Jack O’Brien is one of the hottest tickets in theater internationally, and he’s right here in our neighborhood. Serving as artistic director at the Old Globe theaters since 1981, O’Brien is one of San Diego’s, and the GLBT community’s, own, and during his Globe tenure he’s become one of the most important figures in contemporary theater, period. Always balancing between wacky-musical entertainment (Hairspray, The Full Monty) and extreme erudition (Shakespeare, Tom Stoppard), O’Brien has received numerous Tony nominations and directed world premieres by important playwrights like A.R. Gurney, Terrence McNally and Stoppard. His 2001 staging of Stoppard’s Invention of Love at the Lincoln Center in New York earned him a Tony nomination for Best Director of a play, along with a nomination for Best Director of a musical for his Broadway production of The Full Monty the same year. Last year O’Brien won the Best Director Tony for his 2003 Broadway mega-hit production of Hairspray, a musical based on the John Waters film. For this year’s Tony Awards, O’Brien has received his sixth Tony nomination for the production of Shakespeare’s Henry IV, staged last year at the Lincoln Center. O’Brien has directed stars like Kevin Kline, Ethan Hawke, Marissa Jaret Winokur and Harvey Fierstein. He is openly gay, but has recently become more comfortable sharing his personal experiences as a gay man – and in the conversation that follows he publicly and for the first time outlines exactly why.

Jack O’Brien: Are you saying as a producer, as a director or both?

GLT: As Jack O’Brien.

JO: It has got to be something I relate to and it has got to be something that, frankly, turns me on in some very personal way – either touches me or makes me laugh, or I think it has something really nifty to say.

JO: Oh, yeah, I mean, absolutely. I am encouraged, Brian, by the fact that we are being encouraged to take a broader profile than what our [the Old Globe’s] 60-year reputation might engender. By that I mean, we passionately believed in Compleat Female Stage Beauty [by Jeffrey Hatcher, staged in 2002] so much so that we risked taking it out of subscription thinking it was going to offend our subscribers. And guess what? They all wanted it and they were pissed that they didn’t get it. That was a piece that really moved me. The Arthur Miller piece [Resurrection Blues] moved me a great deal. Just the fact that at 88 he has enough fire in his belly to not only be witty and sexual but, of course, political, as well. I thought that was really cool, as well.

JO: I mean [laughs], you know you just have to stop me because I just talk.

JO: Should be. I mean by that, maybe not a political stance singularly, but theater is an abstract dialogue with what’s in the air. By that, I mean, it isn’t two-dimensional the way film and television is; it isn’t simply oral the way a CD is. It has this arresting propensity for being in front of your face. So, all of your pores should be open. And everything that stimulates you … We should be trying an assault on all of those avenues of access. And politics is clearly one of them. Not always, but certainly, it should be political.

JO: Well [laughs], look at my list of failures. No one starts out to do something that tanks. You do believe in it. You passionately believe in it. And sometimes, it is misunderstood. Here is a perfect example. Stephen Metcalfe’s last play, Loves and Hours, which our audiences ate with no small degree of spoons, was sort of reviled by the local press. Obviously, Brian, a nerve was hit. And I don’t think any of them saw it. I will say that most of the reviewers were women and most of those women may have shockingly seen something of themselves on stage. I don’t know what it was. It was dismissed, and in a way that, frankly, made me angrier than anything in a long time. Not that I think everything I do should be beautifully appraised, but because here is a writer who has chosen to live in our community, whose work we have honored over the years to a certain degree, who comes up with what is basically a very funny play about our community and it has straight characters, gay characters, old people, young people. It is a very interesting cross-section of a whole societal chunk. Instead of saying even so little as, “Well, I didn’t like it, but God knows it was funny” or “they laughed”, they just dismissed it. As if laughter is a negligible achievement. And that is always a problem for me.

JO: Well, yes. I think that is a problem between the reviewing faculty and the audiences. Our audiences more and more, not only here at the Globe but everywhere, want to be entertained. They really do. I mean if you go see [the film] Troy, it is mostly about people’s bodies more than it is about Homer and the classicists are pissed off that Hecuba is left out and Cassandra is left out and that a lot of the details are left out. I had a perfectly swell time because I didn’t expect anything except to see as much of Brad Pitt as I could possibly see. And in that respect, I have never been happier.

JO: [laughs] I know. I would love to touch that subject. [laughs]

JO: Exhausted, usually. You know, Brian, I find it increasingly more difficult to have what we laughingly call a private life, only because I am so peripatetic at the moment. I am on more airplanes, covering more productions, in more cities than I ever have in my entire life. And, it is very hard to have what one would construe to be a supportive and normal life when you have, you know, a show in London, a musical in Toronto, and another one on the road, and commitments in New York and you are running a theatre. So, usually, I am flat on my back staring dully at the television screen, holding onto my two dogs.

JO: Well, I don’t stare at the Tony.

JO: No, no, no, no, no. That smacks of narcissism and I am too old for that.

JO: Actually, Brian, I had sort of prepared myself. We knew that we were being swept under by a tsunami of The Producers and nothing was going to stop it. I was less upset about myself, to be perfectly frank, Brian, than I was for the score by David Yazbek [for The Full Monty] and that performance by Kathleen Freeman who played “Jeanette.” She had never created a part in New York before. She was a beloved figure in film and theatre her entire life and she was dying. And it was one of the greatest acting/comedy performances I have seen in my entire life.

JO: She was unbelievable. And, you know, the girl who won for The Producers [Cady Huffman] is a young woman who has her whole career ahead of her. It broke my heart. And Andre de Shields, as well. It broke my heart that those really resonant performances were swept aside. Those really hurt more than my loss. As far as Invention [of Love] was concerned, the Tonys aren’t always about reward, they are about politics. And [David Auburn’s] Proof was going on the road. And a lot of the votes are controlled by presenters [from] out of town. And they very often look at the road brochure and they say, “Gee, that’s coming to our theatre. Let’s vote for it.” The Tony in premature will guarantee more tickets sold than not. And so, I was caught in an interesting crossfire between art and commerce. And in those cases, commerce always wins.

JO: Well, slightly goofy. I was riding a big elephant. I knew that. It was hard to ignore me, teetering in my howdah up there on that big Hairspray elephant, so I figured I was hard to miss. And … and I knew that I was riding exactly the same kind of juggernaut that sunk me two years before. I can’t tell you that I expected to win, because at this point in my career, it doesn’t mean what it would have 20 years ago. And I don’t mean that in a disingenuous way. I think it is great to be singled out and it is wonderful to win and it is very good for business and everything that attends it. But by the time you get to this stage in your career, you either believe in your career or you don’t. And if other people love it, you’re happy – and if they don’t, you are deeply regretful, but you keep doing it because it is what you do. It doesn’t discourage you not to win and it doesn’t sort of, I don’t know, Brian, sort of momentarily stroke your ego to win. Curiously, Brian, it is always the negative things that stick, never the positive ones. It is the bad review that you remember, not the standing ovation.

JO: Yes, I think you do. I certainly am different personally from … I mean I don’t think of myself as a gay director. I think of myself as a director who happens to be gay. So, I don’t lead with a political agenda, I lead with a theatrical agenda. Does that make sense?

JO: Sure it does.

JO: That is absolutely true, Brian. I mean, the community, and the community’s perception, has subtly and inevitably changed in the last 23 years that I have been in residence. When I came here, that wasn’t a card, necessarily, that I should have led with before I established my theatrical credentials. Or, I would have been thought of as someone with only a political agenda which I have never had. But also, what happened in those 23 years is that I fell in love. I had a major relationship and he suddenly died in an accident [in the fall of 2000]. And when that happened, I didn’t feel that I needed to be polite any longer. I was suffering what many people suffer in their lives and it was no less distinguished by the fact that it was a same-sex relationship. So, because of what I was going through, I felt that I had earned the right to share a bit of my pain, if not all of it, with my audience and my constituency. And that was a very determining factor in my easing up on myself as a leader.

JO: Certainly, in Invention of Love. That was the next piece I did after Jim died. That is the best thing I have ever done. It is the most profound and the most beautiful. And the most, maybe, significant, in that no one got lost, and that is an easy play to get lost in.

GLT: Oh, yes, it is.

JO: But in the production we did [at the Lincoln], its emotional arc carried the audience, straight, gay, young, old, straight through. And I think there is probably no piece I am prouder of than that one.

JO: Well, I am about to do another big, whopping musical based on the movie Dirty Rotten Scoundrels which we premiere here [at the Old Globe] in the fall and then it goes into New York. And then I am also scheduled to stage Stoppard’s trilogy, The Coast of Utopia, at Lincoln Center in 2005.

JO: I don’t know that I do make the leap, Brian. I think I see it all as a spectrum of exploration in which my responsibility is to give you a good time. And I have to respect the material, I have to respect who’s in it, and I have to think about the audience. Basically, what your expectations might be, and what you want to see and how you want to see it. If you have, as I have, over the last 25 years run a theatre whose expression extends from Shakespeare on one end of the spectrum to musical comedy on the other, you have to be, to a certain degree, able to pick up any of those projects and handle them because, inevitably, something goes wrong. Somebody leaves, somebody gets a job, somebody gets a television show and you are stuck having to direct it and so you kind of have to know that.

JO: I love Avenue Q. But, Brian, I have to say, and I hope I am not offending anybody, I am not a huge fan of Wicked. … I think it is beautiful to look at and I think it is a very ambitious show, but I don’t think it delivers itself of what it sets out to do. I mean, are they gay? Are they not gay? Are the animals going to talk? Are they not going to talk? What the hell is that musical about? And I’ll be damned if I know. Whereas Avenue Q, I know exactly where I am. And I had a fabulous time.

JO: [Laughs] I know, I know.

JO: Well, Brian, I am not sure that my vote, if I were voting, wouldn’t go to Caroline, or Change. . I think Tonya [Pinkins]’s performance is electrifying. I think it is an extraordinary book for a musical, concept for a musical, and I like everything about it, with the exception of the score itself, which I thought was disappointing. But the rest of it, I thought, was unbelievable.

JO: Oh, man, Brian, the Democrats are going to win in November or I am going to move to Sweden.

JO: Well, yes, we have got to get out of this mess. I have never been embarrassed before to be an American as I am at the moment. I am humiliated. I think our foreign policy is in shambles. I think our morale is in shambles. I think there are so many reasons for us to hang our heads in shame. I think in three short years we have gone from the most admired nation in the world to the most condemned and loathed. And we have gone from a surplus to one of the biggest deficits in modern times. I think we have got to get out of this. And I am serious.

JO: [Laughs] If he offered it to me? … He would be very smart to do so. You would have a very chic White House and you would have a lot of fun in Congress. And I think we could use a few laughs, if you want to know the truth. … I think they would be very wise to have someone a bit more theatrical than Cheney.