One evening in early February, an eager crowd attended a public dress rehearsal of Sam Gold’s new Broadway production of “The Glass Menagerie,” which will open on March 9. The audience faced a barren stage: no curtain, no backdrop, nothing more than a folding table with a bowl of apples on it and an industrial shelf with a few props. They couldn’t have known that this banal view had been elaborately — and expensively — produced. The exposed pipes stretching across the vast black brick wall of the theater had been installed by the set designer, as had the sprinkler system. Sixty thousand pounds of concrete were poured to create the effect of an unremarkable gray floor.

For anyone familiar with Tennessee Williams’s masterpiece — the story of a young man who abandons his mother and sister to pursue a life of artistic freedom — these choices will be surprising. Williams was a controlling aesthete, and in his stage directions, he specifies that the set consist of a threadbare living room on the ground floor of a grim St. Louis tenement around 1938. But what we saw next was an even more profound revision.

The house lights stayed on as the play’s four performers appeared, emerging from a door at audience level and lining up before a staircase that led to the stage. First, the character of Tom Wingfield (Joe Mantello), whom Williams based on himself, mounted the stairs and delivered the play’s famous opening monologue directly to the audience. He explained that the play is not a traditional play but a “memory” and that he will be both the narrator and a character in it. He then introduced the other characters, who one by one climbed the stairs to join him onstage: His mother, Amanda Wingfield (Sally Field), a gloriously needy woman; his sister Laura (Madison Ferris, making her Broadway debut), an eccentric 23-year-old who is written as having a limp; and Jim (Finn Wittrock), the “gentleman caller,” an “emissary from a world of reality that we were somehow set apart from.”

When it was her turn, Laura approached the staircase in a wheelchair. She folded her body in half and placed her hands on the ground, putting most of her weight on them. She hoisted her butt high in the air and shuffled backward on her hands and feet over to the first step to sit down. Amanda collapsed the wheelchair and, lifting it with visible effort, carried it up the steps. Then she came back down to help Laura.

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The audience watched in silence as Laura inched up the stairs backward, with Amanda bowed before her, tenderly placing her daughter’s legs on each successive step. The operation lasted nearly two full minutes. It was painful — and made all the more so by the realization that Ferris’s inability to walk was real. We watched Ferris pull herself up the stairs, moving through a world that wasn’t designed for her comfort, just as we were sitting in a theater that wasn’t designed for ours. The atmosphere in the room thickened. It was as if everything in the theater — stage, actors and audience — had been laid bare.

This feeling of unsettling intimacy was familiar from every Sam Gold production I’ve seen — from his downtown tragicomedy “The Flick,” to his Tony-winning Broadway musical “Fun Home,” to his wrenching “Othello,” which played this winter at the New York Theater Workshop. At 38, Gold is one of the most celebrated theater directors in New York, a master at gently stripping both audience and actors of their expectations and creating a sense of collective interdependence. He does this by dispensing with theatrical conventions — showy sets and costumes, a clear separation between stage and audience, acting that titillates or entertains — so that the focus stays fixed on the bodies of the actors and their words. “I’m not very interested in pretend,” Gold told me. “I’m interested in putting people onstage. I want people. And I want a world that reflects the real world.” His pared-down worlds are, paradoxically, inviting: They corral everyone in the theater toward maximum receptivity. Once you learn the rules and submit to them, it’s as if you’ve been initiated into a family.

A few days before the dress rehearsal, I joined Gold at the Belasco Theater. As we talked, stage technicians rushed around us, testing microphones and arranging props. Gold has worn the same uniform since he was 19: a dark shirt with slightly baggy black jeans, gray New Balance sneakers and owlish glasses that make his childlike face appear solemn. A tangle of curls sticks up from the top of his head, giving him a touch of appealing dishevelment. His walk is tentative, as if he is testing the floor beneath his feet, but when he speaks, he is lucid and assured.

When Williams wrote “The Glass Menagerie” in the early 1940s, Gold explained, he was resisting the theatrical conventions of his time, what Williams called “the straight realistic play with its genuine Frigidaire and authentic ice cubes.” So he wrote a story that was supposed to operate like a memory: shadowy, poetic, expressive. He created an autobiographical narrator who comments on the action, something that had rarely been done before. And he wrote honestly — though discreetly — about being gay.

Gold asked himself what it would really mean to put a memory onstage. A memory is not a simulacrum of an event — it’s a version of it that’s colored by emotion, and it can present itself to us anywhere, anytime. “To me that means there can’t be a set,” he said. “There can’t be fake walls, and there can’t be a couch. The biggest thing was no couch.” He staged the play this way in Amsterdam first, at the invitation of the director Ivo van Hove, but when he was thinking about bringing it to New York, he wanted to go further in his updating of Williams. “It was very emotional and vulnerable for him to say: This is my life. I’m haunted by my sister and my mother,” Gold said. “He was putting himself out in this raw, vulnerable way. Letting his faults be there, letting his homosexuality into the play at a time that that was dangerous.”

Gay characters on Broadway are now a norm, but there had never been an actor in a wheelchair cast in a leading role. Gold decided that to be faithful to Williams’s revolutionary spirit, he would put onstage a person the audience is unused to seeing there. He and Scott Rudin, the show’s producer, began a search throughout the United States and England for actresses with disabilities. They chose Ferris, who at 25 had a range of performing experiences but had never appeared in a professional production.

When Ferris mounts the stairs, she moves as she would in real life. This is the beginning of Gold’s transformation of Laura — a character usually played as pathologically fragile — from symbol into human being. “She doesn’t have to act like she’s vulnerable, because the vulnerability is in the prop — there’s a wheelchair that gets to do that vulnerability for her,” Gold told me. “She gets to have agency, and she gets to be the kind of woman I’d rather see onstage.” Gold hoped that by watching her climb the stairs, we would be roused to an immediate understanding of the family whose lives we were about to enter: The difficulty of their situation is palpably real. The stakes are urgent. Sitting in silence, with the lights up, we were also being invited to see our bodies in Laura’s. All bodies have limitations and failures. All bodies are, at one time or another, dependent on someone else’s for help.

Gold says that one of his favorite pieces of theater he ever saw, Ariane Mnouchkine’s “Tambours sur la Digue,” when he was 22, made him fall asleep — “that kind of sleep where you still feel like you’re seeing the show, sitting in your unconscious.” His roots are in conceptual downtown theater, and he remains unafraid to challenge audiences. But he’s a pop avant-gardist; he likes to make an 800-seat theater feel as intimate as a 70-seat theater, to create public spaces that have the emotional freedom of a living room.

His hit musical “Fun Home” — which won five Tonys and is now on a national tour — may have come closest to this ideal. For that play, based on Alison Bechdel’s autobiographical graphic novel about gay life, suicide, family dysfunction and unarticulated love, he wanted to show the audience three different time frames at once: Alison at 10, Alison at 19 and Alison at 43. To accomplish this, Gold staged the play in the round, something that is almost never done with musicals because the format can make it hard to hear the singing in every seat. But Gold insisted on it, because it allows for simultaneity, so that the stage imitates the page of a graphic novel. “It gave me this opportunity to have the older Alison involved in scenes she’s not in, and watch them and participate in them,” Gold said. “And because of that, there’s a kind of doubling of the intimacy and emotional intensity of the piece. You can keep turning it and looking at it from another angle.” In a play about the closet, nothing was hidden: Audience members could gaze at one another as well as the performers. It’s the only musical I can think of that has a young girl singing an anthem about the beauty of an older butch woman she saw in a restaurant, desire and pride playing across her face.

“The Glass Menagerie” is Gold’s sixth Broadway show, another experiment in making a large audience experience how small a theater can be. At a rehearsal for the play in early January, in a studio in the Flatiron district, Gold sat behind a table, clutching a mug with a picture of a kitten on it. His resting face is sphinxlike, but when he speaks with actors, he is teasing and open.

They were rehearsing the final scene of the play, in which Laura has her first romantic encounter, with Jim, who has come over to her family’s apartment for dinner. The meeting was engineered by Amanda out of the mixed motives that afflict most parents: a genuine desire to see her daughter settled, and a projection of her own fantasies onto her child. Gold had cast both characters against type, so as to complicate the balance of power between them. In most productions, Laura is a pale, tremulous being, and Jim is perfectly ordinary. But Ferris has thick blond hair, high cheek bones and the vivacity of a stereotypical ingénue. Likewise, Wittrock looks like a teen heartthrob — confident and crisply handsome.

That day, Gold was staging the beginning of their meeting, when Jim approaches Laura holding a lit candelabrum and wine and looks around for a place to sit.

Jim: Where shall I set the candles?

Laura: Oh — oh, anywhere. ...

Jim: How about here on the floor? Any objections?

Laura: No.

Jim: I’ll spread a newspaper under to catch the drippings. I like to sit on the floor. Mind if I do?

Laura: Oh, no.

Jim: Give me a pillow?

Laura: What?

Jim: A pillow!

Laura: Oh. ... [she hands him one]

Jim: How about you? Don’t you like to sit on the floor?

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Laura: Oh — yes.

Jim: Why don’t you, then?

Laura: I — will.

In Gold’s production, Jim’s invitation to Laura to join him on the floor had become a minefield of potential humiliations. The only light onstage would be provided by the candelabrum, and the two would huddle over it, warmly illuminated, wet concrete glinting all around them. Getting them there, during this exchange, required a complex choreography. And to make the moment believable, Gold’s direction would have to answer a number of questions. How could Jim ask this of a woman in a wheelchair? Is he being cruel? Or is he simply clueless — and is it precisely his cluelessness that is liberating for Laura, giving her the wherewithal to crawl to his side? Together with the actors, Gold set out to explore all the possible oscillations of feeling that they each might be experiencing.

“How about you? Don’t you like to sit on the floor?”

The question hung in the air, as Ferris bent down, moved aside the bulky footrest at the bottom of her wheelchair and then supported herself with her hands so that her body became a triangle with her butt as the peak. She then swung the bottom half of her body downward, where she landed in a squat. Ferris repeated the movement again and again, trying different ways to maneuver her body toward Jim and the candelabrum: walking on hands and feet, crouching and sliding. None of it looked casual, and she would have to practice until it did. Gold wants every gesture and utterance in his plays to feel so inevitable that it’s as if there was never any direction at all. This takes a lot of extremely detailed directing.

When Jim asks Laura to come even closer, so he can see her better in the candlelight, Ferris tried a few moves, saying, “I have to do this very embarrassing sort of walk-crawl in front of him, so it just adds to the uh — ” “Yeah, it’s so embarrassing,” Gold interjected. Ferris moaned lightly for a moment, then said, “I don’t like doing it in front of you guys!” At this frank acknowledgment, the mood in the room shifted — a feeling akin to the dimming of the lights at a party — and the rehearsal continued.

I asked Gold a few weeks later if he remembered this moment, and he answered wryly: “Acting is humiliation. I’m always asking actors to do things that they’re going to feel humiliated by. If they’re not humiliated, I’m not doing my job.”

In the same way he does with an audience, Gold intentionally destabilizes actors as a way of bringing out raw feelings. Sally Field told me how demanding the opening of the play is. “It’s arduous,” she said. “I may not make it one night. The chair could come flying down. My legs are completely black and blue from that chair banging into my legs.” But the difficulty of carrying that wheelchair up the stairs helped her understand something new about Amanda’s character. “The predicament that life has handed her is so mind-boggling. She’s so without choices of how to fix the predicament, because the ailment that her oldest child has is so real, is so true. It’s so physical.” There is an “unadorned humanness” to Gold’s vision.

Annie Baker, the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright with whom Gold has collaborated for nearly a decade, told me about an argument they had when they were making “The Aliens,” a play about three stunted young men, which takes place on the back patio of a coffee shop in Vermont. Gold and the set designer Andrew Lieberman felt that the set should be only four feet deep — “which is nothing, basically.” The idea of such a shallow stage worried Baker. They eventually compromised and ended up with a set that was six feet deep. “I just remember it changed in this incredible way,” Baker said. “It’s just these guys up against a blue wall for the entire play.” The actors could hardly gesticulate, much less move across the stage for dramatic effect. The picture the audience saw was so still, it was almost like a photograph. Gold is always asking himself, Can the audience read the minds of the actors? By taking everything away, he was trying to leave only what he calls “pure thought” onstage, so that the audience would register even tiny flickers on the actors’ faces as they experienced emotion.

In “The Flick,” a play about two popcorn sweepers and a projectionist at a small-town movie theater, Gold limited the actors by asking them to repeat the same movements over and over again. The set consisted of rows of dirty red velour theater seats, and for three and a half hours, the actors walked up and down them with brooms and dustpans, unfolding their hopes and failures in the offhand way that can happen in the weird proximity of a workplace. Because the space was so confined, every gesture had to be precise, every word and pause teased out for maximum nuance. Matthew Maher, a 45-year-old actor who has appeared in Gold’s “Uncle Vanya,” “The Flick” and “Othello,” explained that every sequence in “The Flick,” down to the eye rolls, was tightly choreographed, and yet he said he has never been in a show that felt more improvisational: “It’s sort of like a demonstration of some weird physics rule that chaos can exist in the tiniest space.” The whole performance was a high-wire act. “He puts actors in a position where the only way they can make the thing work is for you to give the performance of your career,” Maher said. “He thinks you’re a genius.”

Ever since he was a boy, Gold has felt most at home in dark theaters. Throughout his childhood, he went to the movies three or four times a week. He grew up in Chappaqua, N.Y. — “a sort of corporate training ground,” where he felt out of place. “I was always thinking about death and dying, while other people were talking about who won the basketball game,” he said. His father is an investment banker, and his mother is an interior designer who studied painting and sculpture. He has two brothers, who are eight and 10 years older than he. His parents were devoted, but they weren’t demonstrative. He talked to them “like they were my colleagues who I could have a conversation about stuff with,” he said. “I was born an adult.” At the movies, he felt liberated. “When the lights were out, and I was lost in that story, I felt intimacy. I felt connected to myself.”

When Gold was 15, the family moved to Manhattan. He went to Dalton, the Upper East Side prep school, where he began to act and direct and found the artistic community he had always wished for. He instantly identified with what he calls “a New Yorker’s psychology,” feeling relaxed in a dense crowd. The atmosphere of a subway car, where one person might be in mourning while another was late for an appointment, became a model for him of the kind of democratic place a theater could be.

In college at Cornell, Gold took a course with a film professor who was also a Jungian psychoanalyst. The small group of students met in a tiny room to watch Tarkovsky, Bergman and Bresson on 16-millimeter film. For Gold, sitting there, in that “melancholic and vulnerable little space,” was an otherworldly experience. Each meeting, after the movie ended and before the class discussion began, there was a short break. Gold would go across the street to a deli for a snack, and every time he felt as if he were about to get hit by a car. “I was living in this kind of emotional mental space for so long,” he said, “that it was really hard to reintegrate long enough to get a bagel.” When the students returned, they would discuss the film, but he was still lost in the world of the movie. He wanted to be the creator of that experience, to bring people together in a small room and send them to an unfamiliar place that they would have to find their way back from.

At first, he became an actor, and he moved back to New York to try to make it. It took him a year to realize that he was a terrible at it, simply unable to live in the present tense. What appealed to him, he realized, was the community that coheres around a play — how “the play becomes this little story that everybody can invest in together.”

In 2003, Gold was accepted at Juilliard for directing. He had a small, close-knit ensemble at his disposal: the third- and fourth-year acting students, who had been living, playing and “wriggling on the floor” together for two years. While at school, he also served as an assistant director to Elizabeth LeCompte at the Wooster Group, the legendary company at the vanguard of the downtown theater scene. The two places were in productive conflict. At Juilliard, he found a group of openhearted young people who were being groomed for traditional success; the Wooster Group was wild and visionary, a company held together by the enigmatic charisma of LeCompte.

The Wooster Group, whose core members have now been together for 42 years, rehearses every weekday for six hours or more in the Performing Garage in SoHo. Work on projects often goes on for years before an audience sees them, and after a play opens, the actors continue rehearsing it. From LeCompte, Gold learned that directing is a process of creation in layers, like painting, and that the most spellbinding performances emerge from intimate knowledge of the actors: drawing from their personal histories and designing productions around their specific bodies. It was a process Gold compared to biological evolution. “I found that the rhythm in the ritual of coming in every day, the boredom, the space meant that something more weird and interesting and unexpected would enter the room.”

Like LeCompte, Gold resists what he calls “representational reality”: a detailed mirage of recognizable life that the audience can passively witness. Gold, along with a small group of set designers he works with again and again, makes the space of the theater feel unfamiliar in order to prod the audience into alertness. This can mean dispensing with a stage altogether and having an entire play take place in front of the proscenium, right on top of the audience, as he did in “Look Back in Anger,” or creating a sealed ecosystem for the performers and spectators to share, as he did when he staged “Fun Home” in the round and “Othello” in a one-room plywood army barracks that the audience sat in too.

‘When the lights were out, and I was lost in that story, I felt intimacy. I felt connected to myself.’
For “Othello,” Gold and Lieberman realized a fantasy that they always had: to do away entirely with theatrical lights. Instead, the actors used military-style lamps to light the space themselves. The first scene of the show takes place in complete darkness, with the actors lying down on mattresses on the floor and the audience surrounding them on three sides. Gold wanted to “let the audience breathe, let them hear each other breathe and let the Shakespeare and the poetry sort of come out of the darkness.”

Gold’s production was an attempt to make the play’s muscular tragedy immediately accessible — connecting Shakespeare to our era by staging it in a contemporary war zone, but also reaching back to an ancient way of experiencing theater, as a form of collective catharsis. Attending plays was considered a rite of passage for young men in ancient Greece. Because military service was mandatory for all Athenian citizens, many in the audience and onstage were veterans of combat. They sat together watching plays about war and loss. “The plays were a place for the whole society to deal with grief and suffering,” Gold said. “And that was a very powerful idea to me.” Gold told me that “Othello” has an abundance of open vowels (O-thell-o; Des-de-mo-na), and in his production, he wanted to preserve those sounds — which to him are elemental cries (people howl, he says, when they’ve committed murder, or are betrayed).

Gold brushed it off when I asked if he thinks the ancient civic ritual of theater attendance ought to be revived in our fragmented modern age. “The Greeks didn’t have movies or Netflix or the printing press,” he said. “I wouldn’t be that prescriptive or be that self-important about the role of theater.” But Gold’s mission is not unlike that of his predecessors: to engineer a place where we sit alongside other people as we encounter our most complex, hidden emotions.

Gold and his wife, Amy Herzog, a playwright, have two daughters. The elder, Frances, who is 4, has nemaline myopathy, a muscle disease, and uses a wheelchair. Their younger daughter, Josephine, is 2. Becoming a parent to both daughters, he told me, has brought him into contact with his own fragility. “Your life is in three acts, and that second act is a hard shift to make, toward dependency, community, vulnerability, unconditional love.” Now that he had been pried open, the project of turning the lights off and inviting people into a room to experience their own vulnerability felt more pressing.

“Most theater you see has a reassuring quality,” Herzog explained to me in an email. “Sam is not someone who requires or even likes reassurance, so he also doesn’t provide it in his work. This has the paradoxical effect of rendering the audience both more alert (I am not being closely chaperoned through this experience) and more trusting (I am not being manipulated/lied to).” In recent years, Gold has wanted to take on only projects that feel important enough to draw him away from his children.

In mid-January, I returned to the rehearsal studio to watch the progress of the gentleman-caller scene. Gold took his seat at the director’s table, and Ferris and Wittrock began to run the sitting-on-the-floor sequence. After Laura decides to join Jim on the floor, the stage directions specify that she should place her pillow several feet away from him, prompting him to invite her to come closer.

“I can’t hardly see you sitting way over there,” Jim says to Laura. “I can — see you,” she replies. “But that’s not fair, I’m in the limelight,” he says. Laura then edges toward him.

For this moment to make sense, Ferris needed to first seat herself outside the halo of the candlelight, and then, at Jim’s beckoning, move toward it. This required some more delicate maneuvering for Ferris, negotiating the balance between fragility and empowerment, pity and straightforwardness in the interaction between Jim and Laura. By the end of the play, Gold hoped that the audience would see Laura anew, as a person with a playful inner life. She goes to the zoo because she likes it there, not because she is lonely and limited. She collects glass because it appeals to her imagination. “She’s a person,” Ferris told me. “She’s not just this fictitious idea.”

“I want to try to ride the line between being courteous but not being overly sensitive,” Gold instructed them from behind the director’s table. “When I pictured this moment in the story, I’ve always told myself that Jim is not thinking about it. That he’s like: Come sit on the floor! Let’s sit on the floor! And that you’re like, Yeah, I would like that. It’s like, Great, I’d love to sit on the floor with you! As opposed to just, I don’t want to have to do that in front of you. But I don’t know. Maybe that story isn’t the right story.”

Gold probed this idea with the actors for a few minutes — how to play it like a romantic scene: two beautiful young people in candlelight, trying things together.

“This is what you wanted your whole life,” Gold said to Ferris. “Have fun with this guy. And so when he’s like, Let’s sit on the floor, it’s like: Yeah. I’m going to have fun with you. I’m going to do this. It isn’t humiliating yet.”

What I had watched, I realized later, was Gold substantially reinterpreting the lines of the play, complicating them so that a moment that could have been smooth and quick — passing a pillow, sitting on the floor — had become ridged with silence, surprise, subtext. He was performing a kind of freestyle literary criticism, turning a scene that’s often played for pathos into a funny, sparky one about a woman with spunk and originality encountering an unremarkable man, manipulating him a little to get what she wants.

They ran the sequence again. Jim’s tone was even more guileless, and Laura’s was bolder, but still questioning. You could hear the meaning of the scene deepen.

As Gold watched them, his ordinarily deadpan expression became radiant. He looked like a kid hypnotized by a movie. He was seeing how much he could uncover.