Smooth operetta

“I like humans existing in a state of absurdity and trying to gather meaning from the disjointed world around them. And Pirates definitely fits that description,” director Sean Graney says of his latest project, The Pirates of Penzance.

The Gilbert and Sullivan operetta marks the busy Hypocrites artistic director’s second musical foray and the 13-year-old company’s third (Graney directed The Threepenny Opera in 2008, while Matt Hawkins mounted Cabaret last season). “The Hypocrites wanted to continue that trend,” Graney tells me in an e-mail exchange. “But with extreme budget cuts, we didn’t think it would be possible to pay the royalties that accompany most musicals.” The 121-year-old Pirates, however, is in the public domain.

“Like most ‘serious’ theater people, I had written the show off as fluff,” Graney says. “But once I really listened to it, I was like, God this is good, what was my problem?”

The goofy plot centers on Frederic, an orphan raised by a band of well-mannered swashbucklers. Released from servitude on his 21st birthday, Frederic meets his love interest, Mabel, and her sisters, who get kidnapped by the pirates. The girls’ father gets the show’s most famous number, the much-imitated patter song “I Am the Very Model of the Modern Major-General.”

“Most people mock [the show] because they feel it’s too whimsical,” Graney says, “but I find a very respectfully subversive intelligence to the writing.”“Respectfully subversive” isn’t a bad way to describe Graney’s own aesthetic in recent years. The puckish, thrift store–dapper 38-year-old turned both Oedipus and Strindberg’s Miss Julie into debris-strewn rock & roll three-handers for the Hypocrites. After directing a smashing rendition of the quick-change farce The Mystery of Irma Vep last season at Court Theatre, he gave a similar treatment to The Comedy of Errors this fall, stripping Shakespeare’s farce down to a six-actor, modern-language piece of metatheater.

When it works, which it often does, Graney’s approach provides a new avenue into a play’s core meaning. “The best way I can find the spirit of any play written over a century ago,” he says, “is to have a more casual relationship with the text. And reducing cast sizes adds to the dialogue between the actor and the audience—an actor gets to present many different characters and philosophies.”

“Sean knows how to structure a text so there’s this lightning-fast, sharp-edged humor that’s all grounded in the material and yet seems completely spontaneous,” says Court Theatre artistic director Charles Newell. “He makes a reduced cast a virtue as opposed to, Well, we don’t have enough money to do this.”

Yet Graney genially acknowledges his technique doesn’t always succeed. His recent student production of Molière’s Tartuffe at Northwestern “was a lot of fun, but the final product was not entirely successful because I reduced the script too much and ended up missing some essential elements of the play.”

For Pirates, Graney’s going a little more traditional, though “I also wouldn’t call it straightforward.” The cast is reduced to ten actors who perform multiple roles and play their own instruments in lieu of an orchestra. That said, Graney notes, “I didn’t change one word before we got into rehearsals. The original plan was for me to adapt the libretto and have [Hypocrites artistic associate] Kevin O’Donnell rearrange the music. But as I dug more deeply into the poetry, I found it near perfect.”

Despite his affinity for reducing and reconstructing texts, Graney says he’s not “trying to create a brand; that would be a little death to me. When artists try to maintain what they have been known for, it becomes a watery carbon copy, an idea rather than an experience.”

Of Pirates—and really, this could apply to any Graney production—he says, “I know there will be people out there that want a more traditional version of the play. And there are theaters for those lovely people.”

In previews now, Pirates opens Tuesday 14 .

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