This week, justArts spoke with Dylan Hoffman ’18, who directed “The Lesson,” a one-act absurd play for Festival of the Arts.

justArts: How did you come across the opportunity to direct “The Lesson”?

Dylan Hoffman: I took a directing class with Professor Dmitry Troyanovksy in the Theater department. We were talking, and he asked me if I would be interested in directing something for the Festival of the Arts, and I said, “I absolutely would!” He started advising me pretty early on. ... Then we met and we talked about plays I’d be interested in directing. We decided on something in the Theater of the Absurd, and he gave me titles to look up and read. One of [them] was “The Lesson,” and I read the script right away and decided that that’s what I wanted to do. It was a very powerful, very interesting, smart, funny play — in a lot of ways, a very moving play. Then I looked at the grants and got the money and we did it!

JA: Was this your first time directing an absurdist play?

DH: Yes, absolutely. It was my first time working with a “non-traditional” cast. Actually, it was my first time working with a full-length — or close to full-length — piece. I’ve never worked on anything longer than 10-15 minutes, and this piece ended up being about an hour.

JA: What was it like working with such a small cast?

DH: I think that ... it was really a good thing ... When you’re working with a small cast, first of all, just on a sheer logistical level, it’s easier to schedule rehearsals, to find time to work and also to focus — you have more time to spend working with each individual actor, whereas if you had a nine or a ten-person cast, you don’t have as much time to spend with [each] actor. That was great. Also, I think [it] helped us develop a feeling of trust, which is important in any kind of cast environment. All four of us had already worked on a play together earlier in the semester, so there was already that level of familiarity coming in — since it was such a small cast, everybody felt included [and] felt valued, I think. They certainly all came ready to work. So yeah, it was really good.

JA: What was the biggest lesson you learned from directing this play?

DH: In terms of my development as a director, I learned so much about how to handle what my directing professor called the theatrical event. [R]ight after the play, he said that he was impressed by my ability to handle the theatrical event divorced from the text. When I was working on this play, ... I sat down and said I wanted to make something that was interesting, ... and that came from me, right? I wanted what happened on stage to come from my vision for the project and not from the book, and I feel like I, over the course of this project, learned how to kind of creatively come up with interesting moments, moments that aren’t expected, imaginative moments, and I think that’s probably the biggest “lesson” that I got from this project.

—Lizzie Grossman