Tony Awards 2010 Special Interview: B.H. Barry

Today, we are talking to legendary fight coordinator and director B.H. Barry who has worked with basically every major director of the last thirty years and most major stars. A fascinating man himself, he opens up about his life, career, art and collaboration and what receiving a Tony Honor for Excellence in the Theatre means to him. Plus, we discuss everything from the revival of Cole Porter's KISS ME, KATE to David Mamet's OLEANNA...

B.H. Barry has worked on countless productions over the years, working in film, animation, theatre and television. He has worked in plays, musicals, opera, dance and beyond. He's been there; he's done that. Here is a portion of an InDepth InterView we will be running in full next month with questions pertaining to his beginnings in the theatre as well as his feelings on finally receiving a Tony since fight direction is not a competitive category at the ceremony. Yet.

PC: How would you suggest someone get into your profession?

BB: Well, as they say, in the land of the blind the one-eyed-man is king. It's like, if you know how to do a slap or you know how to do a punch, then you can say you're a fight director. It's very unfortunate. I'm lamenting the fact this is the case. I mean, I've trained ten people in my life over the period of fifty years. It takes about six years to train a fight director.

PC: Oh, wow, like a doctor.

BB: Yeah. There's a lot required. First of all, you need to be a student and find out what it's all about. The second part of that is learning teaching. Teaching is a vital part of being a choreographer because ost of the people you work with are actors, they're not physical, they're not used to using their acting like real action. Like real fighting action. It's unique in that you have to learn how to teach them, depending on the individual standing in front of you. Teaching is a vital part of the training and they do that with me for two years.

PC: Learning how to teach.

BB: Yes. Then, the next phase, the next two years, is about choreographing. Going into a theatre situation and working with a director. Many directors don't really know what they want so you have to work with them and understand what their needs are. My job is not only a fight director, but sort of like a second unit director [in film]. A perfect example of my work would be that it doesn't get noticed. That it looks like the director did it. So that it blends perfectly into the story and into the character and that the actions that are chosen are great for the actual play itself. The last thing I want to do is sort of make the actors emulate me onstage. When I first started, it would be like that, with "Look at me! I'm a fight director! Look at this fantastic fight!" The play would start, the play would stop for the fight and it would be very flashy and the audience would applaud it and then the play would start up again. That's how we used to do it, but now with all the realistic-type acting that came with John Osborne and Pinter in the early 60s, realism became a part of fighting as well. So, to be a really, really good fight director the word director is the most important part. You need to be able to direct a fight scene and not how to stage a punch. So, to answer your original question, you have to pay attention to all these things. Most of the time it isn't any good because it doesn't connect with the characters or the story.

PC: What about staging male versus female violence?

BB: What I try to do, and it's probably because I have a daughter. Over the last eighteen years of her life, my career in terms of dealing with female violence has changed. Not changed a lot, but changed for the better. I do not want to send the message to my daughter that she should just lay back, close her eyes and think of America or something. You know, supporting violence as justified. You have to fight back. You have to take a strong position. Throughout all the soap operas that I've done, I've always made the women very strong: In a rape scene, they don't give up; In a fight scene, they don't give up. They have an opinion. They don't just slap and scratch and bite, they fight for survival. The same thing applies to them as I said before: that feeling of just not giving in. Violence often comes out of the fact that you can't speak anymore. Violence, to me, is really ridiculous. It shouldn't be around. We're better animals. We shouldn't be going around hitting each other.

PC: How interesting to hear that statement from you.

BB: (Laughs.) Well, you know, it‘s holding a mirror up to nature. If I could know for one moment in my life that someone picked up a knife and thought of an image I created and put down the knife that's the best thing I could ever ask for. When you don't think, you fight. It makes no sense.

PC: What does it mean to you to win a Tony Award?

BB: Oh! It is absolutely validation of everything I've done. Every year, shows would come up like THE LIFE, like CITY OF ANGELS and all those things, and I never really got mentioned. I mean, I'm not vain but I do have a little bit of ego. Every year when the Tony nominations came out, I'd get into a sort of Tony funk. You know, "Remember me? I'm still here!" When they called up and told me I won this, I was completely overwhelmed. Because everything I'd ever felt for the last twenty years about June... I'll never be back in my Tony funk again!

PC: Maybe like with orchestrations, they'll add a category for fight direction.

BB: I don't know about having a category, but I did feel like I contributed a lot and wasn't recognized for that. But, it's almost like I didn't want to be recognized, but at the same time, it's really, really nice to be recognized by the theatre community. When it was just announced, like two-hundred people on Facebook contacted me. It was like being at my own memorial service.

PC: Or reading your own obituary.

BB: Exactly.

PC: What about working with Michael Blakemore? I mean, talk about running the gamut of content: THE LIFE, CITY OF ANGELS, KISS ME, KATE and NOISES OFF. THE LIFE is probably the most brutal musical of the 90s and NOISES OFF the most frothy, slapstick comedy.

BB: Michael Blakemore is the best director I've ever worked with. He was The Common denominator between all those shows.

PC: And you've certainly worked with all the best.

BB: Yes. He's the best of the best. He works from the outside in and he is absolutely brilliant. I want to be him when I grow up. He knows how to work with someone and collaborate. He uses me well. He hires me to do what I do and he allows me to be creative. A good example of Michael Blakemore would be on KISS ME, KATE. He said to me, "I want to do a knockdown, drag-out fight between Kate and Petrucio." You know, when they first meet. So, I worked with the two of them, Marin Mazzie and Brian Stokes Mitchell, and I developed this fight and it was brutal. I mean, she dropped chairs on his foot, smashed his head on the table, she kicked him, she kneed him, a whole stackof things. It was really quite good, Michael and I really put the good into it. So, we laughed and had a good time doing all of it and thinking we were fooling everyone with it. So, I went away, as I often do after the first draft, planning to come back the second week to work on it. So, Michael called me up and said, "I thought you'd like to know I showed your fight to the company and it got a standing ovation. Everything looks wonderful, wonderful, wonderful. But, you've staged a twenty-first century fight and I need the fight to be circa 1951. It has to be appropriate to the period."

PC: So how did you do that? How did you research that?

BB: I kind of know since I've been doing it all my life. You figure out what is acceptable behavior in that particular period. A kick in the balls would be wrong. A head-butt in the face would be wrong. Some things are anachronistic. So, I had to re-adjust it. I did a pretty big job on it [redoing it]. I'll give you an example: there's one moment when Petrucio comes behind Kate and he grabs her arms. Then, she reaches down and grabs his nuts. Michael said, "That's fine. That's very fun and funny, but after she does that can she give it a little twist?" So, he adds to what I do and we collaborate every step of the way in what we do together.

PC: Could you talk about the difference between directing action for comedy versus tragedy?

BB: I want the audience to have a theatrical opinion versus a real opinion of the violence.

PC: What a great answer.

BB: Too much is too much. John Simon is right 90% of the time on that.

PC: What about OLEANNA, you worked on both the play and the more violent film?

BB: I think the movie David [Mamet] is better. But, in the play, you have to come down on one side or the other. It comes down to: If he hadn't said that, she wouldn't have done this. Or, on the other side, if she hadn't done that, he wouldn't have done this. So, you had to kind of keep your options open. I couldn't make a statement of who was in the right and who was in the wrong. So, the fight had to be tightly balanced in terms of both of them. "Don't call your wife ‘baby'," then he says, "What?" Then he goes to her, she pushes him back, he pushes her. It starts. It escalates from there. At the end of the play, at the end of that fight scene, he picks up a chair and is about to hit her with the chair in that moment they both realize the next moment is about death. At that moment, the play stops. That's what that's all about. The ultimate is that it ends with death. That nobody wins. So, I did that fight with David and we looked at it and it worked very well and originally there was another scene after that fight, but we cut the scene because we decided that the fight said everything. It should stop there.

PC: Who's decision was it to amp-up the action for the film?

BB: Yeah, it was both of us. In a situation like that, you know, you both have ideas. I'm always saying to the director, "Do you like that? Do you like this? Do you like that?" Both of you have ideas and I don't know where his idea ends and mine begins and he doesn't know where my idea ends and his begins. So, the collaboration is just back-and-forth. "What about this?" "That's fabulous". What we worked on, what the ultimate objective of the fight scene was: that nobody wins. You remember when he puts his elbow through the window? Well that's because he fell backwards because she pushed the ladder. So, I had to look at every moment in terms of that mandate of: no one is to blame yet they both are to blame.

PC: You certainly maximized the space in that set. What about working with David Mamet?

BB: I think the thing with David and I is that we're both very visual. There's a quote from him on my wall in my study. It says, "It's not false the deeds which form men's minds. There's no greater error than to ascribe importance to intentions. We will be judged by that least involved of magistrates: history, which asks, ‘What did they do?'" It's the "what did they do" that's the essential part for me to cite. What I try to do is maximize that.

PC: You've certainly done - and do - a lot to improve the quality of theatre, making it so much more realistic and exciting, and I appreciate your efforts and congratulate you on your honor.

BB: Thank you so much. It's been a marvelous conversation.