New York’s rising-star director helms SCR Greenberg premiere

by Christopher Cappiello
photo: Mark Avery/SCR

Before he even finished Yale Drama School’s directing program in 2003, Trip Cullman had assisted high profile directors Mike Nichols and Joe Mantello on HBO’s Angels in America and playwright Richard Greenberg’s Tony Award-winning drama about an out Major League Baseball player, Take Me Out. In the five years since graduating from Yale, the 30-something Cullman has directed a dizzying number of plays, working with some of today’s hottest playwrights.

His latest project, after directing two overlapping plays in New York in February and March, is South Coast Rep’s world premiere of Greenberg’s latest play, The Injured Party.

“Richard came to see a production I did of Terrence McNally’s Some Men at Second Stage, and I guess he really responded to how I directed it,” Cullman says, explaining how he landed in O.C. this spring.

The Injured Party is Greenberg’s eighth world premiere at South Coast Rep, continuing a long and mutually beneficial association. The play focuses on Seth (Reg Rogers), a rather aimless gay man from New York’s Upper East Side uppercrust, who is essentially waiting for his uber-rich grandmother to die so he can get a piece of the family pie.

“I think the play is about nostalgia and sentimentality, while not at all itself being nostalgic or sentimental,” Cullman explains. “It’s about how we define family, how we look for family, how we try to escape the pasts of our own family and try to create a new one.”

After doing what Cullman will only refer to as “something really bad towards the end of the play,” Seth finally stops trying so hard to separate himself from his lineage. “He is allowed to reinvent himself and start new again.” Part of that fresh start includes an untraditional family. “Without giving too much away,” Cullman explains, “Seth ends up raising a child with a woman, his best friend. Their relationship is the most beautiful platonic love affair you’ll ever see onstage.”

The play’s world is one Cullman knows firsthand. “Trip,” after all, is shorthand for the fact that he was born Edgar M. Cullman III, into a prominent New York family with a long history of philanthropy.

“When I read the script, I thought, oh my God, Richard’s writing about my family!” he says, laughing, “although I would say my family is much more functional than they are.”

Cullman, who is gay (and “the opposite of single”), has worked with a number of prominent gay playwrights, including Greenberg, McNally, Jonathan Tolins and Adam Bock. Aside from joking about the pressures of having to cast cute guys in gay-themed plays, however, the young director insists he approaches every project the same way.

“I feel like every play, on some level, is a theatrical representation of the soul of the playwright,” he says. “So it’s really about me kind of getting into looking at a playwright’s sensibility, aesthetic, personality, intellectual concerns, etc., and trying to kind of get to the heart of that playwright himself, or herself, and then putting that on the stage. I don’t think it really matters if you’re gay, straight or whatever.”

With his intelligent, decidedly un-auteur-like approach, and a growing track record of success, it’s small wonder that top playwrights seem to be lining up like planes at LAX to work with this rising star.

The Injured Party runs April 20-May 11 as part of the 2008 Pacific Playwrights Festival at South Coast Rep, 655 Town Center Dr., Costa Mesa. For more information on the play and the festival’s other events, visit www.scr.org.