3.3: Case Study- Mikael Burke and The Magnolia Ballet

Directing Queer Black Southern Memory

Mikael Burke’s production of The Magnolia Ballet (2022) operated at the mystical intersections of race, masculinity, and queerness in the American South. Burke approaches theatre as both an artistic and social practice—one where he can confront his own demons while leading collaborative processes that confront systemic inequities. Though Burke cut his teeth directing classics and adaptations of ballets with his company No Exit Performance in his native Indianapolis, his recent work often explores how inherited histories shape identity, especially within Black and queer communities navigating the lingering violence of white supremacy. Written by Terry Guest and directed by Burke for Chicago-based About Face Theatre and the Phoenix Theatre in Indianapolis, The Magnolia Ballet blends realism, poetry, and movement to tell the story of a young Black man, Ezekiel, coming of age in rural Georgia. Haunted by family ghosts and the weight of Southern tradition, Ezekiel’s search for love and belonging unfolds in a landscape still marked by racism and toxic masculinity. Burke’s concept for Magnola Ballet blends the coming-of-age story with a ghost story format to create a fantasia where different performance elements—flashbacks, dramatic scenes of dialogue, drag performance, direct address to the audience—combine to tell a single story. Under Burke’s direction, the play becomes more than a story of one young man’s awakening—it is a meditation on how fear keeps us from living as our authentic selves. Like Mary Kathryn Nagle’s Sovereignty, Burke’s collaboration with Guest transforms personal and collective history into theatrical language, using performance to challenge cultural myths about power, identity, and inheritance.

"Finding the Why?": Mikael Burke on Directing with Purpose

Mikael Burke: My name is Mikael Burke. I use he/him pronouns or anything respectful. I got into theatre when I was very little. My church growing up was a very small church. Seventy percent of the members were my immediate family. We would do Easter plays and Christmas plays. I think I was a tulip when I was four, a teal tulip. I was introduced to theatre from an early age. We didn’t go see much theatre growing up. That came later. But I started doing it when I was young. Really, I was a choir kid. I was a music kid growing up. When I initially went to undergrad, I went for music. I was going to be a singer. But in college, I had a moment where I realized I like the act of singing. I don’t enjoy the practice of being a singer. Then I started to think about, “Okay, what else do you like to do?” I thought back to those little plays we did when I was younger. I clocked that most of my friends, the people that I gravitated toward, were theatre kids, even though I wasn’t explicitly a theatre kid. So, I changed my major to theatre and never looked back. The act of bringing to life another human being, that was the thing I loved most. I didn’t know that until I took that plunge.

In undergrad, I was still acting but I also became interested in directing and made a concerted effort to direct a play by my senior year. That led to my first year out of school. Like a lot of twenty-two-year-old-about-to-graduate seniors in college, I was amazing. I knew everything, and I had it all figured out. So, I applied to twelve different internships and fellowships for directing at theatres all over the country and I got exactly zero of them. Instead of allowing that to defeat me, I said, “Okay, if you all don’t want to bring me in to do theatre where you are, I’ll just do it myself where I am.” Some friends of mine and I started a small theatre company in Indianapolis, Indiana. We lucked out because my dear friend Catherine, who played Medea in my senior thesis production at Butler University, grew up in Indianapolis. Her high school theatre teacher came and saw her in Medea and said, “We’d love for you to do this show for our students.” So, we did the show at their high school. Someone in the audience at that performance approached me afterwards and said, “I know a guy with an empty theatre on the east side of town. Y’all should come do shows there.” We talked to him. That worked out. Suddenly, we lucked into having free theatre space for a year. We made plays with the little money we had, but we could do it because we weren’t paying rent. That kicked us off. We merged with another small company in town that was run by other friends of ours. That combined company became No Exit Performance.

I was the Marketing and Associate Artistic Director of No Exit for four years. We devised plays from scratch. We did a lot of adaptations of classical ballets into theatre pieces. We produced some plays by playwrights that were alive, mostly playwrights that were dead, some Shakespeare. That is how I cut my teeth. I only assistant-directed twice prior to grad school. It was mostly me feeling my way through what directing is until I decided I wanted to go to grad school and learn all the things I didn’t know I needed to learn.

 

Gibson Alessandro Cima: What made that decision for you?

 

Burke: I did a production of Macbeth and a reviewer in town named Lou Harry wrote a solid review of the piece. But the closing line was, “This production has some of the most striking images that I’ve ever seen and things that I won’t soon forget. But often with No Exit’s work, I’m asking myself why?” The “why” is unclear. At first, I thought, “That’s because you don’t get it.” But when I sat down and thought about it, I thought, "Wait a minute, that seems like an important piece of the puzzle that isn’t making it across the gulf. So, what’s up with that?" I wanted to figure that out. That was my impetus to get serious about applying to grad schools and going after what I wanted. That’s what brought me to Chicago. I came here in fall of 2015 for grad school at the Theatre School at DePaul. That master’s directing program no longer exists. It’s a tragedy of COVID. I’m an endangered species now. But it was a great program. I learned a lot. I was a completely different director coming out of it than I was going in. It was exactly the right thing for me.

That’s what launched me into the freelance career that I have now.  I was very fortunate to have two professional shows in Chicago that premiered within one month of one another in my first season after I graduated. I was able to make a big splash all at once. I was very fortunate that the two shows I was working on were both good plays and plays that were right in my aesthetic wheelhouse. So, I got to come out, I didn’t have to wait very long for people to see not just that I am a good director, but also these are the kinds of plays I am very good at directing. That all happened at once, and I think it opened some amazing doors.

 

Cima: What were the key takeaways from grad school?

 

Burke: It had been very easy for me to hide in the work and keep myself at a safe emotional distance. Grad school taught me if I’m not putting any skin in the game, then it’s not going to be a very meaty thing I’m making. The production cannot be deeply felt if I’m not deeply feeling it, too. Not that I want to dump my trauma into every play, but there is something I find valuable about deciding which of your demons you are wrestling with. If it doesn’t speak to you deeply, why are you working on it in the first place? It should be something that keeps you up at night that you want to untangle somehow in yourself.

Grad school helped me understand on a very basic level that when we’re watching a play, we’re watching something happen. Your job as a director is to make sure that something is happening and it’s clear and you can see it. That means you have to make sure things are changing when they need to change, and it’s trackable. That was revelatory for me in grad school. The “why” question is important. In retrospect, I think it’s fortuitous that is the question that sent me into school, because it is the question I walked away thinking, “The only thing people really care about is the ‘why’ of it all.” If you can talk to an artistic director and get them on board with the “why,” then they’re going to do what you want. If you can get an actor to get the “why” under their feet and in their guts, they’re going to give a performance that’s great. Even if you don’t have enough rehearsal time to work the thing out, get the thing that fuels the fire and magic will ensue.

 

Cima: As you were building that career in Chicago, how did you get work? Did people come to you or were you reaching out to theatre companies? Were you pitching theatre companies with plays you wanted to do?

 

Burke: Both of those first two shows were built on connections I made during grad school. The networking, relationship-building piece of directing is the constant. My first “in” with About Face Theatre was my first year of grad school. One of my professors was the former Artistic Director of About Face, Bonnie Metzker. In my second year of grad school, About Face was producing a reading series and Bonnie put my name forward as a director for one of the readings. That got me in the room with the playwright Harrison David Rivers, who has since been very good to me as a human and friend and playwright. The most significant way I’ve gotten work as a director is at the behest of playwrights. When the playwright goes to the theatre and says, “You’re doing my play and I think you want to do it with this director,” that is the most successful way to open new doors.

I have pitched plays. The other first show I did in Chicago was one I pitched to First Floor. But in general, I find that the pitch is a diagnostic and triangulating tool more than companies are truly considering any of these plays that I’m bringing forward. Companies use it to hear how a director thinks and talks about plays to see, “Oh, you think about plays like I do, and so you’d be a good fit for this other play that I’ve got programmed two seasons down the line.” Building my career has been some pitching, a lot of meetings, networking, conversations, and playwrights opening doors for me, which is beautiful. I invite people to see the work when the work is available. It’s always awkward because you have to send the ask out for them to come see the thing before you know if the thing is going to be good. It’s riddled with anxiety. But it pays off, and more people start to know your name and more people start to know your work. Your reputation starts to grow that way. Then, doors continue to open. I think all of that is true, and it’s important to be a good human being that runs a rehearsal room that is not stifling or antagonizing, but is open, caring, and generative and playful. I think that word also spreads through the grapevine. And when people talk about what’s it like to be in a rehearsal room, those are some things that come up.

 

Cima: Can you talk about how The Magnolia Ballet came about and how you got involved with that process?

 

Burke: Terry Guest, the playwright, and I met in 2018. We met because he auditioned for me, and I almost cast him, but I didn’t. He sent me an email a few months later and said, “I’m also a playwright. I’ve got a play I’d love you to check out.” As a director of a certain amount of visibility, you get a lot of emails from playwrights that say, “I’ve got a play, and I’d love for you to check it out.” There’s a wide array of what those plays are and how fitting they are for you as a director. When Terry sent the email, I thought, “Okay, we’ll see.” But then I started reading it and usually I read 20 pages or so, and I know, “No, this isn’t for me.” And I couldn’t put this play down. That play was called At the Wake of a Dead Drag Queen, which I directed in 2019 with The Story Theatre. We just remounted it this past spring at the Raven Theatre. But that was my first play with Terry.

Then the pandemic happened when everything shut down. During that time, Terry got to cooking on some other new plays. The first one he had ready was Magnolia Ballet. He had a Zoom reading with some actor friends of his to just hear it out loud. He invited me. We know that watching any type of theatre on Zoom is okay at best and agonizing at worst. But I was blown away, because even on Zoom, I was knocked sideways by this play. It was so beautiful, even in that context. I called Terry and said, “I don’t know what plans you have for this play, but they will involve me. Let’s talk about it for real.”

 

Cima: Can you talk about the play a little bit for people that might not have read it?

 

Burke: Magnolia Ballet is a ghost story but not the ghosts that go bump in the night. They’re the ghosts that sit in the back of your head and question that choice you just made or that impulse that you have when you’re trying to live your own truth. That’s the voice of your parents or your grandparents saying, “That’s not how we do things. You gotta man up. You gotta sit the right way, speak the right way, act the right way. Even if it’s not the way that feels natural to you.” It’s a ghost story about that and about generational trauma and what it means to break those generational curses and find a new way forward that is not harmful. It tells the story of a Black teenager named Z and his dad. They live under the same roof, but that is about as far as their relationship goes. It’s very fraught between the two of them. Z spends most of his time at his friend Danny’s house. Danny is white and Z is secretly head over heels for Danny. But that’s the secret that he can’t say aloud to anyone. But everything gets turned upside down when Z and Danny are working on a history project. Z goes hunting in their storage shed for things to use for the project, and he finds letters that his granddad wrote seemingly to another man. That’s when the idea that Z’s personhood might be in his blood, and not this thing that is vehemently against his upbringing, opens a whole new world of possibility up. That’s the story. It goes to some wild places within that. But that’s the gist of it. It’s magic. It’s mystical. There are songs and drag. It’s lovely and funny and delightful, but ultimately very moving because we get to watch father and son, who cannot see eye-to-eye, figure out how to find each other through the flames. It’s beautiful.

 

Cima: Can you talk to me about your process of directing the play, and how you approached it?

 

Burke: That was one that I did pitch. I sent it to Megan Carney at About Face, and I sent it to the former artistic director of the Phoenix Theatre in Indianapolis, Bill Simmons. Both responded, “We want to do it.” So, I got to do it twice. It’s had many productions since then, because it’s a great play. My first chance to work with the play was when we did a live reading of it in the fall of 2021 at About Face with three-quarters of the people who ended up being cast in the Chicago production. I had the chance to do the reading before I got to do a full production. So, I had some familiarity going in.

But in either case, my directing process always starts out with first I read the play and then I reread the play and read it and read it. This is a phrasing I learned from Lisa Portes, but I love it, so I stole it: I go on dates with the play. I’m reading it and listening to it and watching it and observing and clocking “Oh, interesting. You’re really into this. You are not into this. You are not like this other play I know in these specific ways. You’re very like this one.” In that process, I have three analyses that I do. One is a dramatic structure analysis, asking what are the major story beats of the play and how does the rest of the narrative fall around these major tent poles? I do what I call a “small planet” analysis, which is an analysis based on the dramaturg Eleanor Fuchs’ essay “Visit to a Small Planet.”[i] The idea is that none of us know how to read plays because we’re taught how to read books. She argues, “That’s not how you read a play. You have to read a play like you are visiting a new world. And none of the rules of that world are the rules of your world. You have to think of it like it’s a new alien planet and you’re an anthropological explorer and everything is fresh and new. And what do you observe?” Fuchs tells readers to make a small planet in their mind’s eye. It’s a fun exercise because suddenly reading a play is a scavenger hunt. There’s so much delicious textural information you can gain when you are paying attention to all the little clues hiding inside of dialogue. It’s not just lines, words that people are saying. There’s so much world-building happening in things we don’t always pay attention to when we’re reading the story. I do the small planet analysis and the dramatic structure analysis. Those two things combined give me a good sense of what the play itself is.

Another tool I learned in grad school called “Six Questions,” which is about compressing, condensing, distilling information into four questions about the play. What’s it about? What kind of play is it? What’s the story you’re following or what’s the dramatic question? What’s the spine, or what is the behavioral engine that the characters are operating on? Then I answer two more questions. What do I want to do to the audience? What do I think the play is trying to say--what’s the cry of the play? Those two questions are where I finally start to put my own spin on what I’ve learned. I do all of that because that’s what will ultimately enable me to be conversant enough in the play to start talking to other people about what we might be trying to do.

It’s all to get myself to a clear starting line that isn’t just, “I don’t know what it is, we’re going to do it together.” Instead, I’m able to say, “I spent a whole lot of time with this thing, and I think it’s this. So, we’re going to start here and see if that’s right.” If we learn otherwise, we change and we grow from there. But I find that if we have a clear starting point and a clear end goal, a North Star as it were, we will get somewhere. Without it we float aimlessly. Those are the things I do to get myself ready to start moving through a process.

 

Cima: What was that North Star for Magnolia Ballet?

 

Burke: For Magnolia Ballet, the North Star was that the play is ultimately a coming-of-age story. It’s a coming-of-age fantasia, because there are all these different performance elements and styles that are all working together to tell a single story. We have to figure out a way to be as true as possible to the onus and intent of this specific style versus that specific style, versus that specific style while also not losing the thread that they all have to work together. They have to blur and blend easily. We’ve got to be able to be as porous as the ground is in Georgia to make this play work. We want to create a world where anything is possible if only you’re brave enough to believe it and just do it without fear of consequence. So much of what’s going on in the play is how the fear of consequence impedes us from acting or saying or doing the thing that we really want to. We wanted to make a world that made that specific roadblock as palpable as possible, as unignorable as possible. There is one character in the play called Apparition who shows up as a myriad of things, who defies all these rules and expectations. Z is learning how to defy expectation. The only way we’re going to break the curse is if we defy the rules that we thought were there to keep us safe in the first place.

 

Cima: How much rehearsal time did you have?

 

Burke: We had about a month. I think it was four weeks of rehearsal, about a week of tech, and then a week of previews with a little bit of tech time laced in. Six weeks in total.

 

 Cima: And the playwright was in your production?

 

Burke: Yes, he was. He played the main character.

 

Cima: What was that like? Have you dealt with that before?

 

Burke: Only with Terry. Terry was also in At the Wake when we did that together. Magnolia was not our first time doing this particular dance. When we’re in rehearsal, I am talking to Terry, the actor, and Terry is thinking as Terry, the actor. We both respect what that means in terms of the dynamics of how this thing is getting made. He’s not necessarily constantly chiming in, “That’s not how it was in my head.” He’s saying, “Great, I’m the actor. Let’s play. Let’s see what happens.” I also am good at saying, “I have a playwright question. Terry, what do you think about X, Y, Z?” giving him that space or opening the door for that space. Working together is about acknowledging which hat we’re wearing at which time, and having the respect and value for one another to not allow any of the hats we might wear to dictate things beyond the hat that we’re wearing at the time. But then we can still have conversations about, “Hey, this scene in the play, I have questions about yada, yada, yada,” outside of rehearsal. We would do that a lot as well. Outside of the strangeness of the playwright being in the play itself, it functioned pretty much like a normal process.

 

Cima: Playwrights ask for you. Do you have a particular way of working with living playwrights, especially on a first production?

 

Burke: My job as a director—and this is especially true when I’m doing new play development with the playwright, not just directing the first production of their play that for them is already done, but being in the process of making alongside them—I think my job is to tell the story that’s on the page as clearly as I can so I can hold that up to the playwright and say, “Is this what you meant? Because this is what you have.” I try to do that in a way that is honoring what the play is asking for, not what I think the play should be like.

When you are working on Shakespeare or something, it’s easy to get caught up in what you want to do with the thing. Shakespeare doesn’t care because he’s not here. When I’m working on a new play, I make a concerted effort to make it as impersonal as possible. Obviously, I’m still finding my person in it, but it’s not my play to solve right now. I am here to present to you the magic that you’ve put on the page and see if it’s what you want it to be. I feel like that’s the best thing for a playwright because they’re among the trees, so they can’t always see the forest for what it is. I get to be the one that helps them see the big picture of the thing they’re making so they can go back and adjust and tweak and refine to get it to be the perfect thing we’re all chasing. We’ll do a reading or we’ll even do a full production and I’ll say to a playwright, “When I interpret this moment, he says this, and this happens this way and that makes me think that this is a scene about this, or it makes me wonder about this.” I’m wondering why this character asked this question or doesn’t ask this question. I’m trying to point to what I see and ask questions about what I am genuinely wondering about without trying to supply my own answers to any of those questions. It’s not, “I think it should be this.” It’s just, “I wonder about this thing. What are you gonna do with it now?” The playwright could choose to do nothing. But it’s my job to pose the wonder.

 

Cima: Are there important aspects of your directing that we haven’t covered yet?

 

Burke: What I love about the “Small Planet” exercise is that it allows you to home in not just on what the story is, but on how the story is. Magnolia Ballet is dreamy and other plays are not. Some plays are more argumentative, and some plays are more dictatorial. When you can home in on the mood and tone of the play, when you move into conversations with your designers and your actors, it gives you clear things to aim at for your choice making. I know for a fact that if I’m doing Magnolia Ballet, it has to feel dreamy. It has to feel unexpected and delightful. If we’re trying to make a choice about this particular transition, and I’ve got two options and one of them is a traditional transition, and the other one is weird and strange and alarming, the play wants that one. Even if I don’t know what that is yet, or why, I know it’s not the other choice because that goes against what this play feels like, what this play likes, what it gravitates toward. I get so excited and nerdy about that kind of thing in working with designers on bringing plays to life.

 

Cima: You’re a theatre director. You don’t tend to do film and television. Why is that? Why theatre?

 

Burke: I have a spiritual answer and a technical answer. The technical answer has to do with order of operations. In the theatre, I come up with an idea, an impulse, a concept that is a starting point for exploration. Then I get in the room with other people, and I watch and respond and react to what’s coming up in front of me, and that becomes the real generative space for what the end product looks like. Film and TV are the opposite. You have to know within 5% positive or negative what this thing needs to look like and feel like and function like and what the shots are going to be. You have to know all of that before actors get in the room. Because you only have this much time on set to make it happen. It’s not just you and the three actors in the room, it’s you and the three actors and the forty-five, fifty, hundred other people that have to do their jobs so that this thing can show up on camera. My brain doesn’t work that way. I watch film sometimes and I think, “This is great.” I don’t understand how you can know the shape of this scene before you show up on set and have the actor in front of you to figure that out. That’s the thing that baffles me. I’m sure someone somewhere will explain it to me in a way that my little brain can make sense of it. I need the collaborative creative impulsive theatre to make the thing, and then it’s live. I love being in a room and sharing space and sharing breath with people. There’s nothing better than a room full of people that have all agreed to sit down and play pretend together really well. It’s delightful.

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[i] A dramaturg is a literary and research specialist who assists a production team by providing historical context, script analysis, and audience engagement materials. The position originated in eighteenth-century German theatre, particularly in the work of playwright and critic Gotthold Ephraim Lessing.

Discussion Questions \(\PageIndex{1}\)

1. How did Burke’s early experiences in music and church theatre influence his later work as a director?
2. What role did failure (such as not landing internships) play in shaping Burke’s career path?
3. How does Burke’s “small planet” approach to reading plays change the way a director might interpret a script?
4. Why does Burke emphasize the “why” as the most important question in directing?
5. What are the advantages and challenges of working with a playwright who is also acting in their own play?