Actor’s challenging new role as leader
Sean Fenton, the new executive director of Theatre Bay Area, knows what it was like to be an actor in a show that abruptly halted in March 2020.
He’s felt the fear and uncertainty of performing during the omicron surge, when COVID cases among casts and crews brought more cancellations. He understands how hard it is to make it work in the Bay Area as a theater artist, even as an established union actor — so much so that, before he accepted the TBA job, he had been weighing whether to enroll in a doctoral program in clinical nutrition on the East Coast.
“It is a bit of a trip going from community college student to executive,” he joked, referring to organic chemistry and other prerequisites he just completed for that program. “It’s a totally different wardrobe.”
All these experiences will come in handy in his new role at the 46-year-old nonprofit, which advocates for, and provides services to, local theater artists and companies. As Brad Erickson’s successor, Fenton — who also has administrative experience at arts research firm WolfBrown and in Kaiser Permanente Educational Theatre — helps set the agenda for theater in the region, identifying challenges and opportunities in the industry and rallying the sprawling Bay Area theater community toward shared goals.
In an interview with The Chronicle on his first day in the new job, Fenton — a native of California’s Inland Empire who lives in Oakland — said both theater in the Bay Area and Theatre Bay Area were at turning points.
“We’re all reflecting on how we want our sector to look in the future, both because of the pandemic and also because of a renewed commitment to resolving issues around inclusion, diversity, equity and access,” he said.
The challenges are manifold. “We’re still not seeing houses as full, and from a public health perspective, there’s reasons for that,” he said. “But in terms of earned income, of course it’s difficult for theaters.”
Theater workers are leaving the arts or the region altogether. And in terms of racial inclusion, many types of Bay Area audiences and artists still don’t feel welcome in predominantly white spaces.
At Theatre Bay Area, there are now just a half dozen staffers, many part time. (When I worked there eight years ago, the staff was almost double that size.) With the pandemic, it gave up its office space, and that was well after its magazine had stopped printing.
“We are working with a different set of resources,” Fenton said.
The whole staff has less than a year on the job, but Fenton sees fresh eyes as an asset.
“We have an opportunity to shape TBA into what we want it to be,” he said. “We don’t have to go back to the past.”
He plans to spend his early days getting to know what stakeholders — his staff, theater workers, audiences — want from TBA and how it can partner with policymakers and other powerful figures, which might lead to dismantling some programs and creating others. Lots of new leaders spout similar verbiage about listening tours, but in talking to The Chronicle, Fenton demonstrated a professional actor’s particular gift for listening. He doesn’t steamroll ahead; he seeks and finds silent clues in his interlocutor’s demeanor and responds accordingly.
Alameda playwright, composer and lyricist Min Kahng, in whose shows Fenton has frequently performed, said Fenton’s appointment “made him happy for the Bay Area theater community. We’re going to see someone who’s really passionate, who really knows how to listen and who really advocates for marginalized voices.”
Kahng recalled that when the two were working on Kahng’s “The Four Immigrants: An American Musical Manga” at TheatreWorks, Fenton pointed out a lyric that some might regard as a slur. “He took that step to speak about it,” Kahng recalled. It wasn’t just Fenton’s integrity that stood out; it was the grace with which he spoke. “I just remember being grateful for a little pushback. It was not in any way accusatory or an attack.”
Stakes high as Sean Fenton takes helm of nonprofit that advocates for artists, companies
Fenton’s plans for TBA are preliminary, but he hopes to increase its regranting to artists and theaters, drawing on the popularity of the Performing Arts Worker Relief Fund, administered with Dancers’ Group and InterMusic SF, which distributed more than $600,000 to needy arts workers during the pandemic. Already, the nonprofit’s long-running CA$H program, which gives project-specific support to small companies and artists, is expanding to offer general operating dollars in October.
He also hopes to take a more active, less reactive role in disputes about equity, diversity and inclusion, or EDI, whether in casting and programming choices or workplace policies.
“We have a responsibility to be a leader, both by setting an example for how we operate internally as well as by providing resources and tools that* our member companies and individual members can look to,” Fenton said.
“I also want to offer grace to our entire community in this area, because we’re all learning,” he added. “No single person in our community is without biases.”
He envisions TBA as both disseminating best practices and serving as a mediator when needed.
“I want to remind all of us that we share so much common ground,” he said. Good intentions aren’t enough, “but we can’t also ignore good intentions. It’s a good starting point, right?”
Then there’s shared love of an art form.
“The capacity of the theater to bridge us to other cultures as well as to reaffirm our human experiences,” he said, “I think that’s sort of unparalleled.”