Wilson Milam, the American theatre director known for international hits such as Killer Joe, Tracy Letts's play about a trailer-park assassin, and David Rabe's Hurly Burly, in which a go-go dancer is pushed out of a moving car, thought he was getting away from violence when he agreed to direct a London revival of Billy Roche's Wexford trilogy last year. The three plays - A Handful Of Stars, Poor Beast In The Rain and Belfry - have emotional blood and guts aplenty, but the real things are in short supply.
Yet as Milam strolled around Wexford town with the playwright, he learned that violence might come looking for him nonetheless. "Billy's like the mayor of Wexford, and all of his friends, who are hugely loyal, were saying to me: 'We're gonna kill you if you don't do a good job.' They all came to the previews and, thank God, they loved it." Everybody else approved as well, including Roche, so perhaps it's no surprise that Milam has been asked to direct Roche's first play for eight years, On Such As We, which opens at the Peacock Theatre in Dublin tomorrow.
It may be more surprising that Milam, who can pick up commissions from London to San Francisco, has returned to Roche. He has already directed three of his plays, after all, and Roche's studies of small-town Irish life are a world apart from the bleak, savagely comic projects he usually takes on.
"As a director, I am known for violence, for really dark pieces," says Milam. "Whereas in Poor Beast In The Rain, I think we broke one teacup. But with Billy, you just have this gorgeous writing I couldn't resist." Milam reckons that Roche is broaching new territory with On Such As We, and it's a landscape that interests him. "It's still set in Wexford, but it's a place that's under threat. Its very value system, its way of life, almost a sense of decency, is in danger. It's an idea that's always been there, underneath his plays, but he has really brought it out in this piece. There's an idea that people have to stick together to protect what matters to them."
There's also the lure of The Whiffenpoof Song, a delightfully eccentric tune that features in act two. Made famous in the 1940s by Bing Crosby and other singers, it also featured large in Milam's childhood. "I got my mom to tape the record we have at home and send it to me. It just arrived the other day," he says, happily.
The Seattle-born director needed a couple of quick tutorials in the see-sawing cadences of Roche's dramatic idiom, but he says he "got a crash course walking down the road with Billy. Everyone was saying: 'Hiya Billy, howya doin'?' " Milam breaks into a pretty convincing Wexford accent before continuing more seriously. "I think I bring a lack of preconceptions to the play. Sometimes, by being an outsider, you bring something new."
He also loves the fact that Roche's plays are ensemble pieces; in On Such As We, all seven actors, from Brendan Gleeson to Pauline Hutton, are seldom off the stage for long. "In ensemble work, you can really build up the texture, build up the nuances of the work. Working with this group, you can really see when someone gives a certain look and someone else picks up on it, and you see where that goes. Then the whole thing really starts to reverberate."
Milam says he likes to work on scripts by playwrights who are still alive, building his production out of telephone conversations, constant questions and, in this case, shared bottles of wine and late-night Wexford sing-songs. "It's just so great to work with a writer like that. By sitting with them, you learn why things happen the way they do and what prompted certain scenes. I was able to call him up and say stuff like: 'Well, in this scene she comes in and it's clear that nobody likes her, so why the hell does she stay?' "
A love of the dialogue of dramatic process rather than a love of violence is Milam's real artistic touchstone. Perhaps this is hardly surprising, given that he put in time at Steppenwolf Theatre Company, in Chicago. Since the company's beginnings in a church basement in 1974, its members have been firm believers in the idea of the ensemble company. "I was there before they moved into the new building and after the basement, and I loved it. You did everything from manning the box office to reading scripts. But the thing about the space was it was nine feet tall, with no wings and no back stage. What you had was the actors and the script, so you could either focus on your actors or you could ask yourself: 'What does the script want me to discover? How does it allow me to push it around?' Also, it was a small company, so it was mostly young playwrights, and that's where that relationship-building thing started."
Milam's international break came when he met Letts, although Killer Joe seemed at the time an unlikely success story. "We thought we'd be run out of town. If anything, we felt it was kind of funny to be putting on this play in a small suburban theatre. We were sure it would run for about a week." Instead, it ran for eight months in Chicago before coming first to the Traverse Theatre in Edinburgh and, then, to the West End of London, where it stayed for five months.
Killer Joe was also the play that led to Milam directing Martin McDonagh's most recent play, The Lieutenant Of Inishmore, a critically acclaimed production that is transferring from Stratford to the Barbican, in London, later this month. Having seen Milam's way with gore, McDonagh thought he would be perfect for a play about INLA terrorists that kicks off with a drug dealer being tortured and ends with dismemberment.
"It's just so funny," grins Milam. "It's very dissimilar in style to Roche's work, but it, too, is about a community under pressure . . . And at the end there's a new equation; a new balance comes into being."
He attributes his taste for contemporary Irish drama in part to the similarities between Dublin and his home town of Seattle. "The weather is similar and Seattle was also this sleepy little town that was discovered overnight. Nobody used to care about Seattle."
He confesses to an aspiration to bring Roche to Broadway, because "they love Conor [McPherson] there and, you know, Conor loves Billy." But first he has to contend with offering his production of an Irish play to an Irish audience for the first time. "I'm excited to see what the audience reaction will be. That said, I've asked a few friends who live here to come and see the previews and slap me on the side of the head if I've got things wrong." He just can't seem to escape the violence.
On Such As We is at the Peacock Theatre until January 26th. Bookings at 01-8787222
