Last month, Brooklyn-born director Robert Allan Ackerman was in New York for the prestigious Golden Globe Awards, for which he had nominations for his TV movie of Tennessee Williams' "The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone" and his TV miniseries, "The Reagans," which CBS refused to screen. This month he is in Tokyo directing a new stage production of Tony Kushner's "Angels in America" -- which won a TV miniseries Golden Globe for director Mike Nichols -- with a Japanese cast for tpt (Theatre Project Tokyo).
Always drawn to the stage, Ackerman first began acting while he was teaching high school, before making his debut as a director in 1978. Since then, he has become a quiet giant on the world stage, whether in New York, London, Los Angeles or -- since 1990 -- in Tokyo. In recent years, Ackerman has tended to split his work between screen directing in the United States with the likes of Meryl Streep, John Malkovich and Ann Bancroft, and -- in Japan only -- directing for the stage. Last week, the director made time in his busy schedule to share his thoughts on issues from acting and angels to politics and censorship with readers of The Japan Times.
You did "Angels" 10 years ago at the Saison Theater. The play is especially relevant to the 1980s, so why did you decide to do it now in Japan?