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Jack in the Box: Or, How to Goddamn Direct - Paperback | Diverse Reads

Jack in the Box: Or, How to Goddamn Direct

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The Tony Award–winning director gathers memories of people, productions, and problems surmounted from his fifty-year career in this one-of-a-kind how-to handbook.

What do directors do? Jack O’Brien, the winner of Tony and Drama Desk Awards and the former artistic director of San Diego’s historic Old Globe theatre, describes it like this: “You stand before a situation in which something is presented to you. You’re afforded a challenge. Like catching an enormous ball. And you respond. You come up with a vision of some kind. That is, if you respond to the material at all, and one must, or it’s doomed. You sort of feel that since you relate to the material at hand, you might as well try to be helpful.”

In Jack in the Box, O’Brien’s follow-up to his memoir Jack Be Nimble, the director collects stories from the many productions he has worked on, the great talents he encountered and collaborated with (including Tom Stoppard, Mike Nichols, Jerry Lewis, Marsha Mason, and many others), and the choices he made, on the stage and off, that have come to define his career. With humor, warmth, and contagious excitement, O’Brien takes the reader by the shoulder, pulls them in, and tells them how to become a director—or, at the very least, relates an unfailingly honest story of how he did.

ISBN-13: 9781250872647

Media Type: Paperback

Publisher: Picador USA

Publication Date: 11-14-2023

Pages: 272

Product Dimensions: 8.25h x 5.38w x 0.61d

Jack O’Brien was born in 1939 and is an American director, producer, writer, and lyricist who served as the artistic director of the Old Globe theatre in San Diego from 1982 to 2007. He has won three Tony Awards and been nominated for seven more, and he has won five Drama Desk Awards. He is the author of Jack Be Nimble. He lives in Connecticut with an exceptional Norwich terrier named Coda.

Table of Contents

Backing My Way Forward 3

1 "What Is It You Actually Do?" 9

2 The Italian Job 25

3 Mr. Abbott Meets the Kid 35

4 "What's That For?" 49

5 The Jew on Broadway 67

6 Simon Says 79

7 One of the Ones That Got Away 93

8 Andrew and the Broken Eggs 109

9 The Women in My Life (and Their Lives in My Work) 139

10 I Liked Mike 149

11 Two Shakespearean Actors 175

12 The Best for Last 207

13 The Blank Behind the Curtain 237

An Afterthought … 241

The Jack O'Brien Works: A Timeline 247

Acknowledgments 255