Given the instability we all felt during the financial collapse of 2008 and the ensuing recession, I never could have predicted that by 2012 San Francisco (or at least parts of it) would again be awash in money, witnessing a second tech explosion that would have an even greater impact upon the city than the first. This time around, the tech workers decided that working in the suburban campuses of Silicon Valley was no longer as desirable, and, seemingly overnight, the companies and their employees began flooding into San Francisco. In some ways, the changes seemed miraculous, as the sudden influx of tech wealth brought an incredible boom to the cash-strapped city, but it also drove up both commercial real estate and housing prices to such a degree that long-term residents and businesses were displaced in unprecedented numbers, neighborhoods were quickly transformed, and the fabric of the city began changing beyond recognition. For A.C.T., this tech tsunami was complicated and fascinating in equal measure. Ironically, it happened to coincide with our decision to purchase The Strand, an old movie theater turned porn house that had sat abandoned for years, in the very neighborhood that was now becoming the epicenter of the tech invasion. Just as A.C.T. was finally in a position to create a second stage for the organization, something I had wanted for twenty years, the city was being literally upended by this new and ever expanding industry. And it was moving in right next door to our new home.
Our commitment to the city and to its stories had given us a strong impetus to think seriously again about trying to acquire a smaller, second stage for A.C.T., and about putting down roots in a new neighborhood; when we bought it, The Strand represented the opportunity to do just that. We knew that in addition to the expanded programming we could do at a smaller theater, The Strand would give A.C.T. a new face, or at least a more nuanced face, vis-à-vis the city at large. Being a risk-taking nonprofit theater whose only venue is a gilded thousand-seat house was becoming a bigger and bigger challenge; it is difficult in the best of times to explain the notion of nonprofit theater to the general public, but truly challenging when your primary venue looks like a Broadway house.
While people rarely question whether ballet or opera companies require subsidy (since they are clearly not designed for the commercial marketplace), the need for support for theater is harder for the public to grasp. Theater has a commercial correlate, so it is difficult for the average audience member to understand what is fundamentally different between buying a ticket to Wicked at the Curran Theatre (the commercial house next door), versus buying a ticket to Arcadia at A.C.T. To begin with, one has to explain that the ticket price to a show at a nonprofit theater covers not only the creation of that production, but also the training of young artists, the education of schoolchildren, the sustenance of a local pool of artists and administrators, and the ability to sustain risks that a commercial enterprise simply wouldn’t countenance.
A theater like A.C.T. bears little relationship to the commercial booking company that imports product from the “best of Broadway,” product that has already been tested and approved in New York and is selected because it is profit making. The mission of the nonprofit theater is to nurture the art form and create a forum for a specific community; its goal is not to return a profit to its investors. How is one to engage members of the public in understanding this difference so that they will be inclined to support their local theaters? For many years, we have tried to be as transparent as possible about all of the community-based work and long-term artistic investments we have been making at A.C.T., so that people would come to understand who we are. But the gilded domain of The Geary has made telling the story of A.C.T. endlessly challenging, and one of the reasons I have longed for a second stage is my belief that, by working in an alternative performance space with a very different feel, we could overcome that obstacle and radically change the face and reputation of A.C.T.
If geography is destiny, then The Geary Theater has clearly been A.C.T.’s destiny since an extraordinary grant from the Ford Foundation enabled Bill Ball’s A.C.T. to purchase it back in 1974. For decades, The Geary set the tone for A.C.T.’s work: big, elegant, classical, ambitious, extravagant, unabashed. The Geary remains a cathedral to excellence, a thrilling challenge for directors, actors, and designers. But a large gilded playhouse is not the solution for all audiences or indeed for all artists, nor should it be the only public face of a multifaceted organization with so many different kinds of programming. No matter how intimately we have tried to stage certain plays over the years, and no matter how welcoming we’ve tried to be, we have come to realize that there is repertoire that doesn’t belong in The Geary, or at least not anymore. And while we have, over the years, pursued an ambitious artistic agenda that has included a great deal of new and experimental work, it is undoubtedly true that our ability to nurture new artists and new creative endeavors would have been far greater had we had a smaller house in which to experiment. At the same time, it is increasingly clear that some audiences crave smaller, more intimate houses for their theatrical experiences. If there is more than one entry point in a theater company’s ecology, there is more opportunity to develop the kind of pluralism we long to see in our audiences.
We needed a second stage not only to broaden and deepen our audience’s experience, but also to grow our artists. While we were expert in developing young actors, we had done far too little for young designers, directors, choreographers, and playwrights for whom The Geary was simply too big to function as a launch pad. This made it difficult to help nurture the local theatrical scene and to support the next generation of artists. We were a decidedly literary, noncommercial, actor-centric, repertoire-driven nonprofit theater company housed in a gorgeous thousand-seat house that made risk taking difficult. Likewise, we had done powerful work training our M.F.A. students, but mediocre work in introducing these wonderful young artists to the public, because they had never had their own theater in which to perform. And, finally, we knew that if our community-based educational ideas were really going to flourish, we would need a central meeting place for those students and teachers. A 300-seat theater, along with a smaller flexible space, could answer most of our needs, but such a thing did not seem to exist in San Francisco. Or certainly not within our budget.
We had, over the years, rented numerous small theaters, but none that were satisfying, until one day shortly after she arrived, Ellen Richard was invited inside the old Strand Theater, which lay in a semi-ruined state in the seedy Central Market district. Built as a modest infill building called the Jewell Theater in 1917, The Strand was the same vintage as The Geary but with none of its bells and whistles. It had housed vaudeville and then film in its early life, becoming a repertory house for foreign films in the sixties and a weekly exhibitor of The Rocky Horror Picture Show in the seventies. By the early nineties, The Strand had become a porn house showing double features to increasingly unsavory audiences. Finally, in 2003, the theater was raided and shut down by the city of San Francisco, and it remained closed for the next nine years, falling into disrepair. Surrounded by check-cashing stores, pawn shops, and boarded-up buildings, The Strand was absorbed into the decay and blight of that benighted section of Market Street to which San Franciscans had long been accustomed, a core of urban decay and despair that until very recently has proved stubbornly resistant to change.
Ellen Richard was no stranger to real estate. While managing director at Roundabout Theatre Company in New York, she had managed to negotiate her way through the thickets of New York City bureaucracy to acquire the nightclub Studio 54 and transform it into a first-class theater for the Roundabout. She had twice relocated the Roundabout’s offices, refurbished numerous performance venues, and then gone on to be part of the development of the Helen Hayes Theatre as a nonprofit space for Second Stage. So the morass of obstacles inherent in finding and developing real estate in San Francisco didn’t seem to daunt her; indeed, as soon as she was hired in the summer of 2010, she set out to find us a new venue. When we first walked through the doors of The Strand to inspect what was left of the theater, the floors were littered with dead birds, the walls were smeared with filth, and the upper levels of the building were covered in graffiti trumpeting SLUMDOGS and JUNKIES FOR LIFE. But the shell of the building was perfectly adequate, and it was clear that, without destroying the original structure, we could create a simple three-hundred-seat house and have a big upstairs rehearsal room/black box looking out toward the dome of City Hall.
And so, in the spring of 2012, A.C.T. finally leapt into the void and purchased a second stage. The board was initially dubious about staking a claim in what was still an unsavory and potentially dangerous neighborhood, but the tide was turning. In 2011, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors had approved a deal that gave a six-year payroll tax holiday on new hires to any company that moved into a designated zone of the Central Market area. In exchange, it was hoped that these companies would become agents of change, revitalizing a stubbornly destitute urban core. The companies within the payroll tax exemption zone signed community benefit agreements outlining ways in which they would work to better their new neighborhood, and very quickly the techno-hipsters started moving in. Twitter took over several floors at the top of the old Furniture Mart on Market between 9th and 10th, and other companies followed suit. Inspired by this burst of activity and believing that Central Market was the neighborhood for A.C.T. to invest in, a generous and brave trustee named Jeff Ubben bought the ruined Strand in February 2012 and donated it to A.C.T. for redevelopment.
Spurred on by the tax exemption, adventurous corporations such as Dolby Sound, One King’s Lane, Benchmark Capital, and Spotify snapped up property in Central Market, while A.C.T. became the major nonprofit to enter the fray. Through another trustee, Abby Schnair, we were able to secure the services of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill in designing our new theater, and our willing and openhearted architect Michael Duncan worked tirelessly with us as we began to articulate a vision. Almost twenty years after the Geary reconstruction, I found myself once again in the byzantine world of historical preservation and city politics. Although The Strand is not a landmarked building, there were enough special interest groups with a passion for old movie houses and early-twentieth-century architecture to cause design hiccups all along the way, most notably when we were told that we had to memorialize the crumbling and unsafe interior marble staircase by creating a permanent “scar” on the new floor of the theater to mark where the stairs had been.
Duncan’s scheme was to divide the old space in half, retaining the south side as an intimate theater and capturing the north side as lobby and café space, with a large event space/black box theater on the top two floors facing City Hall. Central to Duncan’s concept of transparency and welcome was a double-story lobby with huge windows and an interior LED screen that could project a wide variety of content and colors to light up the theater and illuminate the street all the way across UN Plaza. As we watched the designs evolve, we were mindful of the fact that in The Geary we already had a Cadillac; what we wanted at The Strand was a VW—a simple, functional, welcoming space that could be run inexpensively and didn’t feel intimidating to walk into. We were acutely aware of the many second stages that had been built across America over the past decade and had proved to be as expensive to run as the main house, with far less revenue potential; we didn’t want to make that mistake at The Strand. But how exactly would it function? And for whom? As we met every week to move the design process forward, the vexing question of the relationship of live theater to the neighborhood to which we were moving—with its street-level poverty and the insular and powerful tech worlds surrounding us—became central to our thinking. Why put a live theater next to Dolby Sound? What might induce a twenty-something Twitter worker who had everything he or she could want up in that elevated campus to descend to the street and see a play? And how would the longtime inhabitants of the neighborhood react to a shiny new art complex appearing in their midst? What did we all have in common? How could we coexist?
The question of the relationship of modern technology to the ancient impulses of live theater is a complex one about which much has been written. There are those who believe that theater has to mirror the technological prowess of its age, and indeed recent advances in sound, lighting, and projection technology have changed the way we think about storytelling and theatrical experience, just as they did in the Victorian era. Why build scenery for a multi-location play, for example, when you can evoke the whole world with projections? Why train actors to project heightened language across a thousand seats when you can use microphones instead? There are huge advantages and concomitant disadvantages to our reliance upon technology in the contemporary theater, but, at its most basic, theater is a form of storytelling in which live actor meets live audience member in a kind of intimate transaction that triggers the imagination in new ways. The one relatively constant phenomenon is that live theater usually involves experiencing something in a group and as a group. This is what makes it potent. Aside from attending sports events or going to church, few occasions remain to us in which people of different ages, backgrounds, and predilections find themselves sitting side by side experiencing something together in real time; still, we know that collective experience can be both enriching and comforting.
The tech industry tends to be obsessed with speed. The goal is to do everything faster, more efficiently, more “disruptively,” and with less interference. “Change” is the mantra. At its best, an artistic experience is, by contrast, immersive. It slows down our consciousness in profound ways, functioning more the way dreams do. And just as dreams are mysterious but neurologically necessary journeys that restore and reset our frazzled brains, immersion in a piece of art can briefly stop time and let air into our overcharged and time-crunched minds. The deepest and most fundamental tools of theater have remained unchanged for thousands of years: a live actor telling a vivid story to a real audience in real time. Each performance is unique, unrepeatable. When theater really works on an audience, things start to seep in—you get behind the eyes of a character, you begin to understand how someone thinks, you lose yourself in the melody of a voice, you feel desire, you release. I am convinced that after the immersive experience of a play, when you reenter your quotidian life, there is a new suppleness of thinking that creates room for thoughts, feelings, ideas that one couldn’t have predicted. Indeed, one of the biggest hits in recent A.C.T. history was a production I directed of Glen Berger’s hypnotically written Underneath the Lintel, a solo play about a mysterious man who takes us on a surreal quest for identity, with only a few transformative props and some adjustable lights as storytelling aids. Watching Lintel was like sitting around a campfire listening to a shaggy-dog story slowly unfold; actor David Strathairn turned his spectators into wide-eyed children caught up in the magic of what would come next. For ninety minutes, we were all in the same room, in the same space, held captive by a singular imagination.
We know from experience that, when it works, theater can provide the means to sustain and enrich one’s mental and emotional health. But given the lack of arts education today at every level of the educational system, from kindergarten to university, and given the extremely lucrative benefits of devoting a life to coding or derivatives trading, the choice to engage with live theater isn’t even on most people’s radar screens anymore. This has shifted radically in just the last decade. In his hilarious memoir Little Failure, writer Gary Shteyngart describes spending his Wall Street lunch breaks devouring books: “In 1996, people still read books and the city could support an extra branch of the legendary Strand [bookstore] in the Financial District, which is to say that stockbrokers, secretaries, government functionaries—everybody back then was expected to have some kind of inner life.” So what happens to “inner life” in an era when it doesn’t get you a job and isn’t on the curriculum? How do you encourage people to believe that the encounter with a live work of art might have resonance in their lives? That encounter takes time, inclination, and permission. The arts venue has to feel welcoming enough for a range of people to feel drawn to enter. On one side of our new Strand Theater is an impoverished neighborhood whose inhabitants are barely making it, on the other side are tech workers toiling eighteen-hour days to stay ahead of the competition; neither group is going to naturally gravitate to a play. So I know that in developing The Strand, audience building isn’t going to be simple. I want multiple generations to find a home there, including our own core audience (whom we should never take for granted in our drive to attract newer and younger audiences). One of my interests in opening The Strand is to figure out if and whether multiple and seemingly disconnected audiences can come to embrace The Strand as their theater.
We had the opportunity to test this out when we began using our small Costume Shop space next to The Strand to host community groups and to produce new shows and M.F.A. Program projects. In 2011, when we opened the doors of that forty-nine-seat space at the front of the facility where we build our costumes, it was fascinating to see how quickly audiences found their way there, in spite of the uninviting climate of the surrounding streets. An enormous range of nonprofits took advantage of our free space-sharing program to perform: from Awesöme Orchestra Collective to Lorraine Hansberry Theatre, from the Magic Theatre to Singers of the Street. Each group had its own followers, and soon the word began to spread that something fun was happening at The Costume Shop. I felt as if, after so many years, A.C.T. was returning to something that Ed Hastings had tried so hard to do in the eighties, to be part of the broader ecology of local theater and to help launch and nurture new companies and new artistic efforts. The journey from the proud isolation of A.C.T.’s early years to a more collaborative position in the Bay Area theater community has been a long one, and one can only hope that The Strand will offer infinitely more possibilities for real artistic exchange.
At its best, theater can function as the equivalent of the corner bar, a place where people can gather and feel at home, where when you walk in the bartender knows right away who you are and what you’re drinking. On a recent night at The Geary, a young woman who had recently relocated to San Francisco came to see our production of The Normal Heart and was in line behind a couple who were clearly longtime subscribers. She heard one of our ushers greet the subscribers, asking them how their summer had been and showing them to their seats without looking at their tickets. I feared the young woman would feel disdain for this old-fashioned theater with its longtime subscribers, but the opposite was true. She said afterwards to her friend, an M.F.A. Program student at A.C.T., that she hoped someday to get to the point where the ushers knew her name and welcomed her with the same enthusiasm as the long-term subscribers. That interests me. In our online lives, we are accustomed to algorithms that make us feel that our preferences are known and important, but when we walk into a theater or a symphony hall, we are often like strangers in a strange land. Would it make us come to our local theater more readily if we were known, recognized, personalized?
This was one of many questions circling through my mind when I made my first foray to the new headquarters of Twitter, one block from The Strand, in the spring of 2013. Rusty Rueff, then president of A.C.T.’s board, had arranged a meeting with Twitter CEO Dick Costolo, who seemed a good person to start with, as he had spoken proudly and publicly about taking improvisation classes at Chicago’s Second City early in his career and thus presumably had a predilection for live theater. On the appointed day, Rusty, A.C.T. Trustee Antonio Lucio, and I gathered to prepare for our meeting at a new coffee spot across the street from Twitter. Café Mavelous is run by an intrepid man named Phillip Ma, who hoped that the combination of really good coffee and no Wi-Fi might lure exhausted tech workers to enter his doors and have a (god forbid) real, as opposed to virtual, conversation. It took two years for Ma’s café to catch on, but it was packed the morning we gathered there to plot our strategy. We wanted to ask Twitter to make a contribution to the Strand campaign, possibly in exchange for acquiring naming rights to the lobby, and we had prepared boards showing our massive video screen displaying Twitter’s logo and tweet stream. The idea didn’t seem such a crazy pipe dream at the time; for decades, we have had generous support from traditional corporations such as banks and utility companies, and we naïvely believed that this was an excellent moment for the tech companies to follow suit. We knew that one of the things Twitter was focusing on was how to drive specific audiences to specific venues via Twitter, and we thought The Strand might prove to be a useful laboratory.
When we arrived in the lobby of Twitter HQ, I was struck by the absence of any visual reference to the company at the ground level, and by the security procedures required to ascend. You can’t tweet your way up; you have to gain admission the old-fashioned way, waiting patiently while a guard matches your driver’s license to a name on a list. My board president assured me that I would be overwhelmed by the forward-thinking vibe when we got to the ninth floor, so it amused me that the receptionist who greeted us as we got off the elevator was exactly like the well-coiffed, miniskirted receptionists at most law firms and corporate offices. “Welcome to Twitter. Let me show you around,” she enthused before asking us to sign a nondisclosure form on her iPad. “This is the yogurt bar. This is the granola bar. It’s awesome.” She assured us that part of Twitter’s “awesomeness” was being able to bring your bike to work, as well as your dog, both of which definitely rate on the scale of desirable things.
We had discovered that, alas, Costolo had been called out of town (this was not long before Twitter’s IPO), and we met with one of his colleagues instead. The meeting took place in an all-white corner room; like most tech companies, Twitter doesn’t believe in private offices, and most of the space is communal. That made our task harder. Throughout my long fundraising career, I’ve always found it helpful to sit in a prospect’s office and take a look at the images, books, and trinkets that line the shelves, gathering clues as to what he or she cares about before asking for support. If there is common ground, there is something to build upon. Such was not the case at Twitter. Our host sat in an unadorned room that betrayed nothing about his background or interests. When we pulled out our photographs of The Strand, he looked somewhat surprised to discover that there would be a theater right down the street from his headquarters, and I wondered how often he ever left Twitter HQ to explore the neighborhood. The tech companies work extremely long hours and provide nearly everything anyone could want or need in-house—from food to dentistry to massage—with the apparent result that employees spend most of their long workdays inside the building. As Allison Arieff wrote in the New York Times in December 2013: “Tech tenants now fill 22 percent of all occupied office space in San Francisco—and represented a whopping 61 percent of all office leasing in the city last year. But they might as well have stayed in their suburban corporate settings for all the interacting they do with the outside world. The oft-referred-to ‘serendipitous encounters’ that supposedly drive the engine of innovation tend to happen only with others who work for the same company.”
Determined to find some point of connection, we talked about our dreams and hopes for the new theater, and asked him how he thought we might be valuable to Twitter, in terms of our auditorium (for speeches and meetings), our audience, and our neighborhood building. He thought it all looked . . . well . . . awesome. When we left forty-five minutes later, he graciously promised to consider our request and to get back to us soon. On the street, Rusty and Antonio were ebullient. “What a great meeting—he gave us forty-five minutes!” Apparently, the golden rule at Twitter is “No meeting more than thirty minutes.” This was the world of 140 characters, after all. I came away feeling somewhat discouraged: it was clear that we were speaking a completely different language from this new industry next door, and indeed it is proving to be the case that the nonprofit cultural institutions in San Francisco and the technology-based companies we hope to engage with are like two radically different and often mutually suspicious tribes who have a great deal to learn about each other’s customs, appetites, values, and ways of working if we are going to coexist happily in this city that we have all chosen to inhabit. How do we who believe in live theater move forward in tandem with an industry that is suspicious of large nonprofits (often rightly so), eager to engage only when there is a technical problem to be solved, and unaccustomed to writing checks so that someone else can do the creative work that they often think they can do better and faster? We don’t seem to be disruptive enough appeal to an industry that values breaking the pattern above all else. Yet, truth be told, every theatrical production is a start-up, every rehearsal an attempt to create meaning out of chaos, exactly as if one were writing code. The synergies must be there somewhere.
I have not found answers to these conflicts yet, but there are signs that some kind of dialogue is beginning to emerge in the brave new world of contemporary San Francisco. I remain convinced that the yang of technology’s yin is live experience, narrative, character, immersion. Both can exist, if we can find ambassadors who carry the spark of one part of the culture back to the other. All of us have an investment in education, in the vibrancy and safety of the city, and in juicy experiences. We recently sent the cast of Shaw’s Major Barbara to the offices of the customer service software company Zendesk to observe the behavior of workers in the controlled and pristine world of tech, in preparation for the scene in Undershaft’s munitions factory. The Zendesk workers were delighted to have a company of actors in their midst and were extremely welcoming; it was fascinating to share with them the thinking behind Shaw’s radical play, which questions whether employment alone is enough to nourish men’s souls, particularly if that employment involves the fabrication of bombs. The practice of isolating workers in a controlled environment so as to extract every ounce of labor is vividly depicted in Major Barbara; the comparison with their own “utopian” workplace was interesting and challenging food for thought for the Zendesk workers, just as spending a day at Zendesk headquarters was rich fodder for our actors.
Much will be discovered once The Strand is actually open for business. If nothing else, our new theater’s proximity to the epicenter of tech culture has forced me to reaffirm the core values that drew me to theater in the first place. A great play operates at the intersection of feeling and ideas, and at that crossroads, magical things can happen. To return to Shaw, when that great playwright wanted his audience to understand and respond to the causes of poverty in a capitalist world, he created a work of art in which we identify not only with the underclass but also with the passions and arguments of the industrialists themselves. We engage with Barbara and Undershaft’s beliefs because they arouse our emotions as well as stimulate our intelligence. This is perhaps why a lay audience often grasps (and retains) more about politics and economics from a good play than from an academic lecture. Neurologically speaking, we are discovering that the part of the brain known as the amygdala performs a primary role in determining what we remember. Emotion-arousing information increases amygdalar activity, which in turn correlates with long-term memory and retention. (Interestingly, the amygdalae light up during sports events as strongly as at aesthetic experiences, so perhaps Brecht’s correlation of theater with boxing was prescient!) A student will retain the substance of a lesson far more successfully if that lesson triggers an emotional response connected to the information being imparted. This is one reason why arts education has such consistent benefits, and why it is worth fighting for. This is why speed and efficiency cannot be our only gods, and why it is dangerous when the development of emotional intelligence is neglected. It turns out that what we feel is at least as important as what we know.
If the landscape of our thinking has been forever changed by the tech industry, then we in the theater have to change with it. Sometimes that change is wrenching, sometimes it is invigorating and even, surprisingly, fun. I was recently part of a hackathon at the imaginative Orchard Project in the Catskill Mountains. The idea was to bring together theater workers and software developers to explore ways in which theater and technology could partner to achieve certain goals. One thing that became immediately clear was the longing that young artists have to connect with each other, coupled with their inability to figure out how to do so; thus they imagined apps that would help them find compatible friends in new cities, search for new collaborators, and wake them up to new ideas. My favorite of the hackathon ideas centered around crowd-sourcing local stories. There were schemes for interactive scavenger hunts around the theme of a play and for shared videos of movement ideas that could become a dance; there was even a prototype for an app aimed at aspiring playwrights that would provide a writing prompt each day. The possibilities were endless, like finding a thousand new ways to make a meal. My hope is that the meal itself will remain important. No matter how we distill a complex set of tastes into edible foam or discover the perfect temperature to cook sous vide, we still in the end want to sit down at a table with a group of people and eat together. We are social beings and citizens of the world, and human connectivity takes time and energy. The dream is that The Strand will become a place to gather and be nourished in real time, no matter what the app is that gets people there to begin with.