Director of Brandeis Players' latest performance, 'Escape From Happiness,' Doug Lockwood shares his experience in theater, a personal take on EFH and the importance of the arts in society.

JustArts: What about George F. Walker's play Escape From Happiness attracted you to direct it?
Doug Lockwood: I have always loved Walker's caustic, dark, muscular language and the surprising way that just when you think a character is done, they take an idea or thought three steps further into a verbose extravaganza!
JA: How do you decide which plays you want to be involved in, whether it is directing or acting?
DL: It's a combination of things. There are a bunch of plays I've seen or been part of over the years that I keep on kind of a back burner in my brain, and when the time is right, they begin to boil. Sometimes an artistic director or chair will give me some parameters of the kinds of plays they're looking to produce. With acting nowadays, it's about wanting to work with certain directors more than certain roles. That's been an interesting shift for me.
JA: As a professional actor and director, what importance do you think the arts can bring to the regular workings of society and the people that it reaches?
DL: With the pulse of society becoming more rapid, I believe theater is even more important these days in allowing people to slow down and examine their thoughts and feelings in community with other people. We go through our days with so much armor and technology, and theater is a place where we can unzip that armor and see what's inside. That can produce all kinds of changes by simply sensitizing people to their common humanity. Maybe the armor they wear when they leave the theater can be a little less heavy.
JA: You are a founding member of the Actors Shakespeare Project here in Boston; how did you first become interested in Shakespeare plays and thereby involved with ASP?
DL: I got my undergrad training at University of Colorado Boulder, and there is a wonderful Shakespeare Festival there that I did for two summers. We also had great teachers of Shakespeare at that school. I got involved with ASP when I first moved back to Boston in 2003, and it was great timing because I was more and more interested in site-specific theater which is what we do with the plays.
JA: Having been on both sides of the stage as an actor and director, do you think that the type of interaction and relationship that is built between actor and director impacts the quality or impact of a performance?
DL: Yes. I believe the director sets the tone for everything you experience at the performance from the moment you arrive to the moment you leave. I believe the director's main job is to create a theatrical process where the actors and designers are constantly inspired to investigate and explore the play freshly each time. To truly do that, the actors need to feel a real sense of trust and freedom (as opposed to fear), which they will have only if the process has been truly collaborative and thorough.
JA: Escape From Happiness is a comedic exploration into the life of an average family and the challenges they face. How do you think audience members will react to a theme so familiar to their own lives?
DL: With laughter and recognition and empathy, I hope. I have never seen theater as an "escape" (ironically perhaps), but rather as an opportunity to look closer at my own "stuff," and I do think this play does that in a very darkly funny way.
JA: Walker wrote this play in 1991; what do you think it is about plays like Escape From Happiness, that are a form of social commentary but still manage to remain relevant to society two decades after it was first produced?
DL: Well, I think the great playwrights like George F. Walker tend to write about the big themes, and those don't change, in my opinion, so that his characters' grapplings in this play around personal issues such as family, love and identity are still extremely relevant, as are the societal ones he explores: police brutality, the conditions of our neighborhoods, speaking out against the system, etc.
JA: What Shakespeare character do you relate to most and why?
DL: Well, its always changing, but today I would say Feste from Twelfth Night. He is both inside and outside of his community, and I feel that way too. He can be a trusted friend and confidante, and then he can disappear for a long stretch of time, and I am like that too. I also identify with his mixture of wit and melancholy. And I do enjoy singing.

-Jessie Miller