Shari Sebbens always assumed if she ever took on the role of director it would be for screen rather than for theatre.
After the Jabirr Jabirr and Bardi actor filmed Wayne Blair's hit 2012 film adaptation of The Sapphires (her feature debut) and award-winning TV series Redfern Now, the idea solidified.
Watching directors such as Wayne Blair and Catriona McKenzie (Redfern Now) having conversations with the various heads of department on set, "it just looked like it was something more micromanaged or more compartmentalised [than theatre]," she recalls.
"I felt like, 'Oh, I could do that.'"
So when Sebbens was offered a director's attachment on Taika Waititi's Marvel blockbuster Thor: Ragnarok, she jumped at the chance.
She spent three weeks on set working with the Māori director — and even played a small part in the film, and its sequel, Love and Thunder.
"He's a ratbag and he works really, really hard," she says of Waititi.
"It was great to see an Indigenous person in that position [of director] and I loved that he's able to use his success to create opportunities for other Indigenous people, whilst also having fun," she says.
But even as her star has risen on screen, Sebbens has increasingly invested her time and energy in theatre work; she's spent the last four years developing her craft as a director for stage.
In 2023, she will have a whopping four productions on stage around Australia, including the fourth season of Seven Methods of Killing Kylie Jenner, which she co-directed with fellow actor-turned-director Zindzi Okenyo.
In an impressive coup for a young and rising director, she will also direct the (long overdue) Australian premiere of August Wilson's Pulitzer Prize-winning 1985 play Fences: a family drama set in '50s Pittsburgh, which was adapted into an Academy Award-winning film directed by and starring Denzel Washington, alongside Viola Davis.
Sebbens's production for Sydney Theatre Company (STC) will star Bert LaBonté and Zahra Newman, who are currently in season for the company's production of Lorraine Hansberry's A Raisin in the Sun — another classic of the Black American theatre canon.
"Bert plays Troy, a father that wants to protect his son — but in the only way he knows how, which is [with] toxic masculine energy. And the mother figure, Rose, will be played by Zahra, and [she brings] an enduring love, resilience, and strength," says Sebbens.
"And then with Bert and Zahra, we're hoping to round things out in the following year with a [third African American canonical work]."
First love
"Theatre has always been my number one love and passion," Sebbens says.
Theatre has loved her right back: her mainstage debut, in Griffin Theatre Company's 2012 production of A Hoax, scored her a Best Newcomer nomination at the Sydney Theatre Awards.
In the years since, she has performed in Leah Purcell's remount of Louis Nowra's Radiance (Belvoir St Theatre), Angus Cerini's multi-award-winning drama The Bleeding Tree (Griffin/STC), the 2017 and 2018 seasons of Nakkiah Lui's Black Is the New White (STC), and Branden Jacobs-Jenkins's An Octoroon (Queensland Theatre) — among many other shows.
As her career developed, Sebbens naturally began to take on an unofficial dramaturgical role in the rehearsal room, working on new plays.
"By nature of being an an Aboriginal actor, I think it's safe to say around 90 per cent of the work I do is new work, new Black work, new Australian work … [and] what I was really taken by was the ability to be in development rooms for plays, with playwrights, while they're grappling to get a text together — [for example when] they've got a few scenes and they want a whole play, or they've got a whole play and they want some reworking," she says.
Then in 2015, during rehearsals for STC's production of Kylie Coolwell's Battle of Waterloo, director Sarah Goodes took Sebbens aside and asked her a question: When are you going to start directing theatre?
The seed of that idea took root, and later was nurtured by STC's associate director Paige Rattray (who directed Black Is the New White).
"They were the two women that were really instrumental in pushing me to think about theatre-making as a director," Sebbens says.
So when STC's artistic director, Kip Williams, called in 2018 to ask Sebbens if she'd be interested in taking on the role of 2019 Richard Wherrett Fellow to develop her directorial skills, she agreed.
She knew Wayne Blair was an alumnus of the program.
"Also I really loved it as a pathway because it meant I didn't have to go back to uni and get another $30,000 HECS fee," she says.
In the last two years, Sebbens has graduated from Richard Wherrett Fellow to resident director at STC, and has directed or co-directed four plays: Superheroes (for Griffin), The 7 Stages of Grieving (STC), Seven Methods of Killing Kylie Jenner (Darlinghurst Theatre Company), and City of Gold (STC/Black Swan State Theatre Company) — the latter of which opened in Perth in March and Sydney in May.
In 2023, she will helm or co-helm productions at STC, Melbourne's Malthouse Theatre, Melbourne Theatre Company and Sydney's Griffin.
From studying the canon to staging it
Sebbens has a fondness for August Wilson's play Fences, which she studied at the National Institute of Dramatic Art (NIDA).
"I was very very fortunate to have a phone call with August Wilson's wife [Constanza Romero-Wilson] and she was really excited to find out Fences would find a home here in Australia," she says.
For Sebbens, it's telling that Australian audiences would most likely only be familiar with the film version.
"These are plays that our theatre teachers are making us engage with, but then the gap between drama school and the industry has been far too wide for too long."
It feels right to her that STC as a company is reflecting the global canon, including the Black canon.
"We've ripped ourselves off from these incredible stories by assuming that the canon of great theatre is only due to the work of cishet white men — that's not the case at all. There's incredible works that are around the world that deserve to be in the canon, and our definition of what the canon is needs to be broadened," she says.
However, Sebbens concedes that even a few years ago her desire to work on "great works that don't centre whiteness" might have been met with a little more resistance.
"Five years ago, if I was a resident at the company — or any company really — I probably wouldn't have been doing plays that I loved. But the stories that we've seen on stage have grown so much, even just in the last five years," she says.
Sebbens adds that in the wake of 2020 and the conversations sparked by the Black Lives Matter movements, the industry as a whole is holding itself more accountable in terms of equity and diversity.
"It's just perfect timing for me. I landed at the right time. I've got a habit of doing that," she says.
Another reason canonical works interest Sebbens as a director is that as an actor she was conditioned not to see herself in these kinds of plays.
"You go to drama school and they train you up to do Shakespeare and Chekhov, and then we get out and we're not getting auditioned for Shakespeare or Chekhov or Oscar Wilde … and I loved being in [Shakespeare's] Measure for Measure [at drama school], which has a horrible storyline, but is an incredibly fiercely intelligent play to try and wrestle with," she says.
She says while theatre companies are more likely to cast diverse actors in Shakespeare now, some people still assume Indigenous actors "can't handle the language", so the script is watered down.
"Which is a shame, because one of the best performances I've ever seen of a Shakespeare soliloquy was Jimi Bani doing an Edmund speech from King Lear," she says.
She also notes that actress and language activist Kylie Bracknell translated Macbeth into Noongar in 2020.
"It's so insane to me that people have underestimated the depth in which First Nations mob can grasp the concepts and ideas. You know, war, love, hope and tragedy have all been part of our societies since prior to colonisation … I think there's a lot of really untapped and exciting work to be had with Shakespeare [made by First Nations artists] for sure," she says.
Sebbens herself is dramaturg on STC's upcoming production of The Tempest, which will feature a racially diverse cast.
"My role on Tempest is very different from that of director, but other than Superheroes by Mark Rogers, it'll be the first non-Black or First Nations play that I've worked on," she says.
She loves the way The Tempest talks about nature and signs in nature.
"And even the idea that somebody can control the storm is not an unreal idea to me you know? I've got Yolngu mob that can do that," she says.
Carving out a safe cultural space
Sebbens's goal as a director is to create a "safe cultural space" for Black artists in both the rehearsal rooms and the companies with which she works.
She had firsthand experience of how important Black leadership is in these spaces this year: while her production of City of Gold was in rehearsals at STC, Constable Zachary Rolfe was found not guilty of murder in relation to the death of Kumanjayi Walker.
"And suddenly I had a room of five Aboriginal actors and there was just a blanket of grief that settled upon us," Sebbens recalls.
"We really had to have a moment of collective grieving and just sitting with our anger … A lot of our sadness is because we don't have somewhere to put our rage."
Sebbens was able to help her cast channel their feelings back into City of Gold, but she says if they'd been working with a non-Indigenous director that day, someone would have needed to explain why they were suddenly feeling more fragile than normal.
"And then we also had Sorry Day, and Reconciliation Week, and all these huge calendar dates for Aboriginal Australia, throughout the production of the play," she says.
"It really is a reminder that we don't get time off from being Aboriginal. We don't get to clock off when we leave the theatre. We're Black before we get here. We're Black when we leave. But in that we have created a really beautiful family that I feel very, very lucky to have been a part of."
Cultural safety and care also came through in the set design and staging.
Actor and writer Meyne Wyatt opens the second act of City of Gold with a powerful monologue about the hypocrisy of tokenistically labelling him as Black, while simultaneously expecting him to justify his identity. (A video of the monologue went viral after he performed it on Q+A).
Sebbens decided Wyatt should perform the monologue on the rooftop of the set, because she didn't want anyone looking down on him while he spoke.
"I wanted everybody to be looking up at him, and I wanted him to feel like the most important person in that venue," she explains.
When thinking about creating safe cultural spaces, Sebbens draws on her years of experience as an actor. Her ideas were refined while co-directing Seven Methods of Killing Kylie Jenner with Zindzi Okenyo, which will have its Melbourne premiere at Malthouse Theatre in January.
"I was very lucky, in that Jasmine Lee-Jones, the playwright, wrote in a moment of healing for both the actors and the audience. After the climax of the play, she then lets these two women come together in a way that I've actually never seen in a play in my life," she says.
Having this moment written into the show made Sebbens reflect on how this sense of healing could be achieved in other ways, such as through community engagement.
At any given performance of the show, across its Sydney and Queensland seasons, the audience was packed with Black people, particularly those from the Afro-diaspora.
"[Community engagement] became a part of that care for the cast, it was about creating a room where two up-and-coming actors felt, I guess, they were able to soar… [and] feel like their ownership of the text is what is going to get them through at the end," she says.
Sebbens will again team up with Okenyo in 2023 to co-direct American playwright Aleshea Harris's breakout hit Is God Is, which won three Off-Broadway Theater Awards in 2018, in a co-production by Melbourne Theatre Company and STC.
"Anne-Louise Sarks at Melbourne Theatre Company said she'd like to chat with me and Zindzi about it, and it just so happened to already be one of our favourite plays," Sebbens explains.
Harris's high-intensity, vivid play is a revenge tale about twin sisters seeking justice for the mother they thought had died.
"It's described as Quentin Tarantino meets Spaghetti Western meets Afro-punk meets hip hop, and it is all of those things and more … and the script itself, I really implore anybody who loves reading to pick up a copy of the script because it's one that makes you excited to read [plays] again," she says.
Still in love with acting
Sebbens's relationship with her creative peers is changing now that she's a director.
Actors she's previously shared the limelight with, and playwrights in whose work she's previously performed, are now working with her in a new capacity.
This is amplified when it comes to Sebbens's longtime friend Nakkiah Lui.
In 2017, Sebbens starred in Lui's directorial debut of American playwright Branden Jacobs-Jenkins's blistering satire An Octoroon (Queensland Theatre). That same year, she starred in the debut of Lui's Christmas rom-com Black Is the New White. In 2023, she'll be directing Lui's "sparkly, smart-arsed" Blaque Showgirls for Griffin.
Sebbens particularly admires the rhythm of Lui's writing, calling Black Is the New White one of her favourite productions in which she has performed.
"I remember doing a community night performance of it and the audience was so loud and raucous that Tony Briggs, who was playing the dad, started laughing on stage at his own joke because everybody was laughing at him that loud," she says.
Sebbens has already had practice directing a friend's work, with Wyatt's City of Gold.
Having performed in the original production at Griffin, directed by Isaac Drandic, Sebbens would constantly ask herself if she was making decisions because she still had the original version in her head — or because it was the right choice.
Sebbens was particularly conscious of this when it came to Simone Detourbet's performance as Carina, the role that Sebbens had herself played.
"I used to say to Meyne and Matthew [Cooper], because they were two original performers from 2019, 'Tell me if I'm making Simone do what I did. Tell me if Shari's getting up there too much.'"
But despite how much she's enjoying the challenges and triumphs of directing, Sebbens won't be quitting acting.
"I hope people don't think I'm not acting anymore, because I never, ever wanted to give up acting," she says.
It's a sentiment Sebbens had to put to the test in August, when a rescheduled acting project suddenly went back into production.
At the time, she was due to direct A Raisin in the Sun, and had already spent time in development with most of the cast, including Gayle Samuels, who had travelled from New York to play the family matriarch, Lena Younger.
Sebbens says stepping away from directing A Raisin in the Sun broke her heart.
"Still, it was phenomenal to see it grow into what I think is one of the best productions STC has ever done," she says.
For now, Sebbens remains tight-lipped about the acting project that drew her away from the theatre.
"I can't talk about what the show is, but it's really exciting, I promise," she insists.
But she also hints she has at least one more acting project lined up for the near future — a feature film.
"I was like, 'I better not even tell my mum them things, you know?' Even though she's in Darwin, the news will make its way back down [to Sydney]," she added.
Just because Sebbens's next two acting projects are on screen, that doesn't mean she's quit acting for theatre.
"I miss the stage so much, and I'm starting to do that thing where I'm really freaking out … I was told this nightmare story about how [English actor and director] Laurence Olivier developed such severe stage fright that he didn't go back on stage for years," Sebbens says.
Her last stage performance was three years ago, in City of Gold.
"What if I become a stage recluse and I can never step foot on a stage again?" she jokes.
But whatever project draws Sebbens back onto the stage will need to be something she doesn't want to helm.
"Otherwise I'll just want to direct it. So that's the exciting thing. I don't know what I'll get to come back and do … if they'll have me! It's very presumptuous of me to assume that they will," she says.
Sebbens outright rejects the idea of acting and directing at the same time.
"Obviously someone incredible like Leah Purcell can do it because she's so friggin' smart and passionate … So there's people that can do it. I'm just not sure if I'm one of them," she says.
"But never say never I guess."
