Making the
Invisible, Visible
Director strives to create striking moments in theatre productions
D
oug Joiner doesn’t like to be in the
spotlight. He dislikes large groups,
finds it hard to sit still, and frequently
gets bored at plays. On the surface, very little
suggests he is someone who might teach theater
or write and direct plays for a living. That is
because Joiner’s energies have less to do with
a love of theatre, per se, than with his keen
interest in human experience and his insistent,
almost restless, urge to create.
Whether devising for the stage or building
sets in his workshop, Joiner relishes the process
of making. In particular, he is drawn to the
challenge of transforming an unassuming pile
of raw materials into something unexpectedly
striking and full of meaning—what he calls
“making the invisible, visible.” This is also an
apt description of his life, as the interests that
now absorb him arose unexpectedly and from
inconspicuous beginnings.
As his surname suggests, Joiner comes from
a family of carpenters. But while growing up in
Thomaston, Georgia, he didn’t appear to share
their penchant for building.
“They would gather around to see me drive
a nail, and that was a source of humor,” Joiner
recalls. Woodworking would not interest him
until his mid-40s, when he began building
furniture and sets for plays.
Until he enrolled at Augusta College, he knew
even less about theater. He was 19 when he saw
his first play: Peter Shaffer’s Equus, in which the
main character wrestles with his occupation and
sense of purpose—something the young Joiner
would soon do as well. Around that time, Joiner
took a course in Butler Hall taught by Dr. Gene
Muto, a professor of theatre.
“I took his speech class and for some reason,
he liked me,” Joiner says. “Then, a couple of
10 | #WeArePamplin · Spring 2019
Doug Joiner teaches theatre at AU and also builds sets and directs plays. (Photos by Zhenya Townley)
semesters later, he saw me and said: ‘You. Come
here.’ I was kind of athletic and he needed a
lifeguard in a play.”
The play was Edward Albee’s The Sandbox, and
Joiner—who doesn’t care for crowds or public
attention—soon found himself on stage in front
of a live audience.
“I was dreadful,” he recalls with a grin. “My
first line was ‘hi,’ and my regionalism was such
that it came out ‘ha.’ That was my dialect before
I got into theatre. I was shirtless on stage going
‘ha.’ I guess I was too stupid to be petrified.”
Joiner soon found his way to more roles—the
next in Larry Shue’s The Foreigner, followed by
Moliere’s Tartuffe—but it wasn’t until senior
year that he considered pursuing theatre beyond
graduation. Eventually, he applied to graduate
school and earned his MFA in Directing from
Virginia Commonwealth University.
Today, Joiner teaches theatre at Augusta
University, where he also builds sets and
directs plays for the Maxwell Performing
Arts Theatre—the same stage where he first
performed. Last spring, Joiner directed Every
Brilliant Thing by Duncan Macmillan, about
a character coming to grips with his mother’s
attempted suicide, and Jessica Dickey’s Amish
Project, a fictional account of the schoolhouse
shooting that killed ten in the Amish community
of Nickel Mines in 2006. The plays were
performed on alternating nights, partly to draw
in different audiences, but also because Joiner
doubted audiences would sit through two in the
same evening.
“I don’t like going to see theatre because it
bores me,” he says. “I think that’s why, when I