An American's bravura on the London stage

The British can be regularly counted upon to invigorate the New York theater, as is clear every season when the annual roll call of awards offers up many an English accent. But for all that American theater people sometimes drop into London George C. Wolfe, for instance, director of the just-opened National Theatre premiere of "Caroline, or Change" it's very rare, indeed, to do what an expatriate Ohioan named Daniel Kramer has managed of late. Age 29 and firmly resident in London, Kramer has across four productions announced himself as a directing talent worth reckoning with.

And reckon, local critics and audiences certainly have: Kramer's style, by his own admission, is too urgent and impassioned to invite indifference. Consider, for instance, just two of the reviews for the director's current revival of "Bent," starring Alan Cumming, at the Trafalgar Studios 1. The Observer's theater critic, Susannah Clapp, praised "a director capable of firing up any stage," with Kramer "tauten(ing) every moment that could be soggy." On the same day, the Sunday Times's Christopher Hart blasted "the vile untruthfulness" of both Martin Sherman's 1979 play "and this production." Last year, Kramer's London revival of the iconic Broadway musical "Hair" the definitive staging of that piece in my extensive experience of it drew a scarcely less divided response, not least from the show's original creative team.

So, one has to ask directly in what is only the second interview Kramer has ever given, does he see himself as controversial? "Not enough," says the director in a conversation notable for its candor. "I've got much further to go, and I'm learning. Bring it on."

Or bring it across the Atlantic, which is what Kramer will soon be doing. Having previously directed workshops and the like in New York, he is now readying his professional theater debut there. His chosen vehicle? "Woyzeck," the defining play from the 19th-century German dramatist Georg Buchner an unfinished text that Kramer previously directed at west London's tiny Gate Theatre late in 2004. (On that occasion, the reviews were unanimous raves.) The New York production, as in London, stars Edward Hogg as the disturbed and disturbing soldier of the title; the production will run from Nov. 13 to Dec. 3 at St. Ann's Warehouse in Brooklyn.

In London, "Woyzeck" won applause for its intense, relentless theatricality in a staging that incorporated, among other things, a tricycle, a giant fishtank, and the music of Elvis Presley to chronicle the disintegration of its title character. But it's one thing to play London's 65-seat Gate the same postage-stamp-sized auditorium where Kramer went on to direct "Hair" and quite another to tackle St. Ann's, which, says Kramer, "is the size of five basketball courts." It's not just that an American abroad quite understandably wants recognition in his home country even if, insists Kramer, "London is my home; I'm never leaving." But talking to Kramer, one gets an intriguing sense of a talent who is an outsider in two cultures: a condition that might be tricky in life but can often be enormously productive when it comes to art. As regards Britain, he says, "one thing I've learned very much from this Cambridge-Oxford community" the guys (and, very occasionally, gals) who rule the London theatrical roost "is that politics matter a lot in this industry."

"And I think that's true in New York, too," he continues. "Everyone wants a wunderkind, and I hate that word and I hate the idea of it because it just puts so much unnecessary pressure on you." Small wonder that Kramer points to a quotation from Samuel Beckett "Fail again. Fail better" as his mantra of sorts. "I want to be failing when I'm 50. That's the whole point."

Still, how did the youngest of three children brought up in a small Ohio town end up a lightning rod for such strong critical opinions in the British capital? The answer has to do with an upbringing that left Kramer looking for a way out, a quest that led him to France, Italy, and his adopted home, London. Here, he shares a house in Camden Town, north London, with the actor, writer, and director Simon Callow, 57, who has been Kramer's partner for the last seven years.

Kramer's father, a principal at the local middle school in Wadsworth, Ohio where the director grew up, not far from Akron died when the boy was nine; the event turned young Daniel toward school plays as a kind of solace. In a production of "Peter Rabbit," he recalls, "I was Benjamin Bunny, Peter's best friend, and got to say, 'Hop, bunny hop.' It was very exciting." Later, when the school put on "The Miracle Worker," "they painted me orange, and I went on stage as a black child." If these might seem unexpected paths along the way for someone who now counts such legendary figures as Peter Brook and Jerzy Grotowski among his influences, his mother's remarriage three years after his father died to the very neighbor who had, in fact, embalmed his father prodded Kramer to seek a life elsewhere. ("My stepfather and I don't see eye to eye," is Kramer's succinct assessment of the situation.)

At age 16, Kramer traveled on a school exchange program to France, where he both came out as a gay man and visited Britain for the first time. "I came to London for two weeks and said to my mother, 'That's where I'm going to live,'" says Kramer. He was working in New York in his early 20s, after studying theater at Northwestern University, when the prospect of London arose again. At the time, Kramer met three totally different theater artists Peter Brook being one of them who all advised him to head for Europe. "Brook wrote me a letter saying, 'What are you doing in New York? They're not ready for your work; you sound so much more European,'" recalls Kramer, whose then-burgeoning courtship with Callow, the British co-star of such films as "A Room With A View," didn't hurt: "I came to London after six months of knowing Simon and moved in with him," Kramer smiles, "as one does. I'm a lucky, lucky boy."

Satisfaction in his private life was one thing, attention for his work another. By April 2003, he had a fringe production of "Through the Leaves," a German play from 1970, running on the West End, with Callow in the cast. That led to "Woyzeck" at the Gate, minus Callow but accompanied by major praise, with Charles Spencer in The Daily Telegraph heralding "a director of extraordinary flair." "Shocked," he admits, by the polarised response to "Bent," Kramer continues to gather up assignments that would be impressive in a director 10 or 15 years his senior. In 2007, he will revive Tony Kushner's epic, two-part "Angels In America" for a British tour that finishes with six weeks in London; Greg Hicks will play Roy Cohn in the revival. Michael Boyd, artistic director of the Royal Shakespeare Company, has asked Kramer to do "Hamlet" for the company in 2008.

For now, though, his focus is on getting "Woyzeck" right all over again for America. "I really hope this is the beginning of a dialogue with New York," Kramer says of a production that, because Buchner left the text incomplete when he died at age 23 of typhus, "demands as an artist that you interact with it; with 'Woyzeck,' you go, oh, I actually have to finish it." At the same time, Kramer's own artistic project, one feels, is just beginning. As Hamlet might put it, the readiness is all.

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