Beautiful Chaos. Carey Perloff
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by January. If I had been less naïve and compliant I would have refused; it takes at least six months to understand an organization and its culture well enough to begin to make remotely informed decisions about the work ahead. But I said yes, and made every mistake I could possibly have made.
It all went back to what I thought we had “for free.”
In celebration of an artist whose work had had a dramatic impact on Bay Area theater during his distinguished career at the Magic Theatre (and to please Sullivan), I asked director Robert Woodruff whether he would like to be part of my first season at A.C.T. This seemed like an obvious way to bring younger, edgier audiences into the A.C.T. fold, to salute the city’s cultural history, and to give us license to do more adventurous work. Woodruff eagerly accepted and chose a classic I loved that had strong meaning for him at the time: Webster’s Jacobean masterpiece The Duchess of Malfi.
To honor the company of actors who had meant so much to A.C.T. over the past decades, I found roles for many of them in a 1930s American comedy I had always admired, Dinner at Eight, and in a new translation of Molière’s The Learned Ladies that Richard Seyd had directed very successfully for me in New York. These two plays would give me a chance to see how I related to a whole raft of A.C.T. talent (including Peter Donat, Sydney Walker, Richard Butterfield, and Frances Lee McCain) and to do a few comedies on the grand scale that Bill Ball had espoused and adored.
To share my own personal aesthetic and theatrical training with my new audience, I chose to commission a new Timberlake Wertenbaker translation of Euripides’ Hecuba, which was to star Olympia Dukakis in the title role. And to appease those who felt my tastes were not popular or American enough, I agreed to produce Ken Ludwig’s Broadway farce Lend Me a Tenor, which was not a play that particularly spoke to me but which I thought might appeal to the opera lovers in San Francisco and balance out my Jacobean drama.
And finally, because it never occurred to me that Strindberg’s dark psychological landscape might be a bizarre way to usher in a new theatrical era, I chose to begin my tenure at A.C.T. with Paul Walsh’s new version of Creditors, which we had done so successfully at CSC the season before.
All this was thought through and decided on planes and phone calls between November 1991, when I was hired, and March 1992, when the season was announced. I was still living in New York, still running CSC, and still raising a two-year-old. It was hardly the calmest and most propitious way to plan an inaugural season. Not realizing until I had accepted the job how disastrous A.C.T.’s cash flow was and how complex the union contracts and administrative budgets were, I allowed myself to be railroaded into decisions that had far-reaching consequences. Many of these decisions were shepherded by a shadow marketing consultant whose salary was nowhere to be found on A.C.T.’s official payroll but whose Denver-based office seemed to be generating whatever thinking was going on about how to introduce new artistic leadership to A.C.T. and how to communicate with the audience. “If your theater were a vegetable, what kind might it be?” was one of her first questions to me. I think it was this encounter that led to my ongoing antipathy for consultants and my resistance to the kind of marketing speak so ubiquitous in the field today.
If I was surprised by what I discovered, so was the theater community when they learned that a thirty-two-year-old neophyte from New York had been hired to run one of the five largest companies in America, a once great institution with a theater full of earthquake rubble, a troubled school, a negative cash flow, a dwindling audience, and a traumatic history. Why did A.C.T. choose to gamble on me? Trustee Joan Sadler recently shared with me the letter she wrote to the full board that fall, in which she articulated her unqualified support for their candidate (me), not just “because she was capable, talented, experienced, committed to excellence—they all were. But because for A.C.T., with the special characteristics of its history and its special needs of the moment, she seemed uniquely suited, offering unusual strengths, skills, and understanding. First, because she communicated immediately the kind of passion, the ‘fire in the belly’ that will be a critical factor for us in our daunting task of capturing the public’s imagination and rallying its support. . . . Furthermore, because she recognizes A.C.T.’s unique role . . . with its dedication to training and ensemble, and she is committed to furthering and enhancing both. . . . Thirdly, because she recognized immediately the particular challenge and opportunities offered by the enormous diversity of the Bay Area.” It was a brave and unpredictable choice that this committed but beleaguered board was making. And San Francisco had little idea what it was getting.
Not that I have ever been secretive about my tastes and desires. I am passionate about complex dramatic literature, heightened text, big ideas, deeply invested acting, beautiful visuals, and international collaborations. I am woefully ignorant of pop culture, have little appetite for television, and have kept the remotest track of popular music only in recent years because my son is a musician. I realize this is a terrible admission, one that today would most likely disqualify me for the very job I have been doing for over twenty years. But I came of age at a time when live theater was meant to do something different from pop culture, and when success was measured in ways other than simply the number of people served. The current punishing fiscal climate and the challenge of attracting new audiences has led to a hunger for theater to aim more and more closely for the commercial center, in terms of subject matter, casting, and methods of outreach. The arts have come to rely on metrics that measure success according to the cost per person of producing a given play or mounting a given art exhibition. Obviously, broadening audiences in an era of niche marketing and the ability to self-curate any artistic experience is hard. But as Ezra Pound famously said, “Literature is news that stays news,” and the converse can also be the case: those pop-culture phenomena that may seem on the cutting edge of cool one year may be obsolete the next. If part of the mandate of the nonprofit theater is to nurture and cultivate that which may have lasting value, I believe it’s worth being cautious about the endlessly seductive pull of the trendy and the transient. Looking back on my years at A.C.T., the thing I am proudest of is that we have for the most part managed to consistently fill a large house by programming juicy literature with great actors, rather than by chasing every passing trend. But it’s certainly been a long hard fight, and it’s not over yet.
Chapter 3
The Postfounder Era
My generation of artistic directors sits somewhere between the visionary founders of the regional theater movement and the often refreshingly anti-institutional independent artists who have found homes either in the commercial or experimental theater worlds in recent years. We were idealistic enough to believe in a commitment to acting ensembles, classical repertoire, large-scale new work whose goal was not Broadway, subscription audiences with a love of variety, and federal funding for the arts. We were not disillusioned enough yet to despair of institutions and to hold the nonprofit movement accountable for the lack of access and adventure in the field, a charge one hears repeatedly (and often fairly) today. After all, the founding notion of the National Endowment for the Arts was that the future of a democracy is interlaced with the future of its art forms, and that to nurture the arts there must be a subsidy that protects risk and keeps artists’ vision focused on the long-term growth of the art form rather than the short-term profitability of any given piece of work. Bill Ball articulated this beautifully in the souvenir program printed for A.C.T.’s inaugural season in Pittsburgh in 1965:
The American Conservatory Theater has been founded as a non-profit, educational institution to bring together the finest directors, authors, playwrights, and educators in the theatre arts. Its immediate goal is to awaken in these theatre artists a maximum versatility and expressiveness. And as they approach these goals, we hope that their audiences will be provided with a banquet rather than merely another dessert. . . .
The American Conservatory Theater exists not only for the benefit of the artist—but also for the benefit of the audience. In recent years, the metropolitan theatre audience has become more and more an audience of hit-followers. The thoughtful theatre lover is offered little in the way of a sustained, meaningful repertoire. The thirteen plays which comprise the first season of The American Conservatory Theater encompass every major dramatic epoch in the history of the theatre.
Ball understood that resident theaters were given nonprofit status because