“He basically said, ‘If it was anybody but you, I’d kick you out of my office,’” Mr. Rauch said, and laughed.
By then the two had known each other for years. Mr. Chapin had long since given Mr. Rauch the O.K. to use Rodgers and Hammerstein’s “Cinderella” in his three-show mash-up, “Medea/Macbeth/Cinderella,” which he has staged in Los Angeles, New Haven and Ashland.
There, under his leadership, the Oregon Shakespeare Festival has nurtured socially conscious, historically minded work, including the plays “Sweat” and “All the Way,” with a producing style that diligently encourages diversity.
Mr. Chapin also knew something about Mr. Rauch’s life: that he’s been with his husband, the actor Christopher Liam Moore, since they were undergraduates at Harvard in the 1980s; that their younger child, now a teenager, is a transgender girl.
“So clearly what I got from him was this is not a gimmick,” Mr. Chapin said. “This is something that he wants to examine for a lot of intellectual reasons, but also there’s kind of an emotional oomph to it.”
For Mr. Rauch, once he got the green light, directing the show felt like “coming out all over again.”
When, at the first preview this spring, a student from a religious academy “got up and ran out of the theater to throw up” at the sight of two men kissing onstage — and “made it very clear to everybody that that’s why he was leaving” — Mr. Rauch feared that the whole run would be like that. Instead, he said, it’s been affirming, with some school groups bringing rainbow flags, waving them every time a couple kisses.
