David Feldshuh, MD, is a practicing emergency room physician and the director of the theatre program at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. He is also an accomplished playwright whose play Miss Evers’ Boys was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize in 1992. We recently spoke with him.
Where are you from?
Born in New York City, first nine years raised in the Bronx. I could hear the cheers from Yankee Stadium.
How disappointed were you when Miss Evers’ Boys did not win the Pulitzer?
I received a call from the LA Times asking where I would be at 3 p.m. because I had been nominated for the Pulitzer Prize in drama.
At first I thought it was a joke. When I realized this was an actual reporter, I said that, unfortunately, I wouldn’t be available. The reporter was insistent and I repeated that I wouldn’t be available. He suggested that perhaps I was working in the hospital.
I said again that I wouldn’t be available. I knew two things. I had written the best play I could.
Secondly, I had a group tennis class at 3 p.m. and needed to be there for my classmates to play doubles. I was more than honored to be nominated.
How did you become interested in the Tuskegee Experiment and how did that interest get turned into a play?
I read Bad Blood by Professor Jim Jones. It’s a terrific book that combines historical perspective with personal narrative.
I first saw mention of the book when I was thumbing through the Journal of the American Medical Association when I was a resident in emergency medicine in 1980.
What is your weekly schedule like? How many hours do you work as a physician and what are your duties?
I work 1 or 2 shifts a week (7.5 hours each) at a busy (4-6 patients an hour), free standing urgent care center that is unusual in also diagnosing (hopefully) abdominal pain, vaginal bleeding, mental status changes, chest pain, etc.
This is not from choice but because our patient population frequently believes they have arrived at the ER.
Do you support a national health plan for the US where all citizens are insured?
Yes, I do.
The obvious question is how to accomplish this goal and put more resources into patient care and less into redundant administration that treats physicians as corporate employees or worse with the result that physicians lose the sense of caring that interested them in medicine in the first place.
This is a huge challenge and a worthy goal. But, I suspect a number of false steps will be taken before a viable system is constructed that recognizes the value of fostering a personal relationship between physician or other caregiver and patient.
By the way, I’m a big fan of the many dedicated, knowledgeable and humane nurses, PAs and NPs in practice.
What theatre or arts project has been the most fun for you?
I was trained in and enjoy directing productions with large casts and grand, theatrical gestures.
Plays such as Cyrano de Bergerac or Shakespeare plays hold special challenges with respect to interpretation and execution.
Because of economics, fewer and fewer directors have experience in directing large productions with many actors which I find sad because I have found this kind of production among the most exciting.
When you teach Fundamentals of Directing I and II, what does the syllabus consist of?
Although I had been directing professionally for twenty years, it took me five years to create my own approach to teaching directing.
Essentially, I surveyed many productions and asked a simple question – “Why and how does this scene effectively engage an audience?†I then created a list of roughly 50 techniques and exercises that I believed all successful scenes employ.
In the first directing class I teach these techniques. In the second directing class students apply these techniques to directing three very different scenes.
By the end of the sequence, students know more than they can do but they are, I believe, in a position to continue to learn from making and watching theatre.
What is your strength as a director?
I hope my strengths are a clear vision, the ability to inspire confidence in a team of creative artists toward achievement of a common goal, visual excitement, and insight into helping less experienced actors achieve credible performances.
Who is your favorite playwright?
Shakespeare. He writes plays that demand a point of view and combine theatrical insight with deep character analysis.
What is your current theatre project?
Leonard Bernstein’s Mass is my current theatrical project. It’s a huge opera/theatre piece that originally opened the Kennedy Center in Washington and that will involve in our production over 130 singers.
I will direct Mass in the spring of 2009 as part of the 20th anniversary season of Cornell University’s Schwartz Center for the Performing Arts, where I am Artistic Director and a professor in the theatre department.
What would you do differently in your career – either in theatre or medicine?
I tell my students that despite the fact that people continually instruct that you must make a choice, if you are lucky you can have more than one passion.
I am lucky to be able to work and teach in theatre and continue my fascination with medicine and patient care.
I wouldn’t do anything differently but I suspect that if I had remained in medicine fulltime, I would be working today at the remarkable institution where I completed my emergency medicine residency – Hennepin County Medical Center in Minneapolis.
Each summer when I return to Minnesota for the summer I stop into the Department of Emergency Medicine’s critical care weekly conference.
I am always in awe of the depth and breadth of current training and practice in emergency medicine as well as the insistence that growth can only come from self-critique in an objective and non-punitive environment.
How often do you get to Broadway to see a show?
Roughly 10 times a year. Ithaca is 4 hours from NYC and I love seeing productions that are stunningly written, acted, or directed. My most recent visit was to the musical, Passing Strange.
What is your “still to be visited†top travel destination or site?
My “travels†take me to new learning experiences but are not linked to places. I love to take new courses, courses in which I return to being a beginner. Most recently these “places†include fly fishing and Chinese brush painting. Learning always feels energizing to me and the scope of learning in both theatre and medicine continues to fascinate me.