Bill Ball, ever the stubborn impresario, had been warned by the San Francisco Fire Department for years that the accumulation of twenty years of costumes squeezed underneath the stage of the theater in a makeshift costume shop was a fire hazard that had to be resolved. He remained unconcerned. At the same time, board members had been warned that the unreinforced brick wall at the back of the stage could present a major hazard in the event of an earthquake. But in the random manner of most disasters, the culprit in the case of A.C.T.’s destruction was a loose fan housing on the roof that fell through the ceiling, bringing down the whole gilded proscenium with it. In an instant, the cables attaching the lighting grid to the ceiling moved one way and the arch itself moved another, tearing apart the surface of the proscenium like an orange peel and sending massive amounts of rubble tumbling down into the house in huge waves of destruction. It was a miracle that no one was in the theater: only a few hours later, hundreds of people would likely have been hurt. (Interestingly, the biggest destruction lay in Row G, the critics’ seats. As someone who has never been a darling of the press, the irony of this was not lost on me.)
By the end of the twenty-second temblor, there was sunshine pouring through the roof of The Geary, the air was thick with plaster dust, and the extent of the destruction was impossible to gauge. Producing Director James Haire describes walking across Geary Street in trepidation and trying to see through the swirling dust to the damage within the theater. The first concern of A.C.T.’s management was to make sure that no one had been hurt and that the children in the Young Conservatory were reunited with their parents. Once that was accomplished, a kind of numbness must have set in. As streams of shell-shocked people made their way across town, walking all the way to downtown from Candlestick Park or trying to reach loved ones across the Bay, it became clear to the artists and management at A.C.T. that their playhouse had sustained devastating damage. Alan Stein, then chair of our board of trustees, likes to say that this was the moment he got to utter the immortal words “The show must go on!” as the staff gathered at Ed Hastings’s house on Lake Street and tried to determine how best to proceed.
Within a mere few weeks, A.C.T. was in diaspora, and it would continue to be so for the next six years. It was a major turning point for the company, a moment that could easily have ended Ball’s great experiment. But somehow in adversity the institution rallied: indeed, the earthquake quickly revealed the suppleness and survival instinct that has always lain at the heart of A.C.T. Alternative performing spaces were found, schedules altered, audience members notified, and, miraculously, the 1989–90 season continued to unfold. Perhaps because 1989 was a year of political eruptions and explosions all over the globe, the magnitude of the Loma Prieta earthquake barely penetrated my consciousness in New York: I had a needy infant and was more aware of the fall of the Berlin Wall and the exhaustion of early motherhood than the distress of Northern California. In fact, when Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceauşescu was shot on December 25, 1989, and my friend director Andrei Belgrader called the next morning to inform me of the news, all I could think about was the miraculous fact that my three-month-old baby had just slept through the night for the first time.
Thus, when I arrived at A.C.T. in October 1991 for my second or third interview, it was a shock to discover the extent of the earthquake-induced damage. The Geary lay in silent ruin, like a kind of modern-day Pompeii: nothing had been touched since 5:04 PM on October 17, 1989. The atmosphere inside was eerie and magical. The callboard backstage, covered in dust, announced the evening’s schedule and the actors’ calls; the stage manager’s coffee cup and prompt script lay in waiting offstage right; wardrobe racks and prop tables were readied—it was as if the ghosts of A.C.T. past could rise up at any moment and begin a performance. Because of fears of asbestos, crews had stayed out of the building for months after the event. When the wreckage was finally surveyed, it was discovered to be extensive and structural. Ironically, the much maligned back wall with its unreinforced brick sustained virtually no damage. But the tumbling proscenium arch tore away the fabric of the ceiling and exposed the heavily damaged roof and interior structure of the building. Photographs and video shot right after the quake reveal the vulnerable bones and tissue of this stunning and delicate building, whose original architects (Bliss & Faville) had lavished loving attention on every corner, including delicately molded gold pineapples surrounding the high, round dome and repeated patterns of rosettes dotting the proscenium arch.
All of us who make theater are forced to acknowledge with every closing night how transient our art form is; nevertheless, it was startling to realize how transient the performance space itself can be. The Geary was one of the last fully operational hemp houses in America, its backstage walls lined with a rope system designed to raise and lower scenery by hand. The names of the many flymen of its storied history were graffitied on the walls; pieces of scenery and extraneous props were piled high in the corners; the life and breath of a thousand actors still permeated the air. I was overwhelmed by the beauty of this contemporary ruin. Perhaps because I had spent such a large portion of my younger life immersed in ancient Greek culture and traveling to sites like Epidaurus and Delphi, there was something both moving and strangely familiar about this semi-destroyed theater: it made me feel oddly at home.
The catastrophe had escalated the decision of Ed Hastings to leave A.C.T. He wisely felt that whoever was charged with rebuilding the theater should be committed to working in it afterwards, and that was more of an extended time commitment than he was interested in making at that stage of his long and successful career. Early plans for the reconstruction of The Geary called for a wholesale reimagining of A.C.T.’s operations: the corner property, owned by the theater but currently housing a greasy-spoon diner, a car rental business, and, upstairs, A.C.T.’s box office operations, was envisioned as a new unified campus that would contain the institution’s offices, studios, and school. The architect behind this original inspiration, Joseph Esherick, was a visionary, but it quickly became clear to the theater’s shaken board that it would be a monumental enough effort to rebuild The Geary without taking on an entire new institutional complex. In a sense this was an enormous shame, and twenty years later we are still wrestling with the imperative that an institution as complex and multifaceted as A.C.T. needs a central campus where its original vision of training, performance, and community-based education can truly be realized. Indeed, this is the work of the next decade.
It was clear that rebuilding The Geary was to become the top priority of whoever was chosen to be the new artistic director of A.C.T. For me this was the most exciting aspect of the job, and the most terrifying. I was a downtown director, steeped in alternative performance spaces and accustomed for the past six years of my career to staging plays on the intimate thrust of CSC’s theater. I was a relative stranger to the kind of Broadway proscenium house that The Geary represented and had never imagined that an old-fashioned nineteenth-century theater would become my most treasured artistic home. The learning curve was going to be incredibly steep. Again, it astounds me in retrospect that I was selected for this task, given my lack of experience with building projects or even, indeed, with proscenium theaters; I continue to realize how lucky I was to encounter a board willing to bet on my potential rather than my résumé. I was also braver in those days. I was out around town raising funds to rebuild The Geary before I had any real working knowledge of what the restoration would entail or what kind of work the theater was destined to house. I suppose it is often true that what you don’t know saves you: if I had had any inkling in November 1991 of the vast challenges that lay ahead, I would not have accepted Alan Stein’s job offer with such a light heart. I had to raise almost $30 million in less than two years without an identified donor base or even a proper