I recently reread Arena Stage co-founder and longtime producing director Zelda Fichandler’s words, written in a letter to the U.S. Department of the Treasury in the fifties (and later read into the Congressional Record), arguing that theaters should be accorded 501(c)(3) tax-exempt status: “Once we made the choice to produce our plays not to recoup an investment but to recoup some corner of the universe for our understanding and enlargement, we entered into the same world as the university, the library, the museum, and the church, and became, like them, an instrument of civilization.” So beautifully put. The fact that many large-scale institutional theaters today have become roadhouses to incubate commercial productions headed for Broadway is a sad diminution of the original notion of the nonprofit theater, but in the face of declining contributions and audiences, some argue that this is the only means of survival.
I will never be entirely sure why the board of A.C.T. decided to risk everything on me, but I suspect it was that, on some deep level, I shared DNA with Bill Ball: I believed in the uniqueness of A.C.T.’s mission, and I knew it was worth fighting for. Most important of all, A.C.T. was about lifelong learning. That’s the piece of it I loved. The founding definition of A.C.T. stated:
The American Conservatory Theater combines the concept of resident repertory theater with the classic concept of continuous training, study, and practice as an integral and inseparable part of the performer’s life. . . .
Our goal is to awaken in the theater artist his maximum versatility and expressiveness.
I hoped her versatility and expressiveness would be awakened as well.
Ball’s company of forty-plus actors was engaged in constant artistic growth, taking and teaching classes while performing a repertoire of up to twenty-three plays in the first full San Francisco season. Modeled on the Comédie Française, A.C.T. was built around a large rotating repertoire, a permanent acting company, and a conservatory in which actors studied and students acted. The conservatory quickly became a major training program in which young actors apprenticed at the feet of master actors while performing alongside them onstage. As the critic Martin Gottfried explained it, “[Bill Ball] is training them to discipline flamboyance and then apply it to productions that he stages with all the devices of grand opera, ballet, mime, and magical full-throated theater. Combining these primary theater colors with an unrelenting demand for such basics as voice control, diction, movement, and facial expression, and pumping them up with the inspirational effect of his own genius, he blends directorial creativity with respect for a playwright’s purposes.”
The idea of a theater that sustained not only a permanent acting company but a multi-year actor training program was thrilling to me. This was how the ancient art of theater had always been carried forward. Educated actors and an educated audience meant the opportunity to do challenging work in a sophisticated way. San Francisco’s proud separation from the entertainment industry in Los Angeles freed A.C.T. from the oft-bemoaned requirement of hiring television and film stars to populate its stage: Bay Area audiences pride themselves on knowing good theater acting when they see it, and Ball had trained his audience to recognize talent. So although I was sad to leave the vast talent pool that was New York, there seemed to be the potential in San Francisco for a sustained and serious theatrical exploration.
As actor Ray Reinhardt, a member of the original A.C.T. acting company, explained, “No repertory company has been able to make it in New York over a length of time. APA [Association of Production Artists] did have some wonderful seasons, but the pressure becomes too much. It’s more and louder and faster and funnier and—I don’t know. The temptation is always there for other things. . . . I’ll tell you why not Los Angeles. Obviously, in Los Angeles every actor would be going to Bill and every director saying, ‘Oh, just one day out, just one day’s shooting on a film, one day on a television program.’ It would be impossible. Up in San Francisco, it is a very good choice because you are away from the commercial pressure. You’re in a cosmopolitan city. It’s still, as far as . . . social living is concerned . . . perhaps the best city in the United States to be.”
In addition, the fact that San Francisco is an extremely small town compared to New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles makes cross-disciplinary collaboration far easier and quite natural: over the years at A.C.T. we have collaborated with such composers and musicians as Kronos Quartet, Chanticleer, Rova Saxophone Quartet, Nathaniel Stookey, Bonfire Madigan Shive, and Tracy Chapman; such dancers as Pascal Molat and Muriel Maffre of San Francisco Ballet, and Nol Simonse and Joe Goode; and local visual artists and video makers—all because we share the same town and, to some extent, the same philosophy of making art. We also share the frontier spirit that has historically characterized Northern California; after all, this is where the Gold Rush began, where Levi’s were born, where many social movements, from black power to feminism to ecology to gay pride to ethnic studies to social media first found fertile ground in which to grow.
One of my happy discoveries when I took the job at A.C.T. was that San Francisco was the least corporate place I had ever been, and the kind of hierarchy originally envisioned by the NEA as good business practice for the arts, with organization charts for theaters and museums that looked like those of banks and corporations, seemed somehow less applicable in Northern California. A.C.T.’s precarious history as a one-man band with very little in the way of corporate structure or governance was also its saving grace: it had never become an institution in search of a mission; it was, rather, a mission in desperate search of a sustaining financial structure. In many ways, twenty years later, I feel as if we are still searching for that elusive formula whereby a thousand-seat theater company can produce serious and exciting work while at the same time developing new plays and sustaining a highly regarded training program in the most expensive real estate market in the world. I discovered early on that survival is never something one can or should count on; each play, each season, each young actor in training has to be its own event, its own journey, as if it might well be the last. This was the lesson of the earthquake.
Chapter 4
Urban Archaeology
“It’s like seeing a dear friend in intensive care,” actor Raye Birk said about The Geary Theater as it lay in ruins after the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake. Indeed, my first glimpse of the destruction was an awesome sight. I can’t remember upon which of my early visits to A.C.T. I was taken inside the ruined building, but I do remember how astonishing it was. And beautiful, in a kind of horrifying way. Truth be told, in addition to my love of talking, I love ruins. In fact, since the second grade I had longed to imitate Heinrich Schliemann, excavator of Troy, by reading Homer and finding lost cities on the plains of Greece and Turkey. I majored in ancient Greek at Stanford with the express purpose of preparing myself for this lifelong adventure, after having spent my teenage years in the Four Corners region of the American Southwest, digging up Anasazi ruins in the baking heat under the guidance of an archaeologist named Arch from the University of New Mexico, on whom, I recall, I had an enormous crush. I loved the puzzle-making aspect of archaeology—the process of finding isolated clues that, if pieced together correctly, could yield lost information about human behavior from remote times and places. In high school I had interned at the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology just when the rich cache of artifacts from the Ban Chiang excavation in Thailand was being shipped back to the museum. My best friend, Nora Winkelman, and I spent hours and hours in a dark basement piecing potsherds into recognizable shapes in order to help the team leaders explore the very first evidence of domesticated rice in history, one broken pot at a time. It was thrilling—our own private detective story. There was something about the mundane exercise of reconnecting broken pottery that allowed my imagination to run wild, and that sensation came back to me in powerful waves as I beheld the ruins of The Geary Theater in the fall of 1991.
The stories of that fateful October day were already legion. George Coates’s experimental production Right Mind, a version of Alice in Wonderland, had just opened to strong reviews. It was the year of the all–Bay Area World Series, and anyone in town who could snare a ticket had rushed to Candlestick Park to watch the San Francisco Giants play the Oakland A’s. The game was about to begin. The city was calm. The Geary was momentarily quiet—A.C.T.’s stage crew had just left the theater for the dinner break before