Sheila Daniels makes audiences listen. When Bart Sher,
the
decorated artistic director of Intiman, hired her as his associate
director last fall, he was effectively hiring his opposite.
Sher favors thunder, bombast, Sturm und Drang. Daniels, who toiled
in the Seattle fringe scene for 15 years, builds intensity with
quietness, favors substance over flash. She doesn’t push her actors to
assault the audience; she makes us lean forward, go to them.
Sher’s offer to Daniels was the kind directors dream of, but Daniels
hesitated. Her first thoughts weren’t about fame and glory—they
were about leaving a humble life for the rarefied air of a Tony
Award–winning theater.
“I had crafted a poverty-stricken but easy life,” she says in what
turns out to be—appropriately—a lulling interview.
The soft-spoken director had just recovered from a rough couple of
years: “I had been through the death of a friend and an amicable but
very painful divorce. I lost a huge amount of weight, had been studying
Buddhism, and had come to a place of inner peace I hadn’t had since I
was 4 years old. Getting that offer was kind of like falling in love
when it’s a terrible moment to fall in love.”
Friends told her she’d be crazy not to take the job. She
relented, and the first thing Sher did was push her out of the plane.
Next week, her first show at Intiman opens: A Streetcar Named
Desire, the biggest production of her career.
This is Sheila Daniels’s moment.
“I wanted to hire her because she’s a great, young, local director,”
Sher says. “And I immediately wanted to give her as hard and big a job
as I possibly could.” The stage and the audience are more than twice
the scale she’s used to. And the budget? “Nothing on the set will be
from my living room. That’s a first,” Daniels says.
Daniels came to Seattle in 1992 to recover from a sour relationship
in Corvallis, Oregon, and began one of the more prolific careers in
Seattle theater. She directed dozens of plays, from “terrible ensemble
pieces” (her words) to the quietly brilliant Bridge of San Luis
Rey that helped one of its leads (actress Amy Thone) and its
production company (Strawberry Theatre Workshop) win Stranger Genius
Awards.
As a director, Daniels is tender, almost maternal, and coaxes deep,
multifaceted performances out of her actors. She can terrify audiences,
as she did with God’s Country—a tense version of Steven
Dietz’s play about white supremacists in which Daniels demonstrated her
ability to forsake quietude for noise when necessary—but prefers
persuasion. Her best work is gentle but firm, permeating our minds and
replacing our thoughts with her own.
A director’s gifts are always hard to track onstage and Daniels, who
makes a virtue of seeming unobtrusive, leaves particularly light
footprints. It’s difficult to identify signature Sheila Daniels
moments, but her résumé is full of excellent, varied
productions you might have forgotten were hers. An abbreviated
list:
Crime and Punishment: A searing, emotionally dense version
for three actors in which Daniels pushed the audience close to the
stage, so we could hear the actors whisper and hiss. The Last
State: A moody solo show about Hawaii by Sarah Rudinoff.
Waiting for Lefty: A production of the 1935 socialist play
which then-theater-editor Annie Wagner called “tough” and
“high-voltage.” And God’s Country: Its simmering violence was
so angry, so close to the surface, some audience members found
themselves flinching and weeping.
Daniels loves actors, and had to learn how to be tough with them.
When she first started directing, she says she was nurturing to the
point of timidity. She was, she says, “a chickenshit.” (Daniels may be
gentle, but she’s also principled and stubborn. For 2006, she protested
the Iraq war by refusing to pay taxes and sent a letter of explanation
to the IRS in lieu of a check. The IRS hasn’t written her back.)
One night after a rehearsal for Streetcar, Daniels tells me
the actors are beating themselves up. “They’re halfway ready for
performance and want to be ready for performance right now,” she says
in another lulling interview, this time sipping pints of… Stella.
“And that difference feels like shit. You can see the buoy you want to
swim to, but you’re still in the middle of the ocean.”
But Daniels remains calm. “I partly learned how to direct—how
to manage stress—working customer service for a courier company,”
she says. “If you can deal with someone screaming ‘Where’s the
fucking kidney?‘ over the phone, you can deal with being a
director.”
And she found just the right actors. Daniels scoured the country for
her Stanley Kowalski, auditioning scores of men on both coasts. She was
looking for a particular mix: a kinetic, physical actor, a little
dangerous but controlled enough to handle stage violence. He had to
surprise her in rehearsal. He had to find Stanley’s sense of humor.
(“Brando didn’t find it,” she says.) And he had to know Shakespeare.
“This play is Shakespeare,” she says. “Shakespeare with New
Orleans accents and 100 props.”
Daniels nearly despaired of finding her man when Chelsey Rives, who
is playing Stella, suggested Jonno Roberts, a Los Angeles–based
actor who grew up in a working-class family in New Zealand. He was
perfect.
“I’m in that wonderful place where I’m in love with the actors,” she
says. Then she yawns. It’s nearly ten, close to her bedtime. She gets
up at six every morning to go running. “I’m a morning person in the
theater,” she says, laughing, and walks out the door. 
