And now, to this list of surprising design thinkers, I add the esteemed stage actor Brian d’Arcy James, who recently was kind enough to take time out of his busy schedule—he’s currently starring with Laura Linney in Time Stands Still, a play by Donald Margulies which just opened to stellar reviews last week—to talk to GlimmerSite about the relationship between design and acting.

 

Brian is an actor whose range is remarkable. At 41, he’s played many parts, but just to go a few years back, he won an Obie Award for a haunting portrayal of a brooding Irish thug in Conor McPherson’s The Good Thief. Then he shifted gears and played the smooth-talking, hyper-ambitious press agent Sidney Falco in the biting musical version of Sweet Smell of Success—and earned a Tony nomination. He scored another Tony nomination last year for his starring role in Shrek the Musical. Somehow, he managed to bring surprising depth and humanity to the part of an ogre (and he had to fight through heavy layers of prosthetics and makeup to do it). Now, in Time Stands Still, Brian is playing a war reporter who’s home from Iraq and having trouble adjusting to domestic life with his girlfriend and fellow journalist, played by Linney.

 

So how does an actor like Brian manage to constantly reinvent himself, in so many different forms? it turns out it's the same way a great designer can take on a wide range of different projects and consistently find ways to innovate: It’s all about the process, and the working principles that guide that process.

 

Brian typically starts by questioning everything about a character he’s tackling—down to the smallest details. “Asking stupid questions is a big part of my job,” he says. “You’re always challenging the assumptions about a character. You’re constantly asking, ‘What if we do it this way instead?’”

 

In his endeavor to answer some of the questions he raises, Brian is a big believer in “going deep”—completely immersing himself in the world of the character he’s playing. "That's the fun part," says Brian, referring to his intense research process. For example, to try to empathize with his Time Stands Still character James Dodd, Brian talked to many journalists (he picked my brain, in fact) but especially zeroed in on war correspondents. He interviewed them about their mind-set, read what they’d written, and talked to doctors who’d treated them for post-traumatic stress disorder. He was looking for the same kinds of small revealing insights or “Glimmer moments” that can help a designer identify the crucial details that may make a new design more relevant and resonant.

 

Brian describes the creation of a character as an iterative process, not unlike design. “It’s a series of explorations of scenes,” he says. And along the way, the actors must be willing to fail, over and over, as they shape and refine the prototypes of their characters. “That’s the rehearsal process,” he says. “You try and fail, then try and fail again. And gradually, by continually failing, you cobble together the things that work.”

 

As for the design principle of “embracing constraints,” well, that comes with the territory when you’re a stage actor: You’re constrained by the limits of a stage and a set (and sometimes, if you’re playing Shrek, you’re constrained by a nearly-suffocating costume and 2-hour makeup job).

 

 

  

 

Then there’s the text: The actors must remain faithful to those words, especially when they’ve been written by a Pulitzer-winning playwright like Time Stands Still’s Margulies. That could be perceived as a limitation on the actor’s freedom to create a character from scratch. And yet, like so many of the best designers I’ve talked to, Brian actually relishes these inherent constraints; they seem to fuel his creativity. “I find that the constraint turns out to be the converse—it’s liberation,” he says. “In the exploration of parameters, you find unexpected discoveries.”

 

Brian tends to talk about his construction of a character in architectural terms. At the time of our conversation, he was only a week or two into rehearsals, and he said he was just starting to “build the foundation and the baseboards” of the James Dodd character. After that floor was done, he says, “I’ll be trying different crossbeams” for the walls and ceilings. That was a month ago; by the time of the show’s opening last week, critics were lauding the power, the originality, and the structural integrity of his finished design.