I just finished reading Anne Bogart's Conversations with Anne. The book has a format extremely similar to The Director's Voice vol.2 which I bought in DC a few months back and absolutely loved (you can read my review here). It has the exact same typesetting, same font, same way to print the interviewer's questions in bold before the interviewee's answer, same setup with a short introduction of the director before each interview. Yet, while I gave an enthusiastic five stars to The Director's Voice vol.2, and while this book is also very good, I only give it four stars out of five (worse things happen in life than being deemed "very good" instead of "truly exceptional"...) Here is why.
Anne Bogart is a very famous stage director, and rightfully so. If you're into theater, you may have heard about her Viewpoints method, although she is quick to point out in the book that the true inventor of the method was Mary Overlie, and she (Bogart) was more of a scavenger - her word. About a decade ago (around 2004-2006), she held a series of interviews about theater with fellow stage directors she admires as a reaction to the politics of then-President George W. Bush, the invasion of Iraq and the political climate of the time. Her introductions before each interview are perfunctory at best and the main points are typically repeated in her first few statements in the interview itself, making the introduction a bit redundant. She is also clearly on the side of the people she interviews (not a bad thing, but if the two people on stage agree with each other all the time, I tend to feel there is one person too many up there) and she shares an extensive past trying to make art in theater with them, shared experience that the reader doesn't have.
The interviewer of The Director's Voice vol.2, Jason Loewith, is rather unknown on the national stage, but he does such an amazing job introducing his interviewees (retracing their career paths, setting the interviews in the context of what those directors were facing at the time and sometimes adding a few words about what happened after the interview, such as a job change) that I found myself excited to discover their work first hand and looking up online when they might direct a play nearby. Anne Bogart's Conversations are more like an advanced, theater-folks-only version of such interviews, where she either assumes that her readers have far more knowledge of interviewees' work than I have, or doesn't realize that such knowledge matters in making her print audience excited about reading the book. Otherwise you have to go through a lot of pages where people you know very little about talk about themselves. (Side note: Loewith's book has small headshots of the interviewees. Bogart's doesn't.)
An important difference between Bogart's book and The Director's Voice vol.2 was that Bogart's interviews happened in front of a live audience, presumably of theater-lovers with a certain sophistication about the artform, while Loewith's are one-on-one interviews where he can more take the time to ask simple questions on behalf of the reader. Bogart's premise - to hold these interviews following the invasion of Iraq - also makes the book seem slightly dated, since the interviewees do spend some time commenting on the terrible climate they faced and the way they felt about what was going on, but in 2014 the benefit of hindsight makes us not quite relate to what they are saying anymore (we can feel bad about the current political climate for other reasons, just not the ones discussed in the book).
All in all, this is a very good book that, for me, doesn't quite rise to the amazingness of Loewith's book of interviews, but remains nonetheless very valuable for theater-lovers out there.
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