The Art of Collaboration
Director Kate Whoriskey and writer Kate Douglas at New York Stage and Film’s Summer Season at Marist University in 2024. Photo: Deborah Lopez.
When developing a play, the intimate relationship between a writer and director can set the tone for the entire process and production—for better and for worse.
I’ve been lucky enough to work with several directors who seem to instinctively understand my plays and have the skill set to elevate the work to new heights, mostly recently with director Kate Whoriskey.
Whoriskey is one of my favorite theater co-conspirators because she pushes me to make the most vulnerable, boldest strokes in my work. When we first met to discuss my play The Apiary in advance of a workshop at Second Stage Theater, she asked me where I felt the heart of the piece was. I fumbled my way through a lengthy answer—the emotional urgency of the piece was something I intuitively knew, but I had not found succinct and clear language around it yet.
The remarkable aspect of working with Whoriskey was that through our conversations around the text and her incredible attention to detail, I became clearer and more confident about articulating the emotional anchor of the show. She nurtured and supported my search for language around the play and challenged me to go deeper with every line rather than relaxing into vagueness.
Whoriskey and I have now collaborated on four projects, and each time is artistically reinvigorating. We are now so familiar with each other’s working rhythms that she can distill a full paragraph of my feelings from a single one of my looks across the room. I don’t take that familiarity for granted, because it allows us to go deeper in process in a shorter amount of time.
But what is the foundation for that unique alchemy? What makes a collaboration between a writer and director successful?
After speaking to a few long-term collaborative pairs, some themes began to emerge.
Similar attunements, different approaches
The creative bond usually starts with the text: How are the writer and director aligned on the essential questions of the play?
“We’re able to talk about what [the play] is about in the same way even if we might not have the exact same answer,” says director Caitlin Sullivan about her collaboration with playwright Talene Monahon. The pair have been working together since 2022 and will be collaborating again on the world premiere of Monahon’s Eat Me at South Coast Rep in 2026.
“I never had a moment of feeling like we saw anything in the script differently from each other,” Monahon agrees.
“It all starts with the play,” says director Rebecca Aparicio regarding her working relationship with playwright Andrew Rincón. “Any play of Andrew’s that I’ve read or seen speaks to me on so many different levels, on a soul level and an artist level.” They met around 2019 through mutual friends, and Aparicio directed a production of Rincón’s El Mito, or The Myth of My Pain at Purdue University in 2023. Adds Rincón: “We both like the impossible. The magic of it all.”
Purdue Theatre’s production of El Mito, or The Myth of My Pain, written by Andrew Rincón and directed by Rebecca Aparicio. Photo: Melodie Yvonne.
In the early stages, there are also questions of approach and natural chemistry that arise. “It feels like the writer and the director go on a date,” says Whoriskey. “And the date is basically: Do we travel together well or not? Does that person have a spark for you? Do you see yourself generating conversation or shutting it down? Is it stimulating or does it feel like it’s strained?”
Director Mei Ann Teo describes how they listen in these initial meetings not just to the text, but also to the psycho-emotional overtones that both the writer and Teo are bringing in that moment. “I really try to access what the writer desires in their deepest part of themselves, whether or not it’s on the page,” says Teo. “And then I’m also trying to access what’s important to me in terms of working on the piece.”
But what seems to set repeat collaborations apart is that there is enough individuation between the artistic partners for something dynamic to grow. “I want somebody who could come at the same thing from a different perspective and deeply understand it,” says playwright Sarah Mantell, who frequently collaborates with Teo. Teo read Mantell’s play Everything That Never Happened during lockdown and knew they wanted to connect with Mantell. Teo has since directed several readings of Mantell’s work, including Fight Call for Breaking the Binary Theatre and The Good Guys at Second Stage.
“When I’m writing a play, I’m trying to write a bridge,” says Mantell. “Mei Ann [Teo] comes from a different personal history and theatrical training but meets me in the middle of that bridge.”
Sarah Mantell and Mei Ann Teo at the Fight Call workshop at the Breaking the Binary Theatre Festival. Front row (left to right): Alex Might, Sarah Mantell, Susannah Perkins, Sagan Chen, Pooya Mohseni. Back row (left to right): George Strus, Mars Juno Bartolome Neri, Mei Ann Teo, Andres Martinez, Diana Oh, Jonny Beauchamp, Esme Ng, and Marquise Vilsón. Photo: MCP Photo.
Sometimes these differences can be a strength. “We are very yin and yang in terms of our personalities and approaches,” says director Nicky Maggio about their collaboration with playwright Nikhil Mahapatra. The pair have been working together for around 10 years, most recently on Love You More at the Tank. “We both have very different approaches to theater and have different ideas,” adds Mahapatra, “and I think because we’ve collaborated for so long … we can really feel free to throw things at the wall.”
Which brings us to the rehearsal process.
Energetically generative in process
When there is a foundation of alignment, the investigation process during development and rehearsal can go deeper.
“You cannot trust collaborators unless you trust yourself,” says Mantell. “Humility and openness don’t exist without that self-trust. And I could feel that Teo trusted themselves and they trusted me,” when it came to the casting process for Mantell’s play Fight Call. “I like working with Sarah [Mantell] because I can say the hard thing,” adds Teo. “And I can say it with them trusting that I am well-intentioned.”
There’s the underlying bed of trust again allowing these provocations to take root. With the right collaborator, you want to keep going deeper because there is an inherent respect for each other’s process and taste. It becomes “yes, and” instead of “but …”
This is crucial during a development process, which can often be complicated or compressed. When the writer and director are working toward the same vision, untangling the problems that arise in mounting a play is truly collaborative. “I’m not really interested in plays as things to be solved,” says Sullivan. “I want to be in pursuit of something together.”
Having a partner that you can dig around in the sandbox with to find something true is one of the greatest gifts of being a theater artist. “After you start working with someone for a long time, it becomes really easy because you start to have a really fast shorthand for talking about things and your process in the room,” says Mahapatra. “We trust each other to get to where we need to be.”
Playwright Nikhil Mahapatra and director Nicky Maggio with a hanging table, part of the set of the play Love You More, which premiered at the Tank in spring 2025. Photo: Courtesy of Nikhil Mahapatra.
Embracing the unknown
Another theme that runs through these rich collaborations is how trust allows a creative process to emerge. That foundation lets everyone in the room fly. “It’s like moving between certainty and knowledge in a way that is gentle and rigorous for each person,” says Teo. “I don’t go in knowing everything. That would be terrible.”
“I think what’s interesting about theater, maybe particularly from a writer’s point of view, is that you’re allowing a lot of people to have an experimentation period with your material,” says director Whoriskey. “Whenever an artist joins the process, I think they have to let the other artists have the time to experiment.”
Facing the unknown with glee is part of what keeps Sullivan coming back to her collaboration with Monahon. “I don’t know what’s going to happen when we make this,” says Sullivan. “That is a thrilling thing.”
Director Caitlin Sullivan and playwright Talene Monahon at the opening night of The Good John Proctor at the Connelly Theater in 2023.
“I think where I see a lot of collaborations fall apart is when a director is imposing a process onto the writer,” says Maggio. “You have to let the writer lead … show you the process that they are ready for and what they want to do. And then you become their dance partner.”
That is how the writer-director relationship can have a ripple-effect on the rest of the room. “The work can be bigger than the collaborators,” says Aparicio. “The people that collaborate well together are in service of … the story we’re trying to tell.”
It begins from the moment the writer and director meet. “You can’t go into collaboration with your walls up,” Rincón adds. “The work of being an artist is to pull down your walls.”