
David Cromer, a recipient of a MacArthur “genius” grant, is a director and actor of extraordinary insight and empathy. His production several years ago of Thornton Wilder’s Our Town, which he directed and in which he himself at times played the Stage Manager, was transcendent. It won him an Obie Award for stripping the sentimentality from the play and then digging more deeply into the emotional and simple core at his radically theatrical heart.
Cromer got his start in the Chicago theatre – where, among many productions, he directed Angels in America Parts I and II, for which he won a Joseph Jefferson Award, and starred as Ned Weeks in The Normal Heart – but he has established roots in New York since that production of Our Town. He won the Tony last year as Best Director of a Musical for A Band’s Visit and currently is in Kenneth Lonergan’s The Waverly Gallery on Broadway directed by Lila Neugebauer. The cast of The Waverly Gallery also includes Lucas Hedges, Joan Allen, Michael Cera, and Elaine May, who portrays Gladys, the Greenwich Village doyenne of the family and the owner of the gallery of the title. Gladys is beginning to suffer a decline caused by dementia and Lonergan’s play delineates that decline scene-by-scene with the stealth of a stenographer grappling with a heartrending narrative.
Christopher Isherwood in his review in The New York Times of that production of Our Town back in 2009 wrote, “Mr. Cromer, who plays the central role of the Stage Manager, doesn’t seem to have an avuncular bone in his body.” But he’s never been the nephew type either. Is brotherly a better description of him? Maybe. Finally. I’ll let him explain.
DAVID CROMER: I am bad at these things. I have bad grammar.
KEVIN SESSUMS: But you’re a genius.
DC: Yeah, well, thank you, I guess.
KS: Maybe you’re just an idiot savant.
DC: That’s probably more like it. If there is any truth to the quality of the work, it’s definitely attributable to being an idiot savant.
KS: You’re enjoying The Waverly Gallery? What a cast …
DC: Very much. And everyone in the cast is very nice – which doesn’t necessarily make interesting copy.
KS: You’ve done so much theatre as both an actor and as a director, so does everyone being nice to each other necessarily mean a production is going to be good or interesting since there might be a lack of tension on the stage?
DC: I don’t think so. I have a pretty strong record of shows that I have directed in which everyone likes each other very much. I have never been able to see how – and I know that there are people who have seen it – that being uncomfortable with someone, having tension with someone, translates to every night at 8 o’clock I’m going to go out and harness this on a moment-to-moment level. If I’m uncomfortable with you or I don’t trust you, I’m just uncomfortable with you and I don’t trust you. So when I’m onstage with you, I’m just thinking about how uncomfortable I am with you and how I don’t trust you. I have not had that experience that it adds to the work. But, yes, you always hear about that when you’re studying and you’re learning. I’m sure there are people for whom that works. You know, you hear they hated each other and they went out onstage and really took it out on each other in exciting ways. Maybe that works three or four times, but I’m not sure how long that can work. You always hear that Jerome Robbins kept the Jets and the Sharks at each other’s throats supposedly. I wish I had a slightly more sophisticated example. That just gives you an example of how highbrow my references are.
KS: Well, we are here because you’re in a Broadway play. The Waverly Gallery though is an atypical one in its documentary-like quality and its rather redundant narrative structure, the sadness of all its scenes as it burrows deeper and deeper into the sameness until we unexpectedly reach a different emotional destination than we were expecting – even as we reach the narrative one we knew all along that was coming because in some sense we are already there.

DC: It’s interesting you say documentary because the first thing I thought when I read it – and I mean this as a compliment – is that the play never starts (whatever the play was going to be) because we are just dealing with the illness. Every scene is this ongoing struggle – sometimes effectively, sometimes ineffectively – as we are hammering and chipping away at this problem. So the whole thing sort of is a documentary.
KS: Were you more drawn to being a part of this remarkable cast or the play itself?
DC: I don’t think I could separate them. I will say it was extraordinarily flattering to be asked to be in it. So I would say it that way.
KS: Did it help your self regard or does your self regard need any help?
DC: Oh, my self regard needs help.
KS: You just won a Tony for Best Director.
DC: They give them out every year, Kevin. Every year.
KS: You won a MacArthur Grant.
DC: Every year. And the money’s gone from the MacArthur. Are you still a genius if the money’s gone?
KS: Yes. Especially if the money’s gone. I’ve said that you have the career I have the fantasy of having as both an actor and a director. But when you are onstage as an actor how do you turn off that director part of you and surrender to someone else’s direction?
DC: I would say there is a blurry line. As an actor, you’re always planning and thinking about what you’re going to do. You keep giving yourself notes. But then there’s also the collaboration with the director. As for the question of how do I turn it off, I don’t think you turn it off. I think you use it. I think it is part of your critical faculties or your critical facilities or your critical tools necessary to build the thing. To make the thing. I don’t know because I have always kind of done both. Looking back, I would always direct the childhood games we were playing. The position exists because of behavioral patterns in people, not vice versa.
KS: Do you miss Chicago when you’re here, or do you think of yourself now as a New Yorker?
DC: That’s an interesting question. I miss the ease and comfort of Chicago. I miss the fact that I used to hang out with a lot more people when I was in Chicago. But I also think you hung out with more people when you were younger. And if you don’t get married and have kids, then you end up seeing your friends maybe twice a week instead of every day. I’m going back to Chicago to direct Next to Normal at my friend Michael Halberstam’s Writers Theatre in Glencoe. And then we’ve got to do The Band’s Visit’s tour.

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Adrianne Krstansky
Thank you so much.