There’s a method to the badness of course. The playwright Itamar Moses, whose baseball-theme play, “Back Back Back,” Mr. Aukin directed at Manhattan Theater Club in 2008, said: “More than any director I’ve worked with, Daniel likes to explore the farthest emotional or dramatic boundaries of a scene as early as possible. He wants to figure out what the bandwidth is.”
Or, as Mr. Shepard put it: “He allows the actor to set sail. Then he finds where it’s necessary to cut back.”