Beautiful Chaos. Carey Perloff
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me, a striking woman with bright eyes and extraordinary chunks of jewelry around her neck and wrists. This was Sue Yung Li, a landscape architect who worked with the legendary Lawrence Halprin and who would become one of my saviors throughout my A.C.T. career. Finally there was Mary Metz, brilliant and businesslike, the former president of Mills College, with just a hint of a Louisiana accent and a seemingly endless supply of pointed questions. I began to reply.
A confession must be made right up front, one that will come as no surprise to those with whom I have even a passing acquaintance: I enjoy talking. Bruce Weber, in an interview with me in the New York Times some years later, labeled me a “world-class talker,” and indeed talking is probably the only activity in the world at which I am world class. There are so many things in life I have no talent for: I cannot intuit anything on a computer, back the car into our garage, build a fire, remember the passwords for my internet accounts, read music, analyze data, follow sports, or read Brecht in the original. What I can do is set a trail of words in motion and watch them quickly find their way into complete sentences, paragraphs, speeches. I have never had a fear of speaking in public, because there is something about standing before a group that feels liberating to me. I love to extemporize, in front of an audience, about any number of things I care about, and theater and culture most particularly. So the talking part of my first A.C.T. interview was easy. I believe in the transformative power of theater, I have a great love of dramatic literature, I revere great actors and I am willing to fight for them, and I know what it is to run a cash-strapped theater and to fundraise as if my life depended on it. I also knew even then that, unlike many theater people for whom the freelance gypsy life is most congenial, being part of an institution suits my particular temperament. From my first day at CSC, the institution had functioned like an envelope into which I could place my appetites, my questions, my interests; it was the village well around which I could contextualize what I saw happening in the field and contribute to the larger art form. I shared this with the A.C.T. board. They asked questions. I replied. We laughed. We shook hands, and it was over. Two hours later I was back on the highway heading south toward my mother and my two-year-old. The two of them were so delighted with each other (as they have continued to be ever since), that the entire trip seemed worth it just for their pleasure, and I never expected things would go any further than that conversation in the boardroom of the Bank of San Francisco. I was in every possible way unlike the standard profile of a LORT (League of Resident Theatres) artistic director: I was young, female, classical in bent, noncommercial, and way too opinionated.
Two months and several visits later, the phone rang. It was Alan Stein, the gentle and heroic chair of the A.C.T. board. He wanted to see me at his apartment in New York; could I come up tomorrow? Within two minutes of my arrival at East 77th Street, he offered me the job. He was extremely sober about the current condition of the organization, and extremely passionate about its future. He said that if I’d commit to helping resurrect A.C.T., he’d be with me every step of the way. It had all happened so fast that I had no time for self-doubt, self-reflection, or even self-congratulation. I said yes. And so the adventure began.
Chapter 2
What Do You Have for Free?
British director Emma Rice, who has created work with the experimental Kneehigh theater company in Cornwall for two decades, uses an expression about theatrical investigation that struck me as invaluable as soon as I heard it. Whether she is talking about a particular actor or about a piece of theater, she begins her investigation by asking, “What do you have for free?” Not “What is your type?” per se, but “What qualities exist innately in your being that others can instantly ascribe to you?” I teach a class to A.C.T.’s first-year master of fine arts students titled “Why Theater?” in which we borrow from Emma and begin by exploring what each of those young artists has “for free” before we move on to discuss what might stretch them beyond their natural givens. We then do an exercise about our hometowns, in which we try to imagine what a given community has for free, to try to determine what kind of theater might thrive there.
When I took the job at A.C.T. I thought I understood what San Francisco had, as it were, for free. This is critical when you are thinking about running a major arts institution. Despite the fact that the American theater is often in danger of becoming, in the words of Steppenwolf Artistic Director Martha Lavey, a kind of “McTheater” in which institutions across the country often produce the same five plays in the same packaging, I have always believed that great theater grows out of a very specific time and place, with specific artists in service to a specific audience. Repertoire is most interesting when it is determined by the unique geography, demographics, mood, and history of the given community.
After all, it was not a coincidence that A.C.T. ended up in San Francisco to begin with. When Bill Ball first conceived of the notion of a permanent company of classically trained actors committed to staging a diverse repertoire of plays to be produced on a large scale for a literate audience, he traveled across the country looking for the perfect home. Pittsburgh proved difficult because of power struggles with the Pittsburgh Playhouse; Chicago extended a hand, but the deal was never closed. It was San Francisco in 1967 that became Bill Ball’s natural partner in crime. In his book The Creation of an Ensemble, John Wilk quotes the Minneapolis Tribune’s Mike Steele about why San Francisco proved to be the perfect match for A.C.T.: “It’s a city of theatricality. Every street corner is a stage and every fourth person seems to be either a manic actor out of Genet or a street musician out of work. It’s the obvious city for the American Conservatory Theater, America’s most flamboyant regional theatre and one of its best. It reflects San Francisco exactly, erratically brilliant, vain, diverse, perverse, and very exciting.” The Actor’s Workshop founder Herbert Blau, in The Impossible Theater, described San Francisco in the fifties and sixties (with the arrogance and slightly patronizing tone of a transplanted New Yorker) as “a gilded boom town grown urban on a fissure . . . two great universities nearby, and a trolley college of high caliber; a great park of eclectic fauna; a Chinese ghetto which feels affluent and no conspicuous slums; sick comics in the bistros and a Bohemian Club of unregenerate squares . . . withal, a city reposeful and august . . . the old Pacific Union Club on Nob Hill, home of the railroad kings, lording it over the new arrivals: the students, the dockworkers, the doctors of the Kaiser Plan, the Hadassah ladies, the vagrants from the valleys, the junior executives of the new Playboy set, the Beats from Tangiers and North Platte, all the questing intellectuals . . . a city with a nervous graciousness, upholding a worldwide reputation for a culture it doesn’t quite have . . . a city that is a myth, with the golden opportunity to live up to it.” The audacity and elegance of the new American Conservatory Theater in the late sixties and early seventies matched both the appetites and nascent sophistication of San Franciscans, and elicited the kind of financial generosity necessary for a nonprofit venture of that scale to survive. During those initial years, San Franciscans fell in love with Bill Ball and he with them; Ball won their hearts with an unparalleled sixteen-play rotating repertory in the initial twenty-two weeks. As Ball told Wilk: “The idea was to have so much, such a splashy repertory that it was an undeniable experience. We had to dazzle our audience and overwhelm them.”
Alas, despite its glorious beginnings, A.C.T. failed to create an infrastructure to match its ambitions, with the result that by the time Ball departed in the eighties, there was precious little to hold together the brilliant idea he had created. The man who adored casts of thousands and staged legendary curtain calls (called “walk-downs”) at the end of each season (in which actors bowed in the costumes of one show and then madly changed into costumes for the next until the entire season’s repertoire had been represented in one fabulous and continuously swirling bow) had been reduced to producing The Gin Game and other small-cast plays for an increasingly disaffected audience. The story of Ball’s downfall is complex: He rarely engaged with his San Francisco fundraising group (originally called the California Theatre Foundation and later the California Association for the American Conservatory Theatre, or C.A.A.C.T.) in any substantive discussion about the direction the company was taking, because he viewed A.C.T. as a national theater and resisted outside input of any kind. Meanwhile he became more and more fanatic about his own power and need for control. This situation proved unsupportable, particularly when major foundation funding began to dry up, and according to all accounts, Ball became increasingly volatile, unpredictable, and isolated. Rumor