When I was hired to direct Jeremy O. Harris’s Slave Play at New York Theatre Workshop, I was strongly encouraged to hire an intimacy director because of the explicit nature of the play. Most of my work over the years has dealt quite explicitly with intimacy, and I’d never worked with an intimacy director, so I was at first rather skeptical. But after having an informative conversation with Claire Warden, all my fears disappeared. I spoke candidly to Claire about my concern that I didn’t want this to turn into how we were going to try and figure out how “not to do the play” or how to “water down an explicit moment.” Claire made it clear that her role was quite the opposite. She was not concerned with the “comfort” of the actor; rather, she was there to make sure they were “safe.” We began to jive on this very important distinction, because much of my work in the theatre is “uncomfortable,” and rightly so. There should be nothing “comfortable” about depicting acts of racial and/or sexual violence, and I’d always made it a point to create a safe space for the artists in the room to explore the uncomfortable nature of the work. But Claire brought new techniques—much like that of a fight director, which she also functioned as—that could be implemented for the further safety of the artist. This was terribly exciting.
Claire and I worked as a team much like I would with a choreographer or a fight director. She insisted on coming to as much of the table and scene work as possible. I felt comfortable giving over the room entirely to Claire, allowing the actors to form a relationship with her that didn’t rely on the approval of the director. This increased the level of critical rigor that I think is vital when one is exploring physical and emotional intimacy. It was important that we populate the room with many female artists so that there were a variety of intelligent ideas in our brain trust.
Claire ended up pushing our intimacy into extremely exciting places, and we developed a shorthand that incorporated the actors’ and my input throughout the process. I remember vividly the opening moments of connection that she required of each person to have with their partner in an intimate scene: stand facing one another, breathe in and out once, slap their palms on the other in a sort of “high five” motion. This was to contain the upcoming experience. And locate it in a safe space. And it was to be repeated as soon as possible after the intimate moment was done as a form of release. This way the actors didn’t have to carry the trauma of the acts through their days or even through the rest of rehearsal. It allowed containment and release. It remains a profound teachable moment for me as a director.
ROBERT O’HARA has received the NAACP Best Director Award, the Helen Hayes Award for Outstanding New Play, two OBIEs and the Oppenheimer Award. He directed the world premieres of Jeremy O. Harris’s Slave Play, Nikkole Salter and Dania Guirira’s In the Continuum, Tarell McCraney’s The Brother/ Sister Plays (Part 2), Colman Domingo’s Wild with Happy, Kirsten Childs’s Bella: An American Tall Tale, as well as his own plays, Mankind, Bootycandy, and Insurrection: Holding History. His recent plays Zombie: The American, and Barbecue world premiered at Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company and New York Shakespeare Festival, respectively. His recent directing projects include Kirsten Childs’s Bubbly Black Girl at City Center/Encores! Off Center, the Universes’ Uni/Son, inspired by the poetry of August Wilson at Oregon Shakespeare Festival, and Shakespeare’s Macbeth at Denver Center for the Performing Arts. He holds a Directing MFA from Columbia University.