INTERVIEW: Broadway director Kenny Leon on the theme of listening

Mark Medoff’s play Children of a Lesser God is currently being revived on Broadway at Studio 54 with a formidable cast that includes Joshua Jackson, Lauren Ridloff and Anthony Edwards. The romantic story finds a teacher in a school for deaf students falling in love with the woman he meets there.

The man at the helm of the production is director Kenny Leon, a Tony winner who has been represented on Broadway many times before. He has directed productions of Holler if You Hear Me, A Raisin in the Sun, The Mountaintop, Stick Fly and Fences.

For this present revival, Leon has been on a journey of a few years.

“When I was first approached to do the play, I had just finished doing A Raisin in the Sun on Broadway,” the director said in a recent phone interview. “I felt like, oh, wow, approached to do this play that is not specifically with the main theme being race, and as an African-American director, I was like, OK, I’m defined by more than race. I’m defined by subjects of love and family and betrayal and honor, so I was looking it at that way. And quite frankly in my own prejudice mind, I was thinking that it would be a white production of Children of a Lesser God, and it was a wonderful love story that had at the center of it the inability to communicate properly.”

After considering the play and the possibility of staging a new production, Leon took the advice of a friend to take classes in American Sign Language. It proved to be important advice.

“[My instructor] ended up being Lauren Ridloff, so an African-American, sign language teacher, stay-at-home mom with two deaf kids, and her husband was deaf,” Leon said. “And I grew so much in taking those lessons from her and started understanding or seeing the world through the eyes of a deaf person, and because of that, I grew as a person, as a director. And my vision for the play changed, and I ended up casting Lauren Ridloff … and partnering her with Joshua Jackson. Joshua and I had worked on Smart People off-Broadway. We knew we wanted to do something else together, and we had a commitment to do something together. And this came up next, and I put the two of them together. And they were magic from the first table read, so after casting Lauren, it made me realize, oh, the casting of the play should be really diverse. It should be white, black, brown and yellow, and that’s what I thought for the production.”

The show, which recently opened on Broadway, is now much larger than a love story, in Leon’s mind. Beyond the central romance is a focus on the general theme of communication and the difficulties of understanding another person.

“It’s really now a play and a production about how all of us in our country don’t really listen to each other,” he said. “We talk a lot, but we don’t really listen, and how much more beauty there could be in the world if we were to just listen to each other.”

Leon said Children of a Lesser God is his 11th show on Broadway, an impressive feat. This in-demand director doesn’t normally go a season without a new production opening in New York City, and most of his theatrical projects have been met with critical acclaim and big box office numbers.

But of all those shows, Children is his most rewarding.

“This is probably the most rewarding to me because I’ve grown so much as a person,” he said. “I’ve been in the room where I have a third deaf actors. I have hard of hearing. I have hearing. I have black. I have Asian. There’s so much difference in the room that there was so much beauty in the room, and we grew as a company. And I think what you see on that stage is a result of all of us listening to each other and creating something that is quite special, I think.”

To understand the full scope of the drama, Leon needed his cast to bring the characters to life. Once he had Jackson, Ridloff, Edwards and the rest of the company in place, he started to see the narrative working on multiple fronts.

“Once we put the cast together, I started seeing that the play worked on two or three different levels,” he said. “Forty years ago the play was presented as a way to introduce to the hearing community the challenges of the deaf community, and now the play does a little bit of that. But most of the play is just introducing all of us to the rest of us, so now with this production and this cast, it works on a racial level. It works on a class level. It works on an American level, so it works on so many different levels that you can feel the audience just from lights up, they’re really engaged every second of their time in the theater because they’re listening in a different way. And they’re finding themselves in the play. They’re finding themselves on stage, and when you can do that with a play, that’s saying something.”

When Leon was in the rehearsal room with the cast, he welcomed comments, suggestions and collaborations. By all accounts, he’s a director who likes to capture the community aspect of theater, and Children of a Lesser God is the end result of his teamwork.

“I think that theater is the most collaborative art form there is, so I would say that my job is to draw the parameter, to point the direction, to create a foundation on which we build,” Leon said. “And then I’m expecting the ideas to come in from designers and actors because the best work is the work when we answer, when we solve problems, and we’re basically problem-solvers when we’re putting together a play. We solve those problems when we don’t care about where the answer comes from, and I’m more interested in what I don’t know versus what I do know.”

He added: “In an ideal way I figure the play out, and I see it in my mind. But I sort of keep that close to my vest, and I try to lead the actors in a way that will allow them to make the solution specific. And their choice is what brings us to the beauty of the play because I do TV and film and live theater, so in live theater, all you have is the ability to lead the company in a way that they trust you because they’re on the stage every night. So if they trust you and believe what we’ve built, they’re going to repeat that every night, so it’s live. And they have the last word, and they have the last movement. So they have to believe it, so, yeah, it’s very collaborative. If we get into an argument about something, then, of course, I have the last word, but I’m always looking for what they bring to the truth of the story we’re telling.”

By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HollywoodSoapbox.com

Children of a Lesser God is currently at Studio 54 on Broadway in Midtown Manhattan. Click here for more information and tickets.