San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
At the helm in uncharted waters
Lisa Steindler ends sailing sabbatical to helm company through pandemic
Bay Area arts leaders share thoughts on navigating a changed world.
Z Space Executive Artistic Director Lisa Steindler remembers the moment her fourmonth sailing sabbatical finally began.
In January, she was sitting in the galley of the 40foot Catalina she and her husband had chartered — rechristened the Snow Goose, after her favorite book — as it was docked off St. Petersburg, Fla. She thinks it was the end of a Friday.
“My dog was probably in my lap,” she says. “I very well could have been holding a glass of wine, for all I know.”
She felt some loneliness, but also relief and pleasure. She was going to sail the Florida Keys, out to the Bahamas, maybe all the way to the Turks and Caicos.
She and her senior staff had already been sharing managerial duties for years, in a distributive leadership model. She had left the theater with positive cash flow and on track for bookings for the year. She had already drafted her away message, just as she and her staff had collaborated on an eightpage “manifesto,” as they called it, about what to do in case anything went wrong.
Steindler remembers activating her away message “and shutting my computer, and just sitting there kind of silently for a little bit, drinking my wine and feeling like, ‘I’m not going to open that computer for a long time if I don’t have to.’ In a way it was a small ceremony I made for myself.”
Not in Steindler’s eightpage manifesto: What to do in event of a pandemic.
All Bay Area arts leaders are facing extraordinary obstacles right now, but the coronavirus era presents special challenges to those who are either taking the helm or leaving it, to those who must either set the tone as the new boss or say goodbye to something they built.
But Steindler left and came back to the same organization during the outbreak — the same organization, but also a completely different one. One that’s no longer presenting art. One whose building is empty of people.
It was weird enough to weather the change in real time, as did Managing Director Shafer Mazow, Associate Artistic Director Rose Oser and General Manager Abigail Pañares. But for Steindler, it’s as if galeforce winds pulled an aboutface, all while she suddenly has to figure out what kind of new vessel she’s steering.
Steindler’s nowconcluded sabbatical was funded by 02 Initiatives, which gives grants to nonprofit leaders in San Francisco, Alameda and Contra Costa counties. As part of the program, awardees are supposed to cease all contact with the organizations they lead during their leave.
Steindler, 54, has been leading Z Space, which produces new works of theater, dance and genredefying performance, since 2007, after joining the organization as director of new works in 2005.
“The pressure, the daytoday 24/7, the being on, the ups and downs of the economy — it really takes a toll on you, mentally, physically, idealistically,” she says. “I felt like I needed this time away for myself to have renewal of sorts, to get a perspective about the world I’m living in and the work that I’m doing, and the way I felt like I could do that was to step away from it.”
Also, she wanted time with her husband, Lou Helmuth, 61. Throughout their marriage, they’ve almost never worked in the same city.
“We rarely have spent probably a month together in our 30 years,” she says. “It was also frightening, too. I was like, ‘God, can we be together, especially on a 40foot boat, for four months? What does that look like?’ ”
Steindler and Helmuth fell in love on a 22foot ketch, or twomasted sailboat, called the Brave Venture on Lake Champlain. “Maybe our first date, he took me on that boat,” she recalls. Sailing has been a constant in their relationship ever since, even as time together has been scarce.
Though Steindler sailed a little in her youth in Massachusetts and Vermont, she came to love it as an adult.“I love the unpredictability of it,” she says. “That’s probably the Lisa compass that likes to take risks . ... In any moment, you have to be on it.”
She pays attention to winds and weather and tides and wave heights. She focuses completely on her vessel, its occupants and safe passage to their destination. She loves strategizing about the sail. She loves being at the wheel. She loves navigating shallow waters. She loves waking up in the morning and figuring out how to best respond, with the tools at hand, to the day’s weather and water. “Navigating and working with nature is written in my DNA,” she says.
“This is a weird metaphor, but I’m going to use it anyways. It is a lot like running Z Space,” she says.
She and Helmuth had a threeweek delay, so she read novels — emphatically not plays. It took her a long time to stop thinking about Z Space, to stop imagining scenarios and mentally writing little skits about how her staff
would handle them without her. The pandemic hadn’t started. The theater world was still focused on AB5.
When she and Helmuth finally cast off, on Feb. 17, they traveled south on the Intracoastal Waterway, motoring through inlets instead of sailing on the open sea for longer than they had intended, as they got used to the Snow Goose, the largest boat they had ever manned.
Mazow remembers the outbreak first began affecting theater operations around this time.
“One of our technical directors sent an email around saying, ‘Hey, heads up, there’s this thing. We shouldn’t freak out about it, but we should talk about how to sanitize surfaces,’ ” Mazow recalls. “That was when it first became a thing in my consciousness around Z Space.”
Steindler and Helmuth, meanwhile, sailed alongside dolphins. They saw sea turtles pop their heads above the surface. They saw colors in the water and sky that would look “gaudy” if humans tried to recreate them.
They left Key West during the first weekend of March and had no cell service for about 3½ weeks. On March 9, the Z team sent its first email to audiences explaining new sanitation precautions. It was “that inbetween period, where some people had shows and some people didn’t,” Oser remembers. “We probably spent 10 hours drafting and redrafting this email.”
On March 11, the Z team met with their 02 consultant.
“It came up then: Do we want to contact Lisa?” Mazow recalls. “At that moment, we said, ‘We want to respect the sabbatical. We think we know what the right thing to do in this moment is.’ ”
But others at Z Space, including board member and resident playwright Peter Sinn Nachtrieb, reached out to her. They didn’t hear back right away. “We were just concerned about our friend that we loved,” Mazow says.
“It kind of fluctuated between, ‘Wow, I hope she’s doing OK,’ and, ‘Maybe she’s doing better than all of us,’ ” Oser says.
When San Francisco Mayor London Breed issued the shelterinplace order, on March 16, the Z team wrote another manifesto of sorts. “Early on we decided to write down our values and what was most important to us in the crisis,” Mazow says. It guided them in communicating with renters, audiences and staff. Among its tenets: “If we were to reduce our staff hours, we would do it across the board, regardless of position,” Oser says.
When Steindler and Helmuth arrived at Fort Jefferson, in the Dry Tortugas, they heard from other sailors that borders were shutting down, which meant the pair couldn’t go to the Bahamas. They also learned that marinas in Florida weren’t letting in itinerant boats, not even for fuel or water. They had a slip reserved in Key West, but who knew if they would still be allowed back?
The news about the virus and how much the world was changing started to sink in for Steindler when a fellow boater at the Dry Tortugas had a heart attack. The group wanted to send him to a hospital in Key West, but the man feared getting the virus there. They reached out to the Coast Guard, which also brought up the virus.
“We started understanding a little bit I think in those moments: This is big, because this is about life and death,” she says. Still, at that point, she admits, “we didn’t know how the world was treating the pandemic.”
Steindler and Helmuth set off for Key West — with a showmeyourpapers nighttime surprise from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement along the way — arriving the first week of April. Key West let them dock after all. “It was like walking into a new world. Within 10 minutes we started understanding what was happening,” she says.
The couple immediately got in touch with their families. And finally, Steindler reached out to Z Space to let her team know she was OK.
“Lou and I just sat there thinking, ‘What have we been away from, and what did we just come back to?’ ” she recalls.
“At that moment, we were like, ‘Well, we’re going to just pack up and get some food and head on back out, because probably the best place for us to be is out on the water away from everyone, given the virus.’ But it became apparent to us, within 24 hours, that that was not the smartest thing for us, that we needed to get back somewhere
on land.”
Steindler and Helmuth packed suitcases full of all the food they had on the boat and flew to Vermont, where they have a cabin. At their layover at Chicago O’Hare International Airport, the terminal was so empty Steindler could let her dog Rabbit off leash to run around. Flying out, she saw airplanes parked in the grass.
The pair have been sheltering in place in their cabin since April 5, and she officially returned to work at Z Space, albeit remotely, on May 18. Steindler plans to continue working from Vermont until she can safely return to San Francisco.
“It’s just such a different world, a different helm that I’m taking back,” she said, acknowledging that her fulltime staff have been reduced to 80% pay, though a $250,000 Paycheck Protection Program loan Mazow secured has helped. “The prospect of attempting to plan anything seems futile.”
At one of her first virtual meetings since her sabbatical, she got a little emotional, processing the new world.
“It reminded us of how we felt at the beginning of shelterinplace,” Oser says, “that panic of suddenly realizing that things might look really different for a long time. Now, Shafer and Abigail and I are a little bit past that. We did the highs and lows. We did the excited brainstorming. Now we’re on to ‘Let’s make the real action plan.’ ”
Oser thinks it’ll be a while before the whole, reunited team is in the same phase of coping, or even in the same physical space.
In the meantime, Steindler says, “there are ongoing conversations that we’re having about how do we get through this, and how do we help the artistic community at large to get through this? What is our place in it all? I think theater’s going to be one of the last things that’s going to reopen, probably.
“Trying to figure out how we navigate that, it’s the same thing as sailing,” she says.
And she finds herself asking the same questions she asked on the ocean: “Which way are the winds going, and are the tides in our favor, and how can we navigate through this crisis?”