Moritz von Stuelpnagel’s broadway debut show starts this week. Richard Bordelon/The Fordham Ram
By Richard Bordelon
When Moritz von Stuelpnagel first described the play Hand to God to his wife, she said, “I know this is going to Broadway.” In March, his wife’s prediction will be confirmed, as Hand to God begins previews on Broadway at the Booth Theatre, marking von Stuelpnagel’s Broadway directorial debut.
Von Stuelpnagel came to the performing arts through the visual arts (his mother designs museum exhibits) and has had a theatrical journey from Boston to New York, including teaching at Fordham along the way.
Von Stuelpnagel first became interested in directing after studying visual arts and graphic design at Carnegie Mellon for a year. He had done shows in high schools and realized that he preferred the performing arts, which are more collaborative, to the visual arts, which he admitted were often “lonely.” The collaborative experience of the performing arts drew him into the theatrical world because he enjoyed “letting an event unfold in a certain way and having [the work] be a collaborative enterprise between artists.”
He realized that theater also offered a wider range of what kinds of senses, emotions and vehicles artists can use to construct their craft.
“Because you’re employing the audience’s imagination, you actually have a much wider palate of ideas or tools to pull on or draw from to create an experiential interaction,” he said.
After a few years in Boston, von Stuelpnagel moved to New York through the Williamstown Theatre Festival in Massachusetts. He began as an assistant director, working with such prolific New York stage directors as Mark Brokaw, Nicholas Martin, Darko Tresnjak and Anna D. Shapiro.
While assistant directing around the city, he directed any chance he got. Jason Pizzarello, an alumnus of Fordham’s playwriting program, recommended von Stuelpnagel to Matthew Maguire, head of Fordham’s theater program. Von Stuelpnagel began directing plays as part of the playwriting program, which allows professional directors to work with aspiring playwrights to hone their crafts.
In the fall of 2010, Maguire invited von Stuelpnagel to direct The Way of the World by William Congreve as part of the theater department’s mainstage season, an experience that von Stuelpnagel enjoyed immensely.
“I discovered how much I really liked working with the students there,” he said “The student body at Fordham is full of ambition and full of creativity, and not afraid to challenge each other with the discussion of what they find to be important to them artistically. That was really a wonderful environment to find myself in, and I wanted to be part of that conversation.”
His experience directing a mainstage show encouraged von Stuelpnagel to pursue teaching, and he began teaching both Invitation to Theater and Senior Audition 2, a career transition type of class for acting majors.
Although his other commitments have precluded his teaching the past couple of semesters, he admitted, “I’ve loved the time that I’ve had there.”
Von Stuelpnagel serves as the artistic director of Studio 42, which is dedicated to producing plays that are “unproducible,” which means those “that are too big or too nontraditional in structure or too complicated or fantastical that other people seem to get nervous about.”
He admitted that Studio 42 “has given me a great little corner of the market” and encouraged him to work on shows like Verité (opened at LCT3 Feb. 18) and Hand to God (opening at the Booth Theatre April 7), which are being performed this spring.
These shows have something in common, though.
“I think the kind of plays that I am drawn to are the ones where we can laugh about our own suffering,” he said. “To really be alive as a human being means to acknowledge how difficult it is to be fully in ourselves or to face our own limitations in whatever way.”
Verité, which deals with a stay-at-home mom and struggling author who has to make her memoir riveting enough for her publisher to consider publishing it, and Hand to God, which concerns a boy who joins a Christian puppet ministry only to have his puppet become possessed, each have this kind of outlook on life.
Hand to God, which begins previews on March 14 before an April 7 opening night, has been a journey for von Stuelpnagel, from directing its off-off-Broadway premier, to its off-Broadway transfer, to Broadway itself. He claimed that this has been a surreal experience.
“Our billboard went up last week, and it was just unbelievable,” he said. “It’s just getting more and more real.”
His Broadway debut was not a short journey, though.
“A career moves in fits and starts; that’s what they mean by ‘right place, right time,’” he said. “You can slog through your career forever and then suddenly, very suddenly something can explode.”
Working in the New York theater community for a number of years has taught von Stuelpnagel always to look for new things in the performing arts.
“Sometimes the most exciting projects are not always the most widely publicized,” he said. “The more you seek out, the more there is to find. There’s a lot to discover and discovery is part of the experience.”
This attitude of discovery has drawn producers to plays directed by von Stuelpnagel. In 2011, a discovery led producers to find Hand to God, and almost four years later, it has found the bright lights of Broadway.
