Shannon Alexandria Jones
Shannon Jones got interested in theater in high school. From there she eventually decided on a career in the arts. And as executive director of TheatreSquared in Fayetteville, she anticipates any problems that might arise and solves them.
Shannon Jones’ strengths have always shone bright backstage, but she took a step toward the spotlight on Aug. 24 when she accepted the role of executive director for TheatreSquared.
Jones replaced Martin Miller, who was the theater company’s executive director for 13 years and left to accept a job leading McCarter Theatre Center in Princeton, N.J. Miller originally hired Jones to join TheatreSquared as an assistant stage manager in April 2014.
“Her warmth, precision and sense of humor were quickly evident,” Miller said by email last week. Back then, TheatreSquared was a much smaller company. There was a lot to do and never quite enough people to do it. “But Shannon just got things done, anticipating problems and solving them before I knew they existed.”
During her nearly decade-long tenure at TheatreSquared, Jones has been at the forefront of major shifts in the organization’s growth by helping navigate it into a new $31 million, 50,000-square-foot home in 2019, then helping lead the organization through the new realities when the covid pandemic crippled the arts industry a year later, according to the theater’s communication manager, Lara Jo Hightower.
“What sets [Jones] apart is her ability to empower others and help them grow, by coaching and not micromanaging,” which allows TheatreSquared to grow its bench strength, says Esther Silver-Parker, a TheatreSquared board member. “She has strong emotional intelligence and understands that [it] drives performance and helps leaders get the best out of people they lead.”
Silver-Parker appreciates that Jones extends that mindset outside the walls of the theater and into the community, showing that she understands the theater’s impact reaches far beyond growing subscription rates to engage people in the community who may not otherwise have an opportunity to experience theater.
Todd Simmons, president of the TheatreSquared board of directors, describes Jones as very well spoken and capable with a get-it-done type of personality.
“She just inspired a lot of confidence,” Simmons says. Jones is “fantastic at listening to a lot of perspectives and synthesizing those ideas or views into really ‘What do we need to get done?’ and what decisions are needed to move the organization forward.”
Jones is always balanced and even in her responses, consistent and a great communicator once she has heard all the varying perspectives, Simmons says, which he believes is the quality that has allowed her to be successful in the transition to executive director.
‘A GREAT STAGE MANAGER’
While the transition from stage manager to general manager and ultimately executive director might not be evident on the surface, “the qualities that make for a great stage manager — brilliant with people, an expert facilitator, proficiently organized, able to set the tone for the room — are also ideal in a leader,” Miller says. Jones had those qualities and more, as well as a clear passion, pride and affection for TheatreSquared. “She was
always curious to learn and take on new leadership tasks, even if they weren’t yet in her job description.”
Miller and Jones often sat down to talk as she grew into progressively larger roles within the company, and while Miller says he’s grateful she credits him as a mentor, “if I’m honest, I learned more from her than she did from me,” he says.
WORLD NOT YET A STAGE
Jones spent her childhood in Jacksonville, Fla., with three older sisters who were 19 years, 8 years and 3 years her senior. Her mother was a preschool teacher, while her father was a medical instrument technician who worked in local hospitals.
“We were a pretty standard American family despite being from Florida,” Jones quips. They took family trips together on occasion, and her parents were hard workers. “Being a Black family in the South, there were different expectations and upbringing. They worked hard to provide me with opportunities.”
Now as a new mother herself, Jones is beginning to understand the level of work involved in creating such a nice, stable family life. But on the whole, the arts weren’t something her family was involved in. They didn’t go to the theater or other performances together. Jacksonville itself was more of a sports-centric town, and the non-sports part of its identity came largely from the naval base.
“I think theater for a long time has had a veneer of inaccessibility,” Jones says. “As something you do when you’re wealthy (or) middle class.”
As a kid she didn’t have much, if any, access to theater, but her parents made sure she stayed involved with other activities like dance and choir. The Joneses took Shannon to the dance studio run by a family friend when she was just 3 years old, where she gained experience in ballet and pointe, tap, modern and jazz dance. She loved all the resulting dance recitals, although she loved her one solo less.
LET HER TAG ALONG
Whenever she wasn’t dancing, she would ride her bicycle around the apartment complex or catch tadpoles from its little pond, keeping them in an aquarium before releasing them again. If she was lucky, her older siblings would let her tag along on occasion.
As Jones got into middle school, her dance life faded away, and she gave musical instruments a shot. She could plunk out a few notes on the piano, but she didn’t get too far into musical life until joining chorus in seventh grade. Suddenly her alto voice was added to the show choir in all its sequined glory.
Shortly before 9/11, Jones was able to go with the choir on a once-in-a-lifetime trip to Austria for an international music festival.
“It was so amazing,” Jones says, recalling the extraordinary stops like those to the home of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and the “Sound of Music” gazebo. In retrospect, she’s glad she was a part of that group since it gave her that very experience.
Initially interested in a medical degree, Jones focused her efforts on getting into Stanton College Preparatory School, a top-ranked public high school that was highly selective and offered international baccalaureate classes.
Though Jones had not attended the feeder school for Stanton College Prep, she got in with the help of sibling preference, since her sister only three years older than she had attended. While there, she needed an elective and chose theater.
GAINING GRIT
During Jones’ freshman year of high school, her theater class was doing a production of “The Taming of the Shrew,” something that they worked on after school as part of the elective. She loved so many things about it; she got to be a character, sure, but it was just fun to hang out backstage with her friends.
Jones hadn’t yet dropped the idea of going into the medical field, but once she got into her first show, she just kept doing them. She was in plays throughout her freshman and sophomore years until finally “I found myself really homing in on the idea of theater,” she says.
When her drama teacher, Shirley Sacks, told her she could have a career in the arts, Jones wasn’t so sure. Jacksonville didn’t have a solid arts and culture hub, for one thing. But she was enjoying taking something non-essential, and eventually her teacher convinced her to join the international baccalaureate theater program.
“From that point on, I started to understand its viability as a real career,” Jones says. In that program, Jones and her classmates did a tour to preschool and elementary classes with School House Rock, in which she played Interplanet Janet. “During that time I started getting that technical bug for the planning, organizing and keeping people on track.”
When her teacher noticed those qualities in Jones, she pulled her aside and told her, “I really think you’d make an excellent stage manager,” explaining how not everyone needs to be an actor and that Jones had a special potential. Sacks took her into an entirely new side of theater that she hadn’t known existed, but she warned, “You need to grow a backbone.”
ENERGY AND EFFORT
Sacks began to help her develop that skill set within the theater program and also introduced her to their community theater, where Jones spent her time backstage at shows. Her mom took notice of all the energy and effort her daughter was pouring into it and told her that she was treating it like a job.
She felt like it was exactly that at the time, and years later she would find that attitude paid off once it was her formal job for other theaters.
While considering a potential university, Jones was aware that plenty of schools offered bachelor programs in theater that allowed you could pick another subset to specialize in. But University of Central Florida had a few advantages. It was in-state, making it cheaper than other options, and only a two-anda-half-hour drive from home. More importantly, it was one of only a few schools with a bachelor of fine arts for stage management. Jones was sold, and she wound up having an incredible time in a “stellar program.”
Following her undergraduate experience, Jones worked at a number of theaters before landing at Birmingham Children’s Theatre in Alabama. Among her early career mentors was a stage manager who had worked with TheatreSquared’s Artistic Director Bob Ford and connected Jones to him. Just one phone call with Ford opened her eyes to the opportunity that awaited her in Northwest Arkansas. It just felt right, she says, and she took the leap of faith, moving to Fayetteville to become the theater’s assistant stage manager.
‘A GREAT LEADER’
Actress Liz Callaway met Jones in 2019 when she did the one-person play “Every Brilliant Thing.”
Jones was “capable, organized and a great leader,” Callaway said by email. “She had a job to do, but was also open to surprises and ideas that would pop up in rehearsal.”
While doing a one-person play is extremely challenging, Jones took the edge off and made Callaway feel taken care of, especially with her habit of taking the temperature of the room and adjusting her plan to fit it.
“She is a great collaborator, which is so essential in the theater,” Callaway says. “Shannon has so much knowledge and experience in theater that both TheatreSquared and artists in general would benefit from having her in the room.”
When Jones and her boyfriend Brodie had an apartment sold out from under them, Miller placed a call to the longest running board member, Susan Hall, to see if she would be willing to host the couple for a few weeks while they found a new place.
“They were delightful to have around,” Hall says. “Shannon is the most efficient person I have ever met in my life. She is organized to the nth degree but nice about it, charming, very pleasant, doesn’t make you feel like you’re not doing something right, just lovely. … She has every attribute for a wonderful stage manager.”
GROWN SO CLOSE
By the time they did find an apartment, they had all grown so close that Hall begged them to stay and be her children.
Meanwhile, during their stay, she learned a lot of things about stage work. The play they were working on at the time called for broken glass on the floor, but since you can’t use the real thing on stage, Jones and Hall improvised, making panes of glass with sugar and sheet pans.
Hall delighted in being a part of the creative process.
On March 10, 2020, only a couple of days before the U.S. shutdown began, Hall and Jones had a dinner party with a group of folks who worked at TheatreSquared. Those sorts of spontaneous potlucks happen a lot as they try to get to know the visiting artists, only this one had the extra special distinction of being the moment Brodie chose to propose. It was a lovely memory, Hall says, one they hung onto differently as they entered a period when getting together with people changed.
The couple were married in Hall’s garden, then later had a ceremony in Virginia for their families. When their daughter AJ was born, Susan became Gigi.
“They feel like a part of our family,” Hall says. “Everybody is highly on board for her to do this [new role], and she has really risen to her strengths.”
In preparing to move up to executive director, Jones was diligent in working to understand all aspects of the role before agreeing to take it on, Simmons says, from the board, from her more than 80 colleagues — the people whom she would be the future leader of — as well as the patrons.
She worked on “understanding what [staff members] needed, but also how they could complement her in this new role,” Simmons says. “She displayed a lot of humility in realizing she didn’t have all the answers. I love that in a leader.”
The culture at TheatreSquared of taking ownership and pride in their work while fostering collaboration, a readiness to take on risks and adapt to change, is something Jones maintains and grows.
“Shannon has always been integral to creating and nurturing that spirit,” Martin Miller says. “Northwest Arkansas is lucky to have her leading TheatreSquared into its bright next act.”
“Shannon knows that leading TheatreSquared is an opportunity to create her legacy. I am confident that she will build on the foundation that others laid and take the theater to a new level of excellence.”
— Esther Silver-Parker, TheatreSquared board member (NWA Democrat-Gazette/Andy Shupe)