I was invited by the faculty of LIU Post and the Post Theatre Company to direct Wild Party — they felt the history of my work was well suited to the material. After spending time with the piece I found myself thinking about something that bothers me about how musicals from this era are often staged.

Wild Party is set in the 1920s. And musicals set in that period tend to arrive with a glossy patina — the beaded dresses, the jazz hands, the gorgeous artifice — that keeps the audience at a comfortable distance from what's actually happening on stage. But at its core Wild Party is a violent piece. Beneath all the fun and the sex and the music, something genuinely dangerous is unfolding. I didn't want my audience to feel safe.

Working with my design team we made a radical decision. Rather than building a period set, we mapped out the floorplan of a real New York City tenement apartment — three hundred square feet, a kitchen and living room, a bathroom, a bedroom. No walls. Just a floor, the furniture, and a tin ceiling overhead. The audience sat on either side, close enough to see every detail, close enough to see each other across the space.

That proximity changed everything. There was nowhere to hide — for the characters or for the audience.

I also asked our costume and make-up designer to work as naturally as possible. No stage makeup, no wigs. When your audience is that close, artifice becomes a barrier rather than an enhancement. I wanted the actors to look like people, not performers.

One of the things I'm proudest of is the collaboration with choreographer Brad Landers. Wild Party is a dance-heavy musical, and finding a way to put that much movement into the realistic footprint of a domestic space required genuine ingenuity. We also used the space surrounding the apartment for the ensemble — a place to retreat to without fully disappearing when we needed to focus on the principal characters. The world of the party always felt present, even at its edges.