Following this experience, Milikowsky stopped acting, switched her major to theater studies, and “started directing like mad.” After graduating, she got an MFA in directing from Columbia and then stayed in New York. “I was working all the time, having day jobs, assistant directing on productions, and then putting on shows in basements with my friends at night. It was a lot of fun, but it was tiring.” Then she heard about the Luce Foundation’s Luce Scholars Program, which sends young Americans to countries in Asia for a year. The age cutoff was 30; Milikowsky was 29. She applied.
“At the time, when I said I was moving to Korea, everyone in my life was like, ‘What are you doing?’ I just needed something—it’s important to have a career path, but it’s also important to deviate from that path,” Milikowsky says.
Milikowsky ended up spending a year in Seoul, working as a visiting director at a theater and teaching a class of students. Partway through the year, she received an email from Diane Paulus, with whom she’d worked on the Broadway production of “HAIR,” encouraging her to come to the ART. Three days after returning from Seoul, she packed her things and moved to Boston, where she’s spent the last three years.
INDUSTRY STANDARD
“I don’t think we’ve dug all the way into the complexity of what she’s saying here,” Milikowsky says. It’s late on Friday night, and rehearsal is in full swing. “This play just keeps reinventing itself, and that’s what’s so exciting. I think you guys should be looking at each other when she says that line—do you feel that too?” Nods go around the room, actors reset, and the newest interpretation of the line is tried.
This collaborative, discussion-based approach is the cornerstone of Milikowsky’s style. “Shira is the kind of director who will have a conversation with you about why your character does what they do,” Clark says. “She’s really good—more than any other director I’ve had—about sitting down and having those talks.”
“Shira just knows what to say to actors to get them to understand the story they’re trying to tell,” Bialo says. “She has an amazing way of asking exactly the right questions to help you access that story.”
For Longstreet, who hopes to become a professional director, working alongside Milikowsky has been a particularly valuable opportunity. “It’s been a really exciting experience, and I’m just trying to learn all I can,” Longstreet says. “It’s so great to work with someone who’s had so much experience at the professional level. Directing is such a hard thing to describe, since it can mean a lot of different things, but Shira is really just amazing at interacting with actors—not coming in and saying ‘This is what I think it is,’ but making it really a discussion between her and the actors about these characters.”
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In lieu of a dramatic arts concentration, technical training and experiences that approximate professional theater work can be difficult to come by for Harvard undergraduates. But the VDP presents a unique opportunity to help resolve that deficit, providing students with a valuable window into the world they hope to enter. Though Milikowsky’s particular directorial style is unique, the experience of working with a professional director is a more general reward—one that these students can carry with them as they pursue career ambitions not reflected by their diplomas.
—Staff writer Lien E. Le can be reached at lien.le@thecrimson.com.