By Amanda Knox

Erin Murray is a young, spunky, quick-to-laugh, Seattle-based theatre director with credentials. Since earning her BA from The Samuel Beckett Centre at Trinity College Dublin and her MFA in Theatre Directing from Northwestern University, Murray has directed productions for INTIMAN Theatre Festival, Seattle Shakespeare Company, and New Century Theatre Company. She is now directing her first production for ArtsWest, Wonderful Life by Helen Pafumi & Jason Lott, and was kind enough to set aside some time during tech rehearsals to talk to me about the production.

So this is your first production at ArtsWest. What brought you here?

With all the training I’ve received, I was really interested in pushing past making stage pictures—the composition of bodies and set onstage to make a picture. What I felt like I really wanted to work on next as a director was that conversation with an actor about creating character. This past summer I assisted on a production of The Merchant of Venice, and I was speaking with Chuck Leggett—an amazing Seattle-based actor—about his interpretation of Shylock, and he said, “Well, you know, Shylock was really created with myself and John Langs,” the director. I thought, “That’s what I really want to work on. How can I assist someone as great as Chuck Leggett in a way that he can say that we built a character together?” And then, be careful what you wish for, because I found out Mat Wright was trying to find the right director for this one-man show of It’s a Wonderful Life. So I said, OK, let’s do this. I met with Mat Wright and we both were really interested in how to bring a fresh take to such a well known story. And because I had never seen the movie before and it was not a part of my romantic canon of my holidays of yore, I was able to see it as a suicide story. The original idea that I had was that it had to do with someone wrestling with PTSD. Unfortunately, the playwright wouldn’t sign off on that, so we changed it so that you still have a man in 2015 struggling with a serious moment of doubt and crisis, using the story of It’s a Wonderful Life to hopefully come to the same conclusion as George Bailey does to save his own life. I wanted to make it very present and very new, and that got us thinking about how we can open it up even more, by casting a person-of-color who doesn’t look anything like Jimmy Stewart.

Can you tell me more about accessing It’s a Wonderful Life through a person-of-color? I can’t help but wonder if there was a connection with Black Lives Matter and the PTSD that comes from being a person-of-color in the United States. Is your message to convey that this is a valuable life? That this is a story about a person questioning whether their life even matters in this society?

I want to say, “Yes, and…” It’s about bringing a fresh face to 2015 and thinking about the problem of representation. The conversation right now in American theatre is not only how do we get more material with people-of-color cast, but how do you stop assuming race. So often when you read a script, unless the race is specified, you assume the character is white. So there’s lots of activity to get away from that. We’re interested in color conscious casting and how you can use that to further enlighten a story. When you strip all the iconography off of the story from the movie, you’re left with this really vulnerable story that we get to reenter in 2015 with fresh blood. My pull quote for this production is: “If James Bond can be black, why can’t George Bailey?”

And the man is Andrew Lee Creech. What have you learned from working with him?

I’m so pro Andrew Lee Creech. You will fall in love with him. What I’ve discovered is that actors don’t want esoteric director language. They want verbs. To kill. To eat. To win. Supplying them with good verbs to put into action is key. But in addition to giving him the action, I feel like I have to give him an understanding of why the verb is the verb. I tell him, “You can’t just ride the bus. You have to drive the bus and also know how the engine works.” So if my main mission in joining this project was to succeed in constructing a character, I’ve learned that it’s about finding the overarching verb of what drives the character.

Also, I had the bizarre experience of casting a one-man show, which is unusual. Usually, either the person who wrote the show comes to you, or you would have a script and already have an actor in mind. It was so funny casting this. I saw about eight different actors between Seattle and Portland and I basically went on dates with these handsome actors, because that’s really the relationship. With a one-man show, the table is no longer between you and the actor. You need to give them enough information so that, when you leave the bus, they can drive without you. And it was like a date. I was thinking about how I’m going to be investing a lot of time with this person, and they can’t be charming for just ten minutes because the play is a whole seventy minutes.

The headline will read: “Director Goes on Dates.”

“Abuses Power.” Yep. I will say that I was aware that I’m the only female director this season, and I didn’t want to play it safe. I didn’t want to do just some white guy in a powder blue suit going on talking about Christmas. And Mat was like, “I don’t want that either. I don’t want you to play it safe. So let’s figure this out.” That was important to me.

How festive is this show?

There is a red scarf. And the protagonist warms up to the David Bowie/Bing Crosby Little Drummer Boy duet. So that will ring a few bells. Also if you strip Christmas of its iconography, you’re left with the idea that, at the bleakest of times, life is born through the belief in human decency. In that case, this is the best kind of Christmas story.

Wonderful Life plays December 3 – 27, 2015 at ArtsWest Playhouse and Gallery (4711 California Ave SW, Seattle WA 98116). No shows December 24th and 25th. Tickets (ranging from $17 - $37.50) are on sale now and may be purchased online at www.artswest.org or by phone at 206.938.0339, or at the box office Thursday – Saturday 1:30 - 7:30 p.m. and Sunday 10:30 a.m. – 3:00 p.m.