20 years at helm of flagship theater
“I was absolutely sure that I was going to be fired,” Carey Perloff says of her tumultuous first year as artistic director of the American Conservatory Theater.
She had good reason to worry. Outraged Catholic Church members had picketed and leafleted playwright Dario Fo’s satire “The Pope and the Witch.” Audiences had walked out in droves, and the theater and local newspapers were flooded with angry letters about the pervasive, S&M tinged nudity in another production, “The Duchess of Malfi.”
ACT was already in trouble by the time Perloff took over in
1992. Saddled with heavy debt, the Bay Area’s flagship theater was struggling to raise funds to renovate and reopen its Geary Theater home, which had been badly damaged in the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake. The Board of Trustees had taken a big gamble by hiring the little-known 32-year-old head of New York’s small Classic Stage Company to lead the high-profile company through hard times.
At the end of her first season, Perloff was summoned by board Chair Alan Stein “to his beautiful house on Russian Hill. I sat by the window and looked at the bay. And I remember thinking, ‘What a beautiful place this is, how much I’m going to miss it.’
“And he said to me, ‘Carey, this season was very hard. You’ve done the hard part. Now I want you to stay and see it through.’ It took me about 10 minutes to realize he was asking me to stay. I still can’t believe the courage that took.”
“She can stay forever, as far as I’m concerned,” says ACT’s current board Chair Nancy Livingston. As Perloff, 53, celebrates her 20th season as artistic director, the board has renewed her contract for another three years. Out of debt and operating on a $20 million budget, ACT has long been back in the beautifully refurbished Geary Theater and has just acquired a long-desired second stage, the old Strand movie house on Market Street. It has recently converted part of its Costume Shop into a small, flexible performance space, its master of fine arts program is flourishing, and for the first time, it has the added insurance of an endowment fund — now at $30 million.
Quick to credit others
Perloff, who has staged daring productions of classics as well as brought bold, new voices to the theater, is quick to credit others — Stein for guiding the rebuilding of the Geary, Livingston (“this intrepid, tiny woman”) for spearheading the endowment, her new partner on the business side, Executive Director Ellen Richard (“the gift that keeps on giving”), for the new theaters.
Those she credits generally point the finger right back at her.
“I don’t think Carey has ever been given enough credit for how much her drive and energy were instrumental in getting ACT back into the Geary,” says acting teacher Richard Seyd, one of Perloff’s two associate artistic directors during her first year. As “chaotic” as that season was, he adds, it “put ACT on the front pages” and gave notice that “there was a fresh breeze blowing at ACT.”
“When we traveled to the O’Neill Theatre Center together, what blew me away was her ability to be totally present in everything she’s doing,” Livingston says. “She was directing a play there. She was mentoring young actors. At night, she was writing her own play. And she took time out to bike all over the place and go swimming twice a day in Long Island Sound. She bikes all over this city. She goes to the gym. She does yoga and Pilates regularly.
“The one word I would apply to her is indefatigable.”
“What’s it like being married to a whirlwind?” Perloff’s husband, San Francisco lawyer Anthony Giles says, anticipating a reporter’s question. “Yeah, even people who’ve just met her comment on that. She radiates some kind of superhuman level of energy, but I guess I’m just used to it.
“But have you ever met her mother? Unbelievable. There’s something in that female gene line that’s extraordinary. Our daughter has it as well, so that’s the proof.”
Their daughter, Alexandra, 23, graduated from Harvard last year and now lives in Paris, teaching at the American University. Their son, Nicholas, 18, is a freshman at Columbia.
“They’re nonprofit babies,” Perloff says. “I think growing up in that world had a big impact, watching me fundraise all the time … and engage with every level of the community. … Lexie, she’s always been very public policy oriented. I think what she’d really like to do is run UNESCO.”
Perloff wasn’t raised in either the nonprofit or theater world, but in a secular Jewish family with eclectic literary, arts and intellectual interests. She grew up in Washington, D.C., the second of two daughters born to cardiologist and professor of medicine Joseph Perloff, from Louisiana, and author, poetry scholar and critic Marjorie Perloff, born in Vienna to parents who fled the Nazis when she was a child.
“I was raised by very intense cultural Jews,” Perloff says, “and in so many ways it’s had a huge impact on me. I mean, Jews are people of the word, and I inherited that, God knows. Language is really important to me. Education, every notion that Jews have about family and about history.”
‘Good at everything’
Her mother, now retired from teaching — at Stanford and at the University of Southern California — says as a child Perloff showed traits of the woman she would become.
“She was always very definite. And very independent. She was very popular, and she was good at everything — almost annoyingly so. She could do cartwheels and stand on her head, things none of the rest of us could do.
“And she had this doll corner. Well, half her room was taken up with these Madame Alexander dolls, about 12 of them, and they all had names. They had rooms. They had a school and tests and got grades, and they had a newspaper. … They wrote letters. She would make all kinds of things, fountains, gardens. And they had to do this and perform that. So she was kind of a director even then.”
She was also an aspiring dancer and archaeologist, among other things. Studying archaeology led her to theater when, learning ancient Greek (she also reads Latin and speaks French and Italian), her professor had the class learn the alphabet through the plays of Aristophanes.
Stages Greek tragedies
“I got so hooked I read a lot of Greek tragedy, in Greek,” Perloff says. “And we staged a lot of the plays in Greek, which is an extraordinary experience because nobody else understands it. You have to learn how to make it visceral, how to make it communicate even to people who don’t speak the language.” (That background comes in handy when Perloff stages Greek tragedies at ACT, such as her memorable “Hecuba” and her most recent production of “Elektra.”)
As an undergraduate at Stanford, she fell under the influence of Martin Esslin, the pre-eminent scholar of the theater of the absurd.
“That began my love of Beckett and Pinter,” she says. “So on the one hand, I have this passion for the Greeks and Schiller and Marlowe, and on the other hand, the minimalists. I could do a whole season of Pinter and Beckett, and I’d be thrilled.”
A year as a Fulbright scholar at Oxford set the direction of her career. “I was supposed to be studying literature,” she says. “But I spent the time just directing plays and trying to learn by doing it.”
Oxford is also where she met her husband, a theater enthusiast from Ross-on-Wye in Wales, when they were both auditioning actors for the plays they were taking to the Edinburgh Festival.
“He had shaved his head for finals and was wearing skinny red corduroy trousers, and he was hilarious. And charming. Never did I think I would meet the man I was going to marry when I was 21. This was not what I was planning to do. But it was the luckiest thing that ever happened in my life.”
After Oxford, she moved to New York to try her hand at theater. Giles followed, enrolling in the doctoral program at Columbia’s Harriman Institute, studying Soviet foreign policy under Zbigniew Brzezinski. Then, as the Iron Curtain began to crack in 1989, Soviet studies began to change. At that time Perloff was director of Classic Stage and she and Giles had one child. Giles says the shift in international affairs proved fortuitous in his wife’s early years at ACT. He turned from Soviet studies to law and, as a student at Boalt Hall, could tailor his schedule to hers. Perloff, a frequent blogger, wrote recently for the Huffington Post about the difficulties of holding down a full-time job — let alone running a major theater company — while raising children. She credits her husband with making it all possible.
“I never would’ve managed to have children in this business had it not been for him. I never could’ve figured out how to do it, period.”
“To be honest, it seems more daunting in retrospect than it seemed at the time,” he says. “We just dealt with it.”
As a self-proclaimed “morning person,” Perloff handled getting the kids off to school. Giles, a night person, “always cooked” — except when Alexandra began fixing fourcourse meals in high school — and was the primary evening parent.
“Because I had children, I always left the theater at 6, even when I was in rehearsal,” Perloff says. “I always had dinner with my kids and my husband. Always.”
Day starts at 6 a.m.
A typical day for Perloff starts at home at 6 a.m., a good time to take care of overseas calls and Skype with collaborators in England or elsewhere abroad. Perloff is at her office by 8:30 a.m. (“That’s when I can talk to the East Coast, and get my own work done before everybody comes in around 10.”) Her day may be taken up with five-hour rehearsals, meetings with staff, board members, teaching or other duties, and she’s often back at the theater in the evening.
“One of the challenges of being an artistic director is that your right brain has to somehow stay in the pulse of your own creative work, whether that’s the rehearsal you’re in, the production you’re planning next. … It’s complicated, and it means going to see as much work as possible. I read about 20 plays a week. I do a lot of teaching in the Conservatory.”
Not that she doesn’t take time to relax — though some of her off-time feeds her creative work, such as frequent visits to other theaters, large and small, or to the Opera, Symphony, Ballet and other dance companies. Her passion for travel often dovetails with working on a show in Canada or seeing work in Russia or England. She and Giles love to walk in the Marin Headlands. She’s also an avid museumgoer. When she needs a break from her relentless schedule, she’ll often drop into the de Young, near their home just outside Golden Gate Park, for 20 minutes or an hour of quiet inspiration.
The challenges ahead
There are plenty of challenges ahead, not the least of which, Perloff and Richard emphasize, is the skyrocketing cost of real estate with the tech boom hitting downtown San Francisco. ACT needs to find a new home for its offices, studios and classrooms within a year, having been priced out of its longtime lease at 30 Grant Ave.
There are major fundraising campaigns in the works for the Strand renovation and for ACT’s MFA program. And there’s the administration of the Costume Shop, under two new grants that enable ACT to offer it as rehearsal and performance space to other arts groups rent-free.
The board also has launched a Carey Perloff Creative Venture Fund — which has raised more than $1.6 million — to finance an MFA scholarship in her name and help support future productions as well as arts education in local public schools.
“If you’ve been in a job for 20 years, I’m sure you start to think about legacy,” says board President Rusty Rueff.
“Lately I’ve seen Carey think more and more about the impact that our theater has on the community. … And making our work more accessible to the whole city, playing a role in the evolution of central Market with the Strand and the Costume Shop. I think that’s going to be a big part of her legacy.”