The voice on the other end of the phone is modulated with the faux calm unique to consultants and headhunters. “The theater does indeed lie in ruins, but the potential is enormous. The rebuilding campaign is a thrilling opportunity to reintroduce A.C.T. to the community. The cost is estimated to be upwards of $30 million.”
Behind me on the floor, my two-year-old daughter, Lexie, is drinking soy sauce directly out of the bottle, gurgling happily. It is 7:00 PM in New York and she hasn’t been fed yet. I cradle the phone with one cheek and deftly swipe the soy sauce from her hands, substituting an animal cracker to buy five more minutes of transcontinental conversation.
“The search was well under way when we got your letter, but the board is definitely intrigued. We think you should come out immediately and meet the search committee.”
It was August 1991. I had a babbling two-year-old, a job I loved at a beautiful but indigent small theater in New York, and a husband whose career in Soviet foreign policy had been prematurely cut short by the fall of the Iron Curtain. (END OF THE COLD WAR: THERE GOES MY CAREER read the T-shirt I gave him at the time.) I also had a lovely teaching position at Tisch School of the Arts at New York University, which meant there was a pool and a superb library at my disposal. I lived two blocks from my theater, and my life seemed about as full as it could get. Yet something in me had instinctively sent a brief letter of introduction to the search committee of a famed but troubled institution in San Francisco to suggest that I might be an appropriate candidate to helm American Conservatory Theater.
I was not a stranger to destitute nonprofits. The day I took over Classic Stage Company in 1987, I discovered to my horror that no payroll taxes had been paid for several years and Con Ed was about to turn off the power due to outstanding bills. My first task as artistic director was to hire the heaviest actor I knew (no names named) to sit on the sidewalk grate outside the building to prevent eager meter readers from descending to the basement to quantify our negligence. I attempted a crash course on tax law at night while directing Tony Harrison’s Phaedra Britannica by day, and bit by bit we wiggled out from under our disastrous tax burden. Over time, CSC had come back to life through blind chutzpah, a great deal of cajoling, and a Harold Pinter premiere. I figured A.C.T. would just be worse on a magnitude of five. . . .
Thus, two days later, I found myself on a plane to California with my loquacious two-year-old in tow. I told my beloved CSC colleagues that I was going to see my mother, a Stanford professor, for the weekend. The chances of anything materializing at A.C.T. were so slim it seemed unnecessary to tell them the truth.
On the plane, Lexie played Pat the Bunny and I conjured up everything I knew about A.C.T. A few years before, while visiting San Francisco on a Theater Communications Group (TCG) observership, I had attended A.C.T.’s production of Chekhov’s The Seagull. I remembered sitting in the last row of the second balcony of The Geary Theater, while those booming, well-trained voices carried all the way back to the deeply uncomfortable wooden benches that constituted the cheap seats in that otherwise spectacular playhouse. (I still remember that there was no sound barrier between The Geary and the commercial theater next door, and when their musical finished that evening at the quietest moment of Chekhov, right before Kostya shot himself, the crowds tramped loudly down the fire escape stairs outside, and the moment was lost. That was one of the first things I wanted to fix when we renovated The Geary Theater years later.) Because my Stanford drama professor Martin Esslin (author of The Theatre of the Absurd ) was also a resident dramaturg at the Magic Theatre in the 1970s, I spent more time during my undergraduate years going into the city to see experimental theater at Fort Mason than attending A.C.T. productions. But a few years after graduation, when I found myself interning in the casting office at The Public Theater, I auditioned recent A.C.T. alumni and learned more about the theater’s famed graduate-level training program for actors (then known as the Advanced Training Program, the antecedent of today’s Master of Fine Arts Program). It was around that time that rumors began to circulate that Bill Ball, founding genius of A.C.T., had died of a drug overdose in Los Angeles—he had departed A.C.T. a few years earlier, leaving it in the hands of his capable second-in-command, Ed Hastings. Of course I also knew that on October 17, 1989, the company’s gorgeous 1910 Beaux-Arts theater had collapsed in the Loma Prieta earthquake. Clearly, A.C. T. was in a financial crisis and on shaky ground in more ways than one. But I knew, too, that in the mid sixties something legendary had happened with the founding of A.C.T., something idealistic and pure and brave that focused on great actors, great literature, and lifelong learning.
I got off the plane on that late summer day in 1991, deposited my daughter with her soul-mate grandmother, Marjorie, in Palo Alto, and drove up Interstate 280 to interview with the A.C.T. search committee in an office at the Bank of San Francisco. As I drove, my mind flashed back to September 1976 and the first time I had driven that particular route, but in the opposite direction, heading south from the San Francisco airport on my way to Stanford as an incoming freshman from Philadelphia. As soon as I landed in California that day, having never lived anywhere but the East Coast, I felt I had discovered a little piece of heaven. It was the year of the Big Drought, which meant perpetual sunshine and water-saving communal showers, students typing under palm trees and riding bicycles into the hills, watching the nascent Pickle Family Circus cavort around White Plaza (never imagining that years later Pickle members Bill Irwin, Geoff Hoyle, and Lorenzo Pisoni would become beloved collaborators), declaiming Greek tragedy in the back garden of Helene Foley’s house, and watching Professor Jack Winkler climb out of the chimney as the deus ex machina Athena at the end of my first-year Greek class. It was bliss. I was an East Coast girl; I had never encountered the “other” that is California before leaving the protective confines of Germantown Friends School and Philadelphia (a city that at the time seemed inordinately filled with Biddles and Cadwaladers whose claim to fame was the number of generations since the Mayflower that they had parked themselves on Wissahickon Drive) and arriving at San Francisco International Airport, two suitcases in hand, to board a bus to the campus. My college counselor had desperately tried to dissuade me from my California ambitions by informing me that the last GFS graduate to go west had joined the Moonies at Berkeley and never returned, but this had only made the whole venture even more tempting. As we drove south, I saw signs for Half Moon Bay above a glistening blue reservoir and wondered where I had been all my life. This was my coast.
So here I was in reverse, fifteen years later, driving north in a rental car and an ill-fitting borrowed suit, trying to look vaguely professional and rehearsing a few key declarations of principle in my head as I navigated my way downtown. It’s a tiny city, San Francisco. I was an inveterate New Yorker by then, accustomed to colliding with a million people as I shoved my way through turnstiles to jump on the subway in a desperate attempt to get home in time to relieve the babysitter and make dinner before blood sugar levels plummeted and tears ensued. San Francisco seemed like a toy city that day, intimate and charming and somewhat inscrutable. The original Bank of San Francisco is now defunct, but at the time its headquarters sat in a grand pile on a distinguished street corner across from the Transamerica Pyramid, a reminder of the robber baron days when Leland Stanford and Collis P. Huntington ruled the city. In a big, sunny boardroom, six trustees were waiting for me. The head of the board was a smiling man named Patrick Flannery, who was as honest and disarming that first day as he continued to be throughout the many disasters and tribulations that followed over the next five years. Next to him was the imperturbable Ellen Newman, daughter of the legendary Cyril Magnin, who, along with Mortimer Fleishhacker Sr. and Melvin Swig, had selected A.C.T. to be San Francisco’s resident flagship theater back in 1966 when the company first arrived from Pittsburgh. Beside Ellen and her giant glasses was a small, wry man wearing a cowboy belt and a quick grin who introduced himself as Shep Pollack, and the lively and frank Joan Sadler, whose devotion to A.C.T.’s conservatory was legendary. I was captivated by the woman across the table from 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.