ABSTRACT
Tom Cornford’s presentation of The Sunset Limited at the CAPITAL Centre—a staged reading for which he had only a few hours of rehearsal, with Michael Gould as White and Wale Ojo as Black—impressed me with its vitality, intensity, and clarity of vision. No surprise, then, that Tom himself is vital, intense, and clear. With Nick Monk’s encouragement, Tom and I decided to have a talk about the play and its theatrical potential, and rather than submerge my reservations about it, I thought it might be interesting to probe them with a director who had recently tackled it and retained his enthusiasm. As with Ted Tally and Billy Bob Thornton when they spoke with me about adapting All the Pretty Horses, Tom did not need to trumpet his admiration for McCarthy as a writer: it was evident in everything he said. If directing an author’s play is another way of reading him, so, too, is talking about it; and if a production of a play is, ultimately, a kind of dialogue with it, then this is a dialogue about that dialogue, conducted on a stage you can hold in your hands. —Josyph
