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.
The original vision for the rebuilt Geary was an entire campus of offices, classrooms, and studios wrapped around the historic façade of the 1910 building. This was a big idea, and unfortunately it came at a time when A.C.T. had no prayer of pulling it off. The board, having been kept at arm’s length by management for many years, had little understanding of the day-to-day operations of the theater and had been unable to develop the long-term strategies necessary to move the organization forward. The internal atmosphere was too fraught to have safe discussions about how to imagine the future or where the priorities should lie. As soon as I arrived, I realized how limiting it was that A.C.T. had never had a dedicated second stage. (When Tom Stoppard first came to work with us, he asked in consternation, “But where is the Cottesloe?” in reference to the small studio space at the National Theatre in London. He couldn’t understand how we could take risks or develop new work and new artists without a theater smaller than The Geary, and in many ways he was right.) But in the post–earthquake crisis period, contemplating a second stage or a new office and studio complex felt like a luxury. Nor was it politically permissible to truly analyze the cost to the organization of running an M.F.A. program without hurting everyone’s feelings. Many assume that A.C.T.’s conservatory is a money-maker, despite the fact that by definition an M.F.A. program (as opposed to an undergraduate program) is small, elite, and expensive to run (while the Young Conservatory and Studio A.C.T. programs consistently contribute to the bottom line). Because actor training requires extensive facilities and faculty and is thus very costly, A.C.T.’s M.F.A. program in acting is one of the few such programs left housed in a free-standing theater rather than at a university. Yet, as I have said, rich synergies occur when training and production are linked, and during my tenure at A.C.T., Conservatory Director Melissa Smith and I have worked hard to make those synergies ever tighter and more effective. Of course, the more deeply training and performance are linked, the more desirable it has become to combine our rehearsal studios and classrooms with a smaller performance space and informal cabaret space, all under one roof in a single campus that is transparent, flexible, and accessible. But in the early nineties, when the campaign to rebuild The Geary was under way, the gorgeous designs of architect Joseph Esherick to create a single campus around the ruins of The Geary Theater were so beyond A.C.T.’s fundraising reach that they had to be scrapped before I even arrived.
Instead, the decision was made to rebuild the 1910 Beaux-Arts building in the most authentic way possible, while making considerable audience amenity changes and stagecraft improvements along the way. The first necessity was to create a shear wall of sliding steel that would protect the building and its inhabitants in case of a subsequent earthquake, and thus the decision was made to remove three hundred seats from the cavernous back of the house and create an eighteen-inch wall held together by sliding steel bolts. The beneficial consequence of dividing the space with this new wall was that we captured a considerable amount of new lobby space, both on the ground floor and on the mezzanine level. Before the quake, The Geary had about three square feet of amenity space per audience member; postquake it has ten, and that has made an enormous difference in the experience of attending an A.C.T. show. The renovation also created space for a new bar upstairs, as well as a garret that we now use for board meetings and cabaret performances, an expanded basement café, and a plethora of new bathrooms throughout the building. I like to say that my single most important legacy as the female artistic director of A.C.T. is the abundance of women’s bathrooms, permitting “never more than a three-minute wait.” I figured, if the plays were going to be challenging, at least the intermissions should be stress free.
FEMA is notoriously difficult to navigate. This was in the days before Hurricane Katrina made FEMA the infamous agency that it became in the wake of that disaster, but nonetheless, the paperwork and negotiations required to extract a single payment from FEMA were byzantine and time consuming, exacerbated by the fact that the state of California was in a financial crisis in 1992–93 and had not passed a budget for fiscal year 1993. Thus, even when our FEMA appropriation was finally approved in Washington, the funds couldn’t be released through the state budget office, because Sacramento was in fiscal shutdown. One of my most vivid memories of the Geary rebuilding campaign was calling Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi, then a senior member of the House Appropriations Committee, on the floor of the Democratic Convention to beg her to intervene on our behalf to ensure that our FEMA funds came to us in time to begin demolition and reconstruction work. Pelosi, the consummate ward politician, worked her magic in such a way that the money was released on the day the cranes were set to be erected on Mason Street. Years later, after the project had been completed, we named the beautiful central windows of the newly rebuilt Geary after Pelosi and gave her an honorary M.F.A. degree in acting, in gratitude for her help.
Given that much of my career before A.C.T. had been spent at CSC, a renovated stable in lower Manhattan with three-quarter seating and a high tin ceiling, I was used to directing on a thrust stage. I had rarely worked in the kind of highly formal proscenium house that The Geary represented, yet I was called upon to make decisions on a daily basis about potential alterations to that remarkable space. Producing Director James Haire must have thought I was naïve beyond imagining, but he patiently walked me through each decision (where to put the stage management booth, whether to put in a hydraulic tilt stage, how big and deep to make the orchestra pit, and so on), and in the process I acquired a deep and abiding love for that unique historic building.
Because my primary training had been in classics and archaeology, the excavation of the building was resonant to me. As the interior was gutted before reconstruction, we uncovered twenty-six layers of paint en route to the base coat, discovering, for example, the psychedelic treatment that covered The Geary during the 1960s run of Hair. We removed the wood that boarded up the arched windows facing Geary Street, and reclaimed lobby space freed up by the removal of back rows of seats. We created a monumental new staircase dominated by a fanciful curved rail, and reimagined the color scheme of the auditorium to become what the designers at Gensler referred to as “dusty grape.” Very slowly, the damaged structure began to return to life, its Dutch gold surfaces acquiring new sheen, its rotting hemp rope system replaced by mechanical counterweights, its plenum excavated to make way for beautifully appointed new dressing and wig rooms.
While all this was happening, I got pregnant with our second child. It didn’t occur to me at the time how inappropriate this would seem to some of the trustees and supporters who were fighting to save A.C.T. and rebuild The Geary. And, once again, had I imagined what I was getting into, I would probably never have contemplated it. I hadn’t stopped working for a moment during my first pregnancy; I actually liked being pregnant and barely showed, so when I finally told the board at six months that I would give birth at the end of May 1994, many of them were understandably flummoxed. Although we had survived my second season with far less chaos and animosity than the first, the rebuilding process was slow, the financial situation was perilous to say the least, The Geary capital campaign was an enormous challenge, and we still had no managing director. This was probably not the most fortuitous time to have a baby.
At the same time, the work had started to become highly pleasurable. For the 1993–94 season, I directed Paul Schmidt’s new translation of Uncle Vanya and experienced that exquisite rush of recognition and emotional satisfaction that only Chekhov can provide. Interestingly, this production featured a cast as ethnically diverse as Antigone: Sharon Omi played Sonya, Vilma Silva played Yelena, and Wendell Pierce played Astrov, yet this time, no one in the audience complained. Perhaps they had begun to understand the thinking behind our casting choices, perhaps we were better at preparing them in advance for what they were going to see, and perhaps the production itself cohered more successfully than had Antigone, but Vanya turned out to be a major critical and audience success.
I didn’t miss a day of work because of my pregnancy, but the board was understandably anxious about the future: How was I going to complete the fundraising and rebuilding of The Geary with a newborn? From where they sat, I must have seemed totally mad. Once again, I tried to convince them that fundraising while pregnant held certain advantages, a lesson I had learned at CSC. One of the last big donor events I did for the Geary campaign before giving birth was at the Fairmont Hotel, which sits atop Nob Hill, one of San Francisco’s most challenging climbs; I remember walking up that ridiculously steep hill with my huge belly and high heels until I finally gave up the attempt to look elegant and professional, sat down on the sidewalk, took off my shoes, and began to hike the rest of the way up that urban mountain in bare feet. A generous donor saw me from her car, swept me into the front seat, and extracted my promise that I would never do such a stupid thing again if she made a final contribution to the campaign. Sweet, flaxen-haired Nicholas was born on May 23, 1994, and two weeks later he made his Geary Theater debut in a navy blue Chanel romper suit donated by the chair of the board. In early June, the groundbreaking commenced on the building, and I like to chart the phoenix-like rise of the ruined Geary to the growth of that little boy.
It is always dangerous to equate the fortunes of a theater company with the building that houses it. All too often in the American arts sector we have seen huge resources raised to create fancy new arts facilities that then prove unaffordable and unwieldy for the very companies they were supposed to save. Indeed, during the capital campaign, there was much discussion about whether reconstruction of The Geary was the most sensible move for A.C.T. Would it not be better, some donors opined, to raze the building to the ground and build a new space more suited to the twenty-first century and the needs of contemporary theatergoers?
There was a certain amount of sense in that argument. While it would have been heartbreaking to lose that historic playhouse, the discussion about space versus mission is an important one, and the issue must be reckoned with every day and every season. The Geary was originally built as a temple of culture by a city that had endured the 1906 earthquake and wanted the world to know that it was back with a vengeance and intent on being a major player on the national scene. The building is monumental, elegant, and filled with grandeur—high up on its gilded dome are delicate sculptures of fruits and flowers that can barely be seen by the naked eye, yet the architects believed that beauty had to fill every corner of this cathedral in order to lift the aspirations of the artists and audiences within. The historical preservation firm Page & Turnbull put it eloquently in a 1988 report on the state of The Geary:
The exterior of the Geary Theatre, in a bejeweled, Neo-Classical style, still proclaims to passersby that it is a place of classical high culture, continuing ancient and respected traditions. . . .
Classical elements, such as the columns, hovering dome, coffered proscenium arch, relief ornaments, and wall pilasters, refer to palatial imagery as well as to the ancient origins of drama. . . . Like the theatrical drama unfolding on the stage, [its] theatrical architecture was intended to ennoble all those who experienced it.
Needless to say, The Geary Theater is not casual and user friendly; it was built to remind people that when they step into a theater they are entering a parallel universe, far removed from the banality of daily life. Under that golden proscenium, magical things will happen. Nearly every one of The Geary’s thousand-plus seats has a perfect view and perfect acoustics: the architects made sure that the relationship of audience to stage is intimate and close in spite of its scale. It is a house for poetic language, large emotion, powerful acting, and great literature. If geography is destiny, it is clear why A.C.T. had never been home to the kind of television realism or intimate psychological drama beloved by many American theaters, nor to “star” performances by actors unable to fill The Geary vocally and kinesthetically. The Geary is the Wimbledon of theaters and demands true athletes to fill it well.
But in an era of austerity and media-driven appetites, this kind of magnificent playhouse, designed for large-scale classical work and major modern drama, poses significant challenges. Classical plays demand large casts, major design support, and an educated audience. All across America, these things are disappearing. Theater companies shy away from the classics, except for the two or three most recognizable titles, because they don’t believe that they can sell them or that their audiences want to be challenged by three-hour, language-heavy plays. The gradual disappearance of permanent acting ensembles, one of the tragedies of late-twentieth-century American theater, and the rise of the dependence upon television and movie stars to sell tickets, has sounded a death knell for classical theater. When classics are produced, fiscal realities tend to dictate that they be done with hard-working ensembles of five or six, and while this can result in wonderful creativity, as the work of the New York–based collective Fiasco has shown, it means that the experience of seeing “the world onstage” is diminished considerably. Because we can’t approximate the large and various acting companies for whom Shakespeare wrote his plays, we have made Shakespeare come to us, meaning we have cut and pared down his plays such that the rich crowd scenes and minor characters are excised in favor of intimate personal readings of the texts. Across the country, funders are willing to pay for more audience engagement but not for more actors onstage. It seems a bizarre priority. One particularly unfortunate result of this dearth of productions of classical theater is that many young writers may grow up without having seen major professional productions of Shakespeare, Euripides, Brecht, Lorca, Schiller, or Molière; thus the nearest influence is necessarily film and television. The kind of short, clipped scenes and mumblecore acting often characteristic of those media are difficult to sustain at a theater like The Geary.
We thus went through a period of profound soul-searching during the rebuilding of The Geary. There were many days when I wondered why we were undertaking such a project, and whether we would ever find a way to make The Geary relevant to a contemporary audience. I wrestled, and continue to wrestle, with what kind of work to put in that house and how to guarantee a standard of artistry that deserves such a gilded envelope. Several things became clear to me in the years that followed The Geary’s reopening: it was crucial to nurture an acting company capable of taking on that house; it was valuable to insist upon work that was highly theatrical and that employed music and movement as strongly as language to penetrate that proscenium; it was imperative to sustain complex classical work by continuing to educate an audience about the literature they were about to see. At the same time, it would become increasingly necessary to provide alternatives for those people for whom a thousand-seat theater was never going to provide the intimate theater experience they craved.
In January 1996, The Geary officially reopened with my production of The Tempest, featuring David Strathairn as Prospero, Graham Beckel as Caliban, and David Patrick Kelly as Ariel, with shadow puppetry by Larry Reed and music by David Lang, performed live by Kronos Quartet. I will never forget standing in the back of the house for the first preview, listening to Lang’s savage, pulsating storm music performed live in the newly renovated orchestra pit by David Harrington and the astonishing Kronos musicians. It truly felt as if a phoenix were rising from the ashes, shrieking and hollering about its new existence.
We had held numerous celebrations in the house to honor the donors, builders, designers, and so on, but during the run of The Tempest we realized that we had not held a private party just for ourselves, for the artists and staff people who had contributed to this renaissance. So on the final Sunday evening of the show, we decided to hold an ecumenical blessing onstage. Our friend and stalwart supporter Dean Alan Jones of Grace Cathedral agreed to officiate at this homemade resurrection ceremony, and artists and artisans turned out to participate. We started onstage and looked skyward as Eddie Raymond, head of the stage crew, shook incense over the new fly rail and intoned the names of all the flymen who had ever raised a sandbag at The Geary. We held hands as Kitka sang one of the group’s choral chants of celebration, and listened to Olympia Dukakis read two poems: The first was by Brecht, written in 1954 on the occasion of the Berliner Ensemble’s acquisition of a permanent home at the Schiffbauerdamm theater:
You’ve acted theater in ruins here,
Now act in this lovely house, not as a pastime.
From you and us let arise the peaceful WE,
So that this house and others too may stand.
The second piece was a Lorca poem that Olympia remembers copying from the wall of Arena Stage many years before, which she has treasured throughout her career; it became a touchstone for us, as well:
the poem
the song
the picture
is only water
drawn from the well
of the people,
and it should be given back to them
in a cup of beauty
so that they may drink
and in drinking
understand themselves.
Up above in the new stage-management booth, actor Matthew Boston read Kostya’s speech about the moon rising from Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard. Then we danced with Margaret Jenkins, gathered in the box office for Box Office Manager Richard Bernier’s tribute to “St. Margarita,” the patroness of box offices, and descended to the bar downstairs, newly christened Fred’s Columbia Room after the doorman who had greeted Geary patrons for more than thirty years, where Development Associate Jerome Moskowitz read the Hebrew prayer for fertility over the fundraising wall. By the time the celebration was complete, we were like little dogs who had peed in every corner of the new space until we made it our own. In the end, it took years for us to believe that such a magnificent space truly belonged to us. We often felt like teenagers babysitting in a fancy house, waiting to be turned out at midnight when the parents came home. But slowly we have found a way to make the space our own. And this process began first and foremost with the artists who inhabited it.