Beautiful Chaos. Carey Perloff
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at the helm of The Public Theater for forty years and could fight the long fight; it helped that Gordon Davidson cast a long shadow over the Mark Taper Forum for three decades. (As Thoreau famously said, “An institution is the long shadow of a man.”) You learn from your mistakes, and if you are supple and lucky, and if you have a board of directors that has your back, you grow. This doesn’t mean leadership shouldn’t change and evolve with the needs of the organization, but a theater that switches artistic directors every three to five years is a theater at risk of eradication. The problem is that our attention spans are very short and our impatience with failure very great. It would have surprised no one if Alan Stein had fired me. The fact that he didn’t was a minor miracle that I continue to wonder at to this day.
I walked out of Alan’s apartment into the hot May sunshine in a daze, trying to understand what had just happened. Then I called Anthony, and we went out to dinner at our favorite Thai restaurant in Noe Valley, where the waiters charmed Lexie as she held court over the pad thai. Anthony was relieved—he was in the middle of law school at Berkeley, he was loving it, and he wanted to stay. I was exhausted but reconciled. I went into the office the next day to find a letter from John Sullivan pleading with me to let him stay on—he thought we would make good partners after all, and there was so much work to be done. But the die had been cast, and within a month he was gone. Although I promoted Development Director Tom Flynn to administrative director, I would now enter the next chapter of my life at A.C.T. as sole CEO, a position I have never relished and never sought again. The search for a new managing director began, and I dove into preparations for my second season.
As a fitting conclusion to that annus terribilis, we printed a subscription renewal brochure that was covered in quotes from the letters we had received over the course of the year. I leavened the most hostile ones with the occasional positive remark, but I let the criticism stand. The audience must have felt heard and therefore somewhat vindicated, because ironically a surprisingly large percentage resubscribed. Yale Repertory Theatre founder Robert Brustein, whom I had called in desperation during my darkest days, had wisely advised me to let the disgruntled audience go entirely and hope for a new audience to emerge (which he had done brilliantly in his early days both at Yale Rep and at the American Repertory Theater), and to some extent that happened. But at the end of that renewal campaign I learned a critical thing about the Bay Area: it is a community filled with opinions, ready to take umbrage at almost anything, but equally ready to go the distance when engaged. Those subscribers cared about A.C.T. Their outrage was a sign of their affection. They didn’t want to see the theater go under, nor did they want to drive me out of town. They wanted to know that I was listening, that I heard their frustrations, that I would learn from my mistakes and do better. Certainly no one could say it had been a boring season, quipped the brilliant philanthropist Barbro Osher, who had supported the organization for many years. It was clear that this was no longer “your father’s A.C.T.” My first season had served, if nothing else, to expose the cracks in the infrastructure of the organization. I hadn’t yet begun to take on the school, and the staff was only beginning to cohere into a reasonable force. But we had survived, and now, apparently, I had to stay and see it through.
Chapter 7
The Geary Campaign
If the struggle to rebuild the damaged Geary Theater were a play, its lead characters would be FEMA (Federal Emergency Management Authority) and SHPO (State Historic Preservation Authority), and the title would be Waiting for Compromise. When it is your fate to own a landmark building in the state of California, nothing is simple. Everything the federal government tells you to do to prepare for another earthquake is contradicted by the historic preservationists, who don’t want a brick of the nondescript side wall of the theater to be touched, even in the name of seismic stability. Add to this the prerogatives of the donors, who rightly long to inject some new ideas and contemporary panache into the building, and you risk a constant state of stalemate.
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