Beautiful Chaos. Carey Perloff
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closed the season, Sydney’s astonishing comic timing and antic, openhearted collaboration with Jean Stapleton brought the house down and temporarily reassured the audience that I was not the violent iconoclast they had suspected. I will never forget Sydney standing at the lip of the stage after the show, exhorting the audience to resubscribe by promising them excitement “and just a little bit of controversy,” with an enormous twinkle in his eye.
Toward the end of that first season, I went to Europe to fulfill an obligation I had entered into long before the A.C.T. job presented itself: I was directing the world premiere of a new Steve Reich–Beryl Korot opera titled The Cave. Steve and Beryl and I had been working on the piece for several years, and it remains one of the most fulfilling experiences of my life, watching it come to fruition at the Vienna Festival in the spring of 1993. The Cave was a multimedia opera in which the singers sang over the spoken texts of individuals from all walks of life who had been interviewed about the cave at Hebron, where Abraham and his descendants are believed to be buried. My job was to create a visual context for the singers on John Arnone’s elegant set in juxtaposition to the video screens, and to conceive it in such a way that video and live performers melded into a unified image. Reich’s music inspired me in the same manner Pinter’s language did: it was spare, muscular, visceral, and filled with moments of surprising beauty. The third act of The Cave, which sings about the angels who come unannounced to Abraham’s house and are taken in and fed, remains one of the most exquisite pieces of religious music I have ever encountered. As I traveled Europe on tour with The Cave, I realized to my great sadness that I felt more at home among that group of musicians, none of whom was known to me, than I had felt at my own theater for the past year. The attacks and frustrations had taken their toll: I was beaten up and discouraged. I was unsure whether the kind of theater I was interested in making would ever suit A.C.T.; I was homesick for the close downtown community of New York theater that had sustained and supported me at CSC; and I was in open warfare with my managing director.
The day before I left for Vienna I found, left in the fax machine, a letter John had sent to A.C.T.’s board of trustees, telling them that it was clear I was both incompetent and out of my depth and should be replaced. Indeed, although he himself denies it, I later heard from several key staff members that John had approached them to ask if they would support his efforts to have me removed. To be fair, we had lost over a million dollars on my first season, in part because the budget had never been realistically introduced to me, in part because of an economy in prolonged recession, and in part because of my lack of experience in running a theater of this size. In addition, we were already spending a considerable amount of money to launch our capital campaign to rebuild The Geary Theater and to cultivate major donors. Now we were faced with the need to renew subscribers who were clearly angry and disaffected and to try to raise capital dollars from donors who were not yet sure what the new A.C.T. was going to look like. Day after day during my first season, Alan Stein and I had valiantly appeared before every willing patron in town to share our vision of the future of A.C.T.; I had articulated the repertoire I wanted to pursue, I had attempted to wrap my head around the future of the training program, and I had talked personally to every audience member I could meet. I had even gone to Gap headquarters and sat on Don Fisher’s famous baseball mitt chair at 7:30 AM to ask him to support our campaign, a challenging request given that I know nothing about baseball and Fisher told me as soon as I sat down that he liked to go to bed by 9:00 PM and thus had little interest in the theater.
Had only one of the litany of first-year controversies happened, or had they happened in the context of a stable artistic enterprise, each would have probably blown over quickly. But I was new, young, untested, female, and a New Yorker, and every move I made was read as an indicator of further dangers ahead. The economy remained weak throughout that extremely difficult first year, and the possibility of raising the millions required to rebuild The Geary seemed remote. I had a demoralized staff with limited experience in fundraising or marketing, and virtually no artistic team: Aside from Dennis Powers, there was no casting director, no literary manager, no line producer, no company manager. Benny Ambush and Richard Seyd were doing their best, but they, too, were outsiders and overwhelmed by the tide of events. One of my few allies in that lonely first season was the director of the Young Conservatory, Craig Slaight, who had kept his head down and done remarkable work with young artists throughout the darkest times at A.C.T. and continues to do so to this day.
And so, while I was in Vienna staging The Cave, I began hearing rumors that things were reaching a crisis point. Not only was our cash flow a disaster, but my producing partner had all but publicly declared that he had no confidence in my ability to right the ship. The day I got back from Europe, John and I met in my office. I remember the day vividly, because suddenly I felt extraordinarily clear about what the options were. I didn’t want to come to work one more day with a colleague that so clearly doubted my capacity to do the job. I had no interest in internal politics and no desire to spend my energy guarding my back. I’m sure that John had only A.C.T.’s best interests in mind, and that supporting a maverick new artistic director like myself was a challenge he didn’t believe would bear fruit. But the partnership had become impossible. I told John that I was aware of his desire to run the theater alone and that I thought it was most appropriate for him to go to the board and give them the choice. Either he would stay or I would, but I could no longer envision a scenario in which we stayed together. To my great surprise, when he went to the board and proposed that he be left in charge of the organization, the board demurred, indicating that that they had chosen to hire an artist and that they would stand by their decision.
I heard of this decision at a meeting at Alan Stein’s stunning Russian Hill apartment on a sunny day in May. As had happened just over a year earlier when he asked me to come to his apartment in New York to invite me to take over A.C.T, he called and said he’d like a meeting, and off I went. I was almost certain that this would be the end of my tenure at A.C.T. Part of me longed to go back to New York, to a city and a community I felt I understood better, to friends and colleagues with whom I had made work for a decade, to the anonymity of a smaller theater, away from the wrath of the A.C.T. subscribers, the enormous fiscal challenges, the demoralized staff, the struggling school, and my antagonistic managing director. I felt like a stranger in a strange land, without friends, without instincts, overwhelmed and alone. When I got to Alan’s apartment, we sat in the picture window of his living room, overlooking San Francisco Bay. I watched the sailboats pass by below and suddenly felt nostalgic for all that I would miss when I left the Bay Area. Alan came back with the coffee. He sat down, smiled, and said, “Look, Carey. It’s been a hard year. Change is extremely difficult. We all understand that. But now that you’ve done the hard part, it’s time to see it through.”
It took me a moment to realize he was asking me to stay on. I couldn’t fathom how this gentle, intelligent man had the courage to stick with a renegade choice who had caused so much pain and uproar over the past year. But Alan was unfazed. He seemed to take the long view. He liked much of the work he had seen. He liked my energy and enthusiasm. He liked my willingness to talk to the audience, my passion for writing about the work, my eagerness to ask anyone and everyone for support, my facility with public speaking. But most of all, I think he was banking on my spirit. A.C.T. had been through so many near-death experiences in its history, he believed that only a young person of indomitable spirit could keep it alive. We had no cash flow, no theater, no easy remedies. But somehow, he was willing to stick by me. And he was not alone. Many years later, I discovered that it was the women on the board who stood up and defended me, again and again, during that tumultuous first year when I was being attacked from all sides. It hadn’t occurred to me how rare it was for a nonprofit theater board to have among its trustees the president emerita of a major women’s college, an ex-nun who had started her own successful storage business, and a landscape architect with a strong personal aesthetic. These women saw in me an ally and a plausible colleague, and they fought for me when the going was tough.
I stress this because in recent years, as the economy has worsened and the risks of producing theater have increased, boards of directors are looking increasingly to short-term results and last-quarter returns to determine the fate of their artistic leaders. Artistic transitions are difficult and take time to manage; with a new leader comes a new aesthetic, a new energy, and a new way of working, and often that can take several years to come into focus. This requires a stalwart