggestions that the director and others offer to the playwright.  “I’d be nervous if someone took all my notes,” Bensussen says. Her job, as she defines it, is to make sure that the visual world that she creates onstage is the world that exists in the writer’s head, and to make the choices that illuminate where the emphases should be placed.  “You can’t deal with 100 different visions,” she says, “and so you have to incorporate other people’s visions and create the template.  I have to be the editor.” She sees the play “in a musical way,” she explains, and so she sets up scene changes to work without blackouts, which she says slow things down, and without distractions or stops in the action.  With “Rock Shore,” which was performed in an amphitheater, she used lighting to focus from one group of actors to the next: the new group moved to center stage or one of the upstage balconies as the previous group exited. She also emphasizes the importance of her role in the collaborative effort, helping everyone to understand how to think, how to work, and how to create together.  “Certain people in the theater tend to work together over time, so that they develop a built-in trust and a shared vocabulary,” she says.  And always, there are the questions for the playwright, “Is this the story you want to tell, and is it being told the way you want to tell it?” and finally, “How can I help you to do it better?” The director is the only one who reads the play before accepting the assignment at the O’Neill.  Bensussen accepts, she says, based on her feelings about the writer.  “The relationship between the writer and the director is a ‘shidach’,” she says, “and you’d better have a good feeling about it.”  She then has the task of choosing the actors, who accept the assignment without having seen the script beforehand. “The whole workshop process is so pressed for time that we can’t afford the luxury of letting people think about it,” Bensussen says. Working at the O’Neill allows her to bring her husband, Charles Epstein, a molecular biologist working on his Ph.D. at Rockefeller University, and their two kids, Jeremy, 7, and Ilana, 4, along for the summer camp environment.  (Although to the working professionals it’s more like a marine boot camp than a summer camp).  But once the fall arrives and the kids return to school she will return to her job as producing director of Emerson Stage at Emerson College in Boston.  (She has been there since 2000; in 2001 Emerson Stage won the Regional Award of Excellence from the New England Theater Conference).  She loves academia, she says, because “it gives me leeway to control my own schedule” and because “it’s very conducive to parenthood.  You don’t have to be at the office at 8:30 in pantyhose!” But this summer her attention is all for the work at the O’Neill.  “Theater is a world that provides community and ritual—like a religion,” she says.  “You have to believe in what’s happening here.”  But above all, she concludes, “you have to focus entirely on the present, not the future.” Probably good words to live by, because for Melia Bensussen, the future looks busier than ever.  In November she will be co-directing “Alice”, a musical retelling of Alice’s adventures in Wonderland by playwright Elizabeth Swados, at Emerson Stage.  At the same time, she will be working with playwright Jeffrey Hatcher on the world premiere of his adaptation of the George S. Kaufman-Moss Hart play “The Fabulous Invalid.”  It is also scheduled to open in Boston in November. And maybe sometime after that she’ll come back to San Diego to visit her folks?  Ojala que si.