An Interview with the Abnormally Normal Robert Falls

This interview is an in-depth discussion, from a performance perspective, with internationally acclaimed Tony Award–winning director Robert Falls. Falls reflects on his many productions of Eugene O’Neill’s plays, including A Touch of the Poet (1995–96), The Iceman Cometh (1991; 2011–12), Long Day’s Journey Into Night (2002), Desire Under the Elms (2008–09), and Hughie (2004–05). Falls also produced an international Eugene O’Neill Festival (2011–12) at Chicago’s Goodman Theatre and produced the transfer to Broadway of A Moon for the Misbegotten (2000) starring Gabriel Byrne and Cherry Jones. Falls worked with actor Brian Dennehy on all the previously named O’Neill productions and with other actors such as Vanessa Redgrave, Nathan Lane, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Robert Sean Leonard, Pamela Payton-Wright, and John Douglas Thompson. Visually, Falls allows himself to move freely between realism, surrealism, and an epic painterly expressionism when directing, depending on what he believes a given O’Neill play requires.