By Kilian Melloy

“I am in a break room on level five of the rehearsal building we’re in,” Benita de Wit (they/them) says, explaining the poster-filled background on a recent Zoom call. “I was trying to find a little corner where there wouldn’t be actors warming up and people stretching and fittings happening.”

Such activity might seem a little meta, given that de Wit is currently working as associate director with Tony Award-winning director/choreographer Sonya Tayeh on a new stage musical version of the 2010 Darren Aronofsky film Black Swan, a famously hallucinatory (and sapphic) psychological thriller in which Natalie Portman — like Aronofsky, a graduate of Harvard — portrays an emotionally fragile dancer named Nina who finds herself disintegrating under the pressures of a demanding stage mother, a sexually inappropriate artistic director, and the challenges of holding on to the star role of Tchaikovsky’s masterpiece when there’s a new, and quite formidable, dancer, Lily (played by Mila Kunis in the film) ready and able to snatch the role away. Those pressures erode Nina’s sense of reality, pushing her toward a psychotic break… and, perhaps, the performance of a lifetime.

Though de Wit is dialing in from New York, the musical’s premiere is slated to take place in Cambridge, at Harvard’s American Repertory Theater. Scheduled to play May 26 – July 5 at the Loeb Drama Center in Cambridge’s Harvard Square, the musical version, de Wit assures QulturVultur, will preserve the film’s suspense, intrigue, and “WTF?!” moments.Read on to see what else de Wit revealed about the new musical, Natasha, Pierre, and the Great Comet of 1812 composer Dave Malloy’s innovative score, Sonya Tayeh’s collaborative approach, and why the musical is a full-circle moment for de Wit and book writer Jen Silverman.

QulturVultur: You’ve recently worked on Jamie Lloyd’s rethinking of Sunset Boulevard. When it comes to adapting movies to the stage musical form, what elements does a film have to have to make it a good candidate for that?

Benita de Wit: I think there’s something useful, particularly about Black Swan being so dance-based, that means it inherently lends itself to the stage because there’s such a strong dance element. Also, the film follows Nina’s journey into her own mind, like, warping reality. A lot of that works really well on the stage. How do you play with shifting reality and going to a different space? Is she seeing something real, or something not real? It can be really challenging to adapt something from film to stage, because film is such a close-up language and theater uses such a faraway language. So much of the story of Black Swan in the film is told through close-ups on Nina, through really seeing her experience. How do we musicalize that? I think usually in a musical, a lot of that turns into soliloquies, or turns into songs. I think some of that has turned into songs, but a lot of that has also turned into dance. We really tell her story through dance, and through the body, and seeing the experience of her body on stage. Anything heightened, anything going to emotional extremes, I think tends to translate well to the stage.

QulturVultur: Is it just a coincidence that you’ve worked on these translations of movies to stage musicals, or is that an area that you particularly want to work in?

Benita de Wit: There’s not a specific area that I’m often going for; it’s just project to project. It’s whatever excites me. I worked on Sunset Boulevard because I love Jamie Lloyd’s work. I think he’s such a brilliant director. I was so excited by what he did with A Doll’s House and with The Seagull that when I saw he was doing Sunset Boulevard I was, like, “I have to see what he is doing with this show.” So, it’s not necessarily a specific movie-to-musical thing. 

QulturVultur: In the movie, Natalie Portman’s Nina is driven to madness by expectations and pressures, but also the sexual overtures of the show’s choreographer, played by Vincent Cassel. I don’t think the pressures Nina faces in the stage musical are quite the same.

Benita de Wit: They’re not quite the same. In fact, exactly what you’ve pinpointed is the one major element that has shifted from the movie to the stage production. Those sexual advances are no longer part of this story. What we have instead is a choreographer named Leroy [played by Amber Iman], who is this avant-garde, rule-breaking choreographer who used to go to the ballet school years and years ago. She is this brilliant choreographer who has a lot to prove, and that puts a different set of pressures on Nina [played by Melanie Moore], who is trying to understand what this choreographer wants. [Leroy] is really interested in ripping apart the classics; as an artist, what she does is deconstructs, and what we find is that Nina, who is all about classics and technique and dedication, is being asked to dance in a way that she’s never been asked to dance before, and has been asked to throw out a lot of the things that keep her world structured. That is part of what is so destabilizing in this version.

QulturVultur: When it comes to the dance aspect, how much is Sonya Tayeh sticking with ballet versus that being just a launching point?

Benita de Wit: We start very much in a ballet world. The opening number, we really get to see the entire company dancing ballet as a connected, in-sync organism, and it’s an exciting moment. And then [Leroy] comes in and asks them to experiment with their bodies in these new ways. It lets us bring in this different kind of movement to the piece, this more contemporary, more abstract kind of movement. I think it really opens the door to a lot of different styles of dance.

QulturVultur: There’s rival with whom Nina in competition, Lily [played by Jada Simone Clark]. But is Lily how Nina perceives her? Is Lily a projection that Nina has overlaid on a real person? There’s also an erotic charge between Nina and Lily. How is all of that between those two characters translating to the stage?

Benita de Wit: A lot of that is similar. Lily is still there as a member of the ballet company who has this charisma and has this freedom that Nina does not have and wants. And that theme of queerness is still very much in the show, this element of Nina’s sexual awakening and grappling with her own understanding of attraction versus jealousy. I think what’s interesting in the movie that we’ve preserved in the musical is that sense of Nina looking at someone thinking, “I don’t know whether I’m attracted to her or I want to be her.” I feel like that’s quite an identifiable queer theme. For a lot of us, we have that moment of, “I’m feeling something; what is it?” as you come to understand yourself on your journey. That’s a moment that is still very much in the piece, and that Sonya has extrapolated in this beautiful way and created this gorgeous dance moment where we really get to be inside Nina’s experience as she tries to understand who she is and what she wants. That element is very much alive, who Lily is, and how that shifts for Nina at different points in the show. Sometimes she’s a threat, sometimes she’s a friend, sometimes it’s more than that. All of that is very much alive.

QulturVultur: That is a thrill to hear, because, of course, in the movie, that was one of the things that you didn’t have to be a ballerina to appreciate. If you’ve ever been someone who fell in love with their best friend or even their worst enemy, you could appreciate what’s happening there.

Benita de Wit: Absolutely. I think there is a real journey in this show of Nina discovering and understanding for herself what she wants. She’s in a very sheltered world. She has a very overbearing mother, and part of the journey is her being able to articulate and go for things that she wants.

QulturVultur: What might be coming up next for you, or what might you be hoping to do in the future?

Benita de Wit: I direct as well as associate direct, so I like to balance and do both. I’m hoping after this to spend a little time on a couple of projects that I have in development. Often, it’s the people; if it’s someone that I’m really excited about creatively, that will often guide the project that I choose. I’m thrilled that I get to be in the room with Jen Silverman, who’s writing the book, because Jen and I worked together about eight or nine years ago, when I was fresh out of grad school. I was the assistant director on the Off-Broadway production of The Moors, their play that we did here in New York. That’s when I met them, and it was my first professional gig. It’s a really fun full-circle moment to now be behind the table with them, talking about their play, looking at all of these new rewrites, and it’s just a nice journey.

Black Swan is scheduled to run May 26 – July 5 at the Loeb Drama Center in Harvard Square in Cambridge. For tickets and more information, follow this link.