A Conversation With Director Mike Reilly, “The Substance of Fire,” Ruskin Group Theatre, by James Scarborough

Jon Robin Baitz’s play “The Substance of Fire,” directed by Mike Reilly, dives deep into the tangled web of family loyalty and the relentless pursuit of artistic integrity. Reilly guides us through personal trauma, societal expectations, and commercial pressures. At the heart of the story is Isaac Geldhart, portrayed by Rob Morrow, who embodies both resilience and tragic flaw. Marcia Cross brings depth and power to her role as Marge Hackett, a woman ensnared in the chaos of the surrounding turmoil. Reilly’s direction ensures that themes of memory, loss, and ethical steadfastness hit home.

JS: What drew you to direct “The Substance of Fire”? How do you interpret its central themes?

MR: I’ve been working with The Ruskin Group Theatre for nearly twenty years now, and I consider it my artistic home. When John Ruskin called me and said that Rob Morrow had proposed we look at “The Substance of Fire”, written by his friend, Jon Robin Baitz, I was immediately intrigued.  I had worked with Rob on our production of Miller’s “Death of a Salesman” in 2019, and the experience was amazing, so I really didn’t have to think about wanting to direct this production. Soon after, Marcia Cross joined us in the role of Marge Hackett, and the whole thing, really, became a dream come true - to have both Rob Morrow and Marcia Cross in the cast and on stage together, I could not have hoped for a better pairing. After reading the play, I fell in love with it. It is not really about the nitty-gritty of book publishing, rather it’s about family and generational dynamics that seem timeless. Yes, Isaac Geldhart is a Holocaust survivor, and yes, he has experienced great loss in his life, but perhaps more significantly, he deals with a kind of “survivors’ guilt,” and struggles to maintain significant relationships with his children.  Upon arriving in America as an orphan, he re-invents himself (the quintessential American theme), yet where we find him, in the twilight of his life, he feels an urgency to address his past - make sense of the horror and destruction of what he calls “our Europe” - and to document its meaning. There is an abundance of themes to contemplate in this play, but what I find most compelling are the relationships that exist between generations. How each generation, either consciously or unconsciously, is driven to burn it all down and start anew.

JS: How did you approach the historical and personal trauma embedded in Isaac Geldhart’s character?

MR: Isaac, no doubt, has a troubled history. As a child in WWII Europe, he lost everything: his parents; his grandparents; his siblings; his culture. How do you move on from that? How do you build a life that has some kind of meaning? Some kind of substance? At the plays’ opening, we find Isaac nearing the end of his professional career, one that has dealt in the highest echelons of art and culture in America. There are several things going on here. One, Isaac has recently realized that he has spent his life ignoring the atrocities of his childhood, and has now committed himself, and his publishing company, to documenting them. Two, Isaac struggles to face the guilt he feels as a survivor, and as well as a parent who has become increasingly estranged from his children. Through the course of the play, Isaac deals with a creeping dementia where his “dream life is more compelling than his waking reality.” This has created a further tension with his children, who wrestle with the solvency of the company, as well as his increasingly volatile temperament. In the second act, there’s an interesting parallel that emerges. Isaac has struggled with the cognitive incongruity that Hitler’s youthful artistic ambitions present with the later monstrous figure that terrorized his world. Meanwhile, Marge Hackett, the social worker who makes a home visit to assess Isaac’s mental stability reveals her own troubled past. Both have had to struggle to reinvent themselves while making sense of their own past naïveté. Both have a history of circulating in the world of art, politics and culture, yet both know that despite reaching these heights of human achievement they’ve not been spared from the ravages of the darkest human impulses.

JS: Elaborate on the challenges and rewards of working with a text that combines personal conviction with commercial pressures?

MR: Well, this is the ageless tension between art and commerce isn’t it? The theater has long dealt with this conflict. What is art if not conviction? What good is art if you have no audience for it? We have a saying in the theater that, “a play is not a play until there is an audience present to see it.”  This is true of all art. Baitz’ play puts this tension into dramatic relief. For the artist, you hope for an audience, and for a measure of commercial success, yet you try to say something truthful, something over which you have a deeply held conviction. It’s an alchemy of sorts, and it all begins with the quality, the brilliance, of the writing. That’s the challenge, to find a play that can so beautifully speak to something you hold to be true, and compellingly present it in a way that an audience feels drawn to in their own lives. This is where, despite the increasing years that stand between us and the Holocaust, the family and generational dynamics that are at play in “The Substance of Fire” grounds all of us in the universal human experience.   

JS: How do you balance the play’s emotional intensity and its moments of wit and levity?

MR: I let the writing do its work. I let the actors do their work. I let the play emerge as it was intended to. I like to approach plays as a journey of discovery, where we (myself and the actors), spend a period of time exploring its contours, looking for where it lives, ultimately discovering the truth in its moments. To me, this is one of the major joys of directing. Actors like Rob Morrow and Marcia Cross, as well as the rest of our brilliant cast: Emmitt Butler, Barrett Lewis and Fiona Dorn, are incredibly talented and more than able to reach the depths of intensity that are present. These actors are very smart and incisive. They deftly handle the wit and humor with a kind of honesty and ease that reflects the reality of everyday life. What situation in life doesn’t have a complex set of realities? Life is messy and not monochromatic. I’m blessed with the gift of an amazingly beautiful script and an amazingly talented cast - the two most necessary elements in the success of any play.  

JS: What was your vision for the scenic and lighting design? How did it enhance the story?

MR: Different plays require different approaches, some more metaphorical, while others more naturalistic.  Miller’s “Death of a Salesman” and “A View from the Bridge” afford a lot of room to delve into a more metaphoric landscape. “The Substance of Fire” lives in a more naturalistic landscape, yet there is a definite time and space that has to be evoked. The challenge here had more to do with the radical change in location between acts and our limited space at The Ruskin Group Theatre. We need to go from a publishing house conference room to an aging apartment in Gramercy Park in the space of a ten-to-fifteen-minute intermission. So, the set design needed to be unique in a way, able to transform quickly, moving an abundance of furniture on and off the stage in a short period of time. Ryan Wilson, our set designer came up with an ingenious system of moving walls that help to facilitate this. At the same time, I wanted to sneak metaphor in at the edges, so we have the Manhattan cityscape dramatically present throughout, and windows of an imposing nature play a role here as well. The sound and lighting, by Ed Salas, whom I’ve worked with for many years, is subtle, but not without its own dramatic impact. We use Henryk Gorecki’s Symphony No. 3 sparingly and try to emphasize the singular kind of light that permeates a NYC mid-winter’s late afternoon.

JS: How did you work with Rob Morrow and Marcia Cross to develop their complex characters?

MR: Rob and Marcia are artists of the highest order. Mostly, they need me to get out of the way while they explore. Acting is play and actors need to play in order to discover.  Rob and Marcia bring an incredible amount of intelligence to their work, so most of the time they don’t need me telling them what a particular moment or situation is about, but at the same time, I’m there to help them through some tougher moments, to make sure the staging is working both with their choices and the pace of the play, and to make certain that we’re telling the essential story. We talk a lot before, during and after rehearsals, and these talks ensure that we’re all on the same page and ultimately serving the story and our audience. 

JS: In what ways do you think the production’s themes speak to contemporary societal issues?

MR: Themes of loss, regret, guilt and remorse; themes of perseverance, hope, and renewal are timeless. “The Substance of Fire” takes place between 1987 and 1991, yet our contemporary world is still at war with itself, still dealing with internecine battles between cultures, religions and generations. This has ever been true and, sadly, will ever be true. But it is part of the human condition. What can this generation, like Isaac Geldhart’s WWII generation, impress upon the next so that they don’t make the same mistakes? So that we can go to our own resting place at peace with ourselves and what we did or didn’t do in times of great upheaval, of monstrous atrocities, of death and destruction that seems to consume the entire world? It’s overwhelming really, but I think, as Isaac discovers finally, we must let go of all of that and live in the present with those that we care about. We have our family, our friends, our community with us here and now, and we have to allow ourselves to simply be present with and for them in the short time that we have together.

JS: What were some pivotal moments in the rehearsal process that shaped the final production?

MR: Casting, casting, casting. There’s a saying that goes “90% of directing is casting”, and that’s true. We have a brilliant cast. Fill a room with talented, committed artists, and magic happens. As well, Rob and Marcia have been wonderful leaders, taking the younger actors under their wings and really helping them to realize their own power and potential. I love that. I try to create a free and lighthearted environment where actors feel safe to play. That’s not to say that we are not all about business - we treat the text and the production with the seriousness and gravity it demands. Ultimately, I want the entire production, the actors, my stage manager (the incomparable Nicole Millar), designers, and crew to be there and to not miss a moment of the magic. 

JS: How do you ensure the accurate and sensitive portrayal of the play’s historical context to the audience?

MR: We respect it. We strive to get the historical elements correct. We have actual replicas of the illustrated letters from the mid-twentieth century that Isaac collects. We have a replica of one of Hitler’s paintings on a post-card. We have replicas of first print editions of the books that Isaac has purchased. We have NY Times editions from the period, and we have period appropriate costumes. My actors, as I’ve said, are very intelligent, so they have done their research as well, coming to understand both the period of the late 1980s in the publishing world as it first perceived its own apocalypse, as well as that of 1930s-40s Europe and the existential destruction it experienced. 

JS: What impact do you hope this production will have on audiences in terms of its exploration of ethical and familial dilemmas?

MR: Every play hopes to affect its audience in a profound manner. I’m under no illusion that we’ll “change the world,” but I always hope that, for an evening, we’ll bring our audience to a deeper understanding of the human condition. That we can provide a space for them to feel something on a deeper level, in a way that the events of the day rarely allow. It’s been many decades now that families seem to have been horribly fracturing, and that greatly disturbs me. I come from a large, close-knit family, which isn’t to say that we haven’t experienced our own difficulties, but I know what we had, and I know what we stand to lose, and its fragile. I now have four sons of my own, and they’ve grown and moved out of the home to start their own lives as young adults, and its bittersweet. If I’m about anything as a director, I’m about redemption. The human race is so tragically flawed that redemption is a constant necessity, and I think that’s why we have a visceral draw to it. I want our audience to feel the pain, the joy, the anguish and the relief of the journey from the depths of the hell that regret is, to the peace and serenity that redemption provides.

Performances are Fridays and Saturdays at 8pm, and Sundays at 2pm through September 1. Tickets are $25 - $40. The Ruskin Group Theatre is located at 3000 Airport Avenue, Santa Monica, CA 90405. For more information, click here.