‘The Outsiders’ Director Danya Taymor on Making a Gritty, Violent Broadway Musical: ‘This All Needs to Take Place in the Dirt’

variety.com:

Brent Lang Executive Editor By the end of every performance, “The Outsiders” cast is caked in grime and dust. That’s a consequence of the Broadway musical’s sandy stage, which finds the actors who bring the the gritty coming-of-age story to life each night, fighting, dancing and falling in love in the gravel. “In the script there’s an incredible stage direction where it notes that by the end of this one conflict, the boys are bloody and bruised and muddy,” says Danya Taymor, the show’s director. “And I thought, ‘this needs to all take place in the dirt.’ I wanted there to be an organic material that helped us stay grounded and gave us an edge.” That unvarnished intensity is what stood out when Taymor read S.E.

Hinton’s novel about growing up on the wrong side of the tracks in Tulsa, circa 1965. Her book follows Ponyboy Curtis, a soulful teenager who is also the member of the “Greasers,” a blue collar gang locked in a forever war with the middle-class “Socs.” But what made Hinton’s writing so totemic for generations of Americans is the way she channeled the emotional tempest of adolescence, capturing the promise of first love, the persistent feelings of being misunderstood, and the desperation to break free that so often characterize that stage of life. “She’s writing about what it feels like to be a teenager and that never changes,” Taymor says, noting that the book remains almost as popular today as it was when Hinton published it six decades ago. “It’s like why ‘Romeo and Juliet’ still resonate with people.

She doesn’t sugarcoat anything. She talks about these primal things in an unfiltered and honest way.” But Taymor, who somehow missed reading the novel when she was a teen, was still puzzled when she was approached.