San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Organizers sound off on toll of coronavirus.
They were supposed to build a bridge from one era to the next. Some of them felt ready to charge in with bold, splashy plans.
Their predecessors were supposed to go out with a last hurrah, maybe a bucketlist project. At least they’d get to give hugs goodbye.
But because of the coronavirus, new Bay Area arts leaders didn’t get to have anything close to the first years they’d envisioned, nor did outgoing leaders get to sing their intended swan songs or bid their valedictions.
In early May, The Chronicle asked Bay Area arts leaders two questions: What has been the damage to your company or organization? What does it mean for the future of your company or organization?
Now we look at the toll on leaders as individuals, focusing on those at major local institutions for whom the coronavirus outbreak will mark either a first or last chapter. (You may notice a key omission in the list below — the San Francisco Symphony’s Michael Tilson Thomas. The Chronicle will cover his departure more fully in conjunction with the Symphony’s 25day online farewell to him in June.)
The following answers have been edited for length and clarity.
Incoming arts leaders
These leaders were chosen because the onset of the pandemic affected either their first year on the job or the first artistic season they had primarily planned.
Tim Bond, 60, artistic director, TheatreWorks Silicon Valley as of July 2020
Josh Costello, 45, artistic director, Aurora Theatre Company in Berkeley as of July 2019
Khori Dastoor, 39, general director, Opera San José as of October 2019
Jeremy Geffen, 45, executive and artistic director, Cal Performances as of April 2019
Anne Lai, 49, executive director, SFFilm as of March 2020
Johanna Pfaelzer, 51, artistic director, Berkeley Repertory Theatre as of September 2019
Kelly Tweeddale, 60, executive director, San Francisco Ballet as of June 2019
Monetta White, 54, executive director, Museum of the African Diaspora as of December 2019
Sarah Williams, 33, managing director, California Shakespeare Theater as of September 2019
James Woolley, 34, executive director, Frameline as of August 2019
White: You’re always measured by what the first 100 days look like, and I didn’t even get an opportunity for that. When you take on a position working in nonprofit and the arts, you always know there are going to be some challenges, but no one could have seen this coming. Even if you were relying on advisers and you had mentors, they’re in the same position you are.
Pfaelzer: I wanted artists who I was bringing to Berkeley Rep for the first time to fall in love with it and want to come back. I wanted artists who had a really long history with Berkeley Rep to trust that the values were being upheld. Now? Some part of it is going to be about survival, and that’s the part I can’t do by myself.
Lai:I was coming into a new organization and also a new role, because I’d never been an executive director before. I knew my first year would be like sipping from a fire hose, taking in a tremendous amount of information about the cultural institutions and relationships, looking at the first festival and grounding myself day to day. And a lot of that is still superrelevant. I still have to get to know the staff and the organizational history and who we partner with. That doesn’t change, it’s just the way I access that information has changed. I’m not sitting down and having coffee with anyone.
Costello: It was a time to not make
radical changes but to build the structures that we need to be able to go above and beyond what we’ve been able to do before.
Williams: What I expected was to do a lot of listening and to understand how the organization worked before coming in and making drastic changes. Obviously, it looks very different now. That has been one of the bigger surprises for me, just how ephemeral everything’s been. For a 46yearold organization, for it to feel like we’re actually just 1 year old or zero years old and starting over is not what I was expecting.
Dastoor: I expected a lot of handshaking, which is clearly out of the question now.
Costello: If there’s that buzz of energy among the staff that you can feel. It’s a lot harder to see it when we’re not all in the same place. Doing all these meetings over Zoom, it’s hard to tell if somebody’s being quiet because they’re not happy or are they just not wanting to take up room in the Zoom meeting. Is their camera off because they’re pissed off, or is their camera off because they’re in their pajamas?
Williams: I was really looking forward to being able to reflect back on my first year and think, “We really instituted some stability into the organization and we put some strong processes in place.” “Stability” is no longer a word that can really be used these days.
Tweeddale: The metric was going to be broadening the Ballet’s reputation internationally by building out our digital stage by the third or fourth year. And now, in a funny way, the digital stage is right in front of us because it’s the only way to survive.
Woolley: For me it was about audience engagement. We had some great plans to make the (Frameline44 film) festival even more exciting, and they mostly had to do with onsite entertainment. That’s exactly the part that COVID19 hit.
White: None of that has really changed. With fundraising, for example, I’ve had to exercise my creative muscles a little bit more. We just finished an online auction. I might not have thought of an online auction prior to COVID19.
Bond: (Director and choreographer) Ping Chong, who was one of my mentors, said to me many years ago, when I took over the producing artistic directorship at Syracuse Stage, “You have to be a warrior with a sense of the absurd.” What’s it like having to revise your plans so radically when you’re just getting under way?
Williams: It means I have very weird dreams. It means I don’t sleep great. It means I’m always thinking about work, because nothing ever feels set. It just feels like you’re on a hamster wheel. I live in a studio apartment, I live by myself, so the space in which I travel every day is very contained. It feels hard to separate my Cal Shakes life from the rest of my life, because it’s all become one at this point. Costello: As long as I was focused on getting back to normal, I was depressed. As soon as I really shifted to “There is no getting back to normal. We’re in a new place, and we need to behave like it,” then suddenly it all opened up.
Geffen: I’ve now been planning artistic seasons for over 20 years, and I’ve yet to encounter a season that remained as it was on paper. It’s never been this pronounced, but there’s always a degree of change. Oftentimes you end up with something better than the original product.
Pfaelzer: I’ve never made and unmade so many plans in such a short period of time. (Managing Director) Susie (Medak) and I keep looking at each other: “Are we doing something wrong?” Nope, we just keep responding to the information as it reveals itself.
Dastoor: What’s comforted me a lot is the thought that we will do all of these projects. All this work, all this investment, will not be lost. But I’m not going to lie, it’s immensely challenging to wake up one day and rip up what you worked on the day before and start over with a blank sheet because everything’s different.
Bond: I just have to let go of any expectation that this is a season that reflects much of who I am. But it certainly will reflect how I’m adaptable to what the changes are.
Tweeddale: It’s about managing what they call the Valley of Despair. When you face really big challenges, you can quickly go into it, but then you start managing through that and start getting up the other side of the valley. At the same time you have to remember that everyone goes through it at a different rate, so while you’re pushing forward you also have to make sure no one is getting left behind. And when
you’re in there you have to find others to pull you up. Do you have any regrets about taking this job?
Dastoor: No, no, no.
Pfaelzer: No. None. I have anxieties about how to keep doing it well. The larger the company, the harder it is to walk through crises like this, because the need is big. The responsibility is big. The footprint is big. The relationship is big. But on the other hand, each one of those things represents another layer of support and history and practice that you can draw upon.
Williams: “Regret” is not the word I would use. On my best days, I think of this moment and how a year from now — two years from now, a decade from now — this chapter in my autobiography is going to be the one where I learned all the lessons, or at least a lot of lessons. On my worst days, this is just really hard.
Bond: There is no other place I would want to be than solving how the American theater is going to survive this. I would be going crazy going, “Oh, I want to be in one of those rooms where people are figuring out how to solve this at a professional theater.” I would not want to be figuring out how to teach online.
White: I’m a native San Franciscan, an African American woman who grew up here, who remembered when the museum was being built and how important it was for me personally. To be at the helm to protect that is important to me.
Outgoing arts leaders
These leaders were chosen because the onset of the pandemic affected their final year on the job.
Christine Bullin, president and general director, Chanticleer since 1999
Loretta Greco, artistic director, Magic Theatre since 2008
Sheri Greenawald, 72, director, San Francisco Opera Center and Merola Opera Program since 2002
Robert Kelley, 73, founding artistic director, TheatreWorks Silicon Valley since 1970
Nicholas McGegan, 70, music director, Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra & Chorale since 1985
How had you planned to say goodbye to your organization?
Kelley: An event we were having a few days before my official retirement — which, I didn’t think of the title, but I was very flattered by it — called “Sunday in the Park With Kelley.” We had already started the process of trying to get the word out from all over the country, to have a gathering of the tribes. It was going to be a Woodstock kind of event. We’re going to do it exactly a year later, in June of 2021.
Greco: I thought I would get my Gene Price Award (from the San Francisco Bay Area Theatre Critics Circle). I would get to make a fun speech. I just got an Honorary MFA from ACT. I thought (former Grants for the Arts Director) Kary Schulman and I would be the centerpiece of our gala. Now it’s all virtual, and it’s a little weird, and it’s a little scary, because I anticipated reentering the field in the new way. It’s a question of what kind of field there’s going to be to enter.
McGegan: With Leclair’s opera “Scylla et Glaucus,” which would have made a nice splash for my last hurrah. All is not lost, though. The idea is to revive it in a couple of years. The sets and costumes have already been built, and I’ve edited the score for our performance. It’s just a shame I didn’t have a nice goingaway party where I could’ve ascended to heaven.
Bullin: We had scheduled a tour to Australia and New Zealand, and our final concert was in New Zealand, which is my native country. But I had interdicted any kind of big gala party that all my friends would’ve had to come to. I’ve been to those, and I don’t enjoy them. I told everyone, “I’m going to spare you that party, but if you want to celebrate my tenure then take me to lunch.”
What alternative rituals of closure have you come up with?
Bullin: I’d really love it if people would say, “We’re going to have a couple of people over for dinner in your honor and would you come?”
Kelley: I’m thinking I’ll be doing less Zooming as of July 1. It’s not exactly a turnoffthelights, putontheghostlight and lockthedoors event for me. It’s probably obvious that after this amount of time, inevitably, I would think of this as a family. Your role might change in the family, but it’s still your family.
Greco: I hope we can pull off Caryl Churchill’s “Escaped Alone.” It might be outside. It might be to groups of 20, 6 feet apart, masked. It would be beautiful if the last thing I do is to make something, and to make it with this new world in mind.
Greenawald: I’m not worrying about real closure until December, but for now I’m making sure I thank people as I go through these months. I’m making sure everyone knows how much I appreciate them. When you look at your whole tenure, what is the story you tell yourself about it?
Greco: The story is that playwrights Mfoniso (Udofia) and Taylor (Mac) and Lloyd (Suh), they’re all grown up. The story is we grew a whole amazing cohort of artists, who have not only arrived but who are completely reimagining the landscape of American theater and are pushing the culture forward. The story for me is, “What’s that next generation?”
McGegan: The end did coincide with my 70th birthday, which is biblically the rite of passage — I had my threescore and 10, so now get out. And it also coincided with 40 years in the U.S.
In the career that I’ve had, from the ’70s up to now, we’ve avoided war in the countries I’ve lived in. I can look back and think I was lucky, but for those who are looking forward to a career now, I have every sympathy.
Kelley: You really don’t wind up in a leadership position anywhere without understanding that sometimes you’re leading in the sun, and sometimes you’re leading in the dark. This is a dark time for the arts in general. Retirement? That’s just a transition. I’ll always be part of TheatreWorks. I don’t see it as the end of something, but as a change.
Greenawald: I feel like I snuck into town, and now I guess I’ll sneak out.