Chicago Theater Director Lisa Portes On Dealing With Actor Freak Outs

• Logan Javage

Chicagoans is a first-person account from off the beaten track, as told to Anne Ford. This week’s Chicagoan is Lisa Portes, theater director.

“I liken being a director to being the captain of a ship. You choose a play and you set the course for that play. Say you’re doing Hamlet. You may decide you’re gonna do a straight-ahead, Shakespearean-period Hamlet, or you may decide to do a Hamlet that focuses on the generational battle between Hamlet and his stepfather, or you may decide it’s about political corruption. And then you work with a team of designers and actors to flesh out that conceptualization.