Ball’s successor, Edward Hastings, was a compassionate leader and an able director who mounted a major effort to move A.C.T. forward, diversifying the acting company, stimulating A.C.T.’s commitment to new work through the creation of Plays in Progress, building bridges with small local ensembles, stabilizing the finances, and staging major productions of American classics. But for many reasons, it was difficult to keep the ambitious dreams of A.C.T.’s beginnings alive.
By the time I arrived in the early nineties, A.C.T. was so complicated, so troubled, and so dysfunctional that I failed initially to grasp the depths of its paralysis. Ignoring its fraught past (and earthquake-destroyed building) for the moment, I focused instead upon the present day, and tried to envisage what A.C.T. still had for free by being housed in the very specific arts ecology that was the Bay Area in the late twentieth century. This exercise led to some disastrous assumptions that plagued my first year of programming, but it was not done without real thought. Outside of the hermetic bubble of A.C.T., here’s what I assumed 1992 San Francisco had “for free,” in no particular order:
• A tradition of physical comedy, clowning, and vaudeville dating from the San Francisco Mime Troupe’s beginnings in 1959 to the inception of the Pickle Family Circus in the mid seventies and the ongoing presence of such amazing clowns as Bill Irwin, Geoff Hoyle, Joan Mankin, Sharon Lockwood, and Jeff Raz.
• A love for the radical, aggressively acted work of such directors as Robert Woodruff at the Magic Theatre.
• A cultural pluralism that has permitted a wide range of ethnic and cultural traditions to be represented equally around town, from African drumming to klezmer music to Russian Orthodox liturgy to Filipino parades to Japanese tea ceremonies.
• Gay culture—I assumed the presence of a politically powerful gay culture that made its presence felt would be a major plus in programming a season.
• A European feel—I’ve always believed that it’s easiest to make theater in a place where people can walk in off the street and find it. San Francisco’s origins as a European-style city can still be felt in its urban planning and in the intimacy of its streets and sidewalks, to say nothing of its population of Russians, Irish, and Italians. It is a city where many people get around on foot or by bicycle. This seemed to me a helpful thing when building a theater community.
• A highly literate book-reading population.
• A love for the experimental and the multidisciplinary in performance, evidenced by the presence of such visionaries as George Coates (whose new take on the Alice in Wonderland story, Right Mind, had just opened at The Geary Theater before the earthquake brought the building to the ground), Chris Hardman, Lou Harrison, David Harrington, Anna Halprin, and more.
• A sense of pride in being three hours behind New York but always with an eye to the future, a city of endless technological and social revolution, looking to the East instead of the West.
Some of these assumptions proved in the long run to be true and valuable as guiding principles. Others turned out to be misleading. What didn’t occur to me was that, although it had arrived in San Francisco as the brash, brilliant, and exciting new kid on the block, by the early nineties A.C.T. had become a bastion of culture, a somewhat intimidating monolith housed in a gilded structure out of another century. Its relationship to the city as a whole was oblique; from the beginning, Bill Ball wanted to create a national rather than a regional theater (hence the name “American Conservatory Theater” rather than “San Francisco Conservatory Theater”). Ball was grateful for local philanthropy, but his biggest support came from the Ford and Rockefeller foundations, and under his leadership A.C.T. became a self-contained entity within the cultural landscape of San Francisco. Ball brought his acting company with him from Pittsburgh, trained them in the confines of his own very private institution, and produced a repertoire heavy on classical literature without requiring much collaboration from the community at large. Despite the fact that Ed Hastings was an intensely generous community builder who helped spawn many smaller companies (including Turtle Island Ensemble, Asian American Theater Company, and Encore Theatre Company), it was startling to me when I arrived at A.C.T. to discover just how isolated the organization had become.
Trauma leaves its marks on a theater just as it does on a human being, and A.C.T.’s history was one of repeated glory followed by repeated trauma. By the time I arrived, the organization was twisted around its own pathologies like a strange family that has learned to live with its brilliant but transgressive father, its competitive angry siblings, and its wary jealous neighbors. It also seemed to be a very male institution. Few women had held positions of leadership at A.C.T. over the years; in addition to Ball, the power had been housed in the hands of such men as James McKenzie, Robert Goldsby, Allen Fletcher, and Ed Hastings. Some talented women directors had left their mark, including Elizabeth Huddle and Joy Carlin, but they were the exception rather than the rule. When I arrived, the atmosphere was grim. It was as if Daddy had killed himself, Uncle Ed had left town, and now the potentially evil stepmother had arrived. No one had any idea what to make of me. I remember my first A.C.T. company meeting with horror: I walked into an immense studio in which the entire company, from actors to stagehands to stitchers to faculty members, had lined up to hear from the new artistic director. They greeted my words with complete silence and would barely meet my gaze as I looked around the room. It was clear that survival at A.C.T. had come to mean keeping one’s head down so as not to make waves; everything was done by code, there were no policies on anything from maternity leave to sick days to parking, nor any clarity about how decisions were to be reached about play choices, casting, or academic admission. If the buzzword of the new millennium is transparency, the buzzword of A.C.T. in the nineties was secrecy. The very geography of the office space, a rabbit warren of small rooms inaccessible to each other and impossible to navigate, epitomized the culture in which I found myself when I first arrived, and the anxiety in the air was palpable.
It should be said at the outset that the recruitment process that led to my hire was anything but transparent. The board handled the search internally with great care, but very few people outside the small circle of the board had any say in my appointment or any knowledge of me or my work. When Producing Director James Haire, who had been with the company almost since its inception, was asked to give me a tour of the theater while I was in town for one of my interviews, he had no idea who I was or that I was a candidate for the artistic directorship of his own theater until Joan Sadler called him later and inquired, “What did you think of our girl?” To which Jim replied, “What girl?” The person most opposed to my appointment was supposed to be my closest colleague, Managing Director John Sullivan. I discovered halfway into my negotiations that during the search process John had proposed a new organizational scheme whereby he would be named general director and supervise two stage directors (Anne Bogart and Robert Woodruff), who would report to him. The board had considered but ultimately rejected his proposal. John had chosen to stay on as managing director regardless, a disastrous decision from my point of view, and probably from his. He was, perhaps without quite knowing it, deeply invested in my failure, and my year’s “collaboration” with him was among the hardest of my professional life.
Without giving me any real guidelines, Sullivan announced at our first meeting, in November 1991, that