Central to those artists was Marco Barricelli, a powerful, Juilliard-trained West Coast actor who urged me to make the commitment to start an A.C.T. company again. This was not a decision to be taken lightly: an acting company is a complicated organism that demands tenacity to nurture and sustain. By the time I arrived at A.C.T. in the post-earthquake era, Bill Ball’s legendary company had long been dissolved, but the idea of it still held sway. And I came to A.C.T. as a believer myself in the power of long-term collaboration, having worked repeatedly with many of the same actors in New York: Olympia Dukakis, David Strathairn, John Turturro, Julia Gibson, Joe Morton, Kathleen Widdoes, Jean Stapleton, Peter Riegert, Caroline Lagerfelt, and Pamela Reed among them. I have always treasured the shorthand and ease that can develop in rehearsal with actors who know each other well, along with the freedom to risk and to fail. When I arrived at A.C.T., there were actors who had been among the original A.C.T. company with whom I felt an immediate kinship, most notably the oldest among them, including Bill Paterson, Sydney Walker, Joy Carlin, and Ruth Kobart. With these performers in mind, I programmed (during my third A.C.T. season) an intimate David Storey play called Home, both to showcase their talents and to learn from them about the nature of company. Unfortunately, by the time we went into rehearsal, beloved Sydney was too ill to participate, but I was able to replace him with another A.C.T. veteran, Raye Birk, and those four actors were exquisite together as a collection of mentally fragile denizens of a nursing home who harbor endless fantasies, romantic and otherwise, as they live out their final days. Bill (who had been gruff and distant when I first arrived, and must have wondered why the board of trustees of his august theater had handed the reins over to a girl young enough to be his granddaughter) gave me a bottle of Tabasco sauce as an opening-night gift with a card that contained a scrawled quote from the play: “Turned out better.” I still treasure that note.
It was palpably clear in watching those four actors collaborate that the benefits of a permanent acting company were important to reconsider, particularly in anticipation of returning to The Geary, a large theater that demanded very particular skills from its performers. In 1996, as part of our first full season in the new Geary, I decided to stage Tennessee Williams’s The Rose Tattoo, featuring Kathleen Widdoes, a veteran of the Stratford Festival and the New York Shakespeare Festival and an actress possessed of extraordinary vocal and emotional power. The question was whom to pair her with as Mangiacavallo. Marco had just completed a successful Richard III at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival and was down at South Coast Repertory starring as Petruchio in The Taming of the Shrew when I contacted him about The Rose Tattoo. He replied in characteristic fashion that he wouldn’t audition, “because auditioning is my tragic weak spot,” but asked me to come see his Shrew and, if I were still interested, to stay and discuss our Williams project over drinks afterwards. I did. One drink led to another and another, as over the next decade we continued a rich and far-ranging conversation about company and the role of the actor in American theater.
Marco was committed to the notion that actors do their best work as part of a permanent ensemble that trains together and collaborates over long periods of time. As a student of the great teacher and director Michael Langham, he believed in transformation and in responsibility; he remains to this day an actor who takes charge of his rehearsal process from day one, who always brings power, intelligence, and surprise into the room, who demands the most from himself and his peers at every moment, and who is invested not only in his own performance but in the health and direction of the entire organization. (No wonder he went on to become artistic director of Shakespeare Santa Cruz.) In 1996, Marco committed to moving to San Francisco and joining A.C.T. full time; in exchange, I guaranteed him a fifty-two-week salary and a genuine role in season planning and in teaching and directing in the school.
Zelda Fichandler, again in “Whither (or Wither) Art?”, put it best:
Transient, temporary work sometimes feels as nothing but a high form of what the manufacturing industry calls “piece work”—you get paid for the number of “pieces of work” you turn out and how many you turn out is the measure of things, not you, yourself. On a rainy day, “jobbing-in”—our word for piece work—can make one feel devalued: a “gig” can only be followed by another “gig.” You may be moving along but only from here to there—moving, but not evolving.
If an actor is always cast because he’s “right for the role” with no consideration for the development of his own range and versatility, if with each role he starts over again with a group of strangers who have no collective experience to draw upon, if he sometimes gets the sense of himself as a kind of commodity—paid to fill a need—and then “time’s up and thanks,” what is it we’re saying to him? That “Theatre’s a precarious profession, we always knew that, be glad you’re working”? Is that okay? Is that enough? . . .
Artists should be invited to become involved in the total life of the institution in order to provide it with their special knowledge and point-of-view and to have their say. I read that while Ingmar Bergman was heading the Swedish National Theatre, he established a five-member artists’ council that he consulted about repertory, company membership, casting, and the like. I don’t know how this idea would play out in America, though I wish I’d tried it myself.
With A.C.T.’s burgeoning core company, this is what we tried. Once Marco was on board, the company grew. In casting a Stella to play across from Marco in A Streetcar Named Desire, we discovered an actress right out of Yale named René Augesen, who astonished us with her power, sexuality, and honesty even on videotape. Although she turned out to be unavailable for Streetcar, I subsequently cast René in the title role of Mary Stuart (in our co-production at the Huntington Theatre Company) and then asked her if she’d like to stay on at A.C.T. as a company member. René became our leading lady for over a decade, joining Marco and Gregory Wallace, who had come to A.C.T. to play Belize in Angels in America and impressed us with his remarkable wit, his expressive acting, and his deep experience teaching Chekhov. By the time Angels closed, we had persuaded Gregory to remain in San Francisco and to take a central role in reforming the curriculum of the M.F.A. Program. Another remarkable actor, Steven Anthony Jones, had been part of A.C.T.’s life for many seasons, ever since he fell in love with the Bay Area on a national tour of A Soldier’s Play; Steven’s broad understanding of Bay Area theater, and his range as an actor and mentor, made him a natural for the company. And while it was certainly never my intention to populate the company with so many men, I added the protean and beautifully trained Anthony Fusco to the mix (who already lived in San Francisco and had participated in much of our work), as well as Jack Willis, who came to town with Robert Wilson and Tom Waits’s The Black Rider and stayed on, eventually playing everything from Big Daddy in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof to Max in The Homecoming with ferocity, wit, and compassion.
In those early years, the acting company was joined by resident designers Kate Edmunds and Peter Maradudin, and the whole artistic team met every week for two hours to plan the season and to evaluate our ongoing work. In the years since then, A.C.T.’s core company has evolved, grown, changed, and shrunk, following a trajectory that may have been a little too ad hoc for its own good, but we’ve learned as we’ve gone. Our philosophy for the core company began with the belief that each actor should be integrated into both the training and producing wings of the institution. Sometimes that has turned out to be a challenge; A.C.T. has been able to pay for the company by keeping actors employed both onstage and in the classroom, but teaching requires a very different set of skills from acting, and much coaching and patience has been necessary for that model to be successful. Furthermore, my idealistic view of actors as the perfect ambassadors to the funding and audience development world has also often collided with the reality that actors can be shy and introverted people who flourish when given a role to play but feel naked when asked to speak on their own or the theater’s behalf. Finally, it might have been easier in retrospect if I had set official term limits for the acting company, since it’s valuable for a pool of artists to replenish itself and to change over time. Shifts in personnel turned out to be painful and difficult. Nevertheless, the presence of an ensemble of actors with a long-term commitment to each other and to the organization radically changed the artistic life of A.C.T. and gave voice to a sector of our profession that often feels powerless and mute.
It saddens me that the issue of the actor’s role in the American theater today is so rarely discussed in any sophisticated way. A few decades ago it was simply assumed that the mission of a major resident theater included the nurturing of a resident company of actors: Robert Brustein at the A.R.T. had Will LeBow, Karen MacDonald, and Tommie Derragh, among others; Garland Wright at the Guthrie had Isabell Monk, Sally Wingert, and a host of others; Seattle Rep had Jeff Steitzer, Larry Ballard, and Mariann Mayberry, to name a few; and Arena Stage, the theater I grew up with, nurtured such remarkable talents as Robert Prosky and Dianne Wiest. By the early nineties, these companies had all dissolved, with the exception of the A.R.T. company, which was let go with the arrival of Artistic Director Diane Paulus. While there are still important holdouts, such as the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, the Alley Theatre, and Trinity Repertory Company, and some theaters with less formal long-term commitments, such as that of Brian Kulick at CSC or Michael Kahn at the Shakespeare Theatre Company, I have continued to be puzzled by our failure as a field to make a long-term commitment to actors. In the symphony world it would be considered ludicrous to expect a pickup band to play Mahler or Beethoven with the depth and breadth expected of a major orchestra. In ballet, it would be difficult to imagine major repertoire being performed by artists who had not trained and worked together for years. Only in the theater do we assume that a pickup group of artists with different levels of training and experience will be capable of creating a rich and unified production of a classical text, or providing the ongoing vision to develop a new play.
I suppose it is our fanatic free-market sensibility that says we want to be able to choose from anyone and everyone available to us, and that forcing directors to collaborate with acting companies is somehow restrictive. Yet I have never hired a director at A.C.T. who resented working with our company or who didn’t have a positive experience in their highly capable hands. But the sensibility that says that it is worth programming and shaping the work in such a way as to sustain a group of actors over time has been all but lost. Theater is no longer “local” in that sense; whether in Seattle or Dallas or Hartford or Los Angeles, the actors in a given production are, for the most part, imported and thrown together for four weeks before being expected to deliver the goods on opening night. Sometimes that can be exhilarating and lead to success. But as Peter Brook noted so brilliantly in his seminal book The Empty Space, “Two hours is a short time and an eternity: to use two hours of public time is a fine art. Yet this art with its frightening exigencies is served largely by casual labour. In a deadly vacuum there are few places where we can properly learn the arts of the theatre—so we tend to drop in on the theatre offering love instead of science. This is what the unfortunate critic is nightly called to judge.”
While the regional theater has largely abandoned the company model, there are certainly small New York theaters that have collaborated with a given pool of actors over a period of time, and important ensembles around the country such as The Civilians, Lookingglass Theatre Company, Pig Iron Theatre Company, and Tectonic Theater Project, that consistently create work together. But in conversations with funders, I have frequently raised the challenge of supporting an acting company, only to be told that this is no longer an imperative. Indeed, Diane Ragsdale, who served as program officer at The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation from 2004 to 2010, recently told me that I was the only artistic director she could remember who had asked Mellon to support an acting company. While we often talk about giving artists a home, at this moment “artist” usually means playwright, which I find somewhat odd, since an actor’s work is by definition collaborative and needs to be associated with a group and with a production, whereas a playwright’s work is in part solitary and can happen even if not attached to a given theater. The indifference to actors seems shortsighted to me for many reasons; surely our audiences would be more connected to our work if they made the kind of investment in actors over time that ballet audiences make to “their” dancers or jazz audiences to “their” players. Surely if audiences watched transformation rather than typecasting, they would better understand the art of making theater. Surely if actors were given a voice in the repertoire, they would respond with a stronger investment in the work they had helped to choose. And surely if playwrights had the opportunity to write plays for a given company of actors, their sense of having an artistic home would be greatly enhanced.
As I write this, I have to acknowledge that the fight to keep a company alive has all but defeated me recently; a combination of financial constraints, casting imperatives, personality clashes, and natural attrition has diminished our core company, while at the same time we have made a deeper investment in long-term collaborations with our actors in training as well as with core designers, core faculty members, and a broad cadre of like-minded actors such as David Strathairn, Bill Irwin, Michele Shay, Andrew Polk, Sab Shimono, Seana McKenna, Giles Havergal, and many more. Perhaps this is a natural evolution, as one is inspired and energized by different artists at different moments of one’s career, and staying flexible and open to an evolving group of artists is important.
It is also true that, as the M.F.A. Program has grown in its richness and breadth and has become more deeply integrated into the overall creative life of the organization, we have come to view our M.F.A. students and alumni as the true “core company” of A.C.T., and have attempted to give at least one or two of them long-term contracts to keep them in San Francisco after they graduate. That way, the skill set and predilections of the young artists on our stage are well known to us before we go into rehearsal, and the M.F.A. core faculty can continue to coach and train them even as these artists become professionals. This practice feels consonant with the original dream of A.C.T. as a place of lifelong learning.
Indeed, one of the seminal experiences of my recent tenure at A.C.T. was watching alumnus and core company member Nick Gabriel play Clov to Bill Irwin’s Hamm in Beckett’s Endgame in April 2012. I had taught Nick during his three years at A.C.T. and was drawn to his physical expressivity, his mordant sense of humor, his precise use of language, his huge, innocent eyes, and his Michael Chekhov approach to gesture and character. Even when paired with a consummate artist like Bill, I knew he would hold his own. In reviewing the production, the Wall Street Journal’s Terry Teachout wrote, “Mr. Gabriel’s stiff-legged, sweetly patient, and unexpectedly youthful Clov (a nice touch) is one of the finest interpretations of a Beckett role that I’ve had the privilege to see.” Perhaps if this confluence of training and performance were more common in the American theater, the hundreds of actors coming out of graduate school might feel that there was a home for them to keep learning and growing, and might find a reason to stay in the theater instead of gravitating primarily to film and television. A large part of the aesthetic of a theater revolves around the artists who are selected to create the work, so a serious look at what drives our choice of collaborators would seem to be in order.
Just as the students at A.C.T. remind us constantly that the goal of the organization is lifelong learning, there have been artists in my twenty-plus years at A.C.T. who have constituted my own form of continuing education. One of the hardest things about being an artistic director is figuring out how to keep growing and evolving as an artist within your own organization. Because the task is to support the successes and protect the failures of other artists, most of us have trouble understanding how to give ourselves that same permission to change, succeed, and fail. Who in our own organizations will tell us the truth, will challenge our assumptions, will open our eyes and keep us honest? In my tenure at A.C.T., one of the artists who has always had my back and has told me the truth, no matter what, is Olympia Dukakis. I have collaborated with Olympia numerous times as an actress; she has also taught extraordinary master classes in the school, talked to our audiences and raised funds from our donors, developed new plays, and introduced new ways of thinking, and she is currently a trustee of the organization. Because she had been an effective artistic director herself for nineteen years at the Whole Theater Company, she intuitively understood everything I was going through at A.C.T. And because I always knew she would be honest with me, I have turned to her for advice at every crisis and every new juncture. Knowing her has changed my life.
Interestingly, I first met Olympia over an argument about Sophocles. In 1987, I was visiting the home of James Laughlin (legendary editor and founder of New Directions Press) with my literary critic mother, who had collaborated with New Directions on many occasions. Knowing I was a classicist, Laughlin pulled an unpublished Ezra Pound manuscript out of his drawer and handed it to me. It was a brilliantly idiosyncratic version of Sophocles’ Elektra, written while Pound was incarcerated at St. Elizabeths psychiatric hospital in Washington, D.C. I decided immediately that I wanted to direct the world premiere, whereupon I asked Olympia to play Clytemnestra. I had never met her and made the request through her agent, who called me back to say that Olympia had a thing or two to say on the subject of that particular interpretation of Clytemnestra, and would I like to talk about it. Next thing I knew, we were having lunch together in Midtown while she regaled me with stories about the history of the Goddess and why she (Olympia) found Sophocles’ view of Clytemnestra unacceptable in light of this queen’s ancient lineage and the justice of her claim against her husband (stemming from Agamemnon’s murder of Clytemnestra’s daughter Iphigenia). Surely, said Olympia, this was a woman whose desire for revenge was in fact a form of justice, and as such, she should not have been depicted as the harridan Sophocles assumed she was (notwithstanding Pound’s hilariously trashy interpretation of the role). Our lunch was the beginning of a thirty-year conversation. Olympia encouraged me to dig deeper into ancient Greek culture, to question the assumptions made in the major tragedies, which were, after all, plays by men for male audiences, using women as tools for their own points of view. Yet Olympia is no ideologue; she’s too funny, complicated, and self-questioning for that. She is an artist who revels in contradiction; in fact, she is more adept than any actor with whom I have worked at truly holding contradictory feelings onstage at the same time. When I accepted her resistance to playing Sophocles’ Clytemnestra and asked her which Greek heroine she would be interested in exploring instead, she immediately said she wanted to take on the title role of Euripides’ Hecuba. This is why, many years later at A.C.T., we joined together to explore the torment and vendetta of a dispossessed Trojan queen and the men who dared to take her on.
One incident in rehearsal with Olympia has always reminded me why long-term collaborations with truly curious artists are so key. We were working on the penultimate scene in Hecuba, in which the Trojan queen, having murdered the children of Polymestor and put out the eyes of the evil king in revenge for the destruction of her son, defends her actions to Agamemnon. Olympia was confounded by this defense; Hecuba had already accomplished the necessary deed, she reasoned, so why did she need to articulate her reasons to an enemy politician for whom she had no respect? It seemed counterintuitive, until our dramaturg, classical scholar Helene Foley, spoke up. “Don’t you understand?” Helene asked. Up till this moment, she explained, the narrative had belonged to the Greeks. “This is your moment to rewrite history.” Olympia stopped dead in her tracks. The nature of history is an essential theme of ancient Greek tragedy, and of course history belongs to those who write it. For Hecuba to achieve just redress for the murder of her son, she needed to proclaim her position not just to Agamemnon but in such a way that history would hear her and acknowledge the justice of her actions. This idea was electrifying for Olympia; she could be both inside the moment and at the same time outside of it, taking on the audience in an attempt to widen the lens and make her case for posterity. It was a vivid reminder that theater can serve both to reveal character and to stimulate a larger debate about human experience.
Olympia is rare in her ability to be inside and outside of a scene almost simultaneously (which is probably why she also excels at Brecht and made such a memorable Mother Courage). Her broad perspective also means that she always understands both the internal mechanism of making a theater run and the external pressures and suppositions that make the task so challenging. So on occasions when I emerged from a particularly bruising board meeting feeling in some way belittled or disrespected, she would exclaim, “It’s not about you, it’s about two thousand years of patriarchy!” and help me contextualize the situation. She reminded me how quick women are to take the blame when something goes wrong at their organizations, and she endlessly exhorted me to “stop banging your head against a brick wall and look for the open door.” The idea of mentorship has become a common thread of contemporary success stories, and yet true mentorship happens in the American theater less often than one would think. This is a vast country, and each of us toils in her own corner, trying to reinvent the wheel and make the best decisions possible along the way. My multi-decade relationship with Olympia, and the way that at every step she has saved me from giving up and helped me to navigate the future, is something I will never take for granted.
Before leaving this reflection on Olympia and our collaboration, I want to return to the Lorca poem quoted earlier. What Olympia found so radical about the poem is its understanding that theater exists only in relationship to audience. As she told me the story of her journey as an artist, she recounted the stages of her own creative development, including a bleak period in her life in which acting had ceased to be meaningful to her. In her early career, she explained, she was obsessed with perfecting her craft. Then she went through a period in which she loved the thrill of the chase, the competition for roles, the desire to tackle larger and more difficult material and to beat out other similarly talented actors. And then she hit a wall, going through a period of intense burnout in which neither craft nor competition was enough, and she began to doubt whether acting mattered to her anymore. Obsessing about her own craft felt narcissistic; competing for roles felt wrongheaded. She was discouraged and uninspired, and considered leaving the field. What turned her thinking around was the audience. She began to understand that for her to stay current with herself, it was crucial that she stay current with the audience. Indeed, what shifted her perspective and has kept her energized about live theater to this day is her passion for involving audience members as directly as possible in the central issues of a play. She found nourishment in the notion that whatever script she is working on is indeed “water drawn from the well of the people,” given back to them “in a cup of beauty.” The mutual understanding that can happen when that exchange occurs in an authentic way in the theater is profound and unusual. Olympia constantly reminds me that with every rehearsal process, the goal is the same: to give something beautiful back to an audience so that, in experiencing it, they can “understand themselves.”