THE Mill Theatre in Dairy Road, Fyshwick, seems bent upon revising conventional Canberra approaches to theatre-making.

Its next show, Neil LaBute’s tough comedy “Reasons to be Pretty”, introduces the concept of the “shadow director”. 

As well, instead of following the time-honoured Stanislavski technique, they’ll be using the Meissner process, where actors concentrate on the other actors around them through emotional preparation, repetition and improvisation.

I caught up with Tim “Timbo” Sekuless, brother of the artistic director Lexi Sekuless, who is directing the new production coming up in mid-April.

He’s embarking on a play by a writer he says is accused of misanthropy, of hating the very characters he creates. Not true, Tim says. 

LaBute, better-known for “In the Company of Men”, the TV series “Van Helsing” and Netflix’s “The I-Land”, grew up in Michigan as the son of a hospital receptionist and a truck driver, so he knows a thing or two about coming of age in a small town, and wrote of people he really knew.

At the time the play was written in 2008, Tim says, New York audiences and people in big cities had become very removed from what life in small-town, working-class communities was, culminating in Hillary Clinton’s famous depiction of them as “deplorables” in a 2016 election campaign speech.

“It’s relevant in Canberra today,” he asserts, citing attacks from outside the national capital about those living in the “Canberra Bubble”, with “no sympathy at all for people from smaller communities”.

Proof apparent that LaBute is sympathetic to his subjects comes in his comment: “I have profound respect for work and workers and communities who live from paycheck to paycheck.” But then again, he also said: “Everybody has the ability to be manipulative, to be hateful and deceitful.”

If anything, Tim believes, LaBute’s cutting dialogue is levelled at the comfortable intelligentsia, not the young, working-class people in his play, who struggle towards adulthood.

Briefly he explains, “Reasons to be Pretty” involves two young couples, played by Alana Denham-Preston, Rhys Hekimian, Ryan Erlandsen and Lexi Sekuless, who are stuck together in a small town – at least two of them need to move on.

Without giving much away, he says what happens at the end is “bittersweet”, as LaBute strives to show that there is a possibility for the characters to move on in a cruel world. Everyone has a chance.

A fascinating aspect of the production is the involvement of Kim Beamish as shadow director. 

If the name sounds familiar, he was named “CityNews” Artist of the Year in 2018 for his exceptional work as a documentary filmmaker.

“Theatre and film are two very different things,” Tim says. In film, actors are asked to give the same performance no matter when the segment is screened, but quickly adds that Beamish has taken to the theatre with “great aplomb”, immediately adapting to the new genre and to the Meissner process. 

As for Beamish, he’s long been interested in explaining the more fictional content of theatre than the factual scenarios he’s dealt with in documentaries, and once did a unit of drama at the ANU, where he first met Lexi.

Until recently ago he was in Vietnam for three years, directing, and producing a documentary now in post production. Once back, Lexi proposed the “shadow” idea to him and he jumped at it.

“What’s different about theatre is that you can work with actors to get them to develop the audience’s experience more… in documentaries, I can’t play around, I just have to capture it the right way,” Beamish says. 

Next year, Beamish will direct LaBute’s sequel to this play, “Reasons to be Happy”, where the four characters Greg, Steph, Carly, and Kent return a few years later. 

And this time round, Timbo Sekuless will be his shadow.

“Reasons to be Pretty”, Mill Theatre, Fyshwick. Previews, April 12-15, season April 19-May 6.