Michael Pressman: Coming Home...to Broadway

About the author:
Most Broadway fans can only imagine what it's like to see a play unfold from backstage and experience the transformative power of theater up close. Michael Pressman got his first taste of theatrical magic at age eight, when his father, David, directed The Disenchanted at the Coronet Theatre now the Eugene O'Neill in the fall of 1958. Based on a novel by Budd Schulberg, the play featured the Broadway debut of Jason Robards co-starring with his father, Jason Robards Sr., Rosemary Harris and George Grizzard, among others. No wonder the younger Pressman was inspired to become an award-winning producer and director of film, TV with credits ranging from his Emmy-winning work on Picket Fences to Law & Order and the new series Cashmere Mafia and now theater. His debut as a Broadway director, Manhattan Theatre Club's revival of Come Back, Little Sheba starring S. Epatha Merkerson, Kevin Anderson and Zoe Kazan, has received warm reviews for its fine acting and emotional honesty. As Pressman tells Broadway.com, it's a happy case of coming home—in more ways than one.

For me, at the age of 57, to finally realize a lifelong dream of directing a play on Broadway is an experience that transcends simple explanation.

This dream goes back to my childhood. I was fortunate enough to have grown up in Manhattan in an artistic family. My father was an acting teacher and director, and my mother was a dancer. Going to the theater was not considered a luxury—it was our family's religion. My parents were not wealthy, but all their extra savings went to theater tickets. I had life-changing experiences in the theater: I saw Zero Mostel transform into a Rhinoceros, I saw Richard Kiley become the Man of La Mancha, I saw the original productions of The Great White Hope, The Miracle Worker, Incident at Vichy, Fiddler on the Roof, A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum and many, many more.

But my greatest experience was going backstage with my father at the age of eight, watching from the wings as Jason Robards died of alcoholism in his Tony-winning Broadway debut in The Disenchanted, which my father directed. It was at that moment I knew I wanted to be an actor, and my parents enrolled me in a children's theater group at the YMHA. In two short years, I ended up off-Broadway at the Theater De Lys now the Lucille Lortel playing the ringleader of a street gang in a production of Emil and the Detectives. I was seriously hooked.

For every young man, it is a scary proposition to think of filling one's father's shoes, so I became scared of a life in the theater. I also loved movies and dreamed of making them. I went to film school and started having some success. But I kept missing the live experience. So I made some films about the theater, one called Those Lips, Those Eyes about summer stock, starring Frank Langella; and the other, Frankie and Johnny Are Married, based on an experience I had trying to do a production of Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune in Los Angeles.

But I was still missing that sense of connection to a live audience.

I directed theater in Los Angeles, but I knew that New York was the place where theater was cherished and revered as the center of the city's cultural life. Rediscovering the play Come Back, Little Sheba allowed me the opportunity to journey back. There's something about the pain and sense of loss in the characters of William Inge that I've always related to. When I reread the play, I was as moved as when I saw the movie 15 years ago. But it had even more relevance now, because the issues of dependency and addiction and the difficulties of marriage are so much more out in the open.

And yet, have we really shed that much more light on those topics than when Inge's play debuted on Broadway in 1950? The mysteries of anguished lives like Lola and Doc in Come Back, Little Sheba resonate even more strongly today. I also felt the play had a sense of nostalgia for simpler times, before cell phones, e-mail, text messages and answering machines, with the irony being that life was just as complicated. We yearn for the days of the local milkman and the local postman and the Western Union boy instead of voicemail-as-operator or even a hospital where the recorded menus go on forever.

I had a strong feeling that others would feel the way I did about Come Back, Little Sheba—and initially I was quite wrong. I was met with a good deal of resistance to both the datedness of the play and the writing of Inge himself. That is, until I connected with S. Epatha Merkerson, whom I had directed in Law & Order. Then things started to fall into place. Michael Ritchie of the Center Theater Group in Los Angeles had heard about the idea of a revival from the director Scott Ellis, who was a champion of the project, and Michael loved the casting idea of Epatha as Lola. He felt that she answered his major question: Who could climb the mountain already climbed by Shirley Booth? He gave us a slot last year at the Kirk Douglas Theater in Los Angeles and supported us fully. Then Mandy Greenfield from Manhattan Theatre Club flew out and saw the play and picked it up for MTC's season—and, finally, I found my way back.

I realize now what this revival is all about to me. It is more than directing a play on Broadway. It is realizing the dream of returning to my roots. I have finally come back to where I belong. I have come home.