SHARED LEADERSHIP Theatres Find An Inclusive Model Spurs More Diversity and Innovation

by Holly L. Derr

TTheatres across the country are rethinking their organizational structures in light of the forced changes brought about by the COVID-19 pandemic, calls for change from We See You White American Theatre (WSYWAT), and a recognition of the lack of diversity in theatre programming and hiring.

With an industry-wide generational shift in leadership also underway, some theatres have found this to be an opportune time to reorganize their institutions away from the singular artistic director model and to operate instead under shared artistic leadership.

Southern Theatre interviewed leaders at three theatre companies that have recently moved to shared leadership, two companies that have created a second rung of coartistic directors for shared leadership, and three companies that were formed years ago through shared leadership. We asked these companies to share their paths to shared leadership, how their models work, and the advantages and disadvantages they are finding. Permutations of the model abound, and according to numerous artistic leaders, so do the benefits of working this way.

Theatres that recently transitioned to shared leadership

Pittsburgh’s City Theatre had already responded to WSYWAT, which calls explicitly for a “power sharing model for curation and beyond in season planning,” with a series of public commitments in November 2020. So, when artistic director Marc Masterson (he/him) began to consider retiring in a few years, it made sense for him to develop, in collaboration with a succession planning committee, a shared leadership model.

Aiming for as much stability as possible, Masterson drew from existing talent within the organization in October 2021 in naming two co-artistic directors, both of whom make the team more diverse: Clare Drobot (she/her), a dramaturg, playwright and producer, and Monteze Freeland (he/him), a Black actor, director, teaching artist and producer. To ensure there still is one point person per season, the three have been rotating by season as lead artistic director, while achieving consensus in programming and season selection. City Theatre is two years into its three-year plan, and according to Drobot, “We haven’t set next steps after the initial three years yet.”

The call for change posted online by WSYWAT resonated with City Theatre, Freeland said, as it raised important questions about the structure, duration, gender and race of leadership – and charged theatre organizations to determine how they could bring more voices to the table.

“It called for people who had been in positions of leadership for decades to decide whether or not their voice was the voice of the current climate and were they living and practicing equitable behavior and directives within their organization,” Freeland said.

Theatre organizations, including City Theatre, examined what they were producing, Freeland noted, and asked important questions: “Were those voices representative of the work they were hoping to put on stage and new audiences they want to see come through their doors after a vicious pandemic?”

LEFT: When Marc Masterson (left), City Theatre’s longtime artistic director, began considering retirement, he created a shared leadership model with two co-artistic directors: Clare Drobot (middle) and Monteze Freeland (right).

OPPOSITE PAGE: Freeland and Melva Graham appear in Dominique Morisseau’s Paradise Blue, presented in March and April as part of City Theatre’s 2022 season.

A significant challenge shared by many of the leaders engaged in shared leadership is that everything does take more time. So, if you are thinking of adopting such a structure, plan accordingly.

While Freeland and Masterson agreed that diversity has always been a core value at City Theatre, they believe that the greater variety of voices now at the table during season planning has enriched the process.

“[The shift to this model] coincided with COVID, actually, and we began practicing right away a collaborative decision-making process, where there was room for each of us to bring forward our passion projects and where we gave each other space for that,” Masterson said. “It wasn’t the neutral, ‘everything was consensus,’ because I think that can water things down. “

Instead, each of the co-artistic directors advanced projects that interested them.

“We did a drive-in stage,” Masterson said. “We did a lot of digital stuff. We created world premieres that were fully produced with green screens. And we did some readings and workshops and a wide variety of stuff, probably more stuff than we ever did before.”

At Virginia Repertory Theatre in Richmond, VA, three artistic directors began sharing leadership within the last year. Desirée Roots (she/her) became artistic director of community in November

2021 and was joined by Todd D. Norris (he/him) as artistic director of education and Rick Hammerly (he/him), as artistic director of programming, in March and April 2022, respectively.

Here, too, the push to have multiple artistic leaders came from the company’s co-founders, Phil Whiteway and Bruce Miller, as they planned their retirement. Surveying the company and its growth over the years, they identified three areas of importance and persuaded the Board to search for a different leader for each area. Roots, a Black singer, actor and dancer with deep roots in the Richmond community, oversees programs that connect youth with community health and wellness programs, as well as the theatre’s inclusion, diversity, equity and access programming; Norris, a director, oversees one theatre space and programming for children, families and schools; and Hammerly, also a director, focuses on the development of programming for adult audiences in two spaces.

Despite this clear division of duties, the three leaders still have to come to consensus on a variety of matters and therefore they still benefit from having more voices at the table. One example that Norris cited is their policy on masking.

“What shared leadership has allowed us to do is look at masking from different perspectives,” Norris said. “What are the adults wanting? What are the schools and the kids wanting? What are our longtime subscribers saying? What are potential new subscribers telling us? And just as human beings, we’re going to have slightly different perspectives on it as well.”

At theatres that have recently made the transition, it can be difficult for leaders to parse the difference between the challenges of a shared leadership structure and the challenges of the simultaneously occurring pandemic and the upheaval that followed the murder of George Floyd.

Like City Theatre and Virginia Repertory, the Wilma Theater in Philadelphia – which produced the film that made James Ijames’s play Fat Ham eligible for its 2022 Pulitzer Prize – has been in the process of shifting to shared leadership with a rotating lead over the same years in which it has faced the pandemic. As was the case at City, the Wilma’s leaders responded with innovative digital programming that has expanded its audience far beyond Philadelphia.

As the pandemic began, the Wilma had reached a point where succession planning was necessary. Blanka Zizka (she/her), artistic director emeritus and co-founder, says the idea to combine succession planning with a shift to shared leadership arose out of the work happening in the rehearsal room with the Wilma’s company of actors, HotHouse. In fact, Zizka raised the money necessary to pay multiple artistic directors as part of a Transformation Fund that also invested in their lobby as a public gathering space and in the HotHouse company.

Developed in 2011, according to their website, “in order to develop a process for creating the trust that underlies the creation of living, adventurous art,” HotHouse is composed of 16 Philadelphia actors that host various guest directors and artists who are invited to share their techniques and methodologies. The idea is that these artists, who come from around the world and have their own companies, would “work with the actors, using their techniques, so that they would be learning from them how to create, how to unify a company,” Zizka said.

Zizka found the work to be profound and hugely interesting, resulting in “a really strong, deep collaboration with the actors,” she said.

“So, when we were working on a production, it was not me directing in that old-fashioned sense of me having complete vision – of course, I had a vision of the piece – but there was an experimentation that was part of the process, so that we were sharing the knowledge of the process and what we had learned into creating the characters on stage, creating a piece together.”

That process was “pretty radical for the kind of American nonprofit theatre of the size that the Wilma is now,” Zizka said.

Her interest in bringing that process into the theatre’s own operations led to the move toward shared leadership. Zizka chose a diverse group of three directors to become co-artistic directors: James Ijames (he/him), a playwright and Black man who was the first lead after Zizka in the rotation; Russian-born Yuri Urnov (he/him), who was next up; and Morgan Green (she/her), the current lead.

Unlike at City Theatre, the Wilma has used a model in which the concept of a rotating lead applied to the curation of a season as well, with each lead in turn having final say on their year’s programming. Nevertheless, Green describes a very collaborative process, when it was her turn as lead, with at least six voices at the table: the other two artistic directors, the artistic associate, the managing director and an artistic intern.

In the end, though, Green says, “It is a season that is very reflective of me and my taste in conversation with the Wilma’s history and aesthetic. So, I think it was a happy medium that we found together. It is a diverse season, in terms of the types of stories that we’re telling and who is telling them.”

Although the Wilma has taken major steps toward greater diversity and equity, Green says the theatre hasn’t yet reached its goal in that area.

“I think we’re on a journey in terms of diversity and equity work at the Wilma,” Green said. “We’re very much in process, making a lot of policy changes.”

For example, she said, the Wilma shortened the work week to five days and eliminated 10 out of 12s. It also developed a set of values to guide decision making.

“We also are working with an EDI [equity, diversity and inclusion] officer for every production now, who we’re going to hire as an employee next season, and there’s a larger organization-wide blueprint of EDI work that we’ve developed together,” Green said.

After its successful first round of rotation, the Wilma is now looking at an evenmore-shared leadership model in which, rather than rotating as lead, the co-artistic directors share equally in all the decision making.

“We’re currently designing the way to continue with shared leadership but remove the component that’s cycling,” Green said. “So, it’s not like each person gets one year to curate, but that there’s a team of three people moving forward and there’s some mechanism to still cycle the people, but over a longer period of time.“

That change comes, she said, from their recognition that “this rhythm of gearing up and then curating one year, one season, is not sustainable, because the work of curating takes a lot of time to build relationships and develop projects, and it needs more momentum. So, we’re trying to figure out how to keep the many voices in conversation about big decisions, but also find some sturdier stability for the theatre to move forward.”

Theatres with multiple associate artistic directors

Some theatres, like Center Theatre Group in Los Angeles and the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in Ashland, have met the challenge of maintaining stability during a leadership transition, a pandemic and a racial reckoning by keeping the singular artistic director model in place while diversifying and expanding the number of associate artistic directors who constitute the next rung on the organizational chart.

Center Theatre Group (CTG), which presents productions at the Mark Taper Forum, the Ahmanson Theatre and the Kirk Douglas Theatre in Los Angeles, is currently transitioning from the longtime leadership of Michael Ritchie to a yet unchosen new artistic director. Ritchie had so much confidence in the idea of shared leadership that he stepped down even earlier than originally planned to make room for new voices.

While the search for a new artistic director has continued, the artistic side of things has been run by five associate artistic directors: Kelley Kirkpatrick (he/ him); Lindsay Allbaugh (she/her); Tyrone Davis (he/him); Neel Keller (he/him); and Luis Alfaro (he/him), who recently left the position to devote more time to teaching and writing.

The team worked with a consultant, Mica Cole, to build a firm foundation for their work together, based in a shared sense of mission, vision and values.

“This has been a much more meaningful and deeper way of working because of the collaboration and the necessity to have conversations with the group and hear all the different points of view,” Kirkpatrick said.

Planning a season collaboratively also has had a significant impact on the institution: The upcoming season that the team curated for the Mark Taper Forum is not only centered on women, non-binary and trans voices, but also will feature a majority of Los Angeles-based actors, designers and directors, and will feature its first play by a Native American playwright. The collaborators credit this change not just to having more voices in the room, but also to centering anti-racism and serving Los Angeles as two of their shared values.

While the CTG Board has been a champion of the structure, it will be up to the incoming artistic director (or directors) to decide whether to continue using it. In the meantime, the impact is being felt all over the organization.

“As an organization, we’re talking about it, but also departments individually have been talking about: ‘How do you flatten hierarchy? How do you share power? What is shared leadership?’ ” Allbaugh said.

As staff in those other areas of CTG work in this way with each other and with Meghan Pressman, the managing director/ CEO, they are moving from simple discussion to action on the issues.

“I see other departments, particularly our production department, really making great strides in this direction as well,” Allbaugh said. “So, I think it’s a long-term investment in completely changing institutional theatre.”

Oregon Shakespeare Festival (OSF) transitioned in 2019 from the long-time leadership of Bill Rauch to Nataki Garrett, who hired a diverse team of three immigrants as her associate artistic directors – Scarlett Kim (she/her), Evren Odcikin (he/him) and Mei Ann Teo (they/them) – to oversee artistic programming, innovation and strategy, and new work, respectively.

The reorganization was, in this case, not a response to the pandemic and WSYWAT, but instead was part and parcel of an emphasis Garrett put on innovation, including producing digital theatre,