Danya Taymor grew up in Northern California. She was a theater kid, a volleyball player, an occasional renegade, but also an excellent student. “I had some rebellious moments, but I always felt really bad after,” she said on a recent morning. As adults, some of us keep the adolescents we were at a distance. Others, like Taymor, hold them close.
Taymor, now 36, loves the bravery of teenagers, their humor, their emotional intensity. She has made a name for herself putting that intensity onstage. Last year she won a Tony Award, her first, for directing the musical adaptation of “The Outsiders,” a violent and mournful coming-of-age tale. This year, she was nominated for another Tony, for her direction of Kimberly Belflower’s “John Proctor Is the Villain,” which uses the crucible of a high school English class to examine questions of power and gender. She is currently directing “Trophy Boys,” a barbed comedy about a high school debate team.
What makes Taymor so adept at staging stories of teenagers?
“I just take them seriously,” Taymor said.
Taymor was speaking over breakfast (green tea, avocado toast) at a cafe next door to MCC Theater on the Far West Side of Manhattan, where performances of “Trophy Boys” would begin in about a week. I had visited rehearsal a few days before. Four female and nonbinary actors in their 20s and 30s play a team of high school boys charged with taking the affirmative position on the resolution that feminism has failed women. The hourlong dramedy is set in a social studies classroom during argument prep. The classroom’s walls were decorated with pictures of girl boss heroes — Malala Yousafzai, Ruth Bader Ginsburg. As a joke that wasn’t entirely a joke, the stage manager had hung a picture of Taymor among them.
The actors — Emmanuelle Mattana, the writer of the play, among them — rehearsed the play’s opening moments, which include a stylized, somewhat lewd dance sequence. When it concluded, Taymor, in a blouse and high-waisted pants, sat herself onstage to work through it. In that tiny classroom chair, she appeared both authoritative and approachable, genuinely curious about how the actors felt.
Taymor’s process, Mattana would tell me later, is relentlessly collaborative. “The artists get so much agency and autonomy,” Mattana said. Taymor had her own ideas, of course, but she likes to hear from the cast first.
Sky Lakota-Lynch, a Tony-nominated actor who has worked with Taymor on “The Outsiders” and on other projects, echoed this. “When I was in the rehearsal room with her was the first time I was ever asked what I thought,” he said.
Taymor came to theater early. She joined her local children’s theater in first grade and stayed. Her aunt is Julie Taymor, the first woman to win the Tony for best direction of a musical. Taymor saw “The Lion King,” the show that won her aunt the Tony, when she was 9. “That theater at that level could be for kids, and include kids was amazing to me,” she said.
At Duke, she studied theater and public health. (Her parents are doctors.) The theater program was small and so Taymor often worked with people who didn’t identify as actors, for audiences who didn’t think of themselves as playgoers, which she describes as ideal training.
After graduation, she moved to New York City, assisting her aunt on a couple of projects, including “Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark,” and then apprenticing with other directors before joining training programs at Lincoln Center Theater and the Flea Theater. She appreciated the opportunity to work with her aunt, “one of the most incredible living directors, who is also my family,” as she put it. But she did have some anxiety around not being seen as an artist in her own right. So while she was grateful for the experience and mindful of the entree it provided, “it also made me want to work really hard and with a lot of rigor to make sure that I was making my own way once the door was open,” she said.
While her aunt had made her reputation with classics, Taymor focused on new plays, often by playwrights who fused naturalism and experiment: Jeremy O. Harris, Martyna Majok, Will Arbery, Danai Gurira, Sarah Gancher, Justin Kuritzkes and Brian Watkins. Slowly producers and artistic directors began to take her more seriously and in 2021 she made her Broadway debut with Antoinette Chinonye Nwandu’s “Pass Over,” a tragicomedy, with existential undertones, about the plight of young Black men. It was the first play to be staged on Broadway after the pandemic-prompted shutdown.
The next year, she began work on “The Outsiders,” a musical based on the 1967 novel by S.E. Hinton, about warring teenage gangs in Oklahoma. The production, which began its life at La Jolla Playhouse in 2023, was larger, by orders of magnitude, than anything she had ever attempted, but Taymor began rehearsals as she always does, with rigorous, physical warm-ups, sometimes lasting as long as 90 minutes. Through sweat and exercises and games like red-light-green-light, she let the company get to know one another. The goal, she said, “is just to take some of the fear out so we can really play.”
Angelina Jolie, a producer of the musical who attended many rehearsals for the Broadway production, observed this. “She’s nurturing and makes a safe space that all artists — but especially young artists — need,” Jolie wrote in an email.
Taymor wanted the musical to feel truthful to the teenage experience, so she pushed herself to remember the extremes of that time, the volatility. “I’m attracted to intensity of emotion,” she said. “It appeals to young people, but it also appeals to anybody who’s ever been young, because those teenage selves are so alive in us.”
They may be more alive in Taymor than most. Lakota-Lynch, who plays the sensitive Johnny Cade in “The Outsiders,” noticed this. “She’s never lost her childhood curiosity,” he said. Belflower, the playwright of “John Proctor Is the Villain,” had also observed this. “That sense of possibility and transformation inherent in adolescence is something Danya lives every day,” she said.
That sense made Taymor a great fit for “John Proctor,” a giddy, tragic riff on Arthur Miller’s “The Crucible. “The Outsiders” is mostly about teenage boys. “John Proctor,” by contrast, is mostly about teenage girls. “The Outsiders” had made her recall her older brother and her friends. Here she saw her younger self. Rehearsing a scene with two of the play’s stars, Sadie Sink and Amalia Yoo, she found herself in tears, “so much emotion welling up that it was just falling out of my eyes,” she said.
“John Proctor,” would receive seven Tony nominations, including one for Taymor’s husband, the actor Gabriel Ebert, who plays an English teacher. (“Being nominated alongside Gabe is a special kind of magic for us,” Taymor said.)
By the time those nominations were announced, Taymor was already preparing “Trophy Boys.” A commercial producer had seen the play in its debut in Melbourne, Australia, and had immediately thought of Taymor for it. Taymor read it. “It freaked me out,” she said. “It was so intense and funny and disturbing.” But she understood that “The Outsiders” and “John Proctor” had readied her for it.
“That’s where I started to realize, Oh, I need to see this thing through with adolescence,” she said. “I’m uniquely prepared for this task.”
Because the male debaters of “Trophy Boys” are played by women and nonbinary actors, the play has, Taymor said, “broken something open in my imagination around gender and sex and how we present and move through the world.” When she was younger, she had wanted to be one of the boys, because she saw boys being taken seriously. Back then, she took pains so that her femininity would not be seen as a weakness. “That’s sad and it sucks,” she said. Now she makes an effort to present, she said, as extremely femme, particularly at Tony-related events at which — this season, at least — she is the only nominated female director.
The “Trophy Boys” rehearsal room had its feminine touches: crystals, a bedazzled rubber duckie, a tarot deck laid atop a silk scarf. Taymor’s manner — rigorous, joyful — felt feminine. too. (“Shes’s got a cheeky glint in her eye,” Mattana said.)
Taymor and the actors did not have long until technical rehearsals began, but still she did not rush them. She trusts her process, believing that this fusion of guts and inspiration and technique that will make the work feel authentic to the churning experience of adolescence. She still remembers how that felt. She can help her cast and crew to remember it, too. Taymor, after all, is the rebel that she always was. And still the A student. Though now she is also a teacher.
That day in rehearsal, Taymor, folded into the schoolroom chair, looked at her cast. “Great,” she said to them. “Cool. Good job. Awesome. Thoughts?” Then she listened.
Alexis Soloski has written for The Times since 2006. As a culture reporter, she covers television, theater, movies, podcasts and new media.
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