I have spent forty years working in the theater. Not in front of the curtain on the side of the footlights but on the other side.
My mother was an actress and used to take me to the theater when she was performing, and I would sleep in her dressing room some nights while she was onstage. I became fascinated at an early age with the backstage world, the moving scenery, the fast costume changes, the colored lights … everything that it took to make the show. I could sit and watch rehearsals from the side for hours by the time I was five. I wasn’t interested in performing; no, I wanted to make the stories.
By the time I was in third grade, I was creating shows with puppets under our grand piano. That safe space beneath the dark wooden sounding board was like a little theater proscenium for me. I would tape curtains to the front curve of the piano and add a theatrical drop that I had painted in the backyard. Then I would hide behind it and stick out my hands with the puppets on them. I became obsessed with making up stories and presenting them in my piano theater. The good thing was, no one told me a girl couldn’t be the director! That would come later.
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When I was growing up, my family moved to Europe, first to Paris and then Vienna. In these amazing capital cities, I would often spend time sitting in cafés, where I became a compulsive people-watcher, which led to my creating characters in my mind and making up stories. All I wanted to do as I grew up was to tell stories through images, music, and words.
After college, I moved to New York City with every intention of becoming a director. Friends were not very positive about this idea. Women worked in the theater, sure, but not as the number one creative person and leader of a show. There were no role models I could easily draw upon. So I set out to work my way up, first as a production assistant (read: coffee-getter), then as a stage manager. A director took a chance on me and hired me as his assistant, and eventually I started directing in very small places. When I tell it like this, it sounds easy. It wasn’t—it was hard. There were lots of other people in line, lots of men and guys with special connections. The best thing I did was leave New York and look elsewhere for work. I found directing jobs in Europe and less obvious places like Milwaukee! Over time, I built a résumé and a solid career away from the big US cities.
A story that has always stayed with me is from the Vienna State Opera, one of the most prestigious companies in the world. The general director called my agent and invited me to come direct there. This was a huge coup, and my agent called back and said yes on my behalf. Suddenly it came to light that the general director had invited Francesco (the male version of my name), not Francesca. A woman had never directed in Vienna, and he said one never would. He withdrew the offer, saying it had been a mistake. (A woman finally made it there a few years back, but I never did.)
Flash-forward to now. I have often been alone on many frontiers in my field as a female director in opera and theater, and sometimes even more alone in the last decade as the artistic director of two opera companies. I have now directed in more than two hundred theaters and opera houses around the world, on stages in locations as diverse as the jungle of Cambodia, Disneyland, and Broadway. I truly believe I often had to work harder to pass my male colleagues. It is not always a happy ending, but for me there was a truth to hard work and creative talent and a fair amount of self-belief in many dark moments!
I WASN'T INTERESTED IN PERFORMING; NO, I WANTED TO MAKE THE STORIES.
THE GOOD THING WAS, NO ONE TOLD ME A GIRL COULDN'T BE THE DIRECTOR! THAT WOULD COME LATER.
Now I devote considerable energy to supporting my female colleagues as they come into the field. We are still a vast minority, but we’re gaining. And, of course, there is the logic to it all: Women make up half the audience, so why shouldn’t half the people who create the images and tell the stories be women?