.Best Director

Mark Jackson

Writer-director Mark Jackson has had a heck of a run lately. Already
this year he’s returned twice to Shotgun Players, for whom he did the
acclaimed The Death of Meyerhold in 2004. The year began with
his fashionista take on Macbeth, in which actors continually
struck poses like runway models, and he recently finished co-directing
and starring in Faust Part One, his adaptation of Goethe’s
immense and near-unstageable play of the same name, in which the first
half-hour consists entirely of Faust facing the audience and holding
forth on his philosophical discontents before it gets to the
soul-selling and doomed romance. Between those dark and diabolical
undertakings, he staged a similarly bloody but revelatory, fresh, and
pitch-perfect production of Strindberg’s Miss Julie for Aurora
Theatre that made the script’s troublesome misogyny and all-around
misanthropy feel wholly true to the psychology of the characters. With
a strong emphasis on stylized movement and the kind of stage pictures
he wants to create, Jackson likes to have design elements in place on
day one of rehearsal and plunge right into blocking and choreography
rather than leaving them for later, and it pays off in seemingly
seamless integration of word and action.

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