They have changed quite a bit and their art has changed quite a bit. I think this in particular was a very curious piece because the Bengsons started this when they first met. When things are being developed over a long period of time, do you usually try to stay very in touch with the writer’s initial impulse of why they wrote the piece, or do you go more towards the changes in how you feel and the changes in the world? This kind of perseverance has been really inspiring. It’s certainly what we all have done in the last four years at various times in our own lives. I do think that the piece is a lot about trudging forward in the midst of great fear. What’s interesting is that we’ve been working on it for four years, and we have really endured huge life changes throughout that time period. Not that I ever stopped believing in love and falling in love, but it was a difficult time for me. It was kind of a weird moment to be endeavoring upon this great love story.

The piece is about a great love, and ironically, at the time that we started working on it, I was in the middle of a divorce. Their music is extraordinary and their presence is amazing. I went to go hear them sing and it was sort of transformative. She had this project, and I didn’t know who they were. When I first started working on it, about four years ago, I was introduced to the Bengsons through Lisa Steindler at Z Space in San Francisco. So, yes, it was a big year, and we recently sat down to talk to her about staging Hundred Days, her feelings on her Broadway debut, her plans for Off-Center, and her thoughts about the category of “female director.” Last summer she directed the Encores! Off-Center production of Assassins, and a few months later was named the co-artistic director of Off-Center after the death of the program’s artistic director Michael Friedman. She also made an overdue Broadway debut directing Marvin’s Room at the Roundabout. Earlier this season at NYTW she directed Amy Herzog’s new play Mary Jane, which has made it onto many critics’ Best of 2017 lists. Her latest project is the critically acclaimed concert/theatre piece Hundred Days at New York Theatre Workshop. But here are just some of the things she did this year. It’s one of my favorite things to do is to join a collaborative process that is proceedings and to hop into it midstream.Director Anne Kauffman’s name was everywhere this year, which is a slightly bizarre (and cliché) statement to make about a director who has been working consistently for over a decade. There’s even a surprise guest visit, so enjoy! I just want to begin with: I saw Hundred Days at, like, a bar in Astoria years ago, and it has changed quite a bit since all those years ago, so I wanted to ask you: what’s it like joining a creative project that has had such a long history, not to mention a personal history? Sarah Gancher: I love it. We went deep on the making of this fascinating work, her collaboration with Abigail and Shaun Bengson, how one even collaborates, and Sarah as an artist.

She is a frequent collaborator with many of the most interesting theater makers of all dots and stripes working today, and she joined forces with The Bengsons to contribute to the book on their love story/album/imagined event in between and across time and into each other’s lives for Hundred Days, now at New York Theater Workshop. Sarah Gancher is an exciting theater writer who has worked around the country and around the world.

Hundred days nytw