“I woke up one morning and the creative urge was gone,” director Jim Schneider says, explaining why he dropped out of theater a year and a half ago. “I just reached a burn-out point.”
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Suddenly theater, which had been the center of his life since he was a kid, held no attraction. “I didn’t go to theater. I didn’t read a play. I didn’t do anything that was remotely related to theater. I went to work–selling furniture at Marshall Field’s. I spent a lot of time building a home life–coming home, spending time there, putting time into my relationship, which was in need of attention–and having a normal life, which is something I had never had.”
Schneider had grown up in a Leave It to Beaver family in Houston and was always the kid who got everyone in the neighborhood together. When he was six he had them doing plays. At nine he had his own puppet theater in the garage. “When you’re a kid they think it’s very cute, but when you get older it’s like, “I think we should send you to a psychiatrist. There’s something wrong with this child.”‘
Within a week he was putting together “Sand,” a triple bill of Finding the Sun, which he’ll direct, and Albee’s Box and The Sandbox, which Edwin Wald will direct.
