UNM graduate student Christina Squire said she has always loved performing and that directing is a completely different high, which leads to learning and improvement.
She is the director of Irish playwright Augusta Gregory's two plays "Spreading the News" and "Hyacinth Halvey," which will be showing Oct. 31 through Nov. 3 at Theatre X in the lower level of the Center for the Arts building.
Squire studies theater direction and returned to the University two years ago. She is good at balancing the theoretical with the practical, said professor Henry Bial, who Squire works with as a teaching assistant. He compared the process of directing with spending a week in the desert without food or water.
"It's on the sixth day that you have the vision," Bial said.
Bial's characterization of directing might hit painfully close to home for Squire in her first directing experience. Fundamental details such as set design and casting, as well as larger ones such as struggling with a sense of trivialness after the events of Sept. 11, have all presented challenges in the production, she said.
"You are responsible for everything when you're a director," Squire said.
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Despite the adversity, most of the details were refined in rehearsals, Squire said, adding that the instinct of the actors often improved upon what she had originally imagined.
"I became more flexible and learned to listen to them," she said.
With her first production almost under her belt, Squire was hesitant to declare what her future might bring.
"Directing was fun because I was getting attention and everybody liked me," Squire said, almost concealing a smile. "And, because I was a nobody before."
Taking the enjoyment of directing even further, she traveled to Ireland last summer to enhance her understanding of the cultural nuances of the two productions.
The Irish dialect is important to the plays she said, adding that she failed to consider that the first time she read the scripts.
In addition to visiting Augusta Gregory's former house, driving through the Irish countryside and absorbing the culture in famous Irish pubs, she and her husband also paid a visit to the Irish National Library.
Hoping to browse through a collection of Gregory's writing, which include diaries and personal letters, Squire instead discovered that the collection had been donated to the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts. It ironically is the same library where her son works.
But one does not need to travel across the Atlantic Ocean to appreciate the life and work of Augusta Gregory whose best-known contribution was the founding of the Abbey Theater in Dublin, Squire said.
"It was her light, comic style that kept the theater alive," she said, noting that audiences appreciated a variance from the typically serious plays of the time.
"Spreading the News" and "Hyacinth Halvey" both reflect this light nature according to Squire, who described the plays as timeless despite their early twentieth century origins.
"It's the human experience," she said referring to themes of miscommunication, gossip run wild and self-reinvention, which exist throughout the two stories.
