Kerry Cole, sipping a health drink, could pass for the accountant she contemplated becoming one college semester. But her thoughts are far from a world filled with numbers and comfortable offices. On this day, she will be at Theatre Three in the Quadrangle in a couple of hours directing David Mamet’s "An Interview," and she is preparing for opening night.
"I’m really tired of it," she says after shaping the performance through 60 to 90 hours of rehearsals. "Actually, it’s how I deal with separation anxiety; it’s a way of leaving the play. [The director’s] job ends when [the actors’] begins." With "Interview" in previews, it’s almost time for her to move on.
Moving on is nothing new to Cole. Like others in her profession, the East Dallas resident who teaches at Richland College lives project to project, never certain she’ll work again but with a faith that "something always turns up.”
Mamet has occupied her this year, and opportunities with other local groups have materialized in the past. From Garland to Collin County to Fort Worth, she has directed mysteries, comedies and plays about human relationships. Musicals she considers too organized, and plays that make political statements are not her style.
As an instructor at Richland and at UT-Dallas this fall, she has the opportunity to educate students on the realities of the theater, from economics (they want to know why tickets are so expensive) to the experience.
Many of her students think movies are better than the stage because they have such limited exposure to the latter. "Actually, they’re completely separate," Cole explains. "Film is the director’s medium. The director tells the actor where to look and what to do." In contrast,
"theater is much more organic. The director tries more to get the point of the scene across."
Acting on the belief that the only way to experience theater is in person, Cole abandoned the use of a text in her introductory class and took the students to see various productions.
"It was a sterling season I picked," she says with a smile, and the experience provided the basis for wide-ranging discussions on everything from the mechanics of the productions to theories of the purpose of theater.
Cole’s desire — other than to nurture a love of the stage — is to instill in her students a sense of fun. Most have no background in drama and no desire to pursue acting seriously. But acting can be a creative outlet, a way out of a shell and that, she notes, has its own benefits.
Cole takes her sense that the stage should be fun to the actors she directs as well. "Actors are used to being told what to do. I want them to play, to find [ways of expressing the scene]," she says. "I don’t have everything set in my mind."
And that can be a good thing. Once, in directing a screwball comedy with a ghost, Cole insisted on having Spanish moss draped across the set. The set designer humored her, calling the moss HDTs or Hangy Downy Things, but never producing it. She insisted At last, he hung one strand on the set. "We never used it," she admits. "It looked dried and nasty."
That’s something that can’t be said about the rest of her work.
