Greco set to end run at Magic Theatre
To the wave of artistic director turnovers in Bay Area theater, add Loretta Greco of the Magic Theatre. The leader of the 52yearold institution announced Thursday, Oct. 10, that she’ll conclude her tenure at the end of the 201920 season, at which time she’ll have been at the helm 12 years.
“Don’t make it sound like I’m retiring!” Greco jokes over the phone. She said she has no set plans for what comes after she steps down, other than a return visit to the Magic in 2021 to direct Taylor Mac’s “Calamity Joy.” Her last show while still in charge at the Magic will be Caryl Churchill’s “Escaped Alone.”
“This is both terrifying and exhilarating,” Greco says of her decision. “There’s just so much heavy lifting running a theater of this size, and there’s no way for me to do it less than 1,000%, and so I realized if I wanted the room for a new opportunity to manifest, I had to make that space, not to sound too groovy or crunchy about it. Honestly, I don’t know what’s next. I know I want to direct. I know I want to produce. I don’t want to go back and do something I’ve already done. I want to do something different with those passions, but I’m just not sure what.”
Greco’s time at the Magic has been marked by a tenacious commitment to writers — both new, untested voices and legends like Sam Shepard, whose career the Magic helped launch. She has mounted productions that tingle with danger, that crackle with possibility, that subsume you in feeling, that make the outside world disappear — from Theresa Rebeck’s “Mauritius” to Shepard’s “Fool for Love” to Luis Alfaro’s “Oedipus El Rey,” a triumph in both its 2010 and 2019 incarnations, as well as his “Bruja.”
Many Bay Area theaters tout some kind of commitment to new work; Greco believes the Magic’s commitment extends beyond an individual new script to an artist as a whole.
“When we talk about doing new work, we really mean with the playwright at our side,” she says. “We’re not picking the latest thing from New York.”
The company’s writers — Octavio Solis, Jessica Hagedorn, Lloyd Suh, among countless others — are intimately involved with productions, and they keep coming back. “We have writers that we produce three times, four times,” she says. The Magic tells playwrights to “not just write an incredible play, but we want to support you over the course of your career, and we hope that you’re going to pivot and not just write the same thing over and over again.”
Looking to her future, Greco says that she wouldn’t rule out another artistic director position if the right opportunity came along. Her recent production of Mfoniso Udofia’s “runboyrun” at New York Theater Workshop drew critical praise, but she says she’s not interested in the New York freelance life. “I’ve done that,” she says. “I really do believe in moving forward.”
Her decision comes as many of the region’s major nonprofit theaters have recently completed or are still in the midst of a leadership change. American Conservatory Theater has appointed Pam MacKinnon; Berkeley Rep, Johanna Pfaelzer; Aurora Theatre, Josh Costello. TheatreWorks has yet to announce a successor for Robert Kelley, who will also step down at the end of this season.
Magic Theatre is forming a search committee to appoint Greco’s successor.