There’s a point in rehearsals — usually a few weeks in — where something quietly goes off the rails, and it doesn’t look like a problem at first.

Everything is… working.  The blocking is set. People know where they’re going. Lines are mostly there. The scenes are clean. As a director you can sit in your chair and watch it all unfold and think, “Okay. This is coming together.”

And then, almost without noticing it, you start fiddling.  Not big things. Little things. Helpful things.

“Take that line a beat later.”

“Cross a little sooner there.”

“Pick up the glass on this word instead.”

All reasonable, defensible, and completely capable of sucking the life out of a scene if you’re not careful.

I’ve done this. I do this. Especially on shows like Rabbit Hole or Lost in Yonkers, where there’s nowhere to hide. No spectacle to distract you. It’s just people, sitting in rooms, telling the truth or not. And if they’re not — everyone knows.

That kind of pressure does something to a director’s brain.  It makes you want to control things, because if you can just get every moment right — if you can shape every pause and every movement and every inflection — then surely the scene will land.

Sadly it just doesn’t work like that.

I recently watched a run of Rabbit Hole where everything we had worked on was technically there. All the beats were in place, and the emotional turns were where they were supposed to be. It was exactly what we had rehearsed.

And it was dead.

Not bad or wrong – not by a long shot. Just… dead. Like everyone had agreed, very politely, to recreate something we had decided was good a week earlier.

So I did what I always do in this situation – I stopped giving notes.

Not forever — I’m not that evolved — but in that moment, I just shut up and let them run it again.  And something changed. It wasn’t dramatic and the scene wasn’t reinvented, but someone actually listened instead of waiting. A pause stretched a little because it needed to, not because we had set it. A line landed differently and suddenly there was air in the room again.

That’s the thing you forget when you start over-directing: the moment only works if it’s actually happening now – not being recreated from a set of instructions you handed out on Tuesday night.

Lost in Yonkers messes with this in a different way. You can feel rhythm baked into it. The timing and placement matter. There’s a version of that show where everything clicks into place like a metronome and you think, “Yes — nailed it.”  But if the actors are just executing timing instead of living inside it, the whole thing starts to feel like a very well-rehearsed demonstration instead of a Pulitzer Prize-winning play.

Over-directing doesn’t come from arrogance as much as we like to pretend it does. It comes from nerves. From that little voice that says, “If I don’t fix this, it might not land.” So I step in. And then again. And then again. Until the actors stop making choices because they’re too busy trying to remember mine.

That’s when I know I’ve crossed that thin line between shaping the story and managing behaviour.  It’s kind of like going from a director to a puppeteer and it sucks for the actors.

Directors are supposed to shape things. That’s the job. Pacing matters. Clarity matters. You can’t just throw a group of actors on a stage and hope magic happens. That’s not directing, that’s just negligence.

It took me a while to figure out that there’s a difference between giving a scene a spine and trying to control every breath it takes.

I catch myself now — not always in time, but more often than I used to — asking a simple question before I open my mouth:

“Is this about the story… or is this about making it look the way I pictured it?”

Those are absolutely not the same thing, and honestly, the latter is usually just me trying to feel in control.

The best moments I’ve seen in rehearsal never came from a perfectly executed note. They come from that split second where something real slips in. Where an actor surprises themselves. Where the timing isn’t “right,” but it’s true.  You don’t get those moments by tightening the screws.  You are more likely to get them by building something solid enough that it can hold the weight… and then leaving a little space for it to breathe.

For directors, that means stepping out of your comfort zone and letting go, just a bit. Letting the actors carry more of it. Trusting that the work you’ve done is enough.

I still feel the urge every time. I drives me nuts.  That itch to adjust one more thing, lean one more moment, or fix one more beat.

It’s a challenge to not give in to that urge, but I know that my job isn’t to control the moment – it’s to make sure the moment can happen.  As much as it goes against every instinct I have, I know that I have to just leave it alone.