26 minute read
Sustainability Is the Trampoline
An Interview with SARA BRUNER
BY LUE MORGAN DOUTHIT
Sara Bruner and Lue Morgan Douthit met in 2014 at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. Bruner, an actor, worked with OSF’s Black Swan Lab for New Work and played Charles Wallace Murry in the company’s world-premiere adaptation of A Wrinkle in Time; she would go on to join OSF as a company member for six years. Douthit, the Black Swan Lab’s co-producer and co-founder, was amid what would become a 25-year tenure as OSF’s Director of New Play Development and Dramaturgy.
Today, both Bruner and Douthit oversee sprawling artistic initiatives. Douthit is Director of Research and Practice and Co-Founder of Play on Shakespeare, which was launched at OSF in 2015 and is now a nonprofit company that creates and promotes contemporary modern translations of Shakespeare’s plays. In March 2024, Bruner was named Producing Artistic Director Designate of a unique crosscountry strategic alliance uniting three independent theatres: Great Lakes Theater in Cleveland, Ohio; Idaho Shakespeare Festival in Boise; and Lake Tahoe Shakespeare Festival in Incline Village, Nevada. Led by one artistic director, the alliance enables the companies to share creative and administrative staff, increasing production efficiency and supporting long-term employment opportunities for artists. Bruner, who has a long history with all three organizations as an actor, director, and artistic associate, officially assumed the role of Producing Artistic Director for all three companies in September 2024, following the retirement of her predecessor, Charles Fee.
Over Zoom, Bruner and Douthit discussed Bruner’s trajectory from actor to director to artistic director, and the challenges and opportunities of leading three theatres.
LUE MORGAN DOUTHIT | I’d love to hear the story of what that “aha” moment was in your youth when you thought, “Oh, theatre… interesting...”
SARA BRUNER | Generally speaking, I don’t know that I ever have true “aha” moments; things are slower burns for me. I can remember a moment when the beginning of a slow burn started to happen. It was in Deer Lodge, Montana, which was close to Missoula, Montana, where the Missoula Children’s Theatre started; they would tour to Deer Lodge, which was a tiny little town. I started acting when I was four years old. [Missoula Children’s Theatre, founded in 1970, includes an annual Red Truck Tour that casts local students in full-scale productions.] You got cast according to what size you were—it was about which costume you fit into—and my first year, I was an apple seed in Johnny Appleseed. The bigger I got, the bigger my roles got, essentially. We’d rehearse every day after school, and I remember being backstage for the first performance, and all the kids were gathered around watching one of the older kids get their makeup on.
It was mesmerizing; I remember thinking it was really special. The thing that’s still special for me is hanging out with everybody, waiting for your scene and practicing together even when you weren’t practicing. That was the first time I thought, “I like this, this is interesting to me.” But it wasn’t about being on stage, it was about the offstage.
LUE | When and how did it transition to, “This could be a career choice?”
SARA | I never decided, “I’m going to be an actor.” I said yes to everything that had to do with theatre, whether it was running props backstage, running sound for a dance concert, acting in a play—I just said yes, yes, yes to anything that came up. I realized I had made a career choice. “Oh, this is what I do, this is my career now. I’ve invested all my time and all my energy here.” I didn’t start getting serious about it until way too late. It’s not the way I notice a lot of other folks thinking about it now, but it was the way I needed to do it. It was the natural way for me.
LUE | Which is why I wanted to ask the question, because I think we all come to this from different ways. Did you go to graduate school for theatre?
SARA | No. I auditioned for acting but I didn’t like the school I got into, so I didn’t go.
LUE | Excellent. A person with taste. How did you transition from acting into directing?
SARA | When I first started auditioning for grad school, I wanted to go for directing. I talked to a few people at that time about it, and they all said to me, “Oh, don’t do that, you’re too good at acting.” And I listened to them. I think back on that a lot. I love my trajectory, but I often wish I hadn’t listened to people. I was flattered by them saying that to me, and so I changed course and thought, “Okay, well, I’ll go for acting.”
I started assisting people, though, wanting to learn more about the process, and I started noticing my thought process in the rehearsal room. I was already feeling a little dissatisfied with acting. I talk a lot about my own journey with ego in relationship to acting, which wasn’t a healthy one. For a long time, over 10 years, I didn’t feel good at the end of the night after performing, and I knew that other actors weren’t feeling that way because I talked to people about it.
I still loved theatre and wanted to work on it and wanted to figure out what other path there was for me. Then, when I was at Oregon Shakespeare Festival, I did little projects with Daedalus. [OSF’s Daedalus Project, originally organized in 1988, was an annual fundraiser for local, regional, national, and international HIV/AIDS organizations.] I ended up having a conversation with Bill Rauch [then the Artistic Director of OSF] about directing, and that was the turning point for me while I was in that company.
My empathy for actors is strong because I walked in those shoes.
LUE | Are you ever going to act again?
SARA | I will never say never, but right now I don’t have an appetite for it—and there are a lot of other talented folks that have that hunger. I don’t miss being on stage. I miss being backstage, all the fun things that happen backstage during and before a show; I love the camaraderie and the silliness. As much staging as there is on stage in a play, there’s as much in the backstage patterns of a show, and I love it back there.
LUE | What do you think that you have carried forward from your acting experiences into your directing process?
SARA | I’m still trying to find that balance. At this point, I’ve been a director—really working professionally—for six or seven years. I was a professional actor for 23 years. I lived most of my life, thousands and thousands of hours, in rehearsal and on stage as an actor. So it’s mostly an actor’s perspective I’m bringing in still.
There are definitely some useful things; one of them is that I understand how to cultivate a room that can create a certain kind of freedom for an actor in order for them to take ownership of a role throughout a process. Not too much freedom, hopefully, but just enough.
Another thing is that, when you’re an actor, often there’s a real disconnect between what you feel like you’re portraying versus what the audience is perceiving. Now I’m the person who represents the people who just showed up—which is what I always call the audience. “I know you think you’re doing this thing. I’m here to represent the people who just showed up, and I’m telling you it’s not what it seems like.” That’s definitely something I bring to the process. I know how to talk about it with a lot of empathy because I lived on the other side of it for so long. My empathy for actors is strong because I walked in those shoes. There are very few paths I didn’t tread. So I definitely bring that into the room.
For me, the culture of the room is just as important as anything in a process. If your room culture is broken, your play will be broken, whether it’s in perceptible ways or just intangibly. I’m very sensitive to those things, maybe hypersensitive. It’s trying to make the exact right amount of decisions across the board, to make the right amount of a suggestion to let the rest of the artists, including the designers, fly. I think I learned that from being an artist on the other side and feeling too often as an actor that I wasn’t allowed to participate fully in the cocreation of something.
LUE | My impression of you since we met has always been that you had a director’s eye, and that you were interested in more than just how you plug in to the scheme. How have you been able to integrate design and thinking about the three-dimensionality of that as part of how you work on a play?
SARA | First off, I try to surround myself with great people who are fiercely intelligent and work with a lot of goodwill and are really rigorous. And we just have conversations about the plays. I cannot have it be my job to figure everything out. I don’t want to do it, nor do I want to be a single visionary in the room. I think that’s very much some people’s gig; it’s not my gig.
I’m way more interested in—to borrow a phrase our friend, Emily Knapp, uses—the wisdom of the group. I want to create things that are based on the wisdom of the group. So I just talk about what strikes me; I send weird photos, I draw weird pictures, I send weird voicemails, emails. I make offerings and people make offerings back and we collectively make something. To me, that collective vision is all about, “What can only we do as this group of people who have the luxury and good grace to come together in this moment to make this thing right now?” It’s not mine ever; it’s always ours in this moment.
LUE | That’s beautiful. I’ve certainly seen that in the work that you do. How do you set up a room? What’s the difference in your directing process for a new play, a musical, classical Shakespeare— are there differences? And what are the similarities in how you approach those texts?
SARA | Honestly—and I was like this when I was an actor too—it’s always changing because I don’t believe that there is “a way” to do it.
Working on new plays at OSF, it blew my mind that even when we had a playwright in the room, we were still like, “Oh my God, how do we figure out this play?” And the playwright was sitting right there. I was so fascinated by that. Then I would think about Shakespeare plays and go, “What do we think we’re doing? We’re trying to figure this out hundreds of years later with no playwright in the room.”
One essential thing for me with Shakespeare plays is that we try to approach them like they’re brand-new plays. We don’t approach them like they are sacred, or like they’ve been said a hundred times and we’re here to uphold them like they’re museum pieces that we’re just hitting “rewind and play” on so that somebody can watch it the exact way they remember it from the last time.
Eva Le Gallienne famously went into rehearsal for Romeo and Juliet, sat down, and said, “This is a new play by a new playwright, it’s called Romeo and Juliet by William Shakespeare.” I love that spirit because it also gives you buy-in; it’s yours, and you get to be the first one to coin a phrase, to spin a phrase, to speak it. In that way, I try to keep those approaches similar. In all other ways, just like when I was an actor, I look at the play and ask, “How do we do this one this time? Who’s in it? What are the needs of this show? What are all the other external factors? How much time do we have?”
Every play has a different recipe that’s required. There are so many factors to that that I don’t have a way. Maybe someday I’ll have a way, maybe someday. Over and over again I’ve learned that the second I think I understand something, it’s almost immediately redefined for me. I don’t think I’ll ever have a singular way.
LUE | But isn’t that a way?
SARA | That is a way, and it might be maddening for people around me. The one thing I always do is create ways of engagement in the room. Building individual relationships with collaborators is crucial because I want everyone to have buyin, ownership, and freedom in the piece. I’ve been in rooms where fear dictates decisions, and it kills culture and creativity. Using ethical tactics to create buy-in, joy, ownership—that’s about the only thing I do every single time.
LUE | I want to head toward the world of a director as artistic director, and I’d love to hear a little bit about your history with Idaho Shakespeare, in particular, and your relationship with that company. It sounds a little like your children’s theatre experience in a way; you just kept rising up through the costumes that presented opportunities for you. Would you talk a little about that, how that has happened and the trajectory leading to this moment?
SARA | My first exposure to Idaho Shakespeare Festival was in high school in Burley, Idaho; they came to my school and performed in our auditorium. It was the first Shakespeare play I ever saw, and I loved it. I loved how lively and charismatic the actors were. I was drawn to how much spark they had on a regular day of life for me in school.
Afterwards—I must have had Drama or something, because I was allowed to go help them load up their van, which was wonderful. I showed them where the pop machine was, and I remember one of them got a Coca-Cola out of the machine. And one of them gave me their phone number because they could tell I really liked theatre and they said, “If you ever have any questions about becoming an actor, you can give me a call.” And that person is actually Lynn Hofflund, the wife of Mark Hofflund, the gentleman who is the managing director of the Idaho Shakespeare Festival now.
I got a theatre scholarship to go to Boise State, and my first summer I auditioned for the Idaho Shakespeare Festival to be in their internship program. I’d never done Shakespeare before, and I found Phoebe—because that’s what you find, you find Phoebe—and I taught myself a Phoebe monologue. I auditioned and got cast in the company, and then we had to audition for the directors. Most people got cast as spear holders and stuff like that. I auditioned for the directors, and I got cast as Miranda in The Tempest when I was 18. And Bart Sher was directing it.
LUE | This is good.
Over and over again I’ve learned that the second I think I understand something, it’s almost immediately redefined for me.
SARA | I ended up doing 19 seasons as an actor in that company. I played tons of roles: every ingenue, every pants role, twice—I really found comfort in the pants roles, as you can imagine. During that time, what we now call the consortium with Idaho Shakespeare Festival, Great Lakes Theater, and Lake Tahoe Shakespeare Festival was formed, and I started traveling to Cleveland and working on stage at Great Lakes in Playhouse Square.
I was working full time for years. I was assistant directing—but also, for Idaho Shakespeare Festival, I ran props, I would help with strike. I would do anything and everything. I started doing our school tours; I went out on the road with the same tour that I had seen in high school, for, I think, eight years. I cut and directed a few of those along the way as well.
Half of my life I was working for these companies—and along the way, being mentored by our company’s previous artistic director, Charles Fee. He would sit me down and show me spreadsheets in how things were working. I wasn’t fully aware that he was mentoring me, but he was doing it with a lot of intentionality. I wasn’t quite picking up on it, but he definitely saw leadership ability in me before I saw it in myself. That all started to make sense later in my career once I was ready for it—with lots and lots of big mistakes along the way.
In my bedroom growing up, I used to pretend I was an artistic director. I had a theatre company that I’d named. I had posters that represented seasons that I had programmed.
LUE | One hopes to be in a situation where you can make big mistakes and it doesn’t cost you a lot. And we’re perilously close to not being able to make those mistakes in our world at the moment, which I think is really hard on our craft.
Was there a time when you thought, “I’d like to be an artistic director?”
SARA | I did. But this would assume that I was very strategic. I didn’t fully embrace the concept of strategic thinking until I went back to get my master’s degree.
LUE | And remind me, that degree is in...?
SARA | I have an Executive MBA from Boise State University. In terms of becoming an artistic director—I wouldn’t say I wasn’t planning, but I was just going from show to show. I don’t want to sell myself short and say I didn’t have foresight, but I can’t speak to what my methodology was other than just “go, do, go, do.”
But honestly, in my bedroom growing up, I used to pretend I was an artistic director. I had a theatre company that I’d named. I had posters that represented seasons that I had programmed. I would do the dates of the run. I would make up names of the people who were cast. I would sometimes create sets—miniatures of sets, and things like that.
This is something I’ve wanted to do my whole life. It took me too long to say it out loud. I had a ton of access to Charlie as an artistic director, seeing him do his job. I had an amazing relationship with Bill Rauch; I saw him up close, doing his job. And still, I didn’t know what it meant to be an artistic director; it is a huge job, it is so vast, it has so many pieces and parts to it.
LUE | It’s massive. Let’s talk about how massive yours is—in particular, the singular combination of running three different theatres. We’re not talking about three different theatre spaces in one location. I don’t know of another situation in American theatre that is like this, but maybe there are.
SARA | I don’t think there are. My team and I run three theatres: one in Cleveland, one in Boise, and one in Lake Tahoe. The business model is entirely unique in the American theatre. We extend the lives of our shows—which extends the lengths of contracts for those that make theatre with us. We have three separate and dedicated boards and administrative staffs; those of us on the artistic/production side travel with productions, producing September to May at our indoor theatre in Cleveland and transferring shows to our outdoor venues May to September in Boise and July to August in Tahoe.
LUE | Can you describe the way you think about the process of being a director, and whether that can translate to the world of artistic director? Has it in some ways? And then, what more is artistic directing, in your opinion and experience?
SARA | It’s all the same, ultimately, in that it’s all leadership—creating a team and trying to paint a bullseye that is steeped in a strong mission and value statement. And, particularly in a not-for-profit, trying to avoid burnout along the way. Everybody we work with is running around balancing 10 hats on their head at any given moment. Almost everyone I work with has a very sharp brain and could be doing any single thing they want, but they are mission-driven humans and they have chosen theatre.
Being an artistic director and a director are very much the same. They exist on slightly different scales. And then that scale gets even bigger in our companies when we have one team that’s in Tahoe, one team that’s in Cleveland, and one team that’s in Boise, all working in different time zones, on different producing schedules, in different fiscal years, but working on the same product—meaning we’re working on the same plays together.
Really, in the end, it is all about leadership and finding the right folks to surround yourself with. That’s the part where I can breathe a little bit because when that’s in place, it isn’t a job of loneliness and singularity, it makes it more of a team sport. There’s a lot of joy in that.
LUE | You described yourself earlier as the representative of the audience, which I think is healthy. How do you reconcile season selections for three different places, three different geographies, with three different audiences? You’ve worked at all three places, so you have a feel for what lands with those audiences, as an actor and now as a director. Do you have a way of going about that? Or is something beginning to manifest itself in how you’re doing the math of that?
SARA | Well, math is part of it. At the end of the day, it’s a business, too, and I allow myself to embrace that aspect of it. The daydreaming doesn’t exist without the business model. Part of my job is to honor the fact that sustainability is a very real aspect of what we do. Sustainability is the trampoline that allows the daydreamers to have their heads in the clouds.
So it’s very data-driven. We have really good data, and we keep it clean, and we examine it from multiple perspectives. When we’re making our lists of titles we tie into things that are mission-driven, which historically have been things that are related to the classics. Though we’ve been pushing against that because there are obviously—or maybe not obviously—issues, I believe, with the classics and who’s been allowed to tell them and why and what we consider to be classic, etc.
LUE | Also, some of those stories are kind of heinous.
SARA | They are heinous. A lot of them are heinous. Although I also stand by the fact that just because you tell a story doesn’t mean you condone it.
LUE | Right.
SARA | I think that we get that confusion in the theatre sometimes, too. Our job is to be reflective of humanity, warts and all.
LUE | Totally agree.
So you’re doing all the math, you’re figuring out as you’re winnowing things down for season selection, all these things play into the decisions, right?
SARA | Our calendar is a little complicated in how it moves, because where something is placed in one season will determine how and when it moves to another theatre based off of production timelines, and logistically if it can get where it needs to be by x time. And personnel, because it’s not only our acting company that moves across the country with these shows, but also our backstage crew, wardrobe, tech folks, folks who build the set, costumes, and props. We take everyone, it’s not just the acting company; our full production moves between all three cities. So there are a lot of logistical considerations in there as well, and we’re ideally looking for shows that, if you picture the Venn diagram of all three theatres, it’s where all three overlap. Our model was created to maximize economies as they relate to materials and to provide more steady work for folks in theatre. We seek a balanced scorecard.
You once said something that really helped me breathe a little bit, which is to remember that theatre is or can be a unifying factor for us, instead of the endless job of market segmentation. That has helped me think about what we’re always looking for in these plays, which is the universality. We’re producing popular titles, we’re not producing (at least now) new plays. We’re doing shows that are...what’s the right way to define them, Lue, you tell me?
LUE | Well, classical plays doesn’t mean antique. It also means that in their time they resonated because they had inscribed in them conventions and ideas that were easily accessed and are still relatable no matter what the context is, 40 years later or 400 years later. In the plays that you’re choosing, you can still follow the trajectory of “somebody does something, and there’s consequences for it, good, happy, or tragic.” And so I’d say you’re choosing classical plays in that sense.
You’re talking about details, in terms of the choices of three different theatres. But what we’re also trying to get at is our collective sense of “how do we behave together in this world?” Is there a more vital question to be asked? I happen to think theatre asks that question really well. I don’t want your job of trying to figure out how to have plays in all three theatres. I’m just going to say it’s really hard. What piece of advice might you give early-career directors who aspire to be artistic directors?
SARA | Well, one piece of advice I’d give is to be mindful of who you take advice from. Everyone will have an idea for you about what you ought to do. Particularly young artists: they find people that they look up to, and I think they take their words too seriously. Every time someone asks me for advice, I remind them not to listen to me too much.
Try to find the people you love to work with. Be rigorous. That’s one of the number-one things. And I do think you have to show up and be the kind of person in a room who makes people think, “I want to be in a room with that person again.”
LUE | You mentioned burnout a little while ago, so it’s leading me to ask—
SARA | Oh God, are you going to ask me about burnout?
LUE | No, I’m going to ask how you are taking care of yourself to avoid burnout.
SARA | It’s hard for me to not feel a lot of fear right now because of what’s happening nationally, which—emotionally and psychologically—could cause extraordinary burnout. I’ve been recognizing that in myself, and I was already just physically running on low. Lately my mantra has been to not get sad or stressed out but to get strategic about things. That’s been very helpful for me.
I’ve started really letting myself…not be good at the things I’m not good at. I’m going to let other people who are good at them, and like to do them, do them. I have found so much freedom in that. I get anxious every time I think about x. It literally makes my anxiety go up. So I say to so-and-so, “Will you please?” And they say, “Yes, I would love to do that for you.” That’s been a bit of a game changer for me.
LUE | Would you say that some of that strategy came to you while you were at Boise in the EMBA program? Knowing what you’re really good at and sticking with it, and finding people that have a skill set that’s useful—and that they’re good at—was a strategic plan move in a way too, right?
SARA | Yes, definitely. The other thing that that program really taught me is to talk to people outside of the business. Sometimes you get caught up in thinking your problem is really interesting and special. Then you talk to someone from Hewlett Packard and find out it’s neither.
But also just find mentors, safe mentors to talk to—not people you’re working alongside with. That’s been very helpful.
LUE | I think leadership is a lonely position. Nobody’s going to tell you the truth.
SARA | Nope.
Another thing I learned is that my job is not at all to have all the right answers, it’s just to ask the right questions. Which is exactly what directing is as well.
Dr. Lue Morgan Douthit is the Director of Research and Practice and Co-Founder of Play on Shakespeare. She spent 25 seasons at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival where she was Director of Literary Development and Dramaturgy and cofounder and co-producer of the Black Swan Lab.
