Jack in the Box: or, How to Goddamn Direct

The Tony Awardwinning director gathers memories of people, productions, and problems surmounted from his fifty-year career in this one-of-a-kind how-to handbook. What do directors do? Jack OBrien, the winner of Tony and Drama Desk Awards and the former artistic director of San Diegos historic Old Globe theatre, describes it like this: You stand before a situation in which something is presented to you. Youre afforded a challenge. Like catching an enormous ball. And you respond. You come up with a vision of some kind. That is, if you respond to the material at all, and one must, or its doomed. You sort of feel that since you relate to the material at hand, you might as well try to be helpful. In Jack in the Box, OBriens follow-up to his memoir Jack Be Nimble, the director collects stories from the many productions he has worked on, the great talents he encountered and collaborated with (including Tom Stoppard, Mike Nichols, Jerry Lewis, Marsha Mason, and many others), and the choices he made, on the stage and off, that have come to define his career. With humor, warmth, and contagious excitement, OBrien takes the reader by the shoulder, pulls them in, and tells them how to become a directoror, at the very least, relates an unfailingly honest story of how he did.