Читать книгу Beautiful Chaos - Carey Perloff - Страница 10

I decided to open the 1992–93 season with a rare Strindberg three-hander called Creditors, which I had directed to critical acclaim at CSC in a new translation by Paul Walsh, who would become our resident dramaturg at A.C.T. some years later. No one advised me that this taut little exercise in sexual warfare might not be the most celebratory way to begin one’s tenure at a new theater (“A seemingly perverse choice,” sniffed critic Dennis Harvey in the San Francisco Chronicle), but at least it was a gem (and an inexpensive one at that), and I figured that I knew the script well enough to direct it while trying to solve the endless cascade of problems that were bound to present themselves during my first months at A.C.T. But the problems were worse than I’d anticipated, and as soon as I went into production, I realized that I was at a theater without a full-time casting director, a literary department, or a dramaturg, nor was there a resident stage manager who was on my team. Navigating Strindberg’s psychological complexity while learning to steer a rudderless institution was difficult at best. Nevertheless, Creditors opened on an incredibly hot evening in October 1992, and famed San Francisco columnist Herb Caen pronounced it “strong enough to keep the creditors from the door.” The production’s Pinteresque sexual tension, precise sculptural staging, and powerful cast (A.C.T. favorite Charles Lanyer along with newcomers Joan McMurtrey and William Converse-Roberts) intrigued our subscribers and introduced them to dramatic literature that was rich, resonant, and as yet unknown at A.C.T. Creditors was a gripping evening with vivid performances, and our audiences leaned forward and took notice.

Then the disasters began. It all started with Ken Ludwig’s Lend Me a Tenor, a play I had selected in the fraught few months after being hired, before I knew anything about A.C.T.’s internal dynamics. I chose Tenor in my eagerness to find a light comedy to balance the rigors of The Duchess of Malfi, Creditors, and Antigone. The plot of Ludwig’s play revolves around an ill-fated opera production that attempts to replace an ailing tenor with another singer disguised in blackface. On my first official day on the job, in June 1992, I began to hear rumbles from the conservatory about an M.F.A. acting class that had gone disastrously wrong. It was called Rock Stars, and its purpose was to train actors to work “from the outside in” by imitating in as precise a manner as possible the physical and vocal behavior of a chosen rock music performer. A well-intentioned but ultimately misguided white student, having decided to portray Grace Jones, appeared before her classmates in dark character makeup. This caused enormous upset in the school. At that time, there were few artists of color in positions of authority at A.C.T., and few safe avenues for the students to express discontent. Thus, in the wake of the Grace Jones episode, when the naïve new artistic director announced that for her first season she was programming a play that involved blackface, the place erupted. Benny Sato Ambush, the African American director who was associate artistic director at the time, explained to me that, in the context of the school, carrying on with Lend Me a Tenor was probably a very bad idea indeed.

To be honest, once I arrived at A.C.T. and had time to really consider the season, I was not sorry to replace Ludwig’s slim comedy with a more interesting play. But I had no idea how myopic I was being when I chose instead a new Dario Fo farce titled The Pope and the Witch. Again, the choice happened for seemingly sensible reasons. In addition to Benny Ambush, I had made the decision to bring on board a second associate artistic director, Richard Seyd. Richard was a highly respected local director with whom I had collaborated in New York; he was the longtime associate producing director of Eureka Theatre Company, a beloved acting teacher, and a font of knowledge about Bay Area alternative theater. But in all his years as a Bay Area director, Richard had never played a role in A.C.T.’s work. So naturally there was a certain outsider status that he brought to the job, along with a desire to crack open the club that A.C.T. had become and introduce some new elements. Among his many local friends and colleagues was Joan Holden, a principal playwright of the San Francisco Mime Troupe, who had shared with him the untranslated Pope and the Witch, which depicts the upheavals caused when an eager Pope, in thrall to a drug-trafficking Witch, wakes up one morning suddenly believing in the right of women to obtain free abortions on demand. Richard and Joan were excited by the energy and invention of the piece and thought the role of the Pope would be a perfect fit for Geoff Hoyle, clown extraordinaire. Geoff was another Bay Area artist who had not been part of the A.C.T. circle; the Fo play offered a lively opportunity to introduce him to our audience, and his audience to ours. I knew how beloved Fo’s work had been among Mime Troupe fans across the Bay Area and was interested in encouraging that audience to begin coming to A.C.T.

So, with little time to spare and lots of internal debate and agonizing, we decided to replace the previously announced Lend Me a Tenor with The Pope and the Witch. In New York, I was accustomed to season schedules changing all the time, so I was taken aback that the substitution of one play for another was considered amateurish and unacceptable in San Francisco, particularly in the first year of a new regime. But substitute I did, making the additional mistake of trying to explain the switch by being honest about the incident in the school. At that point, the howls of reproach began in earnest. It was bad enough, I was told, to bow to the politically correct pressure of a few students and displace a farce that had run so successfully in New York. But it was sheer idiocy to replace that farce with an Italian comedy about the pope’s vision of free abortion, in a city as Catholic as San Francisco. Within days, I was receiving outraged letters from religious subscribers, from churchgoers, and from the Catholic hierarchy itself, particularly from a group that called itself Catholics for Truth and Justice. (I longed to locate the Catholics who were not for truth and justice, who might be on my side.) Long before we even went into rehearsal with the Fo play, the city was up in arms. There were numerous articles in the San Francisco Chronicle and dismissive editorials abounded (and this was in the days before this kind of crisis could get tweeted and reposted across the cyber-universe). No one could understand why the controversy in the school had been permitted to engender this particular change in programming. Years later, with more artists of color in our midst and a clearly written appeals policy in place in our conservatory, we have other ways to respond to such internal issues, but at the time, it felt necessary to me, as the new head of an organization that prided itself on training and education, to respect the students’ opinions and replace the Ludwig show. So it was devastating to be met with such derision and lack of comprehension. And it took me months to realize that tension between the Catholic and gay communities was particularly acute during that period, and that by my actions I had placed A.C.T. directly in a hostile crossfire.

Summoned to appear at the knees of one Monsignor Steven Otellini of St. Cecilia’s Parish, I begged A.C.T.’s one Catholic trustee, Pat Flannery, to accompany me while I sat on a low stool and was castigated by the outraged priest, who had just written to the chair of the National Endowment for the Arts demanding that “the NEA should seriously reconsider future grants to A.C.T. in light of their callous treatment of a significant portion of the local population.” In response to my letter of explanation, San Francisco Archbishop John Quinn replied, “It is ironic that you extol Dario Fo’s concern about social welfare when the Popes of the twentieth century have been the most significant supporters of social justice among all the leaders of the world,” and declared it totally unacceptable that we were “performing a play in which the Holy Father is portrayed assaulting homeless children and as supporting the drug trade.” My attempts to contextualize the piece in the broader context of political satire, and to talk about the deep humanity of Dario Fo, failed miserably. Soon the Wall Street Journal decided to make a meal out of this naïve young artistic director who had tried to avoid offending blacks only to succeed in offending everybody else instead. There were threats by the Knights of Malta and the Order of the Holy Sepulchre to pressure donors with Catholic backgrounds and corporations with Catholic board members to withdraw funding from A.C.T.

When the production finally opened, it became clear that the play itself was rather pallid in comparison to the scale of outrage it had engendered. This minor piece of Italian political provocation couldn’t begin to stand up to the scrutiny visited upon it by press and audience alike, despite brilliant central performances by the antic Hoyle and his sidekick, Sharon Lockwood. In the end, there were two silver linings to the Pope and the Witch debacle. One was the arrival on the scene of Alan Jones, the wise and gracious dean of Grace Cathedral, who descended from Cathedral Hill in his finest robes during the preview process and told the picketing crowds that, while dissent was honorable, censorship was not. Jones eventually moderated a town hall meeting in which those who were willing to show up (which didn’t include most of the church protesters) got to have their say. He was passionate about the right and indeed the necessity of artists to freely articulate their world view, and he immediately became a treasured friend and later trustee of A.C.T., eventually presiding over a beautiful blessing on the reopening of The Geary.

The second silver lining came in 1997, when out of the blue Fo was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. In the statement accompanying the prize, the Nobel Committee described Fo as a visionary writer “who emulates the jesters of the Middle Ages in scourging authority and upholding the dignity of the downtrodden.” When I was asked to appear on the PBS NewsHour with Jim Lehrer the evening the award was announced to comment on the significance of Fo’s work, I felt a sweet moment of vindication.

But the Pope fracas was only the beginning. A couple of months later, as I began visiting rehearsals of The Duchess of Malfi (which were held in our scene shop due to the enormity of George Tsypin’s set), I slowly began to discover what it was that director Robert Woodruff loved so much about the play. He had been reading Camille Paglia and Susan Faludi at the time and wanted to put onstage the graphic degradation of women that he felt was fundamental both to our own culture and to Jacobean drama. His was an eminently fair reading of the text, although there was nothing subtle about his conception: his brilliant set designer had created a giant metal scaffold filled with office cubicles and bisected by a huge tube through which viscous liquid could gush on demand. San Francisco Chronicle writer Steven Winn described the mise-en-scène (in an article written for the New York Times in June 1993 about my controversial first season) as follows:

The Duchess stood centerstage in a punishing white light, bloodied, naked from the waist down, and bound in gray duct tape from knees to neck. Behind her, in a bank of cramped metal cells, images of masochism and misogyny formed a hellish living frieze. A woman squirmed inside a man’s steel grip. Another sat in a glassy-eyed stupor, ropes of her long hair knotted to the cell’s frame and clawlike pincers locked on her bare breasts.

By the time the actress Randy Danson had endured her tortuous death, dozens of patrons had fled.

Indeed, Woodruff’s production was a bold, graphic, shocking, rather heavy-handed reading of an admittedly violent and sexually aggressive play. And many A.C.T. subscribers, who had received no warning and were apparently used to their classics being somewhat more decorously presented, were appalled. One of my favorite trustees, an elegant and intelligent elderly gentleman who died shortly there­after, said to me mournfully after witnessing Malfi, “And I thought you were such a nice girl.” I will always regret his disappointment in me.

Their horror began at the first preview, when the intermission lasted a full forty-eight minutes because Woodruff had decided at the last moment to put the set on wheels, and the desperate stage crew risked hernias trying to move two tons of metal to a post-intermission position. The length of the interval gave the six-hundred-plus-person audience nearly an hour to line up and accost me with angry accusations about how I was rapidly desecrating the theater they knew and loved. The Pope and the Witch had been bad enough, but this “in-your-face” approach to a classic was the last straw. It didn’t help that Woodruff’s work needs a lot of rehearsal time to gel, and the four weeks allotted to stage this large and complex play was not remotely enough for him to refine his vision. The spectacle that greeted audiences during the preview and opening-night process was unfinished and still somewhat inchoate. By the time Woodruff led the Prologue (an audience discussion that happens on the Tuesday before opening night for each of A.C.T.’s subscription productions), he was mordantly predicting that the Little Man (a cartoon figure that accompanies every theater review in the San Francisco Chronicle and whose demeanor is meant to be a snapshot of the reviewer’s reaction to the work) would have an axe in his back.

A quick sidebar about the Little Man, the icon that has tormented Bay Area theater artists for more than seventy years. There are few serious newspapers in America that apply a visual rating system to theater reviews, but the Chronicle has always found its Little Man illustration indispensable. he is seated in a theater chair beside every review, ready to dispense his verdict on the show by one of five positions: he is either 1) leaping out of his chair in ecstasy, 2) sitting and clapping politely, 3) sitting and staring straight ahead, 4) sleeping in disgust, or 5) most damningly, absent from the chair altogether, having fled the offending production. It is difficult to get past the icon long enough to read reviews in the Chronicle; typically, a potential audience member will simply ask, “What is the Little Man doing?” This is such a disservice to artists and critics alike that it hardly bears mentioning, except to say that Woodruff’s fantasy of the Little Man with an axe in his back has remained with me for my entire tenure at A.C.T. Ironically, when the play was finally reviewed, the Little Man was actually applauding politely, an assessment that baffled the enraged crowds who couldn’t wait to get home and write me hate letters about the production. I received 750 letters in all, which I preserved in two large black binders that I leave in a prominent place on my office bookshelf, as a reminder, I suppose, of those bitter early days.

Woodruff had to depart the day after opening, so I was left to respond to every complaint myself. This was in the days before email, so it was an arduous process, but, surprisingly, in the long run it was also somewhat rewarding. In preparation for writing this book, I reread the entire collection of mail, and in spite of the pain of revisiting that tsunami of criticism, what strikes me twenty years down the road is the passion and intelligence expressed by A.C.T.’s audience. Despite the level of anger, it was clear that these were not philistines who were arguing for a season of easy listening; they were engaged theater­goers who desperately wanted to understand what was going on at a theater they had nurtured for years. I realized that I was no longer at the helm of a small organization in the vast cultural landscape of New York; I was running the flagship and everything I did was going to be highly visible and closely scrutinized. In responding one by one to all the charges against the casting, concept, and design of Malfi, I began to forge a relationship with an audience that I came to admire as one of the most open-minded and engaged theater audiences in the country. I tried as hard as I could to stay open to their criticism. Maybe because they saw my extreme vulnerability, they, too, became more open. Years later, in her brilliant essay “Whither (or Wither) Art?” Zelda Fichandler articulated better than I ever could why it is so important for artistic leadership to acknowledge mistakes, no matter how humiliating:

The creative courage of the artistic director will inspire artists; they, in turn, will support the risks she takes on their behalf whether or not they succeed. The transparency she fosters so that information—whether good news or bad—is available to all, up and down and around the building, will deepen the sense of mutual respect and a communal destiny. And she will see to it that no one is made to feel intimidated to speak up; in story and myth, the figure of Death is always silent. The artistic director’s acknowledgement of ambiguity, relativism, second thoughts, and struggle that exist behind difficult decisions will draw the artists even closer to her, revealing her as worthy of having, using, and sharing power. The blinding glare of certainty always reduces intimacy and trust.

I wish I had had Ms. Fichandler there to remind me of this truth during the ordeal of my first season. It was a lonely time. The nadir came when I discovered that a telemarketer for a local theater was using the Malfi debacle as bait to lure our subscribers away at the same time that Lexie came down with scarlet fever.

Debacle Number Three came in the form of Sophocles’ Antigone, which we produced after Malfi in a nearby smaller theater, The Stage Door (now a nightclub called Ruby Skye). Once again, best-laid plans went awry, and the subscribers were angry before they even walked into the theater. I had announced and fully intended to produce a new production of Euripides’ Hecuba to feature my longtime colleague and mentor Olympia Dukakis in the title role. I commissioned the visionary playwright/translator Timberlake Wertenbaker to create a new version of Hecuba, and she agreed with alacrity, but by the time we dove into the project, we realized it was a massive undertaking, requiring extensive music and choral work that could best be developed in a workshop. Having been forced to announce the work long before it was ready to be presented, I had to take a deep breath and admit that to do it justice, the production needed time to develop. So we substituted Antigone for Hecuba, promising that the latter would emerge in a subsequent season. Indeed, when we finally produced Hecuba in 1995, with an original score by the now Pulitzer Prize–winning composer David Lang sung by Balkan-inspired Bay Area vocal group Kitka and starring a ferocious Olympia, it was one of the triumphs of my tenure at A.C.T.

But at the time, an already shaken audience felt betrayed. Where was Ms. Dukakis when they needed her? Why was Antigone being done instead? A.C.T. had rarely been in the business of commissioning new translations and adaptations of classics, a practice we had employed regularly at CSC, so the audience was less privy to the developmental steps it takes to ready a new version of a classical play for large-scale production and just assumed that we were simply too incompetent to complete the task. I began receiving more mail, this time with the comment, “We don’t like Greek tragedy anyway and don’t wish to see it at A.C.T.” This truly baffled me, because, as far as I could tell, the theater had almost never produced a Greek play. How did our audiences know they would hate what they had rarely seen?

I suspected that their anxiety was tied to their expectation of seeing a declamatory drama performed by people dressed in white sheets, and I was sure that when they saw how immediate and visceral the Greeks could be they would change their minds. To lead my production I cast Elizabeth Peña, a Hispanic actress from Los Angeles, as Antigone; Wendell Pierce, a remarkable African American actor, as Haimon; and Ken Ruta, a powerful A.C.T. veteran, as Kreon. Lang scored the play for Rova Saxophone Quartet, who played it live from the balcony. I set the play in the rubble of a ruined theater and gathered real detritus from the damaged Geary to decorate the stage. One of the most poignant moments of rehearsal happened when Ruta bent down and picked up a piece of one of the gold rosettes that had broken off the damaged proscenium, and memories of all his years at The Geary came flooding back to him. Everything about the set was resonant for those of us who had grown accustomed to the tragic sight of that ruined playhouse: we even had a row of red seats onstage that were crumpled and bent like the seats that had buckled during the quake. We imagined that the chorus of old men, led by the inimitable Gerald Hiken, were aged subscribers whose primary hope was a desire to return to the status quo before the destruction.

Rehearsals for Antigone were a welcome escape from the horrors of the public relations machine that continued to spin out of control in the wake of the Malfi debacle. I relished the complexity of argument in Antigone and the passion of the characters to defend their conflicting views of history. I loved listening to Berkeley Law Professor Robert Post educate the cast and the audience about the difference between natural law (the law of kinship and family) and positive law (the law of government and the machine of justice) and felt that I was finally able to give to my audience something of myself, my own passions and predilections. But once again, when the production opened, a furor erupted. I had always practiced what was then called “nontraditional casting,” and particularly with material as metaphorical as the Greeks, it seemed critical to cast the best talent regardless of race. In the early days, A.C.T.’s actors had been primarily white, but this was an area Ed Hastings worked hard to change, hiring actors of color such as Steven Anthony Jones, Judy Moreland, and Luis Oropeza. So it was with great surprise that I discovered that some of my audience did not seem eager to watch a multiracial cast perform Antigone. To be fair, if the Lend Me a Tenor debacle had not occurred, sensitivities might not have run so high. But in the wake of my decision about Tenor, the casting of Antigone smacked of political correctness to this bewildered and bruised audience, and the letters began to pour in again.

This time, the issue was “authenticity.” It seemed that I was violating the authentic spirit of the play by forcing the audience to see it through the eyes of this very diverse cast. The response led to lengthy discussions about the nature of ancient Greek texts. I pulled out my dog-eared copy of Martin Bernal’s Black Athena and argued that even if authenticity were a desirable requirement in the staging of ancient plays, there was nothing to say that the population of fifth-century BCE Athens was all blond and blue-eyed; I showed vase paintings and discussed the enslavement of Persians and the trade presence of Egyptians to bolster my case for an ancient Athens that looked something like the cast of my Antigone. But again, sadly, the production itself was overshadowed by a controversy it was never intended to incite. Years later, after seeing numerous productions of Greek tragedy produced to great success at A.C.T., our audience has come to enjoy them so much that many of them traveled to Los Angeles to see my production of Sophocles’ Elektra (also with Olympia Dukakis) at the Getty Villa in the summer of 2010. But Antigone angered the audience at the time, and drove an even deeper wedge between them and the artists.

It was lucky that the spring of my first season brought some lighter comedies to the fore, or our subscribers would most likely have voted to abandon A.C.T. and leave The Geary ruined forever. March brought Albert Takazauckas’s production of Dinner at Eight, a play I had been intrigued by for many years and thought would beautifully suit what was left of the A.C.T. company. To follow this particular leg of the journey, it is important to understand what had happened to the notion of company in the years following Bill Ball’s demise. The band of forty-plus actors who had been lucky enough to receive seasonal contracts at A.C.T. had diminished over the years as actors left for Los Angeles and New York, and A.C.T.’s ability to sustain long-term contracts waned. By the time of the earthquake, none of the actors had guaranteed contracts anymore, although the attempt was still being made to give many of them as much work per season as possible. Associate Artistic Director Dennis Powers had endless sheets of graph paper on which he charted the needs of the repertoire and the availability of actors, but a strategic attempt to reimagine the company had not yet been made. A few of the truly great actors from A.C.T.’s early days, including Sydney Walker, William Paterson, and Ken Ruta, were still in town and prepared to do the occasional show, but, unsurprisingly, there was a paucity of leading men and women, along with a plethora of less-tested actors who lined up outside my office during my first months on the job to tell me they were ready to play Hamlet and Henry V. Meanwhile, many interesting Bay Area actors such as James Carpenter, Lorri Holt, and Charles Dean had not worked at A.C.T. and were eager to participate, and of course I had my own stable of favorites from New York whom I was interested in including in the mix.

I knew that A.C.T.’s audience had been weaned on great acting, and that it would mean a lot to them if some of their favorites were part of my programming. But I have to admit that in watching Dinner at Eight night after night, I began to feel that the prevailing style of A.C.T. acting was not always going to gel well with my own aesthetic, and I was anxious to inject new blood. The work of the great Sydney Walker, however, was an inspiration: by the time we got to Molière’s The Learned Ladies, which mercifully 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 and flexible board that remains clear about the theater’s mission and long-term goals and is patient about seeing them realized. It takes a great deal of skill to learn to successfully manage the intersection of art and business that is the job of the artistic director, and longevity can help. It helped that Joe Papp was 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.