Recently, The Harvard Crimson spoke with Hans Canosa, a Harvard undergraduate who directed more shows at Harvard this past semester than any single director has in the past four years combined.

The Crimson: Your last two plays have been Strindberg scripts; do you find anything particularly resonant in his work for you?

Hans Canosa: What fascinates me in his work is issues of--you know, Brustein always used to say excrementalism, that just means shit obviously--that fascinates me, the same way that Brecht in his early plays obsessed with images of shit and sex, and every sexual character was a pimp or a whore...the same thing with Strindberg where he's always talking about the dirt, rising out of the dirt.

The thing that was strange about Dream play was when I first conceived of it, I thought I would have dirt all over the floor, shit everywhere, people shitting and pissing in colors. I mean, I knew colors had something to do with it...but as it evolved, everything became clear and pure and light. I don't know how that happened, it just happened through the process, because everything is discovered there.

The other thing is that he's so personal...Strindberg's so personal, he's writing his autobiography through his work. The challenge to me was that if it is just him, him speaking through his work of himself, what is there for a director to find? Can you discover something outside of what Strindberg was saying?

I know so many people who scream that you have to be responsible to the author. I believe that maybe you have to be responsible to the essence of the play, but never the author. My best friend, she told me there's nothing new to be discovered. I fight her, I fight her all the time. I don't want that to be true, I want there to be something new.

I hate words, I think words have...there's a line in Dream Play that says, "could words ever express your utmost thoughts?" That to me expresses a philosophy, expresses why I've done more Beckett than anything else, because of a frustration with language.

I hate talking to you right now, because everything I say just sounds dead. Physicality...is much more powerful than anything I can say to you.

Like O'Neill, I have no idea, it's so talky, every one of the characters sit there, with their head on the bar for 30 minutes...unreal, unreal, seems like no life, but there's something to be discovered.

The Crimson: Do you believe in the integrity of a text, of a script?

Canosa: Last semester, people were calling me an auteur-director, that's ridiculous, I'm so young, I don't know anything, it's so vast. I take every class I can, I have to suck up everything I can about theater.

The Crimson: Do you care about the actors' input on the script?

Canosa: I don't sit down with a cast, I hate table rehearsals, I never sit at a table, we never read the scripts, if anything we read it running around the room, I never do read-throughs. My actors always hear me harping on how America forgot the second part of Stanislavski, the physicality, the gesture, movement, the purely physical. I like discovery through the text, through physicality, through play.

I met Bina [Martin] halfway when we were doing Miss Julie, she was coming from a very different approach. The other two [actors] responded to my process, which wasn't about building a character genealogy, i.e. what did this character eat for breakfast?

Although Bina said to me, when we were doing character work, I had told her "yes I do know what your character [has] eaten for breakfast", and we were walking down the street, and Bina said to me, "so what did she eat for breakfast?" And I told her. We did cut out a lot though about her character background, I don't know if you noticed.