Mary E. Birnbaum '07

“I’ve always chosen my productions very carefully. By the costumes that I get to wear,” says Mary E. Birnbaum ’07, before bursting into sheepish laughter. She is in her natural habitat, the mainstage of the Loeb Drama Center, where she’s put years of dedicated work into the Harvard drama scene.

Now, she is dressed in everyday clothes, with a long, tiered skirt adding a hint of drama to her appearance. But the true drama is in her face, in the mobile features that light up as she discusses her greatest passion—acting.

“I’m a big diva,” she proclaims, and turns to her friend and co-worker, Kara E. Kaufman ’08 for affirmation. Kaufman’s amused smile reveals the exaggeration.

Still, Birnbaum certainly has the credentials of a prima donna. As a prefrosh, she was accepted into the Freshman Arts Program (FAP); that fall, as a freshman, she played one of the lead roles in the play “Tartuffe.” Since those more-than-humble beginnings Birnbaum has been involved in about 35 shows, both as an actor and a director, and she has had the distinction of acting on the Loeb mainstage three times during her four years at Harvard.

Birnbaum’s awareness of her own star power makes her forgiving of true divas.

“Prima donna actors are great,” she says. “You see this in movie stars. The actors who think they’re a big deal invariably will become a big deal.”

“Actors, at their center, are ego,” she continues. “The ego has to be big enough to fill the whole stage.”

But her tolerance of egotistical actors is not completely self-indulgent. Having directed numerous plays, Birnbaum knows how it feels to work on the other side of the curtain.

“When I’m the director, I’m powerful because I’m the outside eye,” says Birnbaum, quoting award-winning director JoAnne Akalaitis. Because she is outside a given scene, she explains, she can tell the actors—divas or no—how they can make it better.

Considering Birnbaum’s unqualified fondness for the people in the theater community, however, perhaps divas simply don’t exist at Harvard. In fact, the majority of her tightly-knit blocking group is involved in theater, a common interest that brought them together from their first days at FAP.

Birnbaum’s fondness for her colleagues is also colored with intense respect for their abilities.

“The thing about Harvard is that everybody has brilliant ideas all the time,” she says. The difficulty, according to her, lies in synthesizing these ideas together so that everyone is on the same page—her primary role as a director.

Take Birnbaum’s latest directing effort, “The Way of the World,” which will run from April 27 to May 5 on the Mainstage. Birnbaum will stage the Restoration drama, which premiered in 1700, in a 1980s setting. But this concept is merely a canvas for more complex visual metaphors, like paint gradually taking over the stage throughout the play.

“As the ill-conceived actions of the people in the play happen, the set and the costumes become permeated with color,” says Birnbaum.

Birnbaum’s friends recognize the “The Way of the World” as an especial triumph for its director as well.

“It can be seen as the culmination of everything she’s done over the years,” says Nicole B. Urken ’07, Birnbaum’s freshman-year roommate and current blockmate, who is also a former Crimson executive editor.

Birnbaum started her journey toward this mastery of the stage as a child growing up in Connecticut, just an hour away from the theaters of New York City. She saw her first opera when she was three. By the age of ten, she was singing in the Metropolitan Opera House every night as part of the Metropolitan Children’s Chorus. As a senior in high school, she and her classmates were invited to do a month-long run of the “Laramie Project” in London.

Even with such a background, Birnbaum credits Harvard’s seemingly limited theater program for her development into Harvard stage royalty.

“Seeing Harvard from the outside, you don’t really see the arts, which is kind of ridiculous, because there’s so much here,” says Birnbaum. She is especially effusive about the presence of the American Repertory Theater, which is used for professional productions, on the Harvard campus.

“We are so lucky to be able to hang out with the actors, meet the directors, meet the designers,” she says.

“It’s a very exciting thing to be a part of.”