Q+A with Céline Rosenthal, director of "Dial M for Murder"

In an upcoming episode of our podcast we sat down with Céline Rosenthal, who will be joining us this August and September to helm “Dial M for Murder,” a new adaptation by Jeffrey Hatcher of the revolutionary Hitchcock classic. Céline now serves as associate artistic director and resident casting director at Asolo Rep in Sarasota, Florida, and is a wonderful thinker who has traipsed many rooms in the American theater. We discussed her amazing journey to being the director she is today.

(This conversation has been lightly edited for clarity. To listen to the full discussion, visit PPT.org/Participate.)

Marya Sea Kaminski: What’s one of your top takeaways from the recent Theater Communications Group conference? 

Céline Rosenthal: I had the opportunity to attend a session called “Beyond the Land Acknowledgement” that helped to brainstorm some ideas for how we can make more authentic relationships with Indigenous artists and Indigenous communities. And I found that particularly inspiring. It's always lovely when you come away with something to do. 

I think sometimes as a theater industry, we come together, we articulate the enormous problems, and we articulate the enormous hopes, but we don't often come out of every single session with some action items.So to learn about the Land Back movement, to learn about what we can do to welcome Indigenous artists into our spaces, to think about creating grants, to think about opening up our rehearsal spaces for Indigenous artists use. It was exciting and it was exciting to be met with those ideas, with positivity. 

Shaunda McDill: You were a Tony-nominated producer, but now you ended up in the director's chair. How did you end up where you are now?

Rosenthal: It was so very much by accident. And by the time that it happened, it felt inevitable. It felt like the thing that my heart was calling to and I didn't have a name for it. 

I started my adult life as a New York City paramedic. That was the way that I worked my way through school because I was a terrible waiter, truly, truly terrible. And then I lived for a while in Mumbai, India, working with a program called Pankhudi creating after school programs that were mixed with theater curriculum to teach young people English and other skills. And when I came back, having had that experience, I was really interested in how I could be part of the greater ecosystem as opposed to solely an artist.

So I attended the CTI producer's training program, and I started to produce commercially in theater. I was a producer on “Seminar,” which starred Alan Rickman. He had given me a play to read and we were chatting about it over lunch and he sort of stopped and looked at me and he said, “Have you ever considered being a director?” And when Alan Rickman tells you to do something, you do it. So I started applying to graduate programs and I, in my time at NYU, had been directed by the absolutely wonderful Julian Lee, who gave me the opportunity to assist her when she was up at Barrington Stage Company.

So I got to watch her in her process and figure out that that really was what I wanted to do. And I ended up going to grad school and learning to be a director that way. And again, it's very much by accident. But it turns out that that's really what I love.

McDill: I guess I'm curious because I love intersectionality – from either your time in Mumbai or your time as a New York City paramedic, how did those things inform where you ended up landing as a director and a producer?

Rosenthal: I think radical empathy is something that you either have to develop or turn off as a paramedic. You're dealing with an awful lot of human tragedy and you're dealing with people in sometimes the worst moment of their life, and you're there to hopefully make it better. And you see a lot. There's also the creative problem solving that turns on in your brain for the way that you have to step into a situation and do a critical analysis about interventions that can be done. 

That mindset sometimes comes about when we are in the theater–things can get tense and exciting and the stakes can be very high for what we feel. But all in all, nobody's actually dying in front of you. And I think sometimes that perspective is useful, to take a breath and think about it and also to embrace the joy of what we're doing. That all comes from my life as a paramedic, and those skills that I learned about creative problem solving and leadership of a team of people and radical empathy serve me really well.

When I was working in India with the Pankhudi Foundation, I learned that I can make just about anything out of tape at this point. Medical tape, duct tape, you name it. There's some small practical things that are very useful. But there's also approaching a situation with gratitude, approaching a situation with the idea that if we all come together, we can find a way to make it better and we can find a way to uplift everybody who's involved. My foundation comes from those two formative experiences that I had over those years. 

Kaminski: I want to get into your work for Dial M for Murder but first want to mention a different group you’re a part of – Ring of Keys. Can you tell us a little about that? 

Rosenthal: Ring of Keys, for those who are not terribly familiar with lesbian culture, is a reference specifically in musical theater to the song Ring of Keys in “Fun Home.” And my friend Andrea Prestinario is one of the co-founders of this organization. It's a group of non-binary and trans artists, both on and off stage, who come together to support one another.

The group’s work happens in so many different practical ways. Sometimes it's in terms of lasting connections, sometimes it's in terms of directors wanting to find specifically trans or lesbian designers to work with on certain projects or directors. And it's been a lovely way to move through this artistic world and this pretty surreal world, knowing that there's a community to come back to, to support one another, and a place where we can come together and problem-solve some of the challenges that the community faces and find ways that we can advocate for more inclusive spaces.

Kaminski: Let’s dig into “Dial M for Murder” for a second. So you are returning to the script for us. You did a terrific production down in Asolo in the spring, and I'm curious what you were first interested about in this play.

Rosenthal: I have always been a little bit of a Hitchcock nerd. My dad is not a sports dad. My dad is an old movies dad. So that was how we would bond, watching old movies together – and I always loved the Hitchcock films. I always loved to be just a little scared, but in a nice, safe way. So thriller is a genre that I was always excited about and that interested me. And when I heard about this adaptation that Jeffrey Hatcher was working on at the Old Globe, I got really excited because I heard about the gender switch that was going to happen. 

For those who don't know the basics of the plot, Margot is the lead character. She is married to a man and has been having an affair. In the original, she's been having an affair with a man, but in this version she's having an affair with a woman. Her husband, unbeknownst to her, finds out and begins to blackmail her. But then that blackmailing turns into a plot to murder her so that he can inherit her money.

And this is sort of where our show kicks us off. And in the original, as is the case with a lot of thrillers, the character of Margot has a tendency to be this damsel in distress. Lots of things happen to her, and she's not necessarily so much a participant as she is a very beautiful object.

So when I talked to Jeff (Hatcher) about it and about the reasons that he was excited to adapt this piece for today, he had said that when he and Barry Edelstein at the Old Globe were talking about it the brief was, “How do you reexamine this piece and give Margot agency? How do you turn her into an active participant in her own rescue?”

From there this adaptation was born. By keeping the setting in the 1950s and changing the gender of the person that Margot is having an affair with, it heightens the stakes so beautifully, because in the 1950s, a wealthy woman having an affair with a man who she's not married to? It's certainly frowned upon, but I don't know that it's necessarily ruinous in that time period.

However, a woman having an affair with a woman in the 1950s? That is something that is disastrous. That's career-ending for them. It's something that would ostracize them from society. It's grounds for prosecution. It's definitely a much more grave outcome were they to be discovered. And I think that that just gives the story so much more meat.

Uncovering queer history is a personal passion of mine. Especially given that we lost an entire generation of elders in the late eighties and nineties through the AIDS epidemic, there's so much history that just hasn't been passed down to us as younger queers. We need to preserve it and to be able to do that research and to look back at what lesbian culture was like in the 1950s. To remember that and recall that and then be able to sprinkle it in and present it on stage is really exciting.

“Dial M for Murder” runs Sept. 11–29 at the O’Reilly Theater. Get tickets here.

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