Russell Hodgkinson, John Aylward, MJ Sieber, R. Hamilton Wright, Charles Leggett, the cast of Seattle Rep's "Glengarry Glen Ross." Photo by Derek Sparks
Six and a half feet tall, with long hair, rough-hewn features, and a penchant for black leather jackets, Wilson Milam manages at once to stand out and to disappear in plain sight. Have him pointed out to you in a crowd and you can't help but notice him towering over the rest; pass him on the street and you probably wouldn't look up. It's an effect that's well suited to his personality: friendly but somewhat taciturn, in an interview he would sometimes stop mid-sentence to ponder something, an odd flicker of a happy memory crossing his face, only to ultimately defer the question.
Milam's also one of the most successful theatre directors you've likely never heard of, and certainly one of the most successful theatre artists to emerge from Seattle in last few decades. His career began in collaboration with playwright and actor Tracy Letts in Chicago in the early Nineties, with Milam directing Letts' first two plays, years before the he wrote the Pulitzer Prize-winning August: Osage County. From Chicago, Milam made his way to London where he's been based for more than a decade, making a name for himself as a director of new plays, perhaps most notoriously with the premiere Martin McDonagh's The Lieutenant of Inishmore, a darkly comic bloodbath of infamous proportions that's being staged at ACT Theatre in October.
Last year, Milam made his Seattle debut as a director with a widely praised production of Conor McPherson's The Seafarer at the Rep (itself a bit of bloodbath of booze), and now, he's returned to direct one of the plays that's been a life-long dream of his: Glengarry Glen Ross, David Mamet's 1982 masterpiece about an office of desperate real estate salesman, starring a who's who cast of Seattle's best actors, including R. Hamilton Wright, MJ Sieber, and Charles Leggett. The show opens tonight, Feb. 10, and runs through the 28th; tickets $15-$59.
I met with Milam a couple weeks ago to discuss the play and his career over coffee at Caffe Zingaro in Lower Queen Anne, near the theatre. Asked what part of town he grew up in, he chuckled and responded: "Bellevue. Back when QFC was still a pasture land, and there was no bridge. I still say the 'new' bridge."
It was during college, while Milam was studying comparative literature at the University of Washington, that he first caught the acting bug. "I started as an extra in a movie...what was it?" he paused long to try to recall the name. "They filmed a couple here that year. The Long Green Convertible?" He mulled it over then shrugged it off; I never managed to determine what movie it was. "New England college, Harvard-esque. They wanted college students. It was the middle of summer and they had us in wool jackets and overcoats," he explained. "I wound up being a stand-in for lighting for a couple of the actors as well. And I sort of enjoyed that."
After that, Milam began performing in plays at the university, after being cast in a Molière one-act simply because of his height opposite the lead actress. After college, he continued performing in shows around Seattle—"Passable actor, I'm sure," as he put it with a sardonic grin—until he started to become interested in directing.
"I did a production of Inherit the Wind, with Ted D'Arms," he explained, referencing a well-known Seattle actor (at least back in the Eighties) for stage and screen. "I was Jesse H. Dunlap, farmer and cabinetmaker. And I thought Ted was having more fun than maybe some of us were, and I just started thinking about that side of it. Because Ted, just as an actor and a person and a raconteur and bon vivant and all those things, he was just inspiring. And that started me thinking about the other side."
From Seattle, Milam relocated to Chicago, where he landed his first (unpaid) assistant directing job while working the box office, when the director invited him into rehearsal to help provide feedback. But it was Milam's relationship with Tracy Letts that really kick-started his career.
"I met Tracy through an educational outreach show at Steppenwolf that I AD'd, and we became friends," he explained. "And as he was writing the play [Letts' first, Killer Joe] and doing readings, I got to know him, and it was one of those odd plays that he finished and it was great and everybody in town turned down.
"Finally, in the second round of asking friends, they gave us this space in the Next Theatre Lab, up in Evanston. A roof-space about one-tenth the size of this space," he said laughing, gesturing around the cafe. "It sat 45 if you crowded everybody in. And then, just through a series of contacts, we knew somebody who knew somebody who knew somebody who knew that they wanted a show at the Traverse [Theatre in Edinburgh, Scotland], they wanted something gritty and American. And we took it there [as part of the 1993 Edinburgh Fringe Festival], which led to London, which led to getting it back to New York. And that started it for all of us."
"There were wonderful rehearsals and late-night discussions about the script. I'm sure like Mamet, like any of the good ones, we'd rehearse, we'd be reading, we'd stay up all night talking about it, and we'd discuss and discuss and discuss. And there was a wonderful cast," he continued. "Michael Shannon, who's toast of the world right now. He's one of those guys with unerring theatrical instincts, acting instincts." Shannon, of course, went on to a long and distinguished career, including a 2009 Academy Award nomination for best supporting actor for his role in Revolutionary Road; he lost to the deceased Heath Ledger, for The Dark Knight.
"It was no surprise he was going to come through eventually," Milam said of Letts with a grin. "He'd been writing that big script forever."
After going on to direct Letts' second play, Bug, which opened in London in 1996, Milam settled in the UK. One of his most noted productions was the world premiere of Martin McDonagh's The Lieutenant of Inishmore. Set in the Irish countryside, the play follows a sadistic Irish terrorist known as "Mad Padraic," who's too insane and violent even for the Irish National Liberation Army, a splinter group that was itself too radical for the IRA. A dark comedy, the story centers on Padraic returning home in violent rage because someone's killed his beloved cat, about the only thing he has the least empathy for. Comic and extremely violent, the gun-fire onstage reportedly led to calls to the police when the play ran on Broadway; various figures have been thrown around for the gallons of fake blood used every night. Fifteen was what I read about the Broadway production.
"Seven gallons" a night, Milam told me. "It varied. We did it originally at the Royal Shakespeare Company, so we had the benefit of an eight-week rehearsal period."
"I knew from reading it the first time" that the play would be a hit. "My back was out from an injury, and I was hurting myself laughing so hard. Martin had seen Killer Joe, we had a fair amount of blood in Killer Joe, a fair amount of fights, odd weapons. Mayhem. Carnage. And we got to talking, and that started that dialogue."
According to Milam, McDonagh's experience trying to get the play produced was similar to his and Letts's experience with Killer Joe. "Inishmore was another piece that had been turned down just about everywhere," he told me. "We almost had a repeat: the small space at the RSC, the Other Place. Lovely space. Didn't have the tin roof anymore, that you read about and hear about from the famous Other Place stories. And they just kind of left us alone, and we figured out how to do it. Sort of trial and error. Then we went to the Barbican [in London], changed a few things in the West End, changed a few things at the Atlantic [in New York], so by the time we got to the Lyceum [on Broadway], we were a finely tuned instrument."
It was at this point that I inquired more about Milam's directing methods. Whatever else, The Lieutenant of Inishmore is a brutal show—the main character is introduced mid-torture session—and I wondered how Milam worked to present the text, to keep the story from getting bogged down in its own gore.
"You read the script and find out what the script wants and is asking for. I've never been one to go for broad strokes outside," he said, but added: "I've always been a new plays guy, that's how I started. Still to this day, probably three-quarters of the shows I've done have been new plays. And I think I approach anything else as a new play." In other words, for Milam, serving the script is the main priority—essentially, his job is to figure out how to execute the playwright's vision.
"In that one [Inishmore], you have certain technical elements. Like when the INLA boys come back in—" He paused and laughed. "I don't want to give away the end!" He reconsidered how to explain more vaguely.
"When they make their return from meeting with trouble outside, with Padraic's girlfriend," he continued, "your brain starts going, Okay, I have these things I have to do there. Shooting. How do you shoot? We used all live ammo, which isn't always an option because it's very expensive," he said. "I'm a big Peckinpah fan, that's no surprise, so when I figure out elements, I'm going back to Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, going, 'There's something going on there.' And you take an element. Sam probably got it from somebody else—probably got it from Raoul Walsh."
One of the other things I was curious about with regard to The Lieutenant of Inishmore was the political connotations; the play is itself completely indifferent to politics, but I was curious if there was some fear of retaliation for portraying political terrorist organizations as blood-thirsty madmen.
"There was nervousness about whether or not there would be some repercussions. And I remember that there was an explosion, one of the last IRA explosions in London, in White City, while we were in rehearsal," Milam told me. "I did another play about the IRA in Dublin, later, and one morning the playwright called me up and said, 'We've gotten a review in—' he named the paper, I can't pronounce the Gaelic—and I said, 'I don't know what that is.' And he said, 'It's the IRA paper. You have to go down to O'Connell Street and ask at one of the newsstands and they will sell you a paper.' And so I went down there, there was a little bit of haggling—because why would I want one? But I read it, it was a review in the paper," he sort of rolled his eyes at the absurdity of it. "Maybe because of the cease-fire they had a drama critic, an IRA drama critic. But it was a very well-written, rather Marxist analysis with socioeconomic points. I thought it was a nice little review by a very smart man who wrote it."
He paused, thinking. "I don't even have a copy anymore, I think I sent my copy to my mother."
As for Glengarry Glen Ross, directing it has been a long-time dream of Milam's. "This is one of the great American plays, flat-out, bar-none," he told me. "The language, and often just the punctuation, brings me to my knees. What he does with punctuation in this...sometimes he'll start a sentence after a pause without a capital letter, or he'll end a sentence with a full stop when you're going, 'That could have been an ellipsis, it could have been a dash.' Just the language, it's so good. There's stuff in there, a la Pinter and Beckett. And I won't say it's showing off, because I don't think it is showing off, he's just doing it because he's that good. And it serves character and plot and action, and one of the things I do love about Mamet is his Aristotelian beliefs in drama."
When it comes to David Mamet, people tend to be pretty partisan, and I decidedly fall into the camp that thinks he's, at best, not aged well. But asking why Milam thought that a 1982 play about real estate shysters, based on land scams from the 1960s, was still relevant in 2010 was probably the easiest question I've ever asked.
"What's the difference really between selling this Florida land and selling subprime mortgages?" he responded. "They're selling a dream that you can't possibly..." Milam trailed off. "I suppose the dream on the mortgages was that you'd have the wherewithal to afford the changes when the interest kicks in. But you're selling a dream you can't sustain. It's a worthy and admirable goal, for everyone to be able to own a house. But the sheer chicanery—I'm still boggled when I read books on it, and you find out how they were re-packaging and re-packaging and re-packaging mortgages with different concepts and constructs. They knew." He shook his head. "They knew."
"Very interestingly, I was doing a lot of research that very much took us out of the world of the play—more than was useful for the actors, say. But I was reading a lot of books and articles on the original Florida land scams. They basically ended in the early Eighties," Milam explained. "I think time-shares came into play, and lot of legislation made it harder and harder to be quite as cavalier with the salesmanship. A couple years ago, a lot of this land had gone into receivership, that had been sold to unsuspecting northerners. Most of them had probably never seen the land, never found out it was underwater, that you can't get a road to it, that there's no possibility of ever having water or power. And it went into receivership to the counties." He smiled grimly. "New land companies bought it, and they were selling it on the Internet. The exact same parcels of land. And that lasted for about a year and half."
This was at the height of the housing boom, in '07/'08. "Fascinating that it came around again," Milam said. "People still bought it. Not with the same enormity of size and all, it was all land sales over the Internet with the same tricksy small print. I mean, the Golden Rule in this kind of real estate is don't buy sight-unseen, don't do it. It's biblical. Look at it first. See if you can get to it. A good part of it's underwater. One of the early land scams they did, they were selling public park land. They knew no one was ever going to see it for years. Salesmanship is salesmanship. The character of Levine—that was soft-sell. Before we had a name for it, we did it. Going to door-to-door, selling people things they didn't even want."
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